Mother Superior said absently, “We do not speak of our patrons that way. Or our young charges.” She was thinking, as was the rest of her council, of the high hopes they’d entertained when the baby turned up on their doorstep one late October day, still wearing the black hair of the womb, wrapped in a soft wool blanket and bearing a note that said simply, “Familjeflicka.” This, they had thought, was a child destined for one of their rare adoptions.
Young Sister Birgit, who had been born in southern Sweden, had said the word came from her country and meant either “a girl who stays at home” or “a girl of good family.” Given the quality of the blanket and the notorious fact that gravid Swedes often took the short boat ride over to Copenhagen, where mothers’ names were not required for a legal delivery, the note seemed to promise great things. But the sisters found no family portraits, no silver spoons, no precious jewels hidden about the infant’s person; only what one might expect to find in a very ordinary baby’s diaper, and that they gave to one of the novices to deal with. The baby screamed at their inspection, and screamed when she was washed, and nearly took her own head off when she was put to bed with a bottle. The sisters decided to let her cry till she slept, and in the morning they found her whimpering more quietly, but with a mouth stained from blood, not milk. Her tough young gums had broken off the glass nipple.
Sister Birgit was delegated to pick the splinters from the baby’s lips, using tweezers and the light of a good lantern. She had to dose the squalling patient with brandy to make her lie still.
She’s nothing but breath and bones, Birgit thought. Only breath and bones. Though it wasn’t true—the baby’s limbs were nicely rounded, her cries lusty—the phrase made Birgit feel tender. It gave her patience.
In the meticulous work, which took all day, Birgit came to love the little girl. She murmured endearments over the drunken body and torn mouth, and it was then that she shortened the Swedish word to “Famke,” the name that would follow the girl even after her official christening as Ursula Marie. When Famke woke up enough to be hungry again, Birgit would have fed the baby at her own breast, if she could have mustered anything more than prayers. Instead she dipped one corner of Famke’s blanket in a cup of warm milk, freshly bought at the market on Amagertorv, and coaxed the sore lips and tongue to suckle.
In later years, as the growing girl’s cough turned bloody, Sister Birgit would accuse herself of having missed a shard of glass somewhere. She fancied that Famke’s lungs were lacerating themselves as they tried to get rid of that last fragment. Though Birgit and many of the other nuns were also afflicted with persistent coughing, she felt, against all reason, that the unusual event of Famke’s infancy was the source of the girl’s affliction—never mind that she bore no other scars. Birgit prayed for forgiveness, and for Famke’s cure, and she nursed Famke all the way to solid food at the age of five months. Thus she made the best possible use of the “good family’s” sole patrimony; the baby sucked the blanket down to meager threads.
“Sister Birgit,” the Mother Superior reprimanded her gently in private, “you have become too attached to this one child. You must divide your care among the children equally, as our Lord divides his love among us.”
Birgit tried to do as she was told. Though she could never give the chaotic horde of orphans the impartial and impersonal affection required by her order, she could offer them the semblance of equal treatment. In everyday life, the life the other sisters shared, she nursed the orphans’ colds and coughs and combed their hair with the impartiality of a Solomon; when a child died, Birgit washed the body and lifted it into its pine box.
But when she was alone with Famke, Birgit hugged the little girl as tight as she dared, so tight that their bones ground together. Birgit would not have chosen convent life for herself; that had been her parents’ wish, as they’d grown too old and tired by the time their seventh daughter reached adolescence to do anything more for her. Her eighteen-year-old body was starved for physical contact, and Famke’s round little arms gave her the greatest comfort she would ever know.
In these moments of privacy, Famke took shameless advantage of Birgit’s unstated preference. She played by sliding the gold band from the nun’s finger and sticking it on her own thumb, then popped it in her mouth and impaled it with her tongue to make herself laugh. On the unusual occasions when there was candy at the orphanage, Famke knew that even after all the other children had received their justly measured shares, there would be an extra piece or two in Birgit’s pocket. She knew also that if Birgit, and Birgit alone, caught her in some wrongdoing, she had only to place her hands on each side of the nun’s face and kiss her nose to be forgiven and pass unpunished. No one else would learn of her crime, and her bond with her fellow-Swede would grow.
In Famke’s twelfth year, Birgit’s affections led nearly to disaster. As one of the physically stronger nuns, Birgit was asked to supervise the annual boiling of soap. She had been doing it for some years and had the routine chore mastered: rendering the waste fat saved from stringy Sunday joints, adding lye made from stove ashes, stirring endlessly. The older girls were excused from lessons in order to perform this stirring, for production of a good soap, the nuns argued, was of as valuable practical use as hemming the countless towels and blankets they made to sell—all skills the girls would take with them into service—and perhaps even more necessary than lessons in the use of Danish flowers and herbs, or reading the Bible and other useful books.
That year, Famke was big enough to help. Sister Birgit smiled as her darling took the wooden stirring-stick from the orphan ahead of her and began to draw it through the liquid viscous with long boiling. Famke closed her eyes and breathed in the odor that, to her, meant the belly-fluttering thrill of flirtation and the promise of something she didn’t understand but knew, absolutely knew, would be wonderful. And so when one of the older Viggos, a large-eyed youth now nearing the age of confirmation, approached with wood for the fire, Famke smiled and shimmered at him. And he was lost.
Just then Birgit’s attention was momentarily diverted—and for this the other sisters blamed her—by a cloud of bees threatening to swarm either the soap pot, the heavy-blossomed elder tree near which it rested, or the fair stirrer of soap herself. Birgit took off her apron and flapped it vigorously at them. So she did not see Famke slow down in her stirring, gazing at this Viggo, lost in her own hazy ideas of sin. And then Famke lost the wooden plank, or most of it, in the soap pot. With a cry of dismay, she lunged after it; the boy dropped his wood and lunged, too, to save her hand from scalding—and as a result it was his hands that scalded.
Viggo howled with pain and ran toward the well. Famke ran after him. She nursed his burned hands as she’d been trained to do, with cold water and bandages swiftly torn from her petticoat. And finally, as a much-stung Sister Birgit abandoned the bees and came to the rescue, Famke dropped a tiny illicit kiss on one clumsy knot she’d tied over the boy’s wrist.
In that moment, with no interchange of plank and air to cool it, the unstirred fat reached a crucial temperature. The whole soapy potful burst into flames. The conflagration blew toward the elder tree and, as Mother Superior said in yet another council meeting, “We were an angel’s breath from burning up ourselves.”
Indeed, a spark landed in Famke’s hair and started to melt. With a hurt hand, Viggo smothered it, and Famke collapsed in his arms in gratitude. She never mentioned the singeing of her braids to anyone else, but she was to suffer a fear of fire the rest of her life.
Sitting and tallying up the damage, Mother Superior said, “I believe some punishment is in order. For endangering not just herself and young Viggo but the entire orphanage as well, for being . . . Nå, for . . .” Everyone on the nuns’ council knew what she meant. Famke had been born with a character that had no place inside convent walls, and Sister Birgit had only strengthened it. They were all thinking one word: wild. “This time her transgression