Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  “Of course it is there!” says King Christian. “But when did you last stumble upon the thing that satisfied it?”

  The lutenist looks into the King’s eyes that are puffy and red for want of sleep, that are marked so clearly with the imprint of anxiety and grief. He longs to reveal to the King that in the person of Emilia Tilsen he finds an answer to his yearnings, that she fills him with amazement and affords him a vision of the man he wishes to be. But it strikes Peter Claire as cruel, at this moment in history, to speak to the King about love. That Emilia is tied to Kirsten as surely as he is tied to Christian makes it impossible.

  “I believe,” he says carefully, “that when our orchestra is playing in absolute harmony, then I experience ... for some moments at a time ...”

  “Wonderment?”

  “Fascination.”

  “May these be one and the same?”

  “Almost. I am drawn to such intense contemplation of the sound—seeming as one sound, but in reality composed of all our parts—that I am taken to some other part of myself.”

  “Wherein you feel hope or something akin to it?”

  “Yes. Wherein I am no longer this habitual semblance of myself that walks about and eats and sleeps and is idle, but myself entirely.” At this last remark King Christian begins to fiddle with his elfock, for the observation has led him to see how very far, in his fruitless tolerance of Kirsten’s wickedness, he has travelled from the man who once designed men o’ war in his dreams, who saved Denmark’s coastline from the sea, who gathered the vagrants of the city under the magnificent roof of the B0mehus and set them to work on spinning wheels and looms. “Ah.” He sighs. “There’s the trick: to find the way—whether forwards or back—to what we long to be.”

  For all Peter Claire’s eulogies on the subject of harmony, recent rehearsals in the cellar have been marked by discord.

  Jens Ingemann has had to keep tapping and tapping upon his stand: “Signor Rugieri, what is your sudden mania for fortissimo?

  Herr Krenze, you are letting ugly sounds escape from your mouth and none of any beauty from your instrument. Mr. Claire, you are behind. Can you no longer keep time?”

  It is as if the musicians are exhausted. When they congregate in the mornings, they barely speak to each other. They yawn. They stare out of their gloomy prison. In the absence of sunlight coming through the reticulated bricks, they see the long winter waiting just around the corner.

  And then, one afternoon, when they have been playing for the King for almost four hours, and the light is fading and the candles are lit and dripping wax onto the sheets of music, Rugieri and Martinelli lay down their bows as the trapdoor above them closes at last and Rugieri stands up and his chair falls over behind him. “Gentlemen!” he says. “Martinelli and I have been in conferenza. We say that to endure another winter in these conditions is insupportable! We shall all die from the cold. From some consumption. From sofferenza!"

  Martinelli runs his hands vigorously through his black, curly hair, as if to shake out such sofferenza as was already making its way into his head. “We ask what we have done,” he says, “we who are among the finest musicians in Europe—to deserve to be put in this dungeon. If you can tell us, Herr Ingemann, then tell us, per favore tell us, per favore enlighten us . . .”

  Jens Ingemann stares at the two Italians. He has ever been suspicious of them, fearing some such outburst from men who do not save their passion for their music, but who allow themselves to spend it upon ephemeral feelings. He does not answer them, but only glares at them, then lets the full iciness of his glare pass round the whole complement of players, so that all are held by its frozen grip. At this moment Rugieri takes out, from behind his music, a piece of parchment and holds it up. “Una petizione," he announces. “We drew this up last night. We ask the King to consider our situation. We ask him to imagine how much we suffer here, with the cold stones and the chickens . . ."

  “Sit down, Signor Rugieri,” says Ingemann suddenly and gives his music stand a swipe with his hand.

  “No!” says Rugieri. “No, Music Master. We are not the only ones to dare to say we are badly treated. Herr Krenze and Monsieur Pasquier we know are on our side and will sign our petition. And if all shall sign—”

  “None of you shall sign,” says Ingemann. “There will be no petition.”

  Martinelli now lets out a noise that is somewhere between a sigh and a scream. Then, in a burst of Italian, he cries out that he is beginning to go mad in the cellar, that in his country only common criminals and the truly insane are put in such places, that the music itself, though he finds it beautiful, is not compensation enough, that he is not a cask of wine and refuses to grow old in a vault.

