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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
'Emily Bain Murphy weaves an exquisite tale of mystery, enchantment and valor. I loved this spellbinding book!' Rebecca Ross, author of The Queen's Rising Magic, murder and a search for the truth: a thrilling fantasy adventure from the Waterstones Children's Book Prize-shortlisted author of The Disappearances Marit vowed never to use magic again - its force can be fatal. But when her best friend Eve is adopted by a legendary former dancer, Marit draws upon her powers to secure a job with the wealthy family so that she can watch over her. But Marit has another, secret motivation: her father died while working in the family's mines, and she has reason to believe he was murdered. Among the glittering surfaces and intrigues of her new life in Copenhagen, Marit begins to investigate her father's death. But every step closer to the truth brings more danger and soon she is caught in a deception that goes all the way up to the king. Magic may be the only thing that can save her - if it doesn't kill her first.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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i
PRAISE FORThe Disappearances
Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize
“Thick with mystery, buried secrets, and magic, nothing is safe in The Disappearances. Be careful, or you might lose yourself in this strange and wondrous world, where stars go missing, reflections don't exist, and the question, how much would you sacrifice for love? is given entirely new meaning. I adored this book!”
stephanie garber, author of Caraval
“The Disappearances is a wonder of a book. I lost myself in this world where reflections, scents and stars go missing, and revelled in its reveal”
kiran millwood hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink & Stars
“The Disappearances is purely poetic—a beautifully woven story with enough heart to take on its own life”
lindsay cummings, author of The Murder Complex
“The Disappearances is a dazzling debut, as glimmering as the Variants themselves, with a haunting mystery, wondrous world building, and a finely wrought family at its heart. I adored it”
jessica spotswood, author of The Cahill Witch Chronicles
iii
v
To anyone who is still searching for home. And for Pete—a plum.
vii
Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask?
søren kierkegaard
You can turn everything you look at into a story, and everything, even, that you touch.
hans christian andersen
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
william shakespeare
viii
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Marit Olsen November 7, 1866 Karlslunde, Denmark
THERE IS BLOOD ON EVE’S LACE.
I turn my palm as a fresh, incriminating bead blooms red on my fingertip. A new streak of crimson drips down the lace and onto the layers of tulle I just spent a week frothing to be as light as meringue.
With a yelp I drop my sewing needle and a hearty string of curses.
The most important performance of Eve’s life is tomorrow, and I’m bleeding across her costume like a stuck pig. I suck on the tip of my finger, tasting rust, and throw a furtive glance around Thorsen’s tailor shop. I am alone for once, tucked in the back behind reams of muted wools and intricate lace, silk scarves bursting with birds, a pincushion studded with needles and pearled buttons.
I could take more, I think. Thorsen keeps an unsorted stash of deliveries on the third floor. He might not notice the missing fabrics before I put aside my earnings from next week. I rise, 2remembering how I promised Eve I’d make her stand out tomorrow. I envisioned her in a costume dripping in glass beads so she’d reflect light like an icicle in the sun — not one that looks as though she practices arabesques for Nilas the butcher.
Tomorrow, a couple named Freja and Tomas Madsen are coming to the Mill orphanage, looking for a child to adopt. The thought of it makes my heart twist. I’ve poked around, wringing the barest answers out of tightlipped Ness, the orphanage director, and gleaning snatches from servants picking up their masters’ tailoring at the shop. From what I can tell, the Madsens live two towns away — still within a morning’s journey by carriage ride — and they might be Eve’s best chance of getting picked.
If I hurry, I can grab what I need for Eve’s costume before my roommate, Agnes, returns. Otherwise she’ll snitch on me before I even make it back downstairs.
But just as I reach the first step, the bell over the door tinkles, and Agnes herself bursts in with a swirl of leaves. I freeze with my hand on the banister.
“What are you doing?” she asks, unlooping her scarf. We work side by side in Thorsen’s shop and have boarded together in the cramped room upstairs since I aged out of the Mill myself three months ago. For someone who’s barely older than I am, Agnes is as nosy and crotchety as a spinster. But worse, actually, because she has more zest for snooping.
“I just …” I say, but she isn’t even listening.3
“Did you hear?” She cocks her head and smoothes her hair from the wind. My heart falters. She looks positively gleeful. The only time she ever looks that way is when she’s about to deliver bad news.
“What?” I whisper.
“The Mill’s in a panic. That prospective couple, the Madsens — they aren’t coming tomorrow anymore.” Agnes squints at me, her lips curling up into a miserable smile. “They’re coming today.”
My mouth goes dry. The deliciously selfish part of me whispers, Maybe now they won’t pick Eve. I kick at that thought like it’s a dog that won’t stop nipping at my ankles.
Agnes watches my reaction with growing pleasure, and when I turn, she follows. I stomp up to the second floor, trying to drive her away. “You know, I think I saw a mouse up here,” I call over my shoulder. She squeals and hesitates for half a moment until she sees me bypass our bedroom and continue on.
