The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (21 page)

In her childhood it was always cold. She wonders, now that she is eight, if it felt like that when her father died. She does not know. Perhaps he died before she was born. Probably. That’s what her mother told her, what her mother wanted to believe. Natia doesn’t entirely believe it, but she has always pretended that she did. He froze to death, her mother said, on his way back to us. He never saw you, but he loved you before you were born. Never forget, she said, whatever came afterwards, that you were the child of love.

Natia has no picture of him. Her mother never had one. She has no memory. Sometimes she looks at her reflection in the glass windows of the convent when the light is behind her and her features reflect, remembers her mother and tries to see what is different.

Her mother’s face was rounder. Even though Natia is a child there is a sharpness to her chin, to her nose that isn’t like her mother. Her eyes are a different shade, not pale blue-gray, but dark blue, the color of shadowed pools. Her hair is not ice blond, but darker, like warm honey. Someone else has stamped themselves on her, someone else is there in her bones. Her mother was short and deceptively fragile looking. Natia is tall for her age, and her hands and feet are long. Who had these eyes like wildflowers? Who had these big hands?

He must have been tall, she thinks. He was tall and good looking, and still so young. Her mother said that he was eighteen and she was seventeen that glorious summer of 1812.

Natia is the child of war. Everyone hates the Russians, even the priests. Everyone hates that Poland is no more, that they are not free. Everyone remembers that for a little while they were.

Your father was a hero, the sisters said to her soon after her mother began coughing blood, soon after they came here. They were all heroes, the brave young men who died for Poland, whether or not they were Polish. Her father was Dutch, and he served the French Emperor, they said, but he died for Poland.

And because of that they do not ask too many questions about whether her parents were married. Her mother says they were, that they spoke their vows to one another even though there was no priest, even though he was Protestant. Natia doesn’t know whether that counts or not. She thinks when she was younger, before they came to the abbey, that people called her bastard. Back in Warsaw, when her mother cleaned houses and she lived in the scullery. She doesn’t remember that very well. She doesn’t want to. She was always cold and always hungry.

The sisters give her food. Mostly it’s the same bread and soup they eat, but they never tell her she can’t have any. She can’t remember who did. Someone, once. Someone when she and her mother were both very hungry.

Now she is alone. She hears the sisters talking, hears them discussing her with Father
Andrzej
when they don’t think she can hear. There are so many children who need charity. There are so many poor, now that the Russians are back. They do not want to keep her if there is somewhere she can go, if there is someone who wants her.

“She’s too pretty,” one of the sisters says. “She will be preyed upon in service, even if we find her a place in a respectable house. The girl will be a beauty. And she is too young to take care of herself, too innocent.”

Natia thinks to herself that she’s not. She has never been innocent, whatever that means. She remembers what it was like just before they came here, when her mother had the men. She remembers being told to stay in her bed with the covers up and not look, no matter what she heard. She looked anyway. Lots of times. She could peep through a fold and her mother wouldn’t see. She remembers the sweating and the struggling the men did, the coins they left.

She looks at her face in the window and wonders if she is pretty enough to find someone who will take care of her, someone who will not die. But how do you know who will die?

Winter. The washbasin freezes over at night in her room. The snow forces the shutters in some of the rooms downstairs, breaks a stained glass window in the chapel with its weight.

Father
Andrzej
has written a letter. “Your mother,” he said. “I asked her when she was dying if you had any kin. She said that your father had said that his mother still lived in Paris. She must be an old woman, if she is alive. But I have written to colleagues there. Perhaps someone can find her. Perhaps…”

Perhaps she has money, Natia thought. Perhaps she will want me. Some old harridan half a world away. If my mother had thought she would help surely my mother would have written to her. And perhaps she too is long dead.

Cold. The days lengthen, but the world is frozen in ice. They say it is the worst winter since that one, the winter before she was born, when the bravest sons of revolution froze in Vilnius or died in the Berezina.

