The Wild Girl (27 page)

She looked over at the cupboard in which her father kept the more dangerous and expensive medicines – the opium, the powdered mandrake, the belladonna drops – and his precious silver-mounted bezoar stone, taken from the stomach of a gazelle and said to be the antidote to any poison. ‘I cannot give you laudanum,’ she whispered. ‘It’s expensive … and Father keeps a book where he writes down exactly how much he has sold and who bought it. Look, he keeps the cupboard locked.’

‘I only need a little,’ Ferdinand said.

‘I can’t give you any,’ Dortchen said. ‘It’d be wrong. Besides, I’m not at all sure it’s the best thing for you.’ She thought of her mother and her beloved drops, and how many afternoons Frau Wild spent dozing on her couch, the bottle of laudanum close beside her.

‘Please, Dortchen … I thought you were my friend.’

Dortchen took his hands. Long-fingered, slim and stained with ink, they were so like Wilhelm’s that she was filled with tenderness. ‘I am your friend, Ferdinand, indeed I am. Believe me, I cannot give you any laudanum. My father would notice, he’d be angry and I’d get into dreadful trouble. But I can make you up a tea that might help. It’s only flowers and leaves from the garden, but I grew them, I picked them and I hung them up to dry, and Father will not notice if a few are missing.’

Carefully, Dortchen weighed out some dried flowers of chase-devil and calendula, added some dried lemon balm leaves, then poured the mixture into a small muslin bag. Giving it to Ferdinand, she led him back out into the garden.

‘Please don’t come here like this again,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be in trouble if my father sees you here.’

He nodded, his face bleak, then he slouched down the garden path and out the gate.

These Grimm boys – if only they did not care so much about everything
, Dortchen thought to herself.

It was advice she too could take, she realised, and she made up a measure of the same tea for herself. The dried yellow petals of St John’s wort, which Old Marie called ‘chase-devil’ for the way it could drive the megrims away. Gaudy calendula, bright as the sun. Sweet-smelling lemon balm, guaranteed to lift the spirits with its aroma alone.

Looking about the stillroom, she remembered how she had loved coming here as a little girl. With an oversized apron tied over her dress, she would stand on a stool and crush fragrant herbs in a mortar, while her father told her what magical properties each plant had, and how he would mix it with this powder or that tincture to make sick people better. She had thought the stillroom one of the most wonderful places in the world.

Once again her eyes smarted and her throat closed over. She lifted the muslin bag of dried flowers and leaves to her face and inhaled deeply, hoping to bring some sunshine to her own winter-shadowed spirits.

MAY DAY

May 1810

On 1st May, there were bonfires lit in the park and the prettiest girls of the town danced about the maypole. The Wild girls were not permitted to do so, of course, but Herr Wild and Frau Wild did stroll down to Karlsaue Park to watch the spectacle with their daughters, leaving Rudolf in charge of the shop for a few hours.

Karlsaue was a beautiful tree-filled park built on the small island that lay between the Fulda River and a narrow stream that ran at the base of the hill on which the old town of Cassel was built. The Kurfürst had built an orangery at one end along classical lines, topped with a great many marble statues recollecting Roman mythology. These looked down over a long avenue of formal trees to a dainty, gold-topped temple on an artificial island in the centre of an artificial lake. Dortchen had often come here with her mother as a child, to roll her hoop along the path or play hopscotch on the smooth paving stones, which were so different from the small, uneven cobblestones in the Marktgasse.

With the weather so much warmer, Dortchen wore her new dress with the fashionable puffed sleeves and the bonnet that Lisette had sent her for Christmas. The bonnet was rose-pink with a matching satin ribbon that tied up under her ear, and it made Dortchen feel prettier than she ever had.

Strolling in the sunshine, listening to the music and breathing in the
sweet scent of the spring flowers, it was impossible to feel depressed. Dortchen took a deep breath and squared her shoulders.
You must forget Wilhelm
, she told herself.
It’s foolish to eat your heart out for a man who hardly notices you’re alive
.

As if her thought had conjured him from air, she saw Wilhelm walking ahead of her, arm in arm with Lotte. Dortchen’s face flamed and she fell back, overcome with confusion. But Wilhelm turned, and his face lit up at the sight of her. He bent and spoke a word to Lotte, and she turned to smile and wave. Dortchen could do nothing but try to compose her face and step forward to meet them.

Wilhelm took off his hat, smiling at her in genuine pleasure. ‘Dortchen, how are you? It’s so good to see you. We’ve seen nothing of you in months.’

‘Helping my father in the shop takes up a great deal of my time,’ Dortchen answered.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to entice you to come to supper.’

‘It’s my birthday in a week or so,’ Lotte said. ‘But you know that – it’s yours only two weeks later. We’ve had such a hard winter … Jakob has saved up some money and will buy me a new dress. Oh, I cannot wait to get rid of my blacks. I swear I’ll burn them in the marketplace!’

‘It’s been almost two years since Mother died, and Lotte simply cannot let that dress out any more,’ Wilhelm said. ‘Besides, she’ll be turning seventeen, so she should have a dress that befits her grand old age.’

‘I know it’ll be very expensive,’ Lotte said, sounding anxious. ‘Oh, Dortchen, we’ve been living on lentils and dried beans for months. No money even for salt.’

‘I must admit, it’s easier now the weather has started to warm,’ Wilhelm said. ‘We can buy fresh vegetables at the market, though meat is still a luxury.’

‘Jakob says he’ll buy us some for my birthday supper,’ Lotte said.

‘We’re going to write to friends in Steinau to send us some butter – it’s so much cheaper there – and to find some eggs and sugar, so Lotte can bake a cake.’

