The Blue Maiden E-Book

Anna Noyes

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 230

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'Haunting' NEW YORK TIMES 'A shimmering spell of a novel' EMMA TÖRZS 'Partly a young girl's coming of age, partly a treatise of the wildness of women' STEPHANIE DANLER _______________________________________________________ It's 1825, generations since the women of Berggrund Island stood accused of witchcraft, many of them put to death. But the shadow of this violent past looms large over the isolated community. Now, the island is overseen by Pastor Silas, a widower with two wild daughters, Beata and Ulrika. The sisters are outcasts: imaginative, rebellious, and consumed by a curiosity about their home's dark history and the mother they lost. When an enigmatic outsider arrives at their door, his presence threatens their family bond and unearths a buried history to shocking ends... ___________________ Readers are loving The Blue Maiden 'A beautifully told story' 'One of the most immersive novels I've read in ages' 'I loved loved this' 'A perfect read for the fall season' 'A fantastic Nordic Folk Horror'

Leseprobe

Also by Anna Noyes

Goodnight, Beautiful Women

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Grove Press,

an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Atlantic Books,

an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Atlantic Books,

an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Anna Noyes, 2024

The moral right of Anna Noyes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

EBook ISBN: 978 1 78649 582 2

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Isla

When all the witches in your town have been set on fire, their smoke will fill your mouth. It will teach you new words. It will tell you what you’ve done.

—ELIZABETH WILLIS

I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.

—SYLVIA PLATH

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 boots.”

Mette’s eyes grow wild. Her husband holds his hand to the back of her neck as she begins to cough, ragged and racking.

“It’s true,” she gags, fingers scraping at her tongue.

Her husband pulls their son into his lap.

“I would have spoken sooner, but Satan blocked my throat. My God, forgive me.” She wipes her glistening chin. “I still feel it.” She strokes her neck. “In my throat, hair thick and coarse as sheep’s wool.”

“Settle,” commands the priest, though all are silent.

He did not force confession from Ursa, the candle-maker’s daughter, or Mette’s son, or trembling Mette.

The damned, he has found, seep a peaty smell from their pores like drunkards after revelry, no matter their morning scrub. All spring and summer, as the collective bodies warmed together in his pews, he has smelled them—sweet and sharp—the women who fly to Blockula, who thicken the church air. God is good. He wipes his eyes. The tears surprise him, and his shaking hands. Relieved, the priest knows he, too, is good. Later, when the orphans are found strangled behind the barn, goats nosing their bodies, he will tell himself this, remind himself he is not to blame. Needless, he will think of their deaths. Savages, of whoever did them in.

There is less protest than he planned for when he locks the women inside the church.

The four without marks are permitted to go. Mothers break from daughters, sisters from sisters. There is stew to be cooked for the men’s deliberations. Children to be minded.

Old Abel, Catherine’s husband of sixty years, is the only one who wishes to stay behind. Sixty years they’ve shared a bed.

“And did you share one on Blockula?” asks the priest.

“Blockula isn’t real,” stutters Abel. “It’s madness. Anyone can see, there’s nothing out there.”

“I’ll only ask once more.”

Catherine shakes her head. “No,” she pleads.

“Well?” the priest says sharply.

“I suppose not,” Abel answers. He is hesitant, soft-eyed, looking only at her as the doors close behind him.

Ida opens the heavy red journal—once her grandmother’s, then her mother’s. To her, it is a prayerbook.

“Look,” Mette says. “Even now, Ida conjures spells. Her lips are moving.”

“Hush,” says Ida, but she lays the book down. It lives inside her.

Through the keyhole, Herfrid spies her brother, standing guard with his hunter’s bow. “Maybe I’ll shrink down slimmer than the key and slither out,” she mumbles, eyeing Mette. “Maybe I’ll fly a kneeler to the ceiling and shatter the windows.” In stained glass, haloed villagers till soil and harvest hay, casting amber light.

Herfrid’s neighbors stare, afraid of her.

But later the women stretch out in the pews to sing psalms together softly, as if putting children to sleep.

