After helping to save the duchies, my brother went on to save the mines. He threw open the chambers and stepped into my father’s shadow, pumping lifeblood back into the Vestergaard mines, because the economy was buoyed by the nation’s victory and limestone was needed to rebuild. Instead of debasing myself by begging for factory work, now I walk through a cathedral of mazes, forty kilometers of widening channels in a mine that bears my own name. There are secret caverns I’ve found that open up to entire glowing lakes hidden deep underground.
“Philip is finding new ways to make our tunnels hum like the combs of a beehive,” Aleks says warmly. “He barely has need of me anymore.” Aleks inherited almost all the ownership, but Father left me a small portion too. I am my brother’s right-hand man, overseeing the miners and rising in stature, even while some days I spend more time below ground than above it.
I hold my mother’s hand the whole carriage ride, through glittering Copenhagen, as the lamp man makes his way down the lane, lighting the gas lamps with his long stick. We disembark in front of the looming theater and Aleks seems to know everyone we meet, smiling his easy smile, shaking hands with vigor, and brimming with good cheer. I stay behind him, close enough to fall into his shadow, but also feeling a flush of pride when I see my growing mustache in the mirrored halls.
“Are you comfortable?” Aleks asks our mother, and she sighs happily, looks through the program, and remarks that there is a new ballerina taking Copenhagen by storm. Our seats aren’t in the very best boxes, but they are respectable. My mother had to sell all her jewelry during the war and never replaced it. I want to see her with jewels in her hair again, someday.
When the lights go down and the curtains rise, the rumored ballerina steps onto the stage. She is young, with tanned skin, a long flowing dress, and hair dripping with rosettes. Her eyes are large, dark, and sparkling, but even from this distance there is something akin to a challenge issuing from them. Depth and fight, as if this girl has known sorrow. Her dancing is magnetic. She draws in the room as though she’s pulling us on a string. The audience bursts into applause after her solo the same way a rag soaked in oil bursts into flame.
“How beautiful,” my mother breathes, and Aleks sits at attention. As if he never truly used his eyes before.
“Who is she?” Aleks asks.
He sits forward, his eyes caught. His lips twitch; his fingers knead themselves together.
I saw it for a moment, but then I blink and look at her again. I don’t see what he sees. The spell is broken. A woman up, down, up, down, on her toes.
After the final curtain, Aleks breaks through the flowing crowd, moving against its stream toward the stage. He leaves me alone with our mother. She leans against me slightly on the walk to the carriage.
When he returns, the look on his face is smitten. He keeps staring out the window, trying to mask a smile. He came home from war, victorious, invincible. But tonight is the night that we lost Aleks for good.
Helene Lind, that ballerina. She defeated him, with satin and lace and without a weapon or even a single word.
* * *
When the carriage pulls to a stop that night, someone is waiting for me. There’s a rap on my window and my friend Tønnes appears, breathless and white as a ghoul.
“Can you come?” he says urgently. “There is something I want you to see.”
I bid good night to my mother and brother and follow Tønnes out into the darkness, picking through crunching leaves and flickering shadows to the morgue at the edge of town.
My throat goes dry when we approach the door. I’ve never seen a dead body before. I’m sure Aleks has seen many, from his time in the war. Perhaps that’s part of why Aleks was so smitten with Helene Lind tonight. Because she looked so fiercely alive.
But my father’s coffin was closed and I was too frightened to look inside it, even to tell him goodbye.
I recoil when we step into the room and I am first hit with the stench. I try not to be sick. I don’t know how Tønnes stomachs the smell, working here, but he barely seems to even notice it. Tønnes lights candles and then fishes out a handkerchief. “Hold it in front of your nose,” he instructs. I look at it, crumpled in his hand. I’ve never forgotten, from all those years ago, what it felt like to be a handkerchief.
“Look,” Tønnes breathes. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
I steel myself enough to look at the table. At the mangled body. My stomach turns.
“How did he die?” I ask.
