A Royal Patient: Young Doctor Axel Munthe and Crown Princecss Victoria of Sweden-Norway

By Ingar Palmlund

A story about a young man who goes out into the world, meets trials, and finds a princess — so what’s new?

The young man is adventurous Axel Munthe from Stockholm, Sweden, desiring to become a doctor and position himself in high society. Later in his life he would write The Story of San Michele, an international best

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ingar Palmlund Aktiebolag
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9789198296310

Book preview

ENCOUNTER

cleopatra.

The man hath seen some majesty, and should know.

charmian.

Hath he seen majesty?

William Shakespeare

Antony and Cleopatra, Act III, Scene 3

1891 April, Roma

Lamp black. Caput mortuum. Violet. Sepia. Cadmium yellow. Burnt sienna. Blues: cobalt, ultramarine, Preussen blue, indigo. Reds: alizarin, crimson lake. The smell of Preussen blue. Bitter. Raw sienna. Rough taste on my tongue. I need to clean my palette.

My work this morning is too sweet, too placid. Bland. A landscape, the view from my window. Yellow ochre. Too obedient. But I have the right to love. Whisk my squirrel-hair brush in the water, sharpen the moist hairs into a stiletto, pointed. Yellow in ultramarine to get the right green, more yellow. And darkly mustard gummigutta alone, transparent. Like me alone. But the shadows, violet. Umbra there. Yellow ochre. No, that’s too bland, too obedient, too placid. Water, much water. Then red, alizarin, crimson, not just a damp of red but the brush full, saturated with red. Royal red, for a princess married off to a prince, blue, royal blue. Draw, press the brush to the paper, keep my hand from trembling. Now a line across, from top to bottom, across, wobbly. A red form, crimson red, darker than crimson. I can hardly breathe. This streak. Royal red for the Crown Princess. The line looks indecisive, infirm. I don’t always want to be. A red, a sticky red rivulet across my too precise painting. Like blood, dripping, slowly seeking its way south, towards earth. Why did I do that?

Reds I seldom use: alizarin, crimson lake. Now this wound, like a deep red tear in my obedience. Royal crimson. Like blood. The red pigment dries into contours, well defined. Royal red for a woman who loves a real man. But I am not a Jezebel. I know I should be firm, have clear contours, all the time. Always consider who I am. Not as I am now, drifting. I need to clean my palette.

‘It’s for the best,’ they tell me. ‘It’s for your own good. You need to see this Swedish doctor.’

Is that why we stopped here in Roma? The man I need is not here. The love I need. Why is my hand trembling? That crimson is bleeding like a tear across my good painting. Like blood seeking its way towards earth. Why did I do that?

‘You need to see this doctor,’ they say. What do they know? I don’t want to see any doctor. ‘He’s very good,’ they say. ‘He can help.’

***

She is taller than he expects, a slim woman. Precise, hasty movements. Corseted, stiff posture. She is younger too, twenty-five, twenty-eight perhaps. Pale. Her hair dark brown. Broad mouth. Straight dark eyebrows. Dark eyes under her veil. Dark like a thick ice cover on a winter lake. She is wearing a costume in grey and black entirely – a light grey silk blouse, a long jacket and skirt in darker grey, her jacket lapels decorated with large swirls of black silk string. The silver handle on her light grey parasol’s black cane catches the light, a single shiny fleck. She carries her head high. Her face is almost colourless under the veil. Her lips are thin. He notes the spread on her hat of a blackbird’s wing, the delicate feathers almost broken by two jet stones pinned into the black lace wound over the brim. The lace half-covers her face. Large hats decorated with dead birds are in fashion. He does not like them. I saw one of those blackbirds yesterday, he thinks. In flight by the river. Not captured. Not dead.

He rises from his desk and steps towards her, gingerly. His formula: a few polite words of greeting, an invitation to sit down, a gesture towards the comfortable chairs in red velvet by his tall bookshelves. He is used to these awkward first moments of his relationship with the women who come to see him. He wants her to feel like a frightened, damaged bird he will cradle in his hands and help to fly again. She holds up her right wrist so that he may lift her fingers for a moment. He bows, ceremoniously, as etiquette requires, as if wishing to kiss her hand but not daring. Through her thin grey lace glove he can feel her finger bones, a ring on one finger. A light perfume. Limon? No. Lavender? No. Rosewater?

When he lets go of her hand, his eyes for a moment meet hers through her veil. She lifts up the lace, drapes it over the hat. She is not too pale. Her eyes are brown. They are serious, almost fearful, as if asking a question.

‘Would Your Royal Highness please take a seat,’ he offers. Without thinking, he speaks to her in Swedish.

She turns around to the blonde woman who had entered his office behind her. ‘Fräulein may wait outside,’ she orders in German. ‘We wish to be alone.’ Her voice is deep and overcast, her words pronounced with a determined diction. Strong but fragile, he thinks. Her companion curtseys and leaves the room.

‘Would Your Highness like to take a seat,’ he offers again. He wants her to feel at ease. This encounter is important. It should lead to others.

She sits down in one of the chairs, her back straight. She places her parasol cane so that it leans against her left thigh and folds her hands in her lap. He notices the pointed leather boot under her long skirt, a shiny, buttoned patent-leather boot, grey as the material of the skirt. Elegant.

‘Thank you, Doctor Munthe,’ she replies in Swedish as if determined to speak his language. ‘It is kind of you to see me.’

‘Your Highness has come to consult me about something,’ he offers. She nods. ‘How can I help?’

‘My lungs,’ she says. ‘My chest is weak. I cough.’

‘Often?’ he inquires. ‘In the daytime? At night?’

She nods again.

‘Does Your Highness sometimes cough blood?’ His question is cautious, for this is like a game of cards. He does not know her hand yet, nor how she plays. To talk about illness is always safe. To venture further would be daring into an unknown land.

‘Especially at night I cough. It hurts.’

‘Please tell me a little more.’

