The Seventh Child (50 page)

“Did she really yell that
…
? ‘A whore from Hamburg’?”

This was my astonished question to Susanne the night she told me the story for the first time. She put a finger to her beautiful lips. “Marie, promise me you’ll never—” And then she paused. Behind her the mirror hung black and silent, horrified at what had been disclosed, that something like this had actually happened to a human being as radiant as Susanne.

“It’s not like I have anyone to tell it to,” I said.

“But yes
…
that’s how it ended.”

“So suddenly?”

“Yes. But I always knew it would happen. It was in the air. When she got the birds—” She paused again.

“The birds?”

“Yes, when Aphrodite died.”

But I was too impatient to dwell on the peculiar tone in her voice, and that was a mistake I discovered only much later. Instead, I asked the most obvious question. “Then what happened?”

“I lived with a friend and her parents in Kalundborg—and of course I started thinking about being adopted
…
wondering where I was from. But what was most shocking to me was that I was no longer my father’s daughter. That just kept hitting me. I couldn’t care less about my mother and Samanda. I hated them.”

I noticed she said
mother
, though.

“My father hushed it up, and I brushed it off. After all,
he’d
taught me how to float away until things calm down again.” Her reference to Anton’s angst was accompanied by a little smile. “Later I took a room on the fifth floor in an apartment building in Kalundborg.”

“You never spoke about it again?”

She shook her head. “Not even at the funeral.”

“The funeral?” I sat up and saw her straight, immovable back like a dark shadow in the magic mirror behind her.

She nodded without changing her facial expression. “Yes. Samanda’s funeral. She died. It wasn’t long after.”

“Died?” It was such a strange statement that I wasn’t sure I’d heard it right.

“Yes. She died a year later. In the lake. Where we caught frogs.” She looked at me with her bright-green eyes, and there was a peculiar calm in her features. I was shaken. “After I left, she grew feeble in a way that no one could explain
…
She never moved away from home. No one could figure out what was wrong with her.”

A shiver ran down my spine. I cursed myself for not seeing the danger that lurked for Samanda—back when I had observed the two girls at Våghøj. I had only paid attention to Susanne.

“She couldn’t breathe, and finally she couldn’t move,” Susanne said, still oddly calm. She leaned forward so I no longer saw her outline in the old mirror, which had long since withdrawn into the fairy-tale world where both mirrors and human beings have some control over their terrors. “Her legs grew very thin and wobbly, as though they didn’t want to walk anymore.”

I opened my mouth to ask the next question, but she answered before she even heard it.

“They couldn’t figure it out, the doctors. Every part of her just seemed to give in. And one morning they found her in the lake.
She’d
probably gone out to swim. She did that in the mornings from time to time. When it was warm enough. I imagine she didn’t have the energy to get back out again.”

She described Samanda’s demise in short, flat sentences; and, in that moment, I wished more than ever that I’d had Magdalene with me—but she never visited me when Susanne was there.

“She drowned?” I said slowly.

“Yes.”

All the best homes are by the water
, I thought.

“We buried her. It was the first time I’d returned to the farm.”

“But did that have anything to do with—?” I didn’t know how to formulate my grotesque question, but Susanne cut me off before I could finish my sentence.

“No. She was almost always with my mother,” she said. “With
her
mother, I mean. It gets confusing, doesn’t it?” She got up and looked into the darkness, which at that time of night swallowed up the Swedish coast and the old stargazer’s fairy-tale castle on Hven.

“I don’t know what my mother’s conception was
…
about a
happy
family life, I mean,” she said. “Maybe it was just to see her daughters move away from home when they were ready to marry—like she had. But then I suddenly broke the mold. And everything changed. The life
she’d
lived
…
suddenly there was a stranger in the room.”

I nodded almost mechanically, without understanding her strange, fragmented observations. I could only think of Samanda.

“Don’t you think that’s it? Mothers want their children to be like them. They want us to be exactly like them, even when they ought to help us make everything better
…
avoid all the mistakes they made. Josefine
wanted
me to be like her. She didn’t want to accept that
she’d
had to take another’s child as her own.”

