Breath and Bones (3 page)

“Do you think Christiansborg burns to a purpose?” she asked. “Do you think it is destroyed because it is not perfect?”

Albert glanced out the window, too, and what he saw there seemed to calm him. “No.” He picked up his brush again. “The Danes do not behave that way. Not since the Vikings, at any rate.” He turned to a blank page and said, ruminatively, “Perfect . . .”

The sheets now felt as warm and soft as bathwater; Famke slid down them like a happy eel and tried to imagine a world she might create if invited to do so. She had only the dreamiest sense of what it might be: warm, yes, but with jigsaw-puzzle blocks of ice and flowers and pickled herring and definitely Albert. The thick smell of linseed oil and the bite of turpentine, rainbows of paint under nails and across unexpected stretches of skin. There would be no farmwork, no housework, no church services; only art. She would never cough. Instead, she would stand in the middle of this world, or lie in it, perpetually still, with her clothes off and her eyes lost in Albert's.

It would be this life.

“New pots for old!” sang a tinker passing down the street below.

Famke looked up and suddenly the light was gone; even the keenest eye couldn't stretch it any further. Albert sighed and put brush and palette down on the rough board table, where Famke would clean them later. Wiping his hands on what he must have thought was a rag—a camisole she'd left to dry over the back of a chair—he looked from the easel to the bed, from pencil drawing to paint sketch to the real, living girl watching him and trying not to cough.

“I think it is going to be . . .” He paused, searching for the right word: “beautiful.”

It was an ordinary word after all, but nonetheless exotic to her, for he said it in English. Famke felt a rush of hot feeling—not the ordinary fever of her disease but a new kind that Albert had passed on to her, a kind that felt hotter and stronger each time it came over her. She threw the covers off and held out her arms to him, unconsciously splaying her hands in much the same way as Nimue did.

He came toward her, repeating, “Beautiful . . .”

When he was undressed and in the narrow bed himself, he hoisted Famke up and—her arms braced against the sloped ceiling for balance—slid her down onto him. She wobbled, unsure just what to do now; and he kept his hands on her hips. He held her still while he began to move.

Famke looked down into Albert's face; and then he looked up into hers, the planes of it in twilight shadows. Famke removed one hand from the ceiling and pulled her hair to the side so that, behind her, he might look on the face and form of his Nimue, his masterwork, his violated virgin.

“Ah . . .” Very quickly, he gasped and began to shudder.

As she rode that wave, Famke knew that he was seeing her as his heroic nymph, and she did not mind one bit. She had a lovely warm, shimmering feeling, a feeling that—like the new fever, but different—made her
want
something . . . As Albert quieted beneath her, she felt the shimmering rise and then fall away, leaving in its wake a vague sense of longing and that familiar tickle in her lungs.

Famke coughed. The contractions pushed Albert out of her, and he slid back, to where the bed met the wall.

“Really, darling,” he said as she got up and, for want of a handkerchief, coughed further into the paint-stained camisole, “you should take something for that dreadful hack.” He swabbed at himself with the bedsheet. “I'll get you an elixir the next time I'm out.”

Famke shook her head, yes, no, feeling herself cold and wet and somehow bereft, but still with that sensation of wanting inside. She lowered the camisole and smiled at Albert, and he said again, “Beautiful.”

English is spoken at all the principal hotels and shops. A brief notice of a few of the peculiarities of the Danish language may, however, prove useful. The pronunciation is more like German than English:
a
is pronounced like ah
, e
like eh
, ø
or
ö
like the German ö or French eu. The plural of substantives is sometimes formed by adding
e
or
er,
and sometimes the singular remains unaltered.

K. B
AEDEKER
,
N
ORTHERN
G
ERMANY
(W
ITH EXCURSIONS TO
C
OPENHAGEN
, V
IENNA, AND
S
WITZERLAND
)

Famke was not virtuous when she met Albert Castle. According to the Catholic precepts by which she'd been raised, she was no longer truly virginal, as she confessed to him in a bedtime conversation. Few orphan girls, even those raised by the good sisters of the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, could lay claim to that desirable state once they entered the wider world—and why should they bother to hold on to something that would be taken from them once they'd passed communion and were placed in service with some family inevitably headed by a prurient husband, a curious son, or a querulous grandfather who
would
have his way?

“Darling, you're so fierce,” Albert said as he squeezed her.

“It is a fierce world,” she said. “
Overhovedet
, especially, for a girl.”

Besides, immured in her orphanage, Famke had found the idea of sin exciting. It offered the possibility of something other than what she had, something that must be at least pleasant, if not delicious, since the straight-backed nuns who had married Christ were so vehemently against it.

So Famke had taken sin into her own hands. The boys on the other side of the orphanage were just as curious as she, and intrigued by her interest. She courted them first through a crack in the wall separating the boys' and girls' dormitories. This was during the exercise period, when the children
were encouraged to enjoy fresh air and wholesome movement, trotting up and down two barren courtyards, occasionally playing desultory games of tag or statue around the lone elder tree in each one. Famke would lean into her wall and see an eye, almost always blue, peering back at her through the rubble and leaves. They would talk, whispering arrangements for
rendezvous
that, under the nuns' watchful glare, never came to pass. Once, Famke wormed her thin hand along the crack, and the boy on the other side (a Mogens, she believed, or maybe a Viggo—there were so many of both, arriving with those un-Catholic names pinned to their diapers so the good nuns felt bound to retain them) managed to reach just far enough in to touch the tip of one finger. The contact gave her a thrill she'd never known before, and for a good many months it was what she thought sin was, this furtive touch within a wall.

