I lifted my too-long legs up and over the bench, avoiding the guarded looks from Christiana and Henriette from across the room, as Elize squeezed my shoulder and offered me her glass. They were drinking sweet wine. Mama nodded and I took a sip. Elize was only three years older than me but, newly married to Reinhardt Geschke, she belonged to a different circle of women. She rubbed my back as I spluttered on the wine and I wondered how she could bear to have me sit next to her, plain and awkward as I was.
Elize pities you, I thought. She saw Christiana look over and knows you have been left out. She’s being kind.
I set the glass carefully back on the table.
‘Why don’t you help while you wait for your mama?’ Elize reached into the goose down, piled like snow, and placed a handful of plucked feathers in front of me. Copying the others, I tore the fluff from the stem, stuffing it into the jar in front of Elize. Magdalena Radtke’s sharp eyes were on me, making sure, no doubt, that I was stripping the feathers properly.
There was a brief, companionable silence as twenty pairs of hands busied themselves in union. Elize leaned against me in gentle reassurance.
‘So,’ announced Rosina from her position at the head of the table. ‘The new family up in the cottage. What do we think of them?’
Magdalena cleared her throat. ‘I have heard that his wife is a Wend.’
Eleonore Volkmann raised her thick eyebrows. ‘If she has married a German, she is German.’
‘Well,’ continued Magdalena, ‘you would hope so. And yet, when I caught a glimpse of them, the wife had the headdress on. You know’ – she waved a plump hand above her head – ‘that strange-looking, horned thing.’
Elize noticed my confusion and leaned closer. ‘Newcomers to Kay,’ she whispered. ‘We were talking about them earlier. A family, renting the forester’s cottage.’
I knew the building she spoke of. It was a ramshackle one-roomed cabin that stood in front of the dark wall of pines at the village border. No one had lived there for some time and the cottage had started to list towards the trees. Sometimes, from a certain distance, it looked as though the house and the forest had begun to reach towards one another. I often walked that way to collect kindling and would sometimes stop and think how wonderful it was that, emptied of people, a building would inevitably reach for the elements that made it. Clay, wood, earth, grass. Disintegration as reunion.
‘Will they worship with us?’ asked my mother.
‘My husband says yes,’ replied Emile Pfeiffer, who lived close to the forest. She pulled off her headscarf to scratch her head, grey hairs threaded through the brown. ‘Herr Eichenwald asked him about services. His wife seems friendly. Quite forthright. She told us she was a midwife.’
‘We lived in a Wendish village when I was a child,’ Elize said softly. ‘They were very kind to us. They told wonderful stories.’
‘Demons and the Wassermann,’ Magdalena interrupted.
‘The Wassermann?’ asked Christiana.
‘A little fish man who lives in a pond and drowns people,’ Elize murmured. ‘It’s a children’s story.’
Christiana pulled a face at Henriette, who laughed.
Mutter Scheck piped up in her corner. ‘And are there any children?’
‘A young woman,’ answered Emile. ‘Same age as these girls. But no others.’
‘Imagine, a midwife and only one child yourself. Pity.’ Magdalena clicked her tongue against her teeth.
‘Did you meet her – the daughter?’ asked Christiana. ‘What is her name?’
Emile retied her headscarf. ‘She didn’t tell us. Her mother did all the talking. But I expect they’ll introduce themselves at worship. You and Henriette and Elizabeth can meet her then, make friends with her.’
Elize nudged me with her elbow. ‘And you, Hanne.’
I felt my mother glance at me and wondered what she was thinking. Hopeful, perhaps, that I would finally make a friend. That I would become a part of things. She nodded in approval as my fingers stripped the feathers, and I returned her smile, but inwardly I felt my stomach drop, imagining another girl welcomed into Christiana’s fold while I remained steadfastly on the outer.
I was forever nature’s child.
It is probably best to say this now.
I sought out solitude. Happiness was playing in the whir of grass at the uncultivated edges of our village, listening to the ticking of insects, or plunging my feet into fresh snow until my stockings grew wet and my toes numb. Occasionally, in a spirit of contrition after some misdemeanour and knowing it would please my mother, I would run in the road with the children of the other Old Lutherans. There had been some fun in throwing stones and hanging upside down in trees with the boys, but my brothers’ friends did not enjoy being beaten in their races by a long-legged girl, and their sisters had always confounded me. Even as a young child I had felt that girls forsook on whim and offered only inconstant friendship. Allegiances seemed to shift from day to day like sandbanks in a riverbed and, inevitably, I found myself run aground. Better to befriend a blanket of moss, the slip-quick of fish dart. Never was the love I poured into the river refused.