by Rose Tremain
When all five dresses had been tried and it was found that none of them fitted, Ellen Marsvin sat down and put her head in her hands. “Really,” she said, “it is a great disappointment, Vibeke. The cost of these gowns is enormous and I certainly cannot afford to repeat it. Happily, you brought with you your own wardrobe, which must now serve you . . .”
“Oh, no!” said Vibeke. “It must only be that since coming to Boller I have let myself put on too much weight. If the dresses could only be kept for me then I will promise to curb my eating, which I know is a fault in me and one that I must address. I beg you, Fru Marsvin, do not give the dresses away! Let the seamstresses come back in one month and I swear they will fit me then.”
“Ah,” said Ellen, “but it is summer now, Vibeke, when the food at Boller is at its most plentiful, when the cream is thickest, when the mutton is at its most tasty and tender ...”
“I know,” said Vibeke, who felt by now that she would like to weep (but yet also, at the mention of “tender mutton,” felt an involuntary pang of hunger). “I know, Fru Marsvin, but I swear I shall devise some regimen and keep to it steadfastly, if only these gowns can be mine ...”
Ellen shook her head and raised her eyes to Vibeke sadly, as if to say, You will not do it, you will be tempted from it and you will fail, but then at last she turned to the seamstresses, whose faces betrayed nothing and were every inch as grave and sorrowful as Ellen could have wished, and said: “Let the dresses be kept for Frøken Kruse for six weeks. I shall send for you if her measurements show signs of alteration, but if I do not send, despatch the gowns to Rosenborg for one or other of my daughter’s women.”
A sound then escaped from Vibeke’s throat. Ellen Marsvin will later liken this little sound of anguish to the cry of the blue marsh bittern, very rare in Jutland since the drought of 1589. “Whenever I hear the little shriek of the marsh bittern,” Ellen will say, “I am reminded of the mint root and its secret ways.”
THE ANNUNCIATION
It is July now, the month when King Christian expects to see the first ingots of silver brought down to Copenhagen from the N umedal mine.
The vision of silver in quantities so great that all his debts will soon be paid provides a safe haven for Christian’s anxious mind. When memories of Denmark’s defeat in the Religious Wars plague him with fury and remorse, he turns his thoughts to the valley of the Isfoss and the million upon million of dalers imprisoned there in the rock. He gives to these dalers (which he no longer sees as lumps of ore but as new-minted coinage) a consciousness and a will. He imagines them yearning to be free, yearning to arrive in his coffers, yearning to be sifted by his royal hands, yearning to serve him. On countless nights, he calls to sleep from the safety of this reverie of money and sleep almost always arrives.
Now, as July begins to pass and still no silver has arrived, Christian starts to fret.
He sits in his study, doing the nation’s arithmetic and arriving always at a balance that brings on his indigestion. Everywhere he looks in the country there is need. He finds himself wondering whether there might be something else, some other commodity than hard currency, that could answer this need. But what might that “other commodity” be? Could dykes be constructed without earth and men to move that earth? Would men do this work if they were not paid? No doubt other kings had dreamed of a nation in which their subjects were content to gather up the leaves of autumn and call them gold. But in the end there is no remedy for need except money and more money after that—in quantities that are always and evermore increasing as time runs on and tomorrow’s dreams become today’s necessities.
King Christian writes out a list entitled Extreme Measures in the Event of the Failure of the Mine. These measures include the melting down of his private plate collection and the pawning of Iceland to a consortium of merchants from Hamburg. He also writes down the word “Mother.” He adds several question marks after the word, but does not cross it off the list. It was Kirsten who once told him that the Dowager Queen was “sitting like a widow spider on a fat fortune at Kronborg,” but Kirsten could give no proof of this, only “the common knowledge that it is true,” and so he cannot know, given the long history of quarrels between the two women, whether this is a fact or a pure invention. Whenever he speaks to his mother about money, she always pleads poverty. “I have barely enough,” she says, “to buy a basket of anchovies.”
Kirsten comes to him one evening as he is doing his sums for the tenth or eleventh time. There is still light at his window and Kirsten places herself before him in such a way that this last golden radiance of the day falls across her face, turning her white skin to amber and discovering little coils of flame in her hair.
Christian puts aside his pen and replaces the stopper of the inkwell. He looks at Kirsten. He perceives no malice or fury in her, but a meekness that is almost tender and which reminds him of the early days of his marriage when she had been soft and malleable in his hands. “Well, my Mouse?” he says.
She sits very upright on the chair, with a smile just lifting the comers of her mouth. “Am I disturbing you?” she asks.
“Only from work that gives me stomach ache.”
“What work is that?” she asks and now, for the first time, Christian notices that she seems nervous. In her hands she holds a little bottle of salts and this she keeps turning and turning in her lap.
“Accounts,” he replies gently. “But all will be well when the silver arrives from the Numedal. What is the matter, Mouse?”
She lifts her head into the golden light. “Nothing,” she says, “or at least I hope you will think it a ‘nothing,’ or rather something to gladden you, and this is it: when the winter comes, I shall put into your arms another child.”
