The Wild Girl

by Kate Forsyth

  The keys jangled. Her father snorted, muttered and rolled over. Dortchen stood motionless. His breathing seemed to steady. Dortchen waited another excruciating few minutes, then tiptoed out into the hall. As quietly as she could, she flew down the corridor to Hanne’s room. In the dark, with her hands shaking, it was very difficult to find the right key. At last Dortchen found it and unlocked her sister’s door.

  Hanne sat up in her bed. ‘Who is it?’ she cried in alarm.

  ‘Shh, it’s me. I’ve got the keys. Hurry, it’s almost dawn. Get up, get dressed – we need to get you out before Father wakes.’ As she spoke, Dortchen was gathering together Hanne’s dress and stockings and shawl. It was growing lighter by the second. She helped Hanne dress and swiftly pinned up her hair, then Hanne caught up a few treasures and pushed them into her reticule. The two sisters hurried down the back stairs to the kitchen.

  As Dortchen struggled with the stiff lock of the back door, the quail called its loud, distinctive cry.

  ‘Father will wake now,’ Hanne said. ‘Quick, Dortchen.’

  At last they managed to get the back door open, and Hanne and Dortchen hurried through the dew-silver garden. The sky was clear overhead. It was going to be a beautiful day.

  At the gate, the sisters embraced. ‘Thank you,’ Hanne whispered. ‘Don’t get caught putting the keys back.’

  ‘I won’t,’ Dortchen said. ‘Go, and God bless you.’

  She went back into the kitchen and locked the door behind her. She stood with her back to it, listening. She heard a few faint noises. Her father would be getting up, and Old Marie too. The keys felt very heavy and dangerous. Dortchen must not be caught in the corridor in her nightgown, the keys in her hands.

  She thought for a moment, her heart slamming in slow, heavy strokes against her ribs. Then she put the kettle on to boil. Very carefully, she crept up to her room, dressed rapidly and did her hair, and put the keys in the pocket of her gown. By the time she reached the kitchen again, the kettle was hissing and Old Marie was there, staring at it with worried eyes.

  ‘I’ll take Father up his shaving water,’ Dortchen said. ‘Since Hanne can’t.’

  She filled his porcelain jug with warm water and carried it up the stairs. It was hard to balance the jug and open the door, but she managed it. Her father was in his dressing room, in his socks and trousers and shirtsleeves. ‘I have your water, Father,’ she said, carrying it to him. He poured some into his bowl and lathered up the soap, his straight-edged razor lying on the cloth before him.

  Dortchen went back into the dim bedroom. Her mother was a silent mound under the eiderdown. Dortchen went across the room and slipped the keys back into her father’s coat pocket. The keys gave a betraying jangle and Dortchen looked around. Her father did not call out, though, so she turned to go with a quick rush of relief.

  Her mother was watching her from the bed.

  THE STORY WIFE

  October 1810

  Dortchen looked out the stagecoach window, hardly able to believe she was leaving Cassel.

  They rattled over the bridge, the water of the river gleaming pewter grey in the early-morning light. The jumbled roofs of the Old Town were veiled with mist, and the whole valley before her was hidden. As the stagecoach began the descent, the mist swallowed up the view so that it was as if Dortchen were passing into another world.

  She was going to Marburg, to assist at Hanne’s wedding. The thought made her insides clench with excitement.

  Hanne’s disappearance had not been discovered till late in the evening of the day that Dortchen had released her. Dortchen had gone about her business all day with a twist in the pit of her stomach, dreading the moment when her father discovered Hanne was gone. He went up several times to speak to his daughter through her door, but had taken her silence as stubbornness. Just before supper, he took up another beaker full of the foul-smelling green mixture.

  Dortchen and her mother had sat in silence in the drawing room, their hands idle on the sewing in their laps. Röse read on, oblivious, her hands busy with her knitting, while Mia sat in the big chair, pretending to sew. Dortchen listened to her father’s heavy footsteps coming down the stairs and braced herself. He was furious, of course, but Dortchen kept her head, looked him in the eye and lied through her teeth.

  ‘Perhaps she climbed down on a rope made of her sheets,’ Mia cried.

