Leaving Norway: Book 1: Martin & Dagny (The Hansen Series - Martin & Dagny and Reidar & Kirsten)

by Kris Tualla

  ***

  Joy bubbled up from Dagny’s belly and lifted her mood to its highest point since the day she walked out of the convent. She wanted to believe that the reason was because she was going to learn English and surprise Torvald, and truly that prospect made her happy in many ways. And yet, if she was honest with herself, the fact that Martin was going to be her tutor was like adding thick, sugared cream to the top of a sweet confection.

  Dagny couldn’t believe she had done what she did—challenge Martin with a demand in order to protect his secret. What had come over her? She had never been so outspoken with the nuns.

  “If I had been, they would have smacked my hands,” she murmured, rubbing her knuckles without thinking about it. “What must he think of me?”

  It didn’t matter, because there was nothing going on between them. Martin would help her with English and that was the extent of their involvement. She had her fiancé, Torvald, to occupy her heart and her thoughts, and there simply wasn’t room for another man.

  Dagny went to the area of the deck where she found the gathering of women yesterday and was relieved to see them in the same place today. Several smiles greeted her approach, and she grinned widely in return.

  “Are you ready for more English?” one woman asked.

  The second part of her question sounded like for mer engelsk so Dagny nodded. “Yes. I am.”

  “Good!” the woman moved over to make room for Dagny on the bench.

  As Dagny sat, she pointed at the women’s knitting needles and yarn. “Have more?” she managed.

  “These?” the woman asked, lifting the items.

  “Yes,” Dagny answered. Then she splayed her empty hands. “Jeg har ikke noe å gjøre…”

  “Nothing to do,” said the first woman who spoke to her yesterday, Mary Whittlestone. “I have nothing to do.”

  Dagny gave her a grateful smile and repeated the words.

  “Here.” Dagny’s bench mate pressed the needles and yarn into her hands. “I started a scarf.”

  Her words were so like jeg startet en scarf that Dagny answered without pause. “I start a scarf, også. Thank you.”

  The woman beamed. “You are quite welcome, dear.” Then she reached down and dug through a satchel for more yarn and another set of needles.

  Dagny applied herself to knitting, listening and repeating. Her practiced hands worked at elaborate stitches while her mind searched for similarities, patterns, and rhythms for her new language. By the end of the afternoon, she was able to concoct two or three-word sentences which the women seemed to understand. Mary corrected her gently, explaining in her own broken Norse when Dagny was confused.

  Her time passed just as it had yesterday, with easy feminine camaraderie. Dagny asked about procuring more yarn and one of the ladies offered to sell her enough for mittens and stockings for Torvald. Dagny didn’t ask about the yarn’s color. Just as she didn’t think about how the scarf she was making was the same color as Martin’s eyes.

  ***

  Torvald stopped in his supper preparations and stared at Dagny. “You seem to be in a heightened mood,” he observed.

  She grinned widely. “I am.”

  He spread his hands, a limp linen towel hanging across one palm. “To what do we owe this blessing?”

  “I have found an occupation for my time!” she exclaimed. “While you spend your days playing games with the men, I shall spend my time with their wives.”

  “Simply spending time?” Torvald cocked one brow. “And that is enough to elevate your entire demeanor?”

  Dagny covered her smile with one hand and shook her head.

  Torvald tossed the damp towel aside and crossed the tiny cabin to stand in front of her. “What is it you little vixen?” he teased.

  Dagny swung her hands behind her back. “I shall have a surprise for you.” Well, two surprises.

  “A surprise?” he prodded.

  She nodded. “My hands shall not be idle.”

  Torvald’s lips curled in pleased response. “So you are making something for me? A gift?”

  Dagny wagged a finger in his face. “You will get no further information from me.”

  “Not even like this…” Torvald gripped Dagny’s shoulders and his mouth descended over hers. As it always happened when he kissed her, she felt her core heat and melt, the warmth flowing outward through her arms and legs until she was consumed. She kissed him in return, applying all the skill he had taught her.