‘Sometimes I get brown streaks on my handkerchief. It is difficult for me to sleep. I cannot sleep through the night without waking.’

‘I see.’ He knows about coughing blood. He knows the curse of sleeplessness. In her meticulously articulated Swedish he hears an intonation she cannot get quite right. A sweet melody should have been there, seducing the ear to listen for pauses, for the breathing, the silences, and the shades of emotions beneath and beyond the words. Her vowels – her hard long aaas are a little too short, too open, and her short eees too pointed. Some of her consonants too pushed, crisp, with little or no aspiration. Some words seem uneasy in her mouth, not much, just a shade of foreign inflection. She sounds angry, probably unaware of the tinge of resentment in her way of speaking.

‘Is Swedish difficult for Your Highness?’ he asks gently. ‘Would Your Highness prefer that we speak in another language?’

‘Ja,’ she says swiftly. ‘Deutsch?’

With a hand gesture, perhaps too quick, he pushes away her offer.

‘Das will ich nicht.’ He knows he sounds brutal. He should have been more tactful, avoided a confrontation, perhaps saying das wollte ich nicht. His German is not that good.

‘Français?’ she asks.

‘Si vous voulez. Or English? In that language neither Your Highness nor I have a past, I believe. No skeletons.’

He smiles and hopes that the allusion is not a mistake. She looks sharply at him as if trying to find out why he offers this.

‘Nobody embedded,’ she says then. Her tone is solemn, almost ceremonious. Now she seems aloof. ‘Nobody. Not I. Not you. English then. And sometimes a little French.’

Her English sentence sounds awkward, but he is not going to suggest a shift of language again. English was his card on the table.

‘Yes,’ he confirms. ‘Avec plaisir.’

They both smile. The language game has built a truce between them, a bridge they can meet on without ghosts, a space they both can visit as foreigners.

He waits for her next move. He knows that silence can be oppressive, that his not speaking will create emptiness, a space calling for words from her.

‘This morning I was painting,’ she begins, but stops herself.

He does not reply, just watches her hands in her lap, how she interlaces her fingers first one way, then another.

‘I was brought up to be a queen,’ she says. She holds her hands still. For an instant she looks surprised, as if she has slipped.

He looks for her eyes, not saying anything.

‘When I was a little girl, I was trained to become a queen. I was trained to make conversation with anybody. In a circle of empty chairs, all different, I had to talk with each chair in a manner that was suitable.’

He just watches her and does not respond. He can see that this has some hidden message to him, but he cannot decipher it yet.

‘Some were gilt armchairs with woven silk covers on the seats, red or blue silk. Or velvet. Other chairs were very simple. Some even from the kitchen or the servants’ quarters. I had to talk to them all. It was a training.’

‘Language is a kind of costume. A disguise often,’ he says.

‘I was brought up at the Court of Baden in Karlsruhe. My father is Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden.’

He nods to acknowledge that he already knows this.

‘Old Kaiser Wilhelm was my grandfather. My mother’s father,’ she adds. Now she sounds defiant. ‘The present Kaiser Wilhelm is my cousin.’

He hesitates for a moment before he presents his next card.

‘And what kind of armchair am I? Gilt or simple?’ he asks, hoping that his tone is light enough.

She looks sharply at him again, as if she wishes to find out if this matters to him.

‘I don’t know yet. A doctor may always be removed from the circle.’

He smiles politely. This card is of no importance to him.

‘I am at Madame’s disposal.’ He pauses, then adds: ‘But I will treat Madame as any other of my patients.’

She raises her head, looking bold.

‘I may remain in Roma for some time,’ she informs him as if giving an order to a servant.

‘And I shall leave next week,’ he says amiably. ‘I’ll be on Capri for about a month. Then I’m going to England for the summer. If Madame wishes to consult me, Capri is where I can be found. But I can make an hour of my time available to Madame on Tuesday, if that is convenient.’

‘I was brought up to be a queen,’ she counters. ‘Sometimes that is a heavy burden.’

He waits. This is serious, honest, about her pain.

‘Can you imagine the little girl making conversation to empty armchairs?’ she asks.

He notes the catch in her voice and that she swallows.

‘I can,’ he says. ‘I see her before me.’

‘That is who I am.’

He knows the kind of woman she is. He was asked to see her. He has heard the rumours. She seems reticent now, hesitating to reveal her frailty. He asks about her appetite.

‘Not good,’ she says. ‘I eat because I know I must.’ That was what he would hear often during their conversations. ‘I know I must.’

Years later he will remember with some tenderness these first moments with her as a patient, a slight flush rising on her cheeks when she spoke, as if she was not used to talking about herself.

***

Coming out from his dark room she is, for a moment, almost blinded. A river of sunlight streams in through the tall window. Light glistens from the white walls and the white details in the ceramic tiles on the floor. The woman in blue sitting by the window in a simple rattan chair looks like a woman in a Vermeer painting. But this is only Fräulein waiting for her to get out from the doctor’s office. The light shimmers in the whiteness of the woman’s neck and the strands of blonde hair that have escaped from her chignon, in the white roll of lace on her lap, in the white thread in her left hand, and in the silver hooking-needle in her right hand. The woman looks up from her work, smiles, and quickly rolls up her lace to put it away in her brown reticule, embroidered with bold vine leaves in Preussen blue. Victoria nods to her. In the carriage driving them through the street traffic to the doctor’s office Fräulein had remarked that she did not understand why this visit was necessary, considering that the Crown Princess was in very good health after the stay in Egypt.

‘Fräulein, it’s time to leave,’ she says. ‘Please note that we have a new appointment on Tuesday at two o’clock mit dem Herr Doktor.’

Her back straight and her head kept very high, she starts down the narrow, winding stairs, not waiting for her companion. To feel her way through the gloomy stairwell she taps each worn stone step with the tip of the parasol cane before moving her foot towards it. Why am I here, she ponders. Why did they make me visit this doctor? Because the Queen said I should? Because he has been told to examine me?

