Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,46

fingered his piles of scores. She opened a notebook full of drawings of birds, anatomies of snakes and reptiles. Neat sketches of dying things. She flipped through it curiously, left it out and open and looked at the music on his stand black with his own notations.

He said, There is another room.

She followed him back into the front room into a small room furnished with a table. The window looked into the cliffs and a thick stand of trees.

He said, This could be your room. Put your fiddle here.

She turned to him and said gravely, Thank you. I have never been given such a gift.

He wanted to take her to the bed in the big room but felt closed in under his own roof.

He said formally, Would you like to look at the sky?

Together they retreated outside again, up into the woods where he’d worn a path to a place silent and still and higher than any other spot on that ragged edge of glacial rock. In the grey dawn she turned to him willingly and slipped off his clothes and pulled him to the ground to make love under a sky growing smurry.

They might have dozed outside all through the morning, but the air grew sharply cold and a strange freezing rain woke them as they dozed in the roots of the gnarled firs. Lovers care little for weather. They rose and gathered up their clothes helter-skelter. Her hand taking his, they flew down the path into the shelter of the house. Laughing they dried themselves and warmed themselves against each other’s skin, covered for the first time by the strangeness of sheets, and finally fell asleep.

Dagmar opened her eyes after the restless night and saw a white flower plucked low on the stem, wake robins they’d called them when she was a girl. She looked at the graceful whorl of stalkless greenery, the solitary white bloom. Nyssa had put it in a glass on her night table before she left for the pole house. Dagmar reached to her side of the bed to poke her daughter awake but felt nothing.

She got up and pulled on her gardening pants and shirt. She put on the kettle to boil and dropped tea in the teapot. She opened the door to look at the sky and saw Norea already on her balcony above the apple tree.

What time did Nyssa come in? she called up.

Good morning, Dag.

When she wakes up, tell her I’m in the greenhouse. You want tea up there?

I heard souls slipping under the sea at dawn, croaked Norea.

No, Dagmar thought, and then a chill breeze. Isn’t she in your bed?

Norea shook her head.

Didn’t Nyssa come home last night?

We didn’t bury her shoes.

The kettle screamed.

Time slowed. Dagmar searched the house and Norea’s outside loft. The whole house empty. She ran through the greenhouse and shivered with the outside temperature dropping. She headed for the field.

Flax is a clean-up crop. Dagmar sowed hers in rotations. The Millstone Nether soil wasn’t suited to it but she liked the seeds and its brief lake of blue blooms, so she nurtured it with all her force. She walked into her unsuitable garden. The flax green was just through, ungrown sepals and anthers still hiding their hint of blue. She plunged into the rows. No dry brown bolls for these—she’d murder them.

Nyssa was gone.

Her little flax field was strewn with old chopped chaff. She pulled and trampled down one row, then another. She stripped away the delicate leaves until her hands bled. She dug out the precious roots. She flung them away and tramped into the next row. She ripped stems and spat into the ground. She would raze it all and leave a swallowing field of stone. She thrashed along until she was exhausted, then she walked down to Colin’s to tell him that Nyssa was gone.

Tumbly sea, deep grey swells crashing against the cold rock. Colin spoke from the blasphemy of knowing, She’s not a child, Dag. She’s got a right to go.

Dagmar raged back at him, She was taken.

She wanted to claw ragged blood rivers through his face. She wanted to scar him with her trowel. She wanted to put seeds in his eyes and blind him. She would reason herself free of his law.

Colin answered into her chill eyes, The ocean’s made of mothers’ tears. The more suddenly a young girl goes, the more she doesn’t want to be found. There were portents.

What portents? said Dagmar.

Patterns, he said. She was poised