Christian finds that he cannot speak. The realisation that Kirsten still remains, in spite of all her tantrums and rejections, her sulks and accusations, her storms of weeping and her wild behaviour, his true wife and that her body could take his seed into it and let it engender a new life, thereby cementing again the bond between them, sends surging to his breast such an overflow of love and gratitude that he feels tears start in his eyes. In an instant, all his worries about the nation’s precarious financial state fall away from him and are forgotten. He holds out his arms. “Kirsten,” he says, “come to me. Let us give thanks to God, who brought us together in His house and holds you to me still.”
The sun is moving very fast now towards its setting and the gold is gone from Kirsten’s face and she is in shadow. She has opened her bottle of salts and is holding them to her nostrils, as though she felt herself about to faint. But then she seems to master the frailty that threatened to overcome her and she rises and comes to the
King. He reaches out for her as ardently as he had reached for her on the day when he first became her lover. He sits her on his knee and kisses her mouth.
King Christian has a private notebook in which he occasionally writes down the thoughts and meditations which seem to come into his mind uninvited.
These Phantom Observations, as he calls them, fascinate him far more than what he terms his “habitual mundane philosophising.” Part of this fascination lies in the fact that he does not know where these things have originated nor how they have come into his head. Is the human brain like a plot of earth where crops, flowers, weeds and even the embryos of mighty trees could seed themselves according to the direction of the wind or the flight patterns of birds? If so, might it be overtaken by the random—as if by giant roots and thistles—so that reason has no space in which to thrive? Should a man strive, therefore, only to let in those thoughts which proceed logically from other thoughts and to protect himself from everything that had about it the feeling of uninvitedness? Or, might it be true that certain kinds of valuable perception only arrive as the wind-blown seed arrives in the water meadow, their provenance for ever unknown or unrecorded?
What absorbs Christian about all this is that he does not know the answer to any of it. It resists the defini
tive. But year by year, his notebooks fill up with these ghosts, these shadows, which, when he reads them again, sometimes seem to have no meaning at all, as if they were the jottings of a madman. One day, he tells himself, he will make a pyre of the notebooks and let all the thoughts and halfthoughts scribbled there rise up as smoke into the vacancy from which they have come.
Later on the night of Kirsten’s announcement of her pregnancy, when darkness has come on and he is once again alone, Christian feels himself suddenly tormented by one of these uninvited ideas and this is it: he has dreamed Kirsten’s visit. When the brain is overburdened with worry—as his is now—it can start to see strange visitations, to conjure reveries, and this is one such insubstantial thing. The truth is that Kirsten never came into his room, never sat where the evening light touched her features, never spoke a word. The truth is that she has never been there at all.
Christian hurls his large body out of bed and takes up the lamp. He wakes no servant but goes alone and unshod over the cold marble floors until he comes to Kirsten’s rooms.
His knock is answered by the young woman, Emilia, and he can see that beyond her there are lights in the chamber, as though Kirsten had decided to stay up late, to play cards or gossip with her women. But when he pushes past Emilia he realises that the bedroom is empty. The bed has been made ready for the night, but it has not been slept in.
“Did she come to me?” asks the King.
Emilia looks confused. “Come to you, Sir?”
“Earlier this evening. Just as the sun was setting. Did she come to my rooms?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Where is she now, Emilia? Which part of the palace?”
Emilia holds herself very still but looks away from the King when she says: “She has gone out of Copenhagen, Your Majesty— just for the evening . . .”
“Gone out of Copenhagen? To what end? To whose house?”
“She did not say, Sir. She asked me to wait up for her, that is all.”
King Christian walks to Kirsten’s bed and stares at it. Then he reaches out and picks up the lace edging of the sheet and begins to fold it over towards the bed-head. He does this very tenderly, almost as though he saw Kirsten asleep there, with her hair spread in a fiery halo on the pillow, and was trying to cover her from the night’s chill.
Since his meeting in the cellar with Emilia, Peter Claire has felt himself to be living in a mild state of astonishment.
He finds it almost difficult to believe that what was said there can possibly have been said. He plays and replays the conversation, as though it might be a piece of music, the performance of which could be expected to undergo a gradual amelioration. Except that there is no amelioration. The stark fact remains: he offered his love to Emilia Tilsen and Emilia Tilsen refused him. In any version of the dialogue, however worded or reconstituted, her refusal is there and cannot be ignored.
It puzzles him more than it might puzzle other men because he is not used to being refused. In his twenty-seven years of life, women have behaved towards Peter Claire as the sea behaves towards the wind. His power to disturb their calm, to whip up their longings and even—at some ardent soiree in the early hours—to cause their mouths to be touched with a fleck of passionate foam, has never before deserted him. Yet now, when at last his feelings run deep and sure, when he seems to know that his future lies with Emilia and that a truly happy life would await him if his love were reciprocated, this one young woman appears as indifferent to him as stone. She was far more affected by the hens in their plight, by concern and sorrow for them, than by his declaration. She told him plainly that no understanding between them ever existed.
Yet she did come to the rendezvous.
