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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  The Children of Crow Cove Series by Bodil Bredsdorff

  Copyright

  1

  The three white houses in the little cove pressed their shoulders into the fierce wind so as not to be toppled.

  Waves thundered against the stony beach. The movement of the water turned over large stones in deep crevasses. Broken masts and shattered planks were thrown onto the shore and pulled out again. The entire coast was a wall of noise.

  Inside, the sounds melted together into a continuous boom that wore down the listeners. Everyone who lived by the cove was gathered in one of the houses around the day’s only meal.

  “Potatoes, potatoes, nothing but potatoes,” said a little boy crankily.

  He bent his light head over the boiled potato, began to peel it, and burned himself.

  “Stupid potatoes,” he hissed, and waved one hand in the air to cool it while he wiped his nose with the other.

  “Come on, Doup,” the man reprimanded him. “You should be glad there are any left at all.” He ate his own potato with the peel on.

  “Let me help you,” said the dark-haired young woman sitting next to Doup. She transferred his potato onto her plate, peeled it for him, and put it back again.

  “Thank you, Myna,” he mumbled, and attacked it hungrily.

  “A little lump of butter would have been nice,” said the older woman with a sigh, “but the cow is giving hardly any milk at the moment.”

  She sat at the head of the table with a child, the youngest in the room, in her lap. The boy was big enough to eat by himself, but once in a while a piece of potato would fall to the floor, and the woman would carefully pick it up and clean it off. Every time the boy put a bite in his mouth, he hummed a little.

  “If only the storm would die down,” said a young man who was sitting on the other side of Doup, “so we could go hunting.”

  “Yum, yes,” said a half-grown girl with a short, reddish-gold braid at her nape. “Imagine eating meat!”

  Then she got up and walked with outstretched arms toward the small boy on the woman’s lap.

  “Come on, Cam! Come here to Eidi,” she said, and lifted him up.

  Even though Cam wasn’t all that big, you could see he was quite heavy. He had apparently eaten his fill, because he allowed himself to be taken away.

  The only one who hadn’t said anything was a tall boy several years older than Doup. He had a small head perched on a long, white neck, pale brown hair, and a pair of gray-green eyes, which stared emptily at the potatoes on his plate.

  While the others talked, he leaned farther and farther over the table. His stomach hurt. It felt like a hand that was making a tighter and tighter fist. And it wasn’t just the hunger. He knew it was his fault there was nothing but that pot of potatoes on the table.

  If he hadn’t forgotten to close the gate this past summer, the sheep would never have gotten into the garden, and there would have been plenty of carrots and onions, parsnips and beets, and cabbage, most of all cabbage, for the whole long winter.

  But the animals had attacked the vegetables greedily. The potatoes, which grew in a different enclosure, had been spared.

  And that wasn’t all. Every day he went over to the empty house where the potatoes and the few vegetables that had survived in spite of everything were stored and looked at the pile that was shrinking day by day. When he saw a rotten potato, he picked it out right away, so it wouldn’t infect the others. The hens got it; that’s about all they got.

  “Tink,” said the woman who had held Cam in her lap, “give me your plate. There’s one more for you and Doup.”

  Tink shook his head, pushed his chair back, got up, and walked out of the room.

  * * *

  The wind forced his breath into his throat and whipped water from his eyes. The storm tried to press him into the house again, but he turned his back on the gale and let it push him toward the potato house.

  He felt his way into the room, breathing in the harsh odor of earth, and sat down on a pile of driftwood. For a long time he stayed there, staring into the potato pile, trying to figure out how many were left. Not many. Little by little the darkness blended the pile and the floor into an indistinguishable mass. He leaned his head back and rested it against the clammy wall.

  The cold crept from the wall through his shirt, up against his skin, and then beneath his skin. Eidi should have let him stay with Bandon. She should never have taken him along to Crow Cove. He had brought bad luck on them all. He didn’t belong and had no right to stay.

  Tink was frozen through when he decided what he had to do.

  * * *

  He didn’t know how long he had been walking, only that it was quite some time. The dark-gray morning had become a light-gray day. The wind had slacked off, and he had long since left the boom from the beach behind him. He climbed yet another hilltop and entered a hollow on the way to the next.

  With every step he took, his shoes filled with ice-cold water that was then pressed out again to make room for even colder water. Tired clouds dragged themselves along, their rain-heavy bellies bumping into the hilltops. The air was full of moisture.

  Finally Tink could see the high road that went from north to south. A stone rose along the side of the road. When he reached it, he circled it to find a dry place to sit. Someone was lying on the other side. Tink approached hesitantly. Something was wrong.

  The man lay on his stomach, his face against the ground. Tink cleared his throat and said hello, but got no answer. Then he walked all the way up to the man and patted him on the shoulder. The man didn’t move. A few tufts of hair in an uncertain color stuck out from under his knitted cap. Tink turned him on his back so he could see his face.

