The Wild Girl

by Kate Forsyth

‘Thank you so much for having us,’ Jakob said. ‘You’re very kind.’ He looked tired; his dark hair was rumpled and his fingers were stained with ink.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ Karl looked with admiration at the three young women in their best pale muslins.

  ‘We thought, if you liked, we could do it every few weeks,’ Gretchen said. ‘We can invite a few of the other young people we know in town, so you can make some new friends.’

  ‘We’ve brought a book to show you,’ Wilhelm said, holding up a slim leather-bound volume. ‘It’s a collection of folk songs by some friends of ours that has only just this month been published. We even contributed a few poems.’

  ‘Though I wouldn’t have let my name be associated with it if I had known what an unscholarly production it was,’ Jakob said.

  ‘Clemens said that it wasn’t about preserving a historical artefact,’ Wilhelm answered him. ‘What he and Achim wanted to do was renew and revitalise the old songs so that they regained meaning for us all today.’

  ‘Yet didn’t he also say they wanted to prove an enduring sense of folk spirit among the German people?’ Jakob asked. ‘Wouldn’t that aim have been better met by actually collecting the songs and tales in their original form? As far as I can tell, they’ve rewritten many of the songs and even made up some of their own.’

  ‘Well, they are poets in their own right,’ Wilhelm argued.

  ‘Then they should publish a book of their own poems, not one which claims to preserve old folk songs,’ Jakob said.

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ Wilhelm replied, though in a rather uncertain tone.

  Lisette cast Hanne and Gretchen a look. ‘Won’t you come through to the sitting room? It’s cold out here in the hall. Perhaps, Herr Grimm, you could read us one of your poems?’

  ‘They’re not mine,’ Jakob said. ‘I didn’t see fit to write my own composition for a book that was meant to be a collection of folk songs. All I did was send Herr Brentano and Herr von Arnim a few old counting rhymes I remembered from my childhood.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lisette answered. ‘Well, perhaps you could share some other poems with us?’

  ‘Perhaps we could sing some of the songs?’ Hanne suggested, as Lisette led the way into the sitting room. As the Grimm brothers followed the girls in, Dortchen saw Jakob turn to Wilhelm and make a very similar grimace to Lisette’s.

  Karl, who went in last, did not shut the door behind him. A narrow wedge of lamplight was cast out into the hall, falling through the balustrades and onto Dortchen’s face. She pressed her face against the wooden struts, unable to hear what was being said within.

  ‘A book of folk songs,’ Röse said in a voice of deep disgust. ‘I thought you said that the elder Grimm brothers were of a sober cast of mind, Dorothea. Indeed, I am glad now that I am not to be part of this so-called reading circle. No doubt they will soon be reading novels.’ She stood up. ‘I am going to go and study Schwager’s sermons.’

  ‘That sounds like fun,’ Mia said.

  ‘Fun! Indeed, I should hope not,’ Röse replied. ‘I do find the frivolous turn of your mind quite distressing, Maria.’

  ‘I find the way you prose on all the time more than quite distressing,’ her younger sister retorted. ‘In fact, it makes me feel sick to my stomach.’

  ‘That’s from gorging yourself all morning. Gluttony is a cardinal sin, you know.’

  ‘So is vainglory,’ Dortchen answered swiftly.

  Röse sniffed and stomped upstairs.

  ‘I’m going to see if Old Marie has made any more strudel,’ Mia said, running down the steps. Dortchen stayed where she was, looking through the staircase at the half-open door, straining her ears to listen.

  ‘What a shame no music has been provided with the songs,’ Hanne was saying. ‘Though I know some of them. The words do seem a little different. Shall I see if I can remember the tunes?’ She began to play the old piano.

  ‘It’s called “The Boy’s Magic Horn”,’ Wilhelm said. ‘Isn’t that beautiful? I do think they’ve done something rather fine, Jakob.’

  A low rumble from Jakob in response, then Hanne’s clear voice rang out, singing, ‘Up there, in the high house, a lovely girl is peeping …’

  Dortchen tensed, ready to run, wondering if her sister knew she was hiding in the hall. But no footsteps came near, so she crept down the stairs and sat outside the door, her back against the wall, the skirts of her dress folded up beneath her to protect her legs from the cold of the stone floor.

