Chapter One
It’s dusk on the twenty-fourth of December, and I’m sitting alone in the back parlor. The dark creeps up from the corners, along with the chill of winter. I tuck my feet up and curl my toes inside my satin slippers so they don’t grow numb.
The doors across from my seat on the sofa are closed, but lamplight leaks around the edges. If I half-close my eyes, it is a frame of light around a portal of pitch black: the entrance to another world, not merely the drawing room.
Every year, my parents throw a party on Christmas Eve, as regular as clockwork. Every year, I wait, imagining that this will be the night when my nutcracker returns. And every year, I have been disappointed.
I twist my fingers in the golden chain around my neck, then untwist them again. I’m eighteen now—much too old for childish thoughts of magic—and yet, still I sit here in the cool darkness, waiting. Suppose this is the year when he returns?
The drawing room doors burst open with a rattle. Lamplight overflows into the parlor. My cat, Maunzi, who has been sitting on the other end of the sofa, leaps down and runs off into a still-shadowed corner as my little niece, Clara, bounces in.
“Aunt Marie!” She climbs onto the green velvet sofa beside me, not worrying about crumpling her new silk frock. “Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asks, then, not waiting for an answer, demands, “Tell me a story.”
“What sort of story?” I ask. My head is filled with the delirium of memories from that other Christmas. The drawing room overrun with mice. My brother’s toy soldiers marching into battle. The image of the mouse king scattered across shards of glass: dozens of fierce faces lit by dozens of candle flames. The nutcracker doll leading my brother’s toy soldiers and the other playthings into battle. The final bloody duel between the nutcracker and mouse king—all these things swirl in my mind, as they always do in these dark days before the new year, when the world is disordered and the veil of reality seems thin and threadbare against the unknown that waits in the cold winter nights. But Clara is only five; I can’t tell any of these things without frightening her.
“Any story you like,” Clara says earnestly.
I shake my head, trying to bring myself back to the present moment. The mouse king is dead, and the nutcracker, who promised to return for me, has never come.
He will not come. More than ten years have passed. It was only a childish dream, and I’m too old to believe otherwise. “I’ll tell you a story later, Schätzchen,” I say to Clara. “Let’s go into the drawing room. I have a present for you.”
She takes my hand, and we go into the other room, where all is light and warmth and laughter. I give her a whole packet of gingerbread dolls, and she lines them up on the table, naming them for her family: “This is Papa, this is Mama, this is you, Aunt Marie, and this is Uncle Fritz.” She looks up at me with wide brown eyes. “Where is Uncle Fritz?”
“He’s coming later,” I promise, though I’m not certain that he is.
Even though my brother is home from the army on a holiday leave, he tends to disappear in the afternoons with his hussar friends. He returns late, sleeps late, then goes off again. If he comes back for the party tonight, he’ll probably bring his fellow cavalry troopers with him, the whole lot of them smelling of beer and smoke and horses. Mother will pretend she doesn’t notice, Father will look thunderous, and my sister Luise will say something cutting about proper behavior for gentlemen.
Do hussars count as gentlemen? I’m not sure they do, even if they are a part of the Grand Imperial Army. The hussars consider themselves a breed apart: more daring, more dashing, more dangerous than other cavalrymen, let alone common foot soldiers.
Clara takes a handful of walnuts from the bowl on the table and pretends they are gifts the dolls are giving to one another while I sit beside her and look around the room. My father is greeting guests. My mother is overseeing the musicians who are arranging themselves in one corner of the room.
My sister Luise is by the great Christmas tree with her husband, Johann. It’s a quiet moment for them, with Clara out from underfoot. Luise leans her head against Johann’s shoulder. Neither of them speaks, and I wonder if I would ever want that with someone—to simply stand quietly next to one another.
From the open parlor door, Maunzi slinks past the toy cabinet that stands in one corner, past the musicians, and the tree, and the tall grandfather clock in the other corner, to disappear out the other door. He will go sulk upstairs until the hustle and bustle of the party is over, no doubt.
