Authors: Kate Forsyth
The Wild Girl (51 page)
At last he lifted his mouth away. ‘Dortchen, you’re enough to drive a man mad. One day you will not let me kiss you, the next …’ His voice was rough. He held her gently, kissing her eyelids, the soft, urgent pulse at the base of her throat. ‘I love you,’ he whispered.
Dortchen’s knees buckled, her senses swam. Only Wilhelm’s body kept her from swooning to the ground. She wanted him to love her, she wanted him to wipe away the past, she wanted to be lost to herself forever.
So she fell to her knees before him and put her hands to that hard male part of him, then pressed her mouth there. He cried out and clutched her head to him. ‘Oh, God,’ he groaned, as she freed him from his breeches. ‘Oh, God.’
Dortchen said the words with him, ‘Oh, God,’ and opened her mouth to him. He arched his back, thrusting his hips forward, allowing her to fill her mouth with him. Then the next instant he pulled away. ‘Dortchen, no,’ he panted. ‘We cannot.’
She followed him blindly, not understanding, seizing him with her hands, nuzzling her head into his groin, trying to take him into her mouth again. He stopped her, lifting her up and pulling her against him. ‘We cannot … It’s a sin … Dortchen, we must wait.’
Dortchen’s head spun and her ears roared. Her body was both aching with lust and shaking with revulsion. ‘A sin,’ she said. ‘Yes, a sin.’
She put her hands down and touched him again, and he groaned. Leaning against him, she worked him with her hands, then knelt once more, tasting him with lip and tongue. She was expecting him to groan and cry out like her father did, but he stopped her hands with both of his and raised her up, holding her away from him. His expression was not what she expected. He looked shocked.
‘Dortchen, what are you doing? You must not … It’s a sin.’
She gazed at him, confused.
‘We must wait … We must be married first.’
Anger filled her. ‘Marry?’ she asked. ‘How can we marry? You are the vassal of your brother and I … I am the vassal of my father.’
‘But, Dortchen—’
‘I cannot marry you. Not now, not ever. My father has forbidden it … and I … I …’ She was unable to go on.
He spoke her name again and reached for her, but she struck out at him, then turned and ran away. Her long skirts tripped her but she scrambled up and ran on. The world was all grey and white and black and cold. She found a dark corner of ivy and stone, and pressed herself there, tearing at her hair and her face, wanting to hurt herself.
Wilhelm’s face haunted her. She had tried to love him, to forget herself in him, but all she had done was reveal to him the wild side of herself, the beast within.
CASSEL
The Electorate of Hessen-Cassel, September 1813–December 1814
They were both now free, so Roland said, ‘Now I will go to my father and arrange for our wedding.’
‘I’ll stay here and wait for you,’ said the girl. ‘I’ll transform myself into a red boundary stone so that no one will recognise me.’
So Roland set forth and the girl, in the shape of a red boundary stone, stood there and waited for her sweetheart. But when Roland arrived home, he was snared by another woman, who caused him to forget the girl. The poor girl waited there for a long time, but finally, when he failed to return, she grew sad and transformed herself into a flower, thinking, ‘Someone will surely come this way and trample me down.’
From ‘Sweetheart Roland’, a tale told by Dortchen Wild to Wilhelm Grimm on 19th January 1812
September 1813
One warm autumn evening in late September, the gate to the Wilds’ garden banged open and Lotte came hurrying down the path, the ribbons of her bonnet flapping behind her.
Dortchen and Mia were digging up angelica and sweet cicely roots, to hang and dry by the fire. ‘Lotte,’ Dortchen cried in surprise, straightening her aching back. ‘What’s wrong?’
Her immediate thought, on seeing Lotte’s white, shocked face, was that something had happened to Wilhelm. She had not seen him since that awful day in the snowy park. He had spent the summer with his friends, the von Haxthausens, who lived on a grand estate near Paderborn. The last time Wilhelm had gone to visit them, his carriage had overturned twice on the potholed roads. Dortchen feared the same had happened again, and he had been injured. She could not ask, however. Even to think of Wilhelm brought a scalding rush of shame and humiliation upon her, so that she could scarcely breathe.
Lotte seized both her hands. ‘Dortchen, have you not heard the news? The Russians are coming! They’re only a few hours’ march away. Oh, Dortchen, what are we to do?’
‘The Russians are coming?’ Dortchen repeated. Mia cried out and sank down onto a water barrel, her hands to her mouth.
‘Yes, they’ve beaten the French and the Grand Army is fleeing,’ Lotte said. ‘Napoléon has no more men. The Russian army is marching right towards us now.’
Dortchen could not take it in. She leant against the wall, her head spinning.
She had been so busy all summer, in the house, the garden and the stillroom, that she had been only dimly aware of events in the outside world. The Russians and the Prussians had forged a new alliance, she knew, and had been fighting against the French for most of the year. Austria had joined them only a few weeks ago, after Napoléon had refused to sign a peace treaty that would have seen him lose all his mighty conquests there. There had been a battle at Dresden, but Napoléon had won.
What could Lotte mean when she said Napoléon had no more men? Surely Napoléon, the greatest military commander since Charlemagne himself, could not be losing the war? What did it mean for her family, for her country? How could the Russians possibly be here, at their very doorstep?
