I fight a sob. I don’t care anymore about the duchies, or being noble. All I want is my far back, for Aleks to come home, to buy food for my mother, to save the mines. Instead I am twelve years old and little more than a handkerchief, soaking up blood and tears.
“ ’Ey. You see that?” Tønnes’s head jerks to the alley across the road. A little boy is crouching there, the shadows falling around him like a veil. He snaps his fingers and a little flick of flame appears between them, then vanishes.
Magic.
“You know that it kills them?” Tønnes asks in wonder, watching the boy flick the flame off and on, off and on, the shadows bouncing around him. Tønnes’s eyes glitter with morbid fascination. I grew up learning to fear the use of magic: that it was the result of something bad, the natural world gone horribly wrong. But I understand why the little boy crouches there and ignites the burn between his fingers. Because magic is power. To have control. To bring something from nothing. I have the sudden unshakable sense that magic could save me, the mines, perhaps even all of Denmark. I watch that little flame with hunger that grows beyond the pangs in my stomach to something much deeper.
I snap my own fingers in the cold air all the way home, wondering if magic can ever be willed into being. Later, after I’ve seen Mother off to bed, I watch for even the slightest spark as my room begins to darken and grow cold with night. I change out of my bloodstained shirt, willing that flame to appear—snapping until my fingers are raw and I hear the quiet sound of my mother crying again—but that little blaze of magic never does.
Chapter Six
Marit
November 8, 1866
Karlslunde, Denmark
I dream that night of being shut in a small wooden box. I smell the fresh pine. Feel the curve of a spoon clutched in my hand.
I hate this dream.
When I hear the dead bolt of a lock, I climb out of the box, just as I always do. My cramped legs burn like fire.
“Marit,” my sister says, her eyes shadowing with fear. “I think . . .” she whispers desperately. Ice-blue Firn knits beneath her wrists, a horrific, mesmerizing beauty. “I think I went too far.”
I wake with a start.
I am curled on the floor, wrapped in a quilt between the fireplace and Eve’s bed. She’s lightly snoring, that patterned breathing of her sleep I know so well. The fire casts flickering light and shadows across her face.
We leave Karlslunde together at dawn.
The Vestergaard carriage is black and sleek, pulled by two enormous Frederiksborg horses with thick, clean fur. We pass Thorsen’s shop and the Mill on the way out of town. The windows glitter and all the candles are extinguished, and I’m secretly glad that our route doesn’t take us past my old little thatched home on the outskirts of town, where Far’s and Mor’s and Ingrid’s lives once filled the house like flames dancing within a lantern.
“I was worried I would wake up and it would all be a dream,” Eve murmurs to me. She discreetly moves her feet so mine can feel some of the heat from the warming box on the floor, then raises her shoulder so I can smell her new coat. “Most people like flowers, you know,” she whispers, elbowing me fondly as I take a deep breath. But to me, a fresh, stiff wool has always smelled even better than roses.
Helene’s hair is pulled back in an elegant knot, and the train of her mended coat pools on the floor at our feet. “I thought we’d use the ride home to get to know each other better,” she says to Eve. “Where shall we begin?” she asks. Her eyes are intense, her attention unyielding. She unscrews a silver canister and unleashes the rich smell of black coffee. The windowpanes fog with steam. “Your favorite food?”
“Plums,” Eve says immediately. It’s probably a tie between that and kransekage, the towering wreathed rings of marzipan cake and icing, but we ate plums only twice at the Mill. Last time Eve tasted one, she declared that people should give plums to show their love instead of flowers.
Helene looks pleased, rifling through a wicker basket until she somehow finds Eve a ripe purple-black plum. I stare at it with wonder. A ripe plum, in November? Eve takes a bite of it, revealing flesh the color of butterscotch. The juice dribbles down her chin.