I didn’t agree with her—and in any case, there was another explanation that I thought was much more plausible. “She could have been incredibly angry that you let her canaries out,” I said. “That might be why she lost control. After all, those birds meant everything to her.”

Susanne put two fingers to her well-formed lips. She was a very beautiful woman, even in the gloaming and at some remove in the antique chair. No wonder men behaved like shy boys in her presence—or that I loved her.

“But, Marie,” she finally said softly and with a cheerfulness in her voice that struck me as odd. She cocked her head, as if to imitate one of the twelve golden birds. “You don’t understand at all, Marie. I didn’t do that
…
Do you really believe I had?” Then she laughed, and everything lit up around her; even the mirror was, for a moment, blinded, reflecting her radiance like ordinary window glass.

I slumped in my bed, more deformed and darker than ever, unmoving.

“Marie, listen to me. It wasn’t
me
who let the birds out!” She laughed again, then turned serious. “And I’m sure she knew that.”

I couldn’t respond at all.

“But that’s what you thought? Like when my things were vandalized. Everyone thought it was Samanda. But it wasn’t.”

Now I understood the anger that had filled one of the children at the cape; it was a revelation that almost toppled me.

“I really hated her, Marie
…
I have to admit that, even now. You have no idea how much you can hate someone when you feel
…
like that
…
like an interloper
…
like someone who has no right to be anywhere.” Shrugging, she said, in a peculiarly light tone, “Of course I shouldn’t have left
…
because after all, it wasn’t Samanda’s fault
…
but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about her longing, because I hated her so much. Or maybe
…
maybe I knew exactly what I was doing
…
” She shrugged again. “And she did die.”

At that moment I had a terrible sensation that another person was in the room with us. I’ve always had an aspect of melodrama about me. But it was only me and Susanne, and she sat motionless before me, practically invisible. Maybe she was about to float away like Anton. I remembered her description of the face
she’d
seen in the depths of the lake at Våghøj. Had it been a mere vision? I suddenly felt so cold, like I might freeze to death right there.

Then she said, “Marie, you’ve always lived in a place where everything was destined to be in harmony—always; in the most beautiful house here by the water, under the twelve beeches, in the nation’s most famous orphanage. You have no idea how much hate you can feel
…
how the anger
…
it can make you kill
…
and sometimes you do in the end.”

Once again I glanced into the mirror to establish contact with the creature that I was sure lived in there—but the glass was completely black, and in that instant, it became clear to me that I’d never speak to the creature again.

“Who do you really think opened the door to that cage?” Smiling, Susanne cocked her head teasingly. “Who do you think, Marie? Until you figure that out, you don’t know anything.”

At that point I’d been sitting in front of her for so long that my mouth was dry, and I felt dizzy.
Maybe there are human acts one really doesn’t want to understand,
I thought, keeping my silence.

“You’ll have to figure it out for yourself, Marie.”

I didn’t reply.

She shrugged again and said, “When you understand that, you will understand everything.”

Later that night, when we lay in bed with the lights off and I had settled down a little, I heard her voice in the darkness—though I don’t think she could hear me crying. I knew that some kind of barrier had been raised between us that night, but back then I didn’t understand why.

“While we sat there singing psalms in the church located at the very tip of the cape,” she said, “the pastor spoke of eternal life and Samanda’s mother just cried and cried, and I decided to find my real parents.”

I felt panicky for a moment and kept my eyes shut. “But you never found them,” I whispered. I knew the answer better than anyone.

“No,” she said.

“Nothing at all
…
?” It was a silly question. My voice trembled, but she didn’t notice.

“No,” she said. “There was nothing to go on at all. No adoption form, no dramatic
King’s letter
as it was called then, no papers. Not at Mother’s Aid Society, either. There weren’t even any records at Kongslund
…
everything was gone
…
or had been misplaced, as Magna put it. Maybe that’s why she hired me to be the deputy director. I guess she felt sorry for me.”

