Once she has crept back to the cellar door, Anna Stina realizes her mistake. She has allowed it to swing shut behind her and she sees now that its lock is of a different kind. The others may be old and worn, but this one is new, its shiny metal still free of the ugly scratches a drunkard makes when trying to fit a key to a lock. She curses herself for her inattention. Even if Björkman and his watchmen had never found the drainage hole through the foundations of the building, they would know that something in the cellar wasn’t right. Two girls had disappeared that way. A new lock on the door and a stricter circulation of its key would have neutralized that problem.
Now the mousetrap has closed around her. The keys Dülitz gave her won’t even fit the hole. With her back to the wall, she sinks down on her heels to think. Her eyes are drawn to the stairs that wind upwards, where the rumble of the watchmen’s sleep echoes in the stairwell. She takes one step at a time, listening carefully on every landing.
The watchmen’s dormitory both sounds and smells like a pigsty. She counts eight narrow beds, of which five are occupied. Their snores are such as to make even the windowpanes rattle. On a table there are empty glasses and bottles. The air is thick with sweat, sour wine, and flatulence. As she takes a step across the threshold, the one closest to her sits up in his bed, his back as straight as a pitchfork, and stares at her.
“Fuck off, Nyblom, it’s my night off. Get someone else to take over your shift.”
Just as suddenly, he falls back onto his straw mattress, into a sleep as deep as before, and leaves her standing with her heart in her mouth. As she creeps closer, a few more muttered words come from the same bed.
“Hey, Nyblom? You look like shit.”
She goes from bed to bed and stares down at the pillows. Often she only sees a mop of hair and has to wait until the head moves or tiptoe to the other side in order to see it. At the far end she finds the face she last saw in the glow of a clay pipe on the stairs of the cellar that she is now unable to access. Jonatan Löf, the father of her children. He lies with his mouth open, panting in the stale air of this room heated by so many bodies, a strand of drool at the corner of his mouth. She searches his face for some likeness to her children. Yes, he has passed his features to Karl. That much is clear. She leaves the room.
Morning is approaching, but not so quickly that she doesn’t have time to consider her options. She sees only one, and that is to mingle with the rest of the female prisoners. In the morning there is an assembly in the courtyard for roll call. Anyone missing will be discovered, but no one expects to find one girl too many. Likely as not, no one will notice. Of those who are considered trustworthy and who have so little time left to serve that they will soon be given their freedom, there is always one group sent outside to work in the garden, or even to go to the city for firewood and other necessities. If she can join them and be let outside the door, she will be able to avoid discovery.
From out in the yard she can follow the light of a lantern at a slow pace past the leaded windows of the building, and when the night watchman is at a safe distance, she dashes across the stones to the section of the workhouse where she once slept. She unlocks it, slips in, and finds a place next to the wall, hidden from view from the door by the spinning wheels that have been gathered in the middle of the room. As she waits, she drops off into restless slumber.
When the morning bell tolls the day’s beginning, the routine is familiar. She is on her feet as if no time has passed since her own days in the workhouse. While the women make up the beds, she walks to and fro between them and tries to appear as busy as they are. No one has time to pay her any attention. After a few minutes, the key is turned in the lock, the door opens, and a gruff voice orders them out to the courtyard for roll call. A subdued row of women hurries out, and she is right in the middle.
It takes a while for them to arrange themselves. The watchmen are irritated. Now she sees men of a different kind to the ones she remembers from last year, and it takes her a while to realize that they are in fact the same, that it is her own perception that has changed. Once she only felt fear. Now she sees a motley crew of a kind she would never have allowed to cross the threshold of the Scapegrace, human wrecks marked by the war, one with a lame foot, the other half-blind, in uniforms so worn and ill-fitting that they look like caricatures of soldiers. Each of them stinks of alcohol and tobacco. The only ones who aren’t hungover are those who have already had time to have a few over breakfast, swaying as they stand. With a great deal of effort, they force the women into formation, in dormitory order, and begin calling out names. Misunderstandings and mispronunciations slow the process, and in the confusion Anna Stina makes her way to the group of women who have already gathered to pick up baskets for gardening, those who are given some breakfast bread out in the meadows. Several of them look her up and down with restrained surprise, more than one lets her gaze linger at her bare feet, but in the prison everyone learns to mind their own business, and each look soon gives way to indifference.
A watchman stands in front of them, ready to show them out, the large gate key spinning around his finger, while the rest are led away to eat. One of them lingers: an old woman, her face in ruins, limbs so thin and crooked that she looks like a squashed spider. She stays in her spot and stares at Anna Stina, blinking slowly. When one of the watchmen shouts at her to hurry up, she holds out a crooked finger and points.
“That one. She shouldn’t be here.”
When the watchman grabs the woman by the ear and twists it to force her to follow along, she holds her ground. Unused to resistance, the watchman is unsure of what to do next. From a deep-seated instinct for self-preservation, the other women back away from the one who has been pointed out. The outstretched finger jabs at the air.
“Her! She shouldn’t be here!”
The small group is starting to attract attention. More watchmen walk over to curse their colleague and ask about the reason for the delay. The old woman raises her voice to a howl.
“That’s Anna Stina Knapp. She’s the girl who disappeared. She’s back, I don’t know how.”
At least one of them finds the name familiar.
“They didn’t take in any new prisoners late last night, did they?”
There are shrugs in response. The man who spoke rubs an unshaven chin and spits tobacco into the gravel.
“Get Pettersson.”
“Wake that devil at this hour? Get him yourself.”
Under mumbled protest, the youngest of them is dispatched. In the silence, the old woman makes her voice as ingratiating as she can when she addresses the watchman who has taken command.
“Surely I deserve something small as a reward?”
He shoots her a look of undisguised contempt.
“You’ve had it already.”
She shakes her head, puzzled, and the watchman holds his fist in front of her nose.
“Your reward is that I didn’t punch you in the mouth the same moment you started yammering without having been asked to.”
One among them laughs more heartily than the others.
“Don’t you know who she is, Söderhjelm? You must be the only one. We call her Ersson-on-her-Knees. She hasn’t spun any yarn since Pettersson invited her to dance on the same day she arrived. Instead she has to support herself with the only means she still has at her disposal. The funny thing is you would have done her a favor by hitting her. If you’d knocked out those buck teeth she might have been able to raise her fee from a crumb to a crust.”
Söderhjelm smiles mirthlessly.
“I’ll leave that to you whoremongers. You know as well as everyone else that I stopped a bullet with my groin in the war, and I can’t say I’ve ever been as happy about that as the moment I laid eyes on Ersson here.”
There is a great deal of merriment, and Anna Stina draws a breath, doubting what her eyes are telling her. The person standing there is the Dragon, Karin Ersson, the woman who betrayed her, the same age as she is, transported here on the same wagon last year. The last of her hair that hasn’t been ripped from her skull is lanky and gray-white, her skin a grid of wrinkles and scars, her body so thin that the skin sags over her bones. As if she was in on the joke and not its butt, she gives Anna Stina a malicious grin.
“Anna Stina Knapp.”
It is Petter Pettersson who is speaking, and Anna Stina knows she is lost.