Ransacker

by Emmy Laybourne

  Knut set Hanne down beside him.

  “Stieg,” she wept.

  Her brother lifted a hand and let it fall. He was trying to speak, but making no sound.

  * * *

  SISSEL WISHED HERSELF inside the house. She took a step and was there instantly, passing through the bullet-chipped stone walls and into the sitting room.

  Hanne wept beside their brother Stieg, whose lifeblood was draining through a wound at his neck. Knut was there, too, standing, kneading his large hands and not knowing what to do. And the woman Lucy, who radiated her own goodness.

  Sissel was dazzled by the sight of her siblings, how beautiful they were, but she also saw the blood flowing out of her brother’s neck, and the veins and organs slowing down.

  The raven came and landed on the ledge of the broken window, perching lightly on a shard of broken glass. He spoke to her with one glance—the Gods couldn’t help, but she was welcome to try.

  Sissel closed her eyes and focused on Stieg. She reached for the iron in her brother’s blood.

  * * *

  LIGHT FILLED THE ROOM, so bright Hanne thought for a moment she was dying, but it was fading now, and she could make out the glowing figure of her sister, Sissel.

  Sissel was standing over Stieg, her hands extended toward him.

  As Hanne watched, the glow left Sissel’s body, starting with her feet and head and then shrinking, until only her hands were illuminated.

  Then the glow was gone, snuffed out, and Sissel stood there in the room. As soon as the light left her hands, her sister’s body began to shake with effort.

  “Heill, Odin,” Hanne said. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  * * *

  SISSEL KNEW THE Gods were leaving her. She felt their glorious all-knowing strength abating, draining away.

  The raven departed, winging off into the darkening evening.

  Sissel focused on working her Nytte on her brother’s blood. She pulled the molecules back toward his heart. Then she shifted focus and tried to make the ones at the wound coagulate.

  She knew Hanne and Knut were talking to her, trying to reach her, but she stayed centered on the blood. The little bits of iron, they were so small, she had to concentrate with everything she had.

  There was a pop in her ears. Sissel felt a trickle of blood flow down her neck.

  Finally, she felt Stieg’s wound had closed enough. Only clear plasma leaked from the terrible wound.

  Stieg opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “Sister,” he said, but she could not hear him. There was no sound at all.

  Owen had then come into the room. He hugged Hanne. Knut embraced Sissel. Daisy went licking at faces and hands. They all needed to touch one another and express their love. Sissel didn’t want to tell them about her ears. She waited until she had hugged each of them and then she edged out of the room.

  The colors of the outside were so bright she had to shade her eyes. The tawny gold of the prairie grass, the green of the trees, the silver-gray of the trunks of the pines—it was all so beautiful she could have wept, but she walked on.

  She reached up and smeared away the blood on her neck, two trickles from the rupture of her eardrums.

  There, near the rented carriages, the Nytteson were gathered around the body of the Baron. She felt an unexpected tenderness for Björn, Harald, and the twins, Arne and Johan. Arne saw her coming and nudged the others. She didn’t know how they would greet her—they had a right to be furious or vengeful, but she didn’t think they would be. The twins were quick to anger. She knew this about them because she’d seen inside them, if only for an instant. They were young and impetuous, but they were decent men. Björn and Harald she knew and loved, somehow.

  Sissel walked to them calmly, bearing herself as straight and tall as she could.

  Björn turned to her. Tears were running down his face.

  His mouth shaped the words, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  He fell to his knees, and the other three did the same. Harald held the hem of her dress. Forgive me, Sister, he said.

  Sissel put her hand on the great Oar-Breaker’s head.

  It always felt strange to speak when she could not hear her own voice, but she did so. “Come inside. You and my siblings must make peace, right now. We all must swear to never harm one another.”

  They were nodding, agreeing, rising to their feet, when Sissel caught sight of one of the injured Pinkertons struggling away from the house.

