The Wild Girl

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘I haven’t much book learning, I’m sorry, sir,’ Marie said.

  ‘I’ll read it for you, Wilhelm,’ Dortchen said eagerly.

  A sudden draught of cold air gusted into the room. Dortchen turned her head and froze. Her sisters all fell silent, and Old Marie rose clumsily to her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, were you wanting something?’ she asked.

  Herr Wild was standing in the doorway, his thick grey eyebrows drawn close down over his red-veined, bulbous nose. ‘What’s going on here?’

  ‘We were having tea,’ Lisette faltered.

  ‘Old Marie was telling us a story,’ Mia piped up.

  ‘And we were peeling the vegetables for supper, Father,’ Hanne hastened to add.

  He ignored her. ‘Have you nothing better to do than sit around and tell old wives’ tales?’ he said angrily to Old Marie. ‘I don’t pay you to gossip. Get on with your work.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Wilhelm packed away his quills and penknife. ‘You may not know that my brother and I have undertaken a scholarly collection of old tales. We hope to publish—’

  ‘A waste of your time and my time, not to mention my servant’s time. I’d appreciate it if you did not encourage her to fritter away valuable working hours again.’

  ‘No, sir – I’m sorry, sir.’ Wilhelm fumbled to shut the clasp on his writing box.

  Dortchen longed to tell her father that they had all been helping prepare supper while Old Marie told her story but did not dare. His face was livid with temper.

  ‘Lisette, I was looking for you,’ he said abruptly. ‘There’s a Frenchman in the shop wanting something, the Lord himself only knows what – I can’t understand a word he says. Come and decipher his gobbledegook.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ Lisette replied and got up.

  ‘You can show the young gentleman to the front door on your way,’ he said.

  Wilhelm bowed, said a subdued farewell and followed Lisette out.

  Herr Wild stared at Hanne and Gretchen. ‘Who invited that young man to sit in our kitchen? Do you think we should allow our standards to decline, just because the whole world is going to wrack and ruin?’

  ‘Dortchen,’ Gretchen said.

  Herr Wild looked at his second-youngest daughter. ‘Of course. Who else would it be?’ He pointed one squat finger at her. ‘You love telling stories so much. For one week, you must not speak unless it is in prayer. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she began, but his large hand lashed out and caught her a ringing blow across the face.

  ‘Not one word.’

  She bent her head in understanding, her throat seizing up with unshed tears.

  BROKEN AXLE

  May 1808

  Four days after Dortchen’s fifteenth birthday, Frau Grimm died. It was as if the pin axle holding the Grimm family together had broken, so the whole machine fell apart.

  Frau Grimm had been ailing all winter. It had been freezing, and the Grimms had not been able to afford much firewood or meat or winter vegetables. They all wore rags stuffed in their boots to stop the cold and damp from seeping through the holes in the soles, and their clothes were darned and patched and frayed at the cuffs. Lotte had had to cut up one of her old muslin dresses to make cravats for her brothers, and Ludwig’s wrists hung out of his sleeves. What little money the elder two brothers made by publishing literary articles was swallowed up by the cost of the paper and ink and candles used to write them. Dortchen had smuggled them a cabbage or two, and some eggs and milk and feverfew tea, but nothing had helped Frau Grimm, who had taken to her bed in midwinter and not got up again.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Dortchen asked, pouring out tea from the big brown teapot into seven cracked and mismatched cups. The five Grimm brothers sat around the kitchen table, their hands lying idly before them. All were pale and wan, their dark hair uncombed, their chins unshaven. Lotte, meanwhile, was curled in her mother’s rocking chair, with her mother’s shawl clutched to her face, sobbing convulsively.

  ‘Do?’ Karl said, shrugging. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘I must get a job,’ Jakob said. ‘But doing what? I applied for a job in the royal library, but they passed me over for someone with half the learning and experience I have.’

  ‘My law degree is useless,’ Wilhelm said. ‘I’d have to go back to university and study this confounded new code of Napoléon’s before I could get a job even as a clerk.’

