The Taker by Alma Katsu Read Free Book Online Page A

supplies. And what curious supplies: bottles of gin, tobacco. Neighbors noticed a lantern burning late, through theone window of her tiny cottage—did she stay up all night smoking tobacco and drinking gin?
    In the end, it was the axmen who gave her away, the lumberjacks who worked for Charles St. Andrew a year at a time and lived far from their wives. Men like this are capable of sniffing out women like Magdalena from across a town, across a valley if the wind is right and they are desperate enough. First one, then another, then each of them in turn found their way to Magdalena’s doorstep once the sun went down. Not that the axmen were her only customers: they paid in coin, after all, not in eggs and cured ham. But through the axmen her reputation was spilled across town, like tainted water emptied from a rain barrel, and the ire was raised of many a good wife. Still Magdalena said nothing. Not while the sun was up. Not even when she was insulted to her face by an indignant spouse.
    The wives, enjoined by the pastor, organized a movement to have her ejected from town. Her presence was the first sign of sinful city living to sprout up in St. Andrew, the sort of thing the settlers were trying to escape. Pastor Gilbert went to Charles St. Andrew, as he was the employer of the axmen, those customers who could be openly complained about.
    Sympathetic as he was to the pastor’s request, Charles pointed out that there was another side to Magdalena’s services that the townsfolk were overlooking. The axmen were acting on completely natural urges—to which the pastor grudgingly agreed—separated by many miles from their legal spouses. Without Magdalena’s services, what might the axmen get up to? Her presence actually made the town safer for its wives and daughters.
    So an uneasy truce was struck between the whore and the virtuous womenfolk and had held for seven long years. In times of trouble and illness, she contributed her part, whether they liked it or not: she would tend to the sick and dying, feed the destitute traveler, slip coins in the church donation box when no one was around to see her enter. I couldn’t help but think she must long for a small measure of femalecompanionship, though she respectfully kept to herself and sought no discourse with the townswomen.
    Magdalena’s actual circumstances were a mystery to many children. We saw that our mothers avoided this puzzling figure. Most of the younger children believed her to be a witch or a supernatural creature of some kind. I remembered their taunting cries, the occasional handful of pebbles flung in her direction. Not by me—even at a tender age, I knew there was something compelling about her. By all rights, I should never have met her. My mother was not judgmental, but women such as she did not associate with prostitutes, nor would her daughters. And yet I did.
    It happened during a long sermon one Sunday. I excused myself and slipped out to the privy. But instead of hurrying back to the balcony and to my father’s side, I dawdled outside in the warmth of a beautiful early summer day. I meandered to Tinky Talbot’s barn to look on the new litter of piglets, pink with black splotches, whirled with thin, coarse hair. I petted their curious snouts, listened to their gentle grunts.
    Then I looked sideways down the path—it was the closest I had ever been to the mysterious singular cottage—and I saw Magdalena sitting in a chair on the narrow window box of a porch, a long, blackened pipe clenched between her teeth. She, too, was enjoying the sun, wrapped in a quilt, her hair scandalously loose around her shoulders. The parts of her not covered by the quilt were slender and delicate, the birdlike bones of her clavicle visible under papery skin. She had no powders on her face, just a trace of lampblack smudged at the corner of her eyes, a ghost of stain on her lips.
    She was unlike the other women in town. You could tell as much by her very attitude: sitting by