told were a sort of map, directions that the body could follow to paradise upon its resurrection. She herself was no needlewoman (the yellow pocket twice needed repairs on the journey), and she certainly felt no call for such a garment, which in any event she would not be allowed to wear until after her baptism as a Saint. She was much more interested in the English lessons that Heber Good-house gave in another emigrant’s first-class cabin. She attended those whenever the ship’s passageways were free of sailors.
Under Goodhouse’s tutelage, Famke learned that English was the language presently spoken by God. The Saints knew this because God—or his angel, which was somehow the same thing to them—had spoken English to their young prophet, Joseph Smith, as the seventeen-year-old-boy dug his father’s field a half-century before. Some years later, God had asked Smith to translate the signs on some golden tablets into the Mormons’ new book of holy history and had given him special eyeglasses, or scryglasses, with which to do it. She imagined joking to Albert that he’d taught her to speak divine language.
Meanwhile she plied Goodhouse with questions. What did Joseph Smith’s tablets say? What did he mean by “The Miracle of the Seagulls”? How long would the train portion of the journey to Utah take? She made Mormon lore her particular study: Perhaps this could be the mythology that Albert was seeking, the set of stories that would unlock his inspiration and let his artistic gifts flourish. The more she knew about it, the better; it would be her gift to him, as the glass ice had been so many months ago.
“Is it true,” she asked Heber Goodhouse, “that you believe your God is married?”
“He is everyone’s God,” the Saint said in a tone of gentle instruction. “He created us in His image and bade us marry; our world reflects His. Even the savages practice a form of marriage.”
“So it is true, then.”
“Yes.” He sighed, as if giving up a battle. “God is a husband. He descended to earth and married the woman you were raised to call the Virgin Mary, who is a treasured part of the Holy Family. We recognize her with our prayers in temple.”
Famke spent a moment imagining the Virgin’s blue veil replaced with the sunbonnet recommended for Saintly immigrants, then dismissed the image as unappealing. “And why,” she asked daringly, “do your people have so many wives?”
Goodhouse’s eyes remained steady, though they did not quite meet hers; this was the stickiest of all the doctrines and covenants, and the hardest to explain to young women. “It is ordained by God,” he said, conscious of some bravery on his own part: “‘If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified.’ Joseph Smith translated this from ancient papyri—er, scrolls of text—”
“What is ‘espouse’?” she interrupted.
“To marry, Sister Ursula.” Heber was somewhat relieved to escape explaining the rest: that Smith had bought the papyri along with four Egyptian mummies, all of which had traveled to Illinois in time to vanish in the Great Chicago Fire. The nuances of his people’s history were always difficult for the unbaptised, who could not accept that they themselves lived in an age of miracles. “Literally, to take a spouse.”
Chapter 12
I saw the Mormon women. Then . . . my heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and . . . I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity . . . and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.
MARK TWAIN,
ROUGHING IT
The boy’s hands had healed over nicely, to a network of scar tissue as pink and white as a well-kept baby’s skin. Those scars stood out dramatically against his slightly darker wrists, but he claimed cheerfully that they did not hurt. Still, even as she explained her dilemma, Birgit had trouble looking away. She had scarcely realized, when she summoned him from his village on Amager, that this was indeed the boy from that dreadful day under the elder tree—the tree so thickly green beyond her window. A Viggo, not a Mogens; a boy apprenticed to a mortician without the usual fee, because no good family wanted a son who had touched death. He reeked of the camphor with which he whitened the faces of the dead; but, she noticed, his hands were very clean, even beneath the nails. At the orphanage, she herself had shown him how to wash his first corpse, and he had learned her lessons well.
She opened the simple wooden box in which she kept her important papers, including the slip that had given Famke her name, and took out a fat packet.
“It is really two letters,” she said, holding them up so he could see the addresses and postmarks framed on the backs of each page (“To Famke, who lived at the top with Albert Castle”; “To the Mother Superior of Immaculate Heart”), but not the texts inside. “You see, the first one arrived at their old boardinghouse. The landlord sent it onward with a note to the house where Famke—Ursula—was in service, though I can’t say how he had that address. Finally the housekeeper of that place had the ragman deliver it here on his way through town. She would not waste a stamp on it. There is some bitterness from the way Famke left, to join the Mormons.” She said the last word bravely and with such obvious resolution that Viggo knew she considered this to be her own chief failure, to have raised and loved a girl who would renounce the one true faith.
“What do the letters say?” Viggo asked, sitting up straight as he’d been taught, eyes wide and interested below his carefully oiled hair. He had always enjoyed a good story, whether of saints or of sinners, and this one was turning out fine. He remembered Famke, of course: the red-haired witch who’d beguiled him at her boiling cauldron. That she had forsaken farm life and married a dissolute artist (for such was the impression that Birgit, with painful regard for the boundaries of truth, had labored to convey) did not surprise him in the least. What surprised him was that the man would return to his homeland without Famke; even in memory, Viggo felt a tug toward her, just as a nail might retain its attraction to the magnet that first gave it a charge, or as a body in a coffin might turn toward the fields from which it had dug his living.
“It is wrong to read another person’s mail—but,” Birgit confessed in a rush most unbecoming to a Mother Superior, even one who was barely thirty-five years old, “I did read both letters, this time, to see . . . The boardinghouse keeper says that in sorting through his aunt’s record books he discovered some money was owed to Famke. He did not want to send it through the mails, but it is there for her to collect.”
“And what does Famke’s husband say?”
Struggling to regain her composure, Mother Birgit traced that letter’s original creases, making sure nothing showed but the address in Nyhavn and, on the back, a green blot of sealing wax bearing the imprint “AC” and a date of some two months previous. She was almost certain that she was doing right.
“He . . . wants her to join him.”
Viggo was perplexed. “But that is wonderful, is it not? She will have the care of a husband again.”
Birgit studied her own folded hands. In fact the letter contained no promise of marriage, but she was trusting to God that such a promise would come if she helped reunite the lovers.
“Yes,” she said miserably, fearing that Viggo would never agree to her modest scheme. “But you see, he is in England with his father, and she has gone to America. Someone must give her the letter, someone must bring her back. Or, that is, deliver her to the address in this letter. Hampstead.” Surely Albert Castle would do the honorable thing if Famke turned up on his doorstep with his letter in her hand, ready to hold him to his half-promise—and with a strapping Danish protector standing behind her. “I thought that if you, perhaps, could collect the money from the boardinghouse, you could use it to go to America . . .”
“Mæka,” Viggo said