*

On the march through the eastern grassland, their fathers and grandfathers and brothers and uncles surround them. And also their sons—those boys over twelve, with newly lanky limbs and acne-stippled cheeks who not long ago stopped seeking comfort for nightmares but still allow their mothers to brush the hair back from their brows. Shy boys, with blank faces. The men carry pitchforks and scythes and pikes and torches and knives. A fire poker and an axe. Abel sneaks hold of Catherine’s hand. “Forgive me,” he says as she moans. “I tried. I tried.” Herfrid hisses, “I’ll come back to torment you. Am I not a witch?” Signe’s spit streaks her uncle’s cheek. “Easy,” cautions the priest. “She isn’t herself.”

The women link arms. They lean on each other’s shoulders and sing. The Blue Maiden and the setting sun are behind them, the horizon pink and hazy once more. Cattle low. An infestation of caterpillars has woven cocoons in the branches of every poplar. On Blockula, thinks Signe, I walk a labyrinth that has no end. I never reach its center. Ida remembers, of all things, her father teaching her to tip honeysuckle blossoms to her mouth for nectar. She waits for their bloom each spring. Now, they scent the air. He limps not far from her on his bad knee. She loves him, still.

“Vengeance will be the Lord’s,” a mother whispers in her daughter’s ear. “The Lord will repay.”

Another looks to the sky. “Deliver me. Deliver me.”

Abel calls, “Even our sows are stunned before slaughter,” at which point he is stunned by the axe handle.

“God is not merciless,” says the priest nearing the pyre. “He asks me to save this unborn child.”

When he pulls pregnant Signe from the others, she struggles against him. She wants to stay linked with the women. She wears one boot, her left foot bare.

Their throats are slit at a good distance from the wood, so it will be dry enough for the bodies to burn.

That morning, thirty-two women had awoken on the island. Now, there are five.

They stoke coals, soak linens, boil water, brush snarls from the children’s hair.

The men and boys are glassy-eyed, but their clothes reek of smoke only until the next washing.

Part II

Berggrund Island, Sweden

1825

Signe gives birth to a daughter, who gives birth to a daughter, who gives birth to a daughter, who gives birth to a son.

The son becomes a priest. Like every Berggrund priest before him, he lives in the tall thin parish house on the island’s southern point—still standing five generations later despite weather-worn slats, crooked shutters, and a sunken porch. Silas shares the house with two daughters, six and ten years old. Their names are Beata and Ulrika.

The other children call the house Bloody Windows. Mostly in whispers, but sometimes one will break from the pack walking to the schoolhouse to shout it, tossing pebbles that ping off the fence. The shutters are rusted red by salt spray. Late at night, candlelight flickers in the sisters’ third-story room. They wait in the window, looking out.

After weeks of hunting, Bea finds the key hidden beneath the sole of their father’s slipper.

As he prepares to give Sunday service, combing water through his disheveled hair, they fake nausea. “You must really be suffering,” he says. “To forgo the Sabbath.” Bea prays he won’t return with the doctor, who palpates their stomachs with tremoring hands.

The key slides easily into the lock. For the first time in six years, the door to their mother’s bedroom swings open.

“Are you sure you want to?” asks Ulrika.

When Bea enters, the air is humid and thick, like it is in the woods where the ground grows soft at the edge of the swamp. Everything is coated with dust.

“Look,” Bea whispers, dumping baby teeth from a lace pouch into her palm.

“Those teeth were mine,” Ulrika says. She riffles through the bedside table drawer, pulling out a round white stone and a red leather-bound book. Bea grips the stone while Ulrika leafs through the book’s yellowed pages, pressed violets fluttering to the floor. Over Ulrika’s shoulder, Bea glimpses a starfish or maybe a lily.

“Is it a diary?” Bea asks, hopeful.

Ulrika shakes her head. “More of a naturalist’s guide.”

A long list of women’s names are inscribed in the front, but Bea only recognizes Bruna, the village herbalist and healer, and beneath that, Angelique. Bea is whispering their mother’s name when Ulrika closes the cover.

“I’m taking this,” she says. “He’ll never know.”

