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 su