“A tree fell on him. He was cutting it down, and it returned the favor.” Tønnes is so unaffected by death. By the way a person can be breathing one minute, with all his dreams and memories, and then the next minute gone, as quick as a frosted breath dissipating. It’s always struck me as unfair, how long it takes to make a life and how quickly it can end. Perhaps I’m looking green because Tønnes directs my attention toward the clothing he put aside to help a family member identify the body and the eight-pound blocks of ice he uses to help with preservation. “But, Philip—this time, when I performed the autopsy, it didn’t go the way it usually does,” he says, brandishing his knife so that it catches the light. His eyes are shining with excitement, his breath quick and shallow. “Do you see, here? This body doesn’t look like it should.” When I glimpse the neat and careful lines carved into the man on the table, my stomach nearly gives up its contents. Tønnes brings me over to the wood stove, where water is boiling away red blood, and it makes me think about how my eyes have seen things that are so beautiful and so monstrous all in the span of a single evening.
“Tønnes,” I ask through the handkerchief. “Why did you bring me here?”
The color has come back into his face, and now his voice grows with excitement. “If I show this to my superior, he’ll take any credit for himself and leave me with nothing. He’ll have to—I’m not even supposed to be in here. So I thought . . . maybe we could ask Aleks if we could use the mines. Someplace private and hidden. Just until we can think about what to do next.”
It doesn’t escape me that he said we. I hesitate. “Tønnes . . . is it wrong?”
His jaw twitches. “I mean—what’s the harm, really?” he says. “He’s already dead. I think a lot of good could come from it, actually. A lot of good.”
I stare down at that body, but it’s as though instead I’m looking into a very deep crevasse, so deep I can’t even imagine where it ends.
“Right. We’re not really hurting anyone,” I say slowly. I take the handkerchief away from my nose. “Since he’s already dead.”
“His family will never know”—Tønnes gestures toward the body—“and it’s not as though he cares.”
I think of the labyrinth of mines, of how I know the passageways like the back of my hand. Forty kilometers of tunnels, of dark corners and dripping echoes, of places the miners won’t go because the walls themselves move with bats. How the miners have started answering to me, and how Aleks rarely descends beneath the earth anymore. He told me once, shaking, that it feels too much like a coffin, like the trenches of the war.
I think of his face, smitten with Helene, and know that he won’t be venturing down into the darkness anytime soon.
“We don’t have to ask Aleks,” I say, with growing confidence. “We can use the mines.”
I set the handkerchief on the table, because I can no longer smell the rot, and I don’t need it anymore.
Chapter Eleven
Marit
Mortensaften: November 10, 1866
Vestergaard Manor
In the morning, when the lawyer arrives to update Helene’s will and accounts, a carriage waits outside to take Ivy to her new employment at a glass shop in Copenhagen. I steal a glimpse out the window as I’m tying a crisp, starched apron around my waist. A red-faced Dorit pushes a braided wicker basket overflowing with food into Ivy’s arms; Brock is pulling her close to him and saying something into her hair. He looks anguished, and for a moment, I feel a twinge of gui
lt.
Then Ivy’s carriage pulls away, a mixture of dust and snow pluming behind it, and I think: But I’m not staying to hurt Brock, or any of the rest of them. I run my fingers over the knots in my hem. I’m here to figure out what really happened to my father—and to make sure that Eve isn’t one more name I have to add to my petticoats.
Nina puts me to work as soon as my foot touches the first floor. “Extra tasks today,” she says, looking through her chatelaine of keys, “to prepare for Mortensaften.” But I know that really I’m paying for Ivy’s empty chair at the breakfast table. Nina sets me to finishing up Helene’s dress for dinner, then darning holes in stockings and embroidering napkins and tea towels.
“Life isn’t fair, all the way round, is it?” Dorit says, stooping down to the goose meant for our dinner. She picks it up. “So sorry that St. Martin tried to hide in a flock of your kinsmen. And now, you’ll be served at dinner for their penance.”
“Better than any other birds,” Liljan says, grinning, “or perhaps we’d be eating crow.”
“Or pigeon,” Jakob adds.
“Owl?” Liljan counters.
