Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  “Do not bother to tell me,” says Kirsten, “for I know where you will go. You will go to that horrible Insect Room to be with Marcus.” “Yes,” says Emilia. “But only if you have no need—”

  “We shall hire some tutor for him! And you shall return to me and be by my side when I need you.”

  Emilia says nothing. She wears the grey dress she was once so fond of. She pulls a grey shawl round her shoulders.

  “I do not sleep,” says Kirsten, “so tormented is my spirit. Once you were my true companion, but now you have abandoned me. My hair is falling out of my head! I am in purgatory and you stand by and avert your eyes.”

  “No . . .” says Emilia. “I’m sorry for you . . .”

  “I am not interested in your ‘sorrow.’ Of what good is that to me? You were ‘sorry’ for that stupid hen and I declare you lavish more affection upon it than you have ever shown to me!”

  At this moment a voice is heard outside the room. It is Marcus calling to Emilia—his old repetitive cry that has never ceased: Emilia, Emilia, Emilia . . .

  Kirsten Munk, King’s Consort, Almost Queen, leaps out of her bed in all her magnificent nakedness, with her wild hair and her nipples like berries and her bush the colour of fire. “Go away!” she yells at Marcus. “Go back to your repulsive insects! Go and be the worm that you are! Emilia is my woman and she has no more time for you.” She slams the door. They hear Marcus begin to cry and Emilia attempts to move past Kirsten, to go to comfort him. But her way is barred.

  And it is now that Kirsten feels her anger explode and break. She reaches out and takes Emilia by the shoulders and pulls her to her naked breast, pinioning her against her body and covering her face with kisses. Weeping copiously now, so that both their faces are wet, she tells Emilia that she was never the thing she was meant to be. Kirsten’s sobs almost choke her, from so deep within her do they rise up. But she is full of words, too. She does not know what words, what caresses, what storms of tears are going to come, but she feels them all welling up in her and breaking, as a river breaks at the lip of a waterfall. And she knows that she has longed for days and weeks for this release and now it comes.

  Emilia struggles to be free of the embrace, but Kirsten is strong and Emilia cannot be free of it, must endure the kisses and the torrent of accusations, must listen and not be able to stop her ears as Kirsten stammers that Emilia was meant to be her consolation for the loss of the Count. She was meant to be her woman and show her womanly love. At night, she was meant to sing her songs and stroke her head and lie down with her and hold her in her arms. She was meant to whisper secrets to her in the darkness and tell her wicked tales that women are not meant to know. She was meant to kiss her lips. She was meant to learn the secrets of the magic quill and what it could do to certain parts of the body. She was meant to bring joy and laughter and bright feelings of ecstasy and love, and all that she has brought is a winter of her own, a remorseless coldness, an insupportable greyness, an aura of death!

  Kirsten lets go of Emilia at last, pushes her away so that her shawl falls to the ground. And the two women stare at each other. And the stare is such that both Kirsten and Emilia will remember it always, for as long as they live: it is a stare which understands that something irredeemable has been done, something that should never have happened, but which can never be undone and which has altered everything.

  Later that afternoon a carriage containing Emilia and Marcus, and such belongings as they both possess, including Marcus’s drawings and the speckled hen Gerda, makes its way down the drive and turns left at the end of it, going towards the Tilsen estate. Nobody stands at the door to wave them away and the carriage is soon swallowed up by the February darkness.

  Of his lost kingdom of the insects Marcus says: “I was becoming small like them, Emilia, I would have lived under the leaves.”

  When Emilia and Marcus arrive at the Tilsen house, Johann is out on his horse and Magdalena and Wilhelm are alone in the attic.

  Boris and Matti come out of the schoolroom and stare at Emilia and then at Marcus, as if both are ghosts.

  Emilia kisses Boris and Matti. Boris says to Marcus: “Otto is my cat now.”

  “Where is my father?” asks Emilia.

  “He thinks Marcus is dead,” says Matti. “He searches for him in the snow.”

  “And where is Magdalena?”

  “In the attic. Sometimes, Papa has to lock her in her room.”

