Dreamless (35 page)
Authors: Jorgen Brekke
He remembered everything now. All the years in the hospital.
If only he’d remembered back then. Something had struck him on the head when the ship sank, and it took years before he could recall who he was, and by then he was no longer a rich man’s son from Trondheim, heir to the Ringve estate, son of her father’s best friend. He was the boy who didn’t know who he was. A fool. A solitary soul without hope.
He’d arrived in Stockholm as a poor young man. But he could play musical instruments and compose songs. It was his mother who had taught him to play the lute when he was a small boy. At the hospital, he had borrowed an instrument from the pastor who came every week to teach him his letters. Even though he may have forgotten everything else, he hadn’t forgotten the music. And it was how he was able to earn his living for years. Until at last fate had brought him back to Trondheim and the Ringve estate and to her. When he arrived at the estate in March, everything had come back to him.
And then he knew who he was.
But no one had recognized him. How could they? They had spent almost twenty years trying to reconcile themselves to his death.
I will tell them now,
she thought to herself.
If they know the truth, then we can get married
. Her father couldn’t possibly imagine a better husband for her than the heir to Ringve, the estate they had visited so often. Then she wouldn’t have to stay here in Denmark, far away from him, and he could live the life that had been intended for him. Everything would be good. And besides, she was worried. She didn’t know what her father might do as long as he was ignorant of her sweetheart’s true origins. He had been so furious to learn about the child she was carrying, and about their first meeting in March. There was no alternative. They had to be told.
And so she began writing the letter.
Trondheim, July 1767
Søren Engel read the letter from his daughter in silence. Then he got up and gave orders for his horse to be saddled and brought from the stable. He rode at once to Ringve Manor, where the captain received him. Engel handed him the letter and watched as he read it.
“Can this be true?” asked Engel.
“I thought there was something familiar about his face,” said the captain, visibly shaken. “I thought there was something about his face when he fell.”
Engel stood there without uttering another word. He couldn’t help thinking about the last thing Nils Bayer had said to him: “There are many different ways to achieve justice.”
Had the police chief somehow known about this? His thoughts were abruptly cut short by the captain.
“What have we done?” he cried. “What have I done?”
“I think we have killed more than just the father of my daughter’s unborn child,” said Engel. “I fear that we have also killed your son.”
* * *
Before Søren Engel rode back to town, he allowed Wessel to keep the letter, as if it might offer him some consolation. The captain then summoned one of the carpenters who was working on the estate at that time. They were busy putting in new paneling in the drawing room.
“Take this letter,” he said, “and put it inside the wall. I don’t want to see it ever again.”
“But if you don’t want to see it, wouldn’t it be better to burn it?”
“It’s impossible for a person to burn away his sins,” said the captain. “He has to live with them, no matter how dreadful they might be.”
The carpenter cast a frightened look at the man, wondering whether the lord of the manor had gone mad. Then he took the letter and left.
AFTERWORD: A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE NOVEL AND THE HISTORY OF TRONDHEIM
The story about Nils Bayer
in eighteenth-century Trondheim is, of course, just as much fiction as the story about Odd Singsaker’s hunt for Julie Edvardsen’s kidnapper. Most of the people described in the novel’s sections set in 1767 are pure fabrication. But what’s true is that back then Trondheim was a small town of barely five thousand inhabitants, and the upper class consisted of very few people, many of whom are still well known today. These individuals had an enormous influence on the history of the city; it’s nearly impossible to imagine a Trondheim of 1767 without them, and for that reason they could not be entirely excluded from this novel. In
Dreamless,
I’ve chosen to approach this challenge in two ways.
First, even though all the key players in the story are fictional, they do possess some traits that I’ve borrowed from real people. Trondheim was the first town in Norway to have a police chief, and that occurred as early as 1686. In 1767, Trondheim’s police chief was Søren Madsen Næbell (who lived until 1780). Like Nils Bayer, he paid far too much for this official post, and subsequently had constant money woes. He was also a quarrelsome man who clashed with many of the other public authorities in town. But unlike Bayer, there are no indications that he had any sort of drinking problem. On the contrary, he was a highly enterprising and moral police officer who did much to shape and elevate the status of the police force in Trondheim.
The wealthy gentleman Søren Engel was not closely modeled after a real person, unlike Nils Bayer, although his name bears a similarity to that of the far from impoverished Thomas Angell (1692–1767). Angell was somewhat older than Engel, and in reality he died in Trondheim the same year in which the story takes place. He is still known today for having willed his entire fortune to the city’s poor.
I should also mention that in 1767, Trondheim had a town physician by the name of Robertus Stephanus Henrici (1715–1781). He had very little in common with the novel’s Dr. Fredrici except for the fact that during certain periods he had financial problems, and he was very generous about giving medicine to those who needed it in town. The pastor at the hospital church was a Sami man named Andreas Porsanger (1735–1780). The Wessel family did own the Ringve estate, but in 1767 there was no Preben Wessel whose son had gone missing.
I also included a number of historical figures in the background of my story. For instance, the founders of the Royal Norwegian Scientific Society were Bishop Johan Ernst Gunnerus (1718–1773), Chancellor Gerhard Schøning (1722–1780), and State Councilor Peter Frederik Suhm (1728–1798). In addition, the founder of the newspaper
Adresseavisen
was Martinus Nissen (1744–1795).
* * *
The geography of eighteenth-century Trondheim is documented in several excellent maps. And so the town in which Nils Bayer finds himself is quite similar to the one that actually existed in 1767. However, back then there was no tavern called the Hoppa in Ila. At that time, Ila was a quite new and not very developed suburb. But toward the turn of the century and well into the 1800s, that part of town grew rapidly and gradually became known for its hostelries. One of the taverns that Nils Bayer visits does have its roots in real life. The inn at Brattøra was established in 1739 and during its first years was the ferryman’s residence. Much later, the building was moved to the Trøndelag Folk Museum in Sverresborg, where it continues to serve as a pub under the name of the Tavern.
As far as the town’s police chief is concerned, he did not live in the same place as Nils Bayer, nor was his office located in the same place as in the novel. And if Søren Engel had actually built a mansion in Midtbyen in 1767, he would have been the first to own one of the huge wooden mansions that today characterize the old section of Trondheim. The building known as Stiftsgården was finished in 1778, while Hornemannsgården was constructed a few years later.
* * *
I should also mention that in the eighteenth century no one spoke—much less wrote—the way they do in my story. If I had attempted to imitate speech patterns from the 1700s, the modern reader would have found the novel very hard to comprehend. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to include a few archaisms where appropriate. Bayer’s free use of Latin and French phrases was originally inspired by what is perhaps one of the world’s very first crime fiction stories—Maurits Christopher Hansen’s novella
Mordet på Maskinbygger Roolfsen
(
The Murder of Machinist Roolfsen,
1840), in which Latin and other foreign words abound. But it’s also in keeping with the zeitgeist of the eighteenth century, which was an era when a learned man had to master three or four languages simply to keep up with the times.
JØRGEN BREKKE
was born in the small town of Horten, Norway, and currently lives there with his family. Brekke has been a teacher and a freelance journalist, but is now a full-time writer. He’s also the author of
Where Monsters Dwell,
the first in the Odd Singsaker series, and a forthcoming sequel to
Dreamless
. Sign up for email updates
here
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ALSO BY
JØRGEN BREKKE
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CONTENTS
Afterword: A Few Words About the Novel and the History of Trondheim
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
DREAMLESS.
Copyright © 2015 by Jorgen Brekke. Translation copyright © 2015 by Steven T. Murray. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