  But even had Tink known the man, he wouldn’t have been able to recognize him. He must have toppled over without bracing his fall. His face was smeared in blood and vomit. A bit of yellow spittle trickled from one side of his mouth. His clothes were covered with filth, gray on the jacket and brown down the pants. And he stank.

  Tink overcame his revulsion and bent down to place his ear against the man’s chest. His heart was beating. He wasn’t dead. Tink turned him on his side, so he wouldn’t choke on his own spit and vomit, and then sat down, leaning against the stone.

  All the thoughts that had whipped through his head slowed and gathered around one question: What should he do?

  If Tink continued and left the man there, he would die. Otherwise, Tink would have to get help. And the only place he could get help was the place he had just left—Crow Cove.

  He untied his little bundle and carefully took out a package wrapped in a tattered piece of cloth. Under it was a sweater with which he covered the man’s chest before buttoning his jacket.

  Then Tink wrapped up his bundle and started out on the long way back.

  * * *

  “Tink!”

  Eidi was yelling. Her voice had become hoarse, and her scream was like
that of an eagle. She stood where the path led from the last hillcrest down toward the cove, facing the sea.

  She cupped her hands to make his name trumpet past the houses and the barn and the enclosed fields. But the wind took her shout and pushed it behind her, toward Tink, who started to run when he heard it.

  When he had almost reached her, he stumbled and fell against her back with such force that they both fell over. Eidi gave a scream of fright.

  Tink fell onto her and didn’t hurt himself, but his eyes went dark. The cold and exhaustion made nausea rise in him like a buzzing dizziness behind his ears.

  Eidi sat up in a hurry.

  “Tink,” she exclaimed, surprised. “What’s happened?”

  His teeth chattered and he couldn’t force his jaws apart.

  “Tink,” she said again, and shook him gently. “Where have you been? We’ve been searching for you all day.”

  He burrowed his head against her shoulder, sure he would never be able to stand. She pulled him up.

  “Come on. We have to get you warm,” she said, and pushed him down the path, across the bridge, toward the house, and in the door.

  * * *

  The fire crackled in the hearth, and the flames spread a warm glow into the half-dark room. Tink lay on the settle and stared at his dancing shadow on the whitewashed wall.

  He was slowly getting warm. Eidi and Cam’s mother, Foula, had covered him with so many wool blankets and shawls and skins that he could barely move. His eyes kept closing, but every time they did, he saw the pathetic figure by the stone and forced them open again.

  Doup’s big brother, Ravnar, and their father, Frid, who was also Cam’s father and Foula’s husband, had taken the two horses and ridden off after the man.

  “They should be here soon,” Eidi said over her busy knitting needles.

  She dropped a stitch and was silent while she fixed it before continuing.

  “Why didn’t you take your horse, Tink?”

  “It was for you,” he mumbled against the wall, not sure she had heard his answer.

  “And what about your money, all that Bandon gave us?”

  Bandon was Eidi’s father and Tink’s stepfather, a rich merchant whom they had once fled from together. Tink didn’t want to be with him and that was why Eidi had brought him out to Crow Cove.

  “They were for you,” he whispered.

  “Oh, Tinkerlink, you little fool,” said Eidi affectionately.

  “All I took with me were the things from my mother and some clothes.”

  “But where are they?”

  Tink shrugged, which was hard under the heavy covers.

  “Do you think you might have dropped them?”

  He nodded, and that was a little easier. “Maybe…”

  “When you bumped into me.” Eidi put down her knitting and walked over to look out the window.

  “It’s too dark now. I’ll go up and look for them tomorrow.”

  Foula came over to the settle with a small bowl of potato soup.

  “Look this way, Tink.”

  He turned his head and looked. Then he shook it and turned toward the wall again.

  “You have to eat,” said Eidi. “Otherwise you’ll get sick.”

  “I don’t feel like it,” said Tink toward the cold whitewash.

  “Me have soup! Me have soup!” yelled Cam, and he crawled onto a chair and settled in at the table. Foula sighed and gave it to him.

  And Tink curled up like a small animal protecting his stomach and finally fell asleep in his warm cave.

  2

  Tink was awakened by the door swinging open with a bang. Ravnar and Frid staggered in with the man. They lifted him onto the table, while Foula poured warm water into a bowl and fetched clean rags and a bottle of alcohol to clean his wounds.

  She cleaned his face first. Afterward she and Frid undressed him, first the jacket and Tink’s sweater, then the stockings full of holes and the worn boots, until Foula said, “We’ll cut the rest off. They’re never going to be clothes again anyway.”

  She gasped when she bent over the filthy pants. She and Frid had to scrub for a long time before skin appeared on the pale legs that were covered with rashes and scrapes.

  Then they went to work on his upper body. Foula threw the clothes she had cut off him into the fire. First it smoked and smoldered with moisture and filth; finally it burned away in clear flames.

  “We’re not going to get him any cleaner than this,” said Foula, sighing. “You can take him over to the settle now.”

