The Wild Girl (57 page)

August 1819

‘I am so hideous,’ Gretchen said, turning sideways so she could see the size of her extended stomach in the mirror.

‘Hideous is the last word anyone would use about you,’ Dortchen said. ‘You’re quite beautiful.’

‘I look like the side of a barn.’

‘You’re about to have a baby,’ Dortchen said. ‘You have to expect to be a little bigger than usual.’

‘A little bigger? I’m enormous. I look like I’m about to give birth to an elephant. I
feel
like I’m about to give birth to an elephant.’

Dortchen came to stand beside her, looking into the mirror. She looked thin and plain and serious next to her elder sister. Her hair was screwed into a knot at the back of her head, while Gretchen’s hung in tight ringlets on either side of her face. Her sister wore a blue silk dress with puffed sleeves, a high waist and a deeply ruffled hem, with pearls about her neck and both plump wrists. Dortchen wore a shabby black gown, although five years had passed since the death of their parents. She had no money to pay for a new dress.

‘I wish I didn’t feel so unwell,’ Gretchen said, returning to her chaise longue, where she lay down and ate another meringue. Her ankles were grossly swollen above her embroidered silk slippers. The sight gave
Dortchen a sharp twinge of memory. She turned away, trying to steady her breathing.

‘Dortchen, be a dear and tell the governess to take the children to the park. I cannot bear their noise.’

The sound of distant childish laughter barely penetrated the elegant panelled doors, but Dortchen did not protest. She went as directed to the schoolroom, where two little girls in ruffled white frocks sat drawing at a table. Four sturdy boys lay on the floor, playing with tin soldiers. A stern-faced young woman sat darning stockings by the window. Like Dortchen, she was dressed in a plain black dress, though hers was rather less faded.

‘Ida, I’m sorry, but Frau Schmerfeld has asked that you take the children to the park. She needs to rest.’

Ida looked at the great basket of mending still to be done and sighed. ‘Very well,’ she said, rising to her feet. ‘Ottilie and Sophie, get your bonnets and gloves, please. Adolf, Karl, Julius and Friedrich, get your coats.’

‘But it’s so hot,’ Julius complained, sitting up. He was wearing a pair of tight blue high-waisted trousers that buttoned over his jacket. The older two were dressed in similar outfits, with floppy lace collars. All looked most uncomfortable. ‘Please, Ida, don’t make us put coats on as well.’

‘You can’t go out without your coats,’ she said. ‘But, if you like, we can take your model ships and sail them in the pond.’

Julius whooped with joy and ran off to find his boat. Friedrich, an angelic looking two-year-old with a head of pale golden curls, lifted his arms to Dortchen. ‘Uppy, Aunty Dortchy.’ Dortchen lifted him up, and he clamped both legs about her hip. ‘Come park.’

‘I’m sorry, sweetling, I can’t today. Your mother’s sick and needs me to look after her.’

He frowned. ‘Mama always sick.’

‘She’ll be well again soon,’ Dortchen said. She tried to pass him over to Ida but he clamped his legs harder, clinging to her with both chubby arms and burying his face in her neck. She cuddled him close. ‘How about we go downstairs? You can give your Mama a kiss goodbye.’

He nodded his curly head. Dortchen said teasingly, ‘Why don’t you
walk with me? You’re too big to carry all the way now. And I’d like to have such a handsome gentleman escort me.’

Friedrich consented to be set down on his sturdy legs and walked alongside Dortchen, holding her hand. He was dressed in a frilly white dress and bib. His curls hung down to his shoulders.

Dortchen brought him into the drawing room, where her sister was flicking through a fashion periodical. ‘You’ve been such an age,’ Gretchen began, then she saw her son. ‘Oh, hello, Friedrich. Aren’t you going to the park?’

Friedrich ran towards her and climbed up on the chaise longue. ‘I’m such a handsome gentleman,’ he told her proudly.

‘Is that so? Don’t you know that vanity is a deadly sin? Dortchen, bring me my embroidery scissors.’

