I don’t know if that’s what I want. A week, even a day ago, it was. Like most young women, most people, I suppose, what I want is something I barely consider. My life has been ruled by what is expected of me. I am expected to be a good daughter, expected to help, expected to marry, have babies, expected to die. Perhaps it is the same for Agathe or even Karl. Unless you are king, someone else makes the decisions for you.
I quickly unclasp the necklace and hold it out. For a second, it dangles between us, catching the waning light, and I remember my mother putting it on me when we went to church.
He hesitates, and in that instant, our hands meet beneath it. I don’t know if I want him to take it. I don’t know what I want at all. But finally, he snatches it from my hand and pockets it.
“To work, then! I brought you this to read.” He hands me a book with a title in gilt script I can barely make out, Faust: A Tragedy. “I showed it to you last week, and I am longing to devour it. It is what I had planned for this evening before I heard of your plight.”
“The proprietress allows you to read any book you desire then?” I take it from him. “Even the new ones?”
“As long as I do not crack the spines or muss the pages. You must be careful about that too. She thinks I can better sell a book to customers if I have read it myself.”
“You are the luckiest creature in the world!” I rub the book’s embossed cover, then hold it to my nose to sniff. Someday, when I marry Karl, I will own dozens, even hundreds of books, and when I smell them, I will always remember this day, this place, this man.
It will not be a happy memory.
“Lucky? Because I can read a book?” He laughs, and his eyes sparkle as he does, and for an instant, he seems less plain.
“You can read any book and come and go as you please and stay out late without anyone caring and up late without someone telling you that you had best get to bed because there is work to be done in the morning. Your life is your own.”
He looks away, feeding the straw into the wheel and beginning to spin. He does not tell me to keep my eyes on the book this time, I notice.
“You are right. Sometimes, I stay up all night reading book after book, for I have no family to object, and when I wake in the morning, slumped over a table or fallen off a chair, back aching, cold because no one thought to cover me with a blanket or tell me to come to bed, I feel very fortunate.”
Silence except for the whirring of the wheel, the tap of his foot upon the treadle.
“You have no family?” I start to open the book.
“I grew up in a foundling home. There is one in town where women can leave their babies if they do not want them.”
I feel his eyes upon me, but when I look up, he is staring at the wheel again, concentrating.
“They . . . leave them there?”
“It is a sort of contraption, a wheel. There is a door on the outside, and the woman, the mother, opens it and places the baby in a sort of bed on a shelf. Then she closes the door and turns a crank and—no more baby.”
“Where does it go?” I feel breathless. Are there many women, women like me, women in my situation? I have never known such a girl, but maybe I did and just didn’t realize it.
“Inside, where someone finds it. Hence the term foundling, I suppose.”
“And they care for it? They . . . ?” Someone had raised him. It must, therefore, be a safe place. Better than the alternative, for both of us to die in the river.
“Many of the babies die soon after.” At my intake of breath, he adds, “But for those who live, I suppose it is not a bad existence. It was there that I learned to read, after all. Had I grown up on a farm with plenty of area to run and play, I might have been illiterate.”
He is trying to cast a good light on it but not doing a very good job. “Did you have many friends among the boys there?”
He laughs, a rueful little laugh. “What? Oh, no. I was always an odd one, I suppose, not fast or good at the games. But there were brothers who taught us, and since I was not interested in playing with a ball or running about like a fool, I got the lion’s share of the teaching. One day, when a lady came around looking for an assistant for her shop, I was hired. I was very lucky that day. Kendra allowed me to sleep in the back of the store until I found a place, and she let me read to my heart’s content.”
I wonder if it was she who taught him his talent for spinning. It seems an impertinent question, though, so I do not ask.
I remember the food I had saved from dinner. “I have something for you.” I walk over and set the basket before him, careful to put down the book before I do.
He looks at it and smiles, though his smile does not reach his eyes. “You are kind.” He stops spinning, lifts the fork, and takes a bite of the cake. But I can tell he is only being polite.
This is confirmed when, after only the one bite, he says, “I must work. There is so much more straw than yesterday.”
I sigh. I know. And I know not why Karl failed to visit me.
He sets the wheel to spinning again. “Read.”