1.

       
News of the Wars with Germany came even to the remotest, boggiest parts of Slesvig. Most Danes thought their simple lives would continue unchanged. It mattered not whether they paid taxes to the King in Copenhagen or some German Duke, money paid out was money lost. The grumblers packed up and moved north to Jutland. Only the stubborn remained, and braced themselves for the second invasion of Germans: civilians who claimed the abandoned properties, brought business from the south and spoke a language almost intelligible to the inhabitants. Many of the words were similar but the newcomers put them together differently: they smiled and gestured and got their way, leaving the Danish peasants feeling vaguely cheated, nudged out and confused. Only the language of food was universal.
       
Deep in the forest, past the rapeseed fields in the lowlands and through the peat bogs, was the Gingerbread House. It was made of stone and timber in the old style, with a neatly thatched roof and low doors, but the old woman who lived there was renowned for her baking. Maybe it was the blackstrap molasses that she made herself, or the twice-milled flour. Maybe it was the brick oven constructed of stones recovered from the nearby ruins of a medieval fortress, cured to perfection from years of baking. Maybe it was the herbs she grew in her garden and dried in her loft. The heavenly smell that wafted through the woods was her best advertisement. Travelers detoured miles from their route to enjoy tea and sweet cream with ginger cakes in her garden, or hearty stew and herbed bread by her hearth. Locals, both Danish and German, relied on her baking for every event in their lives. No wedding was complete without a ginger spice layer cake with creamy frosting; no baptismal feast could forgo gingerbread babies with raisin eyes and frosted smiles; no wake was so humble that gingersnaps were not served. In short, she was something of a granny to everyone, even though her own children had long ago moved north. She had a daughter in Odense and a son in Aarhus, both settled and begging their mother (by letter) to move in with them. But she loved her house and couldn’t leave her oven. Were she to move, the oven would have to be moved brick by brick, and this kept her children from insisting too strenuously. The Danes called her Mor-lille in respectful voices and the Germans called her Grossmutter with a slight sneer, which she chose to ignore, as all rude behaviors should be ignored.
       
One day, when several trays of gingerbread were set on the windowsills to cool, she came back from foraging for wood to find two blond children eating from her house. Although she was annoyed with intruders stealing, she was much too kind-hearted to turn away honest beggars and resolved to teach them a lesson about asking first. She blinked a bit, because they so reminded her of her own son and daughter as children, and called out in her reedy old voice.
       
“Nibble, nibble like a mouse, who is nibbling on my house?”
       
“Grossmutter, starving we are,” said the boy.
       
“Bitte, Grossmutter,” said the girl, “our stepmother abandoned us in the woods because father could afford to feed us no longer.”
       
Her terrier Kvick ran straight to the pair and began licking their knees, bouncing back and forth and yipping excitedly.
       
“Very well, wash your fingers and come inside,” she said. “But I will expect chores as payment.”
       
She served them vegetable lentil soup and brown bread, reasoning that they’d already had dessert. After they’d twice emptied their bowls, she set the girl to sweeping and the boy to chopping the tree limb she’d dragged home. While going over the day’s account-books, from the edge of her eye she observed the girl’s meticulous attention to corners and care with the dustpan.
       
“Girl, what shall I call you?” she asked.
       
“My name is Greta, after my mother who died last year. During the winter it was, so much snow we had that we could leave the house not and she died so that we could eat.”
       
“What of your father? What does he do?”
       
“A woodcutter is he, and sometimes he for days at a time in search of work travels. Far off in Lubeck was he, when Mother died, so was she nought but bones when he returned. Sad he was, but not so sad that another wife could be found not.”
       
“And your brother? What is he called?”
       
“Hans, after our uncle. Younger than I he is, and understands not what has happened to us.”
      
The old woman furrowed her wrinkled brow in concentration. Such a strange way of talking! All backwards and guttural. The words she understood, but the meaning didn’t follow. The mother had starved but the father could afford to marry again. Such savagery was unknown to her. She was sure her Laurant wouldn’t marry again unless it was in the children’s best interest. And hadn’t the girl said that her stepmother persuaded the father to abandon his children?
       
“You may stay here awhile, poor child,” she said. “There’s a few cots in the loft, near the chimney you’ll be snug as bugs in rugs. This uncle of yours, does he live nearby? Can he come for you?”
       
“I know not, Grossmutter. We can send a letter to Bremen. He my mother’s brother be and may have heard not of her death.”
       
“Yes, we’ll try that.” She took paper from a drawer and wrote carefully as the girl dictated her tale of woe. She addressed it to a church parish in Bremen, in hopes that the Lutheran priest would know of the man and pass it on. She would post it in town when she made today’s delivery of gingerbread. What was left of it, that was.