  Krenze smirks. When silence falls after Rugieri’s outburst, which not all have understood, the German viol player remarks that were he a cask of wine, he would be treated with a fine reverence, for the King prefers wine not only to music but to almost everything else in his kingdom. Ingemann snaps that he may have to report this observation to His Majesty. Pasquier, who has worn himself out learning Danish and refuses to embark upon Italian, inquires what Martinelli has said. Rugieri jabs his petizione and screams that King Christian is a man who has known suffering and thus can sympathise with theirs. Peter Claire, ignoring the cold fury that he sees rising in Ingemann’s breast, asks for the petition to be read aloud.

  The petizione is written in Danish, not entirely free from errors. Though Jens Ingemann pretends to block his ears, Rugieri begins to read it out:

  To His Majesty the King,

  We the undersigned, his loyal makers of Sound, do beg him to hear our thoughts and this is they: that we are sad to be in somesuch cellar that we suffer so dearly from cold that our fingers have no blood in them . . .

  “What pathetic fault-strewn rubbish is this?” interjects Ingemann.

  There is a moment’s silence before Rugieri, looking away from Jens Ingemann, continues:

  And we do pray to His Majesty that he hear our praying to him in this our peti&one, and that he do remove us to an elsewhere place . . .

  “Enough!” shrieks Ingemann. “In all my life, I have not been among such idlers and fools. What are you made of? Milk? For what a stink you do make in your sourness, with your petty grievances and complaints. What a smell your want of resolution leaves behind it!”

  “Hey-ho,” says Krenze. “Now the morality. And trying to be poetry all the while . . .”

  But Ingemann gives this no attention and continues. “Do you not know,” he says, “that musicians from all over the world send letters to me, week by week, begging for places in this orchestra? Do you not understand that you can be replaced in a trice, in the time it takes to travel across the North Sea? And so you shall be replaced! Not one of you understands the reasons for our being below the State rooms, for none of you are men of intelligence or sensibility, so you cannot conceive of any reasons. And this I shall convey to the King: that his musicians have no understanding of anything. And you will be sent away.”

  Snatching up his sheets of music, Jens Ingemann marches out of the cellar. There is silence in his wake, broken only by the sound of his furious footsteps ascending the narrow stairway to the rooms above.

  Later that night, King Christian sends for Peter Claire. “Lutenist,” he says wearily, “I hear there is a mutiny.”

  He does not seem alarmed, nor even anxious, merely tired. It is as though, in comparison with the afflictions of his heart, this mutiny of the musicians is of no real consequence. Viol players and lutenists are replaceable; Kirsten is not.

  Peter Claire is silent for a moment, then chooses his words with care. “Music Master Ingemann once told me that the cold in the cellar affected the Italians more than the others, because their blood is not used to it. Perhaps you may have some sympathy with this? And it is only this, Sir. That they fear illness as the winter comes on . . .”

  King Christian is weighing silver, just as he was on the night of Peter Claire’s ar
rival at Rosenborg. The scales themselves are objects of great beauty and the King has three sets of weights in Mark, Lod and Quint. The smallest weight, he says, can measure as little as one gram. And Christian’s large hands, roughened by his hours out hunting, nevertheless manipulate the tools with surprising delicacy. “What about you?” he asks. “Have you forgotten your sacred trust to me? Angels should not mutiny!”

  Peter Claire replies that he has not forgotten his trust and that he does not mind the cold in the cellar. Merely, he sees how others in the orchestra are beginning to suffer.

  The expression on the King’s face is blank. This blankness says: The word suffering is too strong to describe the habitual chill in the vaults. The King is suffering, the poor of the country are suffering, Denmark’s reputation—in her descent into debt and poverty—is suffering! But what these querulous musicians describe is merely discomfort and they should not pretend otherwise.