  ‘Then why are her sheets still on her bed, you stupid child?’ her father replied.

  Mia blushed. ‘I … I didn’t know.’

  ‘Perhaps her lover brought a ladder and she climbed out the window,’ Rudolf said.

  ‘You think the quail wouldn’t have woken and cried out?’ his father replied. ‘No, one of you let her out.’

  ‘But you locked the doors yourself, sir,’ Frau Wild said, twisting her handkerchief. ‘You had the keys in your safekeeping.’

  ‘She must’ve picked the lock with a hairpin,’ Mia said, wide-eyed with amazement.

  ‘Mmpf,’ her father said, his scowling eyes on Dortchen. She turned away, trying to keep her face under control.

  The next day a letter was delivered from Hanne.

  ‘I want to be with Johann and nothing will stop me,’ it read. ‘Since I cannot marry without your permission, Father, I will simply live with him in sin. I do not believe in marriage anyway, and would only get married so people will not call my baby a bastard. Do not be concerned for your reputation. Johann and I plan to move far, far away. If you would prefer the respectability of a married daughter, then you may of course offer us your consent and we will be married as soon as we can. Please find enclosed the necessary documents. You may send them to us at the following address …’

  In a rage, Herr Wild went to the address, only to find it a clearing-house for letters and documents. He tried to track down his errant daughter and her lover, but they had left town and he could not discover where they had gone. He checked with all the stagecoaches and posting-inns, but they had either walked away from Cassel or had friends with private means of transport. Herr Wild and Rudolf took turns waiting at the clearing-house, but no one turned up asking for a package addressed to Herr Johann Fulda. Eventually, after three long weeks, Herr Wild gave in and signed the forms to give consent for his daughter to marry.

  Johann must have had a secret method for receiving messages, for a week later the Wilds received another letter from Hanne, saying the marriage banns had been posted in Marburg and asking whether Frau Wild and her daughters would attend the wedding.

  ‘You may not go,’ Herr Wild told his wife.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not well enough to travel to Marburg. But Dortchen and Mia must go, or else people will talk.’

  ‘Rubbish! How are they to get to Marburg?’

  ‘By stagecoach, of course,’ Frau Wild replied.

  ‘By themselves?’

  ‘Old Marie can go with them. She’d like to see Hanne married. And it has been a long time since she last had a holiday.’

  ‘And who is to pay for this little pleasure trip?’ Herr Wild shouted.

  ‘You, of course. We must pack up a dowry chest for Hanne. Dortchen can take it with her. Röse will not want to go, of course. She can stay and look after me.’

  So Dortchen found herself with Old Marie and Mia on a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling, ten-hour stagecoach journey to Marburg, a small chest of linen and cutlery strapped to the roof. She had not been away from Cassel since she was a child, and looked with eagerness out the window at the smooth brown fields, dusted with frost, and the timber-framed cottages. The trees lining the road held their bare fretwork of twigs against a vast grey sky. Dortchen did not think she had ever seen so much sky. Rooks wheeled above their ragged nests in the treetops, calling sadly, and far away a grey shingled church spire lifted high above a huddle of small houses.

  The roads were in such bad repair that the stagecoach was twice bogged in deep muddy mires and had to be dug out by the coachman, and it once buckled a wheel in a pothole
. It took more than an hour to be fixed, with all the passengers sitting on their luggage on the side of the road, rubbing their hands together and stamping their feet in a vain effort to keep warm.

  It was long past sunset when they finally reached Marburg. Dortchen was so stiff and bruised and exhausted that she caught only an impression of the great bulk of a church, and a string of lights so far above that it seemed like a constellation of bright stars, but must be the lantern-light shining out from the windows of the famous Schloss.

  Gretchen’s husband, Herr Schmerfeld, greeted them at the inn at which the stagecoach stopped for the night. He had sedan chairs waiting for them, one each for Dortchen, Mia, Old Marie and himself, and another for the luggage. Dortchen could not believe such luxury. She lifted the curtain and stared out into the cool night as she was lifted and carried up a steep cobbled road, a linkboy running before them with a lantern. She saw, crowded together, many timber-framed houses with heavy, protruding gables, their roofs almost touching overhead. Lots of young men in black gowns climbed the narrow streets, laughing. Marburg was a university town, she remembered; Jakob and Wilhelm had studied here. It gave her pleasure to know she was travelling a road that Wilhelm would have trodden.