‘Sit down,’ Lotte said. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet.’
She guided Dortchen to sit on the back step, and Dortchen held her head in her hands while Lotte went into the scullery and pumped a mug of water for her. It was cool and refreshing, and helped Dortchen recover her senses. Mia was weeping, and Lotte passed her the cup and her own crumpled handkerchief.
‘I don’t understand,’ Dortchen said. ‘I thought Napoléon was winning.’
‘He lost a major battle near Berlin a few weeks ago,’ Lotte said, ‘and has been retreating ever since. They say his troops fell into a wild panic at the sight of the Cossacks charging down upon them, and simply dropped their muskets and ran.’
‘Cossacks!’ Mia’s blue eyes were rounder than ever. ‘Dortchen, what will they do to us?’
‘
Cossacks
are coming here? To Cassel?’ Dortchen was on her feet at once, grasping the door frame to keep her balance as her vision swam. She had heard so many horror stories of the Cossacks.
‘King Jérôme is fleeing,’ Lotte said. ‘He has ordered Jakob to pack up all the treasures at the palace. Jakob is in despair. Luckily, the King does not think much of books and so Jakob has been able to save some of the most precious.’
‘The King is fleeing?’
‘Yes, the whole court is trying to get away. The highway is jammed with coaches and carts. We can’t get away, of course. Jakob says we must barricade ourselves in and hope for the best.’
‘Wilhelm,’ Dortchen whispered. ‘Is he home? Is he here?’
Lotte nodded. Pity was on her face. ‘Yes, he’s here. He doesn’t want to see you. Oh, Dortchen, I just wanted to make sure you were safe. I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t warn you and you were all hurt.’ Tears were streaming down Lotte’s face. She and Dortchen embraced, then Lotte ran out through the gate.
Dortchen locked it behind her, and then hurried to the outhouses, where she and Mia secured the stable door and dragged hay bales across it. They chased the chickens and geese into their coop and closed it up tight, then ran back to the house. ‘Rudolf,’ Dortchen called up the stairs. ‘I need you.’
‘I’ll go up and tell Mother,’ Mia said.
‘Tell her to sew any jewels or coins she has into our petticoats,’ Dortchen said. ‘Help her.’
Dortchen ran into the shop, where her father was seated at his counter, writing in his logbook. He looked up, stern and unapproachable. Since Rudolf’s return from Russia, her father had hardly looked at Dortchen or spoken to her. She was grateful for this, and did her best not to rouse his ire. So she slowed down, smoothed her muddy apron and said, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Father. It’s just … I’ve had news. The Russians are only a few hours’ march away. The Emperor – Napoléon, I mean – he’s been beaten in a great battle … King Jérôme is fleeing Cassel.’
Her father sat motionless for a moment, then turned and looked out the shop window. Dortchen followed his gaze. All was chaos out in the Marktgasse. People were running everywhere, and shop-owners were hastily banging down their shutters and wheeling away their barrows.
Herr Wild stood up. ‘The drugs! The opium! Dortchen, shut the shop. I’ll hide my cabinet.’ He tossed her his heavy ring of keys, then rushed to the stillroom.
Dortchen hurried out through the shop door, clutching the keys close. Outside, all was in tumult. Carriages and carts jammed the street, with coachmen whipping horses forward. Anxious faces peered from the windows, shouting, ‘Hurry, get a move on!’ Two young men seized an old man and flung him down from his cart as if he were a sack of potatoes, beating his old, bony nag with their walking sticks so it lurched into an ungainly trot.
Mothers dragged their weeping children along by their hands. One young girl screamed in terror as her dropped basket of watercress was trampled by the fleeing crowds. A carriage driver locked wheels with the young men in the cart, who began to beat him with their walking sticks, trying to wrench the two vehicles apart.
Dortchen closed the heavy shutters across the windows and padlocked them. Someone jostled past her. ‘Out of my way,’ he shouted, pushing her so violently that she fell to her knees. It was a butcher’s boy in a bloodstained apron, carrying a long stick strung with rabbit carcasses over his shoulder. Dortchen scrambled to her feet, shaken and bruised. The butcher’s boy shoved past the little watercress seller, who caught hold of his arm. ‘Help me, help me, please,’ she sobbed.
He knocked her down, then, unable to make his way forward, threw down his stick of rabbit carcasses and bullied his way on board a cart filled with cages of chickens. A mangy dog darted forward and seized the leg of one of the rabbits, trying to drag it away. Dortchen grabbed the end of the stick and wrested it away from the starving dog, who ran off with one limp carcass hanging from its mouth. Dortchen helped the watercress seller to her feet, then pressed one of the rabbits into her arms and said, ‘Go home, as fast as you can. Lock your door and don’t answer for anyone.’
The little girl nodded and ran off, the limp rabbit clutched close to her chest like a strange doll. Dortchen dragged the stick of rabbits inside the shop and slammed the door. She locked and barred it, then stood against it,
her heart pounding erratically. Three rabbits dangled from the stick in her hand – more fresh meat than the Wild family had seen in months.