  By the time an hour had passed and the Grimm brothers rose to leave, Dortchen was so stiff and chilled that she could scarcely scramble to her feet. As the sitting-room door was flung open, the warm light flooded over her. ‘I … I’ve just come to get the dirty plates,’ she managed to say.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ Lisette told her.

  Dortchen gathered together the used cups and plates as Gretchen and Lisette brought their neighbours’ hats and scarves and coats and said their polite goodbyes. Outside, an early dusk was already falling. Father would soon be home. Hanne sat at the piano, plonking a key with one emphatic finger.

  ‘Well, I don’t think much of those Grimm boys,’ she burst out, when Lisette and Gretchen came back in, rosy-cheeked and laughing. ‘I swear the eldest one fell asleep while I was singing.’

  ‘Wilhelm says Jakob’s been working very hard,’ Gretchen said. ‘They have virtually no income at all, you know. He and Wilhelm are hoping to get something published, to bring in a little money.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Wilhelm now, is it?’ Lisette teased. ‘You have become friendly.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Gretchen returned. ‘It’s just … well, so many Herr Grimms and Fraülein Wilds, we just thought it was easier.’

  ‘Soon it’ll be Willi.’ Lisette clasped her hands together and fluttered her eyelashes.

  ‘Oh, stop it,’ Gretchen said.

  Hanne sat at the piano again, singing at the top of her voice, ‘My heart is sore! Come, my little darling, make it well again. Your dark-brown eyes have wounded me …’

  Gretchen laughed and ran out of the room.

  A BITTER BLOW

  October 1805

  ‘“English fleet annihilated. Lord Admiral Nelson killed”,’ Herr Wild read aloud from the morning newspaper.

  ‘What? Can it be true?’ the girls all exclaimed.

  ‘It’ll be French propaganda,’ Rudolf said. ‘Old Cyclops can’t really be dead.’

  ‘According to the papers, he is,’ their father replied. ‘Killed in a naval battle off Cape Trafalgar.’

  Dortchen laid down her knife, a lump in her throat.

  Frau Wild groped for her drops. ‘Is the Ogre never to be stopped?’

  Dortchen had heard many people call the French emperor an ogre. She imagined him like a troll out of a story, grinding children’s bones for bread.

  ‘It’s a new world, Mother,’ Hanne said. ‘We have to change with it. It’s no use clinging to old thoughts, old fashions.’ She flicked a glance at her father. ‘The Emperor means to drag us all into the modern world.’

  ‘Do not call that upstart “Emperor”!’

  ‘But he is Emperor now, like it or not,’ Hanne replied, undaunted. ‘Half the world saw him crown himself, and the other half is now being crushed under his boot. It surely can’t be long before our little kingdom is swallowed up too. And then what shall we do?’

  ‘We shall have to fight,’ Rudolf cried.

  Hanne looked at him with scorn. ‘Fight Napoléon? He’d tread on us and not even notice, just like you don’t notice treading on an ant. No, our only choice is to join him.’

  ‘Join him!’ Herr Wild and Rudolf bellowed.

  Frau Wild put both hands over her ears. ‘Little birds in their nest agree?’

  ‘Well, Bavaria signed a treaty with him and look at all the land he gave them,’ Hanne pointed out.

  ‘What do you know of such matters?’ her father asked, but Hanne said impatiently, ‘Oh, Father, I’m not a child,
I read the newspapers. We all do. Everyone knows what France was like before the Emperor came to power. The churches were all closed, the fields were barren, the people were rioting for bread. The government couldn’t even pay its own soldiers. Now look at them.’

  ‘That Corsican upstart stole and plundered his way through Italy and Egypt, and now he turns his greedy gaze to the Holy Roman Empire,’ Herr Wild said.

  ‘Exactly – which is why the Kurfürst should join him just as soon as he can.’

  Dortchen thought of the Holy Roman Empire. So many tiny countries stitched together into a patchwork eiderdown, each with its own archduke or archbishop, prince or landgrave, squabbling over borders and taxes and rights of privilege, each with their own weights and measures, their own laws and curfews. Some of the princedoms were so small that they could fire at each other from their castle walls. Yet for over a millennium they had held together. What would happen now a few of those stitches were torn loose? Would the whole patchwork unravel?

