TWENTY

LUCY

I was so caught up in Sigrid’s story that I jumped at the ping announcing a text. Feeling a little disoriented—like, What am I doing here in the twenty-first century?—I bent over the couch and groped at the phone where it was tethered to the wall outlet. Jack’s text read r u still up? All wrapped up in Sigrid’s love story, I felt a wave of longing for Jack. My battery reading was a measly 14 percent, but it would do for a short call. I pulled the phone out of the charger and dialed.

JACK

It was so great to hear Lucy’s voice. I was kind of embarrassed at how strongly I reacted, actually. I mean, it wasn’t like she’d been gone a month or anything. And to my surprise, she sounded all excited about something.

“Jack, you’ll never guess what I found at my grampa’s.”

“Um…a skeleton in the closet?” Too late it occurred to me that this was a horrible thing to say when someone has actually died. But Lucy just rattled on.

“You’re surprisingly close. I found this old journal, kind of—well, it’s the story of my great-great—God knows how many great—grandmother. It’s this incredible account of how she fell in love with an Irish sailor and went to America. And Jack, she was Danish. Her name was Sigrid—wait, let me check—yeah, Sigrid Larsdatter.”

I confess I’d zoned out a bit, not being that fascinated by some dusty old family history, but that name jolted me right into a hyperalertness that was almost painful. I actually felt like my brain was buzzing, madly trying to connect these wild dots.

“Lucy, stop.”

There was dead silence on the line. Then, quietly and a bit ominously, like you’d better have a good reason to have been so rude: “What?”

“Sigrid Larsdatter? Seriously, that was her name?”

“Yes. Jack, what’s this about? I could hardly make up a name like that.”

“No, it’s just…sorry, my mind is kind of exploding here. Just wait, okay? I have something important to read to you.”

When I’d finished reading the passage from Andersen, neither of us could speak for a while. The silence stretched out between us as we tried to take in the implications. Then Lucy plunged in.

“So…the Match Girl was Sigrid’s daughter, and Sigrid was my direct ancestor. And Sigrid went to America and left the little girl behind? Dear God.”

There was a tinny beep and a surprising vicious expletive from Lucy. “Jack, I have hardly any battery. I have to go and finish reading this. I’ll call tomorrow…”

Her voice disappeared into crackling and a dial tone, but I thought I caught the words “love you” before it died out for good.

I was afraid my father would beat me, but he did not even say one word about it. The only way I knew my mother had told him was that when I arrived back from work a few days later, he did not greet me or even look at me. He acted like I did not exist all evening, and at first I was relieved. After all, my father and I already saw each other little and spoke less. But you’ve no idea how painful being invisible eventually becomes.

When a week had gone by and no more was said, I thought I had seen the worst of it. I would continue to work, save what I could of the few coins I had of my own, endure my father’s silence and my mother’s hard looks, and wait for Donal. I could not have been more wrong.

“Sit down, Sigrid, your father has news.” I had barely stepped in the door when my mother hustled me to the table. I looked from one to the other, trying to read their moods. Certainly my mother seemed to have lost some of the grim bitterness she had been carrying all week. My father looked like he always did after work—tired and dirty.

“I have found you a match,” he said. “You will marry Iver Henricksen ten days from today. He is widowed with no children, so he will accept the child.”

“I have a match!” Though I had never raised my voice to my father, I was all but shrieking now. I could hardly hear myself, my head shrilled so with panic. “I am marrying Donal Sullivan, and we are going to America!”

The table jumped with the weight of my father’s fist. He stood, eyes blazing, his lips pulled back in a sneer, and pointed a thick finger at me. “You are just another girl with a baby in her belly from a foreign sailor who found some sport on his layover. You think anyone will take you once you’re fat with another man’s brat?”

I was on my feet now too, half ready to run blindly out the door. “Mama!” I was crying, hating myself for it because I needed to make them understand. “Please! I can’t…I must marry Donal! I’ll die if I don’t!” Stupid thing to say.

It was like begging water from stone. My mama turned cold eyes on me. “You want to talk about dying, girl? How long do you think you’ll last with the street filth?” When she pushed back her chair and rose heavily to her feet, it wasn’t to join in the shouting but to end it. “Your father has saved you. You will obey him, and be grateful.” Then she turned her back and busied herself at the hearth, her own belly so big with child that she had to stand sideways to the stove.

