Breath and Bones. Susan Cokal

If there is not enough money at the boardinghouse, I could perhaps advance something from our coffers . . .”

      “That will not be necessary—I will work for my passage. The landlord’s money will give me a start in looking for her once I land. And then I will bring her to this husband.”

      Birgit noticed that in his excitement, Viggo’s scarred hands had turned pink. “Yes,” she said, “Famke must be with her husband.”

      When Heber Goodhouse made his proposal, halfway across the Atlantic, it was just as much a surprise to him as it was to Famke. “Marry me, Sister Ursula”—it wasn’t at all what he had meant to say, there in the cabin-cum-office in which she’d presented herself for the study of scripture. He could not even remember how he had fallen to his knees, but there he was.

      What had he done? To have resisted fleshly temptation during these two years abroad, only to yield at the last hour, on his voyage home . . . If his fellow-missionaries could see him now—let alone Sariah, who as his first wife had the right to approve or reject all wives to come—And yet—yet he couldn’t quite retract it.

      The girl had him fixed with her blue eyes, fixed like a moth on two pins. Was she angry? To his horror, Heber realized he was babbling, telling her after all about those papyri, the Lord’s revelation that they were holy records, and the vision he gave Joseph Smith to translate them on the spot (this time without scryglasses) such that the principles of celestial marriage were revealed and recorded in the sacred Doctrine and Covenants—“for the Lord teaches us to increase ourselves—to swell our flock of Saints, the true souls, the sons of Nephi, lest we be destroyed and step into the celestial fire alone . . .”

      “I am afraid of fire,” Famke said, her eyes wide with what he now knew must be confusion as well as modesty.

      “The Lord himself has married, as you know. Marriage is the holy sealing of souls—”

      “I told you in Copenhagen.” She seemed to think he was chastising her in some way. “I am a Mormon. I promise. I have done nothing—”

      “Of course you haven’t,” he hastened to assure her. “In our Church, it is not wrong for one woman to draw the eye of another’s husband. It is lawful and right for a man to have two wives—or more, unto his means—for as it was in the days of Abraham, so it should be in these last days, and when a man is meant to take a wife, God sends a revelation—”

      “Lawful,” the girl repeated. Her face was luminous white.

      Heber clutched his beard. “Yes, yes, I know it is against some earthly laws,” he said; “the laws of Europe and of the United States. For now, we will have to keep the marriage a secret, at least among Gentiles. You will live in the home of my first wife, Sariah. You will call her Aunt. You will share—”

      “I don’t understand,” Famke said, switching to Danish. “Are you really asking me to be your wife?”

      The flood of words came to a sudden halt. “Ja,” Heber said through dry lips.

      “With a wedding? A secret wedding?” Et hemmeligt Bryllup.

      “Yes. One of the other missionaries can do it while we’re still at sea.”

      There was a long silence. Prosaically, Heber felt his hips aching, locked too long in one position. In the corridor, a sailor took the Lord’s name in vain.

      “Why?” she asked at last.

      “Why? Because I—because God—It is meant to be,” he said. “I have had the revelation.”

      She thought that over, too, neither contesting nor confirming his assumption. Heber began to feel a glimmer of hope, and with it, an admiration for her capacity for stillness. She hadn’t moved a hair since they’d begun speaking. She had a marvelous control over her body, a most beautiful propriety. Of course it was right for her to hesitate—she hadn’t even been baptised yet . . . He should tell her to pray on the question, but an unnamable fear stopped him from suggesting it. Instead he made her a promise.

      “You are a Saint,” he said. “You are blessed of God. And if you accept me, I will bring you to the celestial kingdom.”

      “What about now?” she asked, in a tone he felt was both unromantic and unspiritual. “What about this life, this summer—this voyage to America?”

      He was glad to answer that one, at least part of it. “My scheme of raising silkworms will ensure prosperity to Prophet City. You will be my wife and helpmate—”

      “Will you pay for my passage?” she asked. “May I have my tinderbox back?”

      Again she’d dammed his words. But he did not hesitate: “Yes,” he said.

      “Then, yes,” she said. “I will marry you.”

      As soon as Famke had freed herself of Heber’s joyful embrace, she asked for the tinderbox. He appeared glad to give it back; perhaps he thought she was being properly modest in detaching from him, protecting herself from the dangers of exuberant flesh. He took the box, wrapped in a handkerchief, from his desk and handed it to her with a little homily about the beauty of maternal love and how she would find a new mother in Sariah . . .

      Famke unwrapped the handkerchief and saw with relief that the box was intact; even the twenty-three matches were still rattling inside. She held out Heber’s handkerchief, but—

      “Wrap it up again,” he said, averting his eyes from the naked Graces.

      And, thinking the cloth would protect the ladies from scratches, Famke obeyed. She went back to steerage with a merry, light step and crawled into her bunk, still holding the box. That she would soon be a wife and take a man’s hand in marriage, Famke hardly contemplated. This wouldn’t be a real wedding, as it was illegal in most of the world; and from what she understood of Heber’s confused promises, there would be no consummation until she’d been accepted by the first wife and “bonded” to Heber in the Mormon sanctum in Salt Lake City. Anything could happen before then.

      The first wedding ceremony was celebrated that evening, in Erastus Mortensen’s cabin. Mortensen himself presided, and the missionary to Sweden served as witness. Famke had no experience of weddings, so she could not tell if this one were special in any way; to her it felt like just another church service. She had always found priests difficult to listen to . . . She kept her mind on Albert and how this scene might unfurl under his paintbrush: Goodhouse’s long tangle of a beard, the yellow shawl over her own head like a veil; Albert might transform them into God and wife, and it would be no more or less remarkable than the pantheon of goddesses under whose names he had already painted Famke. Yes, it was best to see this ceremony as a painting . . .

      Even on deck that night, staring up at the stars and watching her hair make a red tunnel in the wind, Famke had a hard time realizing what she had done. Heber, now her husband, was apparently too shy to embrace her; so he was just a disembodied voice behind her back, going on about his plans for the silkworm farm and the great Saintly family they would raise on it. She heard almost nothing he said. “Nye Verdener,” she whispered over and over.