“You check it out, luv. I’m done like dinner.”
Luv. Both my parents used to call me that when I was little—but I hadn’t heard it in ages. It sounded nice.
“Sleep well,” I said. “Mom—Uncle Steve said I could choose something as a keepsake. Do you think I could have this?”
“You can ask him,” she said. “Something that old might be worth something, I suppose, but I doubt Stephen cares.” She yawned hugely as we started down the stairs. “Lucy, are you okay on that couch really?”
“I’m getting used to it,” I lied.
“Maybe we should get a hotel room for tomorrow,” she said. “The little guest bed’s pretty bad too, and I just can’t bring myself to sleep in Shamus’s bed.”
No. Me neither.
JACK
With Lucy gone, the Match Girl weighed more heavily on my mind. Now that I’d discovered the pattern, it was impossible to tell myself these were isolated freak events that would likely never happen again. The next full moon seemed to be racing toward me. I thought more than once about telling my parents—even headed down the stairs from my room once to do it—but in the end I just couldn’t find the words. Hey, guys, you won’t believe what’s been happening. No, they wouldn’t. And I would have found that easier to take when this first started, back when I didn’t really believe it either. Now, I didn’t want to waste time with medical tests or shrinks or “proving” to my parents that this was somehow real. I just wanted them to help me make it stop.
Rather than do nothing, I continued to slog through the Andersen books, though I was sick of them—and him. At least they helped me fall asleep at night: I’d hardly ever read anything more boring.
It was getting close to midnight, and I was just about to chuck HCA’s diary and turn out the light when my eye caught something that chased away all thoughts of sleep. In the middle of a long entry about a trip to Italy, I saw the young girl who used to sell matches outside the theater. My heart started tripping fast as I stared at the words. I scanned back to find the place where the passage started and read more carefully:
There are beggars on the streets everywhere; they are quite a nuisance and my landlady warned me that many are also accomplished pickpockets so one must avoid any close contact. Strange how one beggar can stir one’s sympathy, but many become menacing. But there was one little waif, clutching a tray of grimy trinkets, who caught my attention. She jogged a memory, but it was some time before I realized whom she reminded me of: the young girl who used to sell matches outside the theater…
I was just a boy myself, new to the city and poor as a church mouse, struggling to survive on the pittance the Royal Danish Theater paid me as a choirboy. But the little girl —she could not have been more than ten years of age—who stood on the street with her matches until the last patron and player left the theater was clearly worse off than I. She was there on the coldest nights, shivering in her thin shawl, and though I had no spare coins for her I did sometimes slip an extra piece of bread or a hard-boiled egg from my aunt’s table into my coat pocket to give her. Then one night the street was empty of vendors, and when I mentioned it one of the players told me the police had cleared them off due to complaints from the theater patrons.
I was still living at my aunt’s, for though the realization that she was effectively running a brothel shamed me intolerably, for the present I had no other recourse. And I thought no more about the match girl until one night when I was returning “home” unusually late, and saw a slim figure ahead of me. Hearing my footsteps, she glanced back fearfully, giving me a glimpse of her. I recognized her at once, the very striking large blue eyes in a wan little face, and waved to reassure her, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. She redoubled her steps, hurrying to a hovel at the end of the street and slipping in the door.
I didn’t like to speak unnecessarily to my aunt, but I could not resist asking her about the girl the next day. She’s an inveterate gossip who goes out of her way to learn her neighbors’ business.
“Oh, that’s a sad tale,” she told me. “That’s Sigrid Larsdatter’s child. They say she ran off with a foreign sailor, leaving her daughter and husband behind.”
I was shocked. “How could she do such a thing?”
“Oh well.” My aunt shrugged. Her morals, needless to say, were sorely lacking. “I don’t blame her one whit for leaving that Henricksen. He was always a mean old drunk, that one, and I’ve no doubt her life with him was a misery. But leaving the child—that’s harsh.
