The Seventh Child (39 page)

Ole stiffens, and I feel his anger like a cold breeze.

Susanne feels it too. “Among other things, it’s believed to contain information about Kongslund in the fifties and sixties, which may be able to prove that nothing the newspapers have been suggesting actually happened.”

Of course the Almighty One is right. Magna never did anything rash. With the Protocol in a safe place, the powerful people she helped would keep supporting Kongslund.

And then
she’d
overlooked the real danger.

“Who might she have written in Australia?” the powerful man asks, mutedly. I have a feeling he knows the answer.

Susanne’s face is so pale that the shiny halo around her hair is almost gone. I hear the voices in the garden as a distant murmur. Hven lies in the surf, awaiting my visit as always.

I turn and walk away, into the deserted hallway. Nobody follows me, and only the lady in green smiles from her mighty frame on the landing when I pass by. I quickly close the door to my hiding place and flip the key in the lock. Magna put me here more than forty years ago, right here in front of the window, so that I could see the world and the coasts I would never set foot on. She knew what she was doing.

I’d just insulted a king for the second time.

At that moment there came a knock at my door. In all the years Susanne has been the director, she is the only one to come looking for me in the King’s Room.

I wasn’t a person who went seeking others, and others didn’t come seeking me.

There was another knock. Then a third.

“Susanne?” I asked with a thick lisp.

“No. It’s Knud Taasing
…
I’m a journalist.”

My first thought was illogical: no press had been invited to the private funeral, so how on earth had he gotten in? But it was too late to pretend I wasn’t there, and I couldn’t stop him anyway. Maybe I didn’t want to. I needed to start the next phase of the Kongslund Affair, which would have sunk into oblivion otherwise—just as the administration wanted.

During those days I felt the way Jesus must have felt during his last days on Earth: I knew exactly what had to be done—and how it would all end—but hesitated still (perhaps exactly because I knew) whenever I was about to take another step forward.

I rose and opened the door. The journalist stood alone in the dark corridor. He was lean and surprisingly small in his brown corduroys and green pullover.

I’d never let a man into my room before.

“I just want to ask you one thing, a simple thing, and I’ll do it quickly.”

I sneezed. There’s no such thing as a simple or quick thing. Instead, I pointed at a chair by the window, and he sat down cautiously, as though he was afraid it would collapse under his weight. But it was a Chippendale—the most expensive chair at Kongslund. I was aware that the old mahogany mirror followed the scene with disapproval, but so far it remained silent.

There was no way back now; I sat in Magdalene’s wheelchair facing him and gathered my twisted feet on the footrest. This was my preferred position whenever I felt uneasy and needed inspiration from above (I speak of Magdalene, of course). If he found it odd, he didn’t show it.

“I would like to offer my condolences
…
Magna Ladegaard was an incredible woman,” he began.

I didn’t answer but let him study the crooked half of my face, while I waited for his first question. After all, I had called on him myself with the actions I had taken.

“I was hoping I could discuss a few things with you. About Kongslund,” he said.

I said nothing.

“Marie, I think you’re the one who sent us the anonymous letters.” He let the accusation hang in the air between us.

Even though I had expected it, it came as a shock when he said the words so directly. His hand rested on the little brown satchel that he carried with him, and I knew that at any moment he might open it, releasing his demons on whomever did not answer his questions.

I smiled my warped smile. My grimace would have frightened a man less secure than Knud Taasing, but he didn’t even blink.

“
You
sent the letters, because you discovered a secret right here at Kongslund—a big secret—isn’t that so, Marie?”

I still said nothing.

He opened his bag as I’d predicted and said, “Have a look.”

Instantly I recognized the demon
he’d
brought with him to Kongslund on the very day of Magna’s funeral service, and it was true: it would open the floodgates.

“I found this edition at the Royal Library. But I think you’ve got a magazine just like it
…
and I’d like to see it.”

In his hand he held an old magazine, and I didn’t need to lean close to know what it was.
Out and About
, May 25, 1961.