“Where are you going, Marit?” she yells, charging up the wooden stairs behind me. No one ever wanted either of us, but I hope I hide it better than she does. She aged out of the Mill a year before I did, and the bitterness has settled into her like rot — the kind that repels people with one whiff, the kind that doesn’t want anyone to have what she doesn’t. Don’t be Agnes, I tell myself. You want Eve to have a family. Even if it means they take her away — the last person I have left in the world.
Maybe this time my mind will finally stitch these lies well enough to hold.4
“I don’t know why you care so much,” Agnes says behind me. “The Madsens have plenty of girls to choose from. Eve has almost no chance of getting picked.”
“Stop talking, Agnes.” I round the landing to the third floor. Agnes is wrong. Ness must believe that Eve has a very good chance, in fact. Because Ness is having the girls dance. And Eve is the best dancer of them all.
“Unless, of course,” Agnes says, “Eve does something to … improve her odds.”
I pause on the final step. It gives a shrill creak under my weight.
“What do you mean?” I ask coldly.
“Nothing, really. Just that there have been rumors.” Agnes tuts her tongue. “Of magic.”
My blood warms and beats faster. I take the final stair and stop in front of the fabric closet.
“She’s always been good at dancing,” Agnes continues. “Unusually good. Perhaps unnatural.”
“Eve doesn’t have magic,” I say.
Magic. To excel in a single area since birth, like a savant, and do things others can do only in their dreams. Magic — the gift that comes with a hefty price. I shudder and think of my sister, Ingrid, of the blue frost that laced itself beneath the delicate skin of her wrists.
Agnes shrugs. “Using magic might get her picked,” she says in a singsong voice, “until the Firn turns her blood to ice.”5
I kneel to sort through the boxes, gritting my teeth. Agnes is such a shrew.
“Eve doesn’t have magic,” I repeat. “If anyone would know, it’s me.”
I grab a handful of fabric and a spool of gold thread before Agnes suddenly seems to notice what I’m doing. “Hey! You didn’t pay for that!” she cries.
I straighten. All I can think about is Eve, waiting for me at the Mill, her heart in her throat, her fingers tapping. How much I want the Madsens to pick her today; how much I don’t.
“I’ll tell Thorsen.” Agnes crosses her arms and steps in front of me, challenge swimming in her cold blue eyes. “He’ll kick you out, and I’ll have our room all to myself again.”
“In that case …” I shove past her and grab the small bottle of glass beads I’ve been dreaming about. “Might as well take these, too.”
Her scandalized gasp is faintly satisfying and I whirl around to close the distance between us, so that for once I am the threatening one.
“Strike a deal with me, Agnes,” I say. “What do you want?”
She narrows her eyes and thinks, smoothing the front of her apron. “Cover my lunch hours every day for a month,” she says. “Starting …” Below us, the grandfather clock bongs out twelve noon. “Now.”
I reach out my hand to shake and she purses her lips. But then she takes it and the agreement is made.6
“Don’t choke on your lunch!” I call, waving my contraband at her. She leaves me at the top of the stairs without acknowledgment.
Good, I think, trying to forget what she said. About magic and what it leaves behind, a Firn that frosts your veins until, eventually, it freezes you from the inside out.
My hands tighten around the beads.
Agnes has to be gone for what I’m about to do anyway.
CHAPTER TWO
I LOCK THE DOOR BEHIND AGNES and set the borrowed material on my work desk, pulling my chair closer to the glowing ink-black coal stove in the corner. The cobblestone street beyond the window is gray and wet with leaves, and the blunt edges of the windmill blades turn slowly beyond the roofs of the half-timbered houses. The people of Karlslunde hurry by the shop, heads ducked into the wind, pockets patched with stitches so ghastly they make my fingers itch.
I examine Eve’s ruined costume, seeking out the lace not marred with red. My hands shake as I sort through the fabric. When I was young, there was a horrible rhyme that was whispered in the streets and sung by little girls spinning in circles at the market: Magic flows like water; magic freezes like ice. Use too much and it costs a pretty price.
I glance out the window now, waiting until the street is clear. Orphans who have magic are equal parts valuable and vulnerable. If we fall into the wrong hands, we’ll be forced to use up our magic and burn out like a brief, bright flare.8
I shudder even now, picturing Thorsen finding out what I can do.
The street clears, and still, I hesitate. I haven’t used magic in almost two years. Emergencies only, I promised myself, and tucked away my magic like a weapon in a box, highly volatile and unstable. Well, this is an emergency, I tell myself. For Eve. I take a sharp breath as if I am preparing to dive into dark, cold water. Using magic is almost frighteningly easy — as simple as telling my lungs to fill themselves with a deep breath of air. It takes little more than a command, a slight concentration.
I close my eyes. It’s all right, I urge myself, my hands clenching. Such a tiny, inconsequential bit of magic won’t matter.
