by Rose Tremain
Emilia leads Marcus by the hand until they come close. Kirsten stares at him over her embroidered sheet and the furs heaped on the bed. “He is a wraith, Emilia,” she says. “They have turned him into a ghost.”
Marcus’s face, like Emilia’s, is heart-shaped and pale, but thin as a pauper’s. His grey eyes roam the room, looking at Kirsten, then away from her, to her bed curtains, to her clothes hanging on an armoire, to the fire which bums in her hearth.
“Marcus,” says Emilia gently, “this is the King’s wife, Lady Kirsten. Will you bow to her?”
Emilia can feel his body shivering. His grip on her hand tightens.
“Oh,” says Kirsten, still caressing her full lips with the black quill, “we are not at court now, God be praised. Bowing is for fools. But where is your cat, Marcus? Where is Otto?”
At the word “Otto,” Marcus looks about him, as though the cat might be in the room. When he does not find it there, he shakes his head.
“Did the poor child run away from Arhus?” Kirsten asks Emilia. “How could he have travelled so far?”
“I don’t know,” replies Emilia. “Or perhaps he was never there?” “Never there? Well, good heavens, Emilia, have you considered how on earth we are to combat all their hundred and one deceits?” Kirsten flounces from her bed then, in her petticoats, with her legs bare among the rumpled sheets, and begins brushing her wild hair. “You have given this insufficient thought!” she says crossly. “But, luckily for you, my mind is now beginning to work very fast. First of all, we must have the co-operation of my mother and Vibeke, and the other dim-witted servants. They must collude with us—with everything that I shall put in train—or else you know that your father will come and snatch the boy away.”
“I expect he will try,” says Emilia. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless he sees it as a blessing: the last of my mother, gone . . .” “Well, I do not think that we can rely on that. Now. You must do precisely what I say, Emilia. Marcus will sleep on a cot in your room and, if you want to keep him at Boller, you must not let the poor little ghost out of your sight!”
Marcus watches as the mattress and the bolsters are laid on the cot. Then he sits down on the floor and removes his shoes, beneath which his small feet are red and grimy. He takes off his brown jerkin, then goes to the cot and climbs into it.
“Marcus,” says Emilia, “it is not night-time yet. In a while we shall give you some supper.”
But he pays no attention to this. He lies down in the little bed and stares up at the ceiling. “Emilia," he whispers again. “Emilia."
THE THOUGHTS OF MARCUS TILSEN, AGED FIVE, ON THE EVE OF CHRISTMAS
Magdalena said if you are good the angels will come and fill your shoes with gold buttons when you are asleep but if you are awake and see them they will fly away at once and then in the morning there will be nothing only your empty shoes and what a shame that will be.
I went into the forest to see if the angels were waiting there drying their wings under the trees waiting to fly to me I hid in the trees and called angel are you there but not loudly in case my father could hear.
My father always said Marcus this habit of yours to go wandering away from the house we know not where or when is a wicked thing and one day you will be lost and we shall not know how to find you and what will become of you then.
He does not know that in the forest are voices they are everywhere in the leaves and in the wind.
I said where are the angels with their draggled wings and the voices said wait and hide and be quiet as a squirrel Marcus put your arms round the trunk of a beech tree and never move and you will see them and I said will they come in the night and fill my shoes with gold buttons and the voices said they did not know.
The snow began to come down once I asked my father where is it kept when it is not falling and he said you do not see the world properly Marcus despite all my efforts to teach you and this makes me very angry.
The angel was wearing a grey cloak and digging in the earth and then she turned towards me and the voices said she is not an angel she is Emilia she has been sending messengers from far away to find you but they have never arrived but now she has found you and you can run to her and she will take you away from Magdalena the witch and you will never come back you will never come back you will never come back.
My cat Otto is left behind.
I am in a bed in Emilia’s room and my shoes are put outside the door for the angels and Emilia sits by me and whispers where have all your words gone Marcus have they gone up into the sky right up into the black sky above the snow clouds or did you leave them in the forest how shall we find them again and I reach up and touch her hair and she sings me a song about the snow.