* * * * *

A week went by, and then two. The girl was a great help to her, but the boy was a burden. He fumbled every task she set him to, no matter how simple. Sifting flour was too difficult for him and she was always picking out bits of chaff before baking. Picking stones out of the lentils was too onerous a job; after she nearly broke her last molar, she no longer trusted him to help. The goats wandered off on his watch and at least one could give no more milk in the evenings after Hans had sucked it dry all day. When Kvick vanished, she suspected that her little hound had gone to live with a neighbor until the houseguests moved on. For at least a few days, Hans wasn’t such a glutton, not begging seconds and not stealing from his sister’s plate.
       
Every day, the old woman inquired after the post, and now she asked after her dear old Kvick as well. No news from Germany, and no one had seen her little hound. Her Danish neighbors shook their heads sadly, but the Germans chuckled slyly and commented on how fat Hansel was growing. It made her wonder whether she really understood them. Did her own Hans-lille have something to do with Kvick’s disappearance? The hound did shy away from him, he played too rough. Hans didn’t slip treats under the table and tended to trip on the poor dog, sending Kvick yelping to the corner. Greta-lille tried to reprimand him but her brother was oblivious to guidance.
       
The girl looked sad when she asked about her hound, blue eyes filling with tears but not speaking. She so reminded the old woman of Liselotte, who could not tattle on her brother even when he’d stolen green apples and made himself sick. So far away in Odense now, with children of her own and a small business tatting lace tablecloths while her husband was at sea. She shook the cobwebs from her head. Greta wasn’t Liselotte, but she was as dutiful as a daughter, helping with the baking and deliveries, tending to visitors and the washing up afterward. She was learning her letters now and could add sums, always a useful skill. Every evening she read from the Bible while the old woman corrected her pronunciation and helped with the long words.
       
Four days after Kvick vanished, the old woman caught Hans crawling into the oven, stuffing the hot gingerbread into his chubby cheeks. She shrieked in fear and reached for the boy, which only sent him tumbling in. Greta came running and saw that her brother was in the oven.
       
“Hexe! Gott im Himmel, save us!” she cried.
       
“No, no!” said the old woman, grabbing his shirt and pulling Hans out. “He fell in, I didn’t catch him in time, it was an accident.” And she looked around the room, seeing Kvick’s empty kennel near the hearth. She thrust Hans in and latched it shut so he wouldn’t come to more harm.
       
Greta silently assisted her with the jar of herbal ointment, watching as Hans put his burnt hands through the cage wire to be medicated.
       
“Best if he stays in the cage awhile,” said the old woman, her heart still racing.
       
“As you will, Grossmutter,” replied Greta without lifting her eyes from the floor.
       
So Hans took his meals through the slat in the cage, and twice a day put his fingers out so the old woman could rub ointment into them. For two days he was in the cage complaining of his throbbing hands, chewing the peeling skin from his palms. He ate and slept under the watchful eye of the old woman and he whispered to his sister when her back was turned but the words were unintelligible.
       
On the morning of the third day she was rubbing his hands and noticed the boy couldn’t turn around in the cage.
       
“How plump you’re growing, Hans-lille. Soon you won’t fit in this cage. Whatever shall we do with you?”
       
Greta cried out and the old woman turned in time to see the cast-iron pan as she swung it full force at her hoary head.
       
When she awoke, her head ached and she was hot, so hot, but she couldn’t move because her hands and feet were trussed in front of her. She moaned and shifted a bit, then realized she was quite naked and in her oven. Ginger permeated her flesh as she roasted alive. She could just hear the children talking, if she held her breath.
       
“As tasty as Mother she will not be,” said Hans. “Old and stringy she is, like that hound. Gristle I picked from my teeth for days.”
       
“Poor Kvick. Liked him I did,” said Greta.
       
“With a bit of sauce better would I have liked him.”
       
“You should have eaten her hound not. Feared I did, that she was a witch and when I saw her push you into the oven, sure I was.”
       
“She shall eat me not,” boasted Hans. “Feast we shall for days on her old body, until the marrow I’ve sucked from her bones.”
       
“All day will she be roasting, but worth the wait,” said Greta. “With ginger shall I baste her. Her flesh as tender and succulent as a lamb will be.”
       
Foolish children, thought the old woman. Don’t they know you must bleed out the body and gut it? At her size she would yield six quarts of fluid, enough to make blood pudding and blood sausage to last through the winter. The skin must be removed before rubbing the flesh with ginger. Human skin is much too tough, like pigskin. The boy was worthless but she’d thought the girl had promise. She coughed in the dry heat and spit out the bitter ginger-root they’d stuffed in her mouth. It was humiliating to be roasted so ineptly, but maybe the girl would learn from her fumbling attempts. Greta would find the Grimoire and do better, next time.
       