“Swan.”
“Dodo.”
“Blue-footed booby.”
Dorit rolls her eyes and cleans her knife. “Idiots.”
I wind through the main house, the satin dress heavy as lead in my arms, the thread that holds it together somehow light as gossamer. The wind outside whistles with cold, but inside a servant named Oliver lights blazing fires in all the grates and Signe sets candles with flickering tongues of flame on the windowsills and tabletops.
Dorit is standing over the fire stove, brewing gløgg, when I return. “Marit, make yourself useful and go find Brock in the greenhouse.” She begins to stuff a cheesecloth with cinnamon and cardamom and I pull a face at Liljan. “I need three lemons and an armful of elderflower blossoms.”
“Back door,” Liljan instructs me. She’s bleaching tablecloths snow white. “Follow the pergola and you’ll see the greenhouse at the end of the corridor.”
I pull my coat on and make my way through the back gardens. The air is frigid and the sky is already darkening with night, but I stop short. Small flakes of snow are falling, yet a long arched walkway stretches out in front of me, where white, frothy wisteria hangs like lanterns sewn from lace. It curls up evergreen columns and stretches across the top of the pergola, a faint scent of jasmine mingling with fir, the best parts of spring and winter somehow intertwining. I part a curtain of strands and step into the veiled corridor, where the wind doesn’t reach, and everything immediately becomes cool and still. There’s a crunch of gravel beneath my feet as I take another step forward and gingerly reach out to graze one of the blossoms with my fingers. The very edges of the flowers are tinged the lightest lavender, and some are starting to etch with frost.
Someone here is keeping them alive with magic.
I shiver with pleasure that this exists in the world, and for this one moment, it’s mine. I want to stay in this quiet passage for as long as I can, where the Firn and my fear suddenly feel very far away—where life can bloom even though ice encroaches all around it.
At the end of the corridor, the wisteria turns to darker shades of purple and then gives way to a door into a greenhouse. It is lit from within and its windows are tinted the color of green bottles.
“Hello?” I call, opening the door. I have to step down into the greenhouse like a cellar, and the first thing that hits me is a wave of warmth and the smell of something green and earthy. Glass orbs of varying sizes hang from the ceiling, some holding candles, the others herbs. I walk through the little pockets of scents, one step mint and the next thyme and lavender and basil, all wildness caught within glass. Narrow silver trays with leafy plants hang suspended from the roof like wind chimes and create the slightest semblance of aisles. I follow one to the back wall, which is alive and spilling over with pink and white flowers.
I’m so transfixed by them that I don’t notice Brock crouched in the corner until I almost fall on him. Bunches of brightly colored flowers lie gathered in bundles at his feet, and he’s arranging them in massive crystal vases for the dinner. I wasn’t trying to sneak up on him, but still I notice him a half second before he notices me—and his eyes are wet and rimmed with red. Two things dawn on me simultaneously. He’s sitting here crying alone.
And he’s the one making all of this grow.
I clear my throat and he jumps to his feet.
“Ivy made all the glass bulbs,” he says, hurriedly wiping his eyes. He adds curtly, “Did you come to take those, too?”
“Dorit wants lemons and elderflowers. Though I think I just found the lemon,” I say, ribbing just enough so that he won’t suspect I saw him crying. I wonder if he and Ivy played chase in the halls while growing up, if she ever popped into the greenhouse to sneak him a treat. I wonder if everywhere he turns, he sees memories of her. I pluck three bright lemons from a nearby tree and tuck them into my apron pocket.
“Elderflowers are here,” Brock says gruffly. He shoves an armful of their stems toward me.
“Thanks,” I say.
In response, he takes a long look at his muddy hands and then wipes them across my apron.
I glare at him, my sympathy dissipating, and stalk back through the wisteria pergola, which loses a bit of its spell now that I know the magic is Brock’s. I hand Dorit the lemons and armful of elderflowers, and she promptly arranges the sprigs like a delicate crown around an almond bundt cake drizzled with elderflower glaze. The goose is in the wood-fired oven, browning.
