Breath and Bones (40 page)

The nurses wiped Ophelia's lips and lifted her into bed, where the sheets and blankets were paper-white. Out of nowhere, it seemed, there materialized a lovely quilt composed of little velvet hexagons painstakingly stitched together. Most of them had faded, too, so that what had been crimson and emerald and gold was now shades of dove-gray with gentle underpinnings of color.

“Grandmother's Flower Garden,” said Miss Pym, running her hand over the softness as she tucked it around the patient's hard little bones. “That's what this pattern is called. Some woman did fine work here.”

One of the younger, sharper women laid another gleaming cord across the pillow. “If you need anything, pull on this—once for us, twice for a maid. As a rule we're to keep out of sight.”

“Why is that?”

No one replied; but of course she already knew the reason. The rule that servants should never let themselves be seen till absolutely necessary was doubly important in a glass house. And how well she knew the system, too, although her hand had never before held the silken cord for any purpose but to clean it. She exerted herself to give this one a couple of tugs now and was delighted to see a slender, silent China girl appear in the doorway: hands folded into the sleeves of her cotton tunic, face made perfectly smooth, awaiting instructions.

“
Fanden!”
Ophelia exclaimed admiringly.

Miss Pym nodded dismissively to the maid, then opened a door in the right-hand wall. There was a gleaming flush toilet, its tank and pull-chain suspended from a reinforced ceiling. “This is your water closet. You may use it when you are stronger.”

Somewhere downstairs, a parlor clock chimed high and spidery, five times. The nurses exchanged another glance.

“We'll leave you now,” Miss Pym said, with a final tuck to the quilt.

“Where are you going?” the patient asked, suddenly afraid of being on her own in this strange place.

Miss Pym appeared to understand, though she did not answer immediately. She held a warm cup to the girl's lips: “Drink this,” she said.

Heating had taken the bubbles from the water, and mixed with honey and other flavors came a familiar alcoholic bitterness that reassured Ophelia. She drank, and within minutes she was asleep.

There is a saying in South California that if a man buys water he can get his land thrown in
.

H
ELEN
H
UNT
J
ACKSON
, “C
ALIFORNIA,” IN
G
LIMPSES OF
T
HREE
C
OASTS

The elder branches were white with an unexpected snowfall, so clean they seemed to glow electrically in the intense blue twilight of mid-afternoon. Mother Birgit entered her office in her winter coat, wearing all three pairs of woolen socks that she owned. She had ordered the sisters not to light the hearth in here this winter; it was, she explained, an easy economy to make, since the office was used primarily by just one person. In her own mind it was also a penance, like the hair shirt she had once worn, for the missteps she had taken in the case of a particular orphan.

Birgit settled herself at the big, plain desk and uncapped the inkwell: It was time to write the letter for which Herr Skatkammer had asked weeks ago. She had promised, and he was an important benefactor—particularly so now that the Queen had opened her
Børnehjem
, diverting the flow of funds and newborns who might have turned Catholic if the nuns had found them first.

Words were slow in coming, and Birgit found herself gazing out at the elder, lost in thought, coughing abstractedly. There came an echoing cough in the hallway; if she listened carefully, there were coughs all over the building—the famous Immaculate chest was afflicting nuns and orphans who had already tired themselves out in the early days of Advent. If only it were possible to keep them in bed rather than in the drafty chapel! But of course no nun should ever think as much. And then there was Famke—out there
in America with her splintery cough and no one to care for her, unless Viggo had found her by now . . .

Birgit considered some difficult facts. Above all, she wanted to find Famke, not the alarming painting for which the girl had posed. As far as Birgit knew, the canvas about which Skatkammer had inquired was the only one in existence; if it remained in America and Famke returned to Denmark, she might take up a virtuous life. Even if she stayed in America and married her painter, that country was large enough to absorb the scandal. But in Denmark, a much smaller place, eventually the painting would cause trouble.

A gentle wind blew through the courtyard, and the elder tree shook loose a fine powder of snow. That tree was like a hand, Birgit thought fancifully, with many fingers reaching up to grab—what? The rising moon? She could not see it, could see only a few of the clouds that had dropped that blanket of snow.

She forced tree and sky out of her mind and set herself sternly to the task at hand. First she folded a sheet of paper several times, as if the letter were finished. It made a white pad like a bandage—but she must not think of that either, poor Herr Skatkammer lying so badly burned, poor Viggo the day of the soapmaking, poor suffering Catholics everywhere . . . She wrote the address of Skatkammer's American agent on one of the outside rectangles, blotted it, and opened the sheet again.

Dear Herr Jensen
, she wrote at last, with the sense that she was punishing herself,
I am writing at the request of your employer, Jørgen Skatkammer, who has heard of a painting he would like to secure for his collection
. . .

