The Seventh Child (82 page)

It was me.

Eva’s child had been a girl—not a boy as everyone had thought—there was no other possibility.

The deformed shoulders, the black hair (which became lighter as I grew older) and the deformed feet; all of that only described one body in the whole country—a body that had once drawn specialists from near and far to admire its unique design.

I lay there for a couple of hours, I think, staring out the window at the sound, and then I forced myself to get up and continue reading Magna’s grotesque story.

I loved her from the very first moment
, she wrote.

This disclosure revealed with more clarity than you could ask for that the repair woman’s expectation of this tremendous new challenge acquired an even stronger partner the moment she peered into the bassinet: a sudden and deep maternal feeling that had lain dormant for decades.

Together the two positions must have been invincible:
Mother and Repair Woman
.

I remembered how Gerda had once told me (presumably in response to one of my strange but insistent questions) that my foster mother had refused to start a family of her own because it wasn’t reconcilable with her activities as the protector of
all
children at Kongslund. And of course, as a single woman at the time—as Orla’s story abundantly shows—she would be seen as irresponsible and, to put it mildly, tarnished if she were to choose to have a child. Of course Kongslund’s matron could not be subject to that kind of judgment.

The notes that followed were clearly written a few weeks after the events that had been rendered in detail—and I wasn’t surprised. Anyone would have needed time to collect herself.

It was Gerda’s plan that we carried out during the following days. Without her sense of detail it never would have worked. It was clear to us that if we wanted to save this child we had to hide her from Ole and his ever eager helper, Carl. It was difficult because we knew all about their craftiness and cynicism from our time working with them in the Resistance.

I leaned back in Magdalene’s chair and envisioned the two women: determined and convinced of their objective.

First, we baptized the child in the hospital chapel—in part because the staff thought the girl was so afflicted that she might die, and in part because Eva had demanded it. But above all we did it because the birth certificate became the most important part of the cover-up that would hide Eva’s child from its biological father forever. It was Gerda’s resourcefulness that saved us.

At this point, I made an effort to read the text extra slowly and carefully—in order not to miss anything important and because I feared the discoveries that each new sentence might reveal about my life story. At times my heart pounded so hard that I could barely hold on to the old book’s pages. With terrifying clarity I sensed where things were heading.

Eva had expressly made me promise that her child would be baptized Jonna if it were a girl and John if it were a boy. She had already agreed that she herself would be told nothing whatsoever about the child, not even its gender, because it would then be even harder for her to leave; her longing would be stronger. And of course that’s how Gerda got the idea for the switch.

I stopped reading again and closed my eyes. The Protocol was shaking in my hands as though the book was equipped with a small, invisible motor. Now, after half a lifetime, the final, unavoidable truth would finally reach Kongslund. It would bang the front door wide open, trudge purposefully through the hall past the lady in green, and sweep into the King’s Room where I sat alone.

I opened the book again and turned to a new page. To my surprise (and horror), I saw that my foster mother described the two women’s shrewd plan with a pride she could barely contain.

We baptized her Jonna Bjergstrand, as we had promised, and the name was entered into the church registry at the hospital chapel. A few days later we got the birth certificate, and for Gerda, whose artistic talents had brought joy to generations of Kongslund children, it was an easy matter to complete the transformation. First she extended the first
n
in Jonna to an
h
, and then she erased the
a
with her pastel paste. Finally she made a copy and threw away the original.

It was that easy. Jonna had become John. I still remember how satisfied Gerda looked when she showed me the final result: John Bjergstrand. It was like magic. We had erased a little girl and replaced her with a boy. The line in the
h
resembled a little elephant trunk.

I was shocked. I stood and retrieved my copy of the forged birth certificate and scrutinized it. There was no doubt. There was indeed a double space between the first name and the last name (where the
a
had been), but it was barely noticeable—less than a millimeter—and had never been detected, neither by the night watchman, nor by the rest of us
who’d
been so pleased with ourselves for finding the birth certificate that we hadn’t looked too closely at it.

I had arrived at Kongslund on a Friday, and Magna and Gerda had let off the governesses early for the weekend. For the first few days they’d put me in Magna’s living room on the second floor and merely told the staff that it was a little boy in need of special care, one who needed absolute quiet.

But my journey into the nightmare that the Protocol revealed hadn’t reached its end yet. The women still had two important things to do.

Of course there was still a problem we had to solve, and we had taken that into account: we needed to get hold of a boy no one knew of who could fit the name John on the birth certificate, the boy that Ole was to adopt.

To my horror I saw where the story was going—and how the two women’s maternal instincts and desire to protect had clouded their judgment. These two ladies, who more than any other at that time embodied national morals, were in the process of fabricating a deceit that they would never be able to divulge to anyone—and from which they would never escape.

First, Jonna had to disappear completely,
Magna wrote.

And then she continued in an almost conversant tone:
A few days later, Gerda discreetly gained access to the church registry at the hospital chapel. She removed all traces of the name Jonna Bjergstrand.

Yes, she tore out an entire page, I thought to myself.

The next day I persuaded a woman who lived near Svanemøllen and desperately wanted to put her child up for adoption—a little boy—to participate in a much faster and more discreet arrangement than was typical. And then we launched the final part of Gerda’s plan.

