Breath and Bones (5 page)

Famke was sad when Mathilde left, placed out in the village of Humlebæk. But then there was Karin, and then Marie. Famke became a fish herself, swimming through the ranks of girls, toppling them onto their backs
with a flip of her tail. But she was careful to stay on the shore of every pond, the doorstep of every cottage; each Immaculate Heart girl who managed to marry bore all the signs of innocence to her husband.

And soon enough it was time for Famke to go. At fourteen, she'd finally been confirmed; she was capable of earning a woman's wages, and there was no reason to burden the city's few Catholics any longer. Sister Saint Bernard was in charge of placing the grown orphans, and she found a position for Famke as a goose girl and maid-of-all-work in a village called Dragør. Famke mucked out the goose pen, made cheese, and fended off the attentions of the gristled farmer who'd consented to take her. She talked to the girls on the neighboring farms—none of them smelling of soap or bread or ponds, only sweat and dung—and concluded that it would be no better anywhere else; so she hid her unhappiness even in her monthly letters to Sister Birgit. For her second Christmas, Famke's employer allowed a traveling neighbor to carry her to the orphanage with a couple of geese he'd had her kill and pluck. She attended Mass, turned the geese on a spit, and hardly had time to exchange two words with Sister Birgit; but she set off for the farm in new Swedish leather shoes.

There was no cart now, and no one on the road. Famke had walked halfway to Dragør when a fit of coughing doubled her over. Her mouth was suddenly full and tasted horrible—so she spat into the snow and saw a drop of blood. It froze quickly, to glow like a ruby in a bed of spun silk. She kicked the snow over it and walked on, refusing to think of what that droplet meant.

Summer came, and Dragør steamed. Famke told herself she was resigned to her lot. She let the farmer kiss her cheek and even, once, put his hand on her bodice. She attended services at the village Lutheran church and talked to the other farm girls. She met young men, too—hired boys in no position to marry; they gazed at her with the same covetous eyes she saw in the farmer. None of them managed to interest her.

But then, wonder of wonders, a foreigner appeared, dressed in blue and driving a carriage. He stood a long while at the fence rail, watching her shovel out the goose pen; he held a leather-bound book before him and a pencil in his hand. From time to time she wiped the sweat from her face onto her sleeve and cast him a glance from the corner of her eye. When at
last he approached, she saw his book contained a collection of drawings. He turned the pages back to reveal a moth, a chicken, and one of
her
.

There she was—she who had rarely seen her own face in a mirror—with all her busy motion stilled, looking slyly up from a white page. The real Famke, living and flushed, straightened her apron and pushed her hair under her cap, trying to look like the good Christian maiden she'd been raised to be. She knew she reeked of goose.

“
Beautiful
,” the stranger said in his own tongue, perhaps guessing this word was universal; but she looked at him with the round eyes of confusion. Then a slow smile crept across Famke's face, to be mirrored in his. She put one damp finger to the page and accidentally smudged the drawing.

In gestures, the stranger asked her to fetch him a glass of water; he pantomimed that his labors had exhausted him. She brought a dipperful from the farmyard well, lukewarm and tasting of the geese and horses and pigs that trotted across the packed earth. As he drank, she took the opportunity to engrave his face and figure onto her mind. He was tall and sticklike, with thin blond hair combed into a semblance of romantic curls; his green eyes immediately reminded her of a frog's. But he gave her a nice smile with slightly crooked teeth, and he bowed as if to suggest that he considered her every bit as good as he was.

He returned the next day in a carriage decked with flowers, and again she served him a dipperful of water. The flowers drew butterflies; in a cloud of pale yellow and white, their wings dipped from eglantine to
glem-mig-ikk'
, and she thought she'd never seen anything so pretty. She would find out later that the carriage had been decorated for a wedding; when the young man hired it he had asked to keep the flowers, and the proprietor even threw in a bouquet of lilies left from a more somber occasion. Famke's suitor handed them over with a flourish, and she blushed. She looked from the carriage to him—“Albert,” he said, with a thump on his chest—and felt her eyes shining.