  ‘And we have no money for anyone to go to university,’ Ferdinand said. ‘I’d have liked to have gone too, but no chance of that. So I’m even more useless than you two.’

  ‘Aunt Zimmer cannot help any more,’ Jakob said. ‘She’s in exile with Princess Wilhelmine and has her own struggle to survive.’

  ‘She sends us food when she can, but it’s never enough,’ Ludwig said. ‘We’re hungry all the time.’

  ‘Our only hope is to enlist,’ Ferdinand said. ‘But we don’t want to fight for Napoléon. It’d be different if we could fight to save our own country, but he’d just send us off to Russia to die.’

  ‘At least we’d get fed in the army,’ Karl said.

  Dortchen put two spoons of sugar into every cup and passed them along the table. She did not know what else to do. If she could have, she would have cooked them a feast, but her own family’s pantry was almost bare too. The blockade against Great Britain and its colonies was taking a heavy toll, and the people of Hessen-Cassel were being cruelly taxed to pay for the King’s endless round of parties, balls and fireworks displays.

  ‘All we can do is pray,’ Jakob said, with a new note of hopelessness in his voice.

  Lotte looked up, her eyes wild. ‘We’ve done nothing but pray for weeks. What good has it done us? Mother is dead and we’re set to starve to death. God has forsaken us.’

  ‘Do not speak so, Lottechen,’ Wilhelm said gently, carrying a cup of tea to her. ‘We must have faith—’

  ‘Faith!’ Lotte struck out at him, sending the cup crashing to the floor. ‘What use is faith? What use is anything?’

  Dortchen dropped to her knees to mop up the spilt tea, her heart aching for her friend. Wilhelm bent to pick up the broken cup. His dishevelled hair fell over his forehead. Dortchen yearned to reach up and brush it away, to smooth the lines of worry and despair etched on his face. What a burden it was for him and Jakob, to be responsible for this young family – and they were only in their early twenties themselves. How could they support them all?

  ‘Is there no one else who can help?’ she whispered.

  Wilhelm shook his head. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You have done so much for us already. We shall write to all our friends and ask them if they know of any work. It’ll probably mean we shall need to go our separate ways, which we don’t want to do … but there may be no other choice.’

  ‘You mean … you’ll move away?’ Dismay filled her.

  ‘What else can we do, if there’s no work here? We cannot afford to pay the rent here or even our daily bread.’

  Dortchen nodded, unable to speak. Misery choked her. She could not bear the idea of the Grimms moving away. Lotte was her dearest friend, while Wilhelm was her one true love, the other part of her soul. She knew that he would one day come to love her back. Right now, he thought of her as a child. But Dortchen was growing older. Sometimes, when the Wild sisters walked together to market, soldiers would hoot at them. Their eyes would linger on Dortchen’s face and figure just as much as on Gretchen’s or Hanne’s. Dortchen was sure that Wilhelm would one day notice her in the same way. It was only this hope that gave Dortchen relief from her yearning to be with Wilhelm, to look after him, to bring him happiness.

  ‘What … what can I do to help?’ she managed to say.

  ‘Could Lotte stay with you a day or two?’ Wilhelm asked. ‘We have so much to do to arrange the funeral, and Lotte cannot bear being under the same roof as …’ His voice failed him.

  Dortchen nodded, speechless. Sh
e knew Frau Grimm’s body lay upstairs in her stuffy bedroom, the curtains drawn, sheets hung over the mirror, the clock stopped. Dortchen’s mother was sitting with her, giving the Grimm brothers a break from their melancholy task.

  ‘And … perhaps … do you know how to make black dye?’ Wilhelm said. ‘We shall have to go into mourning and we cannot afford to buy new clothes. Lotte will have to dye all her old dresses.’

  ‘I’ll make some for you this afternoon,’ Dortchen said. ‘Lotte and I can make it together.’

  She took the weeping girl back to her own room and put her to bed, with a cup of chamomile tea and a cloth dampened with lavender water. Then she gathered together her courage and went down to her father’s shop. Rudolf was busy chatting and making up packets of tobacco for a group of soldiers in French red, white and blue, while her father was putting together an elixir for a mother with a croupy baby. He scowled at the sight of her.

