Edvard IV into her arms and shut out the lights, the bolt of the lock turning heavily.
The storm continued, and the drive out of the city was slippery. The apartment houses were stained with rain. Puddles were swallowing the curbs. Greta and Hans witnessed a plump woman on a bicycle, her body battened down in a slicker, crash into the rear ramp of a mason’s lorry. Greta pressed her hands to her mouth as she watched the woman’s eyes shut with fear.
Once they were beyond the city limits, the gold Horch, with its white cabriolet top buckled closed, began to roll across the fields. Meadows of Italian rye grass and timothy and fescue and cocksfoot were damp and dented in the rain. Red and white clover, lucerne grass, and trefoil lined the road, bent and dripping. And beyond the fields the kettle-hole lakes, dimpled and deep.
The ferry ride to Arhus was choppy, and Hans and Greta sat in the front seat of the Horch during the crossing. The car smelled of Edvard’s wet coat, curled by the damp. Hans and Greta didn’t speak, and she could feel the churn of the ferry’s engines when she set her hand on the dash. Hans asked her if she needed a coffee, and she said yes. He took Edvard IV with him, and when she was alone in the car she thought of the journey Lili and Carlisle were on; in a few hours they’d probably be settling into the room at the clinic with the view over the willows in the back-park down to the Elbe. Greta thought of Professor Bolk, whose likeness she had captured in a painting that had never sold; it sat rolled up behind the wardrobe. And when she returned to Copenhagen in a few days, when she finished sorting through her furniture and her clothes and her paintings, she would send it on to him, Greta told herself. It could hang behind Frau Krebs’s reception desk, in a gray wood frame. Or in his office, above the sofa, where, in a few years, other desperate women like Lili would surely come in pilgrimage.
It was night when they arrived in Bluetooth. The brick villa was dark, the baroness already retired to her apartment on the third floor. A houseman with a few tufts of white hair and a snub nose led Greta to a room with a bed covered in a slip of lace. He turned on the lamps, his snub-nosed face bent forward, and lifted the windows. “Not afraid of frogs?” he said. Already she could hear them croaking in the bog. When the houseman left, Greta opened the windows some more. The night was clear, with a half-cut moon low in the sky, and Greta could see the bog through an opening in the ash and elm trees. It looked almost like a damp field, or a great lawn in Pasadena soaked after a January rain. She thought of the earthworms that were driven from the ground after a winter downpour, the way they writhed on the flagstone paths trying to save themselves from drowning. Had she really been the type of child who would cut them in two with a butter knife thieved from her mother’s pantry and then present them to Carlisle on a plate, beneath a silver warming bell?
The curtains were made of a blued eyelet and they hung down and across the floorboards, fanning themselves out like wedding trains. Hans knocked and said, through the door, “I’m down the hall, Greta. If you need anything.” There was something in his voice. Greta could sense his curled knuckle pressed against the paneled door, his other hand gently on the knob. She could imagine him in the hall, lit by a single wall sconce at the top of the stairs. She imagined the point of his forehead pressing the door.
“Nothing now,” she said. And there was a silence, only the frogs cho rusing on their patches of peat, and the owls in the elms. “All right then,” Hans said, and Greta couldn’t quite hear him retreat to his room, his stockinged feet padding across the runner. Their time would come, she told herself. All in time.
The next day Greta met Baroness Axgil in the breakfast room. The room looked out toward the bog, which sparkled through the trees. Around the room potted ferns balanced in iron stands, and a collection of blue-and- white porcelain plates was secured to the wall. Baroness Axgil was gaunt and long-limbed, her hands backed with rubbery veins. Her head, also Borreby in size and shape, was held up by a throat tight with tendon. Her silver hair was pulled back snugly, slanting her eyes. The baroness sat at the head of the table, Hans opposite her, Greta in the middle. The houseman served smoked salmon and hard-boiled eggs and triangles of buttered bread. Baroness Axgil said only, “I’m afraid I don’t remember an Einar Wegener. W-E-G, did you say? So many boys came through the house. Did he have red hair?”
“No, it was brown,” Hans said.
“Yes. Brown,” said the baroness, who had invited Edvard into her lap and was feeding him strips of salmon. “A nice boy, I’m sure. Dead how long?”