That night, I remembered how
she’d
once done something strange that I’d never dared ask about. She had installed a beautiful birdcage with four egg-yolk-yellow canaries that chirped to their heart’s content, delighting the children who were big enough to be on the second floor. She marched up the stairs to the governesses’ lounge and Magna’s old office and put the cage in the tall windowsill facing west, so that all day the birds could look at the twelve beeches they would never be able to reach.

Three of the birds lived for nearly fifteen years—an unheard of age for the species—and when the last one died, she didn’t get another one; she just left the cage standing untouched. It was like the room a deceased person leaves behind, because the grieving cannot bring themselves to clean it.

The fourth canary had died suddenly a few years earlier, and that had been an incident as curious as the one Susanne had experienced as a child. One morning the bird was just gone.

Susanne stood in a ray of morning sunlight trying to understand the simple, indisputable fact that no one could explain.

The window was open, but the door to the cage was closed, as it should have been—its hinges apparently untouched. Every indicator suggested that it had been opened during the night and then closed again.

As Gerda entered the room, she said, loudly and a little more frightened than anyone had heard her in years, “Canaries don’t open cage doors and then close them again.” She didn’t have to finish her thought.

Before they fly away
…

No one responded.

24

NILS

June 21, 2008

Of course Magna had pulled the strings and dispatched her loyal envoy, Carl Malle, to talk to Susanne Ingemann while she was still attending the teachers college.

That’s how the most powerful woman in my life operated and planned things, because she had never put her trust in God or the Devil.

Susanne was offered a job at the home, and in addition, was promised to succeed Magna after she retired. Who was better suited after all? And how could the girl from the cape decline that offer, especially after she came to understand her universal duty: to become the next repair woman in the workshop Magna had perfected, and which could never come to an end?

Everything had been arranged exactly the way my foster mother wanted it.

After a dreamless night I woke early, though our guests weren’t due till noontime.

It had been almost six weeks since my foster mother’s death.

This was the day I had been dreaming of my entire life, the day old Magdalene had promised would come since the day we met.

Patience
, she had whispered in her lisping voice.
Patience is the only ally of the ostracized and the deformed.
Then
she’d
giggled in the usual way, as
she’d
done during all the years that she was my only friend. It was the day I would be reunited with the five boys from the Elephant Room.

I looked over the sound toward Hven. But for once I left the telescope in its holder. According to Kongslund’s calendar, it was the longest day of the year; and I was sure that was more than a coincidence, as usual.

A little before noon, I heard two cars pull up on the other side of the house. I waited for almost five minutes before I slowly rose from the wheelchair, glanced into the mirror, which stared back at me silently, and slunk down the stairs past N. V. Dorph’s large painting of the woman in green.

I remember that my eyes met hers for a moment expectantly, as though she had something to do with the imminent ceremony—or could tell me something about it—but she too answered with silence. Then I walked through the hallway and opened the door to the infant room, where all of Gerda’s blue elephants immediately surrounded me with their raised trunks, hundreds of them. The smallest children had been taken outdoors to nap in the pavilion, and there was no one else in the room. For a long time, I stood behind the curtain observing the four guests on the patio. My heart beat so hard and so fast that I clenched my teeth out of fear that they’d hear it through my mouth.

This is it, Marie,
my life’s ally whispered to me.
It’s
now
.
Magdalene had a weakness for pomp, which I think she shared with her distinguished host on the Other Side.

Four men stood beside Susanne Ingemann. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but judging from their facial expressions, they were making the first awkward introductions. Asger Christoffersen smiled faintly. His glasses were as thick as telescope lenses, and he was almost a head taller than the others—as if his study of the stars had pulled his bones and tendons toward the sky. Nils Jensen stood to his left, weighed down by the collection of cameras around his neck—a Nikon mirror reflex, a small Leica, and a large flash that made him look like the man in the photo the newspapers had published when he won the Press Photo of the Year prize for his picture of a dead Iraqi boy. Peter Trøst stood at a slight remove with his hands in his pockets, staring at the sound. Maybe
he’d
read about the history of the place and knew that the little wooden pier down below had a glorious past: this was where
The Falcon
, a royal ship, had called at Skodsborg during the months leading up to the adoption of the Constitution, when the People’s King and Countess Danner needed to discuss the slope of the roof and the placement of the external walls with the architect of Kongslund. Peter very slowly turned to face the others on the patio, as though he yearned to escape.