I uncurl my fists and immediately my fingers prickle and sing with long-dormant magic. I trace around each unstained piece of lace, faintly tapping each knot, and feel a thrill as something courses out of me and into the threads. I try not to think of the magic as something precious pouring out of me — or as a fuse being lit. The truth is, I forgot how quick and easy it is. How dizzyingly good magic feels. At my slightest touch, the knots untangle themselves and loosen.
The patch of lace falls into my hand, as delicate as spun glass, as intricate as a snowflake.
Without Agnes hovering over me, it takes all of seven minutes to reconstruct the tulle, a stiff, intricate honeycomb that would have cost me hours to do by hand. I work swiftly, heart thrumming, and transfer the old layers of lace onto the bodice like patches of stained glass.9
I glance at the clock. Maybe the Madsens will pick someone else, I think. I uncork the gold and white beads I took and touch them to the fabric. The thread instantly winds itself tight to hold them in place, as easily as if I were pushing a plump berry into a frosted cake. Maybe I can save enough money to adopt Eve myself someday.
It’s a thought I’ve never let myself look at too hard or too long, and my heart suddenly tightens along with the final knot. Today, I tell myself fiercely — today the best thing for Eve is to be picked by the Madsens. So I will give her the best chance I can — this tutu laced with magic.
And then I’ll let the chips fall as they may.
I hastily throw the costume over my arm, lock the door behind me, and half run up the sloping street to the orphanage. I’m taking an enormous risk. If Thorsen finds the shop empty, Agnes and I will both be thrown out on the street. I run past the butcher shop that reeks of iron, the soot-soaked windows of the blacksmith, the tannery with its sagging roof. Waves of cholera and Denmark’s two Schleswig Wars created plenty of drudges like me — orphans who run these places and spend our wages to board above them, half-starved and always in debt, our entire lives reduced to the span of one block. I quicken my pace as the warped roof of the Mill comes into sight. Ten years ago, my father was working in an underground network of limestone mines when the earth gave out over him and twelve others in the worst mining accident Denmark has ever seen. The Firn took my sister less than a month later, and 10suddenly, like a candle being snuffed out, I had no more family left in this world.
I don’t want that for Eve. At eleven, she still has the slimmest chance of being picked. But today could be her last one.
I slip into the orphanage through the kitchen door, past the crooked back of Silas the cook, and dart up the side stairs. It smells like cloves and cardamom, which means he’s making kanelstænger — cinnamon twists. In the drafty dormitory room on the second floor, Eve and another orphan, Gitte, are crowding in front of the mirror, slicking their hair up into high buns.
I exhale in relief. I’m not too late.
The tips of my fingers still tingle like frost.
Gitte finishes her hair first and nudges Eve. “You coming?”
Eve catches my eye in the mirror’s reflection. “In a minute.” She pulls at the dull pink costume that Ness scrounged up from somewhere. It hangs lumpily in some places and stretches too tightly in others.
Gitte nods to me on her way out. “Ness says the Madsens will be here any moment.”
I remember the day Eve arrived at the Mill. Most of the young ones either mewed like pitiful kittens their first few days or cooed with lowered lashes. Eve was silent: dark haired, brown skinned, her deep brown eyes flashing. She barely said a word for half a year. Until her Wubbins caught on a spring one morning and ripped right down the middle. Wubbins, a 11horrible rag supposedly in the shape of a rabbit, missing an eye and with stuffing that never quite lies right. Eve came to me, holding him out, her eyes brimming. “Can you mend him?” she asked. I was the first — the only — person she ever asked anything of.
Now, petite at eleven, she is exactly eye-line with my heart.
“Marit!” she says, turning toward me. When our eyes meet, her face blooms into the loveliest grin. “How’d you even know to come?”
“Agnes was finally good for something,” I say, holding out the tutu. “Unintentionally, of course. Here.”
Eve leaps for her costume. “Look at this!” she crows, her finger tips admiring the fabric. “Are you trying to get me sent away?”
My stomach clenches and I turn my back. “Hurry.”
She changes as I look at a small square of gray sky. The first week I aged out of the Mill, I snuck out of Thorsen’s and walked here every night to gaze up at the dormitory room, surprised by my homesickness for Ness, for Eve, for my own bed. On the fourth night, I caught Eve through the window, practicing pirouettes in the mottled light from the street lamp when everyone else was asleep. I watched her for an hour, and by the time I returned to Thorsen’s, hope had somehow brightened like coals within me.
I wonder, my heart closing up like a night flower, exactly how 12many minutes of separation it takes to turn someone you love into a stranger.
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Do you need help with the buttons?”
Eve gives a small squeal of delight in response. “Do I look like Helene Vestergaard?” she asks, twirling at her reflection. Helene Vestergaard, the Mill orphan who grew up to become one of Denmark’s most celebrated ballerinas. When the other young orphans wanted to hear Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and the older ones wanted scary lore about the nightmare demon Mare the Vette, Eve always, always wanted stories about Helene Vestergaard.
