“She’s more scared of us,” the duke whispered. “Look,” he pointed higher up into the tree, to dark spots in the turning leaves. “Her cubs.”
When we were back inside, in the hall, Ofelia knelt in front of Sveva, told her, “You’re not to go out, darling.” She looked up at the duke and me. “None of us should. It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what the bear will do.”
“The bear will sleep and protect her young, I suspect. And when they’ve figured out that this isn’t the best place for them, they’ll move on.” The duke looked amused.
“You’re an expert on Canadian fauna now, are you?” Ofelia stood with her hands on her hips, head tilted, her mouth wavering as she tried not to smile. She looked toward Sveva and me. “In the meantime, we will stay inside. I will not risk anything.”
The duke had been right. The bear and her cubs were on the property for two days, and by the third, they were gone. The deer always returned. Some evenings, after the family had retired, I would go onto a porch or veranda, stand in the dark and listen. Most nights, I could hear something – tree trunks moaning when they were hit with wind, our dogs turning circles in their kennel, other sounds for which I had no reference – a thin screeching sound that I assumed was a kind of bird, footfalls of animals big and small snapping branches in the understorey. Even inside, the wood walls of the house seemed thin, and I sensed animals all around us. As I listened for them, I knew the animals were concerned only with food and mating and sleep, and not with us at all.
* * *
One morning, more than a year after we’d first arrived, the pots in the kitchen began to sway against each other like crude chimes. Rumbling shook the house, and I followed the play of silver rattling in the dining room, the sound of shivering china. From outside, the clang of metal joined a rhythmic pounding on the road. Sveva came running down the front stairs in her nightclothes. “What is it, Miss Jüül?” She must have been five or six years old by then.
I opened the door to elephants stepping in unison down Pleasant Valley Road, as improbable as that seemed, each holding the tail of the one in front with its trunk, metal harnesses swaying. We watched ten or more go by. On the back of the last elephant was a monkey, dressed in a vest and cap. It looked toward us and yelped. Following the elephants were horses pulling carts loaded with caged animals. A leopard circled her cage. A lion opened her mouth but let out more of a yawn than a roar, and the wolf did not howl. She stared at us, her eyes so icy that even at a distance, I shivered.
After the procession passed, I brought Sveva back into the house and up the stairs to get dressed for the day. When I went into the kitchen, I could hear her father’s low voice, and I knew when they were hinging open the front closet to get their coats and boots. The cook came in from his cabin at the back of the property, bowed slightly and went toward the pantry. “George?” He turned to me. “I need to go to town. The duke and Sveva are out for a morning walk. If the duchess wakes, you’ll tell her that I’ll be back soon?”
I followed the tracks of the circus along Pleasant Valley Road and then up the hill past the Campbell house. I skirted the edge of the road, stayed close to the trees, hoping that I wouldn’t be seen. On a flat field, one of three red-striped tents was already unfurled, elephants ringing it, their trunks wrapped around poles. The animals rose from their knees and took measured steps backward, the voice of a man heard above the lumbering of their feet, until the tent was upright. They held the posts perfectly rigid in their trunks as the men secured them with thick ropes and enormous stakes. The men stood in a circle, each stripped to the waist, black skin gleaming. They swung sledgehammers over their heads, then drove the stakes into the ground. While they worked, they sang, the hammers pounding, again and again, in unison. I could see Sveva and the duke on the other side of the field. The sun had cracked over the hill behind me and shone into their faces, which I knew left them partly blinded to the other side.
A low mist clung to the ground and steam rose off the workingmen’s backs. It was late summer, the grass brown after a season of heat. The perimeter was thick with trees beginning to speckle with orange and yellow. The light at that time of day was perfect, eerie. The men’s skin was so dark it looked nearly purple. Their dungarees may have once been blue, but they were grey then, leached of colour. The vapour off their bodies as they sang was another paler shade of grey, almost white, as if the group of men were superimposed against the rich red of the tent’s stripes; the green, yellow and orange of the foliage; the blue of the sky. And then sunlight reached the valley and everything was washed with light.
Four
Denmark, 1906
The fire was out. I wanted to remain in bed but I’d always been the one to get up to stoke it, so I rolled from under the weight of bedding, then prodded at embers still winking in the ash, sprinkled wood shavings and blew them into licks of flame before I added more kindling. My sister, Johanna, shifted in her sleep, moaned a long, slow sigh. “Poor darling, cozied while I rebuild the fire.” She kept sleeping.
I was outside before most of the household was awake. I liked it that way. The dim and cold lent an edge to everything, made it otherworldly. In an hour, sunlight would blur the horizon, the air would warm and it would be just another day. I knew the farmhands were still eating breakfast, and by the time they came to feed and water the animals, I had already slipped the horses some oats and apples, taken one of them out for a ride. I was out for an hour. When I got back, steam lifted off the horse’s sides and haunches when I jumped down. “Inger-Marie!” my mother called from across the gravel yard. “Come!” There was someone standing with her. I tied the horse and walked toward them, squinting at the form of another woman, her skirts to the ground, coat nearly as long, a broad hat hiding her face.