  “And we must call a doctor for the Pinkertons,” she added.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  OCTOBER 1886

  BULLHOOK BOTTOMS, MONTANA

  Sissel sat on the porch shrouded in silence, dressed in black. She had taken to wearing a widow’s blacks in the two months since the terrible shoot-out.

  In the days after the fight, Björn had told her that she was entitled to the Baron’s estate. Counting himself and Sissel there had been five witnesses to the marriage—he felt certain it would hold up in the Norwegian courts. But she didn’t want anything of the Baron’s, not his wealth, his title, or his lands. All she wanted was to wear black.

  It suited her mood.

  Her hearing was gone and would never return. Two doctors had come to examine her. The eardrums had not simply ruptured but had been lacerated. Shredded was the word one of the doctors used.

  The Nytte was still there. Sissel could sense metals through vibrations in her head and chest, but she could no longer hear them singing. Anyway, she didn’t want to work with her Nytte. She had only opened her mind to it once, to see if it was there.

  She just wanted to sit on the porch and feel sorry for herself.

  Sissel knew she was behaving poorly. A truly good girl would be more accepting, she thought. Good girls were meek and hid their suffering, instead of sitting out in plain sight and brooding every day.

  But it was difficult not to brood, because no one could talk her out of it—they couldn’t talk to her at all. Her brothers and sister tried to communicate with her by writing, but writing slowed everything down on a slate. It was dreadful. She preferred not to communicate at all.

  Instead, Sissel sat on the porch and watched as Owen and Knut brought the ranch to life around her, as Stieg wrote long letters to Björn in Norway, and as Hanne planned her wedding.

  The wedding was to take place back in Carter. Hanne had all sorts of lovely correspondence to show Sissel. She had asked the Oswalds to decorate the church. Reverend Neville would officiate. The Royal would host the reception.

  At Hanne’s insistence, Sissel would read the lengthy dispatches Mr. Collier sent to Hanne and try to hide the grief she felt in her heart at the memory of the Royal, and the longing she had for it.

  McKray had visited several times. On his last trip, he brought a doctor from his father’s mines in Colorado. Apparently so many men went deaf working in the mines that McKray Sr. had hired on a hearing specialist on staff. The specialist had examined her ears on the front porch. He had shaken his head. McKray had grown red in the face, asking the man question after question that Sissel couldn’t hear. The man just kept shaking his head.

  After that, Sissel asked McKray to go.

  McKray wrote that he loved her. Scribbled it on the slate.

  She told him it didn’t matter. That she wouldn’t be his wife, not when they couldn’t communicate properly. She told him she was going to be an old maid, and haunt the front porch of the Double B. She knew her voice was rising, knew she was shouting, because she felt the vibration of feet running as Hanne and Lucy came out onto the porch to see what was wrong. McKray tried to take her hands, but she tore them from his grip.

  “If you care for me at all, you will leave and not return!” she shouted.

  He left in a huff.

  Maybe it was for him she wore black, she thought. Sitting on the porch, she found herself thinking of him often. She liked to remember how his hand had felt in hers when they danced together at the Ladies’ Aid Society dance. It m
ade her feel better to cry over McKray than it did about her lost hearing. She worried if she cried about her deafness, she might fall into a hole unescapably deep.

  Things could have been much worse, Stieg had written to her one afternoon. We might all be in jail now, he’d said.

  It was true, they’d been lucky.

  The Hemstads had not called the sheriff after the Pinkertons’ attack. Neither side had wanted the law involved.

  A few days later, after his men had been bandaged up by the town’s doctor and put on a train for Chicago, William Pinkerton came to apologize to the Hemstads and asked them not to press charges. He sat in the same room that the Baron had sat in, pleading his case. They’d had to sit on chairs from the kitchen, because all the fine furniture had been shot to pieces.

  Pinkerton offered them a settlement of five thousand dollars not to speak to the press about the incident. Stieg accepted. After they all signed the contract, William Pinkerton assured the Hemstads they’d never hear from him or the agency again.