The doctor’s office had been murky, brooding. Dark green walls. Heavy green curtains had framed the window behind his desk, from the top to the floor. The brass lamp on the desk had a dark green glass cupola. Only the burgundy red velvet on the divan and two chairs in the corner provided a contrast. As if we were at the deepest bottom of the sea, she thinks. Zu dunkel. Too dark. With the light coming from behind the doctor, she had hardly been able to see his eyes. The tall oak bookshelves that lined two of the walls of the office were filled with thick volumes. Some were bound in fine leather. She had spotted several titles in German, long titles with medical words stamped in gold letters on the spine. Other books were in French or English or Italian. From her chair she had several times glanced at the title printed on the leather of a fat black volume: Psychopathia Sexualis. The words had made her nervous, wanting to leave, but the doctor was talking and his voice had calmed her. He was wearing round blue glasses. Why blue glasses? To protect his eyes? To hide them? Soigné, blond, and he had a blondish-reddish beard and a quiet way with his voice, polite, no, more than merely polite. Young to be a doctor, hardly older than herself. Why had the family insisted that she consult this young man? It strikes her that he had dropped her title. He had not wanted to speak German. In English he had an accent and there were mistakes. But there was also a tone of confidence and fatherly love. That was it: fatherly love. A young man, trying to act as a father. But she already has a loving father. And a husband. And a father-in-law. And a cousin, close enough to be a brother instead of her little brother who died.

She had wanted to tell him about how she ruined her painting this morning, how she felt when she drew that red streak across the tidy, the acceptable, the details of light and shadows. He would not have understood, she thinks spitefully. He would not have explained. He is just another doctor.

Afterwards she cannot let go of him in her thoughts. Who is he? What is he like? What does he know about life?

***

Was this good enough, Axel wonders as the door closes and he is alone, still aware of her fragrance. What does she think of me?

In eons hence, he would muse much later, what do our thoughts matter? My sense of whom I saw? Or our sense of who we were? What did her thoughts matter then? Or her sense of who she was?

PROLOGUE

SALAD DAYS

cleopatra.

My salad days,

When I was green in judgment, cold in blood …

William Shakespeare

Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene 5

1870 November, Karlsruhe

Der Krieg was close. Krieg. A dark word and angry. A word she heard often. War. In the palace basement people were packing food and clothes to send to soldiers in the war.¹

Krieg. Victoria wondered how it looked, der Krieg, the war the French had started. Baden’s soldiers had paraded to go to the war, in uniform, marching in step to the drumming and cheery trumpet fanfares. Papa’s regiment and Grosspapa’s army from Preussen would defend Baden, Papa had said, and they had to win. On the wall in his office Papa had photographic pictures of Baden’s soldiers, how they lived in barracks and tents in a forest. The soldiers’ tents looked exactly like the tent Fritz and one of his friends were playing in last summer. Fritz had not let her in because she was a girl. The soldiers in the pictures smiled. They might get maimed and killed in the war, Mama had said. War was not for girls, but now Mama was always busy with the war, the Red Cross and the Frauenverein to help the wounded.

Except for this morning. Mama had sat her down on one of the fine rose silk brocade Louis XVI chairs and made her talk to a battered old stool from the kitchen larder.

‘Always be polite, Vicky,’ Mama had said. ‘Everybody has a right to human dignity. So you must be polite, but firm.’

Then Mama had brought her to this church to knit among the women sitting here on benches and stools, knitting stockings and vests for soldiers in the war. Sunlight fell in through the glass in the window. It made Holy Maria’s robe red against the night-blue behind her. Holy Maria had silver hair. Her pale cheek almost touched the face of the Jesus child. He was stretching out one hand towards the gifts the three Wise Men from the East were holding. The Jesus child had a golden corona. Holy Maria’s robe and aureole were glimmering blood red, ruby red, like red fire. Soon winter would come. It would be cold. Would the soldiers have fires to keep them warm in their tents? Perhaps they would freeze. She knew what it was like to freeze. Mama never allowed her bedroom to be warmed. That was to make her hardy. One woman was weepy, hiding her face, bending over her knitting. Mama did not notice that the woman was crying.

The rough yarn hurt Victoria’s fingers, the grey wool she had to stretch, point one iron needle into the loop on another iron needle to catch the yarn there, pull the yarn through to make a stitch. Each stitch was hard. She had to do so many, many stitches to make a stocking. The wool smelled bad. Knitting was difficult. She did not like knitting. She shivered and coughed a little.

Some days Mama brought her to an empty school. In a room there, other women were tearing up old sheets, towels, even petticoats, to make charpie. Victoria was allowed to handle a metal spindle to turn the linen strips into rolls for bandages. In the Krieg the soldiers might bleed to death, if their wounds were not properly bandaged. She thought of the soldiers she knew, the guards at the palace. Mama said that the French army was not far from here, that the French were shooting from their guns and cannons at the soldiers who defended Baden. All the soldiers might die, even the palace guards. She knew what it was to be dead. She and Fritz and little Louis one day found a dead sparrow under a rosebush in the garden. It did not move. She had told Fritz and Louis what to do. They must bury the bird. Fritz had fetched the empty Schokolade box from his birthday. It had gold paper. Fritz wanted it to be the dead sparrow’s coffin, so they put the bird on some grass in the box. The master gardener helped them dig a grave under a rosebush in the corner by the orangerie. At least three times they had played funeral over the sparrow.

In the hospital wards Mama had brought her to visit last week, the stench had made her cough. Afterwards, she had bad dreams about the eyes of the wounded men, their bloodied and brown bandages. They moaned, even those asleep. She had asked Mama if anyone would play funeral for the soldiers. Mama had not replied.

‘Is Prinzessin Victoria not too young for this?’ A knitting woman in a black wool shawl, a woman much older than Mama, asked the question, shaking her head.

