The Seventh Child (47 page)

I never would have dared tell her what I know about her. Maybe I was embarrassed by my childhood longing to get to know the children
who’d
left, and embarrassed by my unique talent for tracing them down and spying on them without being noticed. There were other reasons
I
’
d refrained from telling her. Her upbringing was, without a doubt, the most peculiar of the five I had painstakingly pieced together, and, of course, it was due to her parents’ decision—already from the beginning—to ignore the difference between biological and adopted children. An adopted child is born into a strange, upside-down world, in which its biological parents have rejected it and complete strangers have given it their love instead—and that is a peculiar, fragile balance that doesn’t take many unforeseen events to disturb.

But, of course, the most important reason for my silence was the one that could cost her everything, and which I think, deep down, made her—in spite of her remarkable beauty—the same as the old governesses.

She had killed someone in a way that no one could explain.

23

SUSANNE

1961–1978

Susanne was an adult the second time she came to Kongslund. She walked into the villa with the special blend of caution and defiance that children of Kongslund seem to embody.

I think she gave in to her curiosity; I think she let herself be persuaded by Magna when she was hired as her trusted assistant and, later, her successor. And of course no one was better suited for the job.

To me she had always personified the fairy-tale character Thumbelina, who made herself comfortable on the giant green leaf to paddle down the wide waterways to the Kingdom of the Mole. I had loved her since I first sought her out, back when I squatted behind elder and hawthorn bushes to watch her in secret, imagining what her life was like—way out there on the cape.

She arrived as a stranger, and she left as a stranger.

The beginning and end of Susanne’s childhood can be described that simply.

Five years had already passed since Magdalene’s death, when I turned my attention to the girl who left us in March 1962. My endeavor was somewhat complicated by the fact that her family lived in a region that wasn’t easy for me to reach.

The first time I took the train from Copenhagen Central Station I was thirteen years old. Magna was at a conference that weekend at a summer guesthouse in Hornbæk with all her friends from Goodness of Heart. I remember Gerda gave me the look that had frightened the German battalion away from Kongslund, but finally she let me go—and even promised to keep my trip a secret. I think she remembered her own desire to travel—which over the years had been replaced by her love for Magna—and perhaps she understood subconsciously that I was going to see one of the children I had once known. Susanne.

I spent a whole day on the cape, where she lived in the shade of a big maple. She didn’t see me, and I didn’t reveal myself; though perhaps I should have, in light of what happened later. She was the most beautiful, innocent creature the Elephant Room had ever let go of—and no one who saw her could imagine that anything had ever happened to her. It was a delusion I would fall prey to many times. Susanne Ingemann had moved to a home that contained powerful demons, the likes of which I’d never seen, and that was the reason I didn’t recognize them the first few months I watched her from a distance, concealed behind a thicket of hazel. Like so many children preceding her, she became the victim of a force that lives on in many adults—not least women—and which Magdalene once described to me as the dream of everything that
could
have been: the love they
could
have found; and the places they
could
have visited, but for which they never found the courage. And who knew better of this than Magdalene?

Susanne arrived at the little farmhouse on the cape in the cool, early spring of 1962. The farm was well maintained and solidly built; it had been connected to the Ingemann family for four generations. Seen from the main road, between Våghøj and Kalundborg, the main house seemed like a flattened pastry box that a creative child had equipped with windows and doors and a steep roof and then jammed between two hills where it was sheltered from curious glances and the powerful gusts of wind from the fjord. Next to the main building was a small barn, and at the end of the field a little marsh and a lake where the kids from the village skated during the winter and swam during the summer. The lake was gray-blue at midsummer and a rich green in November when the winter storms took over. Susanne’s first memory was from a fall day when she walked to the lake and waded a bit into the water. Staring into the depths, she suddenly glimpsed a strange face swaying back and forth, disappearing and reappearing among lily pads and dock leaves. That’s how she once described it to me.

From the darkness under the water’s surface a little girl stared despairingly at her, and Susanne felt a strong urge to sink down among the lily pads and share the cold and silence with her. Much later, I think that she realized whom
she’d
seen down there, but she never acknowledged it to anyone, perhaps not even to herself. Her father’s shouting on the bank saved her, and she was never willing to say more about it than that.

Four generations ago there had been many boys at Hill Farm, but Susanne’s grandparents had raised three children, all girls. So when their oldest daughter, Josefine, chose to marry the foreman on the neighboring farm, it brought relief to their hearts: the farm would stay in the family for another generation.

I think Fate must have heard their sigh of relief and taken some precautionary measures. A single mistake would be enough, a naive dream—a love that would never amount to anything anyway. And Josefine Ingemann stepped over the edge herself. A few months before she decided to accept the foreman’s marriage proposal, she flirted with a summer visitor from Copenhagen named Ulrik; he had impressed the provincial girl with his exotic, cosmopolitan manner.
She’d
met the tall, handsome man on a market day in town, caught his eye, and shared his dreams of everything that could be. First he wanted to go out into the world to gather material for his epic travel novel—and the following year he would return and publish it, earning his fame and fortune. Then he would marry her and make her the queen of his dream castle.

