by Emily Butler
She was nobody. She was nothing.
The shame of being as featherless as a chick was something Freya never conquered. She hadn’t known shame at all until the day she arrived on her aunt’s doorstep and saw herself as her aunt saw her, repulsive and puny. Then shame washed over her like a river of dark muck. Of course she was not allowed to attend school until her feathers grew back. This took many months, most of which Freya spent wrapped in a Persian blue shawl that had belonged to her mother. At last it became so tattered that Aunt Agatha had it burned.
Aunt Agatha was as selfish a penguin as ever lived. In that day and age, she was what was known as a spinster. That’s not a very pleasant word, maybe, but it wasn’t a very pleasant time to be old and unmarried. There were in general two directions a spinster might take. She could devote herself to the needy penguins in her neighborhood, making sure they had soup to eat, warm underclothes, and someone to listen to their troubles. If Freya’s aunt had been this variety of spinster, oh, how differently things might have turned out! Sadly, she was of the second sort: tight, prudish and aloof. To recognize the needs of another penguin, let alone one who was bald and bewildered, was quite impossible. It was out of the question. It would never do.
There is some debate as to whether Agatha had ever been a child. If she had, it was not a stage that left much of an impression on her mind. To have a child show up and actually require things of her was unacceptable. She determined to put an end to that at once. It was she who would require things of Freya, and here is a list of those requirements:
No disorderly conduct, for that is anarchy
No profanity, audible or imagined
No balderdash or telling of puns
No cherry-flavored cough drops (only eucalyptus)
No breathing through one’s mouth
No sidelong glances, for they are not to be borne
No wallowing in grief, or happiness
No unseemly books
No lewd laughter
No scratching
No birthdays
No pastels
No toys
“No school” might have easily appeared on that list, had the law allowed it.
Fortunately, it did not. With the greatest reluctance, Aunt Agatha permitted Freya to walk the four blocks to and from the large stone building where young penguins were educated.
One wishes one could say, honestly, that school was a glorious deliverance for Freya. That was not the case. It’s true that she was a good student (particularly in poetry—she proved to have a sensitive understanding of this subject, and a terrific memory). But she was an odd bird, and penguins (like most creatures who walk the earth) do not like odd. A student can be annoying or silly and manage to fit in. She can even be mean and still have a friend or two. The one thing she cannot be at school is odd.
Yes, Freya was odd. She never overcame the humiliating loss of her feathers. Of course they had for the most part grown back (the thin spots on her back and shoulders were well covered by her uniform), but something was wrong. By the time penguins are old enough to go to school, their yellow feathers have come in. Beautiful golden plumes adorn their heads, often starting just above their eyes. Sometimes they crop up in obedient stripes, and sometimes they shoot out in a sensational, spiky profusion. But they are always remarkable, and everyone has them. Everyone but Freya.
“Where are your yellows?” asked her classmates, first from curiosity and later from cruel spite. “Freya’s got no yellows! She looks like a baby!” was their daily observation. So Freya took to wearing a hat, indoors and out. She even wore a hat to bed. Wild horses could not drag Freya’s hat off her head. It was just a matter of time before students began to call her Freyhat, and she went by this name until the day she graduated.
In the years after she finished school, Freya watched as her classmates paired off to start their own families, or opened dress shops, or became paleontologists or musicians. Some stayed on at school as teachers. One penguin, whom Freya had privately admired very much, wrote a book of poetry that won awards, both locally and abroad.
What Freya herself did was, in a word, nothing.
Perhaps “nothing” is an exaggeration. After all, she lived with Aunt Agatha as something between a companion and a servant. She kept the house tidy and prepared their meals. She sent the laundry out (but pressed and starched their collars herself). She read at night from a book of her aunt’s choosing, usually a merciless compilation of wisdom from a prior century. She attended no parties, no picnics, no plays, no excursions to the seashore, and never, under any circumstances, did she go to the opera. This was easier than you might suppose, because she was never invited.
Things changed slightly when she came into her inheritance. Before that, Aunt Agatha had given her so little pocket money that she couldn’t afford the fare to go downtown, let alone buy a dish of meatballs when she got there. But after her inheritance was settled, Freya took a few liberties. To begin with, she ordered a better hat. She also frequented bookstores and allowed herself an occasional purchase.
One day, through a bookseller’s window, Freya spied a small text bound in leather of Persian blue, embossed in gold with words that read “Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad, by Mrs. L. C. Davidson.” Overcome with the desire to possess this article, she rushed into the shop and acquired it immediately. It was not at all in keeping with her normal behavior, which was the opposite of impulsive. Not until much later did she recall the blue shawl that had belonged to her mother, the one that had enfolded her securely until Aunt Agatha abolished it.
Whatever the reason for her strange spontaneity, the book was the second thing that changed Freya’s life forever. Travel literature written for females had become fantastically popular, but this was her first glimpse into the world of cycling tours and dress hampers and passports. She read it from cover to cover, and then again, and then once more. Every “hint” was pondered and imagined. Should one really provide each pair of shoes, boots and slippers “with a bag of its own, made of Holland linen bound round neatly with braid”? Mrs. Davidson seemed to think so. Was accident insurance a smart idea? Yes, it was, said Mrs. Davidson.