“Even better than Helene Vestergaard,” I tell her, and yet the embers of a deep grudge suddenly flare up within me at the name. Helene danced her way into a status none of us at the Mill had ever dreamed of — onto the Danish royal stage and into the glittering ranks of the wealthy Vestergaard family through marriage. I never told Eve about my own bitter connection to the Vestergaards. How their mines were the ones my father died in. How the Vestergaards barely sent enough restitution to cover my father’s funeral, let alone the one that followed for my sister a month later. Instead I recited stories of Helene Vestergaard’s legendary rise and then held my tongue, with her name still sitting on it long after Eve had drifted off, and wondered at how the ballerina’s life was a strange mirror to my own: Helene left the Mill for a future with the Vestergaards and their mines — and the Vestergaard mines took my future and sent me to the Mill. A 13full circle of sorts, hers the light side of my own dark coin, this strange connection I could never shake.
“Marit,” Eve says. She pulls on her shoulder strap and shivers with anticipation. “It could really happen today.”
“It could,” I say brightly. I blink, trying hard not to think about what she looked like at age four, when she climbed into bed with me at night because the sound of the wind scared her.
“Which means this might be the last time we’re together …” she continues.
I turn away. I know what she wants from me, and I fumble with the ties on my apron, instantly uncomfortable.
“Please,” she says softly. “I deserve to know, don’t I? You promised you’d tell me someday.” Her worn shoes whisper against the wood floor.
Years ago, she overheard the older girls gossiping about things that she was almost old enough to understand. That her mother had magic; that it had killed her. I’ve never outright lied to Eve about having magic of my own. But it’s a secret I’ve never shared with anyone, holding it tightly to myself since the night my sister died. And talking about the Firn always sheared a little too close to other questions I didn’t want to answer.
“All right,” I finally say, focusing on a strand of hair that escaped her bun. “Yes, I suppose you’re old enough now to hear it. I do think your mother might have had the Firn. I overheard Ness talking once.”
Eve’s shoulders turn stiff. “My mother was too careless with 14magic?” She swallows hard, as if I’ve confirmed something she’s always feared. “When I was a baby? She … chose it over me?”
“It’s never as simple as that,” I say. I sweep back the wayward curl with a pin. “Try to think of magic as a strategy game with very high stakes.” I sigh. “And sometimes … maybe it’s worth the gamble. Maybe it’s the best choice out of two hard choices.”
“A game.” Sadness shadows her eyes, as if it’s pooling somewhere deep within her. The very thing I’ve always tried to keep away. “A game she lost,” she whispers.
I give her a tight nod and think, And my sister, Ingrid, too.
“Eve?” Ness yells up the stairs.
“Coming!” Eve calls. She suddenly looks up at me, her dark eyes blazing in the gray half light of the dormitory room. “But are you certain, Marit? Because … I don’t have magic.”
I suspected this but now relief floods through me, strong enough that I could collapse. “That’s good,” I say softly. She wraps her arms around me, and I hug her back, feeling the delicate knit of her bones.
“Marit, wait. You don’t either — right?” she asks, suddenly pulling away.
I remember her small, stunned face all those years ago when I handed her Wubbins back, miraculously healed. The feel of magic is finally receding from my fingers, the pleasant chill warming. I fight the sudden urge to look at my fingertips, at the thin skin on my wrists.
“Of course not.” I push her toward the door.15
When she reaches the hallway, she turns back, shimmering. The light catches in the beads I took.
“Good,” she echoes me. She smiles. “Then we both have nothing to fear.”
CHAPTER THREE
DOWNSTAIRS, IN THE MILL’S SITTING ROOM, the rug is pushed back from the worn floor near the fireplace to create a makeshift stage. The rickety chairs are arranged in a semicircle to flank the seats of honor, two grand wingback armchairs with splatters of tea and sunlight faded into their arms. The scene is the same as when I grew up here: all of us forced into some sort of show whenever Ness caught wind that a potential parent was coming to visit. She tried to make us look as desirable as possible: sitting in dirt, weeding the Mill’s pathetic excuse for a vegetable garden for the woman who expressed interest in horticulture; positioning us with thick books around the hearth when an academic came to call. Most often, the girls with the golden voices were urged to sing while the rest of us sipped weak tea from the nice china and ate the flaky, cinnamon-flecked twists of kanelstænger. The children who could sing were always snatched up without fail.
But today is Eve’s best chance to shine — because today, Ness has the girls dancing.17
The girls who aren’t performing take chairs in the audience. The fire pops, and there’s a whistle of wind through the crack in the window. No one speaks to me, even though I’ve been gone for only three months. I know why. I am a reminder of a future they don’t want to think about.
Ness glances at the clock.
The tea grows cold.
I left Thorsen’s shop close to an hour ago and the seats of honor remain empty. Every minute I stay is reckless — another minute of idiocy. Eve has wrapped a long sweater around her to cover her costume and continues standing with perfect, expectant posture, even as the other dancers slump against the wall or slide into the audience seats. When she was seven, she spent hours flipping through a book of painted ballerinas, studying their poses until the spine shed its pages like leaves.
