To her horror she gathered that he was on the point of bursting into tears. Never in her life had she imagined that a grown man could weep. She had a lump in her throat, and realized that something important was in fact happening as the chiming of the clock, carried by the cold air, penetrated the drawing room through the open window. Once the chimes had finished, Forsman started to sing a hymn and all those assembled there joined in — including Hanna, although she did so furtively.
She spent that night in a room shared by three of the maids employed in the house of stone. She shared a bed with a girl called Berta, who was about her own age. Berta smelled less than absolutely clean, and Hanna suspected that she might well smell no better herself. Berta pushed and shoved, claimed most of the bed space, and informed Hanna glumly that she would have to be up by five o’clock, despite the fact that it was New Year’s Day and was more or less regarded as a Sunday. But she would have to make the fires and heat up the tiled stoves with the firewood the skivvies brought in.
Berta soon fell asleep. But Hanna lay awake, thinking that there was something missing. It was some time before she realized what it was.
There was no creaking in the stone walls. The cold didn’t penetrate the stone walls like it did in the timber-built house she had grown up in.
And it was only then, as she lay in bed inside stone walls, that it finally dawned upon her that she was now living in an unknown world. She could no longer reach out her hand and touch her siblings, or hear Elin’s heavy breathing as she slept soundly in her bed.
She was somewhere else now, somewhere that was completely new and unknown to her.
She tentatively placed her hand on Berta’s warm body. She missed her brother and sisters who had always been around her. She was on her own now, and she didn’t know how she would be able to cope with the void that surrounded her.
11
The following day Forsman sent Jukka, the most trusted of his servants, to help Hanna to locate her relatives. He had been given the address where they were thought to live by Elin, but Sundsvall was not a town where streets and house numbers could always be relied on.
Even worse was the fact that Forsman, who was confident he knew everybody in the town, had never heard of a family called Wallén. But he hadn’t told Elin that. He thought that perhaps they lived at one of the sawmills in the vicinity of Sundsvall.
The cold was less severe now. Hanna could feel that it was no longer biting into her skin the way it had done during the long sleigh journey.
Forsman went out into the street with them.
‘If you don’t find the family, bring her straight back here,’ he told Jukka, who was standing with his fur hat in his hand.
Hanna thought that Jukka was somewhat cowed and insecure when confronted by his enormous employer in his voluminous fur coat. He was certainly over sixty, but was nevertheless afraid, like a little child worried it might receive a beating.
She couldn’t understand why this was.
They set off. As soon as Forsman had gone back inside, Jukka was transformed. He spat and walked with a swagger, elbowing aside anyone who got in their way, and seemed to be in charge of the snow-covered and inadequately cleared street.
Hanna observed the town she had come to in the pale wintry light. For each stone-built house they passed, there seemed to be ten tumbledown little wooden shacks that had grown up out of the ground. Like mushrooms, she thought. If the stone houses were edible, the wooden shacks were the sort of fungi you stamp on and don’t put in your basket.
She felt worried all the time. Would she be able to fit in here? Or was she the kind of person who would never feel at home in this town?
And then she came to the sea — but that was nothing like what she had expected either. There was a harbour with lots of big ships, some with masts, others with black funnels. But the water didn’t go on for ever, as her father had said it did. She could see land in all directions, and no sign of open water beyond the ice and a network of open channels.
Jukka urged her to keep moving whenever she stopped. He seemed to have just as little time as his employer, and was always in a hurry.
They walked along the icy edge of the harbour. Hanna almost slipped and fell over several times. Her shoes, made by a Lappish cobbler in Fjällnäs, were not suitable for the town’s stony and ice-covered pavements.
They came to a cluster of wooden houses which seemed to be hugging one another in order to keep warm.
Jukka stopped and asked a man pulling a sledge laden with firewood the way to the address he had been given, to the Walléns. The man, who had a large burn mark on one cheek and a very loud chesty cough, pointed and tried unsuccessfully to explain. Jukka soon lost patience, touched his cap as a gesture of thanks, and they continued walking.
‘It’s impossible to find anywhere in this damned town,’ he muttered in his sing-song dialect. ‘Completely impossible, but I think this is it even so.’
He had stopped in front of a two-storey wooden house with a lopsided roof, broken and patched-up windows and a door that threatened to fall out of its frame. Jukka knocked hard on the door. It was opened immediately by an old lady so wrapped up in shawls that the only parts of her that Hanna could see were her eyes and her nose.
‘Wallén,’ said Jukka. ‘Does the Wallén family live in this house?’
The old woman gave a start as if he had punched her. Then she said something he couldn’t understand.
‘Take that shawl off, damn you!’ he roared. ‘I’m here on behalf of Jonathan Forsman, the businessman. He wants to know if anybody called Wallén lives here. I can’t hear a word of what you are mumbling behind all those rags you’re wearing.’
The old woman removed the shawl that was covering her face. Hanna could see now that it was gaunt and hollowed, as if she was often left starving.
‘The Wallén family,’ said Jukka again, making his impatience obvious.
‘They’ve gone,’ said the old woman.
‘What do you mean, they’ve gone? Gone to heaven or hell? Give me a proper answer before I lose my temper.’
The old woman backed away, but Jukka placed his large boot between the door and the frame.
‘There’s only one old man left here in the house,’ she said. ‘They left him behind. I don’t know where they’ve gone to.’
Jukka sucked at his lips and tried to make up his mind what to say to that.
‘We’ll go in and talk to the old boy,’ he said eventually. ‘Show us where he lives!’
The old woman led them up a staircase. Pale-looking children were standing in doorways, staring wide-eyed at the strangers going past. Hanna noticed that there was a stale, acrid smell, as if the house was never aired.
They continued up to the attic floor where the old woman finally stopped outside a door, knocked, then immediately scurried away. When Jukka opened the door, he pushed Hanna inside.
‘Go and talk to your relative now,’ he said. ‘Either you’ll be living here, or you’ll have to come back home again with me.’
The room contained a bed, a Windsor-style chair and a cracked mirror hanging on one of the walls. Hanna could see a reflection of her face in it — a worried face, somebody she didn’t really recognize. Then she looked at the old man lying in the bed who was staring at her as if she had just descended from heaven.
She recalled what her father had said, the last words he had whispered secretly into her ear. About her being a mucky angel. Had he been right?
Was it really an angel the old man seemed to see standing in front of him? Or just a confused serving girl from the distant mountains?