a glance from the corner of her eye. When at last he approached, she saw his book contained a collection of drawings. He turned the pages back to reveal a moth, a chicken, and one of her.
There she was—she who had rarely seen her own face in a mirror—with all her busy motion stilled, looking slyly up from a white page. The real Famke, living and flushed, straightened her apron and pushed her hair under her cap, trying to look like the good Christian maiden she’d been raised to be. She knew she reeked of goose.
“Beautiful,” the stranger said in his own tongue, perhaps guessing this word was universal; but she looked at him with the round eyes of confusion. Then a slow smile crept across Famke’s face, to be mirrored in his. She put one damp finger to the page and accidentally smudged the drawing.
In gestures, the stranger asked her to fetch him a glass of water; he pantomimed that his labors had exhausted him. She brought a dipperful from the farmyard well, lukewarm and tasting of the geese and horses and pigs that trotted across the packed earth. As he drank, she took the opportunity to engrave his face and figure onto her mind. He was tall and sticklike, with thin blond hair combed into a semblance of romantic curls; his green eyes immediately reminded her of a frog’s. But he gave her a nice smile with slightly crooked teeth, and he bowed as if to suggest that he considered her every bit as good as he was.
He returned the next day in a carriage decked with flowers, and again she served him a dipperful of water. The flowers drew butterflies; in a cloud of pale yellow and white, their wings dipped from eglantine to glem-mig-ikk’, and she thought she’d never seen anything so pretty. She would find out later that the carriage had been decorated for a wedding; when the young man hired it he had asked to keep the flowers, and the proprietor even threw in a bouquet of lilies left from a more somber occasion. Famke’s suitor handed them over with a flourish, and she blushed. She looked from the carriage to him—“Albert,” he said, with a thump on his chest—and felt her eyes shining.
Albert drank. As he swallowed, his throat made a little croaking noise, and he and Famke laughed together, like old friends. Before she knew it, his hands were making signs to offer her a ride into the city and an engagement as his model and muse. That she would be mistress as well, Famke had no doubt; her fellow-servants in Dragør had told her what young men who fancied themselves artists were like. She watched this one thoughtfully as he argued his case. From time to time clasping her hand, he repeated two words so often they seemed like a name, Lizzie Siddal, though it had no meaning for her. Finally he kissed her grubby sixteen-year-old palm. When she pulled it away and put it to her face, she smelled his soap. Genteel, perfumed, but made of the same basic ingredients as orphanage soap. Ashes and fat. Prayers and hope.
So Albert and Famke rode away in a cloud of heavy dust, with the geese honking and the pigs squealing a charivari of farewell. The butterflies accompanied them, draining a few last drops from the wildflower garlands.
Famke had no notion where he’d take her and was delighted to find herself returning to Copenhagen, to the harbor district of Nyhavn. This time her experience of the town was different, lighter and lovelier, though almost as sequestered as in the orphanage. She stopped wearing the servant-girl caps and utterly abandoned the crossing of her ankles while seated. She found the life of a model so restful that she put on weight, and for the first time her breasts fit the cups of her hands rather than the flats of her palms. From Albert she learned English; she learned to call the shape of her mouth a Cupid’s bow—perfectly formed even after the mishap with her infant bottle—and to appreciate the line where the red of her lips met the white of her flesh. He taught her to read English as well, in the guidebooks he had brought. From them she learned that Denmark was flat and that the Danes were thrifty people who enjoyed flowers, sunshine, and making butter and beer. She much preferred Albert’s version of her country’s history, with the thrilling princesses and long-ago warriors.
Inevitably, she compared being with Albert to being with the orphan girls, and she quickly decided she liked him better. He pleased her in different ways, without hands or mouth, and he took pleasure from the way she sucked on his flat nipples: “No woman has ever done that before,” he gasped. And when they were working, he looked at her the way no girl had ever done—no man, either, for no one before Albert had thought to preserve her and her beauty for the generations.
Albert once explained to Famke that he’d come to Denmark in hopes that, in a land without a significant artistic or cultural tradition, he might find some last remnant of the medieval life depicted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to which he aspired. At home in his father’s overstuffed, overheated rooms, he had thought of Famke’s land as historically backward—or primal, he amended when she’d learned enough to protest the first term—populated by simple peasants in wooden clogs, flower crowns, and brightly colored folk costumes, still living out the stark paradigms of Nordic mythology. He’d found more of the curlicued Renaissance and overstuffed nineteenth century than he’d anticipated, but nonetheless he’d fallen in love.
When Albert said that, Famke felt a thrill in her stomach, as if she were going to be sick, but in a good way. It left her belly tingling. But even though Albert repeated the word “love” quite slowly, she wasn’t sure exactly what it was he’d fallen in love with. Before she could muster the courage to ask, he had moved on to another subject.
“If I hadn’t come here, I would have gone to America. To the west.”
Famke stared up at the ceiling, which was water stained but marvelous, Albert said, for reflecting light onto color. “America . . . But that is so far away, so . . .” At Immaculate Heart, there had been a jigsaw puzzle from America, a picture of a vast snowy mountain ringed with purple wildflowers. The children had called it Mæka.
“That American west is a new land, and it holds a host of wonders for the artist—and yet it has seen no truly great painter. Yes, had I had the funds, that is where I would have gone . . . to the forests primeval, the mountains and plains, the mines, the canyons . . .”
Albert had reason to respect Mæka’s ancient woods, for it was from good American cedar that his family’s fortune had been made. His father would buy nothing else to make the innovative graphite pencils he manufactured, from a money-saving design that allowed six, rather than five, hexagonal cylinders to be cut from one block of wood. And just after Castle, Senior, decided to affirm his new social status by purchasing work from the era’s fashionable artists, Albert’s determination to become one of them had been born. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti came to the house to hang the Castles’ first acquisition, a portrait that reminded Albert’s father of the dear wife who had died shortly after presenting him with the boy for whom he had finally found room in his budget. Thin and hollow-eyed, but with a smile and a chin-chuck for little Albert, Rossetti had spent an hour or so in the gloomy cedar-paneled parlor. That brief moment of kindness had been a ray of moonshiney hope for the anxious little boy, who hid behind a tasseled settee and observed the careful measuring of the wall, the straightening of the frame, the earnest discussion between the sober factory man and the painter in prime of life, both widowered. That afternoon, nine-year-old Albert decided to learn this magic trick for pleasing people. He would use every technique in Rossetti’s arsenal: the goddesses, the eye for details, the colors.
To Famke, however, the most beautiful thing he had ever made was that first plain sketch from Dragør. When he wanted to toss it in the fire, claiming it was far from perfect—even far from a likeness—she whisked it out of his hands and wept so stormily that at last he allowed her to tack it to the wall above the washtub. It was the one work that he held inviolate, and as Famke scrubbed at the paint stains on his clothing or soaped her own legs and arms, she liked to look at it.
Her face, looking back at her, forever exactly the same.
Kapitel 3