I listen as Eve shares the beginning edges of herself: she likes staying up late and eating things that are tart; she has a scar on her knee from the day she tried to chase a butterfly and ended up falling onto a grate. She’s impatient, she used to have a lisp, she can’t spell to save her life, I want to add. But these things are really just the faintest shadow of Eve, how loyal and fierce and funny she is. She once pushed a girl who was twice her size bottoms-up over a log for saying that my hair was the color of dung hay.
“Did you have a favorite story growing up?” Helene asks.
Eve wipes the juice from her mouth and tries very hard to avoid my eyes while I bury my laugh in a cough. Mythical tales about you, I think. Helene Vestergaard.
Eve spies the worn bound copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s New Fairy Tales peeking out of my bag. “ ‘The Nightingale’?” Eve squeaks out. It isn’t the same volume my father used to read to Ingrid and me when we were small—that one is long gone, sold along with the house to cover our debts after they both died—but I saved my first paycheck from Thorsen to buy another copy. Because it reminded me of my father. And because of what he wrote in his final letter, now hidden in my pocket.
Almost without thinking, I reach for the lines of practically invisible knots sewn into my petticoat: Claus Olsen, b. 28 July 1825 in Karlslunde. A few years ago I started sewing my family’s names into my hems, where they were born, where they died. It’s a comfort to know that I won’t wake up one day and have forgotten it all—that those parts of them won’t drift away like mist now that I’m the only one left to remember them.
d. 26 May 1856 is how my father’s entry ends. In Kalk Labyrint mines.
Kalk Labyrint.
Vestergaard mines.
How could everything have changed so drastically since the last time I visited Copenhagen? Eleven years ago, I was here with him. I was still someone’s child, someone’s sister. A different king was on the throne. The southern duchies of Schleswig and Holstein were still Denmark’s, before Prussia clawed them away. War and death have split through the years like an ax—wars shrinking Denmark’s territories, and cholera weeding out its population. For a few years, the only things that seemed to be growing in Denmark were our graveyards and orphanages.
But perhaps the tide is finally turning, I think, as Eve uses a Vestergaard handkerchief to wipe her mouth and Helene tells her to keep it. There’s a new royal on the throne now—King Christian IX. And at Thorsen’s, we finally started selling more white lace than black.
Beyond the window glass, the countryside changes to long stripes of gray-blue canals. I first glimpse the spires of Copenhagen’s stock exchange, its four dragon tails twisting upward. Wooden ships and jewel-toned houses reflect in the water; crowds of women and men in long, bustled skirts and black suits stream through the tree-lined walkways. There are so many colors here, each fabric like a different note, playing a sonata of crinoline and lace, of tiered ruffles showing below thick velvet capes. The city all but vibrates with the sound of boots and horse hooves and pealing bells, the air heavy with salt and urine and fresh bread and soot. Copenhagen looks the same but not exactly—sort of in the way I can still see the echoes of Eve as a young child, even though her features change each year. My heart clenches as we pass the corner where Ingrid once threw a coin in the bronze fountain of Charity.
I wonder what she would have looked like now.
“The Round Tower,” Helene explains to Eve, pointing as the carriage rattles past. “Inside that garret is a wide, spiraled ramp instead of a staircase.”
My father once stood right there at its base. “More than a century ago,” he said, pulling at the ends of his mustache, “the Russian tsar Peter the Great rode to the very top of this tower on horseback, and his wife Catherine followed behind in her
carriage.”
“Fib or not fib?” I demanded, turning to Ingrid. She was twelve years old, and I was five.
She clapped her gloved hands with delight. “It’s true!” she said.
Because that was Ingrid’s magic. I may be able to stitch things back together, but she could always sense when people were lying.
“Stop wasting magic like that,” Far said in a low, sharp voice. “Marit, next time, just ask me. Do I lie to you?”
“I didn’t ask her to use magic. I could tell she was already doing it,” I said stubbornly, pouting. Ingrid had this telling motion every time she was using her magic. Her hands closed into tight fists at her side, her fingers wrapping around her thumbs like the spirals of conch shells, as if she was concentrating very hard.
“Why do you do it?” he asked Ingrid that day. “Why do you tempt fate like that?”