Her heart sinking, Dortchen did as she was told. Gretchen took her son’s curls in one hand and chopped them off with the scissors. They fell to the floor in pale gold circles.

Friedrich watched them in interest, then shook his shorn head. ‘Not so hot,’ he said approvingly. He saw the plate of meringues and seized one.

‘Manners,’ Gretchen said, taking it from his hand. ‘What do you say?’

His face had fallen, but he looked at her hopefully and said, ‘Please?’

She gave him the meringue, saying, ‘Go and eat it outside, I don’t want your sticky hands ruining my silk.’ As the little boy ran to join his brothers in the front hall, she said, ‘Would you sweep up the mess, Dortchen?’

Dortchen knelt down to pick up the fallen curls. ‘Do you want to keep one, as a memento?’ she asked, holding them out to her sister.

‘Good heavens, no. If I kept every tooth or lock of my children’s hair, I’d have to move to a larger house. Not that I’d mind, I must admit. Really, with six children and another on the way, you’d think Ferdy would buy us something a little more spacious. We’re all on top of each other here.’

As Dortchen sprinkled some lavender water on a handkerchief for her sister, she wondered how Gretchen could speak so. The Schmerfelds lived in one of the biggest and grandest houses in Cassel. Built on an elegant square in the new French quarter, it had nearly a dozen bedrooms, not
counting the servants’ quarters in the attic. It had a pleasant sunny garden to the rear, in which white roses grew inside neat green hedges, and a long ballroom with gilded chandeliers. Gretchen had her own dressing room, and a bathroom with a huge enamel bath that took the housemaids a dozen buckets of hot water to fill. She even had a separate room for her chamber pot, which was hidden under a cushioned seat in an ornately carved chair. Dortchen could not understand how her sister could live in such a beautiful house and still not be happy.

She’s getting close to term
, Dortchen reminded herself.
She must be so hot and uncomfortable.

Certainly Gretchen was looking hot in the face, and her fingers were so swollen that Dortchen had to ease off her rings with some soapy water. This caused another frisson of memory. Dortchen pushed it away determinedly. She never thought of the past at all now, if she could help it.

The last five years had not been easy for anyone. In early 1815, Napoléon had escaped from Elba, the tiny island on which he had been imprisoned after his abdication. He had marched on Paris, gathering men with every mile. The French king, Louis XVIII, had fled, and Napoléon had been carried into the Tuileries Palace on the shoulders of a cheering crowd. Soon Europe was at war again.

As long lines of soldiers once again marched through the German landscape, the sunset skies were as red as fire from horizon to horizon, as if the very gates of hell had been flung open. The newspapers said the vivid sunsets were the result of an erupting volcano in Java, which had killed thousands of people. Dortchen could only think the fiery evening skies a portent of evil.

In mid-June, the French army had been defeated by the British and the Prussians at the small village of Waterloo, in Belgium, at the cost of many thousands of men. Napoléon surrendered and was sent to the most isolated island in the world, the tiny rock of St Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Dortchen had been most relieved but was also filled with compassion.
How must Napoléon feel?
she wondered.
To have ruled the world, and
now be alone, exiled, living in a hut on a rock. What anguish he must feel.

The following year of 1816 was called the Year Without a Summer. The eruption of the volcano in Java the previous year had filled the world’s atmosphere with ash. The sky was leaden and grey every day, and streaked with blood red every evening. Dortchen would hang out the clean white sheets in the morning and bring them in that afternoon grey and speckled with black.

The harvest had failed and food prices had soared. Famine soon followed. Starving families came to Cassel from the country, begging on street corners. Soon there were riots in front of bakeries and angry rampages through the markets. Granaries were looted and set on fire, and shops were robbed. Rudolf slept in the apothecary’s shop, his battered old musket beside him.

The next winter was the hardest Dortchen had ever known. They lived on thin soup and bread made from acorns, and saved every thaler they could to prevent their shop from falling into bankruptcy.

