Wolf Winter (50 page)

“We knew people would believe that. But then he got enamored with the idea of a village. He just can’t help it.” Kristina shook her head. “I think he actually managed to forget what had happened and his own part in it. And the talk of a village, in turn, got your mother going.”

“And Lundgren?”

“That was Nils.” Kristina lowered the corners of her mouth and made a face as if, by shooting the verger, her husband had surprised her. “Lundgren would have talked.”

They fell silent. Frederika saw the knife in Kristina’s pocket. She saw the strong fingers gripping its shank.

“Join us, Frederika,” Kristina said. “You are young, but if you have gifts like that … I’ll teach you the ways of nobility and, with the King dead, all roads will be open to you. You’d have all you could ever wish for.”

All I ever wish for,
Frederika thought. She wanted to smile. She didn’t need Kristina for that to happen. Her head felt light. She did smile and then rose.

“You won’t be able to stop what’s in progress, you know,” Kristina said.

“I am not planning on trying.”

“So what will you do?”

Frederika brushed her hands off against her dress.

Then she said, “Nothing.”

She looked toward the forest behind Kristina. At the four low shapes that she saw but Kristina could not.

I will do nothing,
she thought.
But they will.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For
Wolf Winter
I wanted to find a period when my characters’ world was changing, crumbling, creating additional uncertainties in their lives. In the warm, dusty corridors of the London Library in St. James’s Square I came across a series of colorful, descriptive history books called
Svenska Folkets Underbara Öden [The Swedish People’s Wonderful Adventures
—author’s translation] by Carl Grimberg, written in the early twentieth century and published by Norstedt and Söners Förlag. As I read the volume covering the period 1709 to 1759 I thought,
Yes, this is when it all happens. This was a real Wolf Winter for Sweden.
On the first page the book has an inscription in capital letters: SWEDEN IS ATTACKED, WHILST THE KING IS AWAY IN FOREIGN COUNTRY.

In 1717 Sweden found itself on the cusp of massive change. Its position as a great power, which began in the early seventeenth century and had bestowed on Sweden control over much of the Baltic region, was looking increasingly uncertain. At this point Sweden was fighting in the Great Northern War against Denmark, Poland, Saxony, Hanover, Prussia and Russia. Apart from short periods, the country had been at war for over 150 years. These wars took their toll, both on state finances and, of course, on individuals. Sweden’s population in 1700 was around 1.5 million. It is not known how many men died in active service, but the number often cited is close to half a million. The villages were depleted of able menfolk, with, in additional to the personal costs, consequences for farming. To finance the wars, the king imposed higher taxes, higher customs
fees, and—for as long as it was possible—borrowed abroad. Add to this a few years of crop failure and the plague that returned in 1710, and the times would have felt very dark indeed.

For most of his adult life King Charles XII warred abroad. Crowned at only fifteen, he was a remarkable warrior who commanded fierce loyalty not only from his troops but also from his subjects. Courageous, he displayed the kind of confidence that comes with the conviction of being God’s envoy. He abstained from alcohol and women and, by all accounts, seemed most comfortable at war, amongst his men, dressed like one of them. He was killed in 1718, during an attempt to invade Norway, shot through the head in a trench at Fredrikshald. Theories suggest that he was in fact either murdered on the instructions of his sister’s husband, later crowned Frederik I, or was the victim of an aristocratic plot. In an attempt to clear up the mystery his body has been exhumed three times, in 1746, 1859 and 1917. Whoever was responsible, his death marked the end of autocratic kingship in Sweden.

The nobility had every reason to resent the king. The balance of power inside Sweden shifted during Charles XII’s reign to rest even more firmly in the monarch’s hands. Parliament was forbidden to convene in his absence: the king ruled Sweden from the battlefield. Furthermore, in a bid to appropriate some of the nobles’ money—and, to some extent, control their power—in the mid-seventeenth century the crown initiated a
reduction,
in which it took back some of the fiefs it had granted, sometimes accompanied by large fines or payments. This had a significant effect on the economy and the status of the nobility in Sweden. In 1710, desperately worried by the collapsing economy, starvation, and the threat of loss of territory, the royal council convened Parliament, despite the king’s command, for the first time since 1697. In 1713 the council convened Parliament again and sent a letter to the king begging him to seek peace, explaining that they could no longer muster the people nor the money to defend Sweden. While they were still gathered they received a letter from the king sent five months earlier after he had
first heard rumors of a possible assembly. It simply forbade them to convene.