‘Not too young for war, if the French get here. Not too young to help now.’ Mama’s sharp voice cowed the woman to look down at the knitting in her hands.

‘I’m eight.’ Victoria hoped she sounded polite and firm. ‘Nine next year. I want to help in the war.’

The women in the room were all looking at her. She was not sure what their looks meant.

1876 September, London

Axel, still with a child’s wondering mind and a child’s fears, leaned halfway out of the open train window and waved his handkerchief. The locomotive whistled and billowed smoke. Thump, thump. The train wheels beat a rhythm against the rails, tha thump, tha thump, ever faster. Father and Mother shrank as the train pulled away from the station. The beat increased. He lost sight of the two on the platform. Away from Stockholm. On his way now, on his own, he was someone. Not little Axel any more. That lump in his throat. When Lena said goodbye to him, she had blessed him, stroked his cheek, wiped her eyes with an apron tip, murmured that she might never see him again. She was old now. He had taken her in his arms, felt that softness in her body, and the bones. Her smell gave him a sweet and sour taste in his mouth. Her voice, gentle as always. She had stroked his cheek, gripped one of his hands. Her hands still strong, rough-skinned, but an old woman’s hands now. He took off his pince-nez and wiped his eyes.

‘Now Axel has to be a man,’ she had said.

A man does not cry. The smoke threw soot in his face. He pulled at the leather strap below the window to close it shut. By the door, a mirror gleamed above a metal contraption holding a water carafe and two rough drinking glasses. The glasses tinkled with the train’s rocking. In the carafe water sloshed back and forth. He bent to glance into the mirror at that face he did not like much. Cheeks red. Lips too thick. Chin too round and childish. Nose not nobly arched, more like a potato. Common dark-blond hair hanging down. Perhaps too long. For the journey he had shaved his cheeks and chin. The moustache still looked pitiful, soft and sparse. Lena once said that his eyes were as the blue sky on a clear winter’s day. That steel pince-nez he had to wear because of his weak left eye, did it make him look like a man of the world? People must not think he was setting out on his first long journey away from home. He pursed his lower lip to make it bolder, adjusted the pince-nez, brushed the hair away from his brow and nodded to the mirror face before settling into the plush seat by the window. He stretched out his long legs and tried not to lean his head against the once white crochet antimacassar in case it held lice. The train compartment smelled of soot, cigar butts, old sweat, stale breaths. He cleared his throat to get rid of the bothersome lump. Must not start coughing now. He thought of the day he would come back to Stockholm. He might have a good moustache then. Carry an elegant cane, perhaps. Smell of fine eau de cologne. He would be someone then, a respected man, not a mere student who had recently passed his medico-philosophical examination at the university in Uppsala.

‘A doctor, that’s who I’ll be,’ he told Puck standing by his leg, looking up at him, waiting for his command. ‘You’ll be a doctor’s dog. Sit!’

The noise, the shaking, the beat against the rails. Tha thump, tha thump. The impatient rhythm got into his body. He drew a deep breath, pulled Puck’s head closer to fondle the dog’s ears. The thick lump in his throat melted. This was a beginning. A melody started in his head, one on wings, like a falcon soaring towards the sun. He was free. Like the youngest son in a fairy tale, he was going out into the world. There would be trials, three trials if old tales told the truth. Would he manage? Would he marry a princess, get half the kingdom and live happily ever after in a palace? But the body and the soul – two or one – might still be separate. Two or one, separate or fused, female or male, repulsed or attracted, joined or apart, alone or together. Would he become a real man, respected, rich? He wanted to, to be a man with means to do good for others. The anguish he must leave aside, forget that fear.

He was a Munthe, not a common Johansson or Svensson or Nilsson. Many of the Johanssons and Svenssons and Nilssons were destitute and starving, leaving their stone-filled fields and the cold in Sweden, hungering for America. The Munthe family did not starve. Father, Apothecary Fredrik Munthe by Royal Privilege, was not a poor man. Father had given him the money he needed to go to Menton in the sunny south of France to cure his weak chest. Soon he would be nineteen years old. He had his degree in medical philosophy. He was going to be a doctor and a writer. And he owned a dog, Puck. He was a man now, with a man’s body, with a pince-nez, and soon a moustache. But would he ever do well enough to make Father proud?

The royal carriage he had passed before he boarded the train was the last one, a parlour car as comfortable as an elegant drawing room, with green velvet on the easy chairs and lace curtains at the windows. He had caught a glimpse of the Crown Prince, dapper, slim and taller than himself, about his own age but with an aristocratic face and a finely formed, soft, dark moustache. The porter in the station had told Father that Crown Prince Gustaf was on his way to the royal residence in Norge. Members of the royal family of the United Kingdoms of Sverige-Norge were taking turns to pass time there because there was trouble, some people in Norge clamouring that their country should be freed from Sverige. Had the Crown Prince perhaps seen him passing? Perhaps he should have bowed.

Tha thump, tha thump, tha thump. Grey clouds drifted across the sky. South of Stockholm the tarred or red rickety wooden cottages of the poor clinging to steep granite rocks were soon left behind. I am leaving now, Axel thought, I am going away. South-west, across the country now, to Göteborg. He imagined he was a bird on wide wings, flying. Soon he would see places he had only read about, meet people speaking languages he had never heard spoken, although he had studied German for several years at school and also some French, mostly learning intricate verb conjugations. His life, from now on, would be different. He would do as he pleased. What had been until now would become background, a backdrop, something he could call his past.

