by Norah Lofts
Only Count Knut Holmstrupp and Count Enevold Brandt knew what ailed His Majesty and what was being done about it. They took turns to be in charge and repelled most visitors by saying that the King had just dropped into a doze. When this was impossible, the rule was to say, “I will see if His Majesty feels well enough to receive you,” and hustle Christian out of his towels and into bed; a pinch of snuff, to which Christian was not addicted, set him sneezing, and there he was, a man with a very severe cold.
“I don’t want to be locked in and left alone,” Christian said. “Suppose I had a turn.”
“You will not, unless you excite yourself. Sit and think the good you’re doing yourself. I shall be back.”
“Soon,” Christian said, pitiably.
“Very soon.”
He went out briskly, closing the door behind him. He crossed the empty bedroom, locked its door and put the key in his pocket; went through the King’s private sitting room and into the one beyond where Brandt, Holcke and a couple of cronies were throwing dice at a table.
Brandt said, “Ha, Knut! Off the chain? Being first favorite has its disadvantages.” It was genially said but it had its sting.
“Tomorrow,” Knut said, “yours may be the only face he can bear the look of.”
“God forbid!”
Holcke said, “Valet, nurse, page. It must be exhausting.”
Knut smiled. “Being page comes easily after seven years’ experience. The other roles, I admit, are more trying. But I am learning.”
Really the well-born were so stupid. After almost a year, Conrad Holcke still believed that he could provoke Knut by a reminder of his humble origin, which was in fact his pride.
“I thought you should know,” he said, looking straight at Brandt, “that he has locked his door and intends to sleep until ten. He will then eat—I trust that I remember this correctly—a steak of venison, two partridges and a marinade of shellfish. Will you see to the ordering or shall I?”
“I will,” Brandt said in a subdued voice. He would have recalled if he could, the acid remark about being first favorite. This peasant’s son, this promoted, ennobled page of the backstairs was too clever. He thought of everything. Much of the new treatment for syphilis was unknown, but a diet of slops was as old as the complaint; and only Knut would have thought of ordering, loudly and in public, a meal which in itself could kill a creeping rumor.
Knut, seeming to stroll, actually moving swiftly on unobserved stretches of corridor and stairways, covered a good deal of ground and drew attention to himself wherever he went. This behavior was not solely in Christian’s interest, confirmation of the only-a-cold-in-the-head theory. Knut was only too well aware of the reason which stupid people believed to lie behind the favor of the King showed him and he was very careful about being alone with Christian for any length of time, careful to encourage other favorites, to leave doors open, to be one of a group.
Within twenty minutes he was in his own apartments. He took an armful of firewood from the supply stacked by his stove, opened a window, stepped out onto the terrace overlooking the garden, walked along and by another window entered Christian’s bedroom. There he put the wood down by the door of the dressing room, dipped a small towel into an ewer of cold water, carried it, dripping, into the stifling place and clapped it onto Christian’s head.
It was a moment or two before Christian could speak. When he could he said in a faint, complaining voice,
“I thought you were never coming.”
“So many people needed to be assured that the ride had not worsened your condition.”
“My head was about to burst. I thought I should die...” His face was swollen and purple, his eyes bulging.
“You could have gone into the bedroom,” Knut said.
“Could I? The slightest movement...Look!” He moved one foot slightly and the great toe sprang out at right angles, deformed by cramp; he gave a little scream. Knut went down on his knees, pressed the toe back into alinement and the whole foot firmly against the floor.
“You should have drunk the salt water,” he said. “The salt water was to guard against cramp. Here...” He lifted the yellow jug and it came up, light and empty in his hand.
“What happened? Did you drink it?” The new, the wonderfully clever doctor in Altona who had advised the sweating cure had laid stress on the necessity of replacing the salt lost by sweating.
“My head,” Christian said. “You didn’t come. My head was bursting. I poured water on it. The wrong jug...”
Knut fell back upon the patience of his peasant blood, the heritage bequeathed him from unnumbered ancestors who had matched their pace to that of the plodding oxen, scattered the seed and waited through bad weather and good for harvest, mated their beasts and waited for the increase. He mixed some fresh salt water and Christian drank it; he brought in the wood, threw two logs into the stove and laid the others handy. Keeping the little room at this heat without exciting comment was in itself a problem. He removed the sodden towels and wrapped Christian in fresh ones. Christian, realizing from these actions that his discomfort was to continue, muttered and mumbled until Knut said, “Less than an hour and the whole is wasted. I didn’t risk my neck, riding through the dark to Altona to get advice that is not to be followed.” The hardship and risk of the long ride had hurt him far less than the moment when he sat face to face with the doctor and claimed that he had contracted the pox, like a clumsy sailor on leave, or that other moment when the man had said coolly, “I suppose you have some good reason for lying to me.”
Christian said, “Very well. An hour then. But don’t go away. I have something for you. I wanted you to have them to wear this morning; but they didn’t arrive until we were about to leave. A blue case, on the table by my bed. Fetch it.”