Helene Vestergaard was the one who sent that book to the Mill.
Now Eve bends to warm her muscles, and when she nervously taps a silent pattern into the wall with her fingers, I try not to think about all the wages I’ve just gone and wasted on the tutu.
“Perhaps they aren’t coming today after all —” Ness says, but Eve’s head jerks up at a cracking knock on the front door. A middle-aged man and woman step in, eyes bright. The man has a salt-and-pepper handlebar mustache and expresses his regret about the hour. Ness brushes away his apology and leads the couple to the sitting room, where a pretty girl named Tenna presents them with hot teas and a curtsy. I begrudgingly admit that 18I like the woman’s smile, and my throat constricts as they take their seats in the wingback chairs. I check the clock again as they settle in to listen to a trio of girls sing a simple harmony with clear, high voices. Tenna reads a passage of Scripture from the Mill’s worn Bible, and then Ness gestures at the queue of dancers.
They trot out in a line organized by height, the smallest ones wrapped in mothy tulle with ribbon rosebuds sewn into their hair. I know Ness is doing the best job she can but it’s awful, to feel like a piece of candy displayed behind a window, picked out by someone’s particular taste, hoping that the person who wants you is offering a decent life and not a new kind of nightmare. I watch Eve as she strides out, her tutu still hidden beneath her sweater, and I flush with the sudden memory of the last time I used magic. It was two years ago, when I knew full well I was too old to ever be adopted. But in one last moment of desperation, I used magic to sew myself a new dress. I’ll never forget the look on Eve’s face when she saw me that morning and understood just how much I wanted to get picked — even if it meant leaving her behind. In the end it didn’t matter, because that family chose Anja, who had a cherubic smile and a horrendous penchant for temper tantrums, and I cried hot tears into my pillow that night that I’d used precious magic and hurt Eve for nothing. I gave the dress away in the morning, casting it off along with my final dream of ever being adopted.
In fact, I see the dress right now, the embroidered high collar looking only a little worse for wear, on one of the older orphans setting out biscuits in the front.19
And then Eve drops her sweater, and the entire room gasps.
I sit back in the shadows, a blush of pride and pleasure warming my face at the way she glows in her costume, but she doesn’t seem to notice the audience’s reaction; she juts her chin in the air, finds her pose, and waits, her muscles as taut as pulled string.
Elin sits at the toy piano to play something light and lively, and Eve waits behind the row of smaller girls. The tempo builds, and builds, until my foot is tapping along almost without permission; and when Eve’s cue comes, it is as though she has spent years gathering the music within herself for this very moment.
Eve finally unhooks the latch and sets it free.
She bends and lengthens, fluid and lithe. The room has a draft from the gap where the window glass doesn’t quite kiss the sill; there’s a faint smell of mothballs that even the brewing tea can’t conceal; but it is as though Eve steps out to dance in a space beyond it. Oh, I love her. She makes the other girls look as though their limbs have been hewn from wood and set on rusted hinges.
I want to grab Mrs. Madsen’s arm and tell her that Eve’s never had a true lesson in her life. That she simply feels the music and translates it into dance, as naturally as speaking another language.
Only imagine, I want to plead, what she could be with a real home, actual instruction. What she could be with you.
Eve dances as though her heart has melted and is now pouring in golden, aching fire through her veins. I almost can’t tear 20my eyes away from her to observe the Madsens, who are watching with intent expressions. My heart knots in twin vines of hope and fear at the look that is dawning on their faces. A look as if they know they’ve seen their daughter for the first time.
As the music comes to a climax, Eve throws her legs into an effortless, improvised jeté. She finishes flushed and breathless and stares out at all of us with eyes that are fire.
The Madsens clap and the girls bow and drift into the dining room to set out dishes of meatballs, gherkins, dark slices of rye bread, chicken with brown sauce and rhubarb compote, gløgg flush with golden raisins. My heart is in my throat when the Madsens usher Ness over with a wave of their hands.
“We’d like to speak with one of the girls,” Mrs. Madsen says, and I follow her long, thin finger to the side of the room where Eve stands. I draw in a shaking breath.
“Eve?” Ness asks. Eve curtsies.
“No,” Mrs. Madsen says. “The blond one next to her.”
My breath catches. She means Gitte. Gitte, who wasn’t nearly as good as Eve, not by half. I see Eve blink rapidly. She has a smile plastered on her face that makes me hate them all, and myself, too, because if I’m honest, I am overjoyed.
“Gitte! Come here! Come speak with the Madsens, here, in the private foyer! And then … a feast!” Ness says, beaming.
I take a step toward Eve. I’m going to tell her my plan, right now. That I’m going to save up enough money so that maybe we could make our own future someday. That if no one picks us, 21then we can still pick each other. I’m halfway to her when I suddenly hear the sound of another woman’s voice.