That’s what he said.

And one day he did in fact leave, but even though she wrote him letters for months—so many she lost count—and mailed them to his general delivery addresses around the globe, she never heard a word from him.

After sending one last letter, she gave up and married the foreman from the neighboring farm, who had always loved her—and thereby added her name to the endless list of women
who’d
married a devoted husband while secretly dreaming of another.

The farm at Våghøj would have satisfied Magna’s notions of the ideal home, that much I understood, because to the south and east was water as far as the eye could see.

The oldest residents of the cape would tell anyone who bothered to listen that the windswept landscape bore secrets from the early days of the kingdom. According to legend, King Valdemar the Victorious’s son was struck in the heart by a stray arrow, and thus, in his powerless grief, the king lit a fire so large it consumed every tree, branch, and leaf on the cape—and then he swore in the glow of that fire that all of the cape’s residents were to be whipped by storms and winds every day for a thousand years, never again finding shelter.

But, as is the way of things, the trees returned, taking root in damp clay and rising into the sky. Across the hills and valleys and meadows, white, yellow, and orange butterflies flapped their colorful wings, and squadrons of buzzing insects engulfed the land.

Within this burst of color stood Anton Jørgensen—Josefine’s preternaturally modest husband. And perhaps it was this modesty that prevented his loins from producing an heir—as though some force denied him fertility and the realization of the greatest dream at Våghøj.

The idea of adoption arose when Josefine’s youngest sister happened upon a magazine article that, in eight pages, featured beautiful black-and-white photos from an orphanage in Skodsborg. One photo showed the matron standing on a lawn with her arms open wide in a grand gesture under a heading that read: “Let All the Small Children Come to Me.”

They waited for approval for almost two years, receiving notification the very week that Susanne was born and transported by cab the few kilometers from the Rigshospital to Kongslund, where the governesses placed this tiny being on her fateful path. By chance, in the days when I observed her from my hiding place in the thicket at Våghøj—discovering the hardship that had only just begun—I learned that during our first months of life, she had lain in the bed right next to mine; and this fact fascinated me.

Whether it was Anton’s humility in the face of the formidable women at Kongslund that prevented him from adopting the preferred boy (another fact learned later, this time by Susanne), no one ever knew; perhaps they had merely been promised a second child, as was sometimes the case. When Susanne confronted her father about this detail many years later, he looked at her in surprise, then stuck his hands in his pockets and pretended he wasn’t there. When faced with one of life’s few but difficult questions, that’s just what he did: disappeared abruptly from his body, returning only after the problem or pest had gone away. Susanne knew as soon as she asked it that it wasn’t a question he was ever going to answer.

Despite the child Anton may have desired, when the couple arrived at Skodsborg on March 9, 1962, in their brand new Volvo the color of vanilla custard, Josefine immediately fell for the little beauty sitting on the floor before them. Not until many years later did I discover that Magna had told them about the little girl’s background, a story that could be true or not, but which probably caused one person’s death: Susanne’s biological mother had gone directly from the delivery bed to Copenhagen Central Station where she met with a number of men, did what she needed, and afterward bought a first-class ticket to Hamburg—and that’s where the trail went cold. (After that description the couple agreed to the matron’s suggestion that she destroy all existing papers concerning the child’s mother, an act that ran expressly against the principles of Mother’s Aid Society.)

They drove the 120 kilometers back to the cape on icy roads without stopping once. They were filled to brimming with the desire to put their new baby to sleep in her new home and see her wake up to a new life when the sun rose over the fjord the next morning.

Late that night they made love, as if they wanted to symbolize the conception of the new life in a shared embrace. And in this act, Josefine released all the grief
she’d
accumulated over many years at the cape, crying out under Anton’s muscular body.

When day broke, the snowstorm had driven north, and the sun shone down on Våghøj and Hill Farm, wending its way through the branches of the trees that had once been cursed by old King Valdemar. In a ray of light from the window, the little girl sat in her white crib, like Thumbelina on her leaf, and listened to a calling only she could hear.

In those very days the globe-trotting Ulrik, after one his many journeys around the world, reappeared in Josefine’s life. Discreet and courteous just as she remembered him.

She spotted him on Storegade in Kalundborg where she was doing her Friday shopping, and of course there was no saving her. If she heard a powerful crack from above, she paid no heed. No woman has ever let such a faint warning prevent her from giving her heart—and more—to her one and only.

He invited her for lunch at the Sømandshotel. Afterward she followed him to his room and listened to his stories from all the countries
he’d
traveled to (without giving her the least thought), and it was as though the traveler had never gone away; it was as though her body had never longed for any other.

Anton was the kind of man who didn’t wonder why his wife came home so late that day, and Josefine carried her memory of the adventure so deep inside that not even her best friend noticed anything amiss. Yet, from that day on, a shelf in her bookcase held binders containing clippings of his articles from various ladies’ magazines.