Outside in the passageway the angels are arriving I can hear them they are not as quiet as they are supposed to be they are laughing as they fill my shoes and their wings brush against the walls.
MAGDALENA’S CHRISTMAS GIFT
Johann Tilsen and his sons searched for Marcus in the darkness until midnight. When the search party returned to the house, Magdalena made them drink hot elderflower wine to warm them and said: “Marcus will not be found until he wishes to be found, so why do you wear yourselves out so uselessly?”
Johann nodded. He had foreseen this disappearance of Marcus. It was as if it had only been a matter of time. Because Marcus was as fidgety as the wind, as a blown seed on the eddies of the wind. One day, Johann would look in all the places where Marcus hid but not find him. And after that he might never be found because this is what he seemed to want to do: put himself beyond everybody’s reach.
Johann nevertheless announced that the hunt would begin again in the morning, as soon as it was light, and they would go on horseback and not only search in the woods and forests, and the fruit fields and along the lake, and on the island in the middle of the lake, but also ride over to Boller. “As we know,” he said, “word that Emilia is at Boller might have come to Marcus by some means that we had not predicted.”
They retired to bed. Weary as he was, Johann Tilsen felt an urgent desire to make love to his wife before he let sleep take him.
Now, on Christmas Day, a low sun comes up out of the landscape and coaxes a brightness that no one seems to have seen for a long while. And in this brightness, thinks Johann Tilsen, nothing can stay hidden. He imagines how the Christmas church-goers, dressed in black, would stand out against the blinding white ground, how the pheasants would appear feathered in a sleek new livery. And he tries to imagine Marcus walking towards him through the powdery snow, but the image is unstable; it comes and goes and, after a while, will not return.
Johann and Ingmar, with Wilhelm, Boris and Matti, set off towards nine o’clock, leaving Magdalena to supervise the roasting of the goose. Content in her kitchen, chivvying her maids for breadcrumbs and dried apricots and cloves, for chestnuts and pork dripping, Magdalena kneads the goose stuffing with her powerful hands and tells herself that perhaps today, Christmas Day 1629, one era is ending and another beginning.
Supplanting the dead wife, Karen, had not been difficult. Seducing Johann had been as easy as trapping a fly with treacle. That the four elder boys were all her captives she did not doubt. Magdalena reigned in the household, her own child was thriving on her abundant milk. For most of the time she believed that her future was assured and comfortable.
Yet now and then she was dismayed to see some vestige of Karen’s power remaining, revealed to her by some look in Johann’s eye, by some item of his first wife’s clothing found and kept when it should have been thrown away, by some snatch of song remembered by one of the boys. And all of this Magdalena hated with such a passion that she could feel herself fly into an uncontainable fury within a few seconds.
Nowhere did that fury invade her more frequently than when she found herself with Marcus. For a long time now, she had wanted to be rid of him. Rumour that a house of employment and correction, modelled on the King’
s Børnehus in Copenhagen, had been set up in Arhus inflamed her with longing to take the child there and leave him to his ghostly existence far from her sight. That Johann would not permit this felt to her like a betrayal, only mitigated a little when she was able to announce to Karen’s daughter that this was where her brother was—because he deserved correction, because he refused to be happy, because he was lapsing into a silence that no one seemed able to break.
On the day of Kirsten and Emilia’s visit, Johann had hidden Marcus in the cellar, for fear that he would beg Emilia to take him away.
“Let her take him!” Magdalena had said. “Let him go where he will!” But Johann had refused to yield. He, too, Magdalena dearly saw, was haunted by the child whose birth had been the cause of Karen’s death.
And now, miraculously, Marcus was gone. He was gone to some place of his own choosing, where he might never be found. Magdalena sings as she fills the goose’s rump end with the heavy chestnut and apricot stuffing. She pats the damp, pimply skin that will roast to a succulent amber crispness. She eats a pickled egg.
As the stuffed goose is being placed in a baking dish, Ingmar arrives in the kitchen.
