The Seventh Child (85 page)

But the letter ends up in my hands because Magna has retired and moved away, and the mail carrier fails to recognize that my name is not on the envelope.

At its bedside that morning, Fate must have danced in heavenly glee.

After Eva waited in vain all summer to hear back from Magna, she takes the only course of action that can put an end to it all: she ends her exile and decides to visit her past.

She arrives at Copenhagen’s Kastrup Airport on a direct flight from Australia. It’s early September. From the arrival lounge she calls Kongslund, and an assistant tells her that Magna has long since moved away and now lives in Skodsborg. Without warning she turns up at Magna’s apartment in the early evening of September 10, 2001. Coincidences are falling into a miraculous pattern now, just the kind that the Master finds most delightful.

It was a shock,
Magna writes.
It was a shock to see the woman I had never thought I’d see again, on my doorstep. She had aged, but in her way she was as beautiful as she had been when we helped her win her pardon and her freedom. Of course I could have wished for a more conciliatory reunion, but that was not to happen. She wanted to see her child, and this time she wouldn’t accept any rejection. She was furious, I sensed.

And now something happens—maybe it’s triggered by Magna’s guilt, or maybe just by an intuitive fear of the woman she knows to be a convicted murderer.

Her fury and determination frightened me terribly. Not least because once again she threatened to break her promise of keeping quiet if I didn’t relent. In my fear and confusion, I told her she could find all the answers at Kongslund, because that was true. I didn’t dare tell the truth to her face even if she had a right to know. I think she decided to go directly there, despite it being late at night. But I never had the courage to ask Marie. I don’t know what happened after that.

Deep in her soul, Eva must have sensed the betrayal
she’d
been the victim of.

When she knocked on the door by the southern annex, it was I who opened it, just as Fate had devised.

It was late and dark, Susanne had gone back to her house in Christiansgave, the night-shift assistant was watching television in the sunroom, and the rest of the orphanage had long since settled in for the night.

“My name is Eva Bjergstrand.”

She stood on the doorstep, in the shadows, but I could tell it was an older woman—and my astonishment could hardly have been any less than Magna’s. The woman I’d tried to find for several days with Susanne was here, miraculously.

For a few seconds I said nothing. If I hadn’t had so much practice carrying out conversations with the magic mirror in my room, my facial expression would have immediately revealed my surprise.

Before I could stop her, she lunged desperately into the hallway of the villa that had once housed her child—and had then separated her from it forever. I remember noticing blond strands in her gray, wavy hair—the strangest details from that night.

She stood staring at me for a long time. After that I only remember her one whispering question: “What is your name?”

I didn’t answer.

“Magna told me to look for my child here.” Her voice was surprisingly light and earnest.

“Your child?” I hid my nervousness behind formality, something I rarely did in a world that I wasn’t a part of.

“What’s your name?”

On impulse, I pushed her back out into the darkness on the front steps and asked her to wait while I got my coat. It wasn’t so warm in early September, after all.

“The children are sleeping,” I said. I remember this idiotic rationale quite well.

We’d
barely made it to the sound before she repeated the question that she was so dead set on getting an answer to: “What’s your name?” Then she added, even more insistently: “Who are you?”

The wind was howling in the crowns of the twelve beech trees behind us. “My name is Marie,” I said. “I’m Magna’s daughter.” For once I didn’t mention my status as a foster child, and I was uneasy about this, without quite understanding why.

For the next few minutes we walked side by side along the beach, heading toward Bellevue in silence. She seemed to be contemplating something. Suddenly she stopped and shook her head. “No,” she said.

And stood still.

With my face turned away from her, I gazed toward Hven. But I heard what she said, and in some way understood what it meant, though I had no idea
then
of what I know now.

“Your name is
Jonna
…
your name is
Jonna
Bjergstrand. That’s your birth name, regardless of what they call you now.”

“No, my name is Marie. Your
son
might be
John
Bjergstrand,” I said without expression. “Not
Jonna
.” I figured the woman had lost her mind looking for her lost child.

“Come on, look at us,” she said strangely, which irritated me as much as the wind in the trees behind us. “There’s no doubt. Look at our
eyes
…
I’d recognize that expression and that color anywhere. We have exactly the same eyes.”

“Your son’s name is
John
,” I repeated. “Not
Jonna
. You had a son. I am Kongslund’s foundling.”

Though I had turned to face the sea and had my back to her, I could tell she was shaking her head.

“No.
Jonna
,” she said.

“No,” I said insistently, turning to the water and the darkness.

At that very moment she reached for me. Without turning my head, I felt her right hand draw near to my shoulder. I didn’t let anyone touch me. Not Gerda. Not even my foster mother.

There is no John Bjergstrand.
Suddenly, it was as though I’d heard Gerda’s voice, even though those words hadn’t been spoken yet.

Her hand touched my left, sloping shoulder, and I spun around. Startled, she took a step backward. To make her let go of me, I shoved her hard with my eyes closed.

