But maybe not red, not until he knew for sure that the breath of this fall had left Briar Meadow.
I sat next to my father and threaded a needle I knew he couldn’t see without his strongest reading glasses.
He didn’t look up, so at first I wondered if he’d seen me.
Then he handed me a pair of gold drawstrings, giving me the task of guiding them through the casings.
The faint pleating at the corners of his eyes was better than a smile.
In my hands, my Oliva hands, these drawstrings felt like cords of light.
My parents probably worried when I left the house later that night. But they didn’t stop me.
Piper and Sylvie were already at the reservoir, watching the sky (Aubrey and Graham were likely kissing behind some tree, but I couldn’t see them). Emil’s friends were debating something, as usual, gesturing with their hands as though shaping models from the air in front of them. But I didn’t see him with them.
I walked carefully, nebula bursts of bruising crossing my ankles and heels. I folded my arms against the cold and watched the sky over the reservoir.
The glimmer looked like a layer of sheer, sequined fabric over the moon. It was fading as slowly as a glow bracelet dimming, but we always swore we could see it, the slight dulling of that light an hour at a time.
When the wind took a swirl of leaves, I couldn’t help wondering if it was sweeping away the last pieces of my red shoes.
The heat of someone else next to me was my first indication that Emil was there.
I almost asked about his arm, the taped-on gauze showing at the edge of his sleeve.
Then I found his eyes in the dark.
Even with as little light as the moon and the glimmer gave us, something about him looked sharper, more awake. More resolved, like an old photo that had finished developing in solution.
I uncrossed my arms, my hand finding his.
A blue spark and a slight shock flitted between my fingers and his.
We both jumped back, laughing at the same time when we realized it was static. Not a trail of ion-dyed flame. Not some dangerous magic that lived in the space between his family’s history and mine. Just our hands meeting in dry, charged air.
Probably, we would settle around each other.
Probably, but maybe not yet.
So for now, we stood next to each other, watching the sky.
Der Streuobstwiese, 1518
The scent of wild roses is still in their hair and clothes when Geruscha wakes them both.
Lala sits up, startled by wondering if a sergeant is at the door of this still-drying wattle and daub.
Then she smells the rosemary and lavender and remembers where they are. Der Streuobstwiese. The meadow orchard that is now their home.
She slides her palm onto Alifair’s shirt. He turns over with a soft moan and sits up. The moon through the oiled paper of the window shows the place on his neck where Lala kissed him hard enough to leave a mark.
Geruscha crouches. “It is your cousin,” she says, and then runs off at the order of an older woman.
“My what?” Lala asks, before snapping into recognition.
Alifair lights the single tallow candle. The light gilds his shoulders as he puts on his boots.
Emich and Roland are following Aldessa’s orders, fetching whatever she asks. Josse prepares water for the blessing.
The birth is more groaning than screaming, her bibio seeming frustrated and put out by the length of the whole matter.
“This child clearly wishes to be born,” she says weakly, “so why not get on with it?”
Henne rubs oil on her belly. Alifair offers to play his Blockflöte to distract her, a new one, crudely and quickly made from maple wood.
Bibio Dorenia summons Alifair close.
“If you play that blessed thing now,” she whispers, “I will snap it in two.”
Lala gives him a look back to tell him that, for his sake, he is best to leave this part to the women.
With that, he is off to gather water and wood alongside the other men.
Bibio Dorenia begins screaming, and Henne goes out to tell everyone to open chests, untie knots, shoot an arrow into the air, to bless the last moments of the birth.
Bibio Dorenia squeezes Lala’s hand so hard Lala fears it will snap off.
And then, just when Lala thinks her fingers will break, he is there, her cousin, his face new and red as a berry. The first small sapling off their gathering of aspens.
He will grow up among wild pears and wood betony. He will know the many forms love takes.