“About a year,” Greta replied, and she looked to one end of the breakfast-room table and then to the other and was reminded of another breakfast room on the other side of the world where a woman not unlike the baroness still reigned.
Later in the day Hans led her down a path alongside a sphagnum field to a farmhouse. It had a thatched roof and timber eaves, and a puff of smoke was rising from the chimney. Hans and Greta didn’t approach the yard, where there were hens in a coop and three small children scratching the mud with sticks. A woman with yellow hair was in the door, squinting against the sun, watching her children, two boys and a girl. A pony in its pen sneezed, and the children laughed, and old Edvard IV trembled at Greta’s leg. “I’m not sure who they are,” Hans said. “Been there awhile.”
“Do you suppose she’ll let us in if we ask? To have a look around?”
“Let’s not,” Hans said, his hand falling to the small of her back, where it remained as they returned across the field. The long blades of grass swiped at her shins. And Edvard IV chugged behind.
In the graveyard, there was a wooden cross marked WEGENER. “His father,” Hans said. A grassy grave in the shade of a red alder. The graveyard was next to a whitewashed church, and the ground was uneven, and flinty, and the sun burning the dew off the rye grass made the air smell sweet.
“I have his paintings,” she said.
“Keep them,” Hans said, his hand still on her.
“What was he like then?”
“A little boy with a secret. That’s all. No different from the rest of us.”
The sky was high and cloudless, and the wind ran through the red alder’s leaves. Greta stopped herself from thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Summer in Jutland, no different from the summer days of his youth, the days when Einar certainly was both happy and sad at once. She had returned home without him. Greta Waud, tall in the grass, her shadow lowering itself across the graves, would return home without him.
On the drive back to Copenhagen, Hans said, “What about California? Are we still going?”
The Horch’s twelve cylinders were running powerfully, the vibration shaking her skin. The sun was bright, and the top was down, and there was a strip of paper swirling about Greta’s ankles. “What did you say?” she yelled, holding her hair in her fist.
“Are we going to California together?” And just as the wind was rushing around her, sending her hair and the lap of her dress and the strip of paper whirling, her thoughts began to pass chaotically through her head: her little room in Pasadena with the arched window overlooking the roses; the casita on the lip of the Arroyo Seco, now let to tenants, a family with a baby boy; the blank windows of Teddy Cross’s old ceramics studio on Colorado Street, transformed after the fire into a printer’s press; the members of the Pasadena Arts & Crafts Society in their felt berets. How could Greta return to that? But there was more in her head, and then Greta thought of the mossy courtyard of the casita, where in the light filtering through the avocado tree she painted her first portrait of Teddy Cross; and the little bungalows Carlisle was building on the streets off California Boulevard, where newlyweds from Illinois were settling; and the acres of orange groves. Greta looked to the sky, to the pale blue that reminded her of the antique plates on the walls of the baroness’s breakfast room. It was June, and in Pasadena the rye grass would have burned out by now, and the palm fronds would be brittle, and by now the maids would have pulled the cots onto the sleeping porches. There was a sleeping porch at the rear of the house; its screens were on hinges, and as a girl she would open them up and stare out, across the Arroyo Seco to the Linda Vista hills, and she would sketch the rolling dry-green sight of Pasadena. She imagined unpacking her paints and screwing together her easel on the sleeping porch and painting that vista now: the gray-brown of the blur of the eucalyptus, the dusty green of the stalks of cypress, the flash of pink stucco of an Italianate mansion peeking through the oleander, the gray of a cement balustrade overlooking the expanse of it all.
“I’m ready to go,” Greta said.
“What’s that?” Hans called, through the wind.
“You’ll love it out there. It will make the rest of the world seem very far away.” She reached over and stroked Hans’s thigh. It had all come to this: she and Hans would return to Pasadena, and she realized no one out there would ever fully understand what had happened to her. The girls from the Valley Hunt Club, now married certainly, with children enrolled in tennis clinics on the club’s courts, would know nothing about her except for the fact the she had returned with a Danish baron. Already Greta could hear the gossip: “Poor Greta Waud. Widowed again.
