by Rose Tremain
The King rests his bulky frame on Kirsten’s delicate dressing stool. He sighs and passes a hand across his eyes, which look puffy and tired. “I fought with death once,” he says. “Long ago. I saw it come into the room and it was black and had a sting like an adder. It almost took the life of my boyhood friend, but I fought it with its own weapon, with an answering inky blackness, and I won the day.”
It is clear to King Christian that Emilia marvels at this story, but as soon as it has been uttered he regrets that it has come into his mind. The sad truth is that, as he ages, each and every memory of Bror Brorson creates in Christian a growing awareness of how, in a man’s life, everything that is precious to him may little by little be lost and that, even as he believes himself to be embarked incessantly upon one accumulation after the other, he is in reality at the mercy of perpetual subtraction, so that when he looks about him in middle age he finds himself—to his own chagrin and surprise—in a grey desert where the horizon is unpeopled yet the ground is covered in shadows.
Emilia looks out into the sunshine and imagines the musicians on their stage and, among them, Peter Claire the lutenist. To evoke his face, his voice, makes her tremble. She remembers how, after Karen’s death and the coming of Magdalena, any wish she might once have had to be loved by a man fell away from her so completely that she believed it was gone for all time. But, standing at the window on this summer afternoon, Emilia asks herself: “What is all time?”
And it is her mother’s voice she hears in answer to this question. “At its moment of conception,” says Karen, “all time is eternity. And only later, perhaps a long time later—on someday that no one had foreseen—does this eternity suddenly appear less infinite. And this is well known, Emilia dearest. Well known to those who have lived a little longer in the world than you.”
CONCERNING CLOTH AND AIR
“Imagine,” the King used to boast, “a spool of silken thread unravelling across Russia! Imagine the hills and valleys and towns, the rivers and mountains and cataracts, the seas of ice that it would have to cross! It was such a spool that was used to sew the coronation garments. Everybody in the country had new clothes in the red and yellow colours of the House of Oldenborg: soldiers, sailors, musketeers, wash maids, dancing masters, grocers, money lenders, midwives, children . . . everyone! It was my decree.”
They say that tailors and button makers made more money in that coronation year, 1596, than they would ever be likely to make in the rest of their lives. Some worked so many hours at a stretch that they were stricken with temporary blindness and, when the great day came, couldn’t see the King as he passed among them under his embroidered canopy. But at least they could get drunk in the streets of Copenhagen. On the King’s orders, all the city fountains had been drained, cleaned and refilled with red and golden wine, and the citizens drank them dry.
King Christian had waited nine years to be crowned. He was determined that nobody living in Denmark would forget this moment in history.
A week before the coronation he sent for Bror Brorson.
Queen Sofie despatched a secret message to Bror’s house in Funen ordering him not to come, but he arrived nevertheless. It was as if he had found the Queen’s words entirely empty of meaning.
He had grown tall and his face was as handsome as it had always been, and his hair golden and wild. But yet there were changes in him. His legs were bowed from the hour upon hour that he spent riding—his only pastime. His walk, in consequence, had become awkward, almost foolish. And his blue eyes—his eyes the colour of the sky . . . there was something wrong with the way they looked at things. They looked and did not seem to see.
“Bror,” said his royal friend, as he welcomed him to Frederiks-borg, “I would like to know that you are happy.”
Bror laughed. He flayed some dust with his riding crop. “Remember,” he said, “Hans Mikkelson’s fly swat?”
“Yes.”
“That’s where I would like to be—back at the Koldinghus school. I wouldn’t even mind being in the cellar, for I would already know that you were going to rescue me.”
“But why would anyone wish to be back at the Koldinghus?” “Only so that I could be a boy again.”
Bror’s body was restless, always shifting and moving like one constantly searching for something that he had mislaid, yet not knowing what the lost thing might be. Even in sleep, he fidgeted all the time and his bolsters fell to the floor, and his sheets were bunched and tangled. Queen Sofie warned Christian that his friend was going mad.
But King Christian wanted to believe, at this moment of his assumption of power, that everything in his previous life had some meaning and had been ordained by God. God had decreed that King Frederik should die young, knowing how strong was Christian’s yearning to rule; God had decreed that his mind should be fertile enough to nurture within it five languages and so make himself understood and admired across Europe; God had decreed that Tycho Brahe’s recipe for a skyrocket should be given into his hands by the Duchess of Mecklenburg and God had decreed that he should save Bror Brorson’s life. Thus, Bror was part of God’s scheme of things. He had been saved for a reason.
At dawn on the morning of the coronation, Christian woke Bror.
Outside, in the grounds of Frederiksborg, the lake still held on its surface the glassy stillness of the night. In Bror’s wardrobe was hanging the suit of scarlet and gold he would wear on this day of days. In the state bedchamber were laid out the robes of white silk that would adorn the new King as he rode to church. On a velvet cushion in the vaults of the Frue Kirke sat the crown.
“Bror,” said Christian, “we are going to ride towards the sunrise.”