Josse blesses him with the water, and then Henne does the same, with salt and a dot of honey on his forehead. Bibio Dorenia, Lala knows, will not let go of him until he is baptized, and maybe not even then. She will keep a piece of iron near her bed to protect them both.
“And what will you name him?” Lala asks, dabbing sweat from her bibio’s forehead and hair.
Bibio Dorenia traces her finger over the baby’s small hand. It is the first time Lala can remember seeing her bibio’s wonder as plain and glimmering as a child’s.
“I thought I would name him for your priest who cast us out of the city.” She gives Lala a teasing smile.
Lala tries to call up the man’s Christian name, and flushes with the shame of how she cannot.
Bibio Dorenia laughs.
“Emil,” she says as she bends to her son’s small hand and kisses it. “His name is Emil.”
Strasbourg, 2018
Author’s Note
Yesterday, I flipped through a British issue of Harper’s Bazaar that had been left behind in a lobby and found a spread commemorating the seventieth anniversary of Moira Shearer dancing in the film The Red Shoes. The pages showed Misty Copeland, Isabella Boylston, and Tiler Peck wearing breathtaking gowns and brilliant red shoes, and talking about how vividly the film captures devotion to dance.
Sometimes your obsession with a story follows you even as you’re following it.
Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” has enthralled me for as long as it has horrified me. As a young dancer, the idea of becoming possessed with dancing both frightened and thrilled me. It stayed with me, the thought that a woman’s body, and the color she puts on it, could be so powerful and so dangerous.
I knew the cautionary tale the original fairy story was meant to be, a warning to selfish and vain girls.
But I also recognized it as a warning that women—our bodies, our will, the colors we wear and the colors we are—have unimaginable power. Red shoes, I slowly understood, were not only a symbol of the forbidden. Red shoes signified the bright fire of being a girl, a woman, who is unafraid of her own body and what it wants.
If Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” has ever entranced you the way it has me, you’ll probably recognize the references to the original story and its typically stated provenance in the pages of this novel. But long before I wrote a word of this book, I wondered if Andersen might have drawn inspiration from a strange corner of Alsatian history, a fever that plagued the city of Strasbourg in 1518.
Five centuries later, I’m in Strasbourg, where the glint of the canals and the warmth in the air almost lets me imagine this city in the summer of 1518. Because at the moment, my obsession is red shoes not only as a fairy tale but as a point where fairy tale and history intersect. A Hans Christian Andersen story about a girl whose red shoes dance her to death, and the unbelievable but true account of a dancing plague that happened in this city five hundred years ago.
The dancing plague of 1518 is far from the only one in historical record. It’s not even the only one that happened in Alsace. But it was one of the largest, affecting hundreds, and, thanks to both contemporaneous accounts and the invention of the printing press, one of the best documented. This novel is a work of fiction, drawing on the accounts of several dancing plagues in the region during the Middle Ages. But the occurrence in Strasbourg in 1518 always was, and remains, the central inspiration fo
r the story, and the guiding framework for its historical reference points.
I came to Strasbourg for three reasons: to research the parts of the book I hadn’t yet written, to fact-check the ones I had, and to learn what today’s Strasbourgeois think of la fièvre de la danse.
The answer to the last one turns out to be not much. Several people I’ve met had no idea what I was talking about. Some looked on in fascination at the French articles I pulled up on my phone. Others thought I was talking about “dancing fever,” the kind more fit for disco movies, and wondered if I was old enough to have seen any. (This was, I will admit, likely due to the shortcomings of my fledgling French.)
In the days I’ve been here, I have breathed in rhythm with this landscape. I have walked its forests. I have stood beneath what remains of Strasbourg’s first astronomical clock. I have been shamed out of the same church that shuns Lala from its pews (as modern of a city as Strasbourg is, it has, as every city does, those who would rather not see a girl of color and her trans husband beneath its sacred stone arches). I have grown dizzy under the spire of its enormous cathedral, and I have climbed to the top of it, so high that I could see far-off mountains in one direction and distant forest in another.