  Emilia says nothing to this. She leads Marcus in, out of the cold, and they all sit down by the parlour fire. Marcus stares silently at his brothers and they stare back. Emilia asks one of the maids to bring hot tea, and when it arrives she warms Marcus’s hands on the china cups.

  Then, after some while, Wilhelm appears. When he sees Emilia and Marcus, he swears under his breath and goes running back up the stairs.

  When Johann Tilsen returns to find Marcus alive and sitting by the parlour fire, he takes his youngest son in his arms and begins to weep, and this weeping of his goes on and on until Boris and Matti cannot bear it for another second and run out of the room. Emilia slowly approaches her father and lays a gentle hand on his shoulders.

  Now, Emilia lies in her old bed in her old room and listens to the old familiar crying of the wind.

  By her bed is the clock she found in the forest, with time stopped at ten minutes past seven.

  She does not know why Magdalena was locked in the attic.

  She does not know why Ingmar was sent to Copenhagen.

  She cannot predict what world Marcus will enter now.

  What she does know is that time itself has performed a loop and returned her to the one place she thought she had left for ever. It has stopped here and will not let her go. Kirsten will not come by in her carriage to beg her to go back to Boller. Emilia’s foolish dreams of the English musician are all in the past. She will grow old in the house of her childhood, without her mother, without her father’s love. She will die here and one of her brothers will bury her in the shadow of the church, and the strawberry plants, which creep further and wider each year, gobbling up the land, even to the church door, will one day cover everything that remains of her, including her name: Emilia.

  MEASURING THE ICE

  It used to happen when Christian was a boy and the lake at Fred-eriksborg froze in the heart of winter: the tennis court marker would be sent out onto the ice by King Frederik to measure its depth. He would bore holes in five different places, and Christian remembers watching this man inserting the measuring rod into the holes and then drawing it up and squinting at it, to calculate where the ice ended and the water began.

  There was a formality about this measuring of the ice which used to create in the young Christian feelings of intense fascination and excitement, as though the tennis court marker were measuring time itself and would announce how much of it remained and on what day he would become King.

  And then, if the ice was pronounced solid enough, the skating would begin. Everyone who worked for the royal household was permitted to join in. The stable boys would be seen dancing arm in arm with the scullery maids; the fencing master would perform a series of dazzling twirls and leaps; Queen Sofie’s golden plaits would stream out behind her head; babies were pulled along on little sledges and dogs would try to follow the skaters and go slithering and sliding and rolling about in yelping confusion.

  There were a few winters so mild that the lake never froze at all and everybody’s skates would remain where they were, in drawers and cupboards, the leather unoiled, the blades unpolished. And at these times, the people of Frederiksborg would agree: “A winter without skating is not a winter. A winter without skating makes the spirit sluggish and brings in the spring too soon.”

  Now, on a February morning, in this winter of 1630, the King watches from his window as the tennis court marker walks out onto the ice, which has been forming slowly for a week, and begins to bore the holes for his measuring rod. The day is glorious, the trees dark and glistening as th
e sun melts the night’s frost, the sky a soft and innocent blue. It is the kind of day on which the visibility of things makes the world seem as though it had been newly created. And the bright sheen on the silent, frozen lake makes King Christian yearn to be out there, moving and turning on the immaculate whiteness.

  He has forgotten the pains in his stomach. And for one strange moment, as the marker walks from one borehole to another, the King can see Bror Brorson, dressed in brown velvet, a boy of twelve who skates with long athletic strides, who goes faster than everybody else, who never tires, who is still there, crossing and recrossing the lake when the sun goes down, when the dusk turns him to shadow and the night obliterates him . . .

  “It is good ice,” the King is informed. “It is as thick as four loaves of bread.”

  Christian lets out a shout of pleasure, orders that skates be found for everyone, including Signor Ponti the paper manufacturer and his daughter the Countess. While the King puts on the woollen bonnet he has always worn to protect his hearing from the cold, word goes round the castle: “The skating is going to begin!” Jens Ingemann is summoned and told to make sure the musicians are warmly dressed, as golden music stands are brought out and set down in a line in the middle of the lake. Again, the sight of these music stands makes the King feel as contented as a child. He enjoys the way they appear to grow out of the frozen water, as though Danish ice had miraculous properties and could nourish music stands in its depths and make them sprout, like gilded saplings, in a single February morning.