  ‘Do not presume to express opinions on matters which you cannot possibly understand,’ her father said to Hanne. ‘What is the fifth commandment?’

  Hanne only just managed not to roll her eyes. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother.’

  ‘And what meaning do you give to the word “honour”?’ Herr Wild asked.

  ‘That children be, with modesty and humility, respectful and obedient to parents, serving them reverentially, helping them in necessity and exerting their labour for them.’

  ‘Very well, you can exert yourself in labour in the stillroom all afternoon. There are many powders to be ground and essences to be distilled if we are to be ready for whatever the next few weeks bring us.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Hanne said and rose, folding her napkin and dropping it on her plate. At the doorway, she turned and said sweetly, ‘Because I agree we’d best be prepared for the worst.’

  There was silence once she had gone.

  ‘Is the Ogre really going to invade us, Father?’ Mia asked in a trembling voice.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Herr Wild said. ‘It’s England that Napoléon wants to invade.’ He slapped his hand on the paper. ‘It says here that Napoléon never intended to fight against Austria, that he was provoked into battle by the Austrians mobilising against him.’

  ‘What if the Austrians lose another big battle like the one at Ulm?’ Dortchen asked. ‘Could they lose the war?’

  ‘Of course the Austrians won’t lose,’ Herr Wild said. ‘Do you think some upstart from Corsica could possibly bring Emperor Francis to his knees? Enough foolishness. Eat your breakfast, do your chores. Rudolf, get to your books.’

  For once, Rudolf did not argue but rose and went out of the room.

  Dortchen and Lotte walked to school, clutching their bonnets against the cold wind. People stood in knots, reading the newspaper together. The hurdy-gurdy man sat on the kerb, his monkey huddled in his arms, his instrument sitting silently beside him. Across the road, the rag-and-bone man was patting the well-padded shoulder of a housewife, who dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron, her front step still unscrubbed. No one could believe it was true. The famous English admiral dead? The French triumphant on the sea as well as on land? The future seemed as dark and uncertain as the sky.

  ‘Surely it cannot be true,’ Lotte said, dragging her satchel of books behind her.

  ‘The newspapers say so.’

  ‘The local papers are full of lies, my brother Jakob says. It’s the English papers we should be reading.’

  Dortchen shrugged. ‘Well, that’s not something we can do very easily.’

  ‘The palace!’ Lotte cried. ‘They’d have the English papers there. Prince Wilhelm is half English, you know. Let’s go to the palace and see if we can find out what they say.’

  ‘But we can’t read English,’ Dortchen protested. ‘And the palace is so far away – it’ll take us an hour to walk there and an hour to get back.’

  ‘We don’t need to walk all the way out to Wilhelmshöhe – the Kurfürst and his family are at the Palais Bellevue. I know because Aunt Zimmer is here with the Kurfürstin. It’ll only take us fifteen minutes. And one of the count’s secretaries will have translated the papers already.’

  ‘I can’t miss school.’

  ‘What does school matter when we may be invaded any day?’

  Dortchen did not reply. It was different for Lotte. She had no father, and though Jakob did his best to play patriarch, he was only twenty and never made Lotte kneel before him for hours, praying. Nor did he beat her.

  Lotte sighed. ‘After school, then. When you’re meant to be doing your chores.’

  Dortchen nodded.

  That afternoon, after school was let out, the two girls hurried down the street, their cloaks muffled to their chins against the icy air, their satchels banging on their backs. Autumn leaves whirled against them, damp and black. A carriage clopped past them, the horse lifting its tail to drop a steaming pile of greenish turds that were then squashed into the cobbles by the wheels.

  At the Königsplatz, the girls cupped their hands and called. One by one, six faint echoes bounced back at them. Dortchen and Lotte smiled at each other and, holding hands, ran across the square, dodging carts and carriages of all sizes and shapes.

  Soon they were outside the Bellevue Palace, which was built in the French style with little dormer windows set into the steep slate roof. The palace had a lovely view across to the gardens and parkland on Aue Island, and to the rolling countryside beyond the river.

