a few vigorous strokes to a particularly stubborn tangle. “Perhaps you won’t need to join the outside world. Perhaps you’ll stay here . . .”
“What, with you?” Famke turned and gave her a big hug, slightly frightening to Birgit in its intensity. “I would love to stay with you. But I’ll never be a sister. Instead, maybe I’ll take you with me when I go into service.”
Birgit picked up the brush again, disciplining herself to make firm, even strokes, and then to braid the girl’s hair tight. “What would I do in the outside?” she asked.
Since it was impossible to reach the boys’ side of the building, Famke turned her attention to the part she herself occupied. At night in the dormitory, she lay awake listening to the other girls breathe, feeling the heat radiate from their bodies. She wondered why she had never noticed that Anna had a loud, tickling laugh or that Mathilde’s hair was long and bright. Mathilde also had large and capable hands that nonetheless managed to look graceful as they scrubbed out a pot or picked up a stitch dropped in Famke’s knitting. Mathilde smelled good, like bread and soap. She began to interest Famke very much.
She was thirteen, a year older than Famke and a suitable model for the younger girl’s reformation. The nuns looked on their friendship with relief and, as Famke took on some of Mathilde’s habits, with complacency. They saw that she washed herself frequently, volunteered to help deworm the littlest orphans, and even rose early, with Mathilde, to make breakfast.
Famke’s hair curled in the steam as she stirred the enormous kettle of havremels grød, the oatmeal gruel they ate each morning. Through the dully fragrant cloud of it, her eyes kept seeking Mathilde. She knew no love poetry, except what was found in the Bible, but she thought there must be some nice way to describe the curve of Mathilde’s back as she bent over the bread board, or the graceful undulations of her hands as she kneaded the dough.
“You look like a fish,” Famke blurted out, and Mathilde’s eyes got wide. Then, out of embarrassment, Famke laughed; and Mathilde, with an affronted air, turned wordlessly back to her work.
In the end, won over or perhaps worn down by that persistent blue stare, it was Mathilde who approached Famke over the bubbling pots, who kissed her and set her heart pounding, who held Famke close and hard and gave her a taste of that delicious, elusive shimmering feeling.
“You are my little fish,” Mathilde whispered into the red curls. Famke felt glad all over.
That night she was awakened with a tickle in one tightly curled ear. “Let me in,” Mathilde whispered, tugging at the blankets that the nuns always snugged like winding-sheets around the children’s bodies.
Famke wiggled herself free, emerging from her cocoon warm and white and fragrant. Mathilde slid in beside her and, with little ado, put her supple lips up to Famke’s, her hand on the region Down There.
Famke jumped. “Fanden,” she swore, daring to speak the name of the devil for the first time ever.
“It’s all right,” Mathilde whispered, touching Famke through her nightgown. “You see, there is a little cottage Down There, with a little roof of thatch. A little fire burns on the hearth.”
If there was indeed a fire, it was drawing water to it; but the water did not quench, only made the fire hotter. Famke remembered the day of soap and flames: the smell of ashes and fat, the heat of Viggo’s hand under her lips.
Mathilde’s finger moved. “The cottager comes home to warm himself.” But the cottage door was closed, and Famke yelped in pain.
“I see.” Mathilde propped herself up on an elbow and retreated to the roof of thatch. “The cottage-wife has built herself a wall. Shall I look for a window?”
Mathilde’s hair shone white in the light of her eyes, and all around them the darkness crepitated. Famke realized that cottagers were coming home in the ward’s other beds too. That thought made her bold, and curious; her fingertips itched.
With the swift motion of sudden decision, Famke pushed aside the other girl’s nightgown. “There is a net. There is a fish and—a pond? Yes, a deep, deep pond . . .”
“Be careful,” Mathilde whispered breathlessly; “there must be nothing larger than a fish. Someday I shall be married.”
It was the first and for a long time the only secret Famke had from Birgit.
“A schoolful of Sapphos,” Albert said when she told him, laughing out a puff of smoke. “What a picture that would make. A cottage . . . a pond . . .” He hugged her close to his chest and deposited a kiss of his own on the crown of her head. She felt him stirring against her hip, and that was all she needed to know about anyone called Sappho.
Famke told him, with an air of great revelation, that romantic attachments were not uncommon among the older girls, or even among the novices who were expected to take holy orders. Some of the girls swore these orphan embraces would prove the best of love, for they came without responsibility, without danger, without babies. But somehow they weren’t enough for Famke. She longed for the open space beyond the orphanage wall, for the freedom she associated with the wind that occasionally rattled the leaves of the elder trees; for the forbidden boys.
Famke was sad when Mathilde left, placed out in the village of Humlebæk. But then there was Karin, and then Marie. Famke became a fish herself, swimming through the ranks of girls, toppling them onto their backs with a flip of her tail. But she was careful to stay on the shore of every pond, the doorstep of every cottage; each Immaculate Heart girl who managed to marry bore all the signs of innocence to her husband.
And soon enough it was time for Famke to go. At fourteen, she’d finally been confirmed; she was capable of earning a woman’s wages, and there was no reason to burden the city’s few Catholics any longer. Sister Saint Bernard was in charge of placing the grown orphans, and she found a position for Famke as a goose girl and maid-of-all-work in a village called Dragør. Famke mucked out the goose pen, made cheese, and fended off the attentions of the gristled farmer who’d consented to take her. She talked to the girls on the neighboring farms—none of them smelling of soap or bread or ponds, only sweat and dung—and concluded that it would be no better anywhere else; so she hid her unhappiness even in her monthly letters to Sister Birgit. For her second Christmas, Famke’s employer allowed a traveling neighbor to carry her to the orphanage with a couple of geese he’d had her kill and pluck. She attended Mass, turned the geese on a spit, and hardly had time to exchange two words with Sister Birgit; but she set off for the farm in new Swedish leather shoes.
There was no cart now, and no one on the road. Famke had walked halfway to Dragør when a fit of coughing doubled her over. Her mouth was suddenly full and tasted horrible—so she spat into the snow and saw a drop of blood. It froze quickly, to glow like a ruby in a bed of spun silk. She kicked the snow over it and walked on, refusing to think of what that droplet meant.
Summer came, and Dragør steamed. Famke told herself she was resigned to her lot. She let the farmer kiss her cheek and even, once, put his hand on her bodice. She attended services at the village Lutheran church and talked to the other farm girls. She met young men, too—hired boys in no position to marry; they gazed at her with the same covetous eyes she saw in the farmer. None of them managed to interest her.
But then, wonder of wonders, a foreigner appeared, dressed in blue and driving a carriage. He stood a long while at the fence rail, watching her shovel out the goose pen; he held a leather-bound book before