  ‘Why are you interrupting me?’ he demanded as soon as the customer was gone.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. May I go to the forest, to gather oak galls? Lotte needs to dye her clothes black.’

  Her father grunted. ‘Very well. Do not dawdle – you are needed here for your own chores.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Gather me some bark from a young oak tree, it makes an excellent gargle for sore throats. And bring me some fresh young leaves too. I have a customer with haemorrhoids and there’s nothing better for them than a poultice of fresh oak leaves.’

  She nodded and slipped away, keeping her face demure. She could not help a little bubble of happiness at the idea of an afternoon wandering free in the forest, far away from the desperate unhappiness and grief of the house next door, and the gloomy piousness of her own. It had been a long time since she had been allowed to go to the woods.

  Dortchen went into the kitchen to get her basket and bonnet. The room was stiflingly hot, with the fire going on the hearth and a pot of soup bubbling away. Old Marie was busy polishing the silver, her old face rosier than ever.

  ‘I’m going to the forest to gather oak galls,’ Dortchen explained, taking down her basket from its hook. ‘I’ll look for mushrooms, too, while I’m there.’

  ‘Can you bring me some acorns, too, if you can find any ready for picking?’ Old Marie said. ‘I’ll grind them for flour and make us all some bread for our breakfast.’

  ‘Really? You can make bread from acorns?’

  ‘Indeed, of course you can. My grandmother always used to tell me that oaks were the first tree that God ever made, and acorns our first food.’

  ‘I never realised it was such a useful tree. Father wants me to gather leaves and bark as well.’

  ‘My grandmother used to grind up the bark to make snuff,’ Old Marie said, smiling at the memory. ‘My brother’s nose only needed the smallest tap to start spouting blood, and she would make him sniff the oak snuff to stop the bleeding.’

  Dortchen put on her bonnet and took up her shawl and gloves, listening with only half an ear, her thoughts still with the grief-wracked house across the street. She wished with all her heart that she could help them somehow.

  ‘My grandmother would cut the bark on Midsummer’s morning,’ Old Marie went on. ‘She’d gather up the oak moss as well, for good luck and good fortune.’

  Dortchen’s hands stilled halfway through drawing on her gloves. ‘Good fortune?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She always thought that oak moss gathered on Midsummer’s morning was the best way to draw luck and prosperity towards you. She’d grind it up and mix it in oil, then rub it on a silver coin and put that in her pocket. She said a coin made in the year of your birth was best. Or else she’d bathe the coin in moonlight, light a candle rubbed with the oak-moss oil and pray to the lady of the moon to bring silver and gold.’

  ‘Did you ever do it?’ Dortchen asked.

  ‘Would I be living under your family’s roof if I was blessed with a fortune?’ Old Marie asked.

  ‘I suppose not,’ Dortchen replied.

  Old Marie gave her a hug and a kiss. ‘I think myself lucky enough to have a warm bed and a roof over my head in these hard times, don’t you worry, my sweetling.’

  ‘What about your grandmother? Was she blessed with good fortune?’

  ‘Indeed she was. We had our own farm back then, with an apple orchard and a whole flock of geese, and our own mill. And she lived to a great old age, my grandmother. But once she died, things turned sour. My father died and my brother was conscripted into the army and sent to fight in the New World, then my husband too, and we lost the farm.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because no one gathered the oak moss,’ Dortchen said, pulling on the remainder of her glove.

  ‘Oh, that’s just an old superstition,’ Old Marie said. ‘What would your father say if he heard me filling your head with my grandmother’s nonsense? They’d be calling me a witch and lopping off my head like that poor old woman in Switzerland. Shocking scandal, that was, and not so long ago.’

  Dortchen smiled absently and went out the back door. That afternoon, in the shadowy green depths of the forest, she fingered the silvery filigree of oak moss growing on the north bole of the tree and began to make plans.

