‘Yes?’ She was brusque, then her eyes widened as she recognised me. ‘How is it possible you are here?’
‘Who is it?’ a voice came from behind her, thin and frail. Frau Hässler.
Frieda’s hand closed around my arm and I was drawn inside before I could speak.
‘It is her. The new companion.’
Frau Hässler peered at me through rheumy eyes, crossed herself in shock. ‘Is it true?’ She reached a hand to test my flesh. ‘You came back.’
‘Yes.’
‘How can it be?’
I did not know how to answer why I alone had been granted such a privilege, so instead held out my hand, and the letter in it. ‘I came to bring you this. It is from Edgar.’
She gave an involuntary moan and sat down heavily by the fireplace. ‘Is he well? Why did he not come too?’
A new horror filled me.
She thought Edgar could still be alive.
My cheeks felt hot with shame. I should have done this differently.
‘I have not met him. He is not... this is all I found.’
I held the letter out and Frieda took it from me.
While Frieda read the letter I looked about me at their home. I couldn’t bear to watch Frau Hässler’s face. The room was small and bare, showing the same decline as the exterior. Enough wood burned in the fire, but the walls needed whitewashing, and the rug across the boards was threadbare. It looked as though their life had been jammed into the only room that they could afford to heat, a bed in one corner and a table in another, and taking up much of the space a great spinning wheel with a fistful of fine ivory wool wound around the bobbin. In a place as backward as Blumwald many women still hand-spun when they had no other way to bring in money. I wondered whether Frieda or Frau Hässler was the spinster here, or both. Of all their possessions, this was the one in best condition. A basket of fleece sat at its side, a hunk speared on the needle of the distaff, from where the fibres were drawn down into a thread that looped the hooks of the flyer and onto the bobbin. Operated by means of a foot pedal, the great wheel turned, spinning the bobbin to put a twist into the thread, the twist that transformed raw wool into yarn. A simple, household magic I had never learned.
Frieda finished, and said, ‘So, Edgar is dead.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Frau Hässler reached for the letter, running her fingers over the faded ink. ‘See, it says here, Edgar is thinking of us.’
‘He never finished writing.’ Frieda shot me a sour look. ‘He never got to leave that place.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. My presence here felt like an insult.
Frau Hässler hunched over the paper, rereading her son’s last words to her.
‘Losing Edgar broke her heart, and our family,’ said Frieda. She turned her back to me, settling herself at the wheel to spin. ‘We don’t need you coming here stirring up the past. You escaped the Witch, well, good for you. My brother didn’t. Thank God for watching over you, and leave the rest of us alone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.
I knew I should go, but too many questions crowded on my tongue. My father and the Witch, conspiring together in his study...
‘What do you remember of when your brother was taken?’ I asked. ‘Do you know why he was chosen?’
‘He was chosen because he was no one important.’ Frieda’s words were underscored by the rhythmic hum of the wheel, the clack of the flyer. ‘One day we were happy, the next the Witch came down from her castle and Edgar never came home. We had a letter from the old duke telling us that he had been taken by the Witch and offering us compensation.’
I frowned. ‘Compensation?’
‘Money. As though we were farmers who’d lost sheep to the wolves. Money for a life. A life buying everyone peace from the Witch.’
I thought of my Witch hunched over her ledgers, or reading English novels, or picking out the chives from her eggs at breakfast. I could not understand how that woman could be the monster they all feared.
‘I saw him,’ said Frau Hässler. She had begun to pray, holding onto her rosary beads like they were the hand of the son she had lost. ‘I saw Edgar in that carriage of hers – his face in the window – and I saw that awful creature, like a demon in black rags. She had her hand on him, but when he saw me too he smiled.’ Her voice broke. ‘He told me all would be well. He told me he would write.’ Glassy tears spilled down the deep furrows in her cheeks.
Edgar had gone to the Witch, and disappeared, like all the companions.
