there was little reason for Maria to believe that it wouldn’t be a long and unpleasant questioning. Her father and her stepmother always wanted a strict accounting of her activities beyond their sight.
She paused at the gate and looked at her family’s cottage. She could see the yellow flicker of a lantern shining from between cracks in the shutters. The dim light shone on the flanks of an unfamiliar horse tied up by the side of the house.
Who’s here?
Suddenly, she thought of her father. Had he …
“Papa!” she called out. She ran to her house, afraid that the horse belonged to a priest come to administer last rites or console her stepmother. “Papa!” she called again, and the door to the cottage burst open.
For a moment she felt a near-disabling relief as she saw her father push through the doorway. But it soon gave way to alarm at the expression of rage and terror contorting his face. He ran to her, clad only in a nightshirt, bellowing, “Maria!”
Maria couldn’t find her voice. He was ill. He shouldn’t be out of bed. His hair was wild in the moonlight, his eyes gleamed with some preternatural terror, and the skin of his face had flushed almost purple. He grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. “You took it off! You took it off!”
“Papa?” Maria cried.
“What did you do?” He stared into her face. “Why did you take it off?”
“I don’t understand.” She hugged herself as her father shook her. “Papa, you’re hurting me.”
What frightened her most was the fact that her father was crying. “It was to keep you safe. Why did you take it off?”
Keep me safe? Her father was delirious. He must be talking about her cross. She reached up and pulled it from under her chemise. “No, Papa, I didn’t take it off.”
Her father backhanded her. She fell to her knees in front of him, clutching her face and sobbing.
“Don’t lie to me!” he screamed.
“I-I d-didn’t,” Maria sobbed into the ground.
“If you didn’t—” He sucked in a shuddering breath and stumbled backward. “If you—”
“P-papa?”
She got to her feet as her father stumbled backward again, gasping for breath and shaking his head. Her stepmother ran from the doorway, calling to him: “Karl?”
He shook his head, his voice no more than a breathless wheeze, and fell backward into her arms.
Maria held the cross between her breasts and said, “I didn’t take it off.”
Her father kept shaking his head and slid down as if his legs couldn’t support his weight anymore. Her stepmother’s voice cracked as she said his name. “Karl. You can’t leave me alone with this! Not now.” She turned back toward the door, where Maria’s three brothers stood. “Come, help me bring your father inside.”
Maria stepped forward, but her stepmother turned to face her. “Please. Not now. He’s too upset.”
“B-but …” Maria stood transfixed in front of the cottage as her brothers ran out, toward their father. As they helped carry him inside, her stepmother watched her, eyes shiny with tears and an emotion Maria didn’t want to understand.
What have I done?
The confusion and fear in her parents’ eyes confused and frightened her. Worse was the sudden unfocused guilt that consumed her.
For the first time in years, she was too keenly aware of the fact that she was a bastard child. Her father’s blood ran in her veins, but not his wife’s. Did Hanna hate her for that?
Maria followed them to the doorway, and every labored breath her father took made her shudder and left her feeling as weak as if she were the one who couldn’t breathe.
She stood in the doorway, suddenly a stranger in her own house.
Hanna and Maria’s older brother, Władysław, eased her father back into his bed; the covers were still thrust aside, as if he had sprung from his sickbed in a delirium. Her two younger brothers stepped back. The youngest, Wojciech, cried silently, while Piotr, her middle brother, held his shoulders.
Near where Maria hung back, next to the doorway, a young man tried uncomfortably to stay out of the way. Maria recognized the curly hair and the patches of stubble on his chin that had yet to make a beard. He was one of the younger sons from a neighboring farm, and he held his hat in his hand, crushing the brim in his nervousness.
“Shall I fetch a doctor—” he began.
Maria’s stepmother didn’t even glance at the boy. “And a priest. Move!”
The boy ran for the door before Maria could collect herself to remember his