“I see.” Mathilde propped herself up on an elbow and retreated to the roof of thatch. “The cottage-wife has built herself a wall. Shall I look for a window?”
Mathilde’s hair shone white in the light of her eyes, and all around them the darkness crepitated. Famke realized that cottagers were coming home in the ward’s other beds too. That thought made her bold, and curious; her fingertips itched.
With the swift motion of sudden decision, Famke pushed aside the other girl’s nightgown. “There is a net. There is a fish and—a pond? Yes, a deep, deep pond . . .”
“Be careful,” Mathilde whispered breathlessly; “there must be nothing larger than a fish. Someday I shall be married.”
It was the first and for a long time the only secret Famke had from Birgit.
“A schoolful of Sapphos,” Albert said when she told him, laughing out a puff of smoke. “What a picture that would make. A cottage . . . a pond . . .” He hugged her close to his chest and deposited a kiss of his own on the crown of her head. She felt him stirring against her hip, and that was all she needed to know about anyone called Sappho.
Famke told him, with an air of great revelation, that romantic attachments were not uncommon among the older girls, or even among the novices who were expected to take holy orders. Some of the girls swore these orphan embraces would prove the best of love, for they came without responsibility, without danger, without babies. But somehow they weren’t enough for Famke. She longed for the open space beyond the orphanage wall, for the freedom she associated with the wind that occasionally rattled the leaves of the elder trees; for the forbidden boys.
Famke was sad when Mathilde left, placed out in the village of Humlebæk. But then there was Karin, and then Marie. Famke became a fish herself, swimming through the ranks of girls, toppling them onto their backs with a flip of her tail. But she was careful to stay on the shore of every pond, the doorstep of every cottage; each Immaculate Heart girl who managed to marry bore all the signs of innocence to her husband.
And soon enough it was time for Famke to go. At fourteen, she’d finally been confirmed; she was capable of earning a woman’s wages, and there was no reason to burden the city’s few Catholics any longer. Sister Saint Bernard was in charge of placing the grown orphans, and she found a position for Famke as a goose girl and maid-of-all-work in a village called Dragør. Famke mucked out the goose pen, made cheese, and fended off the attentions of the gristled farmer who’d consented to take her. She talked to the girls on the neighboring farms—none of them smelling of soap or bread or ponds, only sweat and dung—and concluded that it would be no better anywhere else; so she hid her unhappiness even in her monthly letters to Sister Birgit. For her second Christmas, Famke’s employer allowed a traveling neighbor to carry her to the orphanage with a couple of geese he’d had her kill and pluck. She attended Mass, turned the geese on a spit, and hardly had time to exchange two words with Sister Birgit; but she set off for the farm in new Swedish leather shoes.
There was no cart now, and no one on the road. Famke had walked halfway to Dragør when a fit of coughing doubled her over. Her mouth was suddenly full and tasted horrible—so she spat into the snow and saw a drop of blood. It froze quickly, to glow like a ruby in a bed of spun silk. She kicked the snow over it and walked on, refusing to think of what that droplet meant.
Summer came, and Dragør steamed. Famke told herself she was resigned to her lot. She let the farmer kiss her cheek and even, once, put his hand on her bodice. She attended services at the village Lutheran church and talked to the other farm girls. She met young men, too—hired boys in no position to marry; they gazed at her with the same covetous eyes she saw in the farmer. None of them managed to interest her.
But then, wonder of wonders, a foreigner appeared, dressed in blue and driving a carriage. He stood a long while at the fence rail, watching her shovel out the goose pen; he held a leather-bound book before him and a pencil in his hand. From time to time she wiped the sweat from her face onto her sleeve and cast him a glance from the corner of her eye. When at last he approached, she saw his book contained a collection of drawings. He turned the pages back to reveal a moth, a chicken, and one of her.
There she was—she who had rarely seen her own face in a mirror—with all her busy motion stilled, looking slyly up from a white page. The real Famke, living and flushed, straightened her apron and pushed her hair under her cap, trying to look like the good Christian maiden she’d been raised to be. She knew she reeked of goose.
“Beautiful,” the stranger said in his own tongue, perhaps guessing this word was universal; but she looked at him with the round eyes of confusion. Then a slow smile crept across Famke’s face, to be mirrored in his. She put one damp finger to the page and accidentally smudged the drawing.
In gestures, the stranger asked her to fetch him a glass of water; he pantomimed that his labors had exhausted him. She brought a dipperful from the farmyard well, lukewarm and tasting of the geese and horses and pigs that trotted across the packed earth. As he drank, she took the opportunity to engrave his face and figure onto her mind. He was tall and sticklike, with thin blond hair combed into a semblance of romantic curls; his green eyes immediately reminded her of a frog’s. But he gave her a nice smile with slightly crooked teeth, and he bowed as if to suggest that he considered her every bit as good as he was.
He returned the next day in a carriage decked with flowers, and again she served him a dipperful of water. The flowers drew butterflies; in a cloud of pale yellow and white, their wings dipped from eglantine to glem-mig-ikk’, and she thought she’d never seen anything so pretty. She would find out later that the carriage had been decorated for a wedding; when the young man hired it he had asked to keep the flowers, and the proprietor even threw in a bouquet of lilies left from a more somber occasion. Famke’s suitor handed them over with a flourish, and she blushed. She looked from the carriage to him—“Albert,” he said, with a thump on his chest—and felt her eyes shining.
Albert drank. As he swallowed, his throat made a little croaking noise, and he and Famke laughed together, like old friends. Before she knew it, his hands were making signs to offer her a ride into the city and an engagement as his model and muse. That she would be mistress as well, Famke had no doubt; her fellow-servants in Dragør had told her what young men who fancied themselves artists were like. She watched this one thoughtfully as he argued his case. From time to time clasping her hand, he repeated two words so often they seemed like a name, Lizzie Siddal, though it had no meaning for her. Finally he kissed her grubby sixteen-year-old palm. When she pulled it away and put it to her face, she smelled his soap. Genteel, perfumed, but made of the same basic ingredients as orphanage soap. Ashes and fat. Prayers and hope.
So Albert and Famke rode away in a cloud of heavy dust, with the geese honking and the pigs squealing a charivari of farewell. The butterflies accompanied them, draining a few last drops from the wildflower garlands.
Famke had no notion where he’d take her and was delighted to find herself returning to Copenhagen, to the harbor district of Nyhavn. This time her experience of the town was different, lighter and lovelier, though almost as sequestered as in the orphanage. She stopped wearing the servant-girl caps and utterly abandoned the crossing of her ankles while seated. She found the life of a model so restful that she put on weight, and for the first time her breasts fit the cups of her hands rather than the flats of her palms. From Albert she learned English; she learned to call the shape of her mouth a Cupid’s bow—perfectly formed even after the mishap with her infant bottle—and to appreciate the line where the red of her lips met the white of her flesh. He taught her to read English as well, in the guidebooks he had brought. From them she learned that Denmark was flat and that the Danes were thrifty people who enjoyed flowers, sunshine, and making butter and beer. She much preferred Albert’s version of her country’s history, with the thrilling princesses and long-ago warriors.
Inevitably, she compared being with Albert to being with the orphan girls, and she quickly decided she liked him better. He pleased her in different ways, without hands or mouth, and he took pleasure from the way she sucked on his flat nipples: “No woman has ever done that before,” he gasped. And when they were working,