When it was brought, Christian took it into his damp hands, held it for a few seconds and then handed it back,
“Open it,” he said, and waited, with something eager and child-like in his bulging, reddened eyes while Knut revealed a set of eight gold buttons, each set with an emerald about the size and much the color of a pea, ringed with small diamonds. A costly and very acceptable present.
“Very beautiful. Very splendid,” Knut said as though commenting upon something impersonal, a sunset, a piece of scenery.
“You like them?”
“Very much. It is a munificent reward for a very small service.” He still spoke as though the whole business hardly concerned him. The strength of this attitude lay in the fact that it was not completely false, not a mere pose; Knut was incapable of feeling real gratitude because he always saw himself as the bestower of favors, not as the recipient. Had Christian been able to take the crown from his head, place it on Knut’s and say, “Henceforth you are King!” there would have been no gratitude in Knut’s response, he would have been too much concerned with the up-welling of the inward certainty that he would be the best King Denmark ever had.
“They were made to order,” Christian said. Be pleased, Knut, please! “Would you have preferred rubies? I couldn’t ask. I wanted it to be a surprise. But if you would rather have rubies...”
“These please me very well.” He closed the case. He had not lifted one of the trinkets, held it to the light to watch its sparkle or done anything that any other man would have done. Christian felt—and it was far from the first time—a sense of disappointment and failure. Knut was his friend, his one true friend in all the world.
The true friend fetched and applied a fresh cold cloth and under its stimulus the King said, still in that rather pitiable manner, “Knut, I am truly sorry about the Order of Danneborg. There is no man living to whom I would rather give it.”
“The rules were made before you were born,” Knut said. He grinned suddenly, “Even you couldn’t dig up my old grandfather and ennoble him in order to qualify me!”
Christian, pleased because Knut had grinned, gave his high-pitched, rather cackling laugh.
“No, I couldn’t, could I?
That’s the sensible way to look at it.”
“I’m never anything but sensible.”
“Yes, you are, Knut. Always, you are different...”
He had always been different. The first to realize it were his parents, humble members of the serf class which recent laws had robbed of all rights and forced back into the mud. By what trick of nature had their coupling produced such a beautiful baby, who grew into such a handsome, fastidious, clever boy with elegant hands and feet; a boy who could not pour pig swill, or handle a muck fork, or witness a pig-killing without being sick? They grumbled to one another, their only child and quite useless, and at the same time they competed with one another to spare him the heavy or dirty work; and they worried about his future; there was no place in the world for such as he. Once, and not so long ago, there been a primary school in every village in Denmark and peasant’s son with brains in his head and ambition in heart was offered the chance to advance, to become an official or even a professional man. Then had come the times and the new laws, and the government had withdrawn its support from the schools. In the little village in Zeeland where Knut was born, Heer Thaarup, the schoolmaster, had died of a broken heart when the one-room school was turned into a bullock shed; but his daughter, unmarried at forty and without resources, lived on in the two rooms that adjoined the shed. She had entertained a stubborn thought: If it were a good thing for children to be taught when the government paid for the teaching, it is still a good thing. She had also entertained an imaginative thought; she imagined that if she were prepared to impart the knowledge which she had absorbed effortlessly, through the pores of her skin, the parents of her pupils would contribute enough food to keep her alive. She needed very little; firewood was there to be gathered and what clothes she had would last her time.
She had miscalculated. The new laws decreed that a peasant belonged to the owner of the land he tilled and that every male, at the age of fourteen, must start on twelve years’ service with the army; if he did not die in battle, or of disease or hard usage, he would come back, an old man at thirty-six and resume work on the holding. In the circumstances it seemed pointless waste to give a handful of meal, six eggs, a pig’s foot in return for having a boy taught to read and write and count. In the end she had one pupil, Knut Bagger, whose parents were glad to have him out of the way and happily, if not usefully, employed. Fräulein Thaarup crammed him mercilessly, feeling that if only she could pass on all the things, useful, interesting and strange that she knew, her death would be no more than the breaking of a vessel whose contents had been emptied into another. That she would die, and quite soon, was certain, for the Baggers’ contribution was inadequate and her attempts to keep herself all came to nothing. Her hens laid away or were taken by foxes; she tried keeping goats and making goat cheese, she tried bees. But Holland banned the import of Danish bullocks, and men who could not sell their bullocks and must still pay their dues had no money to spend on cheese or honey. Dying the long-drawn-out death of slow starvation, Fräulein Thaarup taught Knut with passion. His education was superior in scope and depth to that being received by the young Crown Prince in Copenhagen.
But he was almost fourteen. Military service loomed and he knew he could not face it. No army sergeant would see the difference between him and the rest of the year’s recruits; no army sergeant would spare him, as his parents did, from what was hard, dirty or distasteful. And no army sergeant would want a recruit with only half a hand. It was the only way out. Dozens of times Knut went out to cut firewood and with the axe in his right hand, looked at his left. A thumb? Two fingers? All fingers, clean across the knuckles? He could never bring himself to do it. The very difference which enabled him to contemplate the deed rendered him incapable of performing it. When he left the little holding, he was still unmaimed and his parents had firewood for three winters.
