( december 15th )

In the moat, the water was still, it saw no movement aside from the autumn winds blowing leaves onto its surface. They formed a lid that could hide many things, she thought, watching even the flow bent away from her window, high-up, unreachable.

The water cast a protective charm on the manor, it kept enemies out and fires in. Herself, it kept contained. All summer, she had been equally unloved as she had been unattractive. The two share a definition, she learned soon enough.

No longer was there a world awaiting her on the other side, neither going forward nor going back. She had lived this once and that must be a life, then, over. Now.

This season could only lead to winter.

( december 16th )

The room is heavy, she never liked it.

It is the gaze of every portrait, they weigh on her like suffocating cloth dipped in chloroform. They are boulders on her shoulders, on her chest. East wing, dining room, two of four walls decked in her husband's ancestry that hasn't welcomed her, not warmly at least. Is it because they have no arms, most portraits done full face, crackling features as if they had been attacked by old age. Caroline Becker looks at them as the maid sets the table for four, she thinks death got them first.

She thinks, death gets everyone first.

( december 17th )

On the dining table, a single candelabra has been left alight, five small flames the only guard against the shadows filling the room. Midnight has come and gone. The paper in front of Caroline is blank, until she puts her pen to it and writes the first sentence.

Who are you?

The chalkboards are bound together with string, front to front, a hard parcel left off to the side, out of reach. When she leans over for them and loosens the knot, revealing the insides, words have appeared in an elegant handwriting.

We are the same.

She asks again, who are you? Thrice. Different answers each time, same swirling letters: we are searching, we cannot find, we long to rest in - Finally, Caroline Becker who does not awaken the dead grabs the chalkboards and hurls them at the floor, screaming.

No!

( december 18th )

Must I be like Ophelia and wait for my branch to break, she wrote to him and meant, when does the suffering end?

It was a beautiful letter, her maid said so herself. Her handwriting was elegant, softened by swirls, though she had not been careful enough, perhaps she had not cared at all. The paper was stained at the bottom and at the top, where the date had been marked in smaller lettering. It almost looked like she had underlined the month, november, november, All Hallows' og Saint Martin's Eve. Goose and ghosts.

With a line from their poem, till a' the seas gang dry, she had signed herself, as well as with her name that was no longer his to dictate. That was where the second splatter of ink stood out, starkly.

A mistake for prosperity.

( december 19th )

They have received guests at the manor, the talk of the village goes. Socialites from the capital, Copenhageners, a different race from the people living in these parts. Do they even know what a cow looks like, or would they only recognise it by taste?

At the manor, they are served beef tenderloin in the east wing dining room, beneath the stares of the Rosengaard family. Their guests compliment the food, scorn the landscape that grew it and comment with vulgar curiosity on the portraits on the walls. We could as well be at a ball, the man laughs, pointing to a painting hanging above Caroline Becker's head. She is certainly dressed for the masquerade.

Caroline turns in her seat to see - and what she sees makes her gasp, a trembling hand clasping her mouth.

"Oh," Erik Becker chuckles, "hers is a tragic tale."

( december 20th )

They meet halfway between east and west wing, between midnight and morning, the stairs leading to a dawn neither will watch unfold. They have beds of down and dust to which they shall return when the time comes.

Caroline Becker is waiting for the woman of the waters, her hands balled into fists and her skin prematurely damp. Cold. The fireplaces and cocklestoves do not live long, prosperous lives in this house. Should she wonder why? Her guest is see-through and hushed, her feet leave trails of mud across the carpets.

Trails that will be gone by the first ray of sun, of course. As they will be repeated by vigil.

"We are not the same," says Caroline who needs plenty of fresh air, rumour has it, and who doesn't awaken the dead. "You belong to this manor, whereas I was brought against my will. You have your own name to which you must answer."

( december 21st )

Pauline Ernestine wasn't called Ophelia and it must have had its reasons, but she found none of them on her way to the moat. Night had long since fallen, had draped itself softly across the manor's rooftops, dripped from the gutters like excess water and with shade running down her scarred features, she might as well have given up her soul. Already.

Would the stars take it? Would the water?

Quietly, though her skin was too tight and irritable at every little seam, she slid down to the edge of the water, dress hems soon muddy and drenched from her descend. The banks of the moat looked like fortress walls around her. Was she really home at Rosengaard or was this Elsinore, after all?

Was there ever a better time to break branches?

( december 22nd )

For dinner, they are having asparagus soup, the housemaid proud of her work as she carries it into the west wing dining room, a German-inspired pinetree decking the far south corner, paper roses and glass ornaments hanging from its branches. December is cold day in and day out, but Caroline Becker thinks of vapour on the mirrors, of mire and mud, unable to squeeze down even a single bite.

"I have no desire to stay here any longer," she tells her husband who is as quiet when he eats as he is unshakeable by complaints. The maid listens in, forgetting to be offended by the lady's lack of appetite.

"I thought it was your wish to get away," he comments, expecting compliance rather than a change of address.

"Yet there are things," she replies, "from which we cannot run."

He remains silent. They are not the same ghosts that walk the capital and Jutland's barren fields, but they haunt in a much similar manner.

( december 23rd )

Everything began in the east wing and because everything begins there, it is where she ends.

By the doors which she cannot step through, her portrait has been placed, on the thick carpets with their intricate, oriental patterns. It looks foreign there, as if the face she almost cannot recognise requires greater distance, more time. Halting in front if it, in front of her features before their disruption, she stares at herself, her name gilded for prosperity. Like a mistake someone once made.

Out of the doors to the east wing, Caroline Becker steps forth, dressed in a nightgown and an oil lamp. She glances from the painting to the woman it portrays, her features withdrawn and pale. Ghostly. They look much the same, the two of them. In this very moment.

"You found yourself," she says. "Do not follow me as I go to find what I have lost."

As she speaks, she holds out the oil lamp, her fingers trembling, shining from sweat, every little droplet catching the flickering light from behind the lampshade. Wordlessly, she drops the lamp by the foot of the portrait, porcelain splintering and flame catching onto the rugs, onto the canvas. Fire is such a fast eater.

Someone screams. Their voices are no longer discernible from the roar of the flames, nor from each other.

( december 24th )

She woke up to the sound of someone screaming. Only with her eyes wide open, did she realise it was her own voice, rising and falling and breaking on the way. Pauline Ernestine was engulfed on every side by flames, they were sucking on her bedlinen, on her hair, on her clothes. She was bright ablaze. She was aflame.

I have entered Hell, she thought to herself at the edge of consciousness, where every outline looked black and the smoke seared, the heat suffocated. She stumbled out of bed, throwing herself at the floor, hard parquet, unforgiving stone, but it could not quench the flames. The granite and the wood. It was all burning, it burned, it burned.

Like a match in the night, she ran to the doors, threw them open with her whole body's weight. The stairs at the end of the hallway seemed unreachable, but she kept moving forward, desperate, thinking, if Hell is here, the descend must surely lead to death, to rest, to peace.

Soon Pauline Ernestine would learn, there is no fall that annuls fire.