The Snow Queen (3 page)

“But you've always been such good friends . . . ”

“Perhaps, when we were children. But now he thinks only of his studies, and we have nothing to say to one another.”

“Boys never say anything interesting, anyway,” observed Katrine, with the superior wisdom of seventeen.

They skated on, around the bend of the river. The sharp air stung their cheeks, brought tears to their eyes.

Sleighbells jangled just ahead and they steered closer to the bank, under leafless elder-branches.

Silver harness trappings gleamed. All along the river skaters wheeled in slow circles, staring, as the sleigh swept by. The team was a matched pair, white as milk. The woman who grasped the reins so carelessly in her pearl-trimmed gloves had hair the colour of winter sunlight.

“That's
her
,” breathed Katrine. “Kai's cousin from the north.”

“She
says
she's a cousin,” said Gerda. “I don't think they know a single thing about her.”

“She's very beautiful,” observed Katrine.

“I suppose,” said Gerda, grudgingly.

“She looks like a princess,” said Katrine, admiring the woman's ermine-lined cashmere cloak, the silver-blonde hair streaming artlessly over her thrown-back hood. “Her husband, or her father, must be someone very important.”

But Gerda could not imagine this elegant, free-spirited creature as someone's daughter, still less as someone's wife. She seemed to exist outside the bounds of domesticity, answerable to no one but herself.

A little way downriver the white sleigh glided to a stop. Gerda watched the woman lean down from her seat, laughing. And then she reached out a white-gloved hand to draw someone, a young man, up beside her.

Gerda put her mittened hand over her mouth to smother a cry. She could not see the young man's face. At this distance the dark shaggy head in its knitted cap, the narrow back in its nondescript woollen coat, could have belonged to anyone. Yet Gerda knew, with a sick emptiness in her breast, that the boy beside the pale-haired woman was Kai.

Gerda had spent the morning shopping. When she arrived home, breathless and parcel-laden, she found Kai waiting. He made a great pretence of stamping snow from his boots on his own doorstep, but she knew he had been watching for her. She stepped into her front hall, set her parcels down on a bench, and looked warily at Kai through the open doorway.

“Come in,” she said. “Before I let all the heat out.”

He nodded absently, and stepped over the sill.

“Let me take your coat.”

He shook his head. “I'll not stay. I only came to tell you . . . ”

Gerda waited, slowly unwinding her scarf, unfastening her mantle, taking off her bonnet. Under all her layers of flannel vests and chemise and stays her heart was thudding against her ribs. She knew, before the words were out, what Kai was going to say.

“Gerda, I'm going away for a while.”

“With her?”

“If you mean the Lady Aurore, yes, with her. She's invited me to return with her to her winter home in Sweden. She lives in a great house near Uppsala, where the university is.”

“Kai, you can't be serious! To travel all the way across Sweden, in the dead of winter . . . ”

“Why not? The winter roads are nothing to her. She says that blizzards are her natural element.”

“But Kai, who
is
this woman? What do you know about her?”

“I know that she is a woman of great learning — a Doctor of Philosophy. Learned men come from many countries, to talk with her and consult her library, in which there are many thousands of volumes, on every subject under the sun. Even the philosopher Sören Kierkegaard has been to visit her. She is writing a book of her own, in which she hopes to reveal the secret pattern of the universe. And Gerda, this is the best part, I have not told you this — she has asked me to be her pupil— her assistant! When this great work is finished, my name could be written with hers!”

What had become of her quick-witted irreverent Kai, who made her laugh with his clever nonsense? When had he turned into this humourless young man who spoke in the lecturing tones of a schoolmaster? “And when will this great work be finished?” she asked in a small, sad voice.

“Oh, not for years, perhaps for decades,” Kai told her. “Such works are not written in a day.”

She saw that his thin face was flushed, as though with fever. His eyes, which all these past months had seemed so cold and distant, burned with a hectic light.

“But surely your mother and father will not give you their permission, to go so far from home?”