Again I paused in my reading.
The woman at Svanemøllen
? This could only be Dorah Laursen, whom I had traced to Helgenæs so many years later. That was how the fragile woman had become part of the mysterious drama.

Gerda went and retrieved the boy early in the morning. It was May 13, the anniversary of Kongslund. She dressed him in a jacket and set him in the carry-cot
she’d
brought under a pink blanket, as we had planned; when we revealed the find, the color would make everyone assume
we’d
found a girl. I drove Gerda to Kongslund and stopped the car, letting her out on the slope, which she climbed to place the carry-cot at the doorstep by the southern annex. No one saw her come or go.

I took a deep breath. No, no one except for the invalid woman in the neighboring villa, who saw everything and had tried to tell me about the scene right before she died.

And yet a problem had occurred, as Magna notes:
Unfortunately Agnes noticed the carry-cot before I made it there. Good thing she found it, and not one of the brighter students. She suspected nothing and, thankfully, didn’t pick up the baby. Instead she screamed out loud and called for help. She’s a very naive girl, and
she’d
never seen a foundling.

I closed my eyes. There was no longer any doubt. The two mad women—whom the entire nation knew as the emissaries of Goodness—had deceived everyone into thinking that they had found a little
girl
on the doorstep—me, that is—and that I was a foundling, placed there by an unhappy and irresponsible mother. It had all been one big lie. I saw the genius of their strategy. It would keep me hidden forever. No one would even consider looking for a foundling’s origins. They were simply untraceable.

As soon as the boy from Svanemøllen had been brought into the house, everything moved swiftly. Magna carried the cot past the Giraffe Room and into the bathroom, where Gerda was at the ready with my deformed body, which she immediately placed in the cot instead of the boy. I stayed there for the rest of the day so I could be photographed again and again—the miraculous foundling—by the many magazine photographers who buzzed about Kongslund for its anniversary.

The timing hadn’t been a coincidence, either. Magna’s assistant had carefully selected May 13—the day of the anniversary—because then the story would break through all the country’s media and be confirmed by hundreds of witnesses. Even with a photo. Not even the most skeptical reader would see through this deceit. Fortunately, Agnes’s unintentional remarks to one magazine—about it being a boy—hadn’t been paid attention to by anyone.

Magna had yet another reason to make me a foundling—as she later noted in the Protocol:
Marie’s identity as a child without a past means we don’t have to provide her with a fabricated history, which could be easily revealed as such. We needed a foundling, so we created one.

In this way Eva’s little daughter gained her own (thoroughly false) prehistory, and I was exhibited as the famous foundling who had come to Kongslund from nowhere and had been rescued on the very day of the great orphanage’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It was so mysterious and compelling a story that, much like an actual fairy tale, it enchanted everyone. The lie could have lived for a hundred years.

A few days later, when Eva Bjergstrand suddenly refused to fulfill her part of the agreement and leave the country, the two women were forced to overcome a final crisis.

Maybe she sensed that something fishy was going on—maybe even that the child’s father was involved, the way Magna suggested in the Protocol
: Girls from the social class that Eva grew up in have a sixth sense for that kind of thing
.

Eva had been furious, Magna wrote. She insisted they tell her about the adoptive family—and during the final hours before her departure, she threatened to demand the child and reveal everything if Magna didn’t comply.

In desperation, my foster mother showed her the only official document available—and here, the ruler of all apparent coincidences must have shrieked so loudly that it could almost be heard on planet Earth. But of course it couldn’t. On the form was the name that Eva would never forget—the name of the woman whom she would come to believe was her child’s adoptive mother:
Dorah Laursen.

After the name came the address that
she’d
remember fifty years later:
Svanemøllen, Østerbro.

Magna must have been convinced that
she’d
forget the name. But even if she didn’t, it wouldn’t matter because Eva Bjergstrand was going away as far as possible, never to return.

After that, grieving deeply, Eva left Denmark. To find a new life and atone for her crimes—both the one for which she was pardoned and the one she had committed when she became pregnant with the young law student and career politician’s baby in Visitation Room 4.

In Gerda’s and Magna’s eyes, all their efforts had been motivated by the honorable need to save the little creature who required such extensive repairs. In one move, they had achieved a number of advantages, which they felt was more than sufficient justification for their deceit.

Eva Bjergstrand had been pardoned and was setting out for a new life; she would no doubt meet an Australian man and have children of her own. Ole Almind-Enevold got the son
he’d
always wanted—add to the bargain a child who was not deformed like his real child. In addition, the boy from Svanemøllen would get a wealthier and better home than the one he would have had with a mother who didn’t want him.

Finally—and most importantly—Eva’s child would receive crucial care with Magna. Kongslund’s matron saw herself as the only person capable of protecting a child with such a terrible mental ballast and unusual physical shape.

From the two women’s point of view, this was a scheme that worked in everyone’s favor, and which was therefore in line with the principles of Goodness. In the Protocol, Magna even described how they congratulated one another when the project was completed, toasting with a glass of port in the King’s Room.

And yet it all went wrong.

Lykke Almind-Enevold refused once and for all to adopt and then had a nervous breakdown. The young lawyer dared neither press her on the issue nor leave her because it would make him seem callous and lacking in the moral fiber necessary for public office.