Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 Read online

  Other wonders crowded her out in the summer and fall of 1789, both local and foreign, above all the events in France that we read about in letters and newspapers. Even at our distance from the storming of the Bastille, we in the Eastern Sea sensed the first stirrings of a great war. The Duke of Lithuania, the Czar in St. Petersburg, the King of Sweden, the King of Denmark, and the Margrave of Brandenburg were all neighbors with big ambitions, linked to the House of Bourbon either as allies or enemies. We read the decrees of the Holy Roman Emperor and his Aulic Council. We sent our delegates to the great conclave of the Hanseatic League, the Hanse Theutonicorum, in Luebeck to discuss how the united merchant-cities of the North and Baltic Seas should defend themselves as neutrals in the event of war between the Powers. Closer to home we were astounded by Frau Borchardt the baker's wife giving birth to triplets, two of whom survived. We marveled at the restored organ in St. Jakobi, with its sublime sound and ingenious wood carvings. The Town Council passed a resolution to install a new waterworks. Just as our ancestors had done before us, and we had done all our lives, we ate roast goose on St. Martin's Day, lighted candles on St. Lucia's Day, dropped lead into water to read our futures on Sylvester Night. Grain prices rose in our Hamburg, London, and Amsterdam markets. We began to ship cargoes as spring arrived in 1790.

  My first ship of the season, bound for London with fifty lasts of wheat, sailed with the morning tide on the day that the stranger who sold eggs reappeared in Ollemunde's market square. I stood a long while in the shadow of St. Nikolai's watching her before I dared approach. I was not mistaken: it was her, in the same yellow head-scarf and red-inflected coat. From across the square I still saw the brooch at her throat flash in the sun. I could see that she disturbed the market, which rippled and hummed in a different register this morning, as if trying to digest something that refused to be digested. At the opposite end of the square Frau Giesemann and the Widow Harloff were talking with the customs official and the master of licensure. I strode to the stranger's booth. She offered no explanation for her absence and sudden reappearance. She waved her arms over the booth's topography of eggs. As she did so I thought I caught a scent of pine trees and tall irises on the banks of swift running water.

  "What do you wish today, mein Herr?” she said. I looked into her eyes. They were green, like the color of waves just before they crest and crash onto the beach. I was so certain they had been blue, bluer than cornflowers. My gaze dropped to her brooch, which was like lace spun of bronze. She smiled. I asked what she had and she told me.

  "Delicate as peas, mein Herr, are the eggs of the chaffinch, the siskin, the hawfinch, and the hampling. Something more robust perhaps? The dove's egg, that of the whinchat or the wheatear? Might you fancy the stippled egg of the wagtail, or something heartier still, say, the brightness of the sea-swallow or the garbled offering of the mew and the wake? I can give you these."

  I heard a commotion in the market and guessed that the farmwives were coming with city officials to the stranger's booth. I could not make up my mind. Seeing my hesitation and hearing the commotion that drew nearer, the young woman touched my arm lightly (how I felt that for days afterwards!) and pointed to a pair of eggs on a yellow plate by themselves.

  "Dabchick eggs,” she said. “The little diver, your favorite. The grebe. I begged her for a special offering, since you so enjoyed the last one. She was pleased to give you two this time."

  I nodded, placed a Schilling on the counter, took the eggs. I could see the crowd boiling towards us. For the second time I asked her where she came from. For the second time she shook her head. I asked her name, and this too she refused. She urged me to go, not to be caught up in the coming spectacle. I saw her logic but would not leave. She pushed me away, gently but with strength I would not have imagined in such a slight body. My shoulder burned from her touch. I ducked into the crowd, in the opposite direction from the Widow Harloff and the Frau Giesemann. Just before I did so, I turned and saw her green eyes following me. The stranger who sold the eggs whispered: “I came from the west of East, from the east of West. I came in my little boat. Call me Olipa Kerran."