  The sedan chair reached a wide market square, and the carriers paused to catch their breath before attempting the next steep incline. Looking through the curtain, Dortchen saw a richly ornamented building with a clock on its parapet, and a statue of a soldier on a rearing horse, killing something that looked rather like a dog but was more likely a dragon. A man stood on the steps below it, selling hot chestnuts. Herr Schmerfeld bought them all some, in cones of paper made from old maps that warmed the hands beautifully. Dortchen ate them gratefully, for it had been a long time since their midday repast.

  Herr Schmerfeld’s house was at the very top of the cliff, right underneath the Schloss, and the poor sedan-carriers were panting by the time they set the chairs down in the cobbled courtyard. It was a large, whitewashed, gabled house with a pointed turret and black timber frames. The front door was huge and had forged iron vines twining across it.

  Inside, all was modern, however. Rich carpets covered the floor from wall to wall, and gas-lit chandeliers hung in the hallway. Old Marie went up to get the girls’ bedrooms ready and unpack their bags, while Herr Schmerfeld showed Dortchen and Mia into a large sitting room that was decorated with numerous golden statues of camels. Gretchen, Hanne and Johann Fulda were sitting by a roaring fire, drinking wine from crystal glasses. Hanne jumped to her feet at the sight of Mia and Dortchen and came forward with outstretched arms.

  ‘It’s so lovely to see you,’ she cried. As she embraced Dortchen, she whispered, ‘Is all well? Did you get into trouble?’

  ‘Not really,’ Dortchen replied, not liking to say that she and her sisters had not been permitted to leave the house since Hanne had run away. Except to go to church, of course. Each day they had to endure Herr Wild’s suspicious rage and disapproval, while their mother had taken to her bed and stayed there.

  It was a great relief to be away from Cassel.

  The next morning, the four sisters went out to see Marburg, in the company of Gretchen’s husband and Hanne’s betrothed. French soldiers were everywhere, of course, but so too were young men in their black student’s gowns, arguing loudly about law and philosophy. The Old Town itself was quaint, with the streets so steep that no horse and carriage could drive up them. This meant everyone walked, or rode in sedan chairs, or led about small donkeys loaded high with books and scrolls or panniers of vegetables – or even, Dortchen saw, two immense, carved chairs with red velvet seats and backs.

  Away from the gloomy, repressive atmosphere of their father’s house, Dortchen and her sisters became carefree, talking and laughing as they had not for years.

  They visited the Schloss at the crest of the hill, which was half in ruins since Napoléon’s troops had demolished the fortifications after an uprising earlier in the year. They then walked down the hills to the immense Gothic pile of the Elisabethkirche, the church built hundreds of years earlier to hold the tomb of St Elizabeth of Hungary. Nearby was a high wall with curving iron spikes and a heavy iron gate.

  ‘That is the poorhouse,’ Gretchen said. ‘Can you believe the Grimms wanted Lotte to go there and write down stories from some old hag while she was here? They think of no one but themselves, those brothers.’

  ‘I would like to visit there while I am here, if I may,’ Dortchen said quietly.

  Herr Schmerfeld looked at her with warm interest in his eyes. ‘That is very commendable of you, Fraülein Dortchen. I shall arrange a visit for you, and ask my cook to prepare some soup for you to take.’

  The next week was taken up with preparing for Hanne’s wedding, exploring the town and visiting Gretchen’s smart new friends. But once Hanne was safely transformed into Frau Fulda, and the new husband and wife had driven off to Nentershausen, where a new job and a home awaited them, Dortchen was at last free to visit the poorhouse. She hoped to coax a story or two from the woman Clemens Brentano had called ‘the Marburg Märchenfrau’. The Story Wife.