Under my eye, the great gilded owl atop the clock looks back at me, lifting its wings and whirring as it prepares to strike the hour. My heart skitters briefly in my chest. The sound of this clock once heralded the arrival of the mouse king.
But not tonight. Instead, my best friend Trudy sweeps into the room with her parents and her younger sisters. I leave Clara with the gingerbread dolls and the walnuts on the tablecloth and go to greet the Wendelsterns.
Trudy is scanning the room when I reach her side.
“Fritz isn’t here,” I say into her ear when I lean in to hug her.
“I wasn’t looking for him,” Trudy replies quickly. Water droplets glitter in her hair where snowflakes have melted, but I think the red on her cheeks is more than the cold winter air outside. She is neither a soldier nor a horse, and so Fritz hasn’t noticed her blushes and sighs and stammers over the last year. Still, I like the idea of Trudy as my sister, so I haven’t tried to discourage her.
I draw her away to the table with Clara, who immediately asks again for her story.
“In the Kingdom of Dolls,” I tell her, “there is a lake of rose water, as pink and sweet-smelling as you could ever wish. On the water swim silver swans with golden necklaces on their long necks. They don’t eat bread crusts like the swans you know, but only marzipan. Would you like to visit the lake shore and feed the swans?”
But Clara shakes her head. She doesn’t want to share her sweets with birds, however beautiful they might be, and her attention is wandering. There is so much to see around the room. She slips down from the table and goes with Trudy’s younger sisters to investigate the shining treasures in and around the Christmas tree.
I stay with Trudy. The Aschenbrandts have arrived. Petra and Magda join us, and we all exchange stories about the things we saw on our separate visits to the Christmas market until there is a banging and clattering in the entrance hallway.
At first, I can’t see through the crush of bodies in the room. Then there is a flash of emerald green, the crowd parts, and Godfather Drosselmeier is there.
He twirls the green cape from his shoulders and reveals a large package in his hands, tied up with a wide red ribbon. Little Clara creeps close to Luise’s skirts with wide eyes, and my sister puts a protective hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
Godfather Drosselmeier is uncanny, with his wrinkled face, his shining white wig, and the large black eye patch which takes the place of his right eye. If I were to see such a strange-looking person on the street, I know I ought not to stare—and yet, I believe that he enjoys the effect he has on people, that he wants to be stared at. No one, I think, would insist on wearing a violently yellow frock coat all year round if they didn't wish to be noticed.
He stands in the middle of the room, grinning brazenly at the guests and making a spectacle of himself. Another swoop of his cape, and the single package has become three, stacked together in a precarious tower atop his outstretched hand. Clara claps, and the adults murmur appreciatively, even though Godfather plays these tricks with his presents every year.
He hands the smallest parcel to Luise, the middle one to me, and the largest one to Clara, who pulls at the ribbon immediately. The wrapping falls open. There is a doll inside, slender arms upstretched above her dress, which has skirts like pink flower petals.
Clara lifts the doll from the box, but before she can do more than stroke its painted face, Godfather Drosselmeier plucks it from her hands. With a dramatic flourish, he inserts a little golden key into the doll’s back through a slit in the fabric of her dress.
There is a clicking sound as he winds its mechanism, then he sets the doll on the table, and everyone watches as it begins to dance.
Luise and I open the other two packages, and there are two more dolls in purple and red costumes. We hand them over for Godfather to wind up, and soon all three are moving across the tabletop. Each doll spins to the left while raising its right arm, pauses, takes a step and blinks its painted eyes, then reverses its arms and spins in the other direction.
By the time the third doll is wound, Clara is already fidgeting. I’m looking for the polite words to thank Godfather for the beautiful dolls that can only be looked at and must therefore inevitably join the ranks of similar puppets on the highest shelf of the toy cabinet. I’m too old to play with dolls, the way I ought to be too old to believe in magic.