And finally, Knud Taasing, who had accompanied Nils and who was uncharacteristically quiet, his brow furrowed. Two childcare assistants had put sun-yellow freesia in four blue vases under a blue sunshade and set a white table with crystal glasses and shiny silverware on the patio. Susanne Ingemann leaned in and nudged one of the vases a half an inch more toward the center of the table.

I could tell she sensed my presence, and suddenly she turned toward the fluttering curtains in the half-open patio door and said something to the others. Everyone glanced toward the door to the infant room.

I stepped into the sunlight, joining them.

They froze almost as if they’d seen a ghost or a human being they thought had been dead for years. And in a way that was true. I had put on a black dress and buttoned it all the way up my neck, like an aging Magdalene would have done. It seemed to me an appropriate gesture, but it no doubt made me appear as though I’d arrived from a bygone era.

“This is Marie.” Susanne quickly gave me a glass of elderflower juice, no doubt to break the tension.

Surprisingly, my hands weren’t shaking, but I sensed their curiosity like little birds in the air around me. Throughout the Kongslund Affair, I had been a mystery, just as I had in all the years before that; and now here I was, very much alive—the deformed little girl who had once played in the attic, the famous matron’s strange, invisible foster daughter. Susanne introduced me to them one by one, but none of the four men made a move to shake my hand. Touch didn’t come easy to any of us—not even to Knud Taasing who hadn’t been born to unknown parents. I knew
he’d
told the others about the letter from Eva, making me the anonymous letter writer, but there was no hostility in their faces. I assumed that they, like Taasing, thought her letter was very recent, and of course I didn’t do anything to change that perception—just as they had to trust my assurance that there’d never been a letter to Eva’s child enclosed.

Susanne explained that both Taasing and Peter Trøst had tried to get ahold of Søren Severin Nielsen, but that he hadn’t returned their calls. No one had tried to contact Orla. The TV star greeted me with a subtle bow; the friendly gesture made my squinting left eye water, and I wiped away a silly tear. No doubt he ascribed my odd reaction to his fame and his beauty; he had no way of knowing that I had studied every one of those features up close for many more years than most, and therefore remembered them much better than anyone else today, now that his handsomeness had begun to fade.

“Thanks for having us.” Asger bowed politely and a little stiffly. Despite the summer warmth, he wore a wool crewneck sweater. At that moment, he cocked his head as though he recognized a distant creature in my asymmetrical appearance—or maybe he remembered the assistance I had given him when he wanted to find his biological parents. I’d had to act fast, giving him the most logical answer I could find.

He suspected nothing.

Strangely enough, the conversation began with that very topic. “Asger says you once helped him get the name of his biological mother,” Peter Trøst said casually.

I looked away, shocked. My heart was now beating harder than when I first made my entrance. As a child I had loved Peter—at a distance. How could you not?

“How did you find her name?” He gestured toward Asger, as though it was the astronomer’s question to begin with.

Knud Taasing stood a few feet away, giving me an inscrutable look. He hadn’t even mentioned my involvement with the anonymous letters in his articles, and while I understood the problem of proving it if I denied it, I couldn’t help but wonder why
he’d
refrained from doing so. Maybe he was hoping I’d provide more fragments of the answer to the riddle concerning the adopted child—or maybe he just feared that the next revelation would involve his only remaining friend. I understood that in order to preserve his friendship, Knud had chosen not to tell the photographer what he knew. For that reason, Nils was now standing only a few feet from where
he’d
spent his first year in Magna’s care—without knowing the least about it.

