The Blue Maiden (eBook)

Part I

Berggrund Island, Sweden

1675

Today, wash day.

The island’s thirty-two women wake before dawn. This is their favorite time, wind not yet alive on the water, as if the wind sleeps also.

Wives turn to the broad, freckled backs of their husbands. The children stare from the doorway then come burrowing in, crowns of their heads burning but their feet unfathomably cold. They smell mossy, of addled sleep, damp sweat. Their sheets will be scoured. The children, lately, suffer nightmares they cannot remember.

Across town, women attend to the morning.

One is greeted by a vole’s mauled body, laid out on her doorstep. Another presses damp tea leaves to the fleabites ringing her ankles. A third sips cream off the top of the milk, then puffs on her dead father’s pipe. Ash is shoveled, chicken thighs taken from the ice chest and salted. In the dustpan, a curled black shape is mistaken for a snake, but no, only a leek, petrified from hiding many months under the cookstove. The baby inside Signe hiccoughs. Ida watches the ocean from her stoop for the day’s first waves, sketching a new drawing in her book. Not a specimen this time but an image from her imagination: a long line of women wading into water.

The priest waits for them at the church gate.

The sky pinks, across the street the grassland cast in soft hues that will harshen by half past six.

Beside him stand the orphan brothers, farmhands seven and eleven years old. The older brother trims their hair crooked with sheep shears. Their vests are flecked with hay because they sleep beside the goats for warmth and comfort.

Last night the priest—knowing they were starving—plied them with a supper of plums, pork loin, and hard-boiled eggs. They ate on haybales. “Let me tell you a story,” the priest said. “About the two of you. I have a vision you will help me.” But they were not listening, absorbed in sucking their sour plum pits, so he suggested one more treat. He’d catch them two pike and fry them crisp.

The priest knows the village children whisper that his legs are too long for his torso, and his house too tall and thin. When he rides his scrawny horse through town his feet drag the ground, leaving a cloud of dust.

At the stream, hooked pike flapping on the bank, he held the young boy’s head under the water. He had explained himself quite carefully over their dinner. He was willing to explain himself once more. “Stop,” begged the older one, pounding the priest’s back. “I’ll confess anything you want. We’ll do anything at all.”

The priest explained as the water churned how he simply did what God told him to. “God,” said the priest, lifting the small boy who gasped and dripped, “might as well be holding my own head underwater.”

The church bell tolls.

The orphans do as they’ve been told, pointing discreetly to the women filing past with their families while the priest notes the chosen in his ledger.

The older boy imagines the spot on the women’s foreheads as the whorl of an inked fingerprint. The younger sees something purple and raised, like the birthmark on the butcher’s wife’s cheek.

“Why pick so many?” the older chides his brother when they’re hurried last of all through the doors.

“Because I saw it,” he answers too loudly. “The Devil’s mark.” Already he looks like he could cry.

The priest leads the village in song, limestone walls echoing, even in summer radiating cold. He leads them in prayer. They kneel on cushions the women embroidered as girls, some by chance bending to their own childish handiwork or their mother’s needlepoint of wild roses, their grandmother’s sea grapes. He waits as their daughters tuck limp bouquets of fern, lily, and bloodroot around the oxidized plaques by the door, honoring the dead.

When he reads from his ledger in the smooth voice of a sermon, the women blush to hear their names issue from his mouth.

He tells them they’ve been marked.

The youngest is fifteen, the eldest has just celebrated her birthday. “One hundred and two,” she insisted to doubting great-great-grandchildren, “and even I was your age once.” But they could not believe a person so old could ever have been so young.

As the orphans are called to the pulpit, they hold hands.

“She’s who took us,” says the little brother, pointing to the butcher’s wife in the front pew, purple birthmark curled around her eye. Some days she gifts him scraps of crisp chicken skin, humming as she bustles.

“Where did she take you?” asks the priest.