  Ravnar and Frid carried him over to the settle against the opposite wall from where Tink lay. The man mumbled a bit when he lay down, and Foula covered him with a blanket.

  “If he survives this,” she said, “he has Tink to thank for it.”

  “I wonder who he is?” said Ravnar.

  “I know,” said Foula quietly.

  She sat down in the chair by the hearth, still holding one of the filthy rags between her hands.

  “Who is it?” asked Ravnar.

  “This is the man I lived with before I came here to Crow Cove. I left because he hit us—Eidi and me. Every time he was drunk. And he was often drunk. He gave her the scar she has in her eyebrow. His name is Burd.”

  Tink’s stomach knotted up. He turned his head, looking for Eidi, but she and Cam must have gone to bed. Foula threw the rag into the fire, got up, and washed her hands. Tink faced the wall again.

  “Perhaps it’s a coincidence that he passed by,” said Frid.

  Foula didn’t answer.

  “In any case, he can’t harm you now,” he said to calm her. “He’ll have a hard time getting drunk here in Crow Cove. To say that it’s far to the nearest tavern is an understatement.”

  He tried to make it sound funny, but it wasn’t.

  They managed to get Burd to drink a little cold soup and a bit of water.

  “Do you think we can leave him here for the night?” asked Foula.

  “There’s nothing else we can do,” said Frid. “Better to let him lie here in the warmth.”

  * * *

  The next morning, the pale sunshine came and went, and in between the wind made the rain beat against the window just as a reminder that it was still there.

  “Here!” said Eidi, and handed Tink a small bowl of piping hot oatmeal.

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  He was sitting up in the settle with a blanket over his knees.

  “Do eat,” she said. “Or you are going to get sick.”

  “I am sick—in my throat. It hurts when I swallow.”

  All he wanted was a mug of hot water. Foula stirred in a teaspoon of sugar.

  Eidi knotted a striped kerchief around her head and put a shawl under her jacket. She was going out to help the others gather driftwood.

  “But afterward I’ll go up the path and look for your things,” she promised Tink.

  * * *

  Then he was left alone in the parlor with Foula and Burd. Even little Cam had gone along to the beach.

  Foula puttered by the hearth, sweeping up the fine ashes that had blown onto the floor every time the storm sent a puff of air down the chimney. Tink suddenly thought she looked like an old woman with her back bent. It was as if she could feel his gaze, because she turned around and looked at him. He could tell by the two vertical furrows between her eyebrows that she was worried. She set aside her broom and came over and sat down next to him.

  “How does your throat feel?” she asked.

  “It hurts,” he said.

  She placed the inside of her arm against his forehead.

  “Yes, you’ve got a bit of a fever,” she said. The furrows grew deeper. “Tink,” she continued in a serious voice, “no one here wants you to leave. You belong here, and you have from the first day.”

  “But it’s my fault—”

  At that moment there was a deep moaning from the other settle, where Burd was struggling to sit up. Foula walked over to help him. He rubbed
his face, accidentally touching his wounds, and groaned again loudly. Then he opened his bloodshot eyes for the first time and looked around in confusion.

  “Foula,” he mumbled, surprised, and grabbed her hand.

  She tried to pull it away.

  “Where did you go?” he said, and threw his arms around her, and held her tightly while she attempted to break free.

  Then he abruptly released her.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me. And how did I end up here?”

  His eyes searched the floor while his hands gripped the blanket edge.

  “And what am I doing here with all these rats? Can’t you scare them away with that broom over there? You know I can’t stand rats. They eat glass; you can never have a bottle in peace from them. They gnaw the glass, as if it were cheese and sausage, and the brandy runs out, and they drink it, and then they are not afraid of humans anymore. Look,” he exclaimed, full of disgust. “That fat devil there on the blanket. Dead drunk and pissed.”

  He shook the blanket violently out across the floor.

  “There! Away with it!”

  He grabbed Foula’s hand again.

  “And while we’re talking about brandy,” he said, patting her on the back of the hand, “don’t you have a little sip for a sick man?”

  Foula pulled her hand away. She hesitated for a moment.

  “Wait!” she said, and left the room.

  Burd continued to brush off the blanket with angry jerks. He looked over at Tink.

  “And what kind of little rat are you?” he asked, but Tink wasn’t sure it was him that Burd saw.

  Foula returned with a glass of liquid. Burd emptied it in one swallow and handed her the glass. She filled it with water from the bucket.

  “Phew,” said Burd. He spit the first mouthful out but drank the rest.

  Then he threw the glass on the floor, shattering it.

  “Hah, I got it there,” he said with satisfaction, and leaned back against the pillows. “Now it has something to gnaw on.”

  A little while later he was asleep again.

  * * *

  Frid brought Cam home and left again. Not until evening did everyone return together. The storm had covered the coast with driftwood, which they had now stacked in large piles beyond the water’s reach. While the others had collected wood, Myna had waded around in the freezing water and gathered a large basket of mussels. Eidi brought Tink’s bundle.