They mounted two headstrong horses bred from the Arab stallion once taken from a tailor’s assistant in return for the pardoning of a crime. They rode east through the forests at a tearing gallop till the horses were white with sweat. They did not stop at any obstacle in their pathway, but jumped over it, and only when the sun was up and already hot did they stop and drink from a stream and let the horses rest in the shade of the trees.
“Now,” said Christian, “we are alone. Nothing and no one is here but us and the horses and the forest, and you shall tell me now—before this day begins and my life takes a different course— what is wrong with you.”
Bror bent down and immersed his face in the sweet water of the brook, and held it there for so long that it was as if he did not intend to surface. But then he raised his head and wiped the water from his eyes with his hand. The sun glanced on him through the branches of beech and dappled him with shadows. He did not look at Christian, but at some distant thing he seemed to have spied among the bracken. “I have come to the conclusion,” he said, “that the human mind is like a piece of woven cloth. And my trouble is that mine ... or so it seems ... is all in threads . . .”
“You mean that you are confused?”
“Confusion usually has an ending. But these threads . . . I cannot seem to knit them back together . . .”
Christian said nothing, but only looked at his friend with a stem unblinking eye. Eventually he said: “Why has this happened to you, Bror?”
Bror picked out two stones from the water and rubbed them together in his hand, so that they made the strangely sweet piping sound of a skylark. “I do not know . . .”
“But there must be signs or clues?”
Bror returned to the stream, not to drink, but only to let the water trickle through his fingers as it bubbled onwards towards the wider rivers and the sea. “Perhaps,” he said at last, “it is because I have never, since that day when we exploded the skyrocket ...”
“Never what?”
“Never . . . since the Queen sent me away . . . found anything in the world to do.”
Christian was silent. What went through his mind were the thousand sinecures he could bestow, yet he could not at that moment think of one which did not demand of its recipient the ability to read and write. He asked himself whether he should give Br
or Brorson some menial occupation. Surely, he might make him a groom to care for his horses? But what would be the consequences of such an appointment? When he went by the stables, what would it do to him to remember that this was where his friend lodged now, in a room above the stalls?
Then it occurred to Christian that perhaps Bror’s terror of written words and all his struggles with them might now be in the past. He picked up a twig from the dewy grass and in the dust of the pathway wrote his name, Christian, and handed the stick to Bror. Bror knew what was being asked of him and his eyes began a rapid blinking, as though some blinding light had begun to distress them. Then he bent low over the path and, with the earnest concentration of a child, he traced out a single letter that he followed with a full stop. The letter was not quite a “B” and nor was it quite an “R,” but rather like an “R” that has repented of being an “R” and is in the middle of striving to become a “B.”
Bror looked up at Christian and Christian looked down at the cross-bred letter, and the only sound was that of the river in its eternal travelling over the bed of stones.
“It doesn’t matter, Bror,” Christian said at last. “Today I shall find you something magnificent to do! You will take part in the tilting competition and I stake my life on the certainty that you will win it.”
“I will try,” said Bror. “I will try to win it, for your sake.”
This was all there was to be done.
All his life, whenever the memory of Bror Brorson has surfaced to distress him, King Christian has repeated this sentence over and over again. On that day of the coronation, this was all there was to be done.
They say that even the sick and the dying of Copenhagen rose from their beds on that August morning. The streets were packed so tightly with people that, at times, it seemed that the air had nothing in it a man could breathe and some citizens began gasping and reaching up with their arms, trying to pull down towards themselves sweet breezes from the sky.
They moved and shouted as one scarlet and gold mass: the subjects of His Majesty King Christian IV, King of Denmark, King of Norway, King of the Goths and the Wends, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarm and Ditmarsten, Count of Oldenborg and Delmenhorst. On his grey horse, surrounded by drummers, trumpeters and men at arms, with children throwing flowers in his path, he rode to the Frue Kirke under a scarlet canopy held aloft by four of the nobles, and the sound of human shouting and wailing with emotion followed him every step of the way.
And then he entered the church and—as Christian remembers it—the interior was cold and silent, with the people and their cries and flowers shut out, and solemnity reigned and voices were stem and there was the smell of sorrow in there, sorrow for all the dead kings passed away and sorrow for the smallness of man in the midst of all his colossal strivings.
And as the three bishops approached, to lay with their six hands the crown on the young King’s head, it seemed to him that this was where the smell originated, in the vestments of the three bishops, purple and gold and white, and as he knelt before them and these vestments came round him and enclosed him, he had to fight against a feeling of repulsion and terror. For what the smell, by being all-enfolding and all-enclosing, seemed to negate was the very thing that was being bestowed upon Christian by the placing of the heavy crown on his head: earthly power. What the scent of the bishops’ robes affirmed was his own weakness and impotence in the sight of God. Over his head were being whispered the words of the anointing. He had arrived at the most important moment in his life. Yet what was such a moment? Man at his greatest is still mortal. A nail in the sole of his foot can snatch his life away. Kings can never outlive their subjects.
It was the first time in his life that King Christian understood that God was pitiless. The weight of the intricate jewelled crown, when it fell on him from the bishops’ hands, felt too heavy to be borne.
