by Rose Tremain
And it was while her maid was gone that the Queen experienced the first pang of labour—a pain so familiar to her since the births of her two daughters that she paid it almost no heed, knowing the process would be long. She went on knitting. She held the underdrawers up to the sunlight to inspect them for dropped stitches. The pain came again and this time it was severe enough to make Sofie lay aside the drawers and lie herself down on the cushions. She still thought that many hours of labour lay ahead but, says the old story, Christian knew in advance of his being that Denmark needed him, that the kingdom was floating free at the mercy of the polar storms and the hatred of the Swedes across the Kattegat Sound and that he alone would be the one to build enough ships to anchor and protect her. And so he fought to be born as fast as possible. He kicked and struggled in his mother’s waters; he headed for the narrow channel that would lead him out into the bright air that tasted of the sea.
When Elizabeth returned with the flagon of beer, he had been born. Queen Sofie had severed the umbilicus with a thorn and wrapped the baby boy in her knitting.
The story goes on. People no longer know what is true or what has been added or taken away. The Dowager Queen Sofie remembers, but the story is hers. She is not a woman who makes gifts of what she owns.
They say that Danish children born at that time were at risk from the devil. They say the devil, driven out of the churches by the implacable Lutherans, began to seek unbaptised souls to inhabit and that he flew round the crowded cities at night, sniffing for the odour of human milk. And when he smelled it, he would flit unseen through the window of the infant’s room and hide in the darkness under the cradle until the nurse slept, and then he would reach out a long thin arm and with his threads of fingers find a passageway, via the little breathing nostrils, to the brain, at the core of which lay the soul, like a single nut of a pine cone. And he would gather it between his finger and thumb. With infinite care he would extract his hand, now slippery from its passage into a living organ, and, when the soul was out, pop it into his mouth and suck it until he felt arrive in his being a shuddering of ecstasy and joy that would leave him exhausted for several minutes.
Sometimes he was interrupted. Sometimes the nurse would wake up and sniff the air, and light a lamp and come towards the cradle just as the soul came out, and then the devil would have to drop it and flee. And wherever the soul landed, it would be swallowed by the matter around it and lodge in that place for all time. If it fell into the folds of a blanket, there it would stay, so that there were at that time a great quantity of children who grew up with no soul in them at all. If it fell onto the baby’s stomach, in the stomach it would remain, so the infant would always and for ever have one thought, which was to feed the flesh of its hungry soul and so grow to a huge fatness ultimately fatal to the heart. The worst thing, so the women said, was the soul’s falling onto the genitals of a baby boy. For then that child would become the very devil of a lecherous man who would in time betray his wife, his children and everyone who should have been dear to him just to gratify his soul’s yearning for copulation and might in his lifetime commit infamy with more than a thousand women and boys, and even with his own daughters or with the poor creatures of the hearth and field.
Queen Sofie knew she must not let her son’s little soul be stolen by the devil. They say that after he was rowed with her across the lake, and washed and laid in his crib (the bloodstained knitted drawers being consigned hastily to the fire), she ordered, all brilliant as the April morning was, that the window of his room should be closed and a lock be fastened to the casement so that it could not be opened day or night. The nurse protested that the baby Prince would suffocate for want of air, but the Queen would not be moved and so this one window in the castle was closed for six weeks until the child had been baptised at the Frue Kirke on the second of June.
And the King goes now and then to this room where he lay as a baby and looks at the window or at the dark night sky beyond and, knowing he is in possession of his soul, thanks God that the devil never came in to steal it.
It is also reported that, at the same time, King Frederik II and Queen Sofie sent for the great astronomer Tycho Brahe and showed their son and heir, Christian, to him, and asked him to make predictions concerning the future King’s existence on the earth. Tycho Brahe consulted the stars. He found Jupiter ascendant and told the King and Queen the boy would have a fruitful life and be accorded honour and dignity throughout the world. He had only one warning: trouble and danger would arrive in 1630, the year following Christian’s fifty-second birthday.