  Torvald broke from the kiss and rested his cheek against her head. “Lay with me, Dagny,” he whispered, his hot breath tickling her in a most pleasant way. “Please share my bed.”

  Dagny leaned her head back and met his eyes, heavy-lidded with desire. She whispered her resolute response, “Marry me, Torvald, and I gladly will.”

  Chapter Eight

  June 5, 1749

  Martin led Dagny down the slippery steps from their passenger deck, past the crew’s quarters, and into the hold below.

  “I’ve given the matter some thought,” he explained once they stood in the belly of the ship. “If you want to succeed in your surprise, then Torvald mustn’t see us together. And for the general state of your reputation, my lady, neither should anyone else.”

  Dagny’s cheeks pinkened deeply enough that Martin could see the color by the light of the oil lamp he carried. “Thank you for being so considerate,” she murmured.

  Martin ignored the tickle of pleasure which her response prompted in his chest and hung the lamp on a hook above them. He pointed at the gathering of traveling trunks beside them.

  “If anyone comes down while we are having our lessons, I will point at one of these trunks and ask if that is the one you meant, as if I am simply here to help you retrieve something from your chest.”

  Dagny’s eyes widened. “Martin, that’s brilliant!”

  Another annoying tickle. “Also, from now on, I will come down before you and leave after you are gone, so that no one sees us together. And if we plan for our tutoring sessions to take place during busy times of the day, there shouldn’t be crewmen lounging on the deck above us to witness either of us coming or going.”

  Dagny appeared awestruck and gave her head a small shake. “How did you think of all this?”

  Martin felt his own cheeks heating. “I have an uncle in Christiania who practices discovery.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “What is that?”

  “When a crime is committed, he discovers who did it and why,” Martin explained as succinctly as he could. “Whenever I spent time with him, he taught me some of what he knows.”

  “How completely fascinating!” she exclaimed softy.

  Martin nodded, a pang of sadness killing his pleasure at Dagny’s eager reaction. “He is a very interesting man. I shall miss him quite a lot.”

  Dagny laid her hand on his arm. “Everyone on this ship has chosen to go to a new land and leave much behind. I would be interested in hearing more about why you made that decision sometime.”

  Martin smiled. “I’ll tell you in English.”

  Dagny withdrew her hand and gave him a playfully chastising look. “If you don’t begin teaching me, how will I understand?”

  Martin chuckled and pointed at one of the trunks. “You sit there, and we shall begin.”

  Dagny settled herself and looked up at him, practically vibrating in anticipation. “Where do we start?”

  Martin switched to English, speaking slowly and gesturing as he did so. “Hello. My name is Martin Hansen.”

  Dagny nodded her understanding. “Hello. My name is Dagny Sivert—” She stopped suddenly and cleared her throat. “Dagny Sivertsen Haugen.”

  “I am pleased to meet you,” Martin continued, noting her unexpected hesitation.

  “I am pleased to meet you,” she parroted.

  “We are on a ship. We are sailing to America,” he continued.

  Dagny’s eyes met his, her gaze intense with concentration. “We are on a ship. We are sailing t
o America.”

  ***

  Dagny was immediately encouraged. ‘We are on a ship’ sounded enough like Vi er på et skip that she thought she would easily remember it. The same was true for ‘We are sailing to America’ and Vi seiler til Amerika.

  As Martin spoke and gestured, Dagny understood him. Of course, he was speaking slowly and that was helpful. When the women on the ship talked, their words tumbled off their tongues so quickly that it was impossible for Dagny to separate them out.

  “How do you say, ‘please slow down and say that again’?” she asked in Norse, interrupting him in mid-sentence.

  Martin nodded and answered in English. “Please slow down and say that again.”

  Dagny made a face. That sounded nothing like Hvordan kan du si du bremse ned og si at igjen. She looked up at Martin and asked her next question slowly and clearly.