Albert drank. As he swallowed, his throat made a little croaking noise, and he and Famke laughed together, like old friends. Before she knew it, his hands were making signs to offer her a ride into the city and an engagement as his model and muse. That she would be mistress as well, Famke had no doubt; her fellow-servants in Dragør had told her what young men who fancied themselves artists were like. She watched this one thoughtfully as
he argued his case. From time to time clasping her hand, he repeated two words so often they seemed like a name,
Lizzie Siddal
, though it had no meaning for her. Finally he kissed her grubby sixteen-year-old palm. When she pulled it away and put it to her face, she smelled his soap. Genteel, perfumed, but made of the same basic ingredients as orphanage soap. Ashes and fat. Prayers and hope.

So Albert and Famke rode away in a cloud of heavy dust, with the geese honking and the pigs squealing a charivari of farewell. The butterflies accompanied them, draining a few last drops from the wildflower garlands.

Famke had no notion where he'd take her and was delighted to find herself returning to Copenhagen, to the harbor district of Nyhavn. This time her experience of the town was different, lighter and lovelier, though almost as sequestered as in the orphanage. She stopped wearing the servant-girl caps and utterly abandoned the crossing of her ankles while seated. She found the life of a model so restful that she put on weight, and for the first time her breasts fit the cups of her hands rather than the flats of her palms. From Albert she learned English; she learned to call the shape of her mouth a Cupid's bow—perfectly formed even after the mishap with her infant bottle—and to appreciate the line where the red of her lips met the white of her flesh. He taught her to read English as well, in the guidebooks he had brought. From them she learned that Denmark was flat and that the Danes were thrifty people who enjoyed flowers, sunshine, and making butter and beer. She much preferred Albert's version of her country's history, with the thrilling princesses and long-ago warriors.

Inevitably, she compared being with Albert to being with the orphan girls, and she quickly decided she liked him better. He pleased her in different ways, without hands or mouth, and he took pleasure from the way she sucked on his flat nipples: “No woman has ever done
that
before,” he gasped. And when they were working, he looked at her the way no girl had ever done—no man, either, for no one before Albert had thought to preserve her and her beauty for the generations.

Albert once explained to Famke that he'd come to Denmark in hopes that, in a land without a significant artistic or cultural tradition, he might find some last remnant of the medieval life depicted by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to which he aspired. At home in his father's overstuffed, overheated rooms, he had thought of Famke's land as historically backward—or
primal, he amended when she'd learned enough to protest the first term—populated by simple peasants in wooden clogs, flower crowns, and brightly colored folk costumes, still living out the stark paradigms of Nordic mythology. He'd found more of the curlicued Renaissance and overstuffed nineteenth century than he'd anticipated, but nonetheless he'd fallen in love.

When Albert said that, Famke felt a thrill in her stomach, as if she were going to be sick, but in a good way. It left her belly tingling. But even though Albert repeated the word “love” quite slowly, she wasn't sure exactly what it was he'd fallen in love with. Before she could muster the courage to ask, he had moved on to another subject.

“If I hadn't come here, I would have gone to America. To the west.”

Famke stared up at the ceiling, which was water stained but marvelous, Albert said, for reflecting light onto color. “America . . . But that is so far away, so . . .” At Immaculate Heart, there had been a jigsaw puzzle from America, a picture of a vast snowy mountain ringed with purple wildflowers. The children had called it Mæka.

“That American west is a new land, and it holds a host of wonders for the artist—and yet it has seen no truly great painter. Yes, had I had the funds, that is where I would have gone . . . to the forests primeval, the mountains and plains, the mines, the canyons . . .”

