The Storm Sister Read online

  Then I moved on to the voicemails. Doubtless most of them, like the texts, would be from people offering condolences. But as I dialled in to retrieve them, my stomach did a flip when I heard the oldest message left ten days ago. It was a bad connection and his words sounded muffled, but I knew it was Theo.

  ‘Hi, my love. I’m calling on the satellite phone while I’ve got the chance. We’re sitting out somewhere in the Celtic Sea. The weather is bloody awful and even my famous sea legs have deserted me. I know you’re cross I kicked you off the boat, but before I try and get a couple of hours’ kip, I just want you to know it’s got absolutely nothing to do with your sailing abilities. And to be honest, I wish you were aboard now, as you’re worth ten of the men here. You know it has everything to do with the fact that I love you, my darling Ally. And I just hope you’ll still be speaking to me when I get back! Goodnight, sweetheart. I love you, again. Bye.’

  I abandoned all thought of listening to other waiting messages and simply replayed Theo’s again, and again, soaking in every word. I knew from the time it was left that he must have called only an hour or so before he went onto the deck to see Rob being hurled off it. And went to his death to save him. I wasn’t sure how you saved a message forever, but I knew I had to find out.

  ‘I love you too,’ I whispered. And any last vestiges of anger that I’d held inside me about him ordering me off the boat that day dissipated into the air.

  Over breakfast, Celia told me she was heading out to do some last-minute shopping for Italy.

  ‘Have you decided where you’re going next, Ally? You know you’d be more than welcome to stay here while I’m away. Or come with me. I’m sure you could get a last-minute flight to Pisa.’

  ‘Thanks, it’s so very kind of you, but I think I’ll probably go home,’ I said, worrying that I might be becoming a burden to Celia.

  ‘Whatever you decide. Just let me know.’

  After she’d left the house, I went upstairs and decided I was strong enough to give CeCe and Star a call. I dialled CeCe’s number first, as she was the one that arranged everything for both of them, but it went to voicemail and so I called Star instead.

  ‘Ally?’

  ‘Hello, Star. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m well. But more importantly, how are you?’

  ‘I’m okay. I was thinking I might pop round and see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be by myself. CeCe’s off to take photographs of Battersea Power Station. She wants to use it as inspiration for one of her art projects before it’s turned into a new development.’

  ‘Can I just come and see you then?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  ‘Good. When’s the best time?’

  ‘I’m here all day, Ally. Why don’t you come for lunch?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll come over around one. See you tomorrow, Star.’

  As I ended the call, I sat on my bed and realised that tomorrow’s lunch would be the first time I’d ever spent more than a few minutes with my younger sister without CeCe present too.

  I took my laptop out of my rucksack, thinking I should check my emails. I set it up on the dressing table, and plugged it in. There were further messages of condolence and the usual spam, including a girl supposedly called ‘Tamara’ offering me comfort now the nights were drawing in. Then I saw another name I didn’t immediately recognise: Magdalena Jensen. After a few moments, I remembered she was the translator who was working on the book from Pa Salt’s library for me and thanked God I hadn’t pressed ‘delete’.

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: ‘Grieg, Solveig og Jeg / Grieg, Solveig and I

  20th August 2007

  Dear Ms D’Aplièse,

  I am thoroughly enjoying translating Grieg, Solveig og Jeg. It’s a fascinating read, and not a story I have come across before here in Norway. I thought you might be interested to start reading through the manuscript, so I have attached the pages I have done so far, up to page 200. I should have the remainder with you in the next ten days.

  With kind regards,

  Magdalena

  Opening the attachment that contained the translation, I read the first page. And then the second, and by the third, I’d moved the laptop and plugged it in by the bed so that I could make myself comfortable while I continued . . .

  Anna

  Telemark, Norway

  August 1875

  13

  Anna Tomasdatter Landvik paused as she waited for Rosa, the oldest cow in the herd, to make her way down the steep slope. As usual, Rosa had been left behind by the others who had all moved on to fresh pastures.

  ‘Sing to her, Anna, and she’ll come,’ her father always told her. ‘She’ll come for you.’

  Anna sang a few notes of ‘Per Spelmann’, Rosa’s favourite song, and the tune flowed out of her, ringing bell-like down the valley. Knowing that it would take Rosa a while to lumber towards her, Anna sat down on the rough grass, folding her slender body into her favourite thinking position, with her knees tucked up to her chin and her arms wrapped around them. She breathed in the still warm evening air and admired the view, humming along to the buzzing of the insects in the field. The sun was beginning to sink towards the mountains on the other side of the valley, making the water of the lake below shimmer like molten rose-gold. Soon it would disappear completely and night would fall quickly.

  In the last two weeks, as she’d counted the cows down from the mountainside, dusk had fallen noticeably earlier each day. After months of it being light until almost midnight, Anna knew that tonight, her mother would have lit the oil lamps by the time she got back to the cabin. And that her father and younger brother would have arrived to help them close up the summer dairy and move the livestock back down the valley in preparation for winter. This event heralded the end of the Nordic summer and was the advent of what, for Anna, felt like interminable months of near perpetual darkness. The vivid green of the mountainside would soon be wearing a coat of thick white snow and she and her mother would leave the wooden dwelling where they spent the warmer months and return to their family farm just outside the small village of Heddal.

