I tried to peer behind her into the dark sanctum of my father’s bedroom. All I could see was the heavy drape of the bed curtains and the dim shape of a body. ‘Klara wrote to me. Is he –’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.
‘The doctor is with him now. He has been... we will know more tomorrow.’ She struggled to gather her words and stared at me as though the dead had risen and walked before her. ‘Why are you here?’
I felt an old familiar tension settle onto my bones. ‘He is my father. Of course I came.’
‘If the Witch finds out you ran away...’
‘I didn’t run. She let me go.’
My stepmother did not seem convinced. She stepped closer. ‘Mina...’
‘I swear.’ Before she could say anything else, I asked, ‘May I see him?’
Her mouth was a tight line. ‘You’ll be in the way.’
It was too easy to fall back into the patterns of the girl I used to be here, but they fit badly, like a shoe outgrown. ‘I’ll do as the doctor says. I’m sure you can use an extra pair of hands.’
A maid came round the corner carrying a fresh cloth and water, and stopped in shock at my presence. I took them from her with a smile.
‘There’s been a spill.’ I indicated the dropped bowl and towel at my stepmother’s feet, and with their attention diverted, I stepped past her and into the sick room.
A hush fell.
My footsteps were muffled by the heavy carpet and curtains hung by the door and windows against the cold.
The doctor was by the bed, bent over the slack body of my father. A moment of horror gripped me: another corpse-parent. Then I saw the shallow rise and fall of his chest and it gave me freedom to breathe too. I set the bowl down by the table and dipped the cloth in the water. My father was stretched out on his bed under bulky covers that were pulled back at one corner to expose a leg bound tightly to a splint. His skin was waxy, drawn taut over his cheekbones and jaw. Gently, I pressed the cloth against his sweat-stained forehead.
‘Tell me.’ My voice trembled. ‘Will he live?’
The doctor knocked my hand away. ‘Less of that, unless you mean to bathe him.’
I listened, numb, as the doctor explained to me the fall, the fracture, a fever that had plagued him since. I had read so much and yet had nothing of medicine, nothing of any use in the world. I only understood as much as my stepmother had suggested: a crisis gripped him. If he sickened further, the outlook was grave, but if he passed the night and the fever broke then there was hope. I felt my cheeks wet with tears: relief I had reached his side, and fear of the hours to come.
My stepmother returned and we passed a painful night in vigil. I had hoped to be of some use but I was only underfoot, closing windows when they were to be opened and speaking when the doctor wanted silence. I felt as though I should tidy myself away and sit the night alone, but that voice had waned in power since living with the Witch and I warred with it through that agonising night. Change had begun its work on me but I was not yet loosed from the yoke of my past.
Dawn broke with the fever, a healthy colour coming to my father’s face as light lined the curtain edges. He did not wake, but the tension lifted from the doctor’s expression and for the first time since Klara’s letter had arrived I felt the world solid beneath me. I turned to the window to hide my face. Relief was a sweet drug and I cried freely in that tiny moment of privacy, shoulders trembling. I had weathered one more storm and come through safe.
b
I fell into a deep sleep until midday, but woke uneasy. My father was out of danger, but memories of my last night in the palace came to me. The Witch with my father. A thought I had been ignoring for too long: he knew about the Witch. He might know what she planned for me. When I came to my father’s rooms I was shooed away by my stepmother, but she softened enough to tell me he had woken and taken a little soup, and perhaps he would be well enough to see me that evening or the next day.
I took my chance to walk through my old home one more time instead. In daylight, I could see the palace was not quite as abandoned as I’d thought. My stepmother’s preparations for Christmas were well under way; I passed deliveries of claret and schnapps and salted hams and boxes of candles and candied fruit and nuts and cloves and an order of half a dozen geese to be stored in the icehouse. Memories lay everywhere: choosing and felling a tree with my mother and father, in the years they still spoke to each other. Cutting swags of ivy and holly, evergreen branches and fir cones to make decorations, until my mother grew overwhelmed by the world and retreated to her room, leaving me alone with a forest of scraps. And after she died, walking through the snowfall alone, sighting snow hares, the deer creeping closer to the town as the mountains became impossible for all but the hardiest creatures.
I wanted to stay within the fantasy of those memories. Every lonely, difficult moment turned sweet with age.
Reality met me sharp and clear in town. The whispers and looks of the night before had swelled into people hovering at the edge of my vision, slipping close to ask snatched questions, about the Witch, the castle, what had happened to me, to touch the edge of my sleeve in wonder. I was a creature of myth. Rare and unreal and unnerving.
At the edge of town, work was under way to mark out the foundations of a new station for the railway. My father had got what he wanted. Sacrificing me to the Witch had been worth it. I thought of her alone in her study, marooned in that collapsing wreck of a castle. The line between us pulled taut and I realised, with a flush of confusion, that I missed her. The Witch had let me in, even if only a little, and that warmed me in the coldest moments.
Here, I had no one.
As fresh snow fell after lunch I stopped at the cathedral, slipping between its monstrous iron-studded door; I was not the demon they thought me, iron could not hold me back. The interior was dressed in violet for advent, and the witch-cursed saint-shrines burned dim – there was no need for protection now the Witch had visited her doom on me. Only one figure sat before the shrine of St Anthony of Padua, hunched in a black lace mantilla, rosary bead clicking between her gnarled fingers. I saw a strange echo of the Witch in her black veil, before the woman rose to leave and I saw it was Frau Hässler. I slipped behind a pillar, debating what to do. Edgar’s letter was still in my pocket where I had slipped it before I left.
Frau Hässler shuffled from the cathedral and I followed. She went to a small, respectable cottage showing signs of lost money – a cracked pane in an upper window, rotten wood around the frame. Snow caught in my hair and clung to my cheeks. Despite my cloak and muffler I was freezing. I kneeled at the step, and edged the paper under the door. Even this far away, I feared the Witch discovering me. Those who had been taken before me were as much my business as hers, but I feared her fury if she found out what I had done.
As I still kneeled, the door was answered by a middle-aged woman as hard as a bar of iron, tall and stiff-backed with chestnut hair shot through with grey like dirty ice melt. Frieda.
I looked up at her, awkward in my winter cloak and muffler dangling from one hand.