“Ness,” the woman says softly, a whisper from the shadows behind us. The whole room turns toward her in shock. She must have slipped in when the girls were performing and I was distracted.
My head whips toward her, my heart pumping and pounding as I strain to see. The woman steps from the shadows into the light.
“I’d like to speak with one of the girls privately too, if I may.”
What I notice first are her long ballerina legs and the glittering pins in her hair. Her glass necklace catches the light to show a hammer and pick. The Vestergaard mining crest.
I turn in slow motion to watch Eve. She’s frozen, her breaths coming short and shallow. But I see the stunned look of disbelief on her face at the exact moment when she realizes who it is.
Helene Vestergaard.
The woman’s eyes trace around the room until they come to rest on Eve.
She gives a small smile, extends a graceful hand, and says softly: “You.”
CHAPTER FOUR
HELENE VESTERGAARD’S EYELIDS are outlined with ink, sweeping up into a delicate point. She has thick hair the color of hickory pulled up in a pin gleaming with glass flowers. Her coat is a lush coal-black velvet embroidered with intricate golden and pink blossoms that must be worth at least two years of my salary. Once upon a time, she was an orphan here, sleeping in the drafty room upstairs. Now she has turned into a stunning beauty, a commanding presence that sucks up all the air in the room. And she is the richest person I’ve ever seen in the flesh. When Aleksander Vestergaard died a year ago, he left his wife of seven years everything — including his vast mining empire.
The sight of her resurrects the resentment I’ve tried so hard to bury over the years. It slips out like smoke between the teeth of a steel trap.
I stumble forward as Helene leads Eve to the private room near the kitchen. They disappear inside, and the door shuts behind them.23
My blood pumps hot and fiercely in my ears, and a copper taste fills my mouth. The idea of the Madsens was hard enough.
To lose Eve to a Vestergaard is unfathomable.
The other orphan girls turn and scatter.
But I follow Ness to the little office set under the curve of the stairway, charging in after her.
“You moved the Madsens’ visit to today, didn’t you?” I demand, putting my hands on my hips. “You asked them to come early?”
Ness shrugs and riffles through her papers. “I invited all of them here,” she says dismissively. “I had a hunch Helene might take an interest in Eve. They are similar in many ways. And yes, I’ve found that a little competition never hurts to get one of you adopted.” Ness is shrewd, and I do think she cares for us, in her own way. She is always looking to throw us a bone. Never one of her own, of course — but she wouldn’t hesitate to pluck out someone else’s, if it might help one of us.
“It is all working out exactly as hoped.” Ness looks up at me, eyes sharp. “You should be happy for her.”
“Where does Helene live, Ness?” I ask. I can hear the desperation creeping into my own voice.
“North of Copenhagen.”
“That’s a full day’s journey from here,” I say, nerves making my voice climb even higher. “I’ll never see Eve again!”
Ness lets out an exasperated sigh. “Eat some bread, Marit.” She jingles a key and kneels in front of her filing drawers. “Don’t be naive. You know as well as I do that most parents in here took one look at Eve and didn’t even consider her.”24
I noticed. But I tried to tell myself it wasn’t because she stood out in the sea of white orphans and parents. That it had nothing to do with the fact that her mother was West Indian and her father could have been almost anyone.
“I’ve never known you to be selfish, girl,” Ness continues. “At least try to think rationally.”
“Perhaps I can’t think rationally when it comes to the Vestergaards,” I say through clenched teeth and with a tone I never would have used when I lived under Ness’s roof. “My father died in their mines, remember?”
Her voice is frigid. “Yes, it was a terrible accident. Yet where do you think those linens on your bed came from last Christmas? Who do you think regularly sends money to pay for shoes — the king of Denmark?” She fixes me with the icy gaze that makes even the most grown orphans shrink back. “Marit,” she says, drawing out her words slowly and unflinchingly, “can you offer Eve something better?”
I take a sharp breath.
Ness finds Eve’s papers, stands, and ushers me out the door.
Eve and Helene are emerging from their meeting, and the look on Eve’s face is somewhere between triumph and terror. When Mrs. Vestergaard gives Ness a slight nod, I see the glint of glass around Eve’s neck.
No.
A hammer and pick.
The Vestergaard crest.25
The wrong side of the coin, turning up in my life again.
Ness clasps her hands together and says, “A feast!”
Eve seeks me out as she and Helene walk toward me, and I can see in her eyes that she knows this is goodbye, this painful fissure of our old life and new splitting as clean as a rip. I swallow, trying hard not to cry. Instead I fix my eyes on Helene’s coat as it trails behind her, the embroidered golden coils of vines and flowers spilling across the floor, and a deep, guttural scream builds within me.
Don’t be selfish, something inside of me is pleading. Don’t be Agnes. But I’m so desperate I suddenly don’t care. Why do the Vestergaards get to keep taking the people I love?
At the exact moment the hem of Helene’s exquisite coat sweeps across a jutting piece of a half-rusted pipe next to the bottom stair, I have a sudden, brilliant, terrible idea.