  Signor Ponti examines the skate blades on the boots he has been given and shakes his head. To Francesca he says: “No, no. To put all my weight on a little edge like this? I am a man of commerce, not a fool.”

  “No, Papa,” replies Francesca, who, in the first years of her marriage, used to skate on the ponds at Cloyne with Johnnie O’Fingal, “you’ll be surprised how well they will bear you up. You may hold on to me at first, until you’re accustomed to it, and then you’ll be off and gliding away.”

  But Ponti is not convinced. He says he will come and watch, and prays that his daughter will not fall over and break her leg or her ankle. He does not wish her to go hobbling into her future life.

  As to Francesca, to skate on the lake within sight of her lover, while the sun shines, while she can feel her lover’s eyes upon her: this prospect is so enthralling that she can barely wait to join the stream of people, led by the King, going down to the lakeside. She puts on her black velvet cloak, the velvet hat. As she looks at herself in her dressing glass, she wonders how much longer this beauty of hers will last.

  But as she arrives at the lake, Francesca puts this thought from her mind. She is a woman who, since her sufferings with O’Fingal, has resolved to be happy. So now there is only the brilliant morning, the notes of music cascading into the air, the snickering of the skate blades on the perfect ice, the infectious laughter of the King, the beauty of Peter Claire, and a feeling of exhilaration as she moves and turns.

  As he plays, Peter Claire notices how gracefully the Danes skate— as though the blades were part of their feet. Even the King’s chancellor and the other elderly members of the nobility appear nimble on the ice. And the King himself, so heavy now and beginning to be sluggish in his movements, seems suddenly younger and lighter.

  As the musicians came out onto the frozen lake, Jens Ingemann took from a pocket a folded square of cloth, snapped it open like a conjuror and set it down beneath his feet, so that he would not be standing directly on the slippery ice. But Peter Claire, Krenze, Rugieri and the rest have to manage as best they can on the unstable surface and Peter Claire notes the tension in all their faces. While the skaters seem as steady as dancers, the music makers are persecuted by a constant fear that they are about to fall over.

  “There should be chairs,” says Pasquier.

  “And furs to keep our legs warm,” says Rugieri.

  But Jens Ingemann only scoffs at them: “Chairs and furs? What are you? A huddle of old crones? Even the pettish Dowland did not ask for a chair on the ice!”

  So they have no choice but to play on, their legs stiff, trying to balance, and the sun climbs as high as it can reach in this deep part of winter, giving a clarity to the scene that hurts the eyes of Peter Claire. He wishes he were not here. He would like to exchange this too-bright day, in which Francesca glides in circles round him, for a different place: the place where Emilia Tilsen has her existence.

  But how is he to arrive there? Though he has held in his hands the very documents Kirsten wishes him to steal and might even be able to write down from memory the complicated sum of the King’s debts, he also knows that he is incapable of betraying the King to his enemies. He looks at His Majesty now, going round and round in his homely woollen hat, the dough of his face folded into a smile and two bright specks of colour starting in his cheeks, like sweet plums placed in the dough by some cook’s affectionate hands. It cannot be done, he says to himself. Alas, it cannot be done.

  March is come in and the snow has begun to melt.

  Today I saw that some new little yellow flower had dared to open its head in the old, damp grass, but I do not know the name of it. They say it is from flowers that bees manufacture honey, but I refuse to tire my mind with worrying about how they do this. Some people, such as the King my husband, are forever asking questions about Nature, such as “What is the greatest distance that a Flea can hop?” or “Why is it that Owls can see in the dark?” But I see no gain to be had from burdening myself with any Knowledge that cannot be Useful to me. If someone could show me how to leap great distances or see when there is no light in the sky, why then I would be grateful, for these gifts might serve my Purposes. But Mere Understanding for its own sake only exhausts the Mind and I have noticed that in Denmark the so-called Scholars do seem to be the most melancholy people on this earth, which observation prompts me to think that all Useless Knowledge must fester in the brain and so bring in an Inevitable Anguish from which there is no relief.

