My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time Read Online Free PDF

furniture,
so that before the wiping could be commenced, one had to fair shovel the bulk into a dustpan. While Fru Schleswig was undertaking
this & other of the heavier duties, I kept up the appearance of cleaning assiduously whenever Fru Krak was in the vicinity,
with particular emphasis on the high polishing of ornaments, my hands clad in gloves to protect my delicate skin. But whenever
Fru Krak was absent, either shopping or lying a-bed with her women’s journals, complaining of colds & flu, sore throats &
headaches, all of them imaginary, I was busy with other endeavours. The first of these was the pilfering of a whole multitude
of neglected gewgaws, junk & diverse paraphenalia I found lurking in musty drawers & creaking chests, or in the corners of
ancient, dust-belching cupboards, for despite the mistress’s warnings & protestations to the contrary, it was clear she had
little inkling of what an accumulation of clutter she presided over. And thus it came to pass that whole battalions of china
soup tureens, silver tankards, faded linen, framed still-lives of tulips or bleeding game, Chinese parasols, ornamental fruit-platters
& Cupid-studded vases made their way to the flea-market, & several tens of kroner correspondingly made their way to my purse,
& then left it again in exchange for such necessities as food & schnapps, & such luxuries as a very darling new bodice & a
frock, & a bar of sandalwood-scented ‘Savon de Marseille’ for Fru Schleswig, to stop her moaning about ‘orl this bakke-brakin
wurke bein thowne att me’, & at the same time cast a deodorizing hint in her direction. But aside from acquiring & flogging
the Krakster’s unwanted goods, my main task was the drawing of an intricate architectural map of the house, its scaled-down
lines painstakingly copied out in pen & ink from pencil sketches I made & measurements gauged under cover of housework. So
bombastically huge a residence! So many chambers! But what secrets lay within?
    How brave, adventurous & clever I believed myself to be, as I filled in the lines of my map, & pondered this! And yet the truth was, I was no more than a foolish puppet, dancing to the pull of strings manipulated by a far more wily intelligence than my own! Had I known, O my dear one, what nightmare the ardent fulfilment of my greed & curiosity would trap me in, I would never have spent as much as a moment on that wretched map, but instead lifted my petticoats & run from that cursed house on Rosenvængets Allé like a bat from Hell.
    But fool that I was, by the end of the first fortnight in Fru Krak’s employ, I was most pleased that the bargain I had struck
with Fru Schleswig concerning her responsibilities seemed to be working as anticipated. So well, indeed, that even our joyless
Mistress Krak was reluctantly impressed by the way the house’s interior had transformed from dinginess to colour, with shining
mirrors, freshly sponged & whitewashed walls, scrubbed floorboards & well-aired rooms. I did not think it necessary to inform
Fru Krak that in the course of her cleaning, Fru Schleswig had come across five birds’ nests in the attic, & an entire dead
cat, which had seemingly perished of starvation in a side-room. Apart from all that I had pilfered & sold, other numerous
oddities turned up in other places, beneath loose floorboards & on top of forgotten cupboards: broken jewellery, sea-shells,
a set of quoits, a bag of marbles, & a huge tin of biscuits – still edible, according to the abysmal hygiene standards of
Fru S, as demonstrated by her devouring of the whole lot in a single evening with a smacking sound that fair grated on my
nerves, though I buttoned my lip, for I had learned at a tender age that the inhabitants of glass houses should not throw
stones. But among the gallimaufry of clutter was one object, found by Fru Schleswig in a basement larder stinking of rotten
fruit, and adorned with what