“To Blockula,” answers his brother. “To the Devil waiting there.”

The villagers gasp to hear the Blue Maiden called by its dark name. Demon spirits are said to awaken at the sound. The name is archaic. No one remembers the naming: the Devil’s home has always been Blockula. It will always be. Innocent villagers cannot find Blockula, for it hides from the uncorrupted eye. Blockula is reached by witch’s flight, riding beasts or broomsticks or slumbering men. There you’ll find a meadow stretching into endless distance, a circular labyrinth to get lost in forever, and the Devil’s house with its door open.

The Blue Maiden, barren of houses and people, shows no sign of its shadow realm. She is the little sister island to Berggrund, domed like a hill rising from the water while Berggrund is low-lying, long, and narrow.

All summer, the priest has preached of mainland women in evil covenant, abducting children and flying them over the water, sacrificing their souls in Satan’s midnight meadow. Reports of carnality, unslakable hunger, candles made from the rendered fat of babes. Parish after parish has exacted due punishment.

Until now, no Berggrunder has been accused, though they are nearest to the Blue Maiden, whose stark silhouette is visible from the mainland only on the clearest days. Berggrund’s villagers are afraid even to think the name Blockula, but the Blue Maiden’s offshore presence is a constant reminder, like a needling speck of soot in the corner of the eye.

The priest clears his throat, and the orphan boy fears there’s something he’s forgotten. He describes the black-gummed goat the witch flew them on.

“And what else?” the priest asks.

“A meadow,” he answers, “that goes on forever. And in it, a gray house. The Devil’s house was tall and thin.”

“Good,” says the priest. “Enough.”

He will not make them speak what comes next, visions God has gifted him, terribly, nightly. How within the great room of Blockula’s house, Berggrund Island’s treacherous women waited on their backs in rows upon rows of slim beds. How the Devil visited them, one by one. He tells this part himself. “Who knows what creatures grow in their wombs now,” he says.

Signe cups her rounded belly, the baby fluttering inside.

She can almost remember it: rickety bed, outside the window a meadow without end, the Devil with long fingers opening her legs.

“But first,” the priest continues, “they feasted. And what were you fed, at the Devil’s table?”

The meal that comes to the older boy’s mind was once his mother’s favorite.

“Speak up,” says the priest.

“Cabbage with bacon,” he repeats, heavy with shame.

“And bread and butter,” says the younger. “Cheese, milk, and cream, and plum cake.”

“And how did it taste?”

“Very good,” the young one says. While his brother answers, “Rotten,” then corrects himself: “One bite good. The next, spoiled.”

“Tell me,”—the priest opens wide his arms to the congregation—“are such simple boys capable of such elaborate lies?”

“I dined there, too,” shouts the candlemaker’s daughter, Ursa, a slip of a girl with a pinched mouth. She twirls her black hair around her finger. “Women danced together, back-to-back. Everything was backward.”

Shock ripples through the pews.

“The bed’s linens were delicate,” she adds crisply. “The meadow’s flowers delicate, too, like lace.”

“Mornings tending the horse I’ve found her covered with sweat,” says Ursa’s older brother. “Hagridden, I wonder.”

“That girl’s a born liar,” scoffs the candlemaker. “Just how did the witch collect her? Ursa sleeps in a windowless room.”

“She stretched herself thin,” Ursa says, naming her schoolteacher, Ida, who is always scribbling secrets in a thick red book. “And slithered down my chimney.”

Mette’s four-year-old son—easily frightened and excitable—begins squirming in his seat. “Me too,” he blurts.

“Quiet,” whispers his father. “This isn’t pretend.”

“You what?” the priest asks. “Someone took you to Blockula?”

“Yes,” answers the boy, though he shakes his head no.

“Who among them?”

He sighs, leaning back against the warmth of Mette’s chest. “Mama.”

“But why go with her? Good boy like you.”

“She promised to buy me a new pair of...