The Wild Girl (54 page)

‘He’s a genius,’ Rudolf said, shaking his head over the newspaper. ‘Will he never give up?’

‘Surely he cannot win against such odds?’ Dortchen said, reading the paper over his shoulder.

‘A normal man, no, but this is Napoléon,’ Rudolf said. ‘I’ve seen him on the battlefield. He could rouse even the most exhausted and war-weary trooper. His men would gladly give up their lives for him and the glory he brings.’

It was not enough, however. Despite his victories and the steep losses suffered by the Allied troops, Napoléon’s army was simply too small and too exhausted. Step by step, they fell back, and at the end of March the Allied forces tramped into Paris.

On 6th April, the Emperor abdicated.

The news was greeted with joy in Cassel. The Marktgasse was full of people cheering and singing and dancing arm in arm. Everyone wore white cockades pinned to their hats, or white ribbons in their hair, to celebrate the restoration of the monarchy in France.

Dortchen did not dance; she disliked anyone putting their hands upon her. She stood on the steps of her father’s shop, watching. She could not help feeling sorrow mixed in with the joy. It had been twenty-five years since the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France – twenty-five years of constant war and struggle and strife. The world had been remade. It would not be easy to turn back to the way things were before.

But we’re at peace now,
she told herself.
That’s all that matters.

On the far side of the square, she saw Wilhelm and Lotte dancing arm in arm. As if sensing her eyes upon him, Wilhelm looked up. At once he flushed and looked away, and Dortchen felt all the old hurt and shame. She bent her head to hide her face.

It seemed there was to be no peace between her and Wilhelm.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

April 1814

A few weeks later, Lotte came to tell Dortchen that the Grimms were moving away from the Marktgasse.

‘We can’t afford the rent,’ she said, sitting down in the rocking chair by the fire.

‘Oh, Lotte,’ Dortchen said, the kettle in her hand. Tears pricked her eyes.

‘I know. I simply can’t imagine not living next door to you. Not that I see you much any more.’

Dortchen gestured helplessly with the kettle.

Lotte shrugged. ‘I know, I know. Work, work, work – that’s all we ever do. At least my life is a little easier now that I only have Wilhelm to look after, and he’s out half the day anyway. We don’t need so many rooms now, with the boys all gone off to fight and Jakob away in Paris.’

‘Have you heard from him?’ Dortchen asked, hanging the kettle above the fire and bringing over her basket of darning. Lotte reached for a needle and thread too. She was no more able to sit idle than Dortchen.

‘Indeed, yes. You know Jakob – he never puts his pen down. He makes me so cross, though. All he writes about are the old books and manuscripts he’s found, when I want to hear about the new French king. I heard he’s a miserable old fellow in a wheelchair, too sick even to go to Paris. I wonder whether they’ll have a grand coronation for him.’

‘I wonder whether he’ll call himself Louis the Seventeenth or Louis the Eighteenth,’ Dortchen said. ‘I mean, his nephew, the poor little Dauphin who died in prison, never ruled.’

‘In the eyes of the Bourbons, he was king regardless of whether he sat on a throne or lived in a prison. Poor boy. I heard they made him spit on portraits of his mother and call her nasty names.’

The kettle boiled and Dortchen made them peppermint tea with honey.

‘Where will you move to?’ she asked, clasping her hot cup between her hands.

‘Wilhelm has found us an apartment in the New Town, near Wilhelmshöhe Gate,’ Lotte said. ‘It’ll be much quieter, he says, and we’ll be able to walk in the royal park.’

‘That’s so far away,’ Dortchen said in dismay.

‘I’ll be able to visit you in your garden,’ Lotte said comfortingly.

Are you moving because of me?
Dortchen wanted to ask, but she did not dare. Any answer would hurt. If Lotte said yes, it meant that Wilhelm still had feelings for her, even if they were ones of anger, resentment and hurt. If Lotte said no, it would mean he did not care. Dortchen closed her eyes, bending her head to breathe in the fragrant steam. Why could she not stop caring for him? She had tried and tried, but the stump of her love refused to wither and die.

On the day the cart came for all the Grimms’ belongings, Dortchen crouched on her bed, watching from above. The washing line that ran between her bedroom and Lotte’s was heavy with flapping eiderdowns, so she could see only glimpses of Lotte and Wilhelm as they piled boxes onto the cart. They both looked worn and anxious.

Dortchen wished that she could help them somehow. If only the fairy tale book had sold better. If only her father had let them be married. If only …

In a way, it was easier not having Wilhelm living next door. Dortchen could walk down the alleyway between the two houses without listening for his distinctive cough, and she could go to the market without being
afraid of bumping into him. Church was no longer an ordeal, with his thin, upright form sitting only a few pews away, never turning to smile at her like he used to do.

Yet Dortchen still found the months after he had moved away more grey and empty than ever before. Spring turned to summer, and she worked from sunrise to midnight in the house, the garden and the stillroom. There was never a moment’s rest in which to think of him, yet he was always present in her thoughts, like a bruise that refused to heal.

Late in June, Dortchen heard that Jakob had returned from Paris, bringing with him some of the treasures that had been stolen by the French. He was home only a few weeks; in August he once more set forth, this time to Vienna, where the great powers were meeting to decide the future of Europe. The social standing of the Grimms was much improved by Jakob’s work at the Vienna Congress. After church on Sundays, many people would hail Dortchen and ask for news of him, expecting her to be well informed. She could only smile and shake her head, and offer whatever stale titbits she had gleaned from others.

