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important.
    The long sleigh journey had taken place in silence when they were travelling through the forests or over the barren plains. Occasionally Forsman had shouted something to the horse, but he had never spoken to Hanna. He sat in front of her in the sleigh like a forbidding wall.
    But the last day of their journey was different. He turned round to shout at her, and she shouted back at him as loudly as she could, in order to make herself heard.
    Jonathan Forsman regarded the New Year as something holy.
    ‘God has created the turn of the year to make us think about the time that has passed and the time that is to come,’ he shouted at her in the back of the sleigh.
    Before he saw the light, he had always indulged in heathen pastimes on New Year’s Eve. He had heated lumps of lead in the open fire and then dipped them into cold water in order to interpret the shapes they made as forecasts of the future. And he had never dared to enter the New Year without being dead drunk.
    But now he was enlightened, he shouted at her. He was no longer afraid of anything.
    When they reached Sundsvall, the town was enveloped by darkness and cold. Forsman pulled up on the edge of the town, in fact. Hanna was not yet able to check her vision of what Sundsvall would look like with the reality. Most of it was still in store for her as she wriggled her way out of the furs and stepped out of the sleigh.
    Forsman’s house was built of stone, and comprised two imposingly large storeys. As he pulled up, hordes of people came teeming out of the front gate and the lodge. Antero was led away, and the sleigh was taken care of. All the furs and other contents of the sleigh were carried into the house. Hanna was bewildered by everything that was happening all around her, all these unknown people staring at her, some of them openly, others surreptitiously. She was used to meeting unknown people one at a time. Sometimes it had been vagrants who had wandered up north on the banks of the river, sometimes individual travellers or people carrying axes and saws that her father had brought home with him from the forest. But never anything like this, this teeming crowd of unknown people.
    Forsman noticed her discomfort, and bellowed out in a loud voice that the girl accompanying him was Hanna Renström, who would be visiting relations in Sundsvall. But tonight, New Year’s Eve, she would be a guest in his home.
    By midnight Forsman had gathered together all his family and all his employees, including his grooms and maids. He opened wide a window in the large room that Hanna had gathered was called ‘the drawing room’ and shouted to everybody to be silent. The clock in Sundsvall’s church struck twelve. Hanna could see that Forsman was counting the chimes silently as his eyes glazed over.
    To her horror she gathered that he was on the point of bursting into tears. Never in her life had she imagined that a grown man could weep. She had a lump in her throat, and realized that something important was in fact happening as the chiming of the clock, carried by the cold air, penetrated the drawing room through the open window. Once the chimes had finished, Forsman started to sing a hymn and all those assembled there joined in – including Hanna, although she did so furtively.
    She spent that night in a room shared by three of the maids employed in the house of stone. She shared a bed with a girl called Berta, who was about her own age. Berta smelled less than absolutely clean, and Hanna suspected that she might well smell no better herself. Berta pushed and shoved, claimed most of the bed space, and informed Hanna glumly that she would have to be up by five o’clock, despite the fact that it was New Year’s Day and was more or less regarded as a Sunday. But she would have to make the fires and heat up the tiled stoves with the firewood the skivvies brought in.
    Berta soon fell asleep. But Hanna lay awake, thinking that there was something missing. It was some