AS DAME PEDERSEN and Frederik folded the bedding, their breath wisped in the chilly room. “Look, it’s a pair of ghosts.”

“That’s all that’ll be left of us, a pair of ghosts, unless you succeed today,” said Dame Pedersen. “Make those seagulls pay for waking me with their jeering.”

“We work as a team, the gulls and I,” Frederik reminded her. His stomach muttering with hunger, Frederik kissed his mother and left.

The Pedersens lived in a couple of rooms tacked onto a herring smokehouse on an island in the harbor. From their threshold Frederik looked across the water to the prosperous city on the mainland. The town was bedecked with necklaces of evergreen. Setting out across the low stone causeway that joined island to mainland, Frederik caught a whiff of a goose roasting for a holiday luncheon.