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.

“Help, please?”

He wasn’t Danish, that was clear. But his request was plain enough, and shy though I was, there was nothing for it but to run over and grab his arm. I helped him hobble to the armchair that had been brought up for him, settled his bad leg on the footstool and then set to work.

The first trills made me stop.

“Is it all right?” he asked, gesturing at the small metal flute—not much more than a whistle, really.

I smiled. “Yes, please.”

So he whistled while I worked, and somehow that put me right at ease. By the time I was done, I didn’t hesitate at all to offer to help him back to the bed, but he shook his head.

“I stay here some.” Another smile. “Sorry—my Danish is small.”

“Where are you from?” The words came out of me before I could stop them.

“Ireland. I am a sailor.”

“What happened to your leg?” I pointed, in case he didn’t understand.

Another grimace, and he mimed snapping a stick. “A storm.” He shrugged with a rueful look. “Now I am on land for long time.”

“Your music is lovely.” I couldn’t believe my own cheek. I never spoke with customers this way. But there was something about this young man that drew me in.

He was there for three months all told, and by the time he set sail again I wasn’t even finding excuses to visit his room—I was sneaking in every chance I got. I loved him madly; that’s the long and short of it. He was merry and quick to laugh, so unlike my own stern father, and he made me feel—oh, like some rare and lovely creature. Donal’s Danish became better and better, thanks to me, and on the day he got his splint removed and his leg pronounced sound, he asked me to marry him. Though there was more to it than that: “Will you marry me, Sigrid, and come with me to America?” He said the New World was a place where a young couple could make a good life. With work on a trans-Atlantic ship, he would make enough from two crossings to book my passage.

America. The very sound of the word was foreign and frightening. But Donal was right when he said we would never be anything but lowly in Copenhagen. And he gave me courage.

There wasn’t much fuss about it. I said yes, and he promised to come for me as soon as he could.

But first would come the leaving, and vast ocean voyages, the distances beyond my imagining. We had just two more weeks while Donal built up the strength in his leg, and the thought of parting made me reckless, I suppose. We became lovers, and although it was furtive and hurried, our first time was the sweetest day of my short life. That night I lay awake, for once not minding the baby’s cries or my sisters’ squirmy bodies pressing me to the edge of the bed—just holding the happiness of it to my heart.

And then he was gone.

I recognized the early signs. Hadn’t I seen them often enough with my mother? But I managed to hide them. And of course I was scared—I was facing so many unknowns already, and here was one more, before I was ready. But I wasn’t terrified or despairing, because I knew my Donal was coming for me. It never crossed my mind that I could be ruined.

The mean streets of Copenhagen were littered with them, the unwed girls who’d borne babies and been cast off like rubbish. They sold themselves for a few coins or some food, sometimes with their children clinging to their skirts. The children were dirty and pale, with the drawn look of illness stamped on their little faces. I remember passing one of these women with my mother on the way to market once. Her little boy’s hair was thin and patchy, mottled with bald spots, and I asked Mama what was wrong with him. She glanced askance, as though he were some malignant growth sprouted from the ground.

“Don’t look at them,” she hissed, and yanked on my hand to keep me trotting. “There’s nothing can be done.”

But that would not be my fate. It was not so unusual for babies to be born a few months after the wedding. My Donal was coming for me, and if he found good ships and fair weather, with a month for each crossing he might be back before anyone noticed my condition. I did not let myself think of the perils that lay between his leaving and our reunion.

I was about four months gone, expecting news of Donal any day, when my mother’s eyes proved too sharp for me. “Sigrid, reach up and get me that crock of lard,” she said. It was my day off, and we were making the pasties my papa took to work for his supper. I heard the hissing intake of her breath as I stretched toward the shelf. Ever thrifty, Mama waited until I had safely settled the crock on the table. As I turned, she slapped my face so hard I felt the imprint of her hand burn my skin like a brand.

“Slut.” When I risked a glance, her face was a mask of fury. Then it contorted, and she sank into a chair, her face in her hands. “You stupid girl. What have you gone and done?” I heard the fear in her voice, and that was worse than her anger.

I knelt beside her. “Mama, it’s all right. I will be married soon—I won’t shame you.”

“You have already shamed me.” Still, I saw hope flare in her eyes. “So. This man—this man you have taken up with without our knowledge or say-so—will marry you. Who is he then?”

I began to tell her about Donal, and her mouth puckered up with bitterness. “A foreigner—and a sailor! Could you be any dimmer! And where is he now, this sailor?” The word spat out, as though Donal were a cutthroat or thief.

“He is working to earn—”

“He has sailed away, you mean, leaving you here, full of his baby!”

“He will come back for me. Soon now.”

“Did I raise you to be an idiot?”

“Mama, no. He wants to marry me. He will come for me. We are going to America.”

That earned me another slap, though this one was halfhearted. “America. Did he give you a written vow? Are there witnesses? Do you even know where he lives?”

I stared at her. “No, Mama. Why would I need such things?”

Her shoulders slumped. “You have nothing, girl. Nothing. Every destitute woman on the street has been told the same tale.”

Tears stung my eyes. “Donal will be true to me—you’ll see!”

Mama tightened her mouth even further and said nothing, just heaved herself up from the chair and went back to her work.