  “Do any of these words sound like English: placere tardus descendit et quod iterum?”

  A wash of surprised approval shifted Martin’s expression. “You speak Latin?”

  Dagny chuckled. “I was raised in a convent. The nuns insisted.”

  Martin opened his mouth as if to ask another question, then shook his head and flashed a quick grin. “Yes. English has as many Latin-based words as it does Germanic. Tardus is the root of ‘retard’ and descendit is ‘descent’ in English. Quod is ‘quote’ or speak.”

  “Would I ask the women to ‘retard descent’?” she asked.

  He shook his head again. “No, that wouldn’t quite make sense. Ask them to ‘slow down’ and then you can ask them to ‘say that again’ if you didn’t understand.”

  Dagny quirked a corner of her mouth. “How do I say ‘I don’t understand’?”

  When Martin said the words in English, which sounded nothing like either Jeg forstår ikke or Non intelligere, Dagny’s former confidence crumbled. That must have been clear in her features because Martin reached out to take her hand.

  “Sometimes it helps to see the word, not only hear it. Perhaps you could carry a small stack of papers and a graphite stick?” he suggested.

  “And where would I procure such supplies?” she scoffed, not intending to sound as rude as she did. She was immediately sorry and felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment.

  If he marked her tone, Martin didn’t react. “I have plenty of both with me. It would be my honor to equip you—as my most accomplished student.”

  “I’m your only student!” Dagny quipped.

  “Even so,” Martin replied with a crooked smile.

  Dagny sighed. “Thank you. You are very kind. I am afraid you got the bad end of our bargain.”

  “Not at all, my lady,” Martin demurred. “I anticipate this diversion will shorten this tedious voyage for both of us.”

  He stood and opened one of the trunks closest to them. After a moment of rummaging, Martin handed her the materials he promised, then closed and relocked the chest.

  “Do you have a pocket in your skirt?” he asked. “So that you can have these with you at all times?”

  The idea that she should always have the paper and graphite to hand hadn’t occurred to Dagny. “Yes, I do,” she said, folding the paper and hiding it away in that very pocket. “That’s very clever of you to suggest it.”

  Martin offered his hand to help her to her feet. “It wasn’t my idea. My uncle always has paper and graphite with him.”

  Dagny laid her palm in his. Martin’s hands were large, his fingers long and tapered. They closed over hers and she rose from her impromptu seat. “So he can write down his discoveries?”

  Martin led her to the narrow steps. “No, so he can converse. Go on up. I’ll follow later. ”

  As she set her foot on the first step, Dagny looked over her shoulder at Martin. “So he can converse? What does that mean?”

  Martin smiled up at her. “My uncle Brander is deaf.”

  ***

  Martin watched Dagny’s ascent and gradual disappearance from his view. Then he turned back to consider where best to create his personal retreat.

  While he genuinely liked his cabin mate Oskar, Martin was already finding that he needed refuge from Oskar’s constant conversation. The man certainly owned an abundance of words, and was capable of coating the surface of any subject. If Oskar might have been able to plumb any depth, Martin might not find the constant babble so annoying. As it was, he ached for some silence.

  The cargo hold was a profusion of stacks, crates, and piles of everything from casks of gun powder to casks of cinnamon and cloves. Iron bolts and bolts of silk. Cases of French reds and German white wines.

  Martin spent the next hour or so arranging himself a little workspace—one where he could spread out his papers to sketch ideas for buildings or plans for houses. Tucked back away from the landing where the passenger trunks were stored, he could hide from view by simply lying on his back, luxuriously stretched out on the copious folds of exported fabrics, both exotic and mundane. The scent of the spices pushed away the mustiness of the hold and the ever-present stench of rodent droppings.

  It was such a comfortable spot he might be tempted to sleep there; if it weren’t for the plentiful rodents who left those pungent droppings, of course. Martin had no desire to awaken to find himself being nibbled on.