Bea uncorks a bottle of brown tincture, lip prints on the rim. When Ulrika turns to the dresser, Bea sneaks a swallow and gags. It tastes the way a leather saddle smells.

“Try this on,” Ulrika says, holding out a necklace. The island’s women never wear jewelry. Inside the blue pendant, a woman’s profile is carved in raised ivory stone.

Bea runs her fingertip over its contours. “Is this her?”

“No.” Ulrika ties the choker tightly around Bea’s neck, the pendant cold and heavy at the base of her throat. “I don’t know this woman.”

Ulrika snakes her arm into the leg of a black stocking, revealing a jagged run.

The dresses in the armoire are simple, with yellow armpits and frayed hems. Mold blooms at their seams. There is a wool sweater with brass buttons. An empty traveling bag. A long gray coat with spring-green lining. Bea reaches into the pocket and finds a tear in the smooth silk. Her hand slips through the hole.

Deep inside the coat, her fingers close around a small, circular shape that must have slipped through, too.

A silver ring.

The band is etched with N. H. and L. H., unfamiliar initials, neither her mother’s nor her father’s.

The ring is too big for Bea. She drops it back into its hiding place.

On the coat’s collar, a strand of red hair. She winds it tight around her finger, until the tip turns purple and pulses with her heart.

“From when she died?” Bea asks, pointing to a stain on the bed’s coverlet.

“Only wine,” says Ulrika, who has begun to tremble. “Sometimes she took her meals in bed.”

She leads Bea out of the room, hand steadying as she locks the door again.

Their mother died giving birth to Bea.

Once, the doctor told Bea that the joy of his life was pulling newborns from his big black bag.

“Don’t you know by now?” he said, patting the bag’s cracked leather, the sides swollen, stuffed full. “This is where babies come from.”

“A baby can’t fit in there,” she’d said.

“I thought so, too. But when I reach my hand in, like magic, it’s so deep I can fit my whole arm. I bet I could fit my whole self if I had to.” He winked. “All the babies I’ll ever deliver are in there, cozy and asleep.”

When he asked if she wanted to see, she went quiet. He undid the clasp anyway. The bag creaked open. Inside were silver instruments and vials of medicine. He shook the handles, and the tools and pills rattled. “I’m afraid the magic only works for me,” he said.

But he had her put her hand in anyway to feel the plain old bottom of the bag, where crumbs collected.

Later, a boy from school shared what his father told him: babies lived inside rotten tree stumps and had to be whittled out.

When she sees the doctor’s bag swinging at his side or Boe Henriksson whittling with a bone-handled knife, she is filled with momentary horror, the queasy feeling that dawns at the beginning of a bad dream.

Her father lets Bea up into his lap, a rare treat.

Most days he locks himself in his study to read gospel, write sermons, and fast, only emerging for occasional bowls of Ulrika’s thin porridge, staring over their heads to some distant place. He says he’s an old man, with little time left for devotion. Though he is fifty, he looks much younger than the other old men with long beards and mottled cheeks. All night, Bea hears his murmurs below, urgent but indiscernible confessions to God. The Holy Spirit tells him to deny his body’s feeble desires. “Did you do something wrong?” Bea asked once, for if she stumbles reciting the Lord’s Prayer she is supposed to go hungry. But Ulrika, who cooks, always sneaks Bea a plateful. “We’ve all done terrible things,” he answered. “I may be the worst of sinners. My whole life is repentance.” But only faith redeems sins, he reminded her. By faith, through Christ, they are forgiven. They live in grace. “No, I offer my wakefulness, my hunger, as a gift,” he’d said, smiling. “To God. A show of love. For the undeserved love he shows me.” Bea’s father has never told her he loves her, and she does not know how to make him smile. Even God is not exempt from her jealousy, when it flares.

Straw crosses are propped on his windowsill. His desk is scattered with papers, his sweater tea stained. He missed dinner but chews peppercorns, kept alert by a burning tongue.

“Which of us is most like Mother?” Bea risks, a question she’s been holding for a moment alone with him, though she’s afraid he’ll put her down. They are not supposed to talk about her mother.

His dark eyebrows furrow.

“She was like me,” he says softly. “We were both curious.”

