Breath and Bones Read Free Page B

housework, no church services; only art. She would never cough. Instead, she would stand in the middle of this world, or lie in it, perpetually still, with her clothes off and her eyes lost in Albert’s.
    It would be this life.
    â€œNew pots for old!” sang a tinker passing down the street below.
    Famke looked up and suddenly the light was gone; even the keenest eye couldn’t stretch it any further. Albert sighed and put brush and palette down on the rough board table, where Famke would clean them later. Wiping his hands on what he must have thought was a rag—a camisole she’d left to dry over the back of a chair—he looked from the easel to the bed, from pencil drawing to paint sketch to the real, living girl watching him and trying not to cough.
    â€œI think it is going to be . . .” He paused, searching for the right word: “beautiful.”
    It was an ordinary word after all, but nonetheless exotic to her, for he said it in English. Famke felt a rush of hot feeling—not the ordinary fever of her disease but a new kind that Albert had passed on to her, a kind that felt hotter and stronger each time it came over her. She threw the covers off and held out her arms to him, unconsciously splaying her hands in much the same way as Nimue did.
    He came toward her, repeating, “Beautiful . . .”
    When he was undressed and in the narrow bed himself, he hoisted Famke up and—her arms braced against the sloped ceiling for balance—slid her down onto him. She wobbled, unsure just what to do now; and he kept his hands on her hips. He held her still while he began to move.
    Famke looked down into Albert’s face; and then he looked up into hers, the planes of it in twilight shadows. Famke removed one hand from the ceiling and pulled her hair to the side so that, behind her, he might look on the face and form of his Nimue, his masterwork, his violated virgin.
    â€œAh . . .” Very quickly, he gasped and began to shudder.
    As she rode that wave, Famke knew that he was seeing her as his heroic nymph, and she did not mind one bit. She had a lovely warm, shimmering feeling, a feeling that—like the new fever, but different—made her
want
something . . . As Albert quieted beneath her, she felt the shimmering rise and then fall away, leaving in its wake a vague sense of longing and that familiar tickle in her lungs.
    Famke coughed. The contractions pushed Albert out of her, and he slid back, to where the bed met the wall.
    â€œReally, darling,” he said as she got up and, for want of a handkerchief, coughed further into the paint-stained camisole, “you should take something for that dreadful hack.” He swabbed at himself with the bedsheet. “I’ll get you an elixir the next time I’m out.”
    Famke shook her head, yes, no, feeling herself cold and wet and somehow bereft, but still with that sensation of wanting inside. She lowered the camisole and smiled at Albert, and he said again, “Beautiful.”

Kapitel 2
    English is spoken at all the principal hotels and shops. A brief notice of a few of the peculiarities of the Danish language may, however, prove useful. The pronunciation is more like German than English:
a
is pronounced like ah
, e
like eh
, ø
or
ö
like the German ö or French eu. The plural of substantives is sometimes formed by adding
e
or
er,
and sometimes the singular remains unaltered.
    K. B AEDEKER ,
N ORTHERN G ERMANY
(W ITH EXCURSIONS TO
C OPENHAGEN , V IENNA, AND S WITZERLAND )
    Famke was not virtuous when she met Albert Castle. According to the Catholic precepts by which she’d been raised, she was no longer truly virginal, as she confessed to him in a bedtime conversation. Few orphan girls, even those raised by the good sisters of the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, could lay claim to that desirable state once they entered the wider world—and why should they bother to hold on to something