All the key characters in
Wolf Winter
are fictional. (Although the noble Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie did indeed exist, as far as I know he did not have a granddaughter named Kristina.) I wanted one of them to have direct links to what was going on in a broad national context, and thus, the priest Olaus Arosander is someone who has been close to the king. Olaus would have been very influential in his local community. Priests taught, preached, punished, conducted national registrations (from 1686 priests were required to conduct yearly catechetical hearings and keep records of births, marriages, and deaths in church books), and also played a vital propaganda role. They had to explain the necessity of the wars to their parishioners and draw links between the parishioners’ sins and poor war performance, and vice versa. The wars would later come to have another consequence for the church. Swedish soldiers, who returned after having been prisoners of war in Russia, reinforced pietist tendencies with a more personal kind of faith, enjoying meeting at home and leading each other in worship and Bible study. In response, Sweden passed the
Konvetikelplakatet,
a law forbidding “unofficial” religious gatherings, with fierce punishments for those who dared to defy it.

Lapland spans four countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. For historical details I turned to local books, such as
Om Tider som Svunnit
[
About Times Past
—author’s translation] by Wolmar Söderholm, 1973, produced locally in the town of Lycksele to celebrate its three hundredth anniversary. For details on the living conditions, the food, and the clothing, I spoke to my grandmother, her sister, and their friends. My grandparents came from two villages outside Lycksele. My maternal grandmother began working when she was eight years old. She desperately wanted to become a teacher (like Frederika), but instead her father asked the priest to release her early from school so she could begin contributing to the family. The priest, on the occasion of according this request,
lectured my grandmother about pride. When my grandparents met, my grandmother worked, cooking food for men who were charcoal stacking. My grandfather, who’d become an orphan at the age of twelve and owned nothing but the clothes he wore and a silver spoon, was one of those men. It is their personal stories and those of their friends that inspired the basics for the lives Maija and her daughters lead. Industrialization reached Lapland very late. My grandmother used to say that there was no “in between.” They lived like people always had, and then, overnight, they went from homemade shoes to high heels.

As part of its nation building in Lapland in the early seventeenth century, Sweden encouraged colonization and, thus, distributed a lot of land that had previously been used by the indigenous people, the Sami (referred to as “Lapps” throughout
Wolf Winter,
as that was the name used at the time), to new settlers. At the same time, the church began missionary work amongst the Sami. The Sami religion, which comprised animism (all natural objects have a soul), polytheism (a multitude of spirits and gods), and shamanism, came increasingly under attack and was ultimately condemned. As in much of Europe fear of “sorcery” was strong: witch trials in Sweden took place 1667–1676, and from the 1680s onward the church worked hard to eradicate Sami “paganism.” The drums, which Sami shamans used to reach a state of ecstasy and access the world of the spirits, were burned. Few of them still exist, although there is one in the British Museum in London. As very little has been written down about Sami religion, I based Frederika’s emerging spirituality of shamanistic journeying on my imagination and according to my belief that all religions are ultimately very much the same. The Sami main character in
Wolf Winter
has borrowed his name “Fearless” from my own Sami ancestors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to begin by thanking my much loved friend Fergal Keane. Without you I would neither have begun nor finished writing this book.

So many wonderful people have believed in this work. Their advice, editing, and author aftercare have been priceless. Thank you to my agents, Janelle Andrews, Rachel Mills, and her team at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop—you are the wisest people I know; Amanda Murray and her colleagues at Weinstein Books in the USA; Sara Nyström at Wahlström and Widstrand, Sweden; Jennifer Lambert at HarperCollins, Canada; and Martina Wielenberg at Droemer Knaur in Germany. A special thank you to Kate Parkin at Hodder and Stoughton, UK, for being so supportive and encouraging and making me laugh even in editing round three.

Thank you to my dear writer friends, Mary Chamberlain, Vivien Graveson, Haroon Hassan, Susanna Jones, Laura McClelland, Lorna Read, Alex Ruczaj, Saskia Sarginson, and Lauren Trimble, for reading the many drafts over many years and following the evolution of this work. Your honesty, creativity, and tireless feedback—even when it was difficult to hear—have helped me greatly.

I’d like to finish with the comment my husband sent to me in an e-mail after reading my first draft acknowledgments, where the final thank-you was to him, my mother, and our twin daughters:

I don’t think you should dedicate this book to us. It’s nice, but quite common—and you’re not. Of course you love us
and we feel part of your journey, but in reality it’s what you created and the support you built around yourself that made this happen. All we did was give you some space.

For that kind of love, Dave—and the space—I am so deeply grateful.