And I have found the generous spirit of those who want to share the history of this place. Some have helped me access information about medieval Strasbourg that had previously seemed impossible to find. A few not only knew about la fièvre de la danse, but have dedicated significant scholarly energy to the varied sources that tell its story.
Before I changed where the first affected woman began to dance, from city lane to country road, I had to know what the historical record said about her (sadly, very little; even her name is recorded differently depending on the chronicler). Before I centralized the locations of the great dance Strasbourg officials put on to try to cure the fever, I had to learn about the Marktplatz and guildhalls they filled with dancers. Before I went after the recorded detail of the red shoes at Saverne, I had to find out how sure historians were that it was true.
The answer is both maddening and realistic in its ambiguity: We don’t know. We may know that impossibly large hail fell on a particular day in a particular year, but we don’t know how important the color red truly was in the story of la fièvre de la danse, just as we don’t know for sure what caused the fever itself. The detail of the red shoes became part of historical record within the same century, so it’s possible that the color red played as strong a role as chroniclers suggest. It’s also possible that some mentions are exaggerated, fabricated, or drawn more from rumor than fact. And if red shoes were in fact given at Saverne, the reason why such a cure was put forth is lost to the last five centuries.
But I still followed that bright-dyed thread. I followed the path of historical records that note these red shoes. I still wondered if perhaps Hans Christian Andersen had, at the back of his mind, a little piece of history that mentions red shoes, and an Alsatian city gripped by dancing as though it was a plague.
Those possibilities remain the blazing heart of my story. And held within that same heart, at the center of this book, is my own heart as a queer Latina woman, with all that means today, and all it would have meant five hundred years ago.
As far as historical record states, Romani people were not blamed for the dancing plague. Neither were queer or trans Strasbourgeois, as far as we know. And as much as historical record states, there were no witchcraft trials associated with la fièvre de la danse. But none of these is whole-cloth invention. The persecution and expulsions of Romani communities referenced in the story, the barring of Romani people from whole cities and kingdoms, are tragically real. Brutal laws punished LGBTQ+ identity. And the historical period in which the dancing plague occurred saw thousands if not tens of thousands executed on charges of witchcraft.
History, no matter who writes it, cannot hide the blood on its hands.
But neither can it hide those who lived it.
People of color existed in medieval Europe. As did the LGBTQ+ community, though their conception of their own identities would likely have been far different from today. Affrèrement, the supposedly platonic pledge in which two men joined their lives, was well acknowledged in medieval France.
Girls like me were here five hundred years ago. So were boys like the one alongside me right now.
Much has changed in five hundred years. And so much has held. Both the good in the human heart, and the vicious insistence on finding someone to blame.
Tomorrow, I will fly back to a country that so often blames my communities for that which they do not like, and that so often hates us for what we are. I love it, my country, even as I sometimes fear it. I go back to it knowing a little more about women who walked this earth before me. I carry their history home with me, on my fingertips that have brushed cathedral stone, on the soles of my shoes that have walked these narrow, cobbled lanes, in my heart that is growing a spark into a story and that led me across an ocean to follow it.
Though no one knows exactly on which street la fièvre de la danse began, I’m writing this from a patch of cobbled stone likely not far from where that first woman started to dance, and not far from where the city’s most powerful men would have decided Lala and Alifair’s fate. I live in a very different time, in a very different world from the two of them.
But I’m walking this ground, a girl of color alongside the trans boy she loves.
So this is where I leave you, dear reader, five hundred years after la fièvre de la danse, five centuries after Lala and Alifair would have left these city gates for the last time. It’s probably appropriate that we part here, among this city’s living and its ghosts.
Thank you for following me deep into a fairy tale that has long frightened and enthralled me, and a moment in history that grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. I leave you on these cobbled lanes, with my own pair of red shoes on my feet, and my heart full of gratitude for every one of you who came with me this far.