For someone else had seen the difference. No less a person than the King, Frederick V, King of Denmark and Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. He came to Zeeland for the shooting and said, idly, to the owner of Knut, “That’s a handsome boy; he would look well in the household livery.” It was enough. His father and mother felt justified in having treated this different boy differently; they saw him as a butler, steward, chamberlain, personal attendant upon the King, free from hunger and hard toil, sheltered from bad weather forever, freed of serfdom’s yoke.
For Knut the next years were bitterly frustrating. There were two kinds of pages, the well-born, pages of the presence, and the others, pages of the backstairs. Between them there was an impassable gulf. And between a page of the backstairs, however personable and clever, and any advancement lay the Bad Times. More and more often posts that in former, prosperous years had been open to young men of humble birth who had ability, tact and application were being taken by the younger sons of good families.
He had escaped military service—occasionally he looked at his left hand with interest; he was fed, somewhat indifferently by home standards; he was sheltered from the weather, clothed and paid a regular wage, most of which he sent home, from pride rather than gratitude. He occasionally earned a coin or two by writing a letter for some illiterate who wished to communicate with another who would in turn pay someone to read the communication, or by totting up some lazy superiors’ accounts in order that they might be falsified within reason. He answered bells, carried wood, emptied chamberpots and in his free time became familiar with the low haunts in the dock area. It was enough, but not enough for someone who had been different all his life and knew it.
He was almost seventeen on the evening when it fell to his duty to carry a basket of logs into the room where the Crown Prince was confined. Christian, on the verge of being fourteen, had two days earlier failed to do four simple sums involved with multiplication and Heer Reventil, reporting this fact to Count Reventlow, Christian’s governor, had said, “Your Excellency, it is hopeless. Beating his buttocks black and blue cannot put into his head what God left out. He is with numbers as I am with music. I cannot tell one note from another. Permit me to say that I am sorry for the boy and wish to resign.”
“We will try another tack,” Count Reventlow said. “One must not give up too easily. He will be confined to his room and given nothing but bread and water, bread and water, until he has worked out those sums and given the right answers.”
Reventil said, “Your Excellency, you could confine me in the Blue Tower and starve me to death and I still could not tell one tune from another...”
“And that would matter little. We are not talking about you, Heer Reventil. We speak of the one who will be King of Denmark and Norway and cannot multiply—or for that matter, add or subtract.”
“Because he lacks ability.”
“Go tell his father that,” Count Reventlow said. “Go on, go over my head. Say that you pity the boy who is incapable of learning and wish to resign. Tell the King that his son is unteachable, an idiot.”
“My wish to resign is because I cannot bear...Your Excellency some dogs can walk on their hind legs, they are so made, some are not and I would grieve to see one who could not...How much more so a boy who tries and is defeated and has been beaten and still cannot. And I cannot see the necessity; he will be King one day. He can hire people—like me, like you—who can multiply, add and subtract. To make his life—he will only be young once, you know—such complete misery...For two days, Your Excellency, he has been unable to sit down and the sums are still wrong.”
“Then, as I said, we will try the bread-and-water treatment; and you, Heer Reventil, can try to make it work or go to His Majesty and tender your resignation. Having failed here, you will, I imagine, find it somewhat difficult to obtain another post.”
This Heer Reventil admitted; so he had given in and he sat in the anteroom, doing his turn as watchman when Knut Bagger carried a basket of logs into the room where Christian lay on his bed, his face turned to the wall. The day’s ration of bread, untouched, and the jug from which he had taken only a few
sips, stood on the table beside him. He was willing himself to die and believed that by tomorrow, if he could resist the temptation—not yet very strong—to gnaw on the dry bread, he would die, and everybody would be sorry.
It was not pity that made Knut pause and look at the boy who would one day be his King; he was congenitally incapable for feeling pity for anyone who was not a peasant, unable to sell his bullocks, behind with his dues. He felt contemptuous of a creature with so few resources, so few wits and so little spirit. He said abruptly, “I could get you something proper to eat if you like.”
The curt way of speaking, the lack of address, pierced Christian’s apathy; even Count Reventlow, running the strap through his fingers, would say, “I am obliged to beat Your Royal Highness.” He turned from the wall, showing a face on which tears had dried and hopelessness had stamped a look which might be mistaken for sullenness.
“How? I’m watched.”
Knut made a grimace and, still holding the basket, turned back, opened the door and said, speaking to himself, “Wet logs again.”
Within minutes he was back, and under the uppermost logs was the carcass of a fowl, complete save for one wing and a slice from the breast. He handed it to Christian and went to the stove, unloading the logs with rather more noise than was necessary.
“Be ready to throw it under the bed,” he said.
The determination to starve to death, so stalwart in resisting dry bread, weakened when faced with cold chicken. Christian sat up and began cramming the meat into his mouth.
“Was this your supper?” he asked in a muted voice.
“No. Ours was boiled cart horse, as usual.”
“Danes don’t eat horses.”
“No? Then it was its harness!” Knut said and gave his wry, lopsided grin. Christian gave a splutter of laughter, hastily checked as he glanced at the door. Knut felt a great uprush of self-esteem. He was nothing; a mere carrier of wood, an emptier of chamberpots, but he had fed the heir to the throe—and made him laugh.