In short, Freya became obsessed with the idea of travel. She pored over train schedules, memorized exchange rates and dreamed of ocean liners. She ordered a trunk with removable trays, and a copper foot warmer covered in green wool. She practiced lighting a clever pint-sized stove in case she should have to boil a cup of water in the middle of the night at a boardinghouse where the kitchen fire had been extinguished.
But the gulf separating Freya’s imaginations from real action was vast. One might think that spending a week in (let us say) Paris, munching on baguettes, would be a simple matter of buying tickets and packing a suitcase. In this, one would be completely mistaken. That is not how things were back then, and that is certainly not how things were for Freya. She had become both her aunt’s custodian and her prisoner. Who would dispense Auntie’s pills twice a day, if not Freya? Who would push Auntie’s wheelchair up and down the street in the afternoon and then give her tea, but Freya? Who would fetch Auntie her reading glasses when she called for them? Dust the parlor? Water the violets? Society frowned upon penguins who forsook their elderly relatives for a thing as frivolous as traveling.
Then Aunt Agatha did something generous for the first time in her life: she choked on a dumpling and died.
Independence was hardly immediate. Experience is the best teacher, and Freya’s experiences had taught her to do very little of her own free will. When Aunt Agatha was alive, she obeyed Aunt Agatha. Who would guide her now?
Who, indeed. Waiting in the wings, just as bossy but far more benevolent, was Mrs. Davidson. That voice, an insistent whisper for so long, grew in volume until it was a loud roar in Freya’s ears. Go forth! said Mrs. Davidson of the Persian blue book. Wander! Be a traveler!
Ev
en so, it took Freya a year to muster the resolve to leave her aunt’s house. An entire year was devoted to this decision, as unimaginable as it sounds. However, when at last she assembled her luggage and had it conveyed to the port, where it would be loaded onto a steamer, Freya meant business. The what, how and why of her adventure had been endlessly debated; the where of it had not. There had never been a question of destination. Freya longed to go back to the white house with the red roof and the apple trees and the elderflower bushes. She would go home to Denmark.
Of course she could have sailed to Denmark directly, but that was little more than a ferry crossing, and nothing like the odyssey of her fantasies. What would a real traveler do? Mrs. Davidson had written favorably of sea voyages, and they seemed to have an element of romance that Freya had most categorically never known.
She decided to take a cruise around the archipelago of northern islands called Svalbard, famous for its rugged beauty. A cruise would allow her to see many new things from the comfort and safety of what Mrs. Davidson called “a kind of floating hotel.” And after visiting the massive glaciers and exotic coastlines of Svalbard, the ship would turn south and stop at various ports of call along Norway. Freya would disembark at one of these ports and, by train and boat, travel to Denmark at her leisure.
What a lovely journey it would have been, had things gone as planned. Alas, things did not. The good ship Angrboda, as she was christened, sailed under a moonless sky and struck an iceberg on the sixth night of the cruise. In less than thirty minutes, she sank, taking many passengers with her. Not all passengers were trapped belowdecks when it happened. Some made it into the life rafts, including a family of gentle woodland grouse of whom Freya had become very fond. Forever after, Freya prayed they had not died of cold and fright before being rescued by a passing Norwegian whaling vessel or the like.
As for Freya, she was stupefied that something as conventional as a cruise could go so horribly awry. Didn’t life owe her the smallest portion of felicity? Had she really asked for too much? She felt paralyzed, tethered to the deck chair where she had been reading under the lamplight. But this inertia was fleeting, and in due course she thrust aside her book. Tearing off her tweed traveling dress and shoes, Freya climbed onto the rail of the deck and dove into the waves. She swam with a swift current and washed up on the shore of an uninhabited island, along with two of her own trunks, including the one in which she had packed Mrs. Davidson’s Hints to Lady Travellers. A good deal of the ship’s cargo washed up as well. This godsend (consisting mainly of foodstuff, some of it very fancy) was enough to keep Freya’s body and soul together. The tinned peaches and Russian caviar were first-rate. No, she did not want for sustenance—only for someone to share it with.
She didn’t learn the name of the place until a month later, when Captain Andrée arrived to make his first attempt to fly a balloon to the North Pole. It was called Danskoya, and the captain and his crew failed, for the winds were not in their favor. Freya saw it all from the mouth of a cave and watched the humans pack up and leave. If they were crestfallen and even disgraced, so was she. Why hadn’t she found a way to steal aboard their boat? She should have at least tried! Instead, she let fear get the upper hand, and for that she was soundly punished. She spent another year on the island, as submerged in loneliness as the Angrboda was submerged under the sea. She was steeped in it like a teabag, soaking it into the very bones of her body. If she had been an outcast before, now she was positively bereft.
But then the humans came back, bringing with them a new balloon, and another basket, and a stowaway named Zoose.
Zoose blinked at the mention of his name, spellbound as he had been by Freya’s tale. Freya looked at him strangely, for she had been in something of a storyteller’s trance herself.
