The Seventh Child (42 page)

And this soul was black, I knew that much.

For days, I sat with the letter from Australia; I knew the words by heart.

We have to forget everything, you said. That was the promise we made one another for the sake of my child. To this day I have kept my word.

And then something unexpected happened.

I saw a lengthy article about a wedding in Holmen’s Church, and in one of the pictures of the guests I recognized
…

The child’s father.

It was taken at Slotsholm on April 7. It was a shock.

The thought of revenge
…

What right does he have to everything I never had?

The words hit me with a force I was completely unprepared for. Perhaps it was because I thought I’d known so many children whose fathers had fled from everything others had assumed was dear to them—many early in the morning, and without a trace, to ensure that they weren’t found—and then the women would be enveloped in the Great Reproach, which everyone involved conveyed to these unhappy, abandoned women whether they wanted to or not.

For this woman, Magna was the only way to reach the child
she’d
never met—and she had enclosed a small white envelope with the words:
My child
.

And yet I didn’t for a second doubt that my foster mother would deny her wish.
She’d
never choose to open a door to a past nobody else knew about. This was where her power resided. And I understood that this was why Fate, in the simple body of a mail carrier, had chosen to throw Eva’s letter at my feet—and so I sat in the King’s Room with the little white envelope in my hands, hour after hour.
My child
. How banal.

This envelope contained Eva’s final words to her child, and once again, all the alarm bells went off—just as clearly as Magna’s song about the blue elephants—and for days I refrained from opening it as I pondered my chances of fulfilling the woman’s wish without committing my final sin. Night after sleepless night I tried to summon Magdalene for counsel, but she rarely left her royal soul mate on the Other Side these days, and I figured that they probably had more important things to do. Her lack of response confirmed my suspicions.

Early on the third morning after receiving the letter, I tiptoed into the Elephant Room, and when the first beam of light pierced the crack between the curtains and struck the eternally marching elephants, I got the answer I’d been waiting for.
Seven elephants go a marching now
, a distant voice sang far above me, and it seemed that the small faces in the beds smiled toward the unknown, for which they had no words yet. The message had never been clear as in Magna’s heyday, when the elephants’ march across the web resounded like boots stomping on a wooden floor.

I went back to the King’s Room and removed the envelope from my desk.

It wasn’t even a millimeter thick, and so light
you’d
think it contained nothing at all. I glanced at the sound and at Hven—the old astronomer had no time for problems as mundane as these, of course—then closed my eyes and slit it open.

There I was in Magdalene’s old abandoned wheelchair—where our young and old eyes had studied the world—letter in hand. A letter I should not have read.

Eva’s message was printed so delicately on such thin paper that
you’d
think it’d been spun from spider silk and kept in the dark for a hundred years.

But there remained a faint scent of another person’s presence.

My dear child.

That was the first, rather sentimental line.

But not even that warning sign discouraged me from reading further.

My dear child,

We were never meant to meet. I’ve long since realized that, and I think it is the best for both of us. But I want you to know that not a single day and not a single hour has passed when I haven’t thought of you and wished you all the happiness a person can have.

How much do you know? How much did they tell you? I’ve asked myself that all these years. You were taken from me when I was still in the delivery room, and I never got to see you. My eyes have never rested on your face, and today that seems like the biggest punishment that a human being can suffer. Ms. Ladegaard wanted to keep both your birth name and the identity of your adoptive family secret out of consideration for us both. I don’t know whether she ever told you about your mother and her fate, but if not, I’ve asked her with this letter to tell you everything and answer all the questions you might have: about my deeds, about my crime, and about the exit I finally accepted because I couldn’t live with you after what I’d done to my own mother.

I was seventeen when you were born at the Rigshospital. No one was to know that I was pregnant. My only demand was that you be baptized in my name, and so you were in the hospital’s chapel the morning following your birth. That one piece of paper is all that documents our connection. That has been my comfort all these years. You’ve been in my thoughts ever since and you’re as close to me today as the night you were taken away.

Only in the final hours did my courage fail me. I demanded to see Ms. Ladegaard to ask her to find a milder solution, but there was none, she said. You were to be adopted in all secrecy. I begged her to give me the name of your new family so that at least I could assure myself that
you’d
be safe. That everything would be well where you were going. She refused. It was only when I threatened to cancel my departure and tell my story that she showed me the adoption form that included the name of the woman who was to be your adoptive mother. And I am glad for this today. That knowledge is my evidence that I’ve never tried to break my promise or do anything that could bring you any harm. I know that the name of your adoptive mother is Dorah Laursen, and that back then she lived in Østerbro. I’ve never contacted her. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ve kept my word.