A TRAPDOOR
It is snowing at Rosenborg. The snow began to fall in northern Jutland and now it is blown southwards, carried on an icy wind.
Peter Claire wakes in a hard bed and remembers he is in Denmark and that today will be his first day as a member of the royal orchestra. He has slept for only three hours and the anxiety that accompanied his arrival seems scarcely to have diminished with the coming of the new day. He rises and looks out of his window onto the stable yard, where the snow is beginning to smother the cobblestones. He watches it fall, in gusts and flurries. He wonders how long this particular Danish winter will last.
Hot water is brought to him and, shivering in the cold room above the stables, he shaves his face and cleanses his skin of the dregs of its sea journey—of stale sweat and salt, of flecks of tar and oily grime. He puts on clean clothes and a pair of black leather boots made in the Irish town of Corcaigh. He combs his yellow hair and refastens the jewelled ear-ring to his ear.
Bowls of hot milk and warm cinnamon bread are served to the musicians in a refectory. Those already there, warming their hands on their milk bowls, turn and stare at Peter Claire as he enters: eight or nine men of different ages, but mostly older than he, all soberly dressed in suits of black or brown cloth. He bows to them and, as he announces his name, an elderly person with a quiff of white hair, sitting a little apart from the others, rises and comes towards him. “Herr Claire,” he says, “I am Jens Ingemann, Music Master. Be welcome at Rosenborg. Here now, have your milk and then I will show you the rooms where we perform.”
The King is out hunting. To ride in the forests, following the scent of a wild boar as the snow falls, is one of His Majesty’s chief delights. “You will see,” says Jens Ingemann to Peter Claire, “that when he comes in, he will be roaring with the rapture of it and ravening with hunger, and we will be asked to play for him while he eats. It is his belief that certain pieces of music aid digestion.”
They are in the Vinterstue, the shadowy room where the lamp was lit the previous evening. Now, in the daylight, Peter Claire sees that what he took for plain wood panels on the walls are in fact oil paintings of sylvan scenes and sea prospects, framed in gold, and the ceiling above them is adorned with ornate stucco painted gold and blue. In a comer of the room is an arrangement of music stands.
“Well,” says Jens Ingemann, “this is where we play sometimes. The days when we play here are good days, but they are few. Look around the room and tell me if you do not find anything unusual in it.”
Peter Claire observes a fine marble fireplace embellished with the King’s coat of arms, the silver lions which looked upon his arrival, a throne upholstered in dark-red brocade, two oak tables, numerous chairs and footstools, a line of bronze busts, a gathering of heavy candlesticks, an ivory model of a ship.
“No?” says Jens. “Nothing unexpected?”
“No . . .”
“Very well. We shall go on, then. Follow me.”
They walk into the hallway and turn left into a stone passageway. Almost immediately Jens Ingemann opens a heavy iron-studded door and Peter Claire sees steps, set in a narrow curve, leading downwards.
“The stairs are dark,” says Jens. “Take care that you do not miss your footing.”
The stairs turn round a vast stone pillar. They end at a low tunnel, along which Jens Ingemann hurries on towards a distant flickering light. Emerging from the tunnel, Pete
r Claire finds himself in a large vaulted cellar, lit by the flares from two iron torches bolted to the walls. The cellar smells of resin and of wine, and visible now are hundreds of casks, lying like miniature ships in dry dock on curved wooden supports.
Jens Ingemann walks on slowly, his footsteps echoing slightly on
the brick floor. Then he turns and gestures to the empty space between the lines of casks. “Here we are,” he says. “This is the place.” “The wine cellar.”
“Yes. There is wine here. And in a cage over there some poor hens that have never seen sunshine nor any green thing. Do you note how cold it is?”
“I would expect a cellar to be cold.”
“So you will get used to it? Is that what you’re predicting?”