I step forward, putting my foot down on the coat with the full force of my weight.
The fabric catches and instantly rips with a horrible sound.
“Oh!” Helene exclaims, turning.
I retreat into the shadows.
“Heavens!” Ness says. She kneels to the rip and clasps her wrinkled hands together. “Oh, it must have snagged on this pipe, here. What an unhappy accident.” She shoots me a look of daggers. “I’m so sorry, Helene. I’ve been meaning to have that pipe fixed.”
I look at Eve’s stricken face, her brief moment of happiness 26as ripped through as the coat, and I step forward to stand beside her. My emotions are fractals, turning wildly in a kaleidoscope. Sadness, fear, desperation.
“Excuse me,” I say to Mrs. Vestergaard, and give a deferential curtsy, “but I’m a seamstress by trade. Might I mend it for you?”
“Yes — Marit can help!” Eve says urgently, as if Helene’s misfortune might make her suddenly change her mind. “Marit is matchless. She’s the one who made my costume.” The curl I pinned earlier has slipped out again to graze the spattering of dark freckles across her right cheek.
“I’m not sure …” Helene looks at me. “This would be an extraordinarily intricate job. I think it’s ruined.”
“Then you won’t mind if I try,” I say, boldly holding out my hand.
Helene exchanges a look with Ness, who gives a slight nod.
“All right,” Helene says, relenting. “Thank you. Do your best and let me know what the cost will be.” She strips off the coat, revealing a cream patterned jaconet dress with a crisp necktie and tiers that pour out from her small waist like water spilling from a fountain. “We’re staying at the Vindmølle Kro tonight,” she says, offering the coat to me. Her eyes linger on mine for half a beat, almost as if issuing me a challenge. “And we leave in the morning.”
“I’ll bring it there,” I say with confidence, and take the coat from her.
What I’ve done today might cost me my job, my board at Thorsen’s, and any goodwill I ever had with Ness — but at least 27I’ve bought myself a chance to see Eve one more time. I look her in the eyes and say, “I’ll come to the Kro.” Then I hug the coat, careful to keep my heart clenched tighter than a fist within my chest, and run.
Thorsen beat me back to the shop.
As soon as I round the corner, I can see his meat-red face through the window, shouting at Agnes and pointing to my empty work desk. Cursing, I duck into an alley and clutch the coat to my chest. I could lie — say I was called out to pick up this job for Mrs. Vestergaard. But I suddenly feel too worn and raw to face either of them. I turn on my heel to steal up the back alley and sit on the cleanest stoop I can find, feeling the cold of the stone seep into my skin. At best, Thorsen will dock my pay for weeks — which is unfortunate, since I already spent it all on Eve’s fabric. At worst, I’m fired, without so much as a single rigsdaler saved to my name. And after the stunt I pulled at Ness’s, I’m probably not welcome there tonight.
But one thing at a time. I am alone in a narrow alley, and I consider the row of windows above me: the shutters all closed, the shades mostly drawn. The windmill blades turn lazily above my head. I’ve never allowed myself this much magic. Not so many times so close together. And never, ever in public.
I take a deep breath and smooth out Helene Vestergaard’s coat, examining its mess of rips and spidering threads. I run my 28fingertips over each fissure, and imagine what the stitching used to look like with its golden tendrils and vines. Magic stirs within me and my veins feel a sparking rush; even beneath my dread of the Firn I shiver with the pleasant chill of magic. I let it flow through me, delicately running my fingertips along the coat’s frayed edges. The threads find one another and knit themselves back together under my touch.
I think of what my father would say. He forbade me to use magic when he was alive. He feared it, and he was right to.
I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to see what it did to Ingrid.
A few centuries ago, under a different king, we would have been burned at the stake for having even a whiff of magic. Now it’s more or less understood that the greatest danger we pose is to ourselves. People avert their eyes and mostly pretend we don’t exist, because the goods that underground magic can produce are useful — despite the unpleasant side effect that the magic might eventually kill us. But even at the age of six, I understood nothing good could come from someone who wanted an orphan with magic. The penny paper stories would make my toes curl up inside my boots: of people being kidnapped and forced to use their magic until the crystalline frost of the Firn filled their bloodstreams and killed them. Sometimes I joined in telling late-night ghost stories at the Mill so no one else would suspect; but it hurt to sit there, listening to the other children’s voices in the dark. They whispered that we had deep blue bones and insatiable appetites, and that when we died we were jealous of the living. They called us draugar — “again-walkers” — because 29the Firn sometimes leaves people’s bodies contorted in unnatural positions, sitting upright after their veins crystallize with ice, as though they’re someday planning to return. The adults would shush the children, insisting that those were little more than silly legends and stories. Yet old fears and customs die hard. We may not be burned at the stake anymore — but they make sure we are always cremated.
I suddenly see Ingrid standing in front of me, the ghost of a memory from years past.