“Do you worry every time you get into a carriage or mount your horse?” Ingrid shot back, red gathering at the base of her neck like a storm. “Or when you go to work in the mines? Every time you do, you risk death. But it’s convenient, or it brings you some value, and so it’s a risk you think is worth taking.”
“That’s different,” Far protested, slamming his hand down on the iron railing.
Except, in the end, it wasn’t. For either one of them.
* * *
We came to Copenhagen that day all those years ago to visit the Nationalbanken.
It hurts to see the building now, under a glittering eave of icicles that hang sharp as knives. My father and Ingrid stood right there, arguing about magic, and then we followed him in through the heavy doors of the bank so that he could open savings accounts for our futures. They were meager accounts, meant to help us in case anything ever happened to him in the mines.
I steal a glance at Helene, who is taking brown paper packages out of the basket and arranging them like pieces of art. Because something did happen to Far in the mines. But then we got the letter they recovered on his body. It pokes at me now, through my pocket. The envelope was delivered as part of his personal things, and it didn’t occur to me until years later how strange it was that he should write us a letter if he was ever planning to come home to us again. I was too focused on the fact that it was the last thing he ever wrote—cryptic, spare. And that it was addressed only to my sister.
To Ingrid, he’d written in his scraggly handwriting. I closed the accounts. I needed them. I’m sorry. Be a Gerda.
Gerda, the goodhearted character from the pages of “The Snow Queen,” which my father read to us every night. From then on I was determined to be a Gerda too—even if he had written the letter only to Ingrid. So I studied the book of fairy tales until I all but had it memorized. Gerda, who followed her dearest friend north to the snow queen’s palace, to rescue him and make sure he was safe.
My eyes flick to Eve as she strains for a glimpse of Amalienborg, its four identical royal palaces set like heavy game pieces around a courtyard shaped like an octagon. What if my father’s two instructions—don’t use magic; be a Gerda—are directly opposed to each other? Which one am I supposed to follow more?
“I remember Ness being quite reserved with the butter,” Helene says, unwrapping the brown paper packages to reveal open-faced pickled herring sandwiches. They are layered with shallots and bright purple beets and dotted with capers, crisp slices of cucumbers, and sprigs of dill. “Has that changed since my days at the Mill?”
“No,” Eve says emphatically.
“Then we shall have it thick as a tooth,” Helene says, slathering creamy butter on a slab of rye bread. My stomach rumbles—I haven’t eaten since yesterday—and I feel a rush of surprise when Helene butters the final sandwich just as generously as the ones for her and Eve and promptly hands it to me.
“You’ve heard that our Princess Dagmar is marrying a tsar this week in St. Petersburg,” Helene says, nodding toward the streets lined with rivers of deep red Danish flags. For the first time, I notice occasional glimpses of the Russian tricolor unfurling between them. “Half of Copenhagen came to see her ship off—including your Hans Christian Andersen,” she says to Eve. She takes a dainty bite of her sandwich. “Perhaps you will meet him, someday.”
Eve looks at me with dazed bewilderment, as if she’s still worried she is caught somewhere in a dream. She savors her sandwich, taking nibbles that last almost the entire forty-five-minute ride from Copenhagen to Hørsholm, and falls asleep with the last of it still in her hand. I eat mine in five ravenous bites and then sit in uneasy silence with Helene as the carriage enters a dense, green-black forest and fills the space between us with shadows.
I’m starting to wonder if we will ever arrive when we suddenly burst out into the sunshine on the other side, turning down a long drive.
A blinding white manor house rises up in front of us, enormous and stately, with creamy gables that curve and build in delicate layers like a cake. I elbow Eve to wake her. Animal tracks deboss the snow around the house. Scarlet berries, cased in ice, melt and drip in the sun.
Eve straightens in her seat and gapes out the window. The house is sided with two expansive wings, each with slate roofs and spires that sharpen to a needle’s point to prick the pearl-gray sky. The walls are covered with sets of glittering windows and an enormous second-floor balcony that overlooks a frozen pond.