The train rushed past stands of dark fir and fields of sugar beet and potatoes to be dug up next month, fallow fields, where fawn stubble from the harvest had been left to rot, and newly ploughed dark fields, where moisture glimmered in the furrows. Smoke and soot blew over grazing brown cows and grey sheep. In patches, aspens flickered their red autumn leaves, and rowans glistened like gold. Swaying silver birches looked like slender young women with long, blonde hair waving in the wind. In some fields, trees and bushes stood watch by the boulders angry giants had hurled to silence tolling church bells. He knew that these big granite rocks had been calved by melting glaciers, but he still liked to think of them as flung by giants. Lena’s old tale was an explanation as good as any. Farmers had piled up smaller round rocks to build walls marking borders between fields and meadows, between one farmer’s land and the next. Birches, rowans and aspens grew along these stone walls too, the heaped rocks protecting their roots from iron ploughs and scythes. Here and there were red-painted wooden farmhouses and red or grey barns.

He had never lived in a red-painted house. In the small market town of Vimmerby in Småland, where he grew up, most people lived in timbered cottages brushed red with inexpensive slush from the copper mines up north to preserve the wood against rot. Some wooden shacks had the dark silvery hue of diluted tar stroked on wood. Less expensive. The most costly preservation against rot was oil paint, especially the cream-white oil paint on big manor houses. Their house in Vimmerby had cream-white oil paint.

Whenever the front door opened or closed in Father’s pharmacy on the ground floor, a little brass carillon tinkled to warn that a customer had arrived. Father would do his best to please customers, always asking how he could assist them. Also, when guests came to their house Father would be in a good mood. In his rich bass voice he would tell stories. Everybody would listen to him. Or Father might sing, his voice sometimes gentle as honey, sometimes booming as if he had a big organ pipe in his breast. Axel liked singing too. When he sang, all around him would clap their hands and say that he was a good boy. He liked that, to be noticed and to please. To please Father, who, like Father God himself, was providing for them all. To please Mother, who prayed to God for them all. To please Arnold, his big brother. To please Anna, his big sister. When he was little and Father thundered, Axel could always flee to Lena’s long skirts and soft bosom.

Father had worked hard, and with God’s help he had done well. In the shed behind their house in Vimmerby, Father and his assistant had rolled white and yellow powders with oil and water on wooden boards to make pills; they had stirred powders into oil to make ointments; they had shaken mixtures to fill the bottles that would be sold as medicines for coughs and pains. Father himself, in a big leather apron, had bottled the water a farmhand brought each week from the spring outside the town. That bottled water Father sold as medicinal mineral water; with sugar and colouring added, the water became lemonade. Father knew how to draw profit from business opportunities. He had bought property and become an important man in Vimmerby. Then Father bought another pharmacy in Stockholm, the capital of the United Kingdoms of Sverige-Norge.² They had all moved to Stockholm, into an apartment in a brownstone house. Arnold, Anna and Axel had been placed in a good school for children from well-to-do families. Father’s wealth had continued to grow and so had his beard. This morning Father had looked like Moses descending from Mount Sinai holding against his long grey beard the stone tablets with God’s Ten Commandments, sternly ordering his people to obey God’s will. An old man with an old man’s body and an old man’s wrath.

From his knapsack Axel fished out the two books he had brought for the journey, Goethe’s Italian Journey and a thin volume of Heine’s poems. He placed them on the window table within reach, lit a cigarette and pulled the smoke deep down into his lungs so that it would do some good. He had wanted a first-class train ticket, now that he was leaving home to go abroad, but Father had said that second class would be good enough. Axel had seen the crowded third-class wagons, where men, women and children were crammed on narrow wood benches, their baskets, sacks and bundles piled on the luggage racks above their heads. It had been a struggle to get Father and Mother to let him, the youngest in the family, travel to France, even though it might cure his lungs. Arnold was a marine officer already, on his first journey in foreign parts somewhere near Cadiz in Spain. And Anna had married Reinhold Norstedt and lived in a manor house near Högsjö. If it had not been for the baptizing of their little Kerstin in June,³ he would never have met Baroness von Mecklenburg. An heiress, he had been told. Although not much older than himself, she had inherited Högsjö manor, where she lived with her husband Baron von Mecklenburg, an older man who had an appointment at the Royal Court. She had two little children and was Kerstin’s godmother now, and he, himself, was Kerstin’s godfather. That was a bond between them. He had talked with the Baroness about his plans to travel abroad and how he was thinking of becoming a doctor or a writer. As he prattled on about his uncertain future, she had listened. When he told her that he did not know what would become of him, a cough attack had stopped him. She had waited until he could breathe.

‘All will be well.’ Her serious grey eyes had met his and she had smiled to him. ‘Jesus said Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet our heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not better than they?⁴ Can you add one single hour to your life by being anxious?’

The moment he thought of his chest as the reason for this journey, he felt the irritation, the urge that often started his cough attacks. Cigarettes were supposed to help, but they did not always stop his ugly, noisy coughing. The pressure in his chest at times wrecked his breathing and rocked him into violent coughing spells. He was angry with his body, hard and soft, self-contained, full of unruly sensations. About the soaring, the bulging of the member that made him a true man, not a whining child any longer, he had been warned. He must not commit the sin of Onan, that abomination, that sin of the flesh, a violation of his duty towards his soul. In Uppsala he had learnt that seed lost from the body reduced strength, blurred vision and might be the origin of nervous disorders. Some men had taunted him for behaving like a girl. There, the secret pleasures were dangerous and forbidden. In the south, he had heard, that might be different.

The coughing had started during his two student years in Uppsala. The rasping, hacking paroxysms and the knotted pain scraping in his breast had scared him. Sometimes his spit had come out brownish, with streaks of blood, leaving a salty taste in his mouth. Mother had prayed to God to save him from consumption. She had knitted a wool vest to keep his chest warm under his shirt. He had worn it only at home, for it itched. Still, his coughing had continued. Little by little he had absorbed Mother’s premonitions that he was feeble and one day might die from chest weakness. Father had sent him to Professor Bruzelius at Kongliga Karolinska Institutet.⁵ The professor had listened to his heart and chest and given the verdict: coughing up blood might mean phthisis, tuberculosis in the lungs. Axel needed to be careful. Any cold or influenza might be fatal. About that other phenomenon, the shameful sensations, Axel had not asked the professor’s advice, and the professor had not shown any interest in that part of his body.

