Forsman listened thoughtfully.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Why shouldn’t I be sure? What is there to be doubtful about?’
‘That your relatives will look after her? Are they on Renström’s side?’
‘No, my side. The Walléns. If it had been Renströms I’d never have dreamt of sending her.’
Forsman contemplated his hands.
‘How long ago was it?’ he asked eventually. ‘That you spoke about it?’
‘Four years come this spring.’
‘A lot could have happened during that time,’ said Forsman. ‘But I’ll take her with me in any case. So let’s just hope there’s somebody there who’s prepared to accept her.’
‘Surely they can’t all have died over the last four years,’ said Elin firmly. ‘Unless there’s been some kind of plague we haven’t heard about up here in the mountains.’
Forsman now took a good look at Hanna for the first time.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘I celebrated my eighteenth birthday the other day.’
Forsman nodded. He asked no more questions. The fire continued burning.
That night Forsman slept on the floor in front of the fire. He lay on his various fur coats spread out on the floorboards, covered only by the reindeer skin. His horse had been squeezed into the cowshed with the cow and the goats.
Hanna lay awake for ages. No man had slept in their cottage since her father died. Now there was somebody else snoring and snuffling in his sleep.
Forsman groaned as he breathed in and out, as if he was dragging a heavy burden behind him.
The next day an occasional snowflake came floating down from the heavens. The mercury indicated minus two degrees. Shortly after eight in the morning Hanna sat down in the sleigh with the two bundles of belongings Elin had prepared for her. She had wrapped herself up in all the warm clothes she possessed, and Forsman wrapped a couple more furs around her — she could barely move.
Her brother and sisters wept when she hugged them and said goodbye, first one at a time and then all of them in chorus.
But Elin merely shook her hand. This was the way it had to be. Hanna had decided not to look back once she had sat down in the sleigh. She was weeping deep down inside when Forsman cracked his whip and the black horse started pulling the sleigh. But she didn’t show it. Not for anybody.
She thought about her father as they set off. It was as if he were also standing there, next to Elin, watching her leave.
He had returned, just for that moment. He wanted to be present when it happened.
It was 1903, the year when famine once again afflicted the north of Sweden.
10
The journey by sleigh from Ljungdalen to the coast was supposed to take five days. That is what Jonathan Forsman had told Elin, almost as if he were making a promise.
‘It won’t take any longer than that,’ he said. ‘The going is good, just right for the sleigh, and I don’t have many business calls to make on the way that could delay us. We’ll only stop to eat and sleep. We’ll follow the river, then turn off to the north and make our way through the forest to Sundsvall. It’ll take five days, no more.’
But the journey did take longer. As early as the second day, before they’d even got as far as the forest that marked the border between the provinces of Jämtland and Härjedalen, they were hit by a sudden snowstorm that blew up from the east and that Forsman hadn’t anticipated. The sky had been blue, it had been cold and the going was good: but suddenly the clouds had started to pile up. Even the black horse, whose name was Antero, had started to be restless.
They stopped at an inn in överhogdal. Hanna was given a bed in a room shared by the inn’s maidservants: but she ate at the same table as Forsman, and was served the same food as he had. That had never happened before in her life.
‘We’ll set off again tomorrow,’ he said after saying grace and checking to make sure that she clasped her hands in prayer properly.
But that night the stormy winds veered to the north and then decided to call a halt. The snowstorm stayed put. They were snowed in and stuck at the dreary inn. Half a metre of snow fell in less than four hours, and the wind resulted in drifts that in places were as high as the building’s roof ridge.
It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the journey, just as dusk was falling, that they arrived in Sundsvall. Hanna had been counting the days, but hadn’t realized that this evening was in fact New Year’s Eve. The following day it would be 1904.
Forsman seemed to think that everything associated with the New Year was important. He pushed the horse hard in order to make sure that they reached the centre of town before midnight. New Year’s Eve had never been anything special for Hanna. She had usually been fast asleep when the New Year began. She couldn’t recall either her father or Elin regarding the dawn of a new year as anything special that deserved to be marked by being awake at midnight, or celebrating in any other way.
The fact that they had spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together seemed to mean nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all as far as Forsman was concerned. It was the New Year that was important.
The long sleigh journey had taken place in silence when they were travelling through the forests or over the barren plains. Occasionally Forsman had shouted something to the horse, but he had never spoken to Hanna. He sat in front of her in the sleigh like a forbidding wall.
But the last day of their journey was different. He turned round to shout at her, and she shouted back at him as loudly as she could, in order to make herself heard.
Jonathan Forsman regarded the New Year as something holy.
‘God has created the turn of the year to make us think about the time that has passed and the time that is to come,’ he shouted at her in the back of the sleigh.
Before he saw the light, he had always indulged in heathen pastimes on New Year’s Eve. He had heated lumps of lead in the open fire and then dipped them into cold water in order to interpret the shapes they made as forecasts of the future. And he had never dared to enter the New Year without being dead drunk.
But now he was enlightened, he shouted at her. He was no longer afraid of anything.
When they reached Sundsvall, the town was enveloped by darkness and cold. Forsman pulled up on the edge of the town, in fact. Hanna was not yet able to check her vision of what Sundsvall would look like with the reality. Most of it was still in store for her as she wriggled her way out of the furs and stepped out of the sleigh.
Forsman’s house was built of stone, and comprised two imposingly large storeys. As he pulled up, hordes of people came teeming out of the front gate and the lodge. Antero was led away, and the sleigh was taken care of. All the furs and other contents of the sleigh were carried into the house. Hanna was bewildered by everything that was happening all around her, all these unknown people staring at her, some of them openly, others surreptitiously. She was used to meeting unknown people one at a time. Sometimes it had been vagrants who had wandered up north on the banks of the river, sometimes individual travellers or people carrying axes and saws that her father had brought home with him from the forest. But never anything like this, this teeming crowd of unknown people.
Forsman noticed her discomfort, and bellowed out in a loud voice that the girl accompanying him was Hanna Renström, who would be visiting relations in Sundsvall. But tonight, New Year’s Eve, she would be a guest in his home.
By midnight Forsman had gathered together all his family and all his employees, including his grooms and maids. He opened wide a window in the large room that Hanna had gathered was called ‘the drawing room’ and shouted to everybody to be silent. The clock in Sundsvall’s church struck twelve. Hanna could see that Forsman was counting the chimes silently as his eyes glazed over.