  Two guards stood outside the front door. Lotte smiled at them and said she had come to visit her aunt, Henriette Zimmer, and they allowed the two girls in without any further questioning. The great hall within was busy with court officials rushing this way and that, all dressed in old-fashioned frockcoats, the heels of their buckled black shoes clacking on the floor. Two soldiers stood waiting outside a set of carved double doors, each dressed in a forest-green jacket with silver epaulettes over white breeches, and a tall shako hat with a green plume. One carried a packet of letters in his gloved hand.

  Dortchen and Lotte stood to one side, not knowing where to find Aunt Zimmer.

  The double doors swung open, and out came a rotund man dressed in shabby riding clothes and a powdered wig with two fat rolls of hair above his ears. Around him clustered a great many men, some in black frockcoats, some in green military jackets. One man was in Prussian blue, with a red sash and a great many medals.

  ‘It’s the Kurfürst.’ Dortchen darted forward and curtsied to the man in the shabby riding coat.

  ‘Dear me, who’s this?’ the Kurfürst exclaimed. ‘What a pretty child. You’re not one of mine, are you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Dortchen replied in some confusion.

  He frowned. ‘Wanting to borrow money, I suppose.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  His expression cleared. ‘Well, then, what can I do for you?’

  ‘We just want to know, sir … We’re worried about the war … Is the Ogre going to march all over us too?’

  ‘Ah, the question of the day,’ he replied, glancing about at the crowd of men. ‘I wish I knew, Fraülein. I certainly hope we’re too small to interest him. At the rate he and his army move, they could march right through us in only a few days. If so, we’ll lose a great many pigs and cows and have a few fields trampled. I fear, though … I very much fear …’

  He seemed then to recollect that he was talking to a girl. ‘But never you mind your pretty head about that. Plenty of old grey ones to do the worrying for you, eh? Run along home to your mother, and tell her the Kurfürst sends his regards.’

  Dortchen stood back, allowing the party of men to pass by her. She heard the man in Prussian blue say in a deep, stern voice, ‘Your Most Serene Highness, I must have an answer for my emperor. Do you mean to stand with us or against us?’

  In an irritable voice, the Kurfürst answered, ‘Why must I choose? Cannot I stay out of it? You’ll tear Hessen-Cassel apart betw
een you, and then what will happen to little girls like that one with the blue eyes?’ He disappeared through another door, the men trailing behind him.

  Lotte had the presence of mind to ask one where they might find her aunt, and they were directed through many crowded corridors to a cold and elegant room where the cold and elegant Kurfürstin presided. Born Princess Wilhelmine Karoline of Denmark, she was tall, with ash-blonde hair arranged in stiff curls all over her head. Sitting with her was her pale daughter-in-law, Princess Augusta of Prussia, and a great number of ladies working away at their embroidery, among them Aunt Zimmer. She rose at once and requested permission to retire, then took the two girls out into the corridor, scolding them all the way.

  ‘We knew that you’re the one person who would know what’s really happening with the war,’ Lotte said.

  Her aunt smiled and smoothed her hair, then said, ‘Well, yes, I am rather at the centre of things, aren’t I?’

  ‘All the newspapers say the English admiral is dead,’ Dortchen explained. ‘Please, tell us it’s not true.’

  ‘I suppose you are half in love with Nelson, like all the other ladies. Ah, to lose an eye and an arm, and keep on fighting. It is romantic, I know. Alas, my little ones. It is all too true. Nelson is dead.’

  ‘And the battle lost?’ Dortchen gripped her hands together.

  ‘No, no, he won the battle first. He gave orders right up to the last minute, by all accounts. We read about it all in the English newspapers.’ She patted her bosom for her spectacles, which hung on a chain about her neck, then beckoned a nearby lackey to bring her the papers, strewn all over a table in the hall. ‘Here we are. The Times says, “We do not know whether we should mourn … or rejoice. The country has gained … the most splendid and … decisive victory that has ever … graced the … naval annals of England; but it has been dearly purchased.”’ Aunt Zimmer translated slowly from the English, stopping often to think of the right words.

  Dortchen’s eyes felt hot. She could not rejoice that the Ogre had at last been defeated at sea, when Admiral Nelson – one of the only men who had seemed able to stop Napoléon in his tracks – was dead.