In this one fact, Peter Claire chooses to see some reassurance. His note to her might simply have been ignored—as a thousand such hasty letters are glanced at and thrown away—and it was not. And Emilia seemed, as she descended into the vaults . . . what did she seem? Not quite, perhaps, the immovable stone he has conjured. Rather, a little like a tree, a sapling, that is too low to be rocked by the wind, but nevertheless finds itself in a small state of agitation.
And something else fills him with a strange wonderment:
Emilia’s refusal has made her more beautiful to him. It has given her a mystery that she had not previously possessed.
He wishes that his sister, Charlotte, were here to tell him what to do next. Is he to take the refusal merely as a sign of Emilia’s modesty and goodness, and so devise some continuation of his wooing of her that will nevertheless assure her how much he prizes these things in her? Or should he cease all advances to her, in the expectation that she might then regret her severity in the cellar and give him some sign that she would welcome their renewal?
Peter Claire sits in the refectory with Jens Ingemann and ponders these questions and, at last, asks the music master how he himself considers the great question of love.
They are eating herring with mustard. The quantity of mustard Jens Ingemann has spread around his herring is surprising.
“I do not consider the so-called question of love at all,” says Ingemann baldly.
“You mean that you never think about it, Herr Ingemann?”
“I mean that I believe it to be irrelevant to any intelligent life.”
“And yet—”
“There are no ‘and yets,’ Mr. Claire. What we aggrandise with the term ‘love’ is the selfsame involuntary thing that consumes the stench toad at the end of winter.”
They eat the herring. Jens Ingemann swirls the salty fish in its bath of yellow and swallows it fast. After a while, Peter Claire says: “Did you believe this when you were young?”
“Oh, yes. That is not to say that I did not enjoy behaving like a toad. And it may be that toads experience rapture. Why should they not? And who can say, if toads had language, that they would not call it something else? Now, if you are asking me about the love of God, or my love of music, then I would give you a different answer.”
“These are the things which bind you to the world? Nothing and no one else?”
“Bind me to the world?” Here, Jens Ingemann swallows his last morsel of herring in its mustard bath and lets a cold smile cross his features. “They do not bind me to the world, Mr. Claire. Far from it. They remind me that the world is a hideous and darkling pit from which I hope soon to escape.”
He wipes his mouth with a linen napkin, then folds the napkin into a small neat square and places it beside his plate. Peter Claire finds himself transfixed by these actions, as though he expected them to reveal to him some important truth missing from the conversation. He knows that all they reveal, in fact, is Jens Ingemann’s fastidiousness and passion for order, and that now, just as he does every mealtime, Jens Ingemann will close his eyes in a silent grace, then get up and return his chair to its rightful position in regard to the table, and walk slowly out of the refectory. But he wants, before he lets this happen, to ask the music master one last question, and so he puts out a hand to forestall the grace and says hurriedly: “Music Master, what do you say, then, about the King’s love for his wife?”
Jens Ingemann’s eyes, on the point of closing—as though the grace were a momentary sleep which overcame him every day at this hour—open reluctantly. “I say,” he intones in a weary voice, “that it is the greatest misery ever to come upon him.”
Peter Claire leaves the refectory at last and walks out of the palace gates and into the city, and loses himself in the crowds of the market-place. He does not know what he hopes to find among the shoe menders, the oyster sellers and the weavers, but to be here, to be in the world outside Rosenborg, always brings to him a familiar gladness of spirit, as if he were a child again and riding with his mother to see the fair at Woodbridge.
He pauses by a ribbon maker’s stall and buys some white satin ribbons for Charlotte. When he holds them in his hands it is not Charlotte that he sees; his mind threads them into Emilia’s brown hair and he imagines the
scent of the hair and the soft warmth of the nape of her neck, and the silky ribbons falling down her back.
I am moving on a wire suspended above a chasm: this is how my Life appears to me. Will the wire break? Will I be cast onto the rocks of disgrace and misery? Or shall I continue to balance by some miracle in my world between the sky and the earth?
The success of my Announcement to the King (seeming to create in him not one whit of mistrust, but only the same innocent joyfulness with which he has greeted the news of the conception of all our many Children) brought to my breast such Relief that I was seized with an immediate Recklessness and did something which, I do declare, could have been my Undoing, had matters so conspired against me. I ordered a carriage to be brought to my door and, wearing a mask of feathers and carrying with me a riding crop, I fled in it to Otto’s lodgings.
Now, I had sworn to myself that I would not weaken and visit my lover in Copenhagen until the whole matter of his Child had settled so deeply into its Coverlet of Lies that I was no longer at any risk from Accusations of Treason. But on that fine evening, in the wake of my excellent Performance as the King’s loyal wife, my rage to mate with the Count was such that I could not master it by any means and do declare that I was in every particular no better than a mare in her Heat who, at the merest sniff of the stallion, reveals to him her inviting second Mouth, like a sudden vulgar pink orchid touched with dew.
Otto was with a group of Cronies playing cards. When the message that “Brigitte” awaited him was taken to him, he came at once into the room where I waited and said to me: “Alas, it is my turn to deal a hand. I cannot be absent from the room longer than three or four minutes.”