“Seems to me the baby was with her grandparents for some time,” she mused. “Yes, that’s right. Then the grandmother died, and the child was sent back to her father. But Henricksen has gone from bad to worse since then. He’s not fit to raise a goat.”
I thought about that young girl sometimes, though I rarely ever caught a glimpse of her after that. Soon I was able to move to a more respectable lodging, and I forgot about the girl until some time later, when my aunt sent me a note to say she’d been found dead and frozen in the street.
I was young enough to be shocked by her end, horrified even, and full of raging indignation against a world that would stand indifferent to a poor child’s suffering. And I took up my pen. Do you know, I had forgotten that altogether until now! I wrote the girl’s history in a lather, more a fiery sermon than a story, with no thought but to find an outlet for my turmoil. I wonder if I still have it among my papers?
Imagine, that was almost twenty years ago. I find that child’s plight still moves me; perhaps I shall find my old account and see if it can’t be turned into a proper tale.
It is too hot here to write seriously. How anything gets accomplished in this scorching sun is beyond me; I find I must lie down each afternoon just to keep from fainting and my face is as red as a lobster. If I ever return here, it must be in the cooler season…
The Match Girl was real. I could hardly believe it. My brain was spinning, trying to grasp what it meant. We were dealing with a “real” ghost, not a fictional character? Was that better or worse?
I grabbed my phone to call Lucy, then glanced at the time. Twelve thirty. Damn. I thought she said they were staying at her grandfather’s house, not a hotel, but I didn’t know if she had her own room. Lucy wouldn’t mind being woken up for this, but her mom would. Reluctantly, I turned out the light. It felt like morning would never come.
I barely slept all night, my stupid brain rehashing Andersen’s journal entry over and over. Plus, I was afraid I’d dream of Little Creepy Girl, with my brain so full of her, and that probably kept me awake too. Then I overslept, staggering into the kitchen in a fog.
“You look terrible, Jack—are you okay?” My mom kind of did a double take when she looked up from her coffee and paper.
“Yeah, just slept badly, and now I’m late. Is there any more of that?” I hefted the coffee pot experimentally and filled up a travel mug.
“Toast?”
“Maybe just a PB sandwich—it’ll be faster and I can take it with me.” I felt rather than saw her eyes on me, felt her unspoken question. “Honestly, I’m fine—just tired. I tested 6.3 this morning.”
“Okay, kiddo. Just for the record—I didn’t ask.”
“I know.” In fairness, she hadn’t, and I had sounded a little testy. “I gotta run. Thanks for the coffee.”
I didn’t want to phone Lucy on the bus—too loud and public—but I texted her. Crazy news. Call u at lunchtime?
By second period, I realized I had messed up. I was down to one test strip, up to 16, and my set, which I should have changed that morning, was looking pretty frayed around the edges. Once the infusion set gets pulled loose or just overstays its welcome in that patch of skin, it doesn’t matter how much insulin you shoot in there; it doesn’t get absorbed. I wasn’t going to make the biology field trip unless I got it all sorted at lunchtime. Reluctantly, I called my mom.
“Um, hi. I wondered if you’d be free to bring me some stuff.”
“What stu
ff?”
“I need test strips and a new set. I can grab the bus if you can’t come, but there’s this biology trip to the Turtle Trauma Centre and…”
“I can come right at noon—is that soon enough?”
“Yeah, I’ll be waiting at the door. Thanks, Mom.”
“You’re not done with me yet. I know you were tired this morning, but Jack, I won’t always be around to bring you stuff.”
Oh, here we go. “I know. Look, I’m sorry.”
She just kept on like I hadn’t said anything. My dad calls it her “Danish implacability.”
“So your backup supplies are going to be really important…”
“Right. Look, I have to get back—”
“…which is why I suggested you keep extra supplies in your locker.”