  As Rosa came towards her, stopping occasionally to snuffle at some grass, Anna sang a few more lines of the song to encourage her. Her father, Anders, didn’t think Rosa would see another summer. No one seemed to know exactly how old the animal was, but she was certainly not much younger than Anna’s own eighteen years. The thought of Rosa no longer being there to greet her, with what she liked to think of as a look of recognition in her soft amber eyes, caused tears to well in her own eyes. The additional thought of the long, dark months ahead sent the brimming drops spilling down Anna’s cheeks.

  At least, she reflected, wiping them away hastily, she would get to see Gerdy and Viva, her cat and dog, when they returned to their farmhouse in Heddal. There was nothing Anna liked better than curling up in front of the warm stove, eating sweet gomme on bread, with Gerdy purring on her lap and Viva waiting to lick up the crumbs. Although she knew her mother wouldn’t let her get away with just sitting around dreaming all winter.

  ‘You’ll have your own home to look after one day, kjære, and I won’t be there to feed you and your husband!’ her mother, Berit, told her regularly.

  From churning butter, to darning clothes, feeding the chickens, or rolling out lefse, the flatbreads her father devoured by the dozen, Anna had little interest in her domestic duties and certainly had no thought of feeding an imaginary husband just yet. As hard as she had tried – and if she was completely honest with herself, she knew she didn’t try hard enough – the results of her endeavours in the kitchen were often inedible or verging on disastrous.

  ‘You’ve been making gomme for years, yet still it tastes no better,’ her mother had remarked only last week, plopping down a bowl of sugar and a jug of fresh milk onto the kitchen table. ‘It’s high time you learnt to do it properly.’

  But
whatever Anna did, her gomme always turned out scrambled and burnt on the bottom. ‘Traitor,’ she had whispered to Viva, as even the ever-hungry farm dog had turned up her nose at it.

  Although she had left school four years ago, Anna still missed the third week of every month when Frøken Jacobsen, the teacher who divided her time between the villages of Telemark county, had arrived with new things for them to learn. She had much preferred it to the strict lessons of Pastor Erslev, when they had to recite bible passages by rote and were tested in front of the whole class. Anna had hated it and had always felt hot at sensing everyone’s eyes on her as she’d stumbled over unfamiliar words.

  The pastor’s wife, Fru Erslev, was much kinder and had more patience with her when she was learning hymns for the church choir. And often these days, she was given the solo part. Singing was so much easier than reading, Anna thought. When she sang, she simply closed her eyes, opened her mouth and a sound that seemed to please everyone came out of it.

  Sometimes, she’d dream of performing in front of a congregation in a big church in Christiania. When she was singing, it was the one time she felt of any worth. But in reality – as her mother always reminded her – beyond singing the cows home and one day lulling her babies to sleep, she felt her talent was of little use. All her contemporaries from the choir were now either engaged to be married, or married, or suffering the consequences of what happened once they were. Which seemed to be that they felt sick and became fat, and eventually produced a red-faced, squawking baby and had to stop singing.

  At the wedding of her elder brother, Nils, she had endured nudges and hints from the extended family about her own future nuptials, but as no suitor had so far volunteered for the position with Anna, this winter it would only be herself left behind with the gammel frøken, as her younger brother, Knut, called the unmarried older women of the village.

  ‘God willing, you will find a husband who can ignore the food on his plate and instead gaze into those pretty blue eyes of yours,’ her father, Anders, often teased her.

  She knew that the question which lay in her family members’ minds was whether Lars Trulssen – who had regularly partaken of her burnt offerings – would be that brave man. He and his ailing father lived on the neighbouring farm in Heddal. Her own two brothers had made Lars – an only child and motherless from the age of six – the unofficial third and he was often found at the Landvik family supper table in the evenings. She remembered how they had all played together in the long winters on the days when it snowed. Her rough and boisterous brothers had enjoyed burying each other in the snow, the distinctive red-gold Landvik hair marking them out in the white landscape. While, much to their dismay, the far more gentle Lars had always gone inside to read a book.

  As the eldest son, Nils would, in the normal course of things, have remained with his new wife at the Landvik homestead after their marriage. But the recent death of his wife’s parents had meant that she had inherited their farm in a village a few hours from Heddal and Nils had moved there to take over the running of it. It was left to Knut to spend all his time out on the Landvik farm helping their father.

  So Anna often found herself sitting alone with Lars, who still came to visit regularly. He would sometimes tell her about the current book he was reading, and she would strain to hear his quiet voice as he told her fascinating stories of other worlds that seemed so much more exciting than Heddal.

  ‘I’ve just finished Peer Gynt,’ he told her one evening. ‘The book was sent to me by my uncle in Christiania and I think you’d enjoy it. I believe it’s Ibsen’s best so far.’

  Anna had looked down, not wanting to admit that she had no idea who Ibsen was, but Lars hadn’t judged her and had told her all about Norway’s greatest living playwright, who apparently came from Skien, a town very close to Heddal, and who was making Norwegian literature and culture known to the world. Lars said he’d read everything Ibsen had written. In fact, it seemed to Anna that Lars had read most books anyone had written, and had even confided in her his dreams of someday becoming a writer himself.

