The Lost Village(75)

Dagny looks terrified, as though she’s been caught out. From the look on her face, Elsa can tell she won’t be of much help.

Ingrid straightens up. Her glasses have started to slide off her nose, but she pushes them back up with the back of her hand. She looks Elsa in the eye, then at the curled-up figure on the bed by the far wall.

“What shall we do?” Ingrid asks.

The helplessness that hits Elsa in that moment is like nothing she has ever felt before. The apparently unending hymn seems to be whispering, intimating to them that it’s hopeless, that there’s nothing they can do. The congregation is so great, and they are so few, and Birgitta can’t even help herself. Even less so the tiny, new human lying in Dagny’s arms.

“We must try to get them out of here,” says Elsa. “Away from the pastor and his congregation. Away from Silvertj?rn.”

Ingrid nods. She doesn’t ask how they will manage any such thing, nor does she need to; she knows Elsa is wondering the same thing.

Dagny looks back down at the girl she is holding in her arms. Her face has relaxed slightly, and she is rocking her gently, lulling her softly to quieten her down. In her eyes Elsa thinks she can make out a trace of a longing that Dagny has buried deep within.

“We must give her a name,” says Dagny.

Ingrid looks over at Birgitta again.

“Do you think she can name the child?” she asks Elsa quietly.

Elsa shakes her head. “I’m not even sure if she understands it’s her daughter,” she says with a heavy heart.

“How about Kristina?” Dagny asks suddenly. “Isn’t that what her mother’s name was?”

“Yes,” Elsa says, “it was.”

Elsa mostly remembers Kristina as she was in her final days, tired and bloated. The fear in her strained, red face, and then the relief once Elsa had promised to look after Birgitta.

But she has failed her. Just as she has failed her Aina.

“Kristina Lidman,” Elsa says quietly to herself. She puts the mug down next to the sink and walks over to Dagny. The cold water has lifted some of her flatness.

“Kristina,” she repeats to the little one.

The baby has settled slightly, and now her cloudy eyes look up at Elsa. There’s something about looking into a newborn’s eyes that’s like nothing else. Elsa isn’t a superstitious woman—not even a particularly religious one, truth be told, though she wouldn’t dream of saying that out loud—but yes, newborns do have a look that suggests they know something. That they have seen something others can’t see.

“It’s a good name,” Elsa says to Dagny.

“The next train leaves tomorrow at three, no?” says Ingrid behind her back.

Elsa doesn’t need to look at any schedule to be able to nod in confirmation. With two trains a week it isn’t hard to remember the departure times.

She knows what Ingrid is thinking, and remembers the half-written letter lying buried in her underwear. There’ll be no time to finish it or send it now. Elsa will just have to hope Margareta understands. She will; she has to. Once they’re in Stockholm they can try to make a plan.

They just have to get out of Silvertj?rn first.





NOW



When we race into the room, Robert is standing stock-still at the window. He doesn’t turn when we enter.

“Robert?” I say cautiously, and then he turns his head.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this isn’t it. His face is still, and his index finger is raised to his lips.

My first thought is that he’s lost his mind (him too), but that passes just as soon as it comes. He doesn’t look crazy.

Max starts to walk over to the window, and Robert nods slowly. I follow him, creeping across the floorboards. My heart is pounding.

Max reaches the window before I do. Then Robert lowers his finger. He doesn’t point, but makes a subtle nod straight ahead.

The window looks out onto the road running down to the river. From up here I can see the houses’ gabled roofs stretching down and away from the square, these set in a slightly more organic way than the poker-straight lines of the row houses further out of town. At first I don’t understand what I’m supposed to be looking at, but just as I’m about to ask I see it, and the words die in my throat.

Something moving.

I only catch a glimpse of it. Something peeks out from behind the corner of a house, then disappears again.

“She’s been doing that for a while,” Robert says quietly, without moving his lips. “Peeking out and then disappearing.”

There it is again. A head; a flash of sunlight on blond hair.

Perhaps she can sense our eyes on her, because suddenly she disappears—there one second, gone the next.

“Is it…” says Max, peeling his eyes from the window. He stares at me.

I nod.

“She’s been moving around between the houses a little, but no further than that. It’s her,” says Robert.

“What is she doing?” asks Max.

“It looks like she’s hiding,” says Robert. “Or looking out for someone.”

Max looks out of the window again, and I do the same, try to pick her out.

Then he straightens his back and looks at me, and something in his face changes.