My father lumbered over to his bed and eased off his big boots. “Here, Hans, can you take these for your papa?” he said. “Greta, go help your mother with the dinner.” Once again, I had ceased to exist.

I lay rigid in my bed all night, my mind racing but arriving nowhere, filled with defiance that had no outlet and, on its heels, a mounting fear. At work, exhausted though I was, there was no end to it, my brain scurrying round and round the same useless plans. I would leave my family and live on my own wages. (Yet I would be fired as soon as my condition became obvious.) I would run away. (Where?) I would send a message to Donal, and he would come for me. (How?) I would steal the passage money and go to America on my own and… (And what? Starve in a strange land?)

I had not thought my father a man to force his daughter to marry, but he believed he was saving me from far worse. A potent mix of love, shame and anger fueled him against me. Yet my mind still fixated on escape. I could not believe it would come to actually marrying Henricksen—a laborer known for his angry temper and hard drinking, a man nearly as old as my own father. A man who would bring me misery, even if I hadn’t loved another.

When I arrived home from the inn that day, my mother was in labor. It went hard, leaving her whey-faced and weak, so that I had to take off work to help Greta manage everything. And the baby—he was a scrawny thing, slow to the suck. The air was thick was unspoken worry.

The days unreeled one after the other, and all I could seem to do was watch helplessly as they flew by. I never returned to work; my father had terminated my position. I was kept busy cooking and watching over the children and tending to Mama. She was too ill to burden with pleas and arguments, and my father was rarely even at home. I prayed every night for God to send Donal back to me, but with dwindling hope, until, impossibly, there were but two days left before the so-called wedding. I’d been on a long slide to a cliff, with nothing but weeds and sticks to grasp at, and now I was pitching headlong to the edge. I clutched at my father.

Weeping, wild-eyed, I begged him, but his face was stony. Before long, seemingly unable to stand me any longer, he strode out the door. How I wished I could do the same.

“Mama!” I fell to my knees before my mother’s bed, where she still rested much of the day.

“For the love of God, leave off, Sigrid.” She looked at me bleakly. “We cannot keep you. Even if we wished it, there simply isn’t enough to go around.”

I was hauled off to the pastor to have some sense talked into me. I was made to sit in a low chair, a child’s chair almost, while he pursed his lips and steepled his fingers and gazed at me coldly in silence.

“You have sinned against God.” His voice boomed out in the silent, chilly room. “You have sinned against the Church, against your community. You have shamed your parents, who work hard to provide for you. You could have been a help to them in your mother’s illness, and instead you add to their burden. You have conceived a child from this sin, and still your father provides. He hands out salvation to you, and you spit on it. One might think the Devil himself has claimed your heart.”

Oh, he made me feel like the worst creature that ever lived. I had sinned with Donal and burdened my mother—no wonder God had not answered my prayers. My words dried up in my mouth, and when he asked what I had to say for myself, I could do nothing but bow my head under his accusations.

“So, then. You will give up this attachment to a man who led you into sin, and obey your father as God commands us. You will pray for forgiveness from your sin, pack up your things and prepare yourself for the life of a dutiful wife. You will come meekly to the church to marry Iver Henricksen, and be grateful for this chance at redemption.”

The words were like clubs, beating me deeper and deeper into my chair, so that I didn’t realize he’d risen and approached me until I felt his hand on my head. My head jerked up; he gazed down at me, his mouth quirked at the corner. Compassion or disdain? I couldn’t tell.

“Go in peace, my child.”

And so I was married in a desolate and brief ceremony, followed by a desolate and blessedly brief consummation. Afterward I lay in my strange bed, in a groove made by another wife and with the musky smell of Henricksen surrounding me, and in my mind’s eye I set fire to every beautiful moment I could remember with Donal. I burned them one at a time and watched them float to the ground like flaming leaves and crumble into ash.

I can’t say there were any big surprises in my new married life. Henricksen’s two rooms were small, dark and grimy. For the sake of the baby—Donal’s baby, I reminded myself—I did my best to set them in order. I don’t suppose anything had had a good cleaning since his first wife died.

He was a hard man and not inclined to sympathy or tenderness on my account. But he was only mean when he was drinking hard. Then the least thing would provoke a violent rage.

The first time he took his fist to me, I wept all night and ran to my mother at first light. Her face fell when she saw the bruise blooming across my cheekbone, but when I fell sobbing into her arms, she stiffened and held my shoulders at arm’s length. “He’s your husband,” she said. “You must learn to manage.”