2.

       
Time passed slowly in the forest. Greta grew old in the gingerbread house. She’d been contacted by a lawyer in Odense regarding a last will and testament decided in her favor after many years’ litigation, and now held the title. Unhappy with life, brother Hans had long since signed on with a freighter in Bremerhaven and jumped ship in New York to seek his fortune in America. The last letter she’d received from him was now old and yellowed, posted from a town called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Greta was far too old and set in her ways to travel farther than Flensburg, and what would her neighbors do without her gingerbread? For she baked from the recipe-book she found in the house, a hand-written tome, leather bound and hand-sewn, some of the pages left blank and the last section left uncut. Truth be told, Greta lacked imagination. Her curiosity didn’t extend to appendices and footnotes. She cleaned her house faithfully but chose not to notice the sparrows nesting in her thatched roof like spiders in an old woman’s hair. She listened to gossip only out of politeness and didn’t puzzle over the ink print that smudged her fingers when she leafed through a newspaper. She never married, choosing to ignore the offers tendered to her until late middle age, and now she bore the honorary title of Granny.
       
The Great War had raged just outside her little world; even though a Sopwith Camel had once flown flaming over her forest and crashed in her bog, life went on much the same. Herbs still grew in her garden and she cured them in the loft. The mill had long since closed, and now she bought sacks of flour at the general store so finely ground that sifting was a mere formality. Molasses came delivered in big jars. The bricks in her oven were so permeated with ginger that anything she baked had the hint of it; even her plain breads were much prized. There was a road near her house now, a rather lonely country road, but paved nonetheless. Horse-drawn carts stopped past, and occasionally a horseless carriage was sighted. Rich people in motoring costumes and goggles paid handsomely for her simple fare. It was when a Danish gentleman asked her what she thought of the Referendum returning northern Schleswig to Denmark, that she realized she was no longer living in Germany. Now she understood why the shop girl in town referred to her as Den Tysker, and new signs erected on the road read Sonder Jylland.
       
One afternoon as she lazed in her garden, a pair of children bumbled noisily through her woods and trampled through her herbs, drawn like bees to the sweet scent of gingersnaps cooling on the sill. From their loud voices and boisterous manners she knew them to be Danes, and from the rucksacks on their backs and sturdy boots on their feet she saw that they were vagabonds. Older than her brother and she when they began their travels, this pair had more confidence and less courtesy. They began gobbling her cookies without noticing Greta in her lawn chair.
       
“Who is nibbling on my house?” she called out, startling the girl and making the boy choke. “Can you not say bitte to an old lady?”
       
“Your pardon, Mor-lille,” said the girl, wiping her face with the back of her sleeve. “May we good have some cookies? Maybe with milk?”
       
She scowled at the impertinence, but then remembered that the proud Danes did not plead, not even to say please. “Very well, but you must pay with chores. There is wood to be chopped, and you can fill my water barrel. It hasn’t rained in a fortnight.”
       
They dropped their packs on the doorstep and cheerfully coordinated the tasks in a way that made Greta envious. Hans hadn’t pumped for her while she held the bucket, he’d been too clumsy. She never could’ve trusted her brother with the ax while she braced a log. Soon there was a neat pile of wood by her hearth and a full water barrel by the kitchen door, so Greta begrudgingly ambled to her pantry and set out lunch. There was pork roast left over from the wedding attended Sunday, and bread baked yesterday was good enough with some butter. They washed it down with generous mugs of her famous ginger beer that made them belch and laugh.
       
“Mor-lille, may we good stay awhile?” said the girl. “So can we camp on your garden, and do chores for food?”
       
“We have tramped long and come far,” said the boy.
       
“Who are your folks?” asked Greta. “Why not stay with them?”
       
“Father is a poor woodcutter, his new bride likes us not,” replied the girl. “Once we had distant family here, we decided to come see the old lands now that it’s Denmark again.”
       
Greta rubbed her eyes and squinted. Their features did look familiar. They both had heart-shaped faces and button noses like the Nisse, the elves her Danish neighbors believed inhabited barns and woods. They turned identical blue eyes towards her imploringly, and Greta was breathless.
       
“Stay you may,” she said. “Just until you find your way. What are your names again?”
       
“I am called Liselotte, this is my brother Laurant. Our great-grandmother grew up in these woods long ago. We heard tales of the gingerbread house and believe it’s near here, if only the ruins. There’s something I seek, a book that was lost by my granny, copied from an older text.”
       