He could tell from my reaction that I was caught. “Yes,” he said. “I visited the childcare assistant who discovered the foundling on the steps.
She’d
kept all the magazines—except for one. This one.” He threw the forty-seven-year-old edition onto my lap, and in the exact same movement—or so it seemed—another demon flew from his bag, landing, in the form of a small white envelope, on top of the magazine. “Here’s the anonymous letter to
Independent Weekend
, the National Ministry, and Channel DK—and to God knows who else. What’s interesting
…
Marie Ladegaard
…
is that the letters on the envelope are the same as those in the article about Kongslund’s anniversary and the wondrous little foundling
…
the red and black letters, the small and the large
…
one by one
they were cut from this issue. There’s no doubt.”

He made a big fuss about his impressive shortcut to the truth.

“And do you know why the childcare assistant who found you doesn’t have that particular issue in her collection?” he asked.

I didn’t respond.

“Because she gave it to the
foundling
.” His eyes lit up. “She left shortly after the episode—and
she’d
asked Gerda Jensen to give the magazine to the child
she’d
found on the stairs that day. It was the only magazine she gave away, and that was only because it didn’t include a photo of herself.”

My movements weren’t as agile as his, yet he jumped when I spun the wheelchair around and rolled across the floor to the old bureau that had once belonged to Captain Olbers. I opened the bottom drawer, pushed aside two stacks of old folders and newspaper clippings, and retrieved an exact copy of the magazine
he’d
brought.

I rolled back to him and handed over the duplicate.

He quickly flipped through the pages until he found the article on Kongslund and then studied it carefully.

The headlines and large chunks of text had been meticulously removed. Letters were missing throughout.

He laughed silently and with a straight face. It was quite a feat.

I closed the drawer and cocked my head. Then, with the lisp that had belonged to the woman in the wheelchair, and which I always used when the world outside Kongslund found cracks in the existence I had constructed, I said, “Yes, that’s how it is.” I hadn’t spoken so strangely since the last of Magna’s army of psychologists had visited my room (at her earnest request) and departed a few hours later with his pipe stiff and cold between his pale lips. “But I’ll never admit to it in public, so you might as well drop the idea of writing an article about me,” I said.

He was puzzled, as was everybody, by my strange way of talking, but only for a moment. For the first time, I sensed an uncertainty in his eyes. “But why not?” he finally asked. “You want the case solved, after all.”

I lisped my reply so quietly that he had to lean forward uncomfortably in the Chippendale masterpiece. “It’s not important.”

“In the article, the foundling is referred to as a boy. How do you explain that?”

I didn’t respond.

“Could it be a mistake?”

I remained silent.

“Who is John Bjergstrand?”

I bowed my head all the way to my crooked left shoulder and squinted at him with my drooping left eye. He didn’t even blink. The silence between us was like a thick glass door that neither of us wanted to open but through which we could easily see one another. Finally, I said, “John Bjergstrand, who is that?” It was like an echo, a muted, distorted, lisping echo. My
s
’s were a complete disaster that afternoon.

“No, I suppose you don’t know. If you did, you wouldn’t need anyone’s help. You wouldn’t have needed to send the letter to the others. But why did you contact me of all people?”

Like all reporters, he was vain, so I decided to tell him the truth.

He was even more shocked than I’d expected.

“You didn’t send it to
me
?” For once, Knud Taasing had been pushed off course. If he hadn’t been sitting across from such a peculiar creature in such a beautiful room, he would have lit a cigarette. I saw his stiffly arched back like a green mound in the mirror behind him.

I told him who the intended recipient had been, and of course that shook him even more.

“
Nils
…
?” he said, incredulous.

“Yes, there were five other boys in the Elephant Room in 1961. Orla, Peter, Severin, Asger, and Nils
…
he was the hardest one for me to locate.”

He was thunderstruck. The mirror observed us mockingly.

“Yes, he’s adopted—he was just never told. But I’ve known for a long time,” I said, whistling through my
s
’s.

“But why
…
?” he said.

