Buried Angels

FJÄLLBACKA 1912

Dagmar still didn’t understand how it could have happened. Everything had been taken from her, and she was utterly alone. No matter where she went, people whispered ugly words behind her back. They hated her because of what her mother had done.

Sometimes at night she missed her mother and father so much that she had to bite the pillow to stop herself sobbing aloud. Because if she did that, the horrid witch she lived with would beat her black and blue. But she couldn’t always hold back her screams when the nightmares got so bad that she woke up drenched in sweat. In her dreams she saw the chopped-off heads of her mother and father. Because in the end both of them had been beheaded. Dagmar had not been present to see it happen, but the image had been burned into her mind.

And sometimes images of the children also hounded her dreams. The police had found the bodies of eight infants when they dug up the earthen floor in the cellar. That was what the witch had said. ‘Eight poor little children,’ she said, shaking her head, whenever anyone came to visit. Her friends would then turn to glare at Dagmar. ‘The girl must have known about it,’ they said. ‘Even as young as she is, surely she must have realized what they were doing, don’t you think?’

Dagmar refused to be cowed. It didn’t matter whether that was true or not. Mamma and Pappa had loved her, and nobody wanted those dirty, squealing little kids. That was why they had wound up with her mother. For years she had worked so hard, yet the only thanks she ever received for taking in all those unwanted children was that people ended up demeaning her, jeering at her, and then they killed her. The same thing had happened to her father. He had helped Mamma bury those children and for that reason people said that he too deserved to die.

Dagmar had been sent to live with the witch after the police took her parents away. No one else was willing to have her, not the relatives or any friends. No one wanted anything to do with her family. The angelmaker from Fjällbacka – that was what people had started calling her mother the day those little skeletons were found. Now people even sang ballads about her. About the murderer who had drowned the children in a basin, and about her husband who had buried them in the cellar. Dagmar knew those songs by heart. Her foster mother’s snotty-nosed kids sang them to her whenever they got a chance.

None of this mattered to her, because she was still her parents’ little princess, and she knew that she had been both wanted and loved. The only thing that made her tremble with fear was the sound of her foster father’s footsteps approaching across the floor. At those moments Dagmar wished that she could have followed her mother and father into death.