  But of Anguish I surely have my share?

  I do not think I have ever known any Season as horrible as this one.

  I am endeavouring to put Absolutely from my mind everything that I do not wish to think about, viz., the Departure of Emilia, and to concentrate only and utterly on securing for myself some Future which shall be more agreeable to me than this maddening Present.

  No reply has come from the English Lutenist. I am surprised that he is so faint of Heart. I conclude that he cares nothing for Emilia. Indeed, he has perhaps found himself a New Mistress and put from him all thoughts of marrying a person who keeps a hen for a pet and who is tied by her heart-strings to her lunatic child of a Brother. And I would not blame him. The only Irritation is that, in consequence, I do not yet have in my possession those documents with which I can bring pressure to bear on King Gustav of Sweden and I do not see now how I am to get them, unless I go to FredEriksborg myself and pilfer them. Would I were a Flea and could become Small and hop there in a trice, or an Owl flying through the night and seeing everything there was to see in the sleeping world!

  I have lived so long without my Lover now that I declare that there are days when I am almost Resigned to his Absence. But in between my bouts of Resignation, I am furious to hold him in my arms. I rage for his touch. I bite my pillow and mutilate my Sorcerer’s Quill. And at these times I know that I must find some means—however devious—to come to him in Sweden.

  And so I reflect that sometimes, because this Society is mired up in a slurry of Lies and Pretence, the most efficacious way of making a Bargain is to Pretend that one has in one’s Possession that very Thing which one does not have. For People are no more suspicious than they are gullible. They can suspect that which is True and believe that which is False. They tend to see that which they wish to see.

  Accordingly, and in a Mood of Bravery, I sit down at my escritoire and compose an audacious letter to the King of Sweden. I tell him that I hold in my hands “certain documents p
ertaining to His Majesty King Christian’s Finances” which would no doubt be of great value to him, but that it is too dangerous to consign such Papers to any Letter-bearer, for fear that they fall into the maw of thieves. And I continue thus:

  If, therefore, Your Majesty would grant me Safe Passage into Sweden, where I would desire to live and have my Being, now that I am so much Reviled in Denmark, then I shall bring to you these Secret Papers, and I do declare that Your Majesty will live to thank me for what Things they shall reveal to you.

  Kirsten Munk, King’s Consort

  I am, on reflection, mightily pleased with this letter and I do not know why I did not think of this Stratagem before. For once I am in Sweden, then surely I shall find some way to remain there, with Count Otto Ludwig, even if, when I am at last in the presence of

  King Gustav, I have no Secret Papers to show him after all. I shall say they were lost in the Sound or that part of the ship caught fire and burned them, or that they were stolen from me as I travelled from Jutland. It makes no difference what I shall say. For I have knowledge in plenty about the King my husband which shall delight the ear of his Old Enemy. And what I do not have, I shall manufacture. I shall become a bee, turning useless little flowers into Honey.

  I am not the only one with recondite Ploys and Schemes.

  My mother and Vibeke are so bursting with their Plan that they walk about grinning and smiling and letting pass between them Secret Looks, which cause me such profound annoyance that I break down at last and say to my mother: “What is this infernal Plan of yours? For I do earnestly wish you would Get On With It instead of skulking around this house like fat Vixens who have gobbled up a Goose Farm!”

  But of course, they will not tell me. They are enjoying their Secret too intensely. And perhaps they fear that I shall try to Foil them—which indeed I would, if I could ascertain what Thing it was they were about.

  All I know is that Vibeke is being taught to master her new Teeth, so that they do not click and clatter when she eats, nor fall out into her pudding. And she is having Lessons of some kind, supervised by Ellen, who never was nor is now a patient Teacher, and so I note that Vibeke arrives at supper very often with her eyes red and her handkerchief wet, and sits silently at the meal or else answers with little answers when my Mother speaks to her. This causes me some mirth and pleasure, but alas, these Moods of Misery do not seem to last very long and the next day Vibeke’s smile is back on her face, as though it had never been off it.