“Gerda, do you imagine they would stand in the way of such an opportunity? They are not rich, you know — I was to become a lawyer, or a schoolmaster. It was not what I wanted, but I thought I would have to make my own way in the world.”

“I will never see you again.”

“Of course you will see me again, you goose. I will come home in the summertime, and we will sit under the rosebushes, and I will tell you of all the marvellous things I have seen, and read about.”

But they were the words of a patient adult humouring a sulky child, and she took no comfort in them.

What could she say to him? She could not tell him how often she had dawdled behind the others on the way home from church, hoping that he would catch up, and walk beside her. She could not say that when she and Katrine chattered over their embroidery — furnishing imaginary parlours, rocking their some-day babes in imaginary cradles — it was Kai's thin, solemn face she saw bent over a book beside the fire. You could not say such things to a young man, even one you had known since you were a toddler at your mother's knee.

“And what news of Kai, Mrs. Sorensen?” The late afternoon sun fell in a dazzle through freshly-washed windows, pooling like molten gold on Mrs. Jensen's best embroidered cloth. Gerda froze in the act of taking Mrs. Sorensen's empty coffee cup. The cup rattled on its saucer, and she set it down.

“My dear Mrs. Jensen, I wish I
had
news to tell you. We are getting quite anxious, there has been no letter these two months past. I did not even hear from him on my birthday. I know how busy he must be with his studies, but surely, a note to let us know when we are to expect him home . . . ”

“But you
are
expecting him home?”

“Oh, most certainly. That was always the agreement. But still, one does grow a trifle uneasy, when one hears nothing . . . ”

Her voice trailed off.

Mrs. Jensen's glance met Gerda's. Her eyes were troubled. She had always had an uncanny knack for reading her daughter's thoughts. But the look was a fleeting one, and she turned away at once to reassure Mrs. Sorensen. “My dear, I am sure you will hear any day now. They are all so thoughtless, these young folk, so wrapped up in their own affairs . . . now try one of these cakes, it's a new recipe — and do let Gerda refill your cup.”

“I'm sure you're right,” said Mrs. Sorensen. “If he had fallen ill, or had an accident, his benefactress would certainly have informed us.”

But Gerda, like Mrs. Jensen, had seen how tired and anxious Kai's mother looked, had observed the dark, sleepless circles under her eyes.

The spring drew on. The plum trees blossomed, and then the lilacs. The beechwoods burst into pale new leaf. Before long it would be midsummer, and the sun would rise three hours after midnight. For Gerda, all this loveliness seemed wasted. She was sick at heart, wondering what had become of Kai.

“If only we could travel to Sweden, and find him,” Mrs. Sorensen wailed to Gerda's mother. “But Mr. Sorensen is not well, the trip would be too much for him, even if we could afford to close the shop . . . with the business so slow these days, one must think of where one's next meal is coming from . . . ”

“You will have to do without me this spring,” announced Katrine. “I have had an invitation from my cousins, in Copenhagen, to stay with them for the end of the Season.”

“For how long?” asked Gerda, despairing.

“Two whole months,” said Katrine. “Just imagine! All of the spring season in Copenhagen . . . They are so lively, my cousins. My mother says they attract young men like moths to the flame. There will be no end of balls and soirees . . . and picnics in the fine weather. Oh, Gerda, what a shame you won't be there as well!”

“How lucky you are,” said Gerda. But she was imagining the dreariness of the months to come, with Kai's absence always on her mind, dulling her spirits, and no blithe Katrine to distract her.

Seduced by the Baroness Aurore's airs and graces, her Paris gowns, the title in front of her name, the village would hear no word against her. And if Kai had vanished from their lives — if he had not even sent a letter for his mother's birthday — well, was it so strange that a young man, immersed in his studies and caught up in the excitement of the great world, should forget to write?

What could Gerda say or do that would shake them from their complacency?
Next month, next year, in his own good time
, they said. Kai would return to them with a gentleman's manners and a sheaf of diplomas in his trunk.

But Gerda knew in her heart that by then it would be too late.