  But then he lays aside the weights and says, “Monsieur Descartes, as you once reminded me, tells us that when we are perplexed we should endeavour to reduce complex propositions to simple ones and then, from the simple, work our way, stage by stage, back up to complexity. Do you still believe in this method, Mr. Claire?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “But when it comes to matters of feeling, how are we really to apply it? In the building of a whaling ship I could proceed thus. Ships I understand. But love is incomprehensible to me. For there is nothing in love that is knowable beyond all doubt.”

  “Imagine love as a whaling ship,” says Peter Claire. “To build it strongly, you would begin with a strong hull. Ask, then, if the hull of your love was strong.”

  The King stares at the lutenist. Into his mind comes the old remembrance of the first time that he set eyes upon Kirsten Munk, wearing a russet dress, in a church pew. A smile passes fleetingly across his face as he replies: “No. I used to believe the ‘hull’ was strong. But now I think it was built upon a fancy, upon imagination.” “Imagination may also bring forth the design of a magnificent ship ...”

  The smile returns and then goes. Goes and returns. “True. But then must enter mathematical calculations. Then must enter some knowledge of future weight and stress, so that at sea the ‘imagined’ ship will still stay up and not founder.”

  “And in matters of love this future weight and stress is unknowable at the beginning?”

  “Yes. It is unknowable—in all cases.”

  “Yet known eventually—at which point new calculations can be made and the ship modified if the need arises.”

  “Or scrapped. Or scuttled.”

  “Yes. If the original design is found to be faulty at its core.”

  “Yes. If, after all, it is faulty at its core . . .”

  “And so, in discovering this, you have after all proceeded from the unknowable to something known.”

  The King is silent for a moment. Then he gets up and looks out of the window, where a waning moon is thin and cold in the sky. He stares at this moon for a long time before he turns and says: “Tell Jens Ingemann and the musicians that the mutiny is no longer relevant. The orchestra will not be in the cellar this winter, for I have decided to move back to Frederiksborg. There is no magical music there and nor will ever be.

  “All this”—and here the King gestures round at the room, at his portraits and mementoes of Kirsten, at the gardens invisible in the darkness—“was born out of caprice, out of rhapsody, and I refuse to inhabit it any more.”

  THE VISIT

  Vibeke Kruse has begun to lose weight.

  This loss of fat from around her waist and stomach, from her thighs and arms, seems to have come about miraculously since the arrival at Boller of Kirsten and Emilia. And a few pounds, once lost, have inspired her at last to make the sacrifices Ellen Marsvin has been urging upon her: to forgo the cakes, tarts and puddings which so delight her, to refrain from heaping up by her bedside little baskets of sugared plums and raisins dipped in peach brandy to quench her pangs and longings in the middle of the night.

  Now, she can allow herself to dream once again of the magnificent dresses she has never been able to wear, but which wait for her under linen wraps in Fru Marsvin’s dressing closet. She is frequently to be found tiptoeing into this closet, removing the wraps and gazing at the beautiful garments. She runs her fingers along the lines of embroidery and caresses the clusters of velvet bows. She wishes the dresses were housed in her own room so that when a yearning for sweetness came over her in the small hours, she could get up and hold against her tongue the syrupy satin of a puffed sleeve, the frothy syllabub of a lace cuff.

  But Vibeke consoles herself with the knowledge that the day is not far off when she will at last put on these marvels. And following on from that day, something else will happen—she knows this in the deepest recesses of her heart. Not a word has been spoken by Ellen Marsvin on the subject of this something else, yet Vibeke knows that it is coming. There is a plan.

  As the days pass and the leaves fall and Vibeke Kruse feels the autumn brightness refected on her complexion and in her lively eyes, so, in strange contrast, does Emilia Tilsen have the sense that she is sinking into an unstoppable drabness.

  When she looks in her glass, she sees a face she almost does not recognise, that was not the face she saw at Rosenborg; her lips not those once kissed by Peter Claire; her eyes not those he gazed at. She begins to curse that fate that brought her back to Jutland. She has come to believe that only while Karen lived could she be happy in this landscape. Now the very sky oppresses her, the very scent of the forests, the very sound of the wind . . .

  No letter arrives from Copenhagen.