  The tumult did not die down in a day or a week. The master of licenses could not find the young woman's name in his book and commanded her to leave. Witnesses said she just smiled and began to pack up her booth. Someone jostled the booth and the egg mountains crashed to the cobblestones. Albumen rivers ran between the stones, puddles of yolk glistened in the sun. I was told the stranger's look mirrored the devastation. Although a crowd followed her down Grey-Brethren Street, through New Wolgast Street and Long Street to the Miller's Gate, no one could say where she went once expelled from the city. I heard this from the wise woman Fraulein Hemmel, who was there, and from my cook Elisabeth Sophie, who was not, and from a dozen others within the hour. The rooks of the market square had cast out the goldfinch while the tower of St. Nikolai looked on and the weigh-house scales creaked their approval. No one bothered to clean up the broken eggs. Dogs and cats lapped up the mess.

  I did not admit to buying the two grebe's eggs. I fried them surreptitiously, ate them alone in my room. They tasted better than I had remembered. Herr Classen and Elisabeth Sophie may have suspected my sedition but they said nothing, for which I was grateful. I spent long hours in the next two weeks reviewing accounts with Herr Classen and conducting a great deal of business in coffeehouses and other public places. I was a torrent of commercial intelligence and was often quayside to greet the captains of my ships. Yet at all hours I felt her touch on my arm, heard her voice, tasted the eggs she had gone as supplicant to gain for me. At dawn, at noon, at midnight, I saw her eyes, sometimes blue, sometimes green, it did not matter. “Olipa Kerran", I chanted to myself, “Olipa Kerran, wherever you are, east of the West and west of the East, Olipa Kerran I will find you."

  I risked queries to my nearest kin, who I might rely on to be discreet. I wrote my younger brother, who had set up on his own as a merchant in Riga, and my sister, who had married an apothecary in Stockholm, as well as our cousin in Koenigsberg, who claimed an acquaintance with Kant and was widely read, and our uncle the professor at the university in Greifswald. Had any of them, I asked, any knowledge of a similar event in the markets of those places? Had they ever heard of a young woman who sold eggs of finches and terns and herons? A young woman who wore a yellow head-scarf and a brooch that looked like woven sunshine? None of them had, though my cousin kindly said he would inquire of Kant himself if I wished (I said I did not think that would be necessary) and my uncle recommended a treatise by Herder on folk customs of the Baltic peoples. My brother said he had seen a dancing bear in one of Riga's markets last year but nothing like what I described and he wondered what our mother would think of me chasing an egg-seller, a flatlander to boot. My sister sent all her love, suggested I speak with Fraulein Hemmel, and then quoted Goethe to the effect that I should dream through moonlight and into daybreak if that is what I must do to find this woman. I missed my sister more than ever (the house had been so quiet since she left) and pledged to read more Goethe.

  In April we Ollemunders celebrated St. George's Day as we had done since before memory and as everyone did from London to St. Petersburg, with a pageant in the marketplace reenacting the dragon's slaying. The entire city watched as the dragon, whose wings were cleverly worked by puppeteers running along side, attacked St. George. Mothers comforted children: “Shhh, my darling, it is not real, see, that's the butcher Wachmann holding up the tail, and the tinsmith Flegel making the jaws snap open and shut, and that is only red paper cut up to look like fire spouting.” The protonotary's son was bold and dashing as St. George, and got great applause when he plunged his spear into the beast. That evening Elisabeth Sophie, Herr Classen and I took turns polishing the medallion called the George Thaler that we (and every other house in Ollemunde and around the Eastern Sea) had nailed into the door lintel. As I did so, I thought again of my sister Dorothea Luisa, who had always loved the St. George pageant and was pr
obably polishing the George Thaler in her Stockholm house even as I polished ours in Ollemunde. My sister was right: I needed to speak with Fraulein Hemmel for more than a few minutes in the market place.

  I recalled the pageant to keep myself company the next day as I left Ollemunde by the Knieper Gate and walked for two hours to Fraulein Hemmel's cottage right up among the first of the great firs that dominated the interior of Fennica Minor. The road through settled farmland had dwindled to a path when I arrived at her cottage. I stopped at the edge of her herb garden. As I looked at the old horse collar above the doorway, the goose bones arranged along the eaves, and the broken rake placed carefully on the roof, I heard Fraulein Hemmel call from inside that her house just might walk away on chicken legs if I lingered outside much longer.