She actually saw boys only during the daily chapel services; the sexes even ate separately, so as to avoid the inevitable temptation. While the priest droned on about the blessings of humility, meekness, and poverty, she flirted through fanned fingers. Breathing deeply, she smelled the strong cheap soap the older girls made in the orphanage yard from ash and fat. For the rest of her life, it would be that smell—even more than the smell from the place that the nuns would refer to only as Down There, when they admitted it existed at all—that made her heart pound with excitement.

To the priest's soporific cadences, in that edifice of gray-painted brick, Famke's azure eyes winked and fluttered. The boys were helpless: She glowed like the rosy windows that Catholics could afford only in non-Lutheran countries. At the age of twelve, her breasts already brushed against the plain gray uniform, and the figure growing inside that rough sacking seemed to color it rainbow bright.

The nuns did not fail to notice her blossoming. Soon, Famke had to sit through services sandwiched between two severe gray bodies.

“She has always been wild,” the Mother Superior said in one of her frequent conferences with the wisest of the nuns. “We saw that from the first.”

“And the visitors saw it as well,” said Sister Saint Bernard, Mother Superior's second in command. “The basest peasant can recognize such a spirit, be the little girl ever so pretty. It's no wonder they always took a different child.”

Mother Superior said absently, “We do not speak of our patrons that way. Or our young charges.” She was thinking, as was the rest of her council, of the high hopes they'd entertained when the baby turned up on their doorstep one late October day, still wearing the black hair of the womb, wrapped in a soft wool blanket and bearing a note that said simply,
“Familjeflicka.”
This, they had thought, was a child destined for one of their rare adoptions.

Young Sister Birgit, who had been born in southern Sweden, had said the word came from her country and meant either “a girl who stays at home” or “a girl of good family.” Given the quality of the blanket and the notorious fact that gravid Swedes often took the short boat ride over to Copenhagen, where mothers' names were not required for a legal delivery, the note seemed to promise great things. But the sisters found no family portraits, no silver spoons, no precious jewels hidden about the infant's person; only what one might expect to find in a very ordinary baby's diaper, and that they gave to one of the novices to deal with. The baby screamed at their inspection, and screamed when she was washed, and nearly took her own head off when she was put to bed with a bottle. The sisters decided to let her cry till she slept, and in the morning they found her whimpering more quietly, but with a mouth stained from blood, not milk. Her tough young gums had broken off the glass nipple.

Sister Birgit was delegated to pick the splinters from the baby's lips, using tweezers and the light of a good lantern. She had to dose the squalling patient with brandy to make her lie still.

She's nothing but breath and bones
, Birgit thought.
Only breath and bones
. Though it wasn't true—the baby's limbs were nicely rounded, her cries lusty—the phrase made Birgit feel tender. It gave her patience.

In the meticulous work, which took all day, Birgit came to love the little girl. She murmured endearments over the drunken body and torn mouth, and it was then that she shortened the Swedish word to “Famke,” the name that would follow the girl even after her official christening as Ursula Marie. When Famke woke up enough to be hungry again, Birgit would have fed the baby at her own breast, if she could have mustered anything more than prayers. Instead she dipped one corner of Famke's blanket in a cup of warm milk, freshly bought at the market on Amagertorv, and coaxed the sore lips and tongue to suckle.

In later years, as the growing girl's cough turned bloody, Sister Birgit
would accuse herself of having missed a shard of glass somewhere. She fancied that Famke's lungs were lacerating themselves as they tried to get rid of that last fragment. Though Birgit and many of the other nuns were also afflicted with persistent coughing, she felt, against all reason, that the unusual event of Famke's infancy was the source of the girl's affliction—never mind that she bore no other scars. Birgit prayed for forgiveness, and for Famke's cure, and she nursed Famke all the way to solid food at the age of five months. Thus she made the best possible use of the “good family's” sole patrimony; the baby sucked the blanket down to meager threads.

“Sister Birgit,” the Mother Superior reprimanded her gently in private, “you have become too attached to this one child. You must divide your care among the children equally, as our Lord divides his love among us.”

Birgit tried to do as she was told. Though she could never give the chaotic horde of orphans the impartial and impersonal affection required by her order, she could offer them the semblance of equal treatment. In everyday life, the life the other sisters shared, she nursed the orphans' colds and coughs and combed their hair with the impartiality of a Solomon; when a child died, Birgit washed the body and lifted it into its pine box.

But when she was alone with Famke, Birgit hugged the little girl as tight as she dared, so tight that their bones ground together. Birgit would not have chosen convent life for herself; that had been her parents' wish, as they'd grown too old and tired by the time their seventh daughter reached adolescence to do anything more for her. Her eighteen-year-old body was starved for physical contact, and Famke's round little arms gave her the greatest comfort she would ever know.

In these moments of privacy, Famke took shameless advantage of Birgit's unstated preference. She played by sliding the gold band from the nun's finger and sticking it on her own thumb, then popped it in her mouth and impaled it with her tongue to make herself laugh. On the unusual occasions when there was candy at the orphanage, Famke knew that even after all the other children had received their justly measured shares, there would be an extra piece or two in Birgit's pocket. She knew also that if Birgit, and Birgit alone, caught her in some wrongdoing, she had only to place her hands on each side of the nun's face and kiss her nose to be forgiven and pass unpunished. No one else would learn of her crime, and her bond with her fellow-Swede would grow.