For weeks I watched her work their farm alone while Hans lay in bed. After lighting the kitchen fire, Thea went outside to feed and milk their cow, driving it down the track for the shepherd to take to pasture, then spent the morning setting milk in pans and collecting water from the creek for the animals, garden, fruit trees and vines. She chopped firewood, boiled, scrubbed and wrung Hans’s salted, evil-smelling clothes, and, once, screamed into the empty air when the washing line toppled and the laundry fell into the dirt.
Thea turned herself to work, and as wretched as I was at bearing fault for Hans’s suffering, I could not help but marvel at how the yoke, the axe, the pans, the scythe, the spade became extensions of herself. So much time had passed since I had carried weight, I had forgotten what it was to work with my whole body. Thea appeared to me as a wonder. Silver, silent miracle of vigour and determination.
Then, seven weeks after the burial of the smoked paper, as summer stretched itself over the valley in a skein of pale heat, Hans recovered. One day he was lying in bed, tongue dry with sand, and the next he rose and ate a little Schlippermilch. The following day he did not return to bed until nightfall, and soon there was nothing about him to indicate he had been so long unwell, apart from a lean frame and a persistent smell of tidal water.
‘You seem better,’ Thea said that night. She watched as he wiped his plate clean with bread.
Hans smiled at her. ‘Do you think so?’
‘I do.’
‘I feel better. I feel as though it was all a bad dream.’ He shook his head. ‘A nightmare.’
‘You see now, about the book. Its power.’
Hans drank deeply from his mug of wine, looking at her over the brim, eyes crinkled. ‘I always believed you. It is not for me to judge the ways the Almighty works upon the world.’ He wiped his mouth. ‘You’re not eating.’
‘No.’ Thea pushed her plate across the table towards him. ‘Here.’
‘You need to eat too.’ He kept looking at her, head to one side, hand wrapped around his wine.
Thea looked pale. She stared at the two plates slick with animal fat.
‘What is it?’ Hans put down his mug. ‘Thea?’
‘Please, eat,’ she murmured, pushing her chair back. ‘Eat.’ And she rushed from the room, hands over her mouth.
Hans found her by the outhouse, on her hands and knees. Thea stirred as he approached and I could tell she did not want him to see the mess she had made.
Hans’s voice was soft. He helped her to her feet, placed her arm around his shoulders, and lifted her.
As they passed me in the doorway, I placed my hand on Thea’s chest and followed them inside. I let Hans place her on their bed, remove her outer things and pull the blanket over her.
‘I’ll get you some water,’ he said.
‘It’s empty,’ she croaked.
‘I’ll go to the creek.’
As soon as he left the room I crawled in next to Thea, buried my face in her neck, and wrapped my arms around her stomach. Her heart was beating quickly. And there was something else there too. Beyond the strong knocking in her chest, a steady patter. Another heart, another body in her body. I listened to them pulse, letting the sound surround me until it felt like a rip pulling me out into a dark sea, thrumming with its own energy. Inescapable.
Days turned. Exhaustion and nausea left Thea bone-tired in the summer warmth. She hauled herself through the day’s washing and cooking, red-knuckled. Some days, when Hans was out in the fields, she undressed and quietly examined the changes in her body, touching the hard roundness of her stomach with open palms, filled with awe. On hot days she sat by the creek and placed her feet in the water to soothe her swollen ankles, leaning against the bank with eyes closed against the sun.
The wind came, and then the rain, and the ground offered up mushrooms that Thea collected, sitting on her heels, no longer able to bend to the ground. She was out there one morning, knife in hand, when Anna Maria came walking along the fence line, waving her arms wildly in the air at her daughter who, on seeing her mother, shouted with delight, then sat back on the ground and sobbed.
‘Oh, Thea!’ Anna Maria laughed, running towards her. ‘Oh, Thea. Look at the size of you now!’
Thea lifted up her arms like a child. ‘My mama.’
‘Oh, my girl,’ Anna Maria said, hoisting Thea to her feet. She stepped back, placed her hands on the round lift of her daughter’s apron. ‘Yes. A boy. Where is Hans?’
‘Adelaide. Buying leather to resole his boots.’
‘Here, I can pick those up,’ said Anna Maria, bending to collect the scattered mushrooms. ‘Let’s go inside, shall we? We have so much to say.’
Inside, Anna Maria made Thea sit while she made coffee for them both and told her the news of Heiligendorf. ‘Your father wanted to come, of course, but he has a great deal of work now, it wasn’t possible.’ She placed a cup in front of Thea and kissed her on the head. ‘He will come to meet his grandson, when he arrives.’
‘When do you think that will be?’ asked Thea, blowing on her coffee.
Anna Maria smiled. ‘Soon.’
‘You feel it?’
‘I know it.’
Thea smiled. ‘How do you know that you know things?’
Anna Maria reached into her basket and brought out a slab of something wrapped in a cloth. ‘I brought you Streuselkuchen.’ She picked up a knife and cut her daughter a slice.
‘I mean it,’ Thea said gently. She gave her mother a searching look. ‘How do you know for sure?’
Anna Maria placed a hand over her stomach. ‘I feel it here. I know it here.’
‘I summoned Hanne.’
Anna Maria put her cake back down on the table and stared at Thea. ‘You summoned her.’
‘With the sixth book.’
‘And she came?’
‘Yes. Hans saw her too. She was with us.’
Anna Maria picked up Thea’s folded hands. ‘Thea, was this a dream? Did she come to you in a dream?’
‘Not in a dream. I was awake,’ Thea whispered. ‘She looked older. My age. She was standing just there. And then I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could feel her.’
‘I wondered . . .’
‘What?’
‘I felt a presence one night. A searching. A searching for you.’ Anna Maria placed her hand over Thea’s stomach. ‘You felt her here?’
Thea shook her head. ‘I felt her everywhere.’ She began to laugh, fingers over her mouth. ‘The next day I thought I had gone mad. I had been so lonely, I wondered if I had dreamed her.’
‘Does it matter if you did?’
‘Yes! Yes, I need to know it happened. I need to know that she’s with me. Like you once said she might be.’
‘What does it matter to your life, Thea?’ asked Anna Maria gently. She gestured to Thea’s stomach. ‘What would it change?’
Thea placed a hand over her heart. ‘Everything.’
Thea went into labour three nights later, just as a storm arrived with torrential rain that sank the yard into mud and a wind that threatened to lift the thatch. By the time she was leaning over the bed, eyes scrunched tight each time the pain moved through her, thunder was booming so loudly I felt it in my lungs.
Anna Maria was laughing to herself. ‘What a night this child has picked.’
Hans nailed cloth over the little window to keep out most of the wet, and then sat in front of the fire, pale and anxious, piling log after log onto the flames.
‘Hans, this isn’t a fever,’ said Anna Maria. ‘You can’t sweat a baby out.’
‘I’ll go,’ he said, standing up. ‘Check on the animals.’