The Toyseller
It was hard to know what to pick. Ursula jingled the copper pennies in her fist and glanced back and forth between a little rag doll with a flouncy dress and button eyes and a wooden horse with wheels you could pull by a string. At last she decided that if it were she, she’d rather have the horse. So, she paid for it and had the toyseller wrap it up in a scrap of burlap with red string.
It had snowed again the previous night, and not many riders and carriages had gone in and out of the castle gates since, so it was slow going up the road and slippery over the bridge. But at last she arrived at the gates. The guards nodded to her, and she went through into the forecourt.
It was a more cheerful castle than most Ursula had seen in her life, she thought as she stood in the large yard, neatly plowed and brushed free of snow. She craned her neck to look up at the stuccoed towers of the main palace. They were a pretty, pale green from copper pigments worked into the stucco, and the light shade made them seem to soar in spite of their massive, stony weight. The windows were framed with plaster work in blue and cream, and pennants snapped from the peaked towers with the crests of the graf and the king.
Ursula shivered and hurried across the court to a door open on the north side. Inside was a great hall that had been converted into a hospital. A fire roared in the hearth, and cots were set in rows before it with men convalescing from the last Hussite war, as well as some local burgers who had gotten injured or had fallen ill. Ursula looked for Mathilde and found her folding clean bandages at a long table set near the wall. She hurried over to the matron and handed her the burlap-wrapped toy. Mathilde nodded, her dark eyes sparkling. “You give it to her, my dear,” she said. “My old legs need a rest.” She nodded toward a mother and daughter hovering at a cot by the window. In it a man lay with bandages swathing the stump of one leg just below the knee. A horse had rolled over on his foot and crushed it in battle, and the lower leg had to be removed by the surgeon–a process that made Ursula shudder every time she thought of it, even though she hadn’t been present for the operation.
She had only been working at the hospital for a few days–ever since she had opened her aunt’s door to find Mathilde standing there with one of the graf’s pages, who announced to a speechless Elisabeth that the graf wished her niece to start work immediately at the castle as Mathilde’s hospital apprentice. “The graf will compensate you for the loss of household help, beginning with this,” he held out a leather purse bulging with coin and dropped it into Elisabeth’s stunned hands, “and this.” He whistled, and another page shouldered through the door and set two huge baskets of finely spun white wool on the floor by the hearth. “A percentage of Fraulein von Koppl’s earnings will come to you as well; a page will bring a purse the first of every month.”
Elisabeth curtsied. “The graf is most, most generous,” she stammered. “But Ursula can bring her pay home herself. The graf need not trouble himself with….”
“Unfortunately,” Mathilde laid a hand on Elisabeth’s arm, “The nature of the work is such that the fraulein will need to board at the castle with me. Irregular hours. You understand. The graf thanks you most sincerely for your sacrifice, Frau Becker. He will not forget what you have done. Ursula, my dear,” Mathilde turned for the first time to look at her, and the compassion–not pity, but compassion–in her eyes made tears spring to Ursula’s. “I’m sorry, but we’re in some haste. Can you get your things? At least what you need for the night; I can have the rest brought over later. There’s a good girl….”
Five minutes later, Ursula walked out of the tower for what turned out to be the last time with all her worldly possessions twisted into her shawl and tied by the corners around her shoulders. On her way out, she put an arm around Elisabeth’s neck and kissed her cold cheek. “Thank you, Aunt,” she said. The woman mumbled something Ursula couldn’t make out, her eyes and fingers busy counting the silver in the graf’s purse.
That’s what Ursula was thinking about as she walked across the hospital to the little family by the fire–the difference between Mathilde and Elisabeth. Everything about Mathilde seemed warm–her eyes, her smile. When she stopped by the beds of the invalids to check on them, Ursula swore their cheeks flushed more warmly, their eyes shone a little more brightly. The matron was like a fire in human form, or sunshine.
The family looked up as she approached. They all put on brave faces for her, but each told Ursula a second story: the man was in pain; his healing was going more slowly than expected, though the danger of fever was past. The wife was worried, probably about many things–her husband, money, how to cheer her daughter for the holiday. The little girl was scared of her father’s leg and probably also that he might not come back home again; her pink cheeks still wore the white traces of tears. Ursula smiled at her and held out the burlap package. “Mathilde got you something. Merry Christmas.”
The little brow furrowed, and then blue eyes looked up to her Mutti, who nodded. “Go ahead. And say thank you to the fraulein and Frau Mathilde.”
The girl took the present tentatively and untied the string with a bit of help from her father. When she saw the toy, she let out a yelp of delight. She hugged it to her chest first and kissed it, then held it out for her parents to see. “What are you going to name him?” her father asked with the first smile Ursula had seen on his face.
“Brownie!” the girl declared.
“Can you make him gallop round the bed, do you think?”
The girl leaped up and did so, laughing at the way the toy bounced on the flagging stones behind her and the leather mane and tail danced just like a real horse’s. The parents held hands and laughed. The other patients sat up in bed and leaned over to watch. Ursula turned away so they couldn’t see her wipe her eyes with her sleeve.
She went back to Mathilde, who was also watching the merriment, and gave her a hug from behind. Mathilde took her hand in one of her weathered ones and pulled her around to sit in the chair next to her. “Sometimes the best medicine isn’t something in a doctor’s bag,” the matron said, nodding at the family, the other patients gathering round to see the toy or warm themselves by the fire–many of whom hadn’t been out of their beds since they’d come to the hospital. “That’s what we’re here for.”
The Rookery 