“So you decided to try your luck in a balloon, after all that,” said Zoose.
“I was determined to have one true adventure,” Freya said. “I thought, ‘If I can make myself do this, my life will mean something. It won’t have all been a waste. I’ll become the penguin Mother and Father wanted me to be. I’ll be fearless and fashionable, not frightened and forgotten!’ I know it sounds silly.”
Zoose scratched his chin and studied Freya’s face. “Seems to me you may have become that penguin already,” he said. This in itself alarmed Freya, but not nearly as much as when he reached up and plucked a feather from her head.
“Ouch!” she yelped. “What was that for?”
Zoose said nothing but held up the feather for Freya to see. And in the growing light of the new day, she saw it very well. It was as yellow as butter.
“Tell us another story, Freya,” wheedled Zoose. “You tell a corker of a tale, you know.”
“No, I do not,” Freya said mildly. “A tale-teller is a person who tells falsehoods, whereas I am as honest as the day is long.”
“Oh, please, Freya, pleeeeease,” said Zoose. His reedy voice issued from the pile of cushions under which he had tunneled. The nights were growing longer, and Zoose’s appetite for Freya’s tales was boundless.
Freya, after many trips back to the balloon, had contrived to fill her corner of the tent with a mound of cotton batting, and now sat upon this fluffy nest like a small empress. She regarded Zoose benevolently, although it was hard to see where the pillows ended and the mouse began. Freya enjoyed being entertaining. She relished it!
“Hmmm.” She pondered, lowering the flame in her portable reading lamp to its most economical level. “Let’s see. Did I tell you about the time I swallowed a beakful of sea glass? It has a happy ending, although it was touch and go for a while.”
There was a sort of muffled response from the jumble of pillows, which Freya took to be encouragement. She stretched her wings, organized her thoughts, and was about to begin when a scuffling noise outside the tent interrupted her.
“Did you hear that, Zoose?” she asked.
“Hear what?” asked Zoose from his cushy lair.
The noise repeated itself, more distinctly. Then someone cleared his (or her) throat. Freya stayed still, listening hard.
“Hello? Hello?” called a voice on the other side of the tent flap. “Is anyone home?”
Zoose popped into view immediately. He and Freya stared at each other, hardly breathing.
“Oh, dear, I’ve come at an inconvenient time,” said the voice. It was a very melodious one, if shockingly unexpected. “I promise I’m harmless.”
“Do you think they know we’re in?” whispered Freya, as if an ordinary evening at home were being disrupted by a brush-and-mop salesman.
“ ’Course they know, whoever ‘they’ are,” Zoose said.
“It’s cold out here,” the voice informed them. “Cold enough to freeze the bottom off a brass monkey! I would never say such a thing, on the whole. But others would!” This was followed by a low, charming laugh.
There was no help for it. Zoose squared his shoulders and pulled back the flap of the tent.
Only once in Freya’s life had she gone to the theater, and she had never forgotten the thrill when the curtains were raised to reveal an actress spectacularly lit by dozens of stage candles. So it was now. Framed in the tent’s entrance, resplendent in a cascade of silvery moonbeams, stood a snow fox.
Freya caught her breath in wonder. Zoose positively goggled. For a moment, they were suspended in time. The creature’s face was turned demurely to the side, eyes downcast. Every star in the Arctic sky seemed to twinkle all at once, punctuating the flawlessness of her fur. She raised her head and peered into the tent. Her ears were perfect isosceles triangles. Her eyes were like black diamonds. She was blindingly beautiful.
“May I…?” she murmured, as if delicacy prevented her from making too forward a request.
“Yes, of course, come in,” said Freya, and the fox put two exquisite paws over the tent’s threshold. Then she slipped all the way inside, curling her tail a
round her body with a silky flourish. Zoose, wordless for once, let the flap of the tent fall shut behind her. But for Freya’s small lamp, they were quite in the dark again.
It seemed correct to wait for the fox to introduce herself, which she wasted no time in doing. “Thank you very kindly. I don’t think I would have lasted much longer out there. When I saw your tent, I almost fainted. Fainted with relief! My name is Marguerite.”
Freya went next. “I’m Freya from Sweden,” she said. “And this is my traveling companion, Zoose. He hails from London. We’re explorers, one might say. May I inquire what brings you so far north?”
“Goodness, I’m a refugee,” said the fox. “Yes, some would call me that. It’s a fair way of putting it. Not to bore you with the particulars.”
“Oh, please, do tell us how you come to be in the middle of nowhere,” urged Freya. “We’d love to know, truly we would.”
“We got all the time in the world,” said Zoose with an almost submissive respectfulness. “Spare no details. Life story, and all that.”
There followed a long pause as the fox judged whether she should grant her audience the boon of an explanation (or so it seemed to Freya). Finally, she spoke. “I am originally from”—here she hesitated for the tiniest moment—“Poland. Are you familiar with that country? No? Well, I am most certainly from Poland. In fact, I am Countess Marguerite, although let us not stand on that formality! How silly it would be to require you to call me Countess, though I would not object if you insisted on doing so.”