Nina eyes my apron. “Marit, have you been playing patty-cake in the mud?”
“Come along,” Liljan says, taking my arm. She grabs a cardamom doughnut dripping with orange blossom icing and pops it into her mouth, narrowly missing a slap on the wrist from Dorit. Signe is polishing the tiniest spoons I’ve ever seen, with Nina overseeing everything and making clucking noises. “She sounds like a hen,” Liljan says under her breath as we head to the hallway.
“Turtledove? Mallard.”
“Pelican, penguin, flamingo.” She hands me a fresh apron from the cupboard. “Stand on the lookout for me. Oh!” A look of delight crosses Liljan’s face. “And if there’s trouble,” she says, starting to giggle, “cry fowl.”
She’s still laughing at her own joke when she ducks into Nina’s office and snags the chatelaine with its keys for the main house. She locates a key with a set of numbers on it and whispers, “With Philip here tonight, Nina will be distracted. But we’ll have to find a way to get it back before she notices it’s gone.”
She doesn’t have to say the rest: that if either of us gets caught, there will be a new spot opening for Ivy tomorrow.
“Marit!” Nina thunders from the kitchen.
“Quack, quack,” I say to Liljan, and we part.
* * *
Two hours later, Philip Vestergaard steps through the front door.
I’ve timed it exactly, slipping into the main house and out of sight when Nina goes to answer the doorbell. I don’t know quite what I’m expecting to see, but I do know I want to be there when he meets Eve for the first time. A dark curiosity is swirling within me, and I clench and unclench my sewing fingers at my sides. It was all so much easier when these people were mere wisps in my imagination, simply destroying the people I loved most in the world rather than showering them with generosity and attention.
Even so, I steel myself anew. I’m not quite ready to let any of the Vestergaards off the hook yet. And a hard heart has always felt easier to bear than a broken one.
Philip stands in the foyer like a lord amid the cold white marble. His back is turned to me when he sheds his wool overcoat and hands it to Jakob, revealing a black dinner jacket so tailored it could slice someone with its edges.
I drop back and melt into the shadows, crawling beneath an alcove table in the hall where I can’t easily be seen. My heart begins pounding loud and hard.
And then Philip tu
rns, and I see his face for the first time.
He doesn’t look frightening—not like the amorphous villain from my nightmares and daydreams about the Vestergaard family. He’s dashing, with his structured jaw and his eyes the color of sea glass. He glances up the staircase, and all I can see of Eve from here are her fingers on the banister. They tremble as faintly as moth wings as she descends, and I want to whisper into her ear, You don’t have to win him, Eve—not anyone, not ever again.
A twitch of Philip’s eye, the straightening of his mouth, betray the faintest surprise at his first sight of Eve. But then, quicker than a blink, he dips into a silent bow, and by the time Eve reaches the bottom stair with Helene at her side, he’s smiling again.
“Hello,” Philip says to Eve in a voice that is surprisingly rich and low-timbered. “I’m Philip, your uncle. I must confess that I’ve never had a niece before.” His face breaks into an easy grin. “I hope I’m up to the job.”
“I’m Eve,” Eve says, and the gown shimmers in folds of satin and beads that move like liquid around her legs. She curtsies, smiling uncertainly, her posture stiff and regal.
“Helene,” Philip says, turning toward Mrs. Vestergaard in a simple greeting, and she allows him a chilly kiss on the cheek. Liljan says there has always been a current of tension between them; first a rivalry over Aleks’s affections, and now an uneasy truce over managing the mines. Perhaps no one was more surprised than Philip to learn, when Aleks’s will and testament were read here at the house, that the majority owner of the mines was now Helene.
“Shall we?” Helene says, gesturing them toward the dining room. Once they depart the foyer, Jakob enters the hallway with Philip’s overcoat tucked across his arm. I dart from beneath the table to stand beside him at the wardrobe. Our eyes meet briefly as we wait there for Liljan’s signal.
It doesn’t come.
And then we both hear the servant door open at the same time. Rae is approaching with a silver carafe.
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