NINETEEN
LUCY
I took the notebook to bed with me. Uncle Steve was arriving by train from Montreal the next morning, and I wanted to know what I had found before asking for it. First, though, I wanted to call Jack—I hadn’t heard from him or even checked Facebook all day. But when I dug my phone out of my purse, the battery was dead. Now I remembered the low battery signal I’d vaguely registered the night before. With a muttered curse, I looked around the cluttered room for a free wall outlet. Grampa’s outlets all seemed to be hidden behind immovable furniture. I had to haul the couch out from the wall and fold myself over the back to plug in my phone. Then I settled into the Couch of Pain.
It was hard to make out the handwriting at first, but once I got used to it, I read quickly. Sigrid’s voice became clearer and clearer, until I almost forgot I was reading. It was like I was meeting an ancestor I never knew existed, seeing her life through her eyes.
I was born Sigrid Larsdatter. Now I am Sigrid Sullivan. I know my life draws to a close, and I wish to tell of those things I was never able to speak of—the secret sorrow and shame that has been the dark and constant witness to the blessings I found in this New World. Reason tells me that my Klara will never set eyes on this record, yet my heart does hold the stubborn hope that one day she may, and know that her mother, though failing to provide for her, did not part from her willingly or fail to love her to the end of her days. For I am mother to more than the four I bore in America. This is my story.
“Sigrid, clear these little ones out of my way.” My mother pushed back the hair that had escaped her kerchief and shooed the two youngest children as though they were chickens. I ran to scoop up the baby and grab Hanne’s hand, leading them away from the hearth where Mama wrestled with the heavy soup pot. Then she put it down abruptly and hurried to the night jar, vomiting into it.
I sighed. Pregnant again. That would make six, and only Johan, my older brother, earning his own keep. No wonder the furrow between her brows had appeared so often of late.
My father arrived home late, black from the coal he shoveled all day, drawn with weariness. He didn’t complain about the thin soup my sister Greta set before him, but tore into it, carefully mopping up the last drops with his bread.
“Did you get paid today?” Mama asked, once he had done.
He nodded. “Most of it.”
We all let out breath we hadn’t realized we were holding: there would be better food tomorrow, not the gruel that sometimes kept us going when his customers showed empty pockets on their due day.
I heard my parents’ low voices that night, my father’s voice rising once in anger—as though my mother had conceived by her own willful design, and he’d played no part in it.
Only a few days later my father told me he had found me a position at the Black Horse Inn, where he delivered the coal. It was his habit to take a drink there when he’d had a good pay—a small enough reward, and even that more than we could afford.
I was nearly fifteen years old, and I thought I was used to hard work—but my first day in the laundry showed me the difference between the up-and-down work in a family household and ten relentless hours doing the same backbreaking task over and over. By midday my back and arm muscles were screaming for a rest, and I was drenched in my own sweat, from the heat of the fires and the clouds of steam that enveloped us as we hooked out the sheets, towels and kitchen cloths from huge tubs of hot water. The soapy linens were dunked into cold rinse water, then fed through a mangle that took all my strength to turn and would flatten your arm up to the shoulder as happily as a sheet if you weren’t careful. Then the next batch went into the suds to boil as we pegged out the clean laundry.
“Lucky for us, this ain’t a proper fancy hotel,” said Frau Olsdatter. She was in charge of the laundry, and while she put me to work smartly, she was kind enough and didn’t stint on her share. “Then we’d have to scrub out every stain on a washboard. But Herr Jensen don’t care if the sheets is a bit spotty.” Herr Jensen was the manager, a balding, paunchy man in a frock coat who’d glanced up at me from his ledger when I presented myself that morning, said, “Come with me” and led me to the laundry without another word.
I went home that night with a new understanding of my father’s heavy footfall. Barely able to eat or answer my mother’s questions, I crawled early to my bed. The next morning I was so sore I had to bite back tears as I dressed myself. My mother looked at me with sharp concern but bit her lip and said nothing.
“It will be fine,” I mumbled. “Laundry is just twice a week, so today will be easier.” I dreaded going back, but I knew the family depended on me.