“I think,” she whispers, blinking down at her wrists in a daze, “I think I went too far.”
I grit my teeth, feeling the tense fear of the Firn build in a gathering storm along my jaw. I shouldn’t think of that memory now.
Instead I examine Mrs. Vestergaard’s coat and even let myself smile a little at my work. The rift has vanished, as though it was never there at all — as if the threads knew exactly where they were always supposed to belong. I don’t have any money to spend warming myself with a coffee in a café, and I certainly can’t return to my room at Thorsen’s, so I wrap Helene Vestergaard’s own coat around my shoulders and sink into its softness. There’s the faintest hint of her perfume, lingering. It smells like spring and paper white blossoms.
Perhaps I can find my own way to Copenhagen.
I can still see little Eve blinking her large, dark eyes up at me, holding out Wubbins. How sternly she instructed me to mend only his tear, not the rest of him, because she liked him perfect 30and ugly just as he was. That was the day she started to thread her way into my closed heart, despite the fact I never wanted her to. Because I always feared this day would come. And I don’t want to know what will happen tomorrow when all those reluctant stitches of hers are suddenly ripped out.
The sky inks with night as I make my way past Mathies’s Bakery, with its torn gold-and-red-striped awning that sags a little bit more with each snowfall. At Christmastime, Mathies always gave each of us orphans a honey heart biscuit, hardened and brushed with melted chocolate, and I ate mine all at once, but Eve would wrap and hide hers under her bed and take one tiny bite each day to make it last until New Year’s. I pause in front of his window, catching the scent of bread wafting from the inside, wondering what the world would be like if I could walk along and fix it all with the touch of my finger. Every tatter, every hole worn into the knee of a pant, every sad, old awning. How much good I could do, if it didn’t threaten to cost me so much.
I wonder if there is someone out there like me, who can mend the rips and tears in people.
Hidden by dusk, emboldened by the magic that I can still feel humming in my veins, I hesitate. Then I dart my hand out and pass my fingers ever so briefly over Mathies’s awning.
Maybe tomorrow, if my plan fails and Eve has left forever, I will come back and watch for the moment he discovers the awning is fixed.
It is still mending itself as I hug Helene’s coat tighter to me and hurry away.31
The Vindmølle Kro sits on the outskirts of town, a white-and-olive-colored inn with a thatched roof. The chimney from the second cottage sends out puffs of smoke that are as thick and white as whipped cream. The air smells like cinnamon pears and burning leaves.
I rap sharply on the door.
“Who is it?” a voice calls from inside.
I clear my throat. “It’s Marit Olsen. With your coat?”
I thrust it at Helene Vestergaard the minute she opens the door. Behind her, Eve is already wearing a new crimson dress with satin rose ribbons and black boots that are as shiny as oil. A new trunk is open at her feet, and inside I see the glint of the gold beads of her tutu.
I turn away from an embarrassing prick of jealousy — wondering what it must feel like, after all those years of yearning, to finally be picked.
Helene takes the coat from me and examines it. Her expression is unreadable.
“You work at a tailor shop?” she finally asks. I nod and she gestures me inside a room with exposed ceiling beams and thick quilts folded at the ends of the two straw beds.
“Marit did well, didn’t she?” Eve asks. The fire crackles in the hearth, and the hammer and pick pendant gleams from her neck. She looks to Helene and me: her gaze bouncing between her past and her future. I desperately try to memorize her dark freckles, 32the mole just below her ear, the way her hair tufts up like soft down around her temples.
“Yes, Eve,” Helene says. She runs her fingers over the whorls. “This stitching is magnificent.” For the first time, I force myself to really look at her as she uncinches a small purse embroidered with flowers. Her eyes are a rich brown — honey dark and intelligent, surrounded by thick lashes and a high arch of cheekbone — and her wrists are small and delicate as a robin’s egg. My finger nails seem so blunt and jagged, bitten to the quick.
“How much would you like for the work?” Helene asks.
“Actually,” I say, “I’d like to request something different as payment.”
Helene cocks a sharp eyebrow and watches me with interest.
Eve stills behind us, listening.
“I’d like you to recommend me to a tailor in Copenhagen,” I say. “Based on the quality of the work I’ve done on your coat.”
I look at her, biting my lower lip. Asking for a favor, from one Mill orphan to another.
Surely a word of recommendation from Helene will go a long way in Copenhagen. Surely she has a tailor who will be eager to please her. And I would still have a chance of seeing Eve sometimes, when they came to the shop. It’s my last, best hope.
“You made Eve’s tutu, as well?” Helene asks, studying me. “Have you done much costume work?”
“Some,” I lie. 33
Helene shuffles through a healthy stack of rigsdalers. “It’s an interesting proposition,” she muses. “But I’d like to raise you a counteroffer. I’ve been looking for someone with truly exceptional skill to make my clothing, and now Eve’s.” The fire gives a loud crack from the hearth.
“Perhaps you would like to come work for me,” she says.
The air in the room instantly stills.
