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time before she realized what it was.
    There was no creaking in the stone walls. The cold didn’t penetrate the stone walls like it did in the timber-built house she had grown up in.
    And it was only then, as she lay in bed inside stone walls, that it finally dawned upon her that she was now living in an unknown world. She could no longer reach out her hand and touch her siblings, or hear Elin’s heavy breathing as she slept soundly in her bed.
    She was somewhere else now, somewhere that was completely new and unknown to her.
    She tentatively placed her hand on Berta’s warm body. She missed her brother and sisters who had always been around her. She was on her own now, and she didn’t know how she would be able to cope with the void that surrounded her.

11
    THE FOLLOWING DAY Forsman sent Jukka, the most trusted of his servants, to help Hanna to locate her relatives. He had been given the address where they were thought to live by Elin, but Sundsvall was not a town where streets and house numbers could always be relied on.
    Even worse was the fact that Forsman, who was confident he knew everybody in the town, had never heard of a family called Wallén. But he hadn’t told Elin that. He thought that perhaps they lived at one of the sawmills in the vicinity of Sundsvall.
    The cold was less severe now. Hanna could feel that it was no longer biting into her skin the way it had done during the long sleigh journey.
    Forsman went out into the street with them.
    ‘If you don’t find the family, bring her straight back here,’ he told Jukka, who was standing with his fur hat in his hand.
    Hanna thought that Jukka was somewhat cowed and insecure when confronted by his enormous employer in his voluminous fur coat. He was certainly over sixty, but was nevertheless afraid, like a little child worried it might receive a beating.
    She couldn’t understand why this was.
    They set off. As soon as Forsman had gone back inside, Jukka was transformed. He spat and walked with a swagger, elbowing aside anyone who got in their way, and seemed to be in charge of the snow-covered and inadequately cleared street.
    Hanna observed the town she had come to in the pale wintry light. For each stone-built house they passed, there seemed to be ten tumbledown little wooden shacks that had grown up out of the ground. Like mushrooms, she thought. If the stone houses were edible, the wooden shacks were the sort of fungi you stamp on and don’t put in your basket.
    She felt worried all the time. Would she be able to fit in here? Or was she the kind of person who would never feel at home in this town?
    And then she came to the sea – but that was nothing like what she had expected either. There was a harbour with lots of big ships, some with masts, others with black funnels. But the water didn’t go on for ever, as her father had said it did. She could see land in all directions, and no sign of open water beyond the ice and a network of open channels.
    Jukka urged her to keep moving whenever she stopped. He seemed to have just as little time as his employer, and was always in a hurry.
    They walked along the icy edge of the harbour. Hanna almost slipped and fell over several times. Her shoes, made by a Lappish cobbler in Fjällnäs, were not suitable for the town’s stony and ice-covered pavements.
    They came to a cluster of wooden houses which seemed to be hugging one another in order to keep warm.
    Jukka stopped and asked a man pulling a sledge laden with firewood the way to the address he had been given, to the Walléns. The man, who had a large burn mark on one cheek and a very loud chesty cough, pointed and tried unsuccessfully to explain. Jukka soon lost patience, touched his cap as a gesture of thanks, and they continued walking.
    ‘It’s impossible to find anywhere in this damned town,’ he muttered in his sing-song dialect. ‘Completely impossible, but I think this is it even so.’
    He had stopped in front of a two-storey wooden house