Like heartbeats, Edith thought, we cannot know how many words there are in us. What she knew was that in stillness, she heard every word said to her in a way she hadn’t before. There was an art to listening. She, unlike the priest, had no god to judge people by. Her gift lay in the power to hear and hold safe all that was said to her. She supposed that her silence was similar to the strongbox she’d seen in the mayor’s office. A place for a woman to leave her secrets, confident that what was said to Edith would not be repeated.

‘I’m going to bed,’ said the cabinet maker. Only as an afterthought, he asked, ‘Has Misha come back?’

Chapter Fourteen

A Roomful of Hens

Edith was up early the following morning. There still was no news of Misha. The day was bone cold, snow fluttered in an icy wind as she wrapped her shawl about her.

‘Please may Misha be safe,’ she prayed, though she didn’t know who to.

It wasn’t the god that lived in the village church, he was too mean to warrant prayers. It wasn’t to the wooden Madonna. Who then?

She saw her grandmother. Yes, perhaps it’s you, she thought as she opened the door to Grandmother’s old room. There was hardly anything in it now; a bedframe, a chest and, perched on the beams, the hens that Edith had brought in last night. She gathered up the eggs and shooed them out into the yard. She was in the henhouse when she heard the latch on the gate. Hoping it might be Misha, she went to see but there were the butcher’s two daughters.

She’d never liked them. As a child they had frightened her, especially Vanda, the taller sister, Misha’s mother. Whenever Edith had gone to Misha’s house in the summer, there had been jars on the windowsill with a spoonful of jam in the bottom to attract the wasps. Lena said Vanda was a witch and she ate the wasps and that’s where she got the sting in her tail.

Una was the smaller, rounder sister. She knew everything about everyone else’s business and little about herself. Her daughter Sorina looked nothing like her; she was taller and striking in her appearance. It was, thought Edith, the most ridiculous notion that she would be a stepmother to these two crows. The idea made her feel sick. She watched them looking around the yard, eyeing up the house.

‘A cabinet maker,’ said Una. ‘He should be ashamed of himself. Look at the state of this verandah – and the girl hasn’t even swept the snow off it.’

‘Lazy like her father,’ said Vanda. ‘What did I tell you?’