“An early morning ride?” The woman lifted her hat as she came toward me. My cousin Kristine, wink of her blue eye, twist of a grin on her lips. “Are you vying to take over the role of one of the farm boys then, Marie?”
My mother had us each by the elbow. “Come, come in! We’re just sitting down to breakfast.” She let go of my arm and pushed slightly. “Go get cleaned up, darling, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
* * *
Later, in my bedroom, boots off, stockings unrolled, Kristine and I lay on the bed, faces turned toward the wood beams crossing the ceiling. She was travelling from the south, where she’d been working as a governess, to a city in the north where she would be a lady’s personal secretary. “She interviewed me in Esbjerg. I honestly had no idea how I did – I fumbled horribly, Marie – but now she’s sent for me. I’ll need to be in Aalborg by the morning after next to begin.”
“What will you do?”
“I’ll take care of the lady while her husband is away – at sea.” She said this last bit in English, swung both arms in arcs. As she flung her hands back down, she hit my elbow and I made a show of rubbing it. It hadn’t hurt, but I smarted from being nicked by her drama. “I suppose it will be somewhat like being a governess – without the children, thank God! I’ve about had enough of children for now.”
“I just can’t imagine what you’ll actually do – will you dress her?”
“Good Lord, I hope not. I’m not a lady-in-waiting.” Kristine sat up from the bed, went toward the fireplace. “And while I’m no longer a governess, this position is just the next as I work my way up.”
I spoke toward the ceiling. “Up to what?”
“I’m not sure, really. I haven’t quite figured out that part. Not a wife, though – that much I know.” She ran a hand along the mantle. I saw the ring she wore, a thin slip of gold around her smallest finger. I knew that my mother and the aunts disapproved – the ring was from a former employer, a woman, and this did not seem right to them.
“You should hear Mother – you probably will, in fact. Every dinner it seems she brings up another candidate for a husband. All far
m boys, of course, and there are so few that she brings the same ones up again and again.”
“No interest then?” Kristine sat back down at the end of the bed.
“Not in marriage, not to them. If I could tumble around with one or two, maybe, but there’s no anonymity here, only expectations.”
“Is that why you like the horses so much, Inger-Marie? If not a man clenched between your thighs, at least another muscled beast?”
I shook my hair, made the sound of a horse exhaling, and I kicked at her hip with my stocking foot until Kristine lunged, held me by the waist. She pushed her thumbs into my bottom ribs and I spat out a laugh, then could not stop, my ribs aching with it.
* * *
The next morning, I crossed the yard, apples in my palms, and went into the stable, the musk of horses heavy in the dark. They juddered greetings with their quavering lips, the light stomp of hooves. Once they quieted, there was another sound – laboured breathing, a sick colt. I went toward the stall and stopped, saw the pale clenched buttocks of a man, pants pushed to his shins, knee bent at an awkward angle. In the curve of his ear, corner of his jaw, I recognized him as one does family – at a glance, even in such an ugly position. It was my younger brother, Soren, and around him, a woman’s bare legs, her nightgown pushed up, his hand against her breast. He ground into her again and again and she moaned. All I could think of was how uncomfortable her bare skin must be against the hay. I felt bile in my throat, a thrum of itchy heat catch between my legs. I wanted to turn and go but kept watching long enough that I recognized Kristine’s nightgown, her hand on his back. Did I imagine the flash of her thin gold ring?
I was surprised, yes. But it was something more than that – I felt embarrassed, not only for the two of them in their contorted and grasping positions, but also for my own naïveté. Kristine had convinced me she was about to become independent, a woman who earned her own way in the world, and yet she knew how to fulfill the role of a country cousin, pinned beneath a rutting farm boy, pressed against a pile of prickly hay. Was one a betrayal of the other? Where was my role between suffrage and the sweet stench of common farm animals?
I left the stable as I’d come in, without being heard, apples still in my hands. The horses murmured and snorted their mild protest at me leaving with their treats. In the yard, the sun wasn’t up but light was beginning to stain bushes and buildings. I stood for a moment, then returned to the stables, this time whistling and singing so I’d be heard. I saddled and led a horse out. Fog clung to the ground, hummocked with mounds of earth turned over last fall. The remnants of hay that hadn’t been cleared were flattened and grey. I could feel the give of thawing ground as I rode.
When I returned, my stomach was hollow with hunger, my skin burning with the sting of riding against the wind. I had missed Kristine’s departure. “She waited as long as she could,” my mother told me. She hadn’t, though, had she? I judged her for giving in, not waiting for a future in which her desire would take her beyond a stable, a farm boy. I decided then that I would go farther away than Kristine ever had. More importantly, I wouldn’t return to be held down in a bed of hay like a common farmer’s daughter. Kristine was more than that. If she didn’t know, I did. I wouldn’t let that happen to me.
The next week when Soren went to town, I said I’d ride with him. I wore my riding pants and when Mother gave me a list of things to purchase, she protested. “Inger-Marie, pants are only appropriate for the farm. You can’t wear them to town.”