  To console herself, Emilia tries to imagine the time a letter might take to arrive here, in this place far from anywhere else. Through her mind rambles a picture of a slow, tired horse or mule, of a letter-bag leaking with the rain. She tries to believe that weeks—or even months—could easily pass before any words written at Rosenborg will arrive in her hands. And when Kirsten asks her, with a teasing smile on her lips, “What of the English lutenist, Emilia? What songs does he send you?” she replies simply that there are no songs yet.

  “ ‘Yet’?” asks Kirsten. “What is this ‘yet,’ my dear Emilia? Is this ‘yet’ not burdened with a weight of expectation it really cannot carry?”

  “No,” says Emilia. “I do not think so.”

  For she does believe that something will arrive. Just as Vibeke Kruse knows that life has some marvels still in store for her, so Emilia Tilsen knows that what began in the cellar at Rosenborg, while the hens scratched in the dust, and continued out in the air by the flying birds of the aviary is not ended, cannot end like this in a slow fading to silence. Merely, she tells herself, there are moments in a life when patience must become the spirit’s sole companion. If she sometimes composes letters to Peter Claire while she lies in her bed and listens to the white owls calling in the woods, she knows that she will not write them, or that if she writes them, she will not send them. She will wait. That is all. She will wait for Peter Claire to keep his promises.

  Meanwhile, Kirsten announces to her that the time has come for a visit to Johann and Magdalena.

  “We shall give them a little warning—a day or somesuch time—for that is only polite,” says Kirsten. “But not so long that they can make any alteration to the household or conceal from us anything they might wish to hide. And so, in a very short time, Emilia, you will be reunited with Marcus and together we shall play with his kitten, Otto.”

  It is a cold day that Kirsten chooses.

  Grey-upon-grey are the folds of the sky as she and Emilia set out in Ellen Marsvin’s best carriage, with all the trappings of the horses polished and bright, and taking with them a gift of cherry jam in an ugly Flemish pot for Magdalena and a ball of scarlet wool for Marcus’s cat.

  Emilia has dressed herself in black. At her neck is her locket containing Karen’s picture. On her forehead are visible the little lines of disqui
et and suffering which wake in Kirsten a gentle tenderness towards her. And in the carriage, Kirsten (who is looking large and resplendent in a brocaded dress of green and gold, with her belly huge as a bell) picks up one of Emilia’s diminutive hands and presses it to her powdered cheek. “We shall vanquish them, Emilia!” she says. “I am still the King’s wife. They must do all that I shall ask.”

  And so, past the fruit fields, where the fruit is picked and gone, and the foliage turning to brown and red, the carriage goes forwards and always forwards until it arrives at the driveway to the Tilsen house. Emilia is silent. And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them.

  When they go in, Emilia hangs back behind Kirsten, in her shadow, almost as if she believed she could slip in unseen and only watch and listen but not be required to speak nor feel her father’s icy kiss on her cheek, nor catch the scent of Magdalena’s body, nor the sour-milk smell of the baby.

  The hallway is dark, as it always was, and so it is in the familiar half-light that Emilia sees them standing there in a line: Johann and Magdalena, then Ingmar and Wilhelm, Boris and Matti, and, beside Matti, baby Ulla in her cradle.

  She looks along the line, notes at once that her brothers all seem larger than when last she saw them and that Ingmar is now taller than his father. But where is Marcus? Emilia lets her eye travel to the oak settle, behind which he often used to hide when strangers came to the house. She wonders if this is where he is. She wants to call to him, to tell him that she’s arrived at last, that it’s safe to come out. Yet she knows that she must hold herself in check on this most troubling visit, that neither her face nor her words must betray her feelings. “You are to be neutral, Emilia,” Kirsten has said. “Do you understand what I mean by this?”

  Emilia understands. Kirsten means that she must be allowed to work her own, long-perfected brand of diplomacy and that Emilia must act as if there were no whiff of cunning in the air, no transaction—spoken or unspoken—taking place. Kirsten has promised her that, at the end of the afternoon when they get back into their carriage, Marcus will be with them. He and the kitten, Otto. He and the mechanical bird. And his pony will trot behind with its bridle bells making music in the dusk . . .