A letter comes with the first thaw, and Father
Andrzej
is happy. You are a fortunate girl, they all tell her. You are going away from here. You are going to Paris.

Natia wants to see the letter. Father
Andrzej
shows it to her, but she can’t read it. It’s in French. “Does she say she wants me?” Natia asks.

He temporizes. “She says that she knew your father intended to marry your mother, and that she met your mother once. We will send you to her.”

“Does she know I’m coming?” Natia asks.

“She will when you arrive,” he says.

And now it is spring. At the first false thaw she is off to Warsaw with Father
Andrzej
. He leaves her there at another house, and then she is on her way to Munich with Father Wicus, a much older man who has no time for children, but who will take her as far as that. He does not talk to her, but at least they have seats inside the carriage. It’s very cold still.

Her birthday comes the day they arrive in Munich. She is eight years old.

That night she sleeps in the infirmary of a convent there. There is no one in the infirmary, but there are no other beds. She dreams of having a kitten who would curl up on her feet. She wonders if the old lady will be very strict, and if she will beat her. She wonders if people will call her bastard in Paris.

A few days later she is on the way to Frankfurt. Three young seminarians are going there, and she is to go with them. The carriage is dirty and wobbles a lot. The seminarians ignore her and drink more than strictly necessary to keep them warm. They don’t want a little girl. The carriage doesn’t stop until late at night.

Natia falls asleep looking at her reflection in the window, watching shadows move on the glass. Sometimes she dreams about distant places, watching shadows move. Sometimes she can see mountains and seas in her reflected eyes.

One of the seminarians is going on to Strasbourg. He is kinder when his friends are gone. She has a few words of German and he has a few words of Polish, enough to say that he has a sister her age.

Natia looks out the window and sees that spring has come. On this side of the Rhine the trees are blooming and the land is greening. Birds are soaring in the sky, singing absurdly.

He teaches her a few phrases of French as they roll along. “Bonjour, Madame Grandmere.” That is what she must say when she meets her. She practices saying her father’s name aloud. “Sous-Lieutenant Francis Charles Leopold Ringeling.” It sounds so very big.

She wonders if there is a big gloomy house with the windows all draped in black, old servants shuffling around in perpetual mourning for the Young Master, an old woman with rings on every crabbed finger who will think her very stupid because she does not know any lessons.

At Strasbourg she changes to a Flying Coach. She wonders if it will fly, and then is told that just means that they change the horses at posting houses. There is an old priest who doesn’t speak a word of Polish who is supposed to take her along. She can’t understand anything he says and he can’t understand her. Nobody can. The only thing she can say is “Bonjour, Madame Grandmere” and “Je ne
parle
pas
Francais
.” He buys her bread and cheese at the posting stops.

A woman passenger who is very pregnant gives her a handful of raisins and smiles at her, showing Natia her sewing. It’s a baby’s gown in thin white cotton. It might be finished before the baby comes. Natia wishes she could talk to her, but smiles are the only language they have.

She is asleep when they come into Paris. When she wakes they are already moving through crowded streets. They stop somewhere there is an inn or a posting house, and the priest gestures for her to get out. The woman passenger smiles at her and says something to the priest. Natia can’t understand it, but the priest calls over one of the
stableboys
and gives him a message and a little coin. The woman pats her arm and smiles, saying goodbye.

Natia waits in the muddy stableyard. She has a little bundle and she stands next to it so that it won’t get lost. The priest has gone inside. He is talking to people and drinking in the public room. Natia thinks it’s not a good idea to go into public rooms. She thinks her mother told her not to, once long ago. Probably because she’s pretty. So she waits outside instead.