Albert had reason to respect Mæka's ancient woods, for it was from good American cedar that his family's fortune had been made. His father would buy nothing else to make the innovative graphite pencils he manufactured, from a money-saving design that allowed six, rather than five, hexagonal cylinders to be cut from one block of wood. And just after Castle, Senior, decided to affirm his new social status by purchasing work from the era's fashionable artists, Albert's determination to become one of them had been born. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti came to the house to hang the Castles' first acquisition, a portrait that reminded Albert's father of the dear wife who had died shortly after presenting him with the boy for whom he had finally found room in his budget. Thin and hollow-eyed, but with a smile and a chin-chuck for little Albert, Rossetti had spent an hour or so in the gloomy cedar-paneled parlor. That brief moment of kindness had been a ray of moonshiney hope for the anxious little boy, who hid behind a tasseled settee and observed the careful measuring of the wall, the straightening of the frame, the earnest discussion between the sober
factory man and the painter in prime of life, both widowered. That afternoon, nine-year-old Albert decided to learn this magic trick for pleasing people. He would use every technique in Rossetti's arsenal: the goddesses, the eye for details, the colors.

To Famke, however, the most beautiful thing he had ever made was that first plain sketch from Dragør. When he wanted to toss it in the fire, claiming it was far from perfect—even far from a likeness—she whisked it out of his hands and wept so stormily that at last he allowed her to tack it to the wall above the washtub. It was the one work that he held inviolate, and as Famke scrubbed at the paint stains on his clothing or soaped her own legs and arms, she liked to look at it.

Her face, looking back at her, forever exactly the same.

The Danes had a splendid record for fighting in the middle ages and up to the last century, but have become an agricultural people, and their activity is devoted to making butter and beer, and raising poultry and hay. Copenhagen is the only city of any size.

W
ILLIAM
E
LEROY
C
URTIS
,
D
ENMARK
, N
ORWAY, AND
S
WEDEN

In a rare moment of introspection, it occurred to Famke that other people might consider she was making a fool of herself. She'd thought the same in Dragør about a milkmaid who trailed around after the local doctor, begging for rides in his buggy and dreaming up reasons he should examine her. And at the orphanage, when one of the girls developed a crush on Sister Birgit—the last person, Famke had thought with scorn, who'd look at an orphan
that
way—Famke had kissed the girl herself and deflected destiny. But now it might seem that she, too, Famke of the Immaculate Heart, had developed hopes above her station.

She was in love, with all the passion and force and urgency and trepidation of her years. She did not precisely look on Albert as a savior, but her life was vastly more enjoyable with him than without, and so he was a sort of hero. She had fallen in love by that first night, with pain and blood marking the sharp dart of love settling into her flesh. He smelled good, including the cheroots. She even loved his odd, froggy eyes, so placid in sleep that she kissed them tenderly as she watched over him. He was the first man she had known well, and because there had been nothing like him in her life before, she occasionally suspected it was foolish to hope he would always be there. And just as quickly, she dismissed those notions—after all, Albert himself told her all those nice fairy tales and myths, and hadn't he mentioned that the Pre-Raphaelites were prone to marrying their models?

One night, Famke felt Albert prop himself up among the pillows and
gaze down at her. “‘He who loveliness hath found,'” she heard him say, “‘he
color
loves, and . . .'”

Her eyes flew open at that. She rolled over and poked Albert to make him speak more. “John Donne,” he said, laughing. “Color is beauty, and you, darling . . . it would take a whole dye shop to describe you.” Then he sobered and took on that tedious tone of the bedtime lecturer, sinking back against the pillows, telling her about something called Old Masters and the National Gallery, the dulling effects of old varnish and the traditional artists' mistaken assumption that to paint like the masters they must limit their palettes to gray and brown . . . Albert intended, like his idol Rossetti, to reintroduce color to loveliness.

To Famke, all this meant was that he loved color; and that itself might mean . . .

Love gave her the stamina she needed to pose the long hours Albert demanded of her; and those hours were growing longer and longer, as he had determined that
Nimue
would be the first picture he finished: She would be perfect, complete, in all senses of the word. Accordingly, he studied the pose from every viewpoint and considered every nuance within the story. He moved the angle of Famke's arms a degree up or down, adjusted the backward thrust of one leg, tried combinations of hair braided and unbraided while Famke basked like a cat in the feel of his fingers. Again and again her lips, nails, and nipples turned blue, but Albert said that was appropriate—“because even a nymph would feel the chill.”