Axel could not recall who had come up with the idea. Maybe he himself had been the first to suggest that a warmer climate was essential to prevent wasting disease. At first he had merely hinted that this might be the best way to protect his chest. Then his idea of an Italian journey had grown into a yearning. Goethe’s poems about Italy, recently translated into Swedish, had enchanted him. He wanted to see the country where lemon trees bloomed, and to receive, like the great Goethe, loving embraces among glorious Roman palaces. He longed to be moved by the schwanken und schweben of the gondolas that had rocked Goethe in Venice.⁶ In an art book a friend at Uppsala showed him, he had studied Italian sculptures of naked marble bodies. Count Snoilsky, who had translated Goethe’s Italian poems, had himself composed verses about wine, women and song in Italy.⁷ And had not his own cousin Fredrik travelled to Italy and written a book, bragging about that Italian journey?⁸ Axel had not spoken very much about his longing to see Italy, but gradually all in the family had come around to accepting the idea that Axel needed a sojourn in southern Europe over the winter in order to protect his weak chest. Father thought Italy would be too dangerous, a country infamous for brigands, as described in the novels about Rinaldo Rinaldini. Menton in southern France near the Italian border was the place Professor Bruzelius had suggested. That was where the professor himself spent the winters with his invalid wife. Menton should be good enough for Axel. Axel had mentioned that on his way to Menton he would like to stop in Köpenhamn, Hamburg, Köln and Paris.

‘Out of the question,’ Father had said. ‘German countries are not safe, what with Preussen’s wars. Preussen took Schlesvig-Holstein from Denmark. Preussen’s war with France over Elsass-Lothringen just a few years ago. Nobody knows what Preussen will want next, now that King Wilhelm of Preussen has made himself German Kaiser.’

Father had bought his tickets for the train from Stockholm to Göteborg and for the boat from Göteborg to London. In the inner breast pocket of his new wool jacket he carried Father’s written instructions, with timetables for the trains and the ship and a letter from a hotel in London that they had a room reserved for him. The bulky linen belt under his shirt chafed against his skin. Mother had sewn it and insisted that he must keep his money in it, safe against thieves. These past days, Mother had wept and made him kneel with her more than once to pray to Lord Jesus and ask for protection. Mother and Lena had packed his knapsack and his suitcase. In the knapsack were four hardboiled eggs and the sandwich packet, buttered bread with smoked sausage, liver paste and the cheese he liked. Again, he felt that lump in his throat. Lena had whispered that she had slipped in a treat, a few bits she had carved off the sugar cone kept locked up in the larder. Last night, after dinner they had all prayed that God keep him safe, now that he was leaving home and going to foreign lands.

His family, he thought, was a family of travellers to foreign countries. The first Munthes, he had been told, had reached southern Sverige in the late sixteenth century, fleeing Flanders to escape the persecution and bloodbaths led by the Catholic Duke of Alba from Spain. In the new country, the Munthes became mayors, judges and military men. Not noblemen who could claim roots in family-owned land, but the Munthes were a clan with much knowledge and many resources, a family of some importance and influence in the United Kingdoms of Sverige and Norge.⁹

Puck snuggled closer and whined. Puck was his own dog. How many times during his two years at Uppsala University had he asked Father for a dog of his own? Father had said no, but with the money Father gave him the day he passed his medico-philosophical examination he had bought Puck, more a puppy then than a dog.¹⁰ Father had not looked pleased when he brought Puck home, but the money had been his to spend as he wished.

Again, Puck whined. The dog was used to roaming freely, lifting his leg to mark his territory wherever it pleased him. Axel looked out through the window. They were passing through a wood, the moss spattered with yellow flecks, birch leaves or perhaps chanterelles. After the rains this summer there would be plenty of chanterelles and other mushrooms to pick. The train’s thumping slowed and it stopped at a station house in a small town. This might be where the royal train wagon would be disconnected in order to continue to Norge. Axel grabbed Puck’s leash, jumped off the train and ran along the platform, praying that the dog would understand that they might have only a few minutes. By the royal wagon he slowed their pace, hoping for another glimpse of the Crown Prince. If the Crown Prince stepped out to get some air he could perhaps salute or say something. Nobody appeared. The lace curtains over the windows prevented any sighting of people inside. Puck dragged towards the far end of the platform. The locomotive whistled and puffed out a cloud of smoke. Axel raced back, tugging with all his strength at Puck’s leash. This time a curtain in the royal wagon shifted as if someone were looking out. He had no time to stop. At the very moment the big iron wheels started moving he hauled the heavy dog up into the train.

Back in the compartment, panting, he again flopped into his chair with Puck by his feet. In his head he heard Father’s voice preaching that he should not take the dog on the journey. Mother had gone on about the poor puppy who had no say, how it would not travel well. But Puck was his dog. He knew how to handle animals.

He had always liked them and been curious about their bodies. In his bedroom in their house in Vimmerby, he had assembled a collection of animal bones, dead spiders, bats and discarded snake-skins. He had kept his treasures on the shelf above his bed – an abandoned bird’s nest, a tiny, carefully woven bowl of dried grass with a few whitish shards from eggshells and some tiny feathers among the brittle straws; an animal cranium that he had found in the wood; a small night owl, one he had shot and stuffed himself.¹¹ Twice he had tried to hatch birds’ eggs in the warmth of his body in his own bed. He had wept, wept when he woke up and saw that he had crushed the eggs he had hoped would produce chicks. And once, Lena’s shrieks had pulled him up from sleep because she discovered a litter of mice by his pillow.¹² At least that was one thing he liked to remember about his childhood, his bed filled with animals. And then, his hours of roaming in the woods. He knew how to use his little air gun. He had learnt how to dissect and empty the bodies of dead birds, how the different slimy organs hung together, how to disinfect the tiny carcasses with spirit, and how to stuff them for display on his shelf. There had also been the animals belonging to the house, the watchdogs in the courtyard, the cat in the kitchen. In the stable were the ponies and the sturdy light-brown Ardenner horses that pulled the wagons loaded with barrels of spring water to be bottled in the outhouse and the bottles of mineral water and lemonade to be delivered to customers. He knew all the horses by name and used to talk to them. And now he had Puck, a dog of his own, one that belonged to him only.