That day I found myself in the hotel kitchen, scrubbing pots, stacking plates, emptying overflowing garbage bins and sweeping and mopping the f loors, which seemed to be constantly coated with grease, crumbs and peelings. Wednesday I was put to work sweeping and mopping the long halls and stairways of the inn, and cleaning out the ashes from every fireplace. This last required going into the guests’ rooms, which frighted me some. But I went with a chambermaid named Elsa, a cheerful girl who showed me how to knock and call out before entering the room. In the time it took me to sweep the ashes into a bucket, dump it out into the ash bin at the end of the hall and tidy up the mess around the grate, she’d stripped and made up the bed and gathered up any trash left by the last guest. Then I took the garbage and linens away while she swept the room. The worst job was cleaning the privies, which Elsa showed me how to do but didn’t help with, saying, “I did my share of that when I started here.”
Thursday was laundry again, and Frau Olsdatter grinned when she saw me. “Still here? Good for you.” She already had two of the big kettles filled with water and was working on a third, her thick red arms hoisting buckets tirelessly. “Here, grab a bucket.”
“We always start girls on laundry day,” she told me later. “Why is that?” I asked, since Frau Olsdatter seemed to be waiting for it. We had taken our midday meal to a little area behind the hotel where servants were allowed. It was shaded by the building, and the alleyway behind allowed a little breeze to reach us, affording some relief from the inferno of the laundry. My new position didn’t pay much, but it included a daily meal, which, as Elsa had said, wasn’t always good but at least was filling.
“Them as aren’t prepared to work hard don’t come back,” she said. “They wake up with everything hurting and give it up. Plus, you can’t shirk here, ’cause I’m always at your side.”
The work got easier as I became accustomed to it, and before the month was out, even the laundry days didn’t leave me as sore and scuttled. I can’t say I learned to enjoy it, but I liked the companionship of Frau Olsdatter and Elsa. When I brought home my first pay, my father counted it carefully and gave two of the eight coins back to me. “For your own necessaries,” he said and gave me a brief smile that was somehow painful. I thought on that smile in bed that night, and it came to me that he was ashamed to have to send me out to work and then take my earnings.
I’d been at the inn about six months when Elsa got herself married to a shopkeeper and left her position, and I was given the job of chambermaid. Though I had worked mainly in the empty
rooms after guests left, I’d had an eyeful by then of some of the rough characters who stayed in that inn, and heard Elsa’s stories of all her tricks and strategies for staying out of the way of the drunk or lecherous ones. And I’d changed a lot in those few months. Before, I would have shrunk at the thought of fending off a man or going into a room where a pleasure lady did her business. I was more confident now—and strong from my time in the laundry. But I never told my parents about the goings-on in some of those rooms.
One morning I was carrying a stack of clean sheets down the hall to the big cupboard where they were stored when I paused outside a door. The most delightful sound was seeping through—a trilling like birdsong, only sorted into the liveliest, happiest tune. I had to stay and listen, it made me smile so. For a stolen moment, I forgot the gritty floors and worries at home.
A few days later I was sent to change the sheets in that same room. “Is he out?” I asked, hoping to work unobserved.
Herr Jensen shook his head. “That one’s never out—he’s laid up with his leg in a splint.” I must have stood there a second too long, because his lips pursed with irritation and he flapped his hand at me. “Get on then, girl! Smartly!”
And that’s when I first laid eyes on Donal Sullivan.
He was sitting up in the bed, with his bandaged leg propped on a cushion. But that’s not what I saw. I saw a young, open face, with curly dark hair and eyes green as a cat’s. He smiled a welcome at me, and I felt the blood rush into my face. I normally avoided eye contact with guests, but I couldn’t look away. Or perhaps I could—but I didn’t want to!
Tongue-tied, I gestured with my stack of sheets, and he reached for the crutch leaning against the bed. It was laborious work to ease himself over to the edge, and the whole time I just stood there, not knowing what to say. But then, as he went to stand up, he grimaced and looked back at me.
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