  Old Marie accompanied her, carrying a basket with soup and bread and cheese and a jar of sour pickles. They rang the bell outside the gate, and soon a small boy with shaggy hair and a makeshift grey uniform came to let them in.

  The gate opened into a narrow courtyard that smelt unpleasantly damp. An arched door led Dortchen and Old Marie into a corridor, with steps leading upwards. Through an open door at the end of the corridor, they glimpsed thin, bowed figures in grey uniforms breaking rocks in the yard outside. The shaggy-haired boy led them down the corridor, past bare, cold rooms in which people lay on narrow pallets, or sat at long tables unravelling old rope or sewing cloth together. The smell was horrible. It was all Dortchen could do not to cover her mouth and nose with her gloved hands. Old Marie reached into her basket and took out a posy of dried lavender flowers, and Dortchen gratefully buried her nose in it.

  At last they reached the office, a large, comfortable room with a fire burning in the hearth and a tray with the remains of a large meal on the table. Dortchen was greeted by a portly man in a grubby waistcoat and his even portlier wife in an even grubbier dress.

  ‘Oh, what an honour, to have Herr Schmerfeld’s sister-in-law visit us,’ the warden’s wife simpered. ‘You’re simply too good.’

  Dortchen explained their mission, and the warden’s wife shook her head doubtfully. ‘Frau Creuzer is wandering in her wits, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure you’ll get much out of her. Mumbles away all day, she does, but it never makes much sense. And she’s frightened of strangers.’

  ‘She won’t be frightened of us,’ Old Marie said comfortably. ‘An old biddy like me and a sweet young girl like Fraülein Wild? We’ve brought her some soup – I’m sure she’d like that. We’ll sit with her a while and have a chat.’

  ‘It’d cause bad feeling among the others, bringing her food,’ the warden’s wife said. ‘Best give me the basket, and I’ll share it among them all.’

  Unwillingly, Dortchen did as she was asked. She saw the warden’s wife’s eyes light up as she rummaged through the basket; Dortchen was sure she would eat all the food herself.

  ‘She won’t say a word to you,’ the warden’s wife repeated, settling herself comfortably by the fire. ‘Afraid of adults, she is.’

  Dortchen had a sudden idea. ‘Perhaps she would tell her tales to some children? Could some of the children from the workhouse come with us?’

  Both the warden and his wife frowned. ‘They’ve got work to do,’ the warden’s wife said.

  ‘I’ll pay for their time,’ Dortchen said, drawing out her thin purse. Her mother had given her a few coins to spend in Marburg, but she had not yet had a chance to visit the shops.

  ‘Very well, then,’ the warden’s wife said, heaving herself to her feet. ‘Though I think it very odd.’

  She rang a bell and a thin, stooped girl came to the door.
‘Call some of the brats, and be smart about it,’ the warden’s wife told her. Soon a small group of grubby, anxious children were brought to meet Dortchen and Old Marie. Many had bruises on their thin arms and legs.

  The warden’s wife took them all upstairs to a long, gloomy room. Old ladies were lying on their pallets in rows, some still and silent, others rocking themselves and humming, or mumbling through toothless mouths. All were dressed in sack-like grey gowns and had bare feet. The warden’s wife led them to a bed near a window, where an old woman sat hunched, knitting with grey wool.

  ‘Frau Creuzer,’ she said. ‘Visitors for you. Be polite, now, and do as you’re told. I’ll be back soon.’

  The old woman shrank away from the sound of her words, looking up with sunken eyes that were filmed over. Her thin grey hair hung in a plait down her neck, and she had barely a tooth left in her mouth. ‘Who’s there?’ she asked in a trembling voice.

  ‘Just another poor old woman like you,’ Old Marie said soothingly. She brought a chair from the wall for Dortchen, then sat down on the bed, taking Frau Creuzer’s thin, blue-veined hands in her own warm, comforting grip. ‘My name’s Marie Müller, and I’ve come as companion to Fraülein Wild, who is sitting just here.’

  ‘We’ve heard that you tell the most wonderful stories,’ Dortchen said gently. ‘Would you tell us one?’

  ‘Tell you a story?’ the old woman said in disbelief. ‘What for?’