Brother Tibolt preached a tremulous sermon on forgiveness that day. He read from the essays of his namesake saint about how all mortals needed the grace of one another. He kept glancing towards our family, sadness in his eyes. Then he stepped to the side of his podium and nodded to the lord.
Torm Sheridan stood up and took the priest’s place. “Roberta Miller, please step forward.”
The silence in the church was a loud one, ringing in my ears.
“Get up,” my father said under his breath.
I stood, my body trembling. I was staring at my feet but when I raised my eyes, I found the boy called Thane had turned in his seat and was looking up at me. He held his chin up at me, the way I had at him. It was as if he was saying, “I know you are not afraid. You have just said so.”
Behind me Rowena had begun to cry.
“Now, girl,” boomed the lord’s voice.
I stepped into the aisle that cut down the center of the building. It was a few short paces and up two steps to reach the lord. Istood in front of the podium and nodded at him. “My lord,” I mumbled.
Standing next to Torm, Tibolt looked wilted.
“You have been accused and found guilty of the sin of rebellion,” Torm Sheridan went on. “This is a foul thing to be found in the heart of a child, more so in a daughter. You will be boxed for a full day.” He opened the old box, and the iron hinges screeched from a lack of use. He nodded to somewhere behind me, and there was the sound of bodies moving and then footsteps.
A set of hands came up under my armpits to lift me, and a second set of hands took hold of my legs just below my knees. As they lowered me into the box, I realized they were two of his keep guards.
The lid was lowered, and I was plunged into darkness. Above my face, two holes smaller than what I could fit my finger through let in some light and even less air.
Though it was muffled, I heard my mother begin to cry.
“Let this be a lesson, friends,” the lord went on. “Girl children are not to be coddled. They are to have the sin punished out of them if necessary. They cannot become decent wives and mothers without guidance. If you love your daughters and wives, do you not want to save them from condemnation? The priest and I have discussed this. We are to return to a more faithful adherence to our saint’s message. The days of grace and the writings of the Lesser Saint Tibolt are over.”
The lord referenced the priest’s namesake of old—a bygone scholar of Rodwin—and not the man himself, but I could hear the scorn Torm had for the priest.
I listened to the sounds of several hundred people leaving the building, their voices rising and rising in discussion of this. I heard my mother fall silent, likely hushed by my father. I heard Brother Tibolt’s sorrowful voice through the air holes, telling me he was so sorry he had to allow for this.
And then I heard nothing, all of the stone echoes in that buildingreceded and gone. Though I was cold and afraid, I reasoned that it was not so bad, that I could withstand a day of this. Telling myself this, I lay there for what seemed like a quarter hour before I heard anything else. This time it was a hissing, like a snake’s breath. At first I did not understand what it was. Then my legs were wet, and I knew I had pissed myself.
18
THEN: DOXOLOGY
The priest could not forgive himself for my boxing. He had quarters in the back of the church, eschewing the finer rooms Father Kenneth had occupied in the lord’s keep, claiming he wanted to be amongst the town should anyone call for a priest.
Tibolt visited me several times in the night. He told me there was nowhere for him to light a fire to keep me warm. He told me he worried about putting a blanket over the box and suffocating me. He told me he could not let me out for at the back of the church two of Torm’s guards stood watch, that they were watching him lean over the box that very moment.
“They know I have not the heart for this,” he lamented. “I will think of something, my girl. I will think of something to avoid this happening again.”
I lay in the chill of my own piss and tried to concentrate on his voice and not the bite of the winter night or the smell of myself.
In the morning, I was lifted from the box by the two guards and sent outside. My father was waiting in the street outside.
“Have you repented for your sin?”
I nodded, chastened and beleaguered.
“Good girl,” he said and placed his hand on the top of my head.
I leaned into his touch, and he put his arm around me.
I could not understand myself. I had been furious at him the day before, but now I burrowed into his side, desperate for affection.
But once I was back in our house, once my mother had provided me a warm, damp cloth to wash off with, once I was clothed in a clean shift and dress, once I had been given bread and cheese to fill my empty belly, I was flush with embarrassment and then rage. I relived an entire church witnessing my shame. I relived the iciness of the wooden box that had given me a splinter in one leg. I relived the abandonment. That day I realized I was just like my father. We were both angry people, just angry for different reasons. And I vowed I would never let the saint or his men break me.