There is a sudden disturbance at the entrance to the inn yard. An open topped carriage is stopping and a woman getting down. She’s wearing a fashionable bonnet trimmed with feathers, and she’s dressed in rose, not the pale kind of pink Natia thinks of as rose, but the dark rich saturated pink of real roses opening in the sun. She has a short jacket and gloves, but as she steps down Natia can see that her boots are black and scuffed, low heeled and meant for walking. The innkeeper and the stable boys are all running to do her bidding. She turns, and her eyes sweep over the yard.

Now that Natia sees her better she’s not so young. The hair visible under the bonnet is gold, but her face has lines around her mouth and eyes, and there is a long scar across her forehead over one eye, clear and white as a sword. Her eyes are dark blue. When she moves she walks like a man, like a general must walk, a stable boy running ahead of her into the inn. She takes off one glove with a snap.

The priest comes tumbling out, hurriedly wiping his mouth. He tries to bend over her hand. They are saying something, and the priest doesn’t like it.

And then the lady in pink turns and walks straight to Natia, who stands perfectly still, her bundle in her hands, and the lady kneels down to face her in the mud.

Natia gulps. “Bonjour Madame Grandmere,” she says, and then stops, her French completely exhausted.

The lady takes
Natia’s
hand between hers, the gloved and the ungloved, and says in perfectly clear Polish, “My dear
Natiaalie
???! I am so glad you’ve come to live with me! I know that we will be very happy.”

For the first time in long months, the first time all across Europe, Natia cries. She can’t help it and she doesn’t know why, she doesn’t know how to bend gracefully into the lady’s arms that go around her, how to cry attractively rather than blubbering nonsense onto her pink shoulder. She just hangs on with all her strength, as though she were a baby and not a grown girl of eight.

“You must be exhausted,” her grandmother says. Natia can’t quite tell how she winds up in the open carriage, her bundle on her feet and her grandmother’s arm around her. “Let’s get you home and a bath and some clean clothes on you. That will feel better.”

Natia thinks that she hasn’t eaten since a bowl of pottage last night at one of the posting stops, but it’s hard to ask. Still, she might. “Do you think I might have some bread?” she asks. “I haven’t eaten today, you see. If you don’t mind.”

Her grandmother’s lips compress into a tight line, and Natia wonders where she got that scar. It looks like the ones the seminarians had from dueling. Surely grandmothers don’t duel. “Idiot priest. Doesn’t know anything about taking care of a child. Of course you can have some bread. We’ll have lunch as soon as we get home. Stupid lout. He was ready to just leave you at the posting house, if some kind woman hadn’t paid to send a message boy.”

The carriage stops and for a moment Natia is confused. It’s a florist shop, the windows full of tulips. Her grandmother doesn’t go in, but leads to the door next to it, a neat black door with a brass knocker. “I have the top three floors,” she says. “The first floors all along the street are shops, with town houses above. Come up and have some lunch, Natalie???.”
Natia
."

Natia stops at the top of the stairs. The drawing room is pretty and quiet, dark blue curtains framing the big windows. She stands there holding her bundle. Her grandmother speaks Polish. She can talk and have someone understand her. “Am I a bastard?” she says. It was not what she meant to say.

Her grandmother tosses her bonnet on the nearest chair. Her hair is honey colored, streaked with gray. “No,” she says. “I know that Francis loved your mother.” She gently takes the bundle out of
Natia’s
hands and puts it on the table, helps her take her coat off as though she were very small.

“They weren’t really married,” Natia says. It’s best to get the worst out of the way first. “My mother was no better than she should be and my father…”

“Was an impetuous young cavalry officer.” Her grandmother sits down on the blue brocade sofa so that their eyes were on a level.

“I’m like them,” Natia says. “I’m bad. I’m too pretty and it worries people, and I have bad blood.”

Her grandmother raises a hand as though to caress her, stops as though she thinks better of it. There’s a long scar across her palm too, and the back of her hand is covered in tiny white scars like snowflakes. “If so, you get it from me,” she says. “I don’t know what they told you about me. Probably not that I’m a courtesan and a scandal and a sometime actress.”