Acknowledgments
“So I have this idea for a ‘Red Shoes’ reimagining about the 1518 dancing plague.” Those words were all it took for my agent, Taylor Martindale Kean, to be fearlessly behind this novel before I even wrote it.
I have Taylor and many others to thank for this book’s existence. Here I’ll name a few:
Full Circle Literary, for making a wonderful home for authors.
My editor, Kat Brzozowski, for believing in this book and for refining it in ways only she could.
Jean Feiwel, for having me as part of the Feiwel & Friends family.
Brittany Pearlman, for her tireless work and encouraging spirit.
Rich Deas, for his phenomenal art direction at MacKids; Liz Dresner, for giving this story an absolutely stunning cover; Cat Finnie and Mike Burroughs, for such gorgeous cover elements.
Everyone at Feiwel & Friends and Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group: Jon Yaged, Kim Waymer, Allison Verost, Liz Szabla, Angus Killick, Molly Brouillette, Melinda Ackell, Kerianne Okie Steinberg, Teresa Ferraiolo, Kathryn Little, Julia Gardiner, Lauren Scobell, Ashley Woodfolk, Alexei Esikoff, Mariel Dawson, Romanie Rout, Mindy Rosenkrantz, Emily Settle, Amanda Barillas, Morgan Dubin, Morgan Rath, Madison Furr, Mary Van Akin, and Jessica White; Katie Halata, Lucy Del Priore, Kristen Luby, Melissa Croce, and Cierra Bland of Macmillan Library; and the many more who turn stories into books and get them to readers.
Taryn Fagerness and the Taryn Fagerness Agency, for helping my stories travel the world.
The writers who helped me refine this book: Robin Talley, who lent me every medieval history reference she had on hand and talked me through how she does research. Tehlor Kay Mejia, who waded through an early draft. Michelle Ruiz Keil, who helped me focus in on this story’s themes.
Thank you to Robin LaFevers for helping me work through the sexism, morality, and, ultimately, the transcendent feminism within the original story of “The Red Shoes.”
Thank you to Jessica Reidy, for her ed
iting and guidance with bringing out Lala’s and Emil’s Romanipen and strengthening their emotional journeys. Thank you to Parrish Turner, for helping me enrich Alifair’s story and illuminate his life as a transgender young man in sixteenth-century Alsace.
There were many scholars and researchers whose work helped me understand the history and context of that summer in 1518: John Waller, who answered questions about the Holy Roman Empire. Kélina Gotman, whose scholarly work proved an invaluable source. Cecile Dupeux of the Musée de l’Œuvre Notre-Dame, who was generously willing to talk to me despite my very middling French and who helped me access the text of firsthand sources, and the Musée staff, who kindly helped me find my way. The City of Strasbourg, in particular those who run and maintain its spectacular museums; so much of this book would be inaccurate or absent without your help.
My mother, for keeping up my faith in happy endings, and my father, whose reaction when I told him about this book’s topic was similar to William Shawn’s reaction to John McPhee wanting to write about oranges.
My husband, for hunting down oak apples with me, for putting up with la fièvre de la danse I fell under while researching this book, and for being my traveling companion, and sometimes translator, in the museums, libraries, and landscapes of the Bas-Rhin and the Schwarzwald.
Readers, for seeing both the brutal truth and the hope held within fairy tales. Thank you.
Thank you for reading this Feiwel and Friends book.
The Friends who made
DARK and DEEPEST RED
possible are:
JEAN FEIWEL, Publisher
LIZ SZABLA, Associate Publisher
RICH DEAS, Senior Creative Director
HOLLY WEST, Senior Editor
ANNA ROBERTO, Senior Editor
KAT BRZOZOWSKI, Senior Editor
ALEXEI ESIKOFF, Senior Managing Editor
KIM WAYMER, Senior Production Manager
EMILY SETTLE, Associate Editor
Dark and Deepest Red Page 23