Then, at last, the service was over and he walked to the door of the Frue Kirke and once again out into the sunlight, where the crowds recommenced their cheering and, as the roar of their “Hosannahs” filled the air, he felt his melancholy pass and the crown on his head become light.
He looked above the people to the roofs of the houses and his eye rested there, and what it saw was a new skyscape of graceful towers, turrets and spires. Now that he was King, he would begin a programme of building such as Copenhagen had never seen. He would employ the best architects in the world, the most experienced craftsmen. Ingenuity and skill were the qualities that would count with him, just as they had counted with his father in his vigil against shoddiness, and into the cloudless air would rise a new city.
Somewhere behind him, wearing his red and gold clothes, stood Bror Brorson, ready to follow him to the coronation banquet, ready no doubt to beg of him a favour that would give some meaning to his restless existence. But Christian knew now that he could do nothing for Bror. He had been wrong to think that God—the cruel and pitiless God who had revealed Himself in the vestments of the bishops— had “saved” Bror for some future purpose. Bror had. no future purpose. It was fruitless to think that a man like this, who could not even write his name, could have any important place in the new Denmark which he, King Christian IV, was going to create. In the battles to come, Bror Brorson would have to fight his own fight all alone.
Yet still King Christian wanted to turn round, to swivel his head, to catch Bror’s eye just for a fleeting second, to see whether, by some look that would evoke the past, Bror would be able to make him change his mind. He wanted his decision put to the test. But at that moment the four nobles holding the canopy took up their places around him and the chancellor whispered to him: “Walk forward, Sir. Keep moving forward so that the procession can begin.”
And so he could not turn. Instead, he walked into the arms of his people who threw roses at his feet, and Bror Brorson trailed along some way behind him, smiling his vacant smile and never knowing that he was slowly disappearing from the King’s mind.
LETTER FROM THE REVEREND JAMES WHITTAKER CLAIRE TO HIS SON, PETER
My dear Son,
I am commanded by Charlotte to thank you for your kind letter to her and your gift of the Gypsy ear-ring. I have told her she must write to you herself, but she begs me to tell you that she is entirely taken up with the buying of petticoats, silk stockings, pillowcases, ribbons and the thousand other artefacts seemingly necessary to a bride’s future existence, and has no time at present to settle down to the task.
We are all glad to hear that you are returned to Copenhagen from Norway, and from the silver mine, which place did sound veiry lonely and where I would not like to have to picture you when—as happens very many times in a single day—my thoughts return to you. That the chestnuts are in bloom in Denmark gladdens my heart, for it means that summer has arrived there. In Suffolk, they have already blossomed and the blossom is fallen and the prickly husks of the fruit (which Charlotte used to describe as “tree furniture,” as you will remember!) grow green and hard. From this you will see that we are a little advanced in the season compared with you, but do not infer from this that we have in any wise left you behind or permit our lives to go on as though you were not still a precious part of them.
And so this brings me to the news which your mother says I should not be imparting to you, but which—after very much thought—I have nevertheless decided to bring to your attention.
Our old friend Anthony Grimes, choirmaster and organist of our church, has died. We buried him last Friday morning and he is laid to rest within the sound of the bells of St. Benedict the Healer. He will be mourned by everyone in the parish and none of us shall forget him. He was a musician of rare talent and a soul so very gentle that merely to come into his presence always worked in me a feeling of sweet tranquillity. I know that he is with the angels.
I must immediately set about the task of finding some new and younger choirmaster, so that we may continue to enjoy sublime music at St. Benedict the H. But it is now that there creeps into my mind
an idea. Why do you not come back to us, my beloved son, and take up this position? No one knows better than you what a high standard of musical excellence we have always maintained here and I can truly say to you that your talents would not be wasted. More than this, the stipend paid to the choirmaster is a good one and Anthony Grimes very frequently told me that he wanted for nothing in his life. More yet than this: I know how earnestly you wish to compose and not merely to play or sing. Well, my dear Peter, I can promise you firstly that time would be found among your duties for your own work. I would make you this sacred pledge. And I do not see why, with so fine a choir as we have, we should not try out your compositions during services and let the congregation of St. Benedict be your first audience.
In obedience to your mother, I shall by no means try to persuade you any further in this matter. If you do not wish to leave what is, after all, a royal position, then I shall understand and never mention it more. Know only how much my heart would rejoice to have you here, returned to the family and working within the sacred walls of my church.
Concerning other matters, let me give you a picture of Charlotte’s fiancé, Mr. George Middleton. He is a fleshy man, but this flesh of his seems kind. He dotes upon Charlotte and calls her his “dear Daisy” (though I know not why). When he laughs, which he does not infrequently, his chin performs an amusing kind of wobble. We have visited his house in Norfolk and it is large and comfortable, and he breeds cattle there and grows marrows and all manner of other new vegetables brought over from Holland and France, and is manifestly liked by his neighbours. In short, he is a good man and I can see in Charlotte’s eyes that she is hungry for him and hungry for his children and so I do believe that all of this will go on very well.
I shall hope to have some letter from you before the tree furniture has come to its last polishing and lies upon the ground.
From your loving father,