At the same blue hour, Frøken Grubbe sat down in Herr Skatkammer's parlor to write to Copenhagen's bishop. She wrapped her right forearm in a sleeve guard and brushed a few distracting hairs from her brow: This letter required the full focus of her energies, and it had to look pristine and professional. It must also read compellingly.

Dear Holy Father!

It is with considerable pain that I take pen in hand. But I must inform you that it is time to put stop to an intolerable situation, a disgraceful canker
eating away at the body of the Church, destroying your flock as murrain destroys sheep
. . . .

If she wrote quickly, she could put it in the afternoon mail.

In the quiet warmth of his own steam-heated office, Edouard Versailles reminded himself that all good beginnings take into account that they are also endings. This would be the beginning of Ophelia's cure, the end of her illness: poor, memoryless Ophelia, victim of an unknown crisis that had robbed her of that precious storehouse of experience, who couldn't even recall when the phthisis had begun to manifest itself, and who had no idea how such fevers were born. Who had no recollection, even, of the quest that had brought her here—an attempt to locate a brother whose name she never spoke, but who was the author of the painting that now sat in Edouard's stable; a quest that had ended in her collapse and subsequent rebirth into the web of health and hope that Edouard was spinning for some lucky patients.

An unlucky patient's hand sat on his desk now, deformed by disease and stored in a jar of alcohol. Edouard picked it up and set it at eye level on a bookshelf, where it bobbed along to the left. He fancied it was reaching for a fetus miscarried at seven months, now forever cradled in another thin womb of glass. Chemicals and sunlight had combined to bleach both hand and fetus to a pallor even less luminous than the new patient's skin . . . Terrible to think what this disease was doing to Ophelia now.

He turned away from the jars to dig into his desk for an anatomical drawing. He found what he wanted deep in a central pigeonhole: It featured a naked human female, and its contemplation replaced niggling distress with a warm glow of anticipation. His mind supplanted the drawing's expressionless face with Ophelia's visage, and he imagined the effects that his success would work on her: the gradual burgeoning of flesh, the bones and eyes sinking back to their rightful places beneath pillows of breasts and delicate shells of eyelids. Her beauty completed, perfected in the eyes of the world; even more intensely gorgeous to himself, who had helped create it. She would far outshine this bland representation of the healthy specimen,
a woman who had probably been born into health and never struggled to recreate herself.

But Edouard also imagined failure: Ophelia's last sour, soughing breath, the subtle fading of her skin from white to waxen yellow, the grave's black dirt clouding her hair. And then there was the damage to himself: Failure would label him as crackpot as his father, the immigrant Frenchman who had perversely refused to mine for gold himself but had made a fortune by buying mountains and rivers, for the use of which he charged those who did the digging and sluicing. The man who did not see his wife or son for twelve years but who built this fantastic house in order to give the woman a view of the outside world when, finally arrived in America, she lay suffering just as Ophelia did now.

Thinking of those awful days, Edouard reflected that it might be time to visit his parents, whose bodies now lay entombed inside a small replica of the Taj Mahal on the edge of the forest. He often went to them at what he thought must be midnight, though the heat and moisture in the house made his clocks unreliable. But then his eye fell on that discarded engraving, and his mind again imposed a picture of that frangible wreck of a girl upstairs, lying in his mother's bed, waiting for rescue.

Edouard felt his muscles stretching in an unaccustomed direction. He realized he must be smiling.

Yes, it was definitely the start.

Edouard breezed into the bedroom the next morning with an armload of charts and diagrams and tables of facts, lists of substances and behaviors desirable and undesirable. Miss Pym, who had accepted private nursing duty, and the housemaid Precious Flower followed with an assortment of basins, towels, and bottles. Ophelia struggled to sit up, looking expectant and eager.

Miss Pym hoisted the patient and arranged the pillows in a tall mound at her back. As she did so, a single downy feather floated upward in the air, and Edouard caught it in his fist lest Ophelia should inhale it. The patient murmured something that sounded like “Summer fool,” and Edouard worried that she already considered him a crackpot. Briskly, as befit a man of
medicine, Edouard pulled out a contraption made of two flexible tubes that joined into one and ended at a little metal cup. He anchored the tube ends in his ears.

His Ophelia did not recall seeing its like before. She was taken aback, then, when Edouard placed the metal cup on her chest and she felt the chill through the gauze of her nightdress.

“Don't pull away,” he said, giving a little expert frown as he moved the cup slightly. “This instrument lets me listen to your lungs. It's called a stethoscope.”

She determined that there was nothing but science in the way he handled the little cup, but what did that matter anyway? She had agreed to stay here, and she would have tolerated almost any strange behavior so long as it produced the feeling of health and release that he promised.