Throwback Thursday: ‘The Robber Maiden’s Story’ by Eileen Kernaghan

My father was a bandit chief. Not many people remember that. He died a long time ago, with a knife between his ribs. Not my knife, either — though I thought of doing it often enough.

I was an ugly child, they tell me, dark-skinned and scrawny. But neither was my mother any beauty. She had a long beard, stiff as a brush, that I used to pull to hear her squeal, and eyes like two burning coals half-hidden under shaggy brows. But the power was in her, as it was in me.

When I was sixteen my breasts were still as small and hard as pine nuts, but my shoulders were as broad as a man’s. One day I buried my skirts under a bush, and put on a man’s boots and leggings, a cap the colour of ripe strawberries, and a deerskin shirt. From one of my cousins I stole a fur-lined cloak, so heavy that it made my shoulders ache. And when I went away from my father’s hall, no one guessed that under my rough bandits garb were a woman’s parts.

But that was later. You asked how I came to know the Swedish woman Gerda, the one they call the Angel of the Snows. You tell me she is famous now, for her travels and her good works. You say she writes books that are published in a dozen languages and people come from miles around to hear her speak. Yes, I can see how that could happen. It doesn’t surprise me very much.

How did I meet her? Well, it’s a strange enough story — I wonder if one day she will write about it in her books? One fine summer afternoon, you see, I was out in the birch wood hunting rabbits. I heard a great creaking and groaning and clattering of wheels on the road through the wood. And when I went to look, I saw a coach with a team of four white horses jouncing over the ruts. You could tell it belonged to somebody important. The coachmen, the footmen, even the outriders, wore scarlet uniforms with gold frogs and epaulettes, and tall bearskin hats. The coach had red silk curtains and a crest on the side, and was so covered in gilt that at first I thought it was solid gold.

But, as it turned out, my parents and their men were waiting around a bend in the track. Soon there was blood as well as dirt splattering the coach right up to its golden door-handles, and the coachmen, the footmen, the outriders all were lying naked under the trees with wide red grins in their throats.