Elsa leans against the basin and, for the first time, allows herself to feel her exhaustion. Her knees are almost shaking, her hands are sore and tender, and tears she doesn’t remember crying have left salty trails down her cheeks.
“Here,” says Ingrid. Her voice sounds just as flat as Elsa feels, and when she walks over to the basin to fill a chipped pewter mug with water, Elsa notices that her skin is sallow and droops from her face. Her normally so neatly curled hair is straggly and damp with sweat, and all she is wearing is a vest and slip.
It’s only when Elsa looks down at herself that she notices that she has taken off her cardigan and shoes, too. It must have happened at some point in the last few hours. Bruises have started to blossom down her left arm. During the worst of the labor pains Birgitta had started to flail and struggle; she must have hit Elsa when she tried to hold her to calm her down.
Elsa drinks in large gulps. The water tastes flat and metallic.
The twilight that has started to sneak in through the windows colors everything a mild blue. Birgitta is still curled up on her side on the bed. Her face is turned away, and her hair is a bird’s nest of dirt and sweat. She isn’t making any noise now; perhaps she has fallen asleep.
Dagny is standing over by one of the windows. The light behind her throws her silhouette into sharp relief. You can barely see the baby in her arms.
She’s beautiful; a perfectly formed little girl with thick, dark hair, albeit slightly smaller than what Elsa remembers her own as being. She has the cloudy blue eyes and strangely shaped head of a newborn, and she had showed off a good set of lungs when Ingrid had clapped her on the behind.
Elsa had held her while Ingrid cut the umbilical cord. Neither of them are doctors, but in the past Ingrid has helped Silvertjärn girls in childbirth, if the doctor wouldn’t make it in time. Elsa has never been present at any other deliveries than her own, and had she imagined being at one, she would have thought it would be Margareta’s, or even Aina’s, one day.
A bustling sound swells outside the window. At first it’s so quiet that it scarce seems real, but then, slowly but steadily, it grows. Words begin to emerge from the mass, from the hymn rising over the village. It breaks the flat spell that has settled over all of them.
Dagny looks up from the baby. The girl has started to whimper slightly at the sound of the congregation’s evensong. Perhaps, tiny as she is, even she understands the danger.
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 Silvertjärn.”
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 Silvertjärn first.
NOW
When we race into the room,