“Of course I can.” I took the list from her. “Look, I’ve got a change of clothes.” I held up a bag to her, then kissed her on both cheeks. “Don’t worry, Mother, I won’t always be an embarrassment to you.” My mother swatted gently at me, but I’d already slipped out of her range. She didn’t know that I had shown her part of my departure plan, as scant and hasty as it was. In town, I ran the last errand, bought the tea, sugar, peppercorns and bolt of fabric my mother had requested. I could’ve left without doing so, and I suppose I would’ve if the train had been due to arrive sooner. I tied them in a parcel, along with a letter to my family, to the place on the saddle where my bag had been, pushed my forehead into the soft heat of my horse’s neck, then boarded a train and left.
Five
I stood on a platform in Copenhagen as the train sucked the steam of humidity after it, leaving a vacuum of cool air. I arrived in the city with no experience and no one to provide me passage into their world, yet I hoped that things would become clear once I got there, somehow. That I would know what to do. Was it God who was supposed to provide these signs? If so, was I supposed to know how to read them?
I stood and nothing came to me – no signs or at least not the ability to discern them – so I approached the ticket counter. “To where?” the man asked me.
“A place to stay?”
“I meant, a ticket to where?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Could you direct me toward a place to stay?”
The man looked from my hat down toward my chest and then to the air beside me, without ever looking at my face. “On your own?”
“Yes.”
“This isn’t a visitors’ office. You’ll have to move along.” I stammered that I was sorry, my heel catching as I backed up. I teetered into the man behind me and his hand caught my shoulder for a moment as I steadied myself. I began walking away from the line, cheeks stung with heat, and someone called out, “Miss!” I turned, scanned the line until I saw a woman looking at me, brow pinched. “You’re on your own?” I answered yes. “Mrs. Stemme’s pension, near the port, admits single women. Go out front and ask one of the hackneys to take you there.”
Gulls wheeled and screeched in the air above me, though we weren’t near the water. The air was laced with dust, weighted with the sour smell of garbage. Men leaned against carriages, some smoking, some staring at me, it seemed. I approached one of the hackneys and he stood up straight, ground a cigarette under his foot and thrust his chin at me. “Miss?”
“Could you take me to Mrs. Stemme’s pension, please? By the port?”
He looked to either side of me. “Travelling alone?” When I answered yes, he picked up my bags, said, “Get in then,” and didn’t speak to me for the rest of the ride.
* * *
At the pension, I was assigned a room with a girl named Lovise. We were two girls in a boarding house full of men. The only other woman worked at the front desk, her skin cracked and teeth greying. She averted her eyes and spoke to the wall beside her rather than to our faces. I knew that she considered neither of us ladies, even though it was she who often had a yellowing line of dried spittle along her lip, her mouth gummy with it.
At twenty, Lovise seemed like an older woman. She was only a year older than I was, but she’d been in the city since she was seventeen. She would corset, stitch and hook herself into dresses so that her breasts were two tight, smooth mounds just below her collarbone, freckles like fallen leaves on a hill. She returned each night late, between eleven and midnight, rarely later, and she still smelled fresh. My mother had told me that you could tell much of what you need to know about a woman by how she smelled. Lovise smelled lovely, despite the cigarettes she smoked. She would open the window, push away the drapes and smoke a cigarette so slowly and methodically that the rhythm of her inhalations and exhalations was like an incantation. After this, she would leave the room with the water basin, return with it filled and wash her face. As she applied cold cream, she would talk, but not too much. Once she’d returned from emptying the basin, she would kneel by her slim bed in silent prayer, then sit on the bed and beam at me. “So, my little Inger-Marie, tell me about your day!” she would say, as though we were sisters or cousins, not two women who had met each other earlier that week in a questionable rooming house.
I spent my first week going into shops to ask if they might need an employee. None did. Lovise suggested I might find a gentleman to go with me when
I inquired about work. “But where will I find this gentleman, and why would he want to spend an afternoon with me going in and out of shops?”
“Men like being seen with beautiful women.”
“Perhaps, but not poorly dressed farm girls.”
She made a motion over me with her palm. “You are not poorly dressed, my dear.” Then she stepped toward me, traced ribs to waist with her index finger. “And this is where you are wrong. They especially like being seen with girls – not too young that it would cause a scandal, of course, but young enough that other men wonder how on earth they enchanted that little bright-eyed sprite.”
“And I am the little bright-eyed sprite?” I pushed her hand away, gripped my side.
“Of course you are, spritely Inger-Marie!” Lovise backed away from me, hands up and eyebrows raised. “The clothes are good. Your boots, however, could use some work.” She gestured to them, tucked under the lip of my bed. I hadn’t thought much about them. “Nearly any outfit can be saved with the proper hat and, especially, footwear.” I looked to her side of the room where there was a row of boots, each with buttons so numerous they seemed to be vying for space. Lovise had evening shoes as well, and these were bowed, beaded, feathered. Each pair looked tiny and I’d seen her struggle in and out of them several times, wondered why she didn’t own any that were the size of her feet.
“But they’re hardly even visible beneath my skirts.”
“Yes, and like any part of a woman that is hardly visible, every glimpse must be worth it. Your boots should be as soft and clean as skin and should have as many buttons as a corset has hooks and eyes.”
Little Fortress Page 4