Then something happened that drove all thoughts of Wilhelm or the peace negotiations out of Dortchen’s mind. She took her mother a bowl of chicken broth and found her sitting up in bed, her nightgown unbuttoned to her belly button, her husband’s shaving mirror in one hand. Dortchen had come in so swiftly that Frau Wild had time to do no more than cry out and try to hide her uncovered breast. It was red, swollen and misshapen, with a great sunburst of yellow pus near the twisted, deformed nipple.

Dortchen stared at it in horror. ‘Mother,’ she whispered.

Frau Wild laid down the mirror and buttoned her nightgown with shaking fingers. ‘Dortchen, you should knock,’ she reproved.

‘Mother, what … what’s wrong with you?’

‘It’s nothing,’ her mother replied. ‘A lump that has burst. It’ll get better now.’

‘Let me look.’ Dortchen moved quickly to her mother’s side. ‘How long has it been there?’

Frau Wild laid her hand protectively over her breast. ‘There’s no need
to gawk at me. I’ve felt it growing for a while, but now that it’s burst all will be well.’

‘It doesn’t look well, not at all.’ Catching her mother’s hands, Dortchen drew them away and folded back the collar of the nightgown. She gazed down at the red-lipped, yellow-hearted tumour growing from the side of her mother’s slack breast. ‘How long?’ When her mother hunched her shoulders, she asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You do so much … You work so hard.’

‘But, Mother—’ Dortchen felt the familiar choke of impotence in her throat. She buttoned her mother up again. ‘I’ll make you a poultice of trefoil and adder’s tongue, but I think we must call the doctor.’

‘Fiddlesticks,’ her mother said sharply. ‘Doctors will see you into an early grave. Some nice tea is all I need.’

Normally, Dortchen was inclined to agree, but she had never seen anything like that terrible seeping tumour. She hurried to tell her father, who, after examining his wife, agreed that the doctor must be called.

The beautiful summer morning was sucked into a dark funnel of fear and grief and horror. The doctor was dour and very sure. ‘A few months, no more. I can operate if you like. I doubt it’ll do any good.’

‘What, cut off my breast?’ Frau Wild cried. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘It’s the only chance,’ he responded, ‘though I think it’s far too late. If I’d been called a year ago …’

Dortchen could not sleep for the guilt that tore at her. She had always thought her mother was malingering, pretending to be ill so she could lie in bed and have her supper brought to her on a tray. At times, Dortchen’s anger and resentment had been so sharp that she had deliberately given her mother the thinnest part of the soup, or not sweetened her healing tea with honey.
What agony my poor mother has endured
, she now thought,
and all without uttering a sound. What a dreadful, unloving daughter I am.

The doctor and Dortchen’s father decided to operate. Frau Wild was not to be told, to spare her the fear that would overcome her. A day the following week was decided upon, and Dortchen was told to cut up old sheets for swabs. Herr Wild gave his wife a double dose of laudanum, so
she was drowsy when the doctor came, rubbing his red hands together, his assistant bearing a bag filled with knives and saws. Dortchen was ordered to help hold her mother down.

The scream she gave when the doctor first cut around the tumour was heart-wrenching. Choking back sobs, Dortchen held her mother’s thrashing shoulder as the doctor hacked away at her breast. Blood and pus poured down. Dortchen shoved piles of linen beneath her. They turned a sodden red in an instant. The doctor chopped away the last lump of flesh, leaving a raw hole where her mother’s breast had been.

He poured brandy onto the wound, deftly bound a wad of old cloth to it with bandages wound about her thin torso, and then set leeches to feed all around. ‘They’ll soon suck the poison out,’ he said with satisfaction. Within half an hour he was gone, having shared half a bottle of quince brandy with Herr Wild first.

Dortchen sat by her mother’s bed, holding her limp hand and staring at the leeches with revulsion. Her mother lay with her blue eyelids shut, as silent and still now as she had been convulsed with agony previously.

The excision of Frau Wild’s breast did not help. She lingered for another few weeks, dying quietly in her bed while Dortchen slept on a pallet beside her.

Nothing could comfort Dortchen, not even the arrival of all her sisters and their families for the funeral. Even Röse came, plump and pregnant, with two little girls clinging shyly to her hands and her elderly husband beaming with pride. The old house was once again filled with children’s laughter and the running of small feet, but Dortchen’s grief was in no way eased. She felt as if she were walking in the valley of the shadow of death, and no longer knew the way back to the land of the living.

HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD

September 1814

After his wife’s death, Herr Wild once again began to drink alone in his study. The brandy inflamed his temper. Once again, he struck out at his daughters and quarrelled with his son.

It was harvest time, and Dortchen was kept busy in the big garden, picking the fruit before it fell and rotted on the ground. Mia stayed at home, doing the housework on her own. Many evenings Dortchen came home, hot and sunburnt, her arms and hands scratched and stained with juice, to find Mia silently weeping as she peeled the vegetables for their supper, a new bruise on her arm or face.

One evening Dortchen came home to find the kitchen empty. The soup was bubbling wildly. She put her baskets of fruit down on the table, took the soup off the fire and walked through the house, dread tightening about her heart. Then she heard a sobbing gasp from her father’s study, at the end of the hall. ‘Please, no, Father,’ Mia’s voice said.

Dortchen crept down the hall and put one eye to the crack of the door. Mia knelt at her father’s feet, her face in her hands as he prayed over her head. The look on her father’s face turned Dortchen to stone. She could not take a step, nor scarcely breathe. She swayed, then put up a hand to save herself. The door creaked a little wider.