  The Nytteson had left six weeks ago, after spending several weeks helping repair some of the damage caused by the shoot-out and getting to know their new brethren. It had been difficult to convince her siblings, at the beginning, that Björn, Harald and the twins were worth trusting, but Sissel told them truthfully that she’d seen into the young men’s hearts. They were good men who had been led astray. She reminded her siblings that they had all seen how charismatic the Baron was—a man with that kind of charm and sincere passion could incite sensible men to immoral acts. Sissel spoke at length, and she won out. It helped that she couldn’t hear her siblings protest.

  In those first days after the fight, once the wariness wore off, there had been a lot of talk. Björn and the others showed a clear need to talk about the Baron, and how he had hid so many parts of his terrible plan from them. Fjelstad had told them each different things about their mission in America. They learned that only Harald had understood the true purpose of the terrible lead-lined trunk. The rest had been told it contained photography equipment. Harald apologized to Sissel, Stieg scratching his words on the slate as quickly as he could. Sissel told Harald she’d already forgiven him, and he gathered her up in his enormous arms for a hug.

  The saddest information that came out as they untangled the lies the Baron had fed them was that Rolf was not sick but dead. When Hanne revealed what Pastor Jensen had said—that he had killed Rolf—there were tears all around. Owen brought up a bottle of old Scotch whiskey from the basement, and they all toasted Rolf Tjossem.

  After this, they all seemed truly bonded as friends. Every dinner turned into a long storytelling session. Arne and Johan told stories of all the mischief they’d made for their mother before they came to work for the Baron and had everyone laughing. Stieg tried to write it down for Sissel, but it was hard to follow. When Björn talked about his life another evening, Sissel saw tears reflected in the eyes of more than one person around the table. Again, the written description didn’t convey the emotion of his tale.

  The night after that, Hanne began to tell the tale of why they had left their home in Øystese. Stieg joined in the narration, still trying to write down what was being said. Sissel told Stieg to stop writing. She’d just watch as her siblings told the story. Watched as Owen joined in, telling them about how he came to join up with the Hemstads. Watched as Björn, Arne, Johan, and Harald exclaimed about the story and asked questions and shook their heads in wonder.

  It was around that time Sissel had asked the dressmaker in Bullhook Bottoms to make her a black dress.

  Brooding about being left out, forever left out, Sissel noticed something no one else seemed to–there was something between Stieg and Björn. She saw her brother light up when Björn came into the room, and saw the way Björn smiled for Stieg. Björn would say something that was undoubtedly clever, then flash his eyes to Stieg’s face to measure his response. There was love between them, more than a brotherly love. They kept it hidden, but she could see it plainly.

  Sissel noted how Stieg steadied himself when Björn let them all know that he had to return to Gamlehaugen to oversee the dissolution of the Baron’s estate. Björn had much to do, because the Baron had made provisions in his will for Björn to inherit the contents of the library, along with an enormous sum of money to ensure the continued protection of the Nytteson.

  Stieg and Björn kept up a steady correspondence in the weeks since he and the others had returned to Norway.

  Just this morning, Stieg told her, by writing on her slate, that Björn had invited him to come to Norway to help him organize the library. Perhaps even to oversee the training and instruction of the next generation of Nytteson.

  “I like Björn very much,” Sissel said, trying to keep her voice low. “I feel you two are perfect companions.” This was as close to saying it outright as she could, but she wanted him to know that she at last understood something important about the way his heart worked, and that he had her blessing.

  Stieg held her hand but would not meet her eye. After a long moment he squeezed her hand to acknowledge what she’d said and went off by himself in the direction of town, perhaps to mail a letter.

  That had been several hours ago, before lunch. Now dust was coming up the long drive to the ranch house. Sissel thought that perhaps Stieg had gotten someone to give him a ride home.

  But it wasn’t any wagon she recognized. It was a handsome black carriage, drawn by a team of matched chestnut Morgans.