I didn’t respond.

“You wrote all five of them because you wanted to know who John Bjergstrand was, or who
he’d
become?”

Magdalene looked at him from her hiding place in my soul, but she too was silent. I had a strong sense that I was utterly alone.

“But you don’t know yet?”

For a long time he sat with his eyes closed. Then he said, “I found the mother of the boy, or rather, I’ve discovered who she was when she gave birth to him.”

Now I was the one leaning in. The words nearly leaped from my mouth? “Where is she?” I kept the abrupt and somewhat absurd question in the present tense.

“She was a very interesting woman,” he said, letting his third demon out of the bag. A notepad filled with dense writing, which he held up. But his handwriting was so illegible that I couldn’t decipher it.

“When I saw your letter
…
the one meant for Nils
…
all I had was the name. That was probably the toughest nut to crack of my career: Who was the boy? Who had sent the anonymous information, and
why
? My first step was to go backward in time, and I only had the names of a few people—a family that might not even exist anymore—whose name had been
Bjergstrand
. But I got lucky. Very lucky. A rare name, it appeared in one of the phone company’s old directories from the midfifties, and it belonged to a woman
who’d
lived in Istedgade in Vesterbro. Her name was Ellen Bjergstrand.” He paused.

That short pause was almost unbearable.
He’d
put his hands on some of the most important pieces of the puzzle that I had been struggling with.

“This woman could be a relative of the mysterious John—but none of my inquiries in the different parishes in Vesterbro, or with the Salvation Army or older residents, produced any results whatsoever. Finally I got so desperate I went to the Royal Library and asked to see all the local newspapers from the time, and as is often the case, my persistence finally paid off. The woman with the last name Bjergstrand, the only one with that name I’d been able to find, was killed in her apartment in Vesterbro in 1959.

He sat bolt upright as if witnessing a replay of the killing. “Actually, she was murdered. And not just by anybody, by her own daughter, whose name was”—he looked at me—“Eva Bjergstrand.”

I glanced away without a word, my crooked shoulder hiding my expression. Then I decided to ask the only logical question—as he anticipated. With a string of lisping
s
’s, I said: “S-s-s-s-o what happened to this mis-s-s-s-erable girl? This Eva Bjergs-s-trand?”

“There was no information about that. Not in the papers, at any rate. The reporters quickly stopped writing about the case. It was a family tragedy that they didn’t want to cover in the first place.” He nodded as though to confirm the girl’s disappearance to himself. “But I found her in the end. Back then, young girls
who’d
been sentenced for committing very serious offenses were imprisoned in Horserød State Prison on Zealand, so I got to work looking for her in the library of Prison Services. I went through all of their old annual reviews and records, and discovered that, indeed,
she’d
been placed at Horserød in 1960. Then I got permission to go through the prison’s archives, and finally I found another lead, which was so faint I’d probably have missed it had it not been for—” He fell silent for several seconds, the corners of his mouth turning up in a small, satisfied grin. “It was buried in a sentence scrawled so succinctly in the margins that
you’d
only be able to find it if you really knew what you were looking for. But I had an idea what I was after.”

Now he was unabashedly boasting. I didn’t want to reveal my curiosity too obviously at this moment, and it irritated me that he couldn’t hide his hunter’s pride at having tracked down his quarry.

“In May 1961, a girl by the name of Eva Bjergstrand was pardoned and released from Horserød—in all discretion and likely without the public ever discovering it. And then
…
she vanished.”

My shoulders sank, and I sat more crookedly in the wheelchair than Magdalene ever had.

“But why?” he said. “Why was the girl suddenly pardoned?”

I didn’t respond.

“Because she got pregnant. Yes. The result of her pregnancy test was actually still in the files. Even competent people make mistakes. And the test was made at Rigshospital. Eva Bjergstrand was imprisoned for murder in 1959, only fifteen years old, and she gave birth to a child in all secrecy at Obstetric Ward B
…
presumably in the spring of 1961
…
when she was seventeen.”