Greta’s heart skipped a beat. Surely they didn’t mean the cookbook! How could she continue her baking without it? “If the house is in ruins,” she said warily, “then the book has long since been eaten by worms.”
       
“This is a special book.” Liselotte laughed. “Farmor said that it was bound with human skin and stitched with catgut. I believe it not, but did promise to seek it.”
       
“And the contents? Would the ink not fade, the pages crumble?”
       
“Of dense cloth were the pages made,” said Laurant. “The characters inked in blood. It was old in tip-oldemor’s time, or so we’re told.”
       
“Then it should be in a museum!” Greta cried, tossing her napkin over the book in her clutter and jumping up to sweep the floor. She resolved to hide it as soon as their backs were turned.

* * * * *

A week passed, then two. Greta went about her business while the children puttered uncomplainingly around the house. Laurant repaired the fence and Liselotte organized the pantry. They both climbed on the roof and rethatched while Greta paced anxiously, adjuring them not to unseat her sparrows. Every afternoon they vanished into the woods, exploring the medieval ruins of the castle and seeking the very house they returned to every night. Greta grew accustomed to their easy banter and casual manners. Her little house was sleek and neat as a cat, and she began to dread the day when the children would move on.
       
One afternoon she came home from a ramble to find Laurant half inside her oven, prying up the stones. It was where Greta had hidden the cookbook and she panicked at the thought that he would find it and leave. With a shriek, she shoved him in and shut the door.
       
“It isn’t lit, you know,” laughed Laurant.
       
“You haven’t baked in days,” said Liselotte, coming down from the loft. “We were checking the flues. Amazing how there’s no ash build-up, almost as if it were enchanted.”
       
“I never questioned it,” grumbled Greta.
       
“Halloo, what’s this?” said Laurant. “Here’s a hidey-hole above the door.” From inside the oven came the sound of scraping bricks.
       
“You found the book!” Liselotte chortled, opening the door. “The riddle says, ‘from castle keep to oven deep, magics mysterious do creep.’”
       
“That isn’t where I put it,” muttered Greta.
       
“The cookbook? Nay, Mor-lille, we found that our first day. Lucky too, else it’d burn up. Bad place to store a book, under the oven floor.”
       
“The Grimoire this be,” said Laurant, emerging from the oven. “Ensorcelled work of art, isn’t it.”
       
They opened the dusty book and read, heads together, while Greta rummaged nervously through the clutter. Under a newspaper and a shirt to be mended lay the cookbook, undamaged. She sat in her chair by the hearth, pulled out the etui and began to stitch on a button. They wouldn’t see her fear if she could help it.
       
Liselotte snorted, looking up from the book. “It’s no use pretending any more.”
       
“For half a century, you lived here,” said Laurant. “You never sought the source of enchantments, never even added recipes to the cookbook.”
       
“There’s my ginger beer,” said Greta.
       
“Which you didn’t write down,” said Liselotte.
       
“You haven’t proved a worthy custodian to the magics, even though you bested a worthy witch,” said Laurant.
       
“But I own the title, free and clear,” insisted Greta.
       
“Which lasts for only fifty years,” countered Laurant.
       
“The law says it is mine.”
       
“The laws of Man say that in absence of legal heirs, the property reverts to our family.”
       
“But I’m not dead yet...” She clapped a hand to her mouth, suddenly aware of how tall and strong they were, much older than were Hans and she when they put the old woman in her oven.
       
“A technicality. The laws of Enchantment say that the house and grounds are ours.” Laurant shut the book with a snap. “You are now in violation of section thirteen, subparagraph twenty-three.”
       
“Very specific is the law in this case,” said Liselotte as she swung the cast-iron pan.
       
Greta came to consciousness sputtering and coughing, dangling by her feet from the hawthorn tree out back. She thrashed around and saw the large vat set beneath her, then the rather large cleaver aimed at her neck.
       
“This is the way to prepare an old woman for roasting,” said Liselotte.
       
As the blood ran from her throat, Greta thought of the recipe for ginger beer.
       
       

3.

Not so deep in the forest, just off the main highway, is a quaint Danish Kro called The Gingerbread House. The inn is run by a brother and sister of indeterminate age who’ve lived there as long as anyone can remember. While the house has been updated with all the modern amenities and expanded to sleep a dozen guests, the oldest part is said to date back to Beowulf’s time. If you are driving through southern Denmark on your way to Germany, be sure to stop by and sample the gingerbread, fresh-baked daily in an oven constructed of stone from a medieval castle, and wash it down with a mug of frosty ginger beer.