Before I can form the right phrase, however, there’s a fresh commotion at the doorway. Fritz enters with his fellow hussars. They are dressed as splendidly as his toy soldiers ever were, with dark green attila jackets and the matching pelisses fastened over their left shoulders all smothered in yellow braid. Unlike the toys, however, these cavalrymen are tall and vigorous, and the floor shakes under the stamping of their boots.
The table, too, vibrates with their arrival. The dancing dolls tip over on the tablecloth, arms still twitching. There is a delicate grinding as the mechanisms attempt to spin the prone bodies and fail.
Godfather Drosselmeier scowls and reaches for the dolls. Luise helps to right them, but Clara runs to Fritz. I turn away from my godfather’s glowering eye and follow after the child. Trudy, Petra, and Magda follow after me toward the cavalrymen.
Behind us, I can hear my godfather muttering dyspeptically while Mother and Luise soothe his wounded feelings. Fritz has always been the least appreciative of Godfather Drosselmeier’s gifts, seeing no purpose to figurines that only move in a set pattern over and over. Our godfather spends so much time on his clockwork mechanisms, and I ought to be more appreciative—but I’m glad for my brother’s interruption.
Fritz catches Clara up and tosses her into the air. “Again!” she cries, and he obliges while the rest of us look on.
When he has sent Clara flying half a dozen times and she is breathless with laughter, he sets her down and pulls an orange from the dangling sleeve of his pelisse. “Merry Christmas, Schmusebacke.”
The other troopers make a semicircle around us, all inquisitive eyes and pert mustaches. They smell not of beer, but of mulled wine from the Christmas market: warm spices and citrus overlaying the wool and leather scents released by the snow which has melted into their uniforms. One of them elbows Fritz with a mischievous look in his dark eyes. “Are all of these young ladies your nieces, Stahlbaum?”
Fritz rolls his eyes, but he introduces us to his fellow hussars, even the ones who are from our city and already well-known to us. He delights Clara by naming her “Mademoiselle Clara Kaltenborn,” as if she were a grown lady. Even if nothing else magical happens this evening, it feels like a small miracle to see these tall young men, softened by the holiday atmosphere, bending low to kiss Clara’s hand as if she is a princess.
She manages to keep up a dignified facade until the dark-eyed trooper who asked for introductions kisses her hand. He has a particularly luxuriant mustache, and she giggles when it tickles her. Immediately, she is mortified by her outburst and hides her face in my dress.
“Ah, Mademoiselle Kaltenborn, forgive me,” he says and winks at me. “I didn’t mean to offend you with my whiskers.” When she is coaxed to look at him again, he makes a great show of twisting the ends of his mustache until she smiles shyly at him.
Fritz introduces me and Trudy, and the Aschenbrandt sisters as well. The dark-eyed hussar is called Dietrich Lang. He has the same lines of golden braid on the cuffs of his jacket as my brother, showing his rank as a lieutenant. When he bows over my hand, his mustache doesn't so much tickle as tingle. My skin feels peculiar under his touch: too hot, too cold, too tight, too… something.
He straightens, but his hand lingers on mine, and there is something in his eyes I can't define. Expectation, perhaps, but what does he expect from me? I know my skin is turning pink under his gaze, and I’m as flustered as little Clara was. I don’t want hussars to wink at me or kiss my hand or smile at me in the way that Lieutenant Lang does.
“What an unusual necklace you wear, Mademoiselle Stahlbaum,” he says, and I’m glad for the excuse to pull my hand from his. My fingers find the delicate chain at my throat and the seven circlets strung on it.
“It was a gift from a friend,” I say. “I wear it in remembrance.”
“It’s a lucky man who is remembered by such a lovely lady,” he says, his gaze lingering at my collarbone.
“Yes,” I say, grabbing Clara and retreating quickly. Only as I walk away do I realize I didn't say the rings were given to me by a man.
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