“Get used to it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t suppose I shall be spending much time down here. I am not really a connoisseur of—”
“All your time.”
“Forgive me, Herr Ingemann ...”
“Of course His Majesty did not tell you. No one told you, or perhaps you would not have come. But this is where we have our existence. This—except for those few precious days when we are called up to the Vinterstue—is where we play.”
Peter Claire looks disbelievingly at Jens Ingemann. “What purpose can an orchestra serve in the cellar? There is no one to hear us.”
“Oh,” says Ingemann, “it is ingenious. They say there is nothing else like it in all of Europe. I asked you if you saw nothing unusual in the Vinterstue. Did you not notice the two iron rings bolted to the floor?”
“No.”
“I cannot remember if they had their ropes attached or not. Probably not, or you would have noticed them. Now, you see, we are directly under the Vinterstue. Near the throne, a section of the floor can be raised or lowered by means of the ropes. Beneath the trap is a grille and beneath that is an assemblage of brass ducts or pipes, let into the vaults of this cellar, and each one fashioned almost like a musical instrument itself, cunningly curved and waisted so that the sounds we make here are transmitted without distortion into the space above, and all the King’s visitors marvel when they hear it, not knowing whence the music can possibly come and wondering perhaps whether Rosenborg is haunted by the ghostly music makers of some other age.”
Jens Ingemann has walked on while talking, but Peter Claire stays where he is, looking around, noting that the torches are not the only source of light in the cellar, but that two narrow slits in the wall give out onto the garden at ground level. They are not windows, only reticulations in the brickwork, their spaces open to the air. And now, as Peter Claire stares at them, he sees a few snowflakes, like an errant coterie of summer gnats, come clustering in.
Ingemann reads his mind. “If you are thinking that we would be warmer down here if the room were not exposed to the outside world, then of course we all agree with you, and I personally have asked the King to have boards nailed across those apertures. But he refuses. He says the casks of wine need to breathe.”
“And we can freeze to death, it’s of no consequence to him?”
“I sometimes think, if one of us were to die, then he might be moved to rehouse us, but it is difficult to come by a volunteer for this role.”
“How can we concentrate if we are so cold?”
“We are expected to get used to it, and I’ll tell you something surprising: we do get used to it. For the Mediterraneans in our little company, Signor Rugieri and Signor Martinelli, it is the hardest. The Germans, the Dutch, the English and of course the Danes and Norwegians survive tolerably well. You will see.”
BUTTONS
The child Christian, after his baptism, was taken away from his mother.
It was the custom of the time to put the baby into the care of an older woman—usually the mother’s mother—because it was thought that older women, who had fought with their own mortality for a greater amount of time, were better prepared than their offspring to wrestle with death on the infant’s behalf.
Queen Sofie was consoled by her two daughters and by her illegal knitting, but it is thought that the beginnings of her quarrelsomeness and her desire to amass a great and secret fortune of her own date from this time, when she was deprived of the baby son on whom she had already begun to dote.
For Prince Christian’s little life was put into the care of his grandmother, the Duchess Elizabeth of Mecklenburg, at Gustrow in Germany. She hired two young trumpeters and positioned the boys, turn and turn about, outside the Prince’s door. When the baby cried, they were to blow their trumpets and the Duchess or one of her women would come running. That the trumpeting disturbed the whole household counted for nothing with Duchess Elizabeth. “All that matters,” she said impatiently, “is that the boy does not die. The rest of everything is chaff.”
He was swaddled, with a wooden rod laid into the swaddling to force his back and his limbs to grow straight. Day and night he cried and the trumpeters blew. When one of the women suggested the rod should be removed, the implacable Duchess accused her of indulgence and mawkishness. Yet in her own kitchen she supervised the making up of an ointment from comfrey leaves to heal the tender skin where the rod had chafed it. And when the Prince’s milk teeth began to bud she ordered that the gums should not be cut but allowed to be “pierced of their own accord, as the earth is pierced by the pale snouts of spring flowers.”