He tells Magdalena that his horse has gone lame and that he has walked it slowly home while Johann and the other boys have ridden on towards the lake. So far, there has been no sign of Marcus.
Ingmar stands on the opposite side of the wooden table to Magdalena as she leans over the goose, still patting it and adjusting its limbs, then starting to rub them with salt. He does not move. He stares.
“A lovely big goose,” Magdalena says as she works.
She knows Ingmar is staring not at the bird, on which they are all going to feast, but at her own breasts, still heavy with milk, still too plump for the dress she wears.
She reaches for another handful of salt. She leans even further towards Ingmar, her reddened hands working more vigorously than before, so that her breasts move from side to side. And she does not need to look up at Ingmar to know what he wants nor to decide that this is what she wants too. She had wanted it long ago when she let her uncle make love to her in one of the pigsties and understood, soon after, that where the father had been, the son yearned to go too. And then playing games with them both, tempting them, lying to them, chiding them, dancing in and out of their sight.
Power.
The older man kept in ignorance; his appetite fed by his own sense of his sin. The younger man kept in a state of wanting and waiting; his longing fed by the knowledge of what his father did.
Power which, once known, could never be matched except by repetition. Power that can now be replicated in this family. Magdalena knows that, for her, there is nothing on earth more complete than this.
She moves slowly, lingering in the kitchen, giving more orders to the maids, lifting the outer leaves of the red cabbages held up for her inspection and touching their succulent hearts, tasting dripping from the white bowl and giving Ingmar her finger to suck . . .
Then she unties her apron and moves silently up the stairs, tiptoeing so that she will not wake the sleeping Ulla, and Ingmar follows. Up above the bustle of the kitchen the house is silent, empty, with sunbeams glancing from the windows, a place of marvellous magic.
Magdalena chooses the linen closet, the very place where Johann Tilsen lifted up her skirt and took her without ceremony, without apology, asserting his self-appointed right as her employer to fornicate with her.
He thought he could do this and forget her. He did not know what power was hers. He did not know how cleverly she would use it.
And now, as she sees in Ingmar the same impatience, the same agony of need, she savours every second, ruffling his dark curls as she locks the closet door, then leaning against the linen shelves, against the piles of laundered sheets, and slowly unlacing the bodice of her dress and lifting out a breast whose nipple is hard and damp.
Magdalena knows that when Ingmar begins to suck, as the baby sucks, her milk will flow and that Ingmar Tilsen will drink. She will suckle him—her stepson—and he will for ever be enslaved to this one moment when events collide and the boy of seventeen drinks from the breast of the woman who haunts his dreams.
His mouth fixes itself to the teat. Magdalena cradles his head. Almost immediately he begins to cry, as a suffering child cries when comforted at last by its mother, his tears hot and copious, his arms encircling her body, drawing it to him, holding it as though he will never let it go.
Then she puts her mouth to his ear and whispers into it the very same phrases—dirty as potash—which once led her cousin to a madness of long duration, where thoughts of patricide were seldom far from his mind.
And all the while Magdalena is smiling. It is Christmas Day and a new era is beginning. It is starting now . . .
Later, as the bright day fades, the Tilsen family sit down together and the roast goose is brought in and set before them.
Johann and Magdalena are at opposite ends of the table and Ingmar sits next to his stepmother. He eats ravenously. His hunger seems to have no limit. Magdalena watches him and cannot get the smile to go from her face.
Johann tells her how he and the other boys rode over to Boller, rode boldly up the drive, only to find the house closed and every window shuttered. They knocked at the great door, but no one answered. “It is strange, is it not,” says Johann, “that no servant appeared?” “No doubt Ellen Marsvin and Kirsten have gone away,” says Magdalena.
“But Fru Marsvin wouldn’t leave the house unattended.” “Perhaps it wasn’t unattended. Perhaps the servants were drunk on Christmas wine! That is why they closed all the shutters. Did you hear any laughter or music or the sound of snoring?”
“No,” says Johann crossly, “we did not.”
“Perhaps the King has relented and called his wife and all her retinue back to Copenhagen?”