This was who he was – a man who owned a dog, a man on his way to Menton, a man thinking of an Italian journey. The rocking of the train made him dreamy. He had heard rumours about a beautiful island of felicity outside the big city of Neapel. Artists went there to paint and be free from the confining mores at home. Maybe those rumours were true. Maybe that was where he should go, to that island of happiness and bliss. Its name was Capri. Puck twitched in his sleep. A thin mist was hovering over the fields and meadows they passed. The elves were dancing, Lena would say. The sky outside was slate grey. Soon the first raindrops speckled the dusty windowpanes, travelling in shaky, sooty streaks across the glass, blurring the landscape.

***

Rain was pelting down when the train stopped in Göteborg. Holding Puck on the leash, he lunged off, his knapsack on his back, lugging his heavy suitcase towards the carriages and wet horses waiting for customers outside the station. At the first cab he ordered the coachman to drive him to the quay for the London ships. The coachman jerked his head instead of stepping down to open the door. Once inside the cab, with Puck by his feet, Axel thought of the man’s smile. It was smug. Perhaps he should have haggled with the man over the price.

In Uppsala he had met students from Göteborg and the west coast. They all had a quick, singing way of speaking, a lilting wit and an easy laugh, as if a salty tang was hiding in the words, another meaning, sharp, slippery. This was foreign. Now, in the rain, he heard the same lilt in the coachmen’s calls to each other. He kept wondering if he would be brought straight to the London steamship. The coachman might make a detour to get more money. Axel wished that he could master that west-coast manner of saying one thing and, perhaps, meaning another, jousting with a shadow of a doubt in the listener’s mind.

Moments later he caught a first glimpse of the sea and a huge, white steamship. The cab stopped. The rain was battering people burdened with luggage who thronged on the quay to form a line. A slow procession was struggling up the gangway to the shipside. As Axel at last put his foot on the narrow gangplank to board the ship, Puck plunged down on his haunches and refused to follow. He had to bellow at the dog and drag him by the leash. The bulky suitcase was heavy. The planks were slimy. In front of him people advanced very slowly, halting at each step. The rain started to soak through his hat and new wool jacket, trickling down his neck. He wanted to pull up his collar, but his hands were full. The broad-backed man before him in the line hardly moved. Others were pressing on behind. Puck started to growl. Puck’s leather leash, wound several times around his left hand, cut into his palm. As soon as he set foot on board, a man in a long brown oilcloth coat demanded to see his ticket and barked that Axel could not have a dog in a cabin shared with three other passengers. The man tugged Puck’s leash out of his hand, growling that the dog would be quarantined for the length of the journey.

Dismayed, clambering down two narrow staircases with his bulky suitcase, Axel finally found the cabin with the number on his ticket, a wardrobe-like space, on each side bunk beds, two above and two below, and hardly any floor between them. He threw his wet felt hat and wool jacket on one of upper berths, and hoisted his suitcase and knapsack onto the lower one. He tried sitting down, but there was too little space between the upper and lower berths. He had to lie down, so without bothering to take off his boots, he stretched out his legs and closed his eyes. Puck, he mused, could have stayed with him. He was almost asleep when the cabin door opened. Outside, three lean, broad-shouldered young men stood ready to enter. The three strangers watched him through the doorway while he got up and piled his wet jacket, knapsack and suitcase on the berth where he had been resting. The men looked alike, sturdy, sunburnt, with straight hair whiter than butter and narrow slits of light blue eyes. Their rough, homespun clothes were worn and mended. Axel crept back into his narrow bunk, wondering how he would be able to snuggle into his usual sleeping position at night. One of the men took a step into the cabin to stow a bulky canvas sack on one of the upper berths. The sack looked light, the way the man hauled it up, but it must have been quite heavy. That sack seemed to be their entire luggage. The cabin was so small that the two other men remained outside the door.

Axel introduced himself and apologized that he had taken up their space. The man who had entered glanced at Axel’s suitcase and the knapsack. He smelled of cowsheds and sweat.

‘When we’re all in, they can be on the floor,’ he said, as if he were used to taking responsibility for others. He spoke in a south-western dialect, slow and deliberate, with many diphthongs, almost another language. His movements were quick, like an animal’s, like those of a wild animal with a sense of its own strength.

The men seemed to be only farmhands, but Axel felt he had to assert his right to be in the cabin.

‘From London I’m travelling to France and perhaps to Italy. Where are you going?’

‘To America. We’re on our way to America. They’re my brothers.’ The man nodded towards the other two at the door.

America, further away than France and Italy. The riskier adventure somehow made these men bigger too. Yet, the broad-shouldered man with narrow hips who had entered the cabin seemed to be Axel’s own age. The youngest-looking among them could hardly be more than fourteen. Axel was glad that he had his money tucked away in Mother’s linen belt under his shirt. He had never slept near strangers before. Now there would be three other men’s smells and breaths close to him.

He had sailed many times in the archipelago near Stockholm and thought of himself as an experienced sailor. Yet after a few hours, the incessant rolling of the steamship on the heaving, choppy North Sea made him queasy. He was on deck the first time he threw up, but rain and chilly wind gusts forced him inside, down to his narrow berth in the cabin. The boat rocked and creaked with each wave, as if straining to hold together. The crew had said that this was not a storm, just a normal North Sea passage. To Axel, the wind and the quaking of the ship seemed bad enough. The ship’s rolling, the foul air in the cabin, and the smell of his own vomit in a battered, enamelled chamber pot he had found in a cupboard under his berth kept his nausea alive. His head felt pressed by a tight iron helmet. His mouth was dry, his tongue rough and swollen. He tried to think of music, imagining himself at the organ at home, labouring with a Bach chorale. Music there, at home, was allied with the fear of God and trust in Lord Jesus. He tried to think of Father and Mother, how they used to go to church every Sunday with all three children, how Father each Sunday evening read a sermon with them all around the table, and how they all sang psalms together. Father would tell stories and sing when they had guests at home, in a good mood then, holding everybody’s attention, and they would all admire and applaud Father.