When the swaddling was gradually loosened and the stout legs permitted to move and kick, and the plump little hands to explore the objects that lay within their grasp, the Duchess would often sit the child on her own lap and talk to him. The language she talked in was German. She told him about the way the heavens and the earth were arranged, with God and his saints high up in the vast blueness of the sky and all his angels floating among the white clouds. “And so you see,” she explained, “because Denmark is a watery kingdom with a thousand lakes, it therefore follows that reflections of heaven are here more numerous than anywhere else on earth, and these reflections, being seen with the eyes of the people and kept in the hearts of the people, make them love both God and nature, and so they are quiet, and when you are King you will be able to rule them and have their trust.”
He would, while she talked, play with the tresses of her hair, which she unwound for him and wove into plaits. And some people whisper today that the King has confessed a strange thing: he believes he can remember the long golden plaits of his grandmother the Duchess of Mecklenburg, and when he is in a state of agitation he caresses his own plait, his sacred elflock, between finger and thumb, and this stroking of his own hair calms and soothes him. Yet no one seems to know whether this is true or, if it is true, to whom it was confessed. It might have been to Kirsten. Or Kirsten might have invented it.
He began to talk very early, but of course it was in German that he talked. He had a voice so loud that, when he cried out, the sound could be heard two or three rooms away, and it was thus soon decided to dismiss the daytime trumpeter, for whom there was no longer any need. The night trumpeter remained, however. Duchess Elizabeth was terrified of the power of dreams. If you did not console a child after a nightmare it would grow perpetually to confuse visions with reality and so fall gradually into a state of melancholy.
The night trumpeter was given a new instrument and a new set of instructions. He was not merely to blow if Prince Christian cried in the dark hours, but to play a sprightly melody to chase away the child’s terrors.
And this, too, they say that Christian never forgot. Sometimes, at three or four in the morning, musicians are roused from their beds above the stables and summoned to the King’s bedroom, where they embark upon quadrilles and capers.
At the age of three, talking constantly and unstoppably in German, interspersed with a little French he had picked up from his visits to the laundry room at Gustrow, where the French laundresses would pick him up in their hot, plump arms and smack fat kisses onto his cheeks, Christian was returned to his parents, King
To calm his incessant talking he was given red and black chalks, and encouraged to make drawings of the things which surrounded him: dogs and cats, wooden soldiers, statues, model ships, fire-irons, fountains and water-lilies, trees and fish. This skill he mastered very quickly, and so to the great store of chatter housed in his small frame was added yet another topic of conversation: discussion of his drawings. Nobody was allowed to escape the subject. Visiting nobility were shown sheet after sheet of scarlet soldiers and charcoal trees, and required to pronounce upon them. The King of France, on a sumptuous State visit, was amused to be addressed (in his own language) thus: “This is a picture of Nils, my cat. Does Your Majesty think it is a good likeness?”
“Well,” said King Louis, “where is the cat? Bring me the cat and I will judge.”
But the cat, Nils, could not be found. Hours passed, with servants calling its name from the gates and round the vegetable gardens, but still it could not be discovered. Then, in the middle of the State banquet, His Majesty of France suddenly felt a tugging at his embroidered sleeve. By his elbow stood Prince Christian, in his night-shirt, holding in his arms his cat, who wore around its neck a blue satin ribbon. “Here is Nils,” he announced triumphantly.
“Ah, but alas,” said King Louis, “now I do not have your drawing by me.”
“You do not need the drawing,” said the boy. “Kings remember everything. That is what my father says.”
“Oh, yes, too true,” said King Louis. “I had forgotten that we remember everything, but now I remember it. Well, let us see . . .” He took Nils from the boy and set the cat on the table between a bowl of fruit and a flagon of wine, and stroked it while the assembled lords and ladies smiled indulgently upon the scene.