Life cannot be redone. But you should know that my love lives on regardless of the distance, even if we never meet. There is no drama in my present decision. Only the certainty that I cannot contain the longing anymore. I was born on Good Friday and committed my irredeemable crime on Good Friday. I write my last letter on Good Friday. I live in a world where I’ve got nothing to do. For me, all that matters is your life. I pray that you can carry on what was good inside of me, not least because you’ve grown up so far from my terrible influence. I pray that you’ll carry me in your memory so that I can live through you like the love you give to your own children. That is all I allow myself to dream of.

Ms. Ladegaard can tell you the rest—she has my blessing to do so.

My love for you will live forever.

—Eva, your mother

My first reaction wasn’t pity for the unknown woman
who’d
lost everything she loved—her child, her native country, and her family (if she had one)—but a far more egotistical feeling that I didn’t understand at first: powerful anger and deep irritation.

I wanted to throw away the letter and forget all about it, forget the fragile handwriting and the clumsy language. Did she hint at suicide toward the end of the letter? That more than anything irritated me.

I turned to the practical side of the matter—the name of the adoptive mother—but I’d never heard of a Dorah Laursen in Østerbro. And I’d seen nothing to suggest that my foster mother knew a woman by that name, neither forty years ago nor more recently.

In the secret compartment behind the lemon-tree carvings, there were the notes from my many years of observing the children whose adoptive families I’d located. From the beginning, my investigation had been logically planned with the help of Magdalene, and Kongslund’s records had been as accurate as
you’d
expect from a matron of Magna’s caliber. The only thing that puzzled us—even then—but which didn’t seem all that important at the time, was the complete lack of information about the biological parents of these particular children. Normally, family names were meticulously recorded in Mother’s Aid Society and Kongslund’s documents, but in each of these cases, the files for the biological father and biological mother were empty. I didn’t care about them at the time, because all I wanted to know was where the children ended up. And it had been easy to find addresses of adoptive parents.

The first time around, I’d been satisfied to track the families residing closest to Kongslund. I was curious about life outside the orphanage so, at a distance, I studied Peter Trøst and Orla Berntsen, and then later Severin and Asger.

But the fifth boy from the Christmas photo from 1961 was completely absent. There was no record of him in Magna’s papers, and regardless of how much I looked, I couldn’t figure out what had happened to his file. Or why it might be missing.

This despite the fact that his date of arrival was clearly marked in the Elephant Room’s annual calendar from 1961: on May 3, a child arrived at Kongslund and was laid in the bed reserved for new arrivals.

No name was recorded, presumably because there had been no baptism at the Rigshospital, which was quite normal.

Back then, Magdalene and I had reluctantly given up on the mystery. Only Magna could tell me the truth, and she would refuse to do so on the grounds that had always guided her work: the children at Kongslund were under her protection and therefore shouldn’t have to fear that anyone would find them—and certainly not the biological parents who had chosen to abandon them in the first place. Besides, I didn’t want to admit what I’d been up to.

Years later, the letter from Australia reopened the mystery about this boy.
Here
was the clue that I’d been looking for all along, I was certain.

Once again I studied the name of the woman who, according to Eva Bjergstrand, had adopted her child: Dorah Laursen.

I was surprised my foster mother had run that risk. Despite her brash manner, Magna was an extremely cautious woman.

On the other hand, the alternative was a scandal of enormous proportions, and she must have believed it was her only option. The very young mother had threatened to reveal what had really happened: an upstanding citizen had impregnated a felon, a minor—possibly even in a prison cell of all places. It could hardly get any worse than that. The father might have even been a policeman or a prison warden, a man who had climbed up through the ranks to the point where his face was in the papers—or at least in the newspaper that Eva had picked up on a bench in Adelaide.

In 1961, the consequences of such a revelation must have seemed devastating to both the man and the governesses at Kongslund.

I found a phone directory in Susanne Ingemann’s office and looked up Laursen. There was no one by that surname in Copenhagen with the first name Dorah.

Then I called information, but that didn’t produce any result either. Unless they had something besides the name to go by, they couldn’t help me, and the number might also be registered in a partner’s name if she was married or cohabitating.

I was sure she would have been married in 1961, because that was a nonnegotiable condition for adoption at the time. Proper family relations. But of course she could have divorced and remarried and divorced several times since.

My next idea was to confirm that a person or family by that name lived in Østerbro in 1961. It took me a couple of days and a visit to the telephone company. There I borrowed a copy of the telephone directory from 1961 and found, as if by magic, the number for the Laursen family—which peculiarly enough was in Dorah’s name. According to the listing, she lived in exactly the part of the city that the Australian woman recalled: Svanemøllevej 31, Østerbro.

By combining street directories from that era with current phone books, I located three persons still living on the same block, two of them even in the same apartment building.

The next day I took the bus to Østerbro, first visiting Dorah’s old apartment. Here I talked to a young mother who didn’t know anything about the woman who used to live there. I had expected as much. I went down one floor and rang the doorbell of the only family that had lived in the apartment building since the sixties. An elderly man opened the door and stared confusedly at me. A little terrier with a gray beard growled from between the man’s feet.