But how could he prevent it?
“I am Mrs. Thorkelsen,” the mother said with ridiculous dignity. Then she dabbed at her eyes with a grubby handkerchief. “Ah, so good, this man!” Raina, who was home from school by now, translated. “You see my poor, poor child, my daughter? What she has been through? The loss of her hand? And she almost died? These people!” Mrs. Thorkelsen gestured angrily at the Pedersens. “I gave Anette to them thinking they would give her a better life than I could—see my sacrifice? How I suffered, the mama? But not as much as my poor daughter.”
“You—you—” Anna Pedersen could barely contain her fury; her hands were fisted, her face nearly purple. She kept glancing at the stove in the kitchen for some reason. But she managed to swallow her angry words, because of Anette.
“And now, thanks to you and all those kind people from the newspaper,” Mrs. Thorkelsen continued smugly, “we won’t have to suffer again, will we, min datter?”
Gavin took a step backward; his nostrils flared as she smiled a mostly toothless, cunning smile. “We? What do you mean, we?”
Anette’s mother stopped smiling. She pushed her child off her lap so she could stand up, her hands on her hips—
And Gavin shuddered at the undistilled hatred in her small, shrewd eyes.
CHAPTER 33
?????
ANNA’S NERVES WERE STRUNG SO tightly, she thought she might fly apart if anyone brushed against her. Her household had been disrupted enough by the events of the past weeks, what with Anette taking over the bedroom—she didn’t begrudge her that, no, it was the least she could do for the child she had maimed. But there was also the fact that she and Gunner had to sleep somewhere, and she’d banished him to the parlor while she slept with her children; Raina was still upstairs in the attic. And then the Newspaper Man, always underfoot now, bringing more and more things into the house, things that needed to be stored somewhere—the letters and toys and clothes and odd trinkets like the beads the Catholics used for prayer, someone’s mother’s old Bible, framed needlework samplers spouting prayers. Even a milk cow—well, that was actually useful, and the cow was a welcome addition to the barn. But the house simply couldn’t hold any more of these things, yet they still came, along with him.
The Newspaper Man. He had turned their lives upside down more thoroughly than the blizzard. What would happen to Anette—to them all—after the blizzard, Anna hadn’t had time to imagine, not in all the turbulence of the sickroom. But even if she had, she’d never have been able to imagine this—the sudden, unwanted glare of notoriety.
People—strangers as well as neighbors—came knocking on her very door asking to see Raina or Anette, “the heroines”！ As if they could just stare at the two, like animals in the zoo back in Kristiania. As if she, Anna Pedersen, would be happy to let them trample all kinds of slush and snow into her house, would be thrilled to be ignored, treated as a hired girl, in order to satisfy the incomprehensible hunger to behold two ordinary humans who had survived an extraordinary situation.
Yet even as her skin pricked with resentment—no one ever asked about Anna, no one ever complimented her or praised her devotion—she was also consumed by guilt. Every time she remembered the sight of that pail, gleaming in the snow, she had to sit down, press her handkerchief into her mouth to stifle her cry. She had banished the pail to the barn, where Gunner could use it for slop. She would buy Anette a new one—a shinier, bigger one—when she went back to school. And a new slate, too, and new dresses, hair ribbons, stockings—anything, to atone for her sins.
But it wouldn’t suffice; she would still have this gaping, pulsating hole within, a hole where her goodness, her Christian charity—her untouched soul—used to reside. She could never make it up to Anette. She was going to hell, and Anna did believe in hell, the old-fashioned kind she was taught in the Lutheran church. Demons and flames and eternal suffering.
Unless…