  Fraulein Hemmel looked even stranger in her own surroundings than she did in the city, swaddled in a patchwork shawl, wearing mismatched bits of amber as a necklace, a lump of a hat on her head. She was smoking a pipe. The cottage smelled of tobacco, wood smoke, and a hundred herbs. She was brewing tea and had set a place already. We exchanged Ollemunde gossip as we drank the first cup of tea, and then she asked me what was wrong. I told her about my desire to find the woman who sold the wild bird eggs, the stranger named Olipa Kerran.

  "Olipa Kerran?” said the fraulein, the wrinkles at her eyes like ridges on very old leather but the eyes very bright.

  "Yes,” I said, leaning forward. “Do you know that name?"

  "Indeed I do,” said the fraulein, and she laughed long. “It isn't a name, my boy. ‘Olipa kerran’ means ‘Once upon a time’ ... in Finnish."

  I looked helplessly at the old woman, who became very serious. She continued: “We Germans forget so much. Here we sit in the middle of the Eastern Sea on our Fennica Minor, the Little Finland, the Pieni Suomen in the language of the first-comers, and pretend that we have always been here, but we know that is not true. We came on the great crusades six centuries ago and met others here before us: Pomeranians, Wends, Letts, Livonians, Finns, Estonians, many others. We lump them all together as ‘the Old Folk.’ Some we conquered, some we drove off, some survived, some did not. We imagine that the names we use for places are their original names, their true names. Oesel we say, and Oesel it is to be sure, but it is also called Saaremaa by most of those who live on that island. Our Windau is also Ventspils, our Reval is Tallinn, our Dorpat is Tartu. Separate kingdoms hidden in plain sight, you could say, tracings and boundaries not on any of our maps, destinations not named in our shipping manifests."

  I knew this history but had never considered its implications. Yet were we, after so many centuries, still to be considered newcomers? Sitting in a wattle-walled cottage under the boughs of the silent firs, I was less confident of my response than I would have been in my counting-house. I thought I heard voices, low and deep, in the silence: a raven karking, a bear brumming, something else making a sound like boulders grinding. I wanted the walls of Ollemunde around me, the towers of St. Nikolai and St. Jakobi with their copper-green onion-turrets peering out over sea and hill to protect us, slate-tiled houses, the six gates, the breakwater in the harbor. The fraulein seemed to read my mind, shook her head.

  "Stay your course, lad,” she said, making another effusion that she said would help ease my ache. “The girl is not making a fool of you, no matter how much you think she is. She is testing you, and she is protecting herself. You saw how the burghers and farmwives drove her out, smashed her eggs. They would do the same to you if they saw you as a threat to order and balance. Draw no attention to yourself or the stones of your city will crush you. Flatlanders know that better than you do with your towers and gates. Whoever she is, or whatever she is, time will bring you together. The girl did not come to Ollemunde to sell eggs. Rather, she did, but she came to sell eggs to one person only. She will return, though perhaps not into the city itself. You may have to meet her outside the walls."

  When I asked the herbalist where I might have to go to meet the woman who sold the eggs, Fraulein Hemmel shook her head and said something about weathervanes, flax-spinning, and the grinding of salt that I did not fathom. I thanked her and left, looking back at the forest as the sun began to set. I was happy to see the lights of Ollemunde before the gates were barred. Fraulein Hemmel had raised my spirits and for the next week Herr Classen and Elisabeth Sophie remarked on what the bookkeeper called my “frivolity” (which I was not sure was a compliment), but, when the stranger who sold eggs did not reappear, I sank back into depression. The stranger did not return that summer of 1790 or that fall or that winter.

  I tried to lose myself in the routine of Ollemunde life. As war gathered around us, Ollemunde stuck doggedly to the rhythms of our ancestors. We read about the Jacobins in France and shuddered at the disruptions of their revolution, determined that no such disequilibrium would shake Ollemunde and Fennica Minor. We made our midsummer bonfires the tallest they had ever been and burned them on every holm and tor, dancing with unaccustomed abandon on St. John's Eve. On St. Margaret's Day we ate mock dragon's tail made of marzipan, to honor the saint's victory over the worm. We scoured the stoops and bollards on St. Boniface's Day, collectively throwing the dirty water out of the six gates with the song about pitching the old serpent out on his ear. And we went to market every Tuesday and Saturday, while the ships sailed in and out of the harbor.