“Can I not stay awhile?” I begged.

“Better not. It will just keep you thinking that this is home. You have your own home now.”

And so I did learn to manage, though Henricksen’s dingy rooms would never feel like home. I kept his house and made his meals and let him have his way with me in the night. I tried to become invisible when he hit the bottle—no easy feat in a tiny place. I stopped up my tears, dabbed witch hazel on my bruises and kept my troubles to myself.

I had a hard time loving the little one inside me at first. That baby, I thought, was the cause of all my misery. If there had been no baby, I would still be at home, working at the hotel and saving for the day when Donal came for me. Instead, I had a rough old man, an ugly life and a river of sadness. But as I grew big and the baby began to tumble and squirm in my belly, my feelings changed. The baby became the bright spot of joy in the grayness of my days. He was a bit of Donal, and if nothing else, we would have each other. By the time I felt the first tightening pains that told me he would soon be born, my love was as fierce as any mother’s.

I say he since that is how I thought. But it was a little girl I birthed. My mother came to me, bossing and bullying me through when the pains came so close together I panicked and cried out that I could not go on. Nonsense, she said briskly, of course I could go on, just as all the women before me had. And because she was my mother, I did what she said and, sure enough, before long I was grunting and straining like a big old sow, and my little Klara came howling into her grandmother’s arms.

It’s good that she was a girl. I’m not sure Henricksen could have swallowed giving his name to Donal’s boy, whatever he promised. But he softened at the sight of the tiny girl baby, and whatever his faults, he never spoke of her father.

Klara was just starting to walk, a bright, babbling little thing with the widest blue eyes. She was my only joy, but I worried after her as well. Though Henricksen had never threatened any harm to her while she was a helpless infant in a cradle, now that she was on her feet it would be harder to keep her out of his way. If she, clumsy and heedless as little ones are, ever fell against his legs when he was full of whiskey…I could not bear to picture it.

Wrapped in these gloomy thoughts, I didn’t hear the knocking at the door until it grew sharp and insistent.

My legs almost gave way when I recognized him. How could I not be laid low at the sight and by the mad welter of feelings he triggered? Impossible to hold all those feelings at once, and so what they distilled into was a kind of rage—against the world, against God himself, I suppose, for letting this cruelty happen. For, you understand, I had slowly come to accept that my parents had been right, that Donal would not come. And now, pain on top of pain, here he was, and I trapped.

“They said you are married.” The voice flat, accusing. Now I took in the expression on Donal’s face and saw that I was not the only angry one.

“You took too long.” I flung it back at him. “My parents sold me off like old stock.”

“I couldn’t help it. There was a storm, a shipwreck. We were blown far into the Caribbea—” His features twisted; he too carried pain inside the anger. “Ah, Sigrid, I—” He stepped inside the threshold and carefully shut the door. “Will you not come here to me?”

He opened his arms, and, married woman though I was, I held my breath and stepped into them. And it all came back—the sweetness of our time together, the happiness I’d almost grasped. I was crying, and he smoothed back my hair and whispered, “Do you love him?”

I shook my head, unable to speak.

“Then come away with me. I have a ticket for passage on my ship in my pocket. There is a room in Boston waiting for us, a start until we can plant our feet. There is no need for us to change our plans.”

Klara’s shrill cry came from the back room. We both stiffened.

“There’s a baby?” Donal’s face was a mask I couldn’t read. It wasn’t joy I saw there though—that was certain. I fled to the back room and stood with the baby, freshly wakened from her nap, as my mind and heart raced. I was afraid he would be gone when I returned. I was afraid he would not want her.

But when I stood before him, holding her on my hip, and said softly, “This is Klara,” his eyes widened.

“But she is…how old is she?”

“She is not quite a year. Donal, she is yours. She is the reason my parents made me marry.”

It is a marvelous thing to watch a man fall in love with a child. It made me fall in love with him all over again.

He stayed over an hour, as long we dared, and when he left our plans were set. I had money for coach hire and a ticket tucked into my petticoats, and had promised to board the Liberty two days hence.

“Be strong, Sigrid,” he said before he left. “You are my wife, and Klara is my child. Whatever the law says, we have the right of it.”

And who in America could say I was not Mrs. Sullivan? No one, that’s who.