Johann shakes his head. Something in Magdalena’s voice suggests that she is teasing him, but he cannot say why. “All of Denmark,” he says, “knows that this separation is final.”
They eat in silence for a while and the scent of the steaming goose and the mashed apricots fills the room and wafts out into the hall, and the little cat, Otto, comes to the door and sits waiting for a morsel of food to be thrown to it. Matti and Boris glance down at the cat. “If Marcus is never coming back,” says Boris, “can Otto be mine?”
Johann anlsen looks tenderly at Boris. “Nothing can be decided,” he says, “until we know where Marcus has gone.”
“He’s gone into his world,” says Boris.
“What do you mean?” asks Johann.
“There is a world where he goes. He told me about it before he stopped speaking. There are buffaloes there and a knife grinder.”
KIRSTEN: FROM HER PRIVATE PAPERS
We spent Christmas in darkness.
I ordered that every door and shutter be closed and every curtain drawn, so that anyone calling upon us would think we were gone away to Arabia or drowned in the Sargasso Sea.
My Mother grumbled and protested, but I flew into a Rage with her, saying she would die a lonely Death if she could not be more considerate towards Other People instead of mired in her own little Universe of her Self and that this was the only way to safeguard Marcus from a wicked Kidnapping.
She retorted that Boller was her house and my arrival in it had constituted an Invasion, such as the Emperor’s soldiers made into Jutland in the wars, so I said: “Very well, then, this is how I shall conduct myself, as your Enemy. And do not underestimate what this new Enmity will cost you!” And she on that instant took up a brass Measuring Rod and advanced towards me with it, intending to smite me, but I was nimble and avoided it, so her blow fell upon an oak table and the Rod bent itself almost in two. She looked mightily foolish holding the bent Rod in her hand and I laughed out loud at her, but I could see in her eyes that she wished me Dead and this observation discomfited me somewhat, because that she is my Mother and should love me, and does not, nor ever will.
I had my way nevertheless and Boller was closed and shuttered.
I prefer the darkness and the candle-light to the normal light of day. It is as though the entire scheming World has departed into the black sky and will come no more to trouble me. Even the wind can barely be heard. The fires burn more brightly. In the soft lamplight I look younger. I hold Dorothea on my lap and see—by the candle flames that stand sentinel in my room and do not move because there is no draught to move them—the features of my Lover. And I begin to compose a prayer (on this day when Jesus Christ was born) which asks for forgiveness of my Sins and the restoration to me of my child’s Father.
On Christmas morning I said to Emilia: “Now I shall open my door and see whether anything has been put in my shoes by the Angels!” and she laughed at me, but then what do I discover in my shoes but two painted Eggs. And I know that they were laid by her hen, Gerda, and that she cooked and decorated them herself. And I do declare that I love these Eggs more than any Gold and shall keep them until they rot, because in them is all Emilia’s sweet affection for me.
I show them to Ellen, my Mother. “What was the last time you made me any gift like this?” I ask her, but she refuses to look at them.
She is a Nasty Woman and Uncharitable as the sea, and I am amazed I have any Heart in my body, for I think there is none in hers.
And now—since her failure to smash me with the Measuring Rod—she has, as I predicted, thought up some marvellous Plan, about which she is devious and smug. (Lord, how I do detest the Plans of Others, which always have about them the unmistakable odour of cruelty!) All that Ellen will tell me is that, when the New Year comes, she and Vibeke are going to Copenhagen.
“Oh?” says I. “What for? To see the King?” But she will not say. Her lips purse themselves together like the petals of some old withered Flower.
This ugly pursing of my Mother’s lips suggests, of course, that she and Vibeke may be planning some Foul Thing against me. Perhaps they will try to get the King to turn me out of Boller? But I do not think they will succeed in this, because the King is not cured of his love for me and would not see his dear Mouse put out into the cold. Yet, to be on the safe side, I have writ to him secretly to warn him against my Mother’s Nastiness. I tell him I am happy at Boller and repeat that the child is his and lives and grows strong in the cold air ofjutland, and we two and Emilia should not be removed from here.