  As it got closer she felt footsteps approaching from within the house. It was Lucy. She stood next to Sissel, wiping her hands on her apron. Hanne came around from the back of the house, where she’d been working in the garden. Since it was October now, she was pulling the last cabbages and carrots, and preparing the beds for the winter.

  Hanne looked to Sissel and gestured to the carriage, asking if her sister knew anything about it.

  “I haven’t a clue,” Sissel said.

  The rig drew right up to the house.

  The driver stepped down and tilted his cap to them.

  Sissel’s eyes flitted over to Hanne—if there was any danger within, her sister would move fast.

  The driver opened the door and out came Isaiah McKray.

  Sissel felt her heart leap—she was so happy to see him—and she felt angry at the same time.

  He held up a hand to stop the barrage of protests he knew to expect. Then he reached back inside and offered his hand to a lady within.

  An elegant lady in a slate-gray traveling dress stepped down. Sissel was struck by the sudden fear that he’d found another girl to marry and had brought this lady here to introduce them. But that couldn’t be. McKray wasn’t cruel, and this lady, Sissel now saw, was considerably older than either of them.

  Her hair was dark brown and her skin was a lighter brown, a beautiful copper color. She had a white, crocheted wrap draped gracefully around her shoulders and held a little book in her hands. She pleasantly shook Hanne’s hand, and Lucy’s, introducing herself with words that were probably lovely and Sissel could not hear.

  Sissel just stood there with her hands on her hips glaring at McKray—what kind of nonsense was he up to?

  “If this is another doctor,” Sissel said to him, “I’ll ask you to please turn back. I have no interest in being prodded and fussed over again!”

  The woman handed McKray her shawl and the little book and began to move her hands. She moved them in a very definite pattern, not like a dance, but practical and exact.

  Sissel watched the woman, turned to gauge Hanne’s response, and McKray’s. The woman put her hand out and tapped Sissel on the hand.

  Her mouth very clearly shaped the word, Watch!

  The woman moved her hands around for another moment and then took the book back from McKray. She opened the front cover and took out a little note.

  Then she handed the note and the book to Sissel.

  Hello, Sissel. Here is what I just said to you: My name is Rosa Ea
rly. I have come from the California School for the Deaf to teach you and your family sign language. This will enable you to communicate fully with them. Mr. McKray sent for me and has paid for me to stay here for the length of time it will take to fully instruct you and your family.

  Sissel took a step back and collapsed into her rocking chair. Tears flooded her vision.

  McKray came to kneel in front of her. She realized he’d shaved off his beard. He took her hands and held them to his chest. He was saying something, but she didn’t need to know the words to feel the sentiment.

  She laid her hand on his smooth cheek. His skin was pale where the beard had been. McKray’s hazel eyes were pleading with her, and she knew this offer was a lifeline. He wanted her to join him in the world again.

  “All right,” she said.

  A grin spread across his face. She saw him say, “Really?”

  “I’ll try.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  They had overdone it. Hanne knew it was true. She wished that she could somehow take back some of the extravagance, but it was too late for that. The guests were entering the church at this moment. They would be gasping and exclaiming over the beautiful decorations the Oswalds had installed right at this very moment.

  Since it was October and there were no flowers to be had, they’d used streamers made of a gauzy white crepe de chine and ribbons, yards and yards of grosgrain ribbons in three complementary shades of yellow and gold.

  Downstairs, in the restaurant of the Royal Hotel, there were waiters polishing the silverware, checking the place settings. It was going to be a big party. They had invited more than fifty people for the reception—nearly everyone they knew in town, plus Lucy and Mr. Witri and Owen’s old cowboy friend Mr. Hoakes, who had brought his new bride.

  The day before, Hanne had counted ten cases of champagne being delivered, along with a crate of oranges, and too many baskets of produce to count. Collier had presided over the arrangements like a quartermaster. He’d hired on extra staff; after the luncheon was served, the waiters were going to clear away the tables for dancing! It couldn’t be a proper Norwegian wedding without dancing.