Gavin stifled a sudden cough.
“Well, yes, perhaps—so tell me, Miss Olsen, you are a schoolteacher? How old are you, if you don’t mind? You look so young. And what did you do during the blizzard, then? When it struck? Tell me everything.”
“I’m sixteen,” Raina said, blushing again. “I just did my job.”
“That’s not true. She’s a heroine,” another voice interrupted, and Gavin looked up. A tall man, handsome, not as weathered and bent as the other Norskis he’d encountered, was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He had a bridle in his hand. So this must be the useless husband.
Raina stared at her hands folded in her lap; she did not look pleased or flattered. The man continued, in a truly awkward fashion; even Gavin sensed that he was putting his foot in it somehow, but neither Raina nor the wife—who kept darting in and out of the kitchen fetching things for Doc Eriksen—appeared to afford him any stature.
“This pretty young woman here, she got her pupils to safety. She tied them all together with their aprons, can you imagine? And she got them all to the Halvorsans’ in the storm.”
“Not all,” Raina said softly. “And Tor helped.”
“Ja, ja, the boy helped. And poor Anette”—Mr. Pedersen nodded toward the bedroom—“she and Fredrik ran off toward home instead.”
“I couldn’t stop them,” Raina said, bitterness creeping into her voice. “I tried. I couldn’t stop them. Anette felt—”
“Anette came home because of me,” Mrs. Pedersen, her arms full of linen, chimed in. “She knew I would be angry if she didn’t come home to do her chores. It is my fault that she is maimed for life.”
“Anette is your child?” Gavin was puzzled; none of these people really seemed related to one another. He couldn’t explain it other than they seemed to treat each other warily, as if they were all on edge. None of the loving affection or long-suffering hatred that springs up between people who share a name or blood.
“No, no, she’s just a girl, you know—” Mrs. Pedersen replied, but was evidently frustrated by her lack of English.
“Her mother abandoned her,” Gunner said.
“She lives here, as do I,” Raina patiently explained to the bewildered Gavin. “We board. I’m the teacher, so I have to board out. I don’t live in this district. Anette was—is—somewhat of a hired girl.”
“I go to her,” Mrs. Pedersen said abruptly, and left the room. Raina, watching her, shook her head; her expression was bemused.
“She is trying,” Raina murmured, and Gavin didn’t know what or who she meant.
“I don’t quite—I would like to write about this, with your permission. You see”—and an idea took shape in his mind. That word that Mr. Pedersen had used—heroine—struck him as useful. Extremely useful—of course! There had to be heroes and heroines among all the tragedy; stories of triumph, stories to keep readers interested instead of tuning out the endless misery. Stories to sell papers. Gavin knew the public; while they liked to read about heroes, the appeal of a heroine—a young, pretty woman like Raina who had, against all odds, saved the lives of her pupils—was far greater. And then there was the child fighting for her life—that was a story people could get behind, too. A story of hope; someone they would invest in and keep buying papers to read about. It really was astonishing, this girl’s story—a child who had been abandoned by her own mother only to be saved by the selfless act of her only friend in the world, a young, innocent boy—
It wasn’t a story, it was a goddamn gold mine. Pulitzer would surely take notice of this back East.
“Are all schoolteachers out here like you?” he asked Raina.
“Like me? We all have to have a certificate, yes, after an examination.”