Life was even harder for the Grimm family. Jakob had returned from the Vienna Congress jobless once more, and so had applied for the position of second librarian at the royal palace – the job Wilhelm had been hoping to receive. Lotte said Wilhelm did not mind; he was just so glad to have his brother home.

The two elder brothers were once again supporting the whole family. Ludwig and Karl had returned to Cassel after the war, and Ferdinand constantly wrote begging letters from Berlin, where he was employed by Jakob and Wilhelm’s publisher for a pittance.

Lotte, standing with Dortchen in the long queue for meat, said that she dreamt every night of food, and woke in the morning to find nothing to eat but a stale heel of bread that had to be divided between them all.

‘And it’s so cold. Last night, Ludwig chopped up the chairs and threw them on the fire just so we wouldn’t freeze. But now we have nothing to sit on.’

‘We have some old stools in the attic. Come and borrow them,’ Dortchen said, huddling her icy hands into her sleeves.

‘Ludwig will probably burn them too. He hates the cold. It means his fingers are so stiff that he cannot draw.’

And Wilhelm will not be able to write,
Dortchen thought, her heart pierced with pity. She did not say the words out loud, though, and Lotte was always careful not to mention his name.

The passing of time had not made Dortchen’s heartache any easier to bear. She and Wilhelm took care never to be alone, though they were polite enough to each other when they met. They never spoke of the past, or their promises to each other. It was hard enough to keep body and soul together through these cold, lean years without weakening themselves with impossible dreams.

Rudolf suspected how Dortchen felt about Wilhelm; he had even once offered to scrape together a dowry for her. Dortchen knew that he needed a horse and buggy, however, so that he could make house visits. Horses were very expensive in the aftermath of the war. She had shaken her head and told him to keep his thalers for more important things.

‘I’m sure the girls would help,’ he had told her. ‘I know times are hard, but Gretchen’s husband seems to have come out of the war richer than ever, and you know Lisette wants to see you happy.’

‘Too much has happened between me and Wilhelm,’ she said. ‘It’s all dead between us.’

Rudolf had looked troubled but did not press her. Afterwards, Dortchen wept by herself in the scullery, afraid that she had spoken the truth.

In 1817 Mia had married a stout Englishman who cared nothing for her lack of dowry. She moved with him to Ziegenhain, leaving Dortchen to keep house for her brother. Dortchen was kept busy in the garden and stillroom, and Rudolf was quietly grateful for her help. It was not just Rudolf who needed her. Dortchen’s sisters were always having babies, so Aunty Dortchen was in great demand, to support the new mother and look after the older children. Sometimes she joked that she had no sooner unpacked her bag from one trip away when a letter would arrive from another sister, begging her to come at once.

In 1818 the von Haxthausens had visited Cassel, returning a few months later with their nieces, Jenny and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Everyone thought this meant that the family approved of a match between Wilhelm
and Jenny. Although she was rich and he was poor, the family were generally good-hearted, and by all accounts Jenny pined with love for him.

Dortchen went to the Grimms’ apartment with her sister Gretchen to meet the family one hot summer’s afternoon. She could think of no excuse to stay away but sat at the back of the room, her head bent over Friedrich’s curly mop. Jenny was a sweet-faced young woman, and clearly in love with Wilhelm.

It was like a stab in the heart, seeing how her face lit up at the sight of him, and Dortchen had to turn away, her vision obscured by a mist of tears. She went blindly out to the garden and pinched off dead flower heads with her fingers, Friedrich hanging on to her hand. Lotte came out to join her, looking anxious, but Dortchen had recovered her composure and teased her about how she would soon have a sister-in-law, and a pretty, fashionable one too.

Lotte caught her hand. ‘He does not love her, Dortchen.’

‘Well, if he doesn’t, he’s a fool,’ she returned. ‘Anyone can see she is smitten with him, and you must admit it’d be an excellent match.’

‘Do you really not care?’ Lotte asked, searching her face with troubled eyes.

Dortchen turned away, saying lightly over her shoulder, ‘Oh, you’re thinking of that silly crush I had on Wilhelm all those years ago? I grew out of that long ago, my dear.’