  As he pounded a nail he found into a beam above him as a place to hang his lamp, Martin was quite satisfied with his makeshift home away from his cabin. He dimmed the light and laid back, finally able to give his entire mind to Dagny’s puzzling—and apparently unconscious—admission.

  Raised in a convent?

  Away from her loving father who so recently departed this earth? And the elder brother who now hovered over her so solicitously on their journey?

  Martin considered Torvald, who looked nothing like Dagny. He was dark to her light, onyx to her pearl. He mentioned ‘their’ parents, but ‘her’ father. Perhaps her mother died, her father remarried, and Torvald became her older brother. That might explain his awkward introduction, switching languages in the middle of it. Perhaps he felt much less brotherly than he ought toward the strikingly beautiful Dagny.

  And they shared a cabin.

  Martin pushed the ramifications of that particular circumstance from his mind, partly because he still didn’t understand Dagny’s banishment to a convent to be raised. Did her mother die birthing her? The prospect of five daughters could easily prove too much for the bereaved widower, with one being a newly born infant. If he sent the young reminder of his wife’s demise to the nuns, Martin wondered how long he waited to reclaim her.

  “It would have been when he married Torvald’s mother, if that was in truth the situation,” Martin whispered to the beams above him. “So perhaps ten years ago, when Dagny was fifteen or sixteen.”

  Surely a decade was sufficient time to strengthen familial affections.

  Martin pulled a belly-deep sigh and stretched his limbs to their fullest extent. The meager light seeping down the steep staircase had almost disappeared. Martin climbed from his fabric pallet, retrieved his lamp from its nail, and wound his way through the cargo toward the narrow steps. It was time to rejoin his shipboard world.

  ***

  Dagny sat with the women and their children in the same place on the sunny deck where they sat every day. She listened intently to their conversation, occasionally asking them to ‘please slow down’ or ‘say that again.’ When she thought the speaker might be amenable, Dagny offered her the paper and graphite.

  When the words were written down, Dagny saw many more similarities to either Norse or Latin than she expected just by listening. The difference, then, was mainly in pronunciation. If she could master that, she should understand more words. Tomorrow she would ask Martin to teach her how English letters were pronounced. Perhaps if he showed her the words in his book she might learn more quickly.

  “I’ll suggest that idea at supper,” she murmured, staring at the words already on her paper.

  As if to approve her e
fforts, the bell rang a warning that the early supper would begin in a quarter of an hour. Mothers gathered their children and trundled them down the steps to their cabins to wash their grimy hands and faces before the meal.

  Dagny sat in the late afternoon light and memorized all of the words she had learned. A cooling breeze kept pulling wisps of her hair free from her braids and pushing them into her face. As she brushed them away again and again, she began to wonder why she braided her hair in the first place.

  Habit, was the succinct answer. The nuns demanded that she corral and conceal all of her womanly assets—lest she be inflamed with desire by her own questionable beauty. Now that idea seemed more than ridiculous. It seemed wrong.

  Dagny carefully folded her paper and, along with the graphite, tucked it deep into the pocket of her skirt. Then she untied her braids and methodically unwound them. Her hair, normally straight after she washed it, retained the arcs of its confinement and hung in scandalously immodest curls to her waist. As the breeze continued to play with her, the slanting sun gilded the strands with silver and gold.

  Dagny combed her fingers through the thick waves of her hair and watched the shifting shapes and colors as the sea’s breath continued to blow. For the first time in her life she was able to admit that she had at least one attractive asset. Her hair was, indeed, glorious. Like the sunlight itself, pale and bright.

  “What other assets have I been hiding?” she whispered to the wind. “I don’t even know myself.”

  The wind didn’t answer her.

  Dagny stood and walked toward the steps, her hair flowing free around her shoulders, and fully aware of the appreciative stares she received from the sailors working on the deck or in the sails.