But there was also that other Father, the thundering Father. Father’s ferocious outbursts of temper. Father beating with a cane or a rod. Mother’s silence then. And Father’s wrath, when Axel had once brought home a human skull with a tuft of red hair, which he had dug up at the cemetery. That time Father thrashed him with the cane as if his body were evil, possessed by the devil, while Mother prayed for his soul.¹³ Lena had tiptoed into his room afterwards to apply liniment to his sore back. On two occasions, Arnold and he had tried to escape, but they had been caught and brought back home. Mother had been in tears and admonished him and Arnold to be good.

And there were the other beatings. He could still see Father’s face in anger; the twitching muscle tightening in Father’s upper lip as he raised the rod. Once he bit Father’s hand that held the rod before Father had started beating his back. That time he ran away, out into the wintry cold. Father had taken a horse from the stable, riding out in the darkness, bringing one of the dogs to search for him. He had clear images of how Father found him, half asleep in a snow bank, when the dog barked. As clear as a glass painting in a church window he could still see Father lifting him up, Father tenderly sweeping a big cloak safely around him. It was the father with his child, the boy safe in his arms, while they galloped home through the wind and the night. It was Father protecting his son against death. But when they got home, Axel had been locked in a dark room, alone, a punishment for his evil soul.¹⁴ Not even Lena had been allowed to enter.

Now, sick in his berth on board a ship heaving on the waves of the North Sea to get to a foreign land, he had to listen to the others in his cabin. The youngest one was sick too. Axel longed for Lena. She would hold her hand on his brow when he threw up, the way she always did when he was little. He almost saw Father’s stern face hovering above him, the severe eyes, the long grey beard, and Mother’s mild face with her tearful eyes. The two had seemed so small on the platform in Stockholm, when the train puffed away. What had he learnt from them? From Father: to sing, to command and negotiate, to dominate and be pliable, to look for opportunities, and to use them. From Mother: a sense of awe at the mysteries of life and death. From both: to trust in God, to fear Death, and the honour of achieving something in the world. By watching Father and Mother together, he had learnt to sense early storm signals and to pluck the fine strings that held them all in the family. There was a strange bond, he thought, between Father and Mother. At times he did not like how Father looked at Mother or talked to her or touched her. A sudden image surged in his mind, the delicate face of a being not of this world, the blonde, angelic, gracious Baroness Sigrid von Mecklenburg at Högsjö manor. Was she ever looked at or talked to or touched in that way by the Baron?

But the Baroness would not respect him as long as he was only the youngest Munthe son, Anna’s little brother. He would have to prove his worth. The Baroness had listened very kindly to him, a sickly young man with a medical philosophy degree from Uppsala University. To get her respect he would have to become a real doctor. Or a poet, so that he could sing her praise. Maybe his ailing, weak chest was the sign of a poetic gift. But to write was not a profession. Writers were mostly poor. He must become a man with a respectable profession. Anyway, he might never see the Baroness again. In Menton he would be mingling with the well-to-do invalids, who spent the winter there in order to protect their weak chests from chilly northern climates. Perhaps this would help him prepare for becoming a doctor, one who could cure ailments and heal others. Perhaps, one day, he might even meet her there, he a real doctor then.

***

A steady rain fell during the three days it took to cross the North Sea. The ship finally ceased rolling and lay still. They had reached England. On weak legs after days of not wanting food, he joined the crowd of steamship passengers hurrying to get off the ship. Several times he had to ask for Puck, before the dog was brought to him, barking, upset by the throng of strangers around them. He tried to follow the butterwhite heads of the three men who had been in his cabin. They had hurried to get off to travel to Hull to find their ship for America. Keeping together, they disappeared in the crowd. They had each other.

He was alone and nervous about entering this foreign country. People were short. He could not understand what they were saying. The crowd pressed into a low building. Uniformed officials looked at his documents, shot a quick glance at Puck, muttered something about ‘dog’, but let them pass. He had learnt some English words from a book, enough to get around he had believed, but what he heard sounded different. A man with a bulging leather bag full of bank notes and coins resting on a stout stomach addressed him in German, offering to exchange Swedish crowns to pounds sterling. The English bank notes Father had given him were in the linen belt under his shirt. Some English coins were jingling in his right trouser pocket. Following the passenger flow to the platform marked ‘London’, he managed to press into a small train compartment with his suitcase and Puck. All the seats were occupied, so he had to stand close to other standing passengers for almost an hour. Puck fidgeted by his feet. The dog smelled, he thought. Or something else smelled. It was an unfamiliar odour. The train finally stopped at a railway station.

Getting down on the platform, he felt lost. The station hall was a huge cathedral in sooty red brick. It had a din, noise, clamours, echoes, a dingy darkness, a grubbiness, strange smells, people milling around. A man tried to grab his suitcase. Axel held on to it. On all sides people were hollering to portly men in uniform, expensively clothed gentlemen, ladies in big hats. Hungry-looking, pale-faced men in ragged clothes shouted, selling newspapers to passers-by. Their shrill voices kept strange rhythms, hacked melodies with only a few, repeated notes. A wrinkled, famished-looking old woman in a black shawl was peddling bunches of dry heather from a basket on her arm, holding out a bunch towards him with a dirty, scruffy hand, black rims under broken nails. There were men who seemed to have no particular business at all moving around in the crowd. These are the thieves, he thought, the pickpockets I