Breath and Bones Read Online Free

that would be taken from them once they’d passed communion and were placed in service with some family inevitably headed by a prurient husband, a curious son, or a querulous grandfather who
would
have his way?
    â€œDarling, you’re so fierce,” Albert said as he squeezed her.
    â€œIt is a fierce world,” she said. “
Overhovedet
, especially, for a girl.”
    Besides, immured in her orphanage, Famke had found the idea of sin exciting. It offered the possibility of something other than what she had, something that must be at least pleasant, if not delicious, since the straight-backed nuns who had married Christ were so vehemently against it.
    So Famke had taken sin into her own hands. The boys on the other side of the orphanage were just as curious as she, and intrigued by her interest. She courted them first through a crack in the wall separating the boys’ and girls’ dormitories. This was during the exercise period, when the childrenwere encouraged to enjoy fresh air and wholesome movement, trotting up and down two barren courtyards, occasionally playing desultory games of tag or statue around the lone elder tree in each one. Famke would lean into her wall and see an eye, almost always blue, peering back at her through the rubble and leaves. They would talk, whispering arrangements for
rendezvous
that, under the nuns’ watchful glare, never came to pass. Once, Famke wormed her thin hand along the crack, and the boy on the other side (a Mogens, she believed, or maybe a Viggo—there were so many of both, arriving with those un-Catholic names pinned to their diapers so the good nuns felt bound to retain them) managed to reach just far enough in to touch the tip of one finger. The contact gave her a thrill she’d never known before, and for a good many months it was what she thought sin was, this furtive touch within a wall.
    She actually saw boys only during the daily chapel services; the sexes even ate separately, so as to avoid the inevitable temptation. While the priest droned on about the blessings of humility, meekness, and poverty, she flirted through fanned fingers. Breathing deeply, she smelled the strong cheap soap the older girls made in the orphanage yard from ash and fat. For the rest of her life, it would be that smell—even more than the smell from the place that the nuns would refer to only as Down There, when they admitted it existed at all—that made her heart pound with excitement.
    To the priest’s soporific cadences, in that edifice of gray-painted brick, Famke’s azure eyes winked and fluttered. The boys were helpless: She glowed like the rosy windows that Catholics could afford only in non-Lutheran countries. At the age of twelve, her breasts already brushed against the plain gray uniform, and the figure growing inside that rough sacking seemed to color it rainbow bright.
    The nuns did not fail to notice her blossoming. Soon, Famke had to sit through services sandwiched between two severe gray bodies.
    â€œShe has always been wild,” the Mother Superior said in one of her frequent conferences with the wisest of the nuns. “We saw that from the first.”
    â€œAnd the visitors saw it as well,” said Sister Saint Bernard, Mother Superior’s second in command. “The basest peasant can recognize such a spirit, be the little girl ever so pretty. It’s no wonder they always took a different child.”
    Mother Superior said absently, “We do not speak of our patrons that way. Or our young charges.” She was thinking, as was the rest of her council, of the high hopes they’d entertained when the baby turned up on their doorstep one late October day, still wearing the black hair of the womb, wrapped in a soft wool blanket and bearing a note that said simply,
“Familjeflicka.”
This, they had thought, was a child destined for one of their rare adoptions.
    Young Sister Birgit, who had been born in