Bea leans her cheek against him, his sweater itchy, his heart pounding. She snaps off a loose button for Ulrika to mend.

“I meant me or Ulrika.”

“Neither of you.”

She still has the strand of her mother’s hair, a red that streaks their own dark blond only after months in the sun.

“You might look a bit like her,” he concedes. “But Ulrika behaves like her, time to time.”

“Like a beast.”

“Certainly. A beast.” His breath is peppery. “With Viking blood.”

“I wish she had a portrait,” Bea sighs. “Do you think I could be beautiful like her when I grow up?”

Though her eyes are different colors—one blue and one brown—she feels, for the moment, sure he’ll say yes. The study is filled with soft, warm light. She fits her hand into his and their shapes are just the same. She could fall asleep right there, to his voice rumbling in his chest.

“Who told you she was beautiful?”

“Ulrika.”

He slides her from his lap, spins her, and glances at her. The inspection is quick, still her cheeks burn.

“Your mother was captivating,” he says, eyes shining. “She knew it. And suffered for it. Be glad you inherited my plain little face.”

“She looked like me,” says Ulrika when Bea brings her the same question.

Like a beast, Bea wants to say but won’t. “Well, who did she behave like?”

“Me,” Ulrika says.

“You were only four when she died,” says their father, glancing up from his Bible. “You don’t remember.” Ulrika stares back, unblinking. “I remember being born,” she says, like a threat.

There are things Bea has forgotten. But now she is six and determined to remember everything.

When the wind gusts, Bea feels their bedroom sway. Outside the window there is only moonlit meadow overgrown with sumac, the white froth of the elder tree they like to hide in, and the curving road. Beyond it, the glint of ocean. There is no view of the Blue Maiden.

Helmi growls, and Bea runs the dog’s velvety ear between her fingers. Their father paces the study below, praying. She does not know if he ever sleeps.

Hours later, she wakes sweat drenched and towels off with her nightgown. Whenever Bea is awake, Ulrika is, too. Bea does not know what woke them, until the woman’s laughter sounds again, just outside the window.

“She’s here,” Bea says. Finally. Finally.

“Only the tavern letting out,” says Ulrika. Bea tallies what lies between their house and the tavern: grocer, butcher, wharf.

She begs to hear the legend once more. It scares her in a way she craves. Telling it, Ulrika’s voice turns slow and deep, like their music box when its key winds down.

Children wake to the sound of fingertips on the windowpane. It makes no difference if they sleep four stories up. The witch finds them.

Sometimes, it seems the story takes place long ago.

Other times, the woman’s face might be hovering, just out of view, in the dark.

“Who is she?” Bea asks.

“Who do you think?” answers Ulrika. “She’s who you least expect. She could be your own mother. Your own sister.” She yanks down the blanket that covers Bea’s ear and nibbles on her earlobe.

Ulrika’s left ear is crumpled, but she’s promised Bea it was normal when she was born. Then at four years old she woke to a woman bent over her ear, whispering wetly before taking a bite.

“What did she say?” Bea had asked.

“Run.”

Because Ulrika is almost eleven, Bea believes everything her sister tells her. She pulls her head through her collar. Inside the safe tent of her nightgown, she breathes the onion smell of her own breath. She watches her stomach rise and fall, soft and round.

She knows when her mother arrives at the window, she’ll have a long, thin braid just like Bea’s and dirt under her nails. Her fingertips on the glass will sound like the ticking of rain, and Bea will climb out to her.

Circumnavigate.

It is Ulrika’s word. When Bea finally wraps her mouth around its syllables, she feels powerful and brave and older, not herself. It is July. The sun sets late, and the tide is low. The seaweed jumps with sand fleas.

She knows Berggrund’s creeks and pond, the estuary and the dank beneath its bridge, the black rock beaches harborside and the sandy shores facing open water. And she’s learned some island history, classroom lessons: burial grounds, Viking rune stones, the witch trial, and vague battles, grave markers honoring centuries of fallen fathers and sons. In Berggrund’s woodland she’s straddled gnarled pines with trunks misshapen by wind, some charred by lightning strikes. Among them, Bea cannot help but whisper.