‘Oh, please, say you’ll come,’ Lotte said. ‘We all want you, even Jakob.’

Dortchen hesitated and looked at her parents. They were standing, very stiff and apart, on the shores of the lake, watching the ducks. When she was small, her father had brought his daughters down to the lake to feed the ducks stale bread. Now, any leftover bread was made into soup.

‘We’ll ask your mother and sisters too, if you like,’ Wilhelm said. His understanding of her situation warmed her through.

‘I’ll ask my father if I may,’ she said. ‘If we tell him it is a joint birthday celebration, he cannot possibly refuse.’

That means we’ll be able to bring some food too
, she thought.
The poor Grimms should not have to feed us all.

‘I’ll only come if you let me bake the cake, though,’ she continued. ‘I know what Lotte’s cooking is like!’

‘I’m getting much better,’ Lotte boasted. ‘It’s hard to burn lentil soup.’

‘You seemed to do it often enough,’ Wilhelm teased.

‘I’m so glad we’ll celebrate our seventeenth birthdays together, Dortchen,’ Lotte said. ‘I could do with some fun. Such a dreary winter we’ve had. We ran out of firewood and couldn’t afford any more, so we spent half the day huddled in our eiderdowns. Our hands were so cold we couldn’t hold a pen or a needle or anything.’

Wilhelm went red. ‘Taxes,’ he said to Dortchen.

She nodded sympathetically. ‘Oh, I know. Father fears the King will bankrupt us all.’

‘Yet he still holds lavish parties every night, and he’s always positively dripping with diamonds,’ Lotte said.

‘Jakob says the Emperor writes him furious letters and threatens to take his throne away from him,’ Wilhelm said.

‘Soon there’ll be no pretence at independent kingdoms, and France shall stretch from the Mediterranean to the Baltic Sea,’ Dortchen said.

‘Cassel even looks French now,’ Wilhelm said, nodding his head at all the women in their light high-waisted gowns, hair tied up in Psyche knots, their feet in flimsy satin slippers. ‘Even you, Dortchen. I used to love to see you Wild girls in your gowns cut in the old way, with waists and a proper skirt.’

She gazed at him in surprise.

‘You didn’t have to wear them, though,’ Lotte said. ‘It was like dragging around a tonne of heavy material every day. So many layers, and so hot in summer. Dortchen looks so pretty and fresh in her light cotton.’

‘She does indeed,’ Wilhelm said. ‘But Dortchen would look pretty in anything.’

There was no mistaking the look of admiration in his eyes. Dortchen felt heat rise in her cheeks and lowered her head so her bonnet hid her face. They walked in silence for a moment, then Wilhelm said, ‘You see, that’s why it’s so important we preserve the old stories, before all of our ways are smothered by the customs of the French. Those who remember the old tales are getting fewer all the time. If we don’t save them, they’ll be lost forever, and that seems so sad to me.’

Dortchen nodded. ‘Yes, it’s important. There’s so much wisdom and beauty in the old tales. It would be tragic to lose them.’

‘Yes, exactly,’ Wilhelm cried. ‘That’s why … Well, I know you’re kept busy helping your father, but …’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘I want to start up the reading circle again, though I want to make it more of a storytelling circle. You and your sisters know so many stories, and so do the Hassenpflug girls. And Julia and Charlotte Ramus know some too, and their father is the pastor and so is always visiting old people. Perhaps he will find some new tales for us too. We could meet every now and again and share the tales we’ve all found. Do you think you could come sometimes, you and your sisters? If your father could spare you?’

‘We’d really love you to,’ Lotte said. ‘We’ve missed you so much.’

Dortchen felt a warm glow in her stomach. ‘Really?’

‘Absolutely,’ Lotte said, giving her old wide smile.

‘We plan to meet on Friday afternoons, when we can,’ Wilhelm said. ‘We cannot meet at our house, of course – it wouldn’t be seemly – but Frau Ramus has offered to host the gathering at her house.’

He knows Father has his church meeting on Fridays
, Dortchen thought, her pulse leaping with a sudden rush of joy.
He does want me!

‘Our collection is coming along well,’ Wilhelm said, ‘but sometimes there are so many different versions of a tale that it’s hard to know which to keep and which to discard, or whether to blend them together to make a more complete whole. The stories are never fixed. They change from region to region, or from teller to teller.’

‘I know I never manage to tell the same story the same way twice,’ Dortchen said. ‘If I’m telling a bedtime story to Mia, I might make it a little less scary. But if I’m telling the story sitting in darkness about the fire on All Hallow’s Eve, well, then I make it as spooky as possible.’

‘I was hoping you’d tell me some more stories,’ Wilhelm said. ‘Clemens has asked us to give him our collection to read, so we want to make it as good as we possibly can.’

‘Jakob is afraid Clemens will lose it, or take the tales and retell them himself,’ Lotte added, ‘so he’s made Wilhelm and Ferdinand copy out the whole collection in their very best script. It’s taken forever, hasn’t it, Willi?’

‘It certainly has. By the end of every day my hand is cramped like a claw,’ he said. ‘But Jakob’s right. It would be a tragedy to lose the collection, when it’s taken us so long to find them all.’

‘Dortchen,’ Frau Wild called. ‘Time to go.’

She nodded.

‘So we’ll see you on Friday?’ Lotte asked.

Dortchen hesitated, glancing towards the dark bulk of her father, then quickly nodded again.

Wilhelm’s face lit up. ‘Oh, good. I’m so glad you’ll come.’

It’s just the stories he wants
, Dortchen told herself. But still she went away down the path with the lightest heart she’d had in months.

SPINDLE