I peer round the corner. There is no one in the yard. I stand still and listen. All I can hear is the faint snuffling of cows carrying through the wall. You would expect someone to be cleaning up the cowshed or bringing fodder for the cows to chew on. Perhaps it is meal-time. I open the door a little and slink into the dim light of the feed store. I wait for my eyes to get used to the poor light.
Just as I thought. A whole mountain of dry hay.
I have to tell him. Perhaps then he will understand that he must leave. After all, the thought of money brought him back here: that cursed dream of riches which draws people to itself like those devices called, if I remember rightly, magnets. Erik can choose the right moment to tell Anna and Mauri. I will tell the Farmhand on one of those nights.
It is a defeat, of course, but I got used to the idea of defeat a long time ago. People regard me as proud and quarrelsome. How little they know me. No doubt tongues will wag. Joy at my misfortune will bring blood to those fleshy peasant cheeks, but what of it?
I will take out my better suitcases and pack my future in them.
Luckily, I have a sister in Turku and not in another backward village, where the greatest social events of the year are the littering of Gunnarsson’s sow, or the butcher’s hands, well used to meat, straying below corset level as he dances with the sexton’s daughter. Only, the sexton’s daughter has never even seen a corset and neither have any other of the fine young ladies of the district.
I will carry a parasol, sit in the park on beautiful summer days, walk along the bank of a river. What a relief, after all these years. Who knows, one day, an ageing but not decrepit gentleman may come along. He will have a sense of propriety, but the blood will still run warm in his veins and he will have the daring to let it to heat up at carefully chosen moments. He may wish to extend a gloved hand to me and help me embark a hire carriage. Then he will take me on an excursion to a remote riverside folly, a place where faded dreams can flower once more.
But first I have to feed the chickens.
If Jansson had kept his word, many a misfortune would have been avoided. The war would still have been waged; the King of Sweden and the Emperor of Russia would hardly have changed their plans because of Henrik and the horse. In this house, however, everything would have been different.
For Henrik never got the horse. Jansson had second thoughts and paid cash for the five years’ toil. I do not know to this day whether Jansson’s act sprang from treachery or stupidity, or whether he wanted to spare Henrik from becoming a slave to the horse out of the goodness of his heart. In any case, Jansson’s decision showed how little understanding of human nature he had. Otherwise, he would have seen Henrik not as his voluntary labourer, but as the independent man the horse had by then made out of the boy.
For a few days, we hardly saw Henrik and he barely said a word to anyone. There was something proud and dangerously mature about him as he moved around the edges of the farmyard, quiet and cold. His eyes, staring sullenly, were like coals in the wax of his hardened face. One night I woke up with a sense that something would happen. Although I heard nothing, I went out and crept into the stable. There they slept, the horse and Henrik: a primitive creature emitting a stench of dark graveyard and, against it, a tall, thin human figure. Not two beings, but one, or rather one and a half, or at least one and a third. A man-horse.
The next morning, Jansson got a surprise. He found the money he had given Henrik on his kitchen table. For a few days there was no word of the runaways. Then both returned – not at the same time, but painfully and shamefully separated from each other, like a man brought home without the lower part of his body. They were accompanied by Crown soldiers. Henrik had been caught somewhere south of Vaasa, attempting to steal turnips from a field at night. What a miserable fate for a young man: to get away with stealing a horse only to be caught pinching turnips.
Whatever we think of Jansson, Henrik escaped the house of correction on account of the farmer’s mercy. Perhaps Jansson felt sorry for Henrik’s sick father, and after Arvid had died of his illness, he probably did not want to stir up old trouble.
Fool that I am, I thought that with time Henrik would also forget, but he did not. In certain matters, one ought to seek the advice of women first, for they have been given a third or fourth or even fifth sight, which sees and understands many things men fail to know. By chance, I turned to the Old Mistress when I happened to pay a quick visit to the chicken shed and found her there feeding her feathered flock.
I cleared my throat, as required by good manners, and she turned and smiled. ‘The chickens are laying well,’ she said.
‘Let’s be grateful we don’t need to worry about them,’ I replied. ‘What I mean is, there are enough causes for worry in a human’s life.’
She nodded and her smile faded. ‘True. Mankind seems to be made for worrying.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘Henrik has been given the nature he has,’ she said. She had forgotten the chickens, although one was pecking at her shoe. ‘He not only bears a grudge, he has to be cunning, too. Can it be healthy for a young man to have too good a memory and too sharp a brain?’
‘Is he still after that horse?’
‘Yes. He’s hatched a plot to get revenge on Jansson. Since Jansson took his horse, he’ll take Jansson’s daughter.’
I was surprised, and at once grew fearful, but I did not show it. ‘Which of them? The pretty girl?’
‘Yes. Anna’s her name. Although, who knows, she might turn out to be a good daughter-in-law. Revenge just doesn’t seem the right reason for taking a wife. In any case, the poor girl won’t make up for the horse. Though you can ride a wife, of course.’
I sensed misfortune approaching, mocking and inevitable. But I did not let this intimation creep into my voice. ‘It’s gone as far as that? Has the day been fixed?’
The Old Mistress shook her head glumly. ‘Anna doesn’t even know yet that she’s to be Henrik’s wife. Just as Henrik doesn’t yet know that I know. But I do know my son; Anna won’t have any say in the matter, once it’s been decided. Jansson will put up a fight for a time, but a daughter is every man’s weak point. And Jansson owes Henrik, in a way.’
‘I see. So he’ll swap the horse for the daughter? Looks as if it’s time to order wedding shoes from the shoemaker.’
‘Have Arvid’s old ones.’
‘Thanks all the same, but I won’t go to a wedding in a dead man’s shoes. Could be a bad omen for the marriage. Although maybe you can’t ruin a union with shoes if hooves have got there first.’
We all see others in our own way. Henrik claims that I am in the habit of skulking and eavesdropping. True enough, I happen to overhear all sorts of things, but a quiet person hears a great deal that he would rather not hear. Sometimes there seems to be nowhere in the world human voices don’t reach.
It was an autumn day. Despite the chilly weather, I was lying on my back in the grass at the edge of the forest, when I heard two voices coming nearer, one clear and girlish, the other lower, a male voice not yet broken by age. I should of course have raised my head from the tussock as a warning. They stopped painfully close to me and instantly I had already heard too much.
‘What if he kills you?’ Anna asked, in a childishly tremulous voice. ‘Father said you ought to take his knife away. They say he’d be best off in the King’s army.’