I don’t remember anything else. Not the waves crashing against the beach. Not the sound of the storm across the sound. Nothing.

Everything seems so oddly familiar in the Darkness: we listen, we are invisible, we walk along the edge as one verse catches another. The song is the only sound we hear.

Maybe at some point I am singing in the wind—or maybe I mimic the words with my eyes closed the way I used to in the infant room.

I don’t remember anymore.

When I awoke from this dream, she lay at my feet.
She’d
fallen in the sand. I could tell that her head had struck a rock. One eye was closed, and the other was wide open. When I kneeled down there was no doubt, just as the Fool’s eye had stared into the sky above the wetlands, Eva’s remaining eye stared into the darkness over the sound. Her head was smashed upon the only rock on the beach. She must have been terribly unlucky. And right then I saw something else: a length of rope that was twisted like a little noose.

When time stands still, you notice the strangest things.

Presumably it was those three things—the eye, the boulder, the rope—that inspired me to take the only logical step imaginable, and which I have to explain here in order to finish the story. For the first time ever, Fate showed me its hand. Eva lay as has always been intended: right next to her children. Or better, the symbols they’d left behind: the rock that Kjeld had struck when he was thrown off Severin’s horse in the wetlands; the rope the police officer hanged himself with when Nils Jensen photographed him beating up a demonstrator in a back alley on Blaagaardsgade; the eye that stared straight into the sky the way the Fool in the wetlands had when Orla’s brutal attack had maimed him. Like all the stories in my secret notes.

For a long time I stood in the darkness studying the three objects. Here was the dead woman only a few hundred yards from the place where the seven children in the Elephant Room began their lives, alone. She had died trying to find her child.

She had been frighteningly close, but she hadn’t made it before Fate stopped her with a single, powerful shove.

With that in mind, I emptied the contents of her pockets of all her personal papers, money, passport, tickets, and other possessions. I didn’t want her to be identified or named, because she belonged to none of us.

She belonged to no one.

I only missed one thing, the photo that Knud Taasing later heard about from his source in the police: the picture of my childhood home.

That cost him his life. I am sure it was Malle’s work, but like so much else in the Kongslund Affair, it could never be proven.

Even the best hunters make mistakes.

After that I walked north as fast and quietly as I could.

At Kongslund I slipped silently from room to room in order not wake anyone.

First I retrieved the old linden branch that I’d picked up at the private school when I read about Principal Nordal’s death in the
Søllerød Post
. I had instantly understood what had happened and who was responsible—of course I had, because more than once I’d seen Peter bike off toward the woods with his black bag on his bike rack.

Next I got the old book that UFO-Ejnar had read during his final hours in the hole, where he had sat down to die because of his love for Asger.
The Black Cloud.
I’d found it on Asger’s patio table one of the last times I’d visited him. I had kept these two tokens in the King’s Room for all these years—not even explaining to Magdalene their significance to me.

Finally I opened the birdcage in Kongslund’s office and grabbed the smallest of the four slumbering canaries—the one that reminded me most of Aphrodite—and snatched it before it could escape. It was twelve years old, but still beautiful. Then I closed the cage door. I only needed one bird to underscore the symbolic meaning of my act.

Without making a sound, I closed the front door behind me and walked back to the dead woman on the beach, my gifts in my arms. I made sure to tread on the edge of the water so that I would leave no trace behind. About halfway there, I kneeled down and pressed the head of Susanne’s canary into the sand until it suffocated and was still.

When I reached the dead woman, I arranged my offerings around her the way I thought was most beautiful and appropriate.

For once, the symmetry preferred by kings and gods was mine, as I made sure that all of my offerings to the dead woman were in the right spot; as I saw it, they formed a perfect pattern, symbolizing what had happened. Eva Bjergstrand herself lay with her face to the sound on which abandoned children had been borne, to meet their savior in the form of a magnificent woman in an old villa.

That was all I could do for the dead woman.

Of course there was another offering on the beach that night, a sign the police never considered because it was long gone by the time they arrived. My own personal gift to Eva. The one thing that the very few people who know me would always associate with me: the Darkness
…

And when I left that spot the Darkness hid me as it always had.

Later I felt a peculiar sense of relief. It was the same sensation as the morning I’d met Magdalene at the pier and cried in her arms for hours. The meeting with Eva had the same effect on me. When Fate puts obstacles in your path, it doesn’t put a lot of thought into it. It’s pure reflex. Like when a doctor taps a little child on its knee with a small hammer. And when Fate lands its final blow, it doesn’t care about motives or states of mind.

I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that the police wouldn’t either.

They would just pick me up and remove me from Kongslund forever—and I couldn’t let that happen.

Two days later, my foster mother found a small notice in the
Søllerød Post
that changed her whole world.

From that day on, I knew she lived in fear.

An unidentified woman was found dead on the beach between Kongslund and Bellevue,
she wrote in the Protocol.

To Magna’s eyes, the description fit Eva Bjergstrand perfectly.
I’m more afraid than ever,
she wrote.