  The Baltic was fired with rumors: a Russian fleet was said to be heading west through the Danish Sound to land troops at Calais and Boulogne in aid of the Bourbons, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin was said to be planning war against the Margrave of Brandenburg, Swedish troops were said to be advancing on Skaane. The warships from Bremen, Hamburg, and Luebeck, our Hanseatic confederates, were no rumor, appearing in Ollemunde's harbor to our wild cheers and a shower of fireworks. An English frigate also visited our harbor, the first of what we were certain would be many such visitors, each politely testing our neutrality, each politely received and assured of our good intentions. The Town Council stopped the planning for the new waterworks and diverted the funding to repairing the harbor's defenses. Crews of men scrubbed the rust off the cannons that had not been maintained since the end of the Seven Year's War and not been fired in anger since the wars of Karl the Twelfth almost a century ago.

  I did my part, contributing to the treasury as part of the wartime levy and supervising the repairs to the Harbor Gate, but my heart was elsewhere. I sought constantly if clandestinely for a sign of a woman with green eyes whose touch was restrained fire. At Wackerow the dry-goods merchant's, I sought yellow cloth of the sort that had covered the stranger's head but was told that no such material could be gotten except possibly from India via the London emporia and that the cost would be ransom for a baroness. At Behn the jeweler's, I found a brooch that looked somewhat like the one the stranger had worn but, when I asked Behn how he had come by it, he could not remember, saying that he thought it might have come from a correspondent in Memel or then again, perhaps with traders from Aabo. Despondent in the long blue twilight, I watched the grebes that dove in the channel between the Olle River and the harbor, thinking that one of them might leave a message. I was always disappointed: they vanished the way the egg-seller had, leaving nothing but a quickly dispersed swirl as evidence that they had been there at all.

  We ate goose as always on Martinsmas, watched the procession of lights on St. Lucia's Day, tried to divine our futures on Sylvester Night. 1791 arrived with a blizzard. Spring was late that year. The news that flowed in as the Baltic permitted shipping again was full of skirmishes along the Rhine, battles in Lombardy and the bombardment of Toulon by Lord Nelson. We began to bury our silver under flagstones in cellars. We ordered more shot from Sweden for our harbor cannons. Flatlanders with relatives in the city began to move into attics and other spare rooms, and to tether the cows just outside the gates of Ollemunde.

  I had done such a good job overseeing the work on the Harbor Gate that the Town Council asked me to do the same on the rema
ining harbor gun emplacement still needing restoration. The bunker was the most remote from the city proper, sitting beyond the mole at the entrance to the harbor. In wind and rain throughout March and April I worked with the engineers and builders to brace the ramparts, directing several crews and halting work only so all could watch the St. George's Day pageant. By early May we had nearly finished the restoration. Late on a Saturday afternoon, with the crews dismissed for the day, I inspected the site. I had done this every Saturday since we started, which gave me an opportunity to see for myself what had been done and to form opinions without the influence of others. As the season advanced, the inspection also provided me with an excuse to enjoy the sunset in solitude. I sat on the embankment that Saturday, as dusk approached, alone, far from Ollemunde's lamp-lighted gates, listening to the slap of the tide. I loved to see the sun reflected off the windows of the Town Hall and the Customs House. I loved the glow from the towers, the shiny black of St. Nikolai, the rust-red of St. Jakobi, the grey of St. Bavo the Dutch Church, the nearly yellow brown of the Danish Friderik Church.

  As the sun began to set I became aware of two things. The first was a pair of grebes diving just off the mole. Down they'd go, seeming to pierce a hole in the harbor floor, finding the key to an underwater door, miraculously popping up hundreds of feet from where they'd disappeared. The second was a small, empty boat bobbing at the foot of the embankment, where the mole met the rocks of the shore. Then I became aware of a third thing: a figure carrying a large wicker basket was coming down the path that ran between the city and the redoubt. The hair on my neck rose. In the dusk I could see the yellow scarf on her head and the brooch on her breast. Her shoes were made of silver birch bark that gleamed in the purple light. She entered the redoubt and walked up to me. I could smell her, an indescribable scent of catkins, hawthorn blossoms and the small yellow flowers that grow in rock crevices. She put the basket down with great care and then straightened up to look me full in the face.