  ‘But that isn’t likely to happen here,’ he had told her, his blue eyes nervously meeting hers. ‘Norway is so small and many of us are ill-educated. But I hear that in America, if you work hard enough, you can be anything you want to be . . .’

  Anna knew that Lars had even taught himself to read and write English in preparation for such an event. He wrote poems in the language and said he’d be sending them off soon to a publisher. Whenever he began talking about America, Anna felt a pang because she knew that he could never afford such a thing. His father was crippled with arthritis, his hands permanently frozen into semi-fists, so Lars now ran the farm single-handedly, still living in the dilapidated farmhouse.

  When Lars was absent from the supper table, Anna’s father often lamented how the Trulssen family land had been left untended properly for years, their pigs running riot and churning the soil so it became depleted and barren. ‘No better than a bog, with all of this rain we’ve had recently,’ her father would say. ‘But that boy lives in the world of his books, not the real world of fields and farms.’

  One evening last winter, as she’d been attempting to decipher the words to a new hymn that Fru Erslev had given her to learn, Lars had looked up from his book and watched her from the other side of the kitchen table.

  ‘Want some help?’ he’d asked her.

  Blushing as she’d realised she had been sounding out the same words over and over in an effort to get them right, she’d debated whether she wanted him closer as he always smelt so terribly of pig. She’d eventually nodded shyly and he’d moved to sit next to her. Together, they had gone over each word until she felt she could read the hymn all the way through without a pause.

  ‘Thank you for helping me,’ she had said.

  ‘My pleasure,’ he’d replied with a blush. ‘If you like, Anna, I could help you to improve your reading and writing. As long as you promise to sing for me sometimes.’

  Knowing her reading and writing had suffered through four years of neglect since she had left school, Anna had agreed. And after that, on many nights during the last winter, they had sat at the kitchen table, their heads together, Anna completely foregoing her embroidery, much to her mother’s disgruntlement. They had quickly moved on from hymns to books that Lars had brought with him from home, wrapped in wax paper in order to keep the incessant snow and rain off the precious pages. And after they had worked, the books were closed and Anna would sing for him.

  Although her parents had at first been concerned that she was becoming too bookish, they enjoyed listening to Anna read to them in the evenings.

  ‘I’d have escaped from those trolls much faster,’ she’d announced to them after reading The Three Princesses of Whiteland one night at the fireside.

  ‘But one of the trolls had six heads,’ Knut had pointed out.

  ‘Six heads just slow you down,’ she’d said with a grin.

  She’d practised her writing too and Lars had chuckled when he’d seen how tightly she gripped the pencil, her knuckles white with tension.

  ‘It’s not going to run away from you,’ he’d said, adjusting her hand around the pencil, carefully placing each finger in the right position.

  One night, he’d shrugged on his wolf-skin coat to ward off the bitter cold and opened the door. As he’d done so, snowflakes the size of butterflies had blown through it. One landed on Anna’s nose and Lars shyly reached out to wipe it away before it could melt. His big hand had felt rough on her skin and he’d quickly stuck it back in his coat pocket.

  ‘Good night,’ he’d murmured, before venturing out into the winter darkness, the flakes of snow melting on the floor as the door closed behind him.

  Anna stood up as Rosa finally reached her. As she stroked the cow’s velvety ears and then kissed the white star in the centre of her forehead, she couldn’t help noticing the grey hairs around Rosa’s soft pink mouth.

  ‘Please be here next s
ummer,’ she murmured softly to her.

  Having satisfied herself that Rosa was making her way slowly in the direction of the rest of the herd, grazing peacefully on the dusky slope below, Anna set off towards the cabin. As she walked, she decided that she was just not ready for change; all she wanted was to come back here every summer and sit in the fields with Rosa. Her family might think she was naive, but Anna knew exactly what was planned for her. And she remembered vividly the strange way Lars had behaved when he’d said goodbye to her for the summer.

  He had given her the Peer Gynt poem by Ibsen to read, gently clasping one of her hands in his as she held the book in front of her. And she had frozen. His touch had signified a new kind of intimacy, very unlike the brother-and-sister relationship she had always thought they had. As her eyes had wandered to his face, she’d seen a different expression in his intense blue eyes and suddenly, he’d felt like a stranger. She had gone to bed that night, shuddering at the look he’d given her, for she knew exactly what it contained.

  It seemed that her parents had already known of Lars’ intentions.

  ‘We could always buy the Trulssen land as Anna’s dowry,’ she had overheard her father saying to her mother late one night.

  ‘Surely, we can find someone from a better family for Anna,’ Berit had replied in a hushed voice. ‘The Haakonssens still have an unmarried son, down in Bø.’

  ‘I’d like to have her settled close by,’ Anders had replied firmly. ‘Buying the Trulssen land would mean no income at all for perhaps three years whilst the soil recovers, but if it does, then it would double our crop yield. I think Lars is the best that we can hope for, given Anna’s . . . shortcomings.’