  MIDSUMMER’S MORNING

  June 1808

  On the morning of Midsummer’s Eve, Dortchen and her sisters and many other girls walked out into the woods that surrounded the palace, picking wildflowers to make midsummer wreaths for their hair.

  They were accompanied by the young men of the town, singing and playing guitars and begging for buttonhole flowers, with stout matrons following behind in buggies to make sure no one was tempted to wander too far into the woods.

  Jakob and Wilhelm and their brothers had set out with the Wild sisters, more ‘to observe and record an intriguing remnant of our pagan past’, as Jakob said, than with any idea of wooing.

  It did not take long till their party mingled with others, however. Gretchen and Lisette walked with Herr Schmerfeld and Herr von Eschwege, two young men they had met at the King’s ball, while Hanne argued about politics with a young chestnut-haired man who wore a loosely knotted red scarf instead of a cravat. Röse sat in the buggy with her mother, it being too hot for walking, she said, while Dortchen and Mia busied themselves plucking buttercups and clover and cow’s parsley by the handful. Ferdinand and Karl walked with the Ramus sisters. Only Ludwig was not there. He had gone to Heidelberg to study art; his board and expenses had been paid for by the Grimms’ good friends Karl von Savigny, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano.

  Lotte had refused to come. She was moping at home with Old Marie, helping her make midsummer cake from ground hazelnuts, fresh raspberries and crystallised rose petals. She had not left the Wilds’ house since her mother had been buried. It was as if her black-dyed clothes had stained her spirit as well as her skin.

  The last few weeks had not been easy for her brothers, either. Frau Grimm’s pension, as the widow of a magistrate, had ceased with her death, and the endless worry and grief had brought on Wilhelm’s cough again. He looked so pale and weary that Dortchen’s heart ached.

  Gradually, he began to fall behind the merry party of flower-pickers; Jakob strode impatiently on, not wanting to miss any pagan rituals that might persist. Dortchen fell back to walk with Wilhelm along the winding avenue that led away from the palace. The leaf litter below their feet hushed their footsteps. Sweet woodruff spread a carpet of starry white flowers under the shade of the trees.

  ‘I haven’t walked this far before,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘You haven’t seen the Lion’s Castle?’ Dortchen asked in surprise. ‘Oh, you’ll love it. It looks like one of those remnants from the past you and Jakob love so much. Except that it was only finished five or six years ago.’

  ‘Really? Then how—’

  ‘It’s a folly,’ Dortchen told him. ‘Apparently, it’s the grandest folly in the world. The architect travelled to England to look at all their ruins and then ca
me home and put everything he’d seen into this one glorious fake. Towers and drawbridges and arrow-slits – it has it all.’

  ‘But it’s all a fake?’ Wilhelm asked.

  Dortchen nodded. ‘The Kurfürst built it for his favourite mistress, as a sort of private love nest. That’s why the way there is hidden by the trees. He didn’t want his wife seeing him going out there to meet her.’

  Wilhelm laughed, but his breath caught in a wheeze. The wheeze turned into a cough and he had to stop, bending over at the waist, one hand resting on a tree for support.

  Dortchen patted him on the back, wishing she knew what to do to help. ‘It seems worse,’ she said. ‘Have you been drinking my linden blossom tea?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ he answered, his voice rasping. ‘It seems to help a little.’

  Dortchen looked up the road. It was empty of all but a few stragglers, a fat woman panting along with the help of a stick and a young boy, and a young couple wandering hand in hand. ‘Do you want to go home?’ she asked. ‘I could beg for a lift for you in someone’s buggy.’

  ‘No. I’m fine. I want to see this Lion’s Castle of yours. Let us just walk slowly for a while till I catch my breath.’

  ‘All right,’ Dortchen said, although she felt anxious about what her father would say if anyone mentioned she had fallen so far behind with a young man. They walked on through the jewel-bright leaves, through shafts of sunlight and cool shade.

  Wilhelm looked about him with eager eyes. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said. ‘We’ve been so busy and anxious with Mother that I have not walked in the forest for a long time.’

  ‘I’m very sorry about your mother,’ Dortchen said awkwardly.