“It feels like a fairy tale castle,” Eve whispers. “Hidden in its own forest.”
Someone in a vibrant red cloak is skating on the pond, lazily, as if she is floating above the ice. But by the time the carriage pulls to a stop and we climb out, she is gone.
The wind is harsh through my thin brown dress and coat, both made from the scratchy fabric Thorsen didn’t think he could sell at full price. I tried to improve the garments with immaculate tailoring and embroidery around the hem and collar, but the cold still finds its way in with hardly any effort at all.
“Welcome home, Mrs. Vestergaard.” A housemaid steps forward as soon as we enter the foyer. She appears old enough to be my mother, with round curves and cheeks that look like apples. “How was your journey?”
“It was fine, thank you, Nina.”
Servants materialize in two mirrored lines, white aprons and smart black uniforms, neat and without a hair out of place. They bow symmetrically when we walk in. The foyer ceiling is vaulted, stretching for a mile overhead, culminating in a glittering pattern of stained glass and chandeliers. The floors and walls are covered in white marble tiles and layered with rugs and draperies, each the width of a palm, to absorb cold and echoes. A scent of lavender foxgloves overflows from a porcelain vase on the foyer table. I wonder, again, how something so out of season could possibly grow here.
Eve gasps at the staircase that spills into the foyer like a trumpet skirt made of marble, and the opulence sends an unexpected wave of anger over me. I brace myself against it. All I can see is Ingrid crying over the sink, wondering how to stretch the money after Far died, worrying that the collectors would come and separate us forever. Something within me stiffens further at the magnificent golden portrait of Aleks Vestergaard, Helene’s late husband. Ingrid and I could barely afford to bury my father in a plain pine box, in a plot far from the prestigious places near the church door, marked with little more than a small, spindly cross.
“Nina,” Mrs. Vestergaard says to the housemaid, “I’d like to introduce you to my daughter, Eve.” An unmistakable ripple of surprise makes its way through the staff before they bow and curtsy again in their unified lines. “Eve, this is our household staff. You’ll come to know their names and they will take excellent care of your every need.”
“Welcome, Miss Vestergaard,” Nina says, reaching out a hand to Eve. “May I take your coat?”
Eve flushes at the sound of her new name, and Helene turns to me. “Nina, this is Marit Olsen, who will join our staff as my personal seamstress. Please find her appropriate quarters.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Nina nods to me. “Come along, Miss Olsen.” Sh
e gestures to a staircase that leads down to a dark corridor.
I want to grab Eve in a hug or take her hand, but I cannot in the presence of these people. Cannot because I should not. So I avoid her eyes entirely to discourage her from doing something inappropriate in front of her new servants.
One of which, it suddenly occurs to me, I am now.
I nod at Nina and follow her as Eve mounts the steps behind Helene to the upper floors.
We part without speaking and I feel something shift between us the moment we take the stairs in two different directions.
Chapter Seven
I follow Nina through an underground corridor that veers right, to the servants’ wing. She’s cutting a pace, her low heels rapping against the floor and echoing.
“Seamstress, eh?” she grunts at me.
To my surprise, when I nod, she rolls her eyes.
The corridor is twenty paces long, lit with sconces that give off a dim light, and it’s cold enough that for a moment, I can see my breath. Nina opens a heavy door at the end and we are hit with a wall of warm air and raucous laughter. The corridor is like a portal to a different world from the cold, white upstairs.
“Not that one!” someone fusses, and someone else adds, “Clod.”
We enter a large kitchen and I hurry to keep step with Nina around a huge bronze wood-burning stove that hisses with pots and pans. Three servants crowd around a hulking slab of wood that serves as a table. A woman with frizzy hair is thrusting a husk of dried barley into a boy’s face as he examines a cookbook. A fourth person—a young man—is barely visible just beyond the corner, shining shoes made of leather black as pitch. He’s dressed in a sharp black uniform like a butler, but his hair hangs long and greasy-looking.
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