“In the records,” I finally said, breathing deeply to keep my voice steady. “I found the name in the official papers in Magna’s office.” I emphasized the word
official
and retained my lisp so that Magdalene wouldn’t feel
she’d
been kept out of the conversation, but made sure I was fully intelligible to my long-awaited guests.

Susanne was the only person present who knew this was a complete lie. Presumably, she was rather shocked at what I might have said to the fifteen-year-old Asger that had satisfied his curiosity. But she hid her surprise perfectly, as always. I could tell that all four men were affected by her beauty just like I had been—and I assumed they knew the main events in her life, since they’d been described in the articles about Kongslund.

Taasing turned to the tall astronomer. “Who was your biological mother then, Asger?” I detected some skepticism in his voice.

“Her name wasn’t Bjergstrand, I can tell you that much.” Asger’s voice remained cheerful.

“Did you ever visit her?”

“Yes and no. I saw her.” His answer was both contradictory and peculiar, and his cheerfulness evaporated.

Susanne came to his rescue. “Let’s have lunch, shall we?” She turned to the infant room door, clapping her hands authoritatively.

“Did anyone else go see their parents?” Taasing asked, fixing Peter Trøst in his gaze.

Peter did not reply.

“Where are those records now?” Taasing asked, turning to Susanne.

“I’ll go to the attic and search for them as soon as possible,” Susanne said.

“Maybe then you’ll find your own form—
from back then
,” Taasing said.

Everyone on the patio froze.

The glass I held in my hand began to shake. There was no way he could have known that.

In the doorway to the infant room a childcare assistant stood with dishes of cured herring and a bread basket. Out on the water, white sails glided inland toward Tårbæk and Tuborg Harbor.

Susanne didn’t succeed in hiding her surprise, which for a second marred her otherwise beautiful face.

“You weren’t going to tell us?” Taasing stood directly in front of her. He was wearing the same green sweater and brown corduroys
he’d
had on during his last visit. “I had been so blinded by my focus on the five boys that I never, until now—right now—took an interest in the last girl from the Elephant Room
…
the last child in the photo.”

Susanne sank into the chair at the end of the table. And we all followed suit, as if spurred by a shared impulse—except for Asger. With trembling hands, the childcare assistant placed the herring dishes next to Susanne. Taasing continued to stare at her.

Then Asger cleared his throat. “Actually, I was the one who discovered it
…
” he said. “A long time ago.” His glasses had slipped down the bridge of his nose and seemed to be plotting their departure, the black frames flapping away over the sea. “This morning I told Peter and Knud—and Nils—after we heard that it was Inger Marie who had sent the anonymous letters. I didn’t think it was necessary to share this information before—because the whole case is about a boy—but I think we have to understand everything in order to figure out what happened.” More than ever, this researcher of the galactic gas clouds seemed as though he was trying to see across the light years to the other side of the universe, slightly afraid of what he might find.

He was afraid, no doubt, of Susanne’s reaction.

She gestured for the assistant to leave the patio, already regaining her composure. It was impressive.

“How do you know about that?” she said.

Asger put a hand on her shoulder, in an oddly intimate and comforting way. “My parents met your adoptive mother, at Kongslund, back in 1962 while they were waiting to adopt. Then they met her again ten years later in Kalundborg when I was admitted to the Coastal Sanatorium. Your mother had the idea to visit the poor sick boy
…
She felt she knew me, and she wanted to take care of others, as you know. But we didn’t know we came from the same place, because they hadn’t told us at that point.”

Asger nodded almost defiantly to Taasing, who sat with his back to the sea, and then he turned back to face Susanne again. “After I’d been at the sanatorium for a while, my parents decided I ought to know, and so they told me I was adopted. My illness was genetic, and they had to tell the doctors that I wasn’t their biological child. That’s why. A few years later they told me about you.”

Susanne Ingemann sat with her head bowed.

“I have no idea why you stopped coming to see me.” Now Asger addressed only her.

“My mother forbade me,” she said and fell silent.

“She forbade it?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you stopped coming? Your mother didn’t want to risk that I might tell you about my past and then you might become suspicious of your own? You weren’t to know?”