by Rose Tremain
Her efforts to become Slim have resulted in Failure. She is as fat and greedy as ever she was; her flesh makes bulges in the dresses my mother had made for her, and over her silver and gold necklaces fall a quantity of chins. But nothing more is said about this. What is more, I note that Other New Garments begin to appear on Vibeke’s corpulent form—and these trimmed with Fur or Ornaments and costing my Mother great quantities of Money. “I am surprised,” I say, “at the limitlessness of your Funds. And at the narrow way in which you choose to spend them. You know that I, too, should like some new dresses, but it seems you never think of me or make me any Offers.”
But these words have no effect upon her. She tells me I have been “spoiled all my life” and that I have wasted all my Portion and let slip through my fingers everything that I once had. And the fact that this is True makes it no less hurtful to me. Mothers should not say such things to their Daughters, but rather strive to help them in their hours of travail. I tell Ellen she is a Wicked and Unnatural Woman and that the day is coming when I shall throw her out of Boller, just as I threw Emilia out, because I cannot abide to be near people who do not love me. But she only smiles her Vixen smile. “Do not fear, Kirsten,” says she. “Vibeke and I shall leave for Copenhagen very shortly and then you will be Quite Alone.”
This realisation of my coming Utter Loneliness engenders in me a most cruel Sadness.
I am a Person who cannot endure to be alone. I declare I was born crying out for Company and laughter.
What am I to do if King Gustav refuses me passage into Sweden?
I think that I shall kill myself. I have my little white pot of Poison, but I do admit that to take this makes me tremble because I do not know what shall happen afterwards or whether it be Fatal Absolutely or whether I might vomit it up again and lie on the floor in torment, only to be returned to Life after all. The risk of this might be great. I believe I shall have to go to some melancholy Scholar and ask him, whose Brain is stuffed with Knowledge-in-Waiting, what means have been discovered of taking one’s own Life with Certainty but without the inconvenience of Pain and Suffering. I cannot quite imagine what these means might be. Except that I might shoot myself in the mouth with a Musket. But I wonder whether my arms are long enough, so that I can hold up the Musket and point it at myself and not inadvertently blast off my left leg or make a mighty hole in the wall? And I reflect therefore that although Death, in its Absoluteness, appears to us a Simple Matter, it may not be very simple after all, especially for those who seek it, because whatever the human heart craves and seeks, this very thing may be the one that is denied it.
And so I endure bouts of Pure Misery and Sorrow, such as I have never known in all my thirty-one years.
I find no consolation in my baby, Dorothea. For, although she resembles the Count in her colouring, she is not like him in any other way. She is merely Like All Other Babies, and that is: ugly, foul-smelling, cross-eyed, mewling, farting, uncomfortable, angry and Wretched. And when I declared before she was born that I would love and cherish her, I do think that I had temporarily forgotten what a Baby is and how my spirit is so vexed by every one of them that I could happily put them in a fish kettle and set them to boil on the range and afterwards eat their tender flesh for my supper.
I used to find consolation in Emilia—in her talk and in her Sweetness and in our little Pastimes together—but she is gone.
Last night, catching sight of the two painted eggs she gave me on Christmas Day, I took them up to cast them away with the waste paper and the spoiled writing quills and the dead ash of the fire. But then this act of throwing them out began to choke me, so that I felt sentimental tears come to my eyes, and so I only put them in a drawer, among our old paintings of flowers that we did at Rosenborg on summer evenings and which I saved, though I know not why.
Of course, I understand that, by this time, the eggs are rancid within the shell, but their putrefaction is still concealed by their sweet painted Exterior. And I wish to remark upon this to Someone and observe how the condition of the eggs resembles the condition of so many People, who may be beautiful of face, as I once was, and all corrupted within.
But there is no one at Boller to whom I can make such observations. Neither in my Mother’s head nor in Vibeke’s is to be found one grain of Philosophical Curiosity.
CONCERNING SHEETS AND DITCHES
At that moment when the winter is almost ended and the herons return to the lake at Frederiksborg, at that moment when spring sends one or two hardy messengers to announce its arrival, yet before it has quite arrived, King Christian likes to ride out into his kingdom to see what is happening on the land.
He travels beyond the regions owned by the crown (in which serfdom has been outlawed and the peasants are paid in money or in kind for their labour) into those great swathes of fields and forests still in the hands of the nobility, where landlords do as they please and reward their workers as the inclination takes them, so that on one estate men and women may thrive and be warm and on the adjoining land they may starve and have nothing.
King Christian would like to have passed a universal law against Vornedskab—the state of serfdom in Denmark—but his power is not absolute like the Kings of England; no law can become law until ratified by the Rigsrad. And it is the landowning nobility who sit in the Rigsrad and always contrive to remember, when such a law sits in draft form before them, the great quantity of dalers or the vast amount of Corn or sheep or pigs they would be forced to sacrifice to keep in unaccustomed comfort men who were born to toil and suffer, and were docile in consequence, and who might now become demanding and rebellious. And so Vornedskab remains and all that the King can do is to make these yearly journeys to see how cruel the winter has been and to sprinkle skillings on the melting snow.
He takes only two or three in attendance with him and puts up at small inns or in the houses of the clergy. In these places, in the smell of their low timbers and in their strange absence of light, he remembers travelling about the kingdom with his parents and looking in the workshop of carpenters, engravers and bookbinders. To those with him, he remarks: “Kings should travel and pry. They should be as inquisitive as rats. Or they will learn nothing.”
This year, three men accompany him, and one of these is Peter Claire.
The days are bright. “In certain conditions of sunlight,” the King observes one morning, “that which would trouble us attains a borrowed beauty.”
He points to the thatch of a low cottage, the early sun on the damp reeds making them shine like silver. “Inside will be a floor made of mud,” says Christian, “and a fire gone out, and every day shall feel like an eternity to those who dwell there.”
“Shall we go in, Sir?” asks Peter Claire.
“Yes. We shall go in. We shall drop a stone into their pool of time.”
No face appears at the small window as they approach the cottage, but they notice, at the turn in the road, a wooden crate set out and on the crate a little selection of objects marked For Sale. There is a broken pot, a wheel, the worn head of a broom, a stone pestle crudely made and a twist of string.
King Christian dismounts and picks up the wheel, from which one spoke is missing, and stares at it for a long time. Now, he thinks, the poor of Denmark have nothing complete with which to barter. They live from bits and parts of things. “And who,” he says aloud, “ever passes this way to buy a broom head or a bit of twine?”
The cottage dweller is a man who lives alone with a cat. He grows turnips in the small plot of ground the landlord has given him, “for turnips grow economically, shoulder to shoulder under the frost, and every bit of them may be eaten.” Then, with a smile, he says: “The cat belonged to my wife, who is in prison. She was a tabby cat, but grown quite white with the eating of the turnips!” And he laughs and the laugh turns to a cough and he spits into the embers of the fire.
The King sits down on the one chair, which is a rocking chair, and Peter Claire and the other gentlemen stand and bli
nk in the low light, which every moment seems to falter, as though the sun were descending instead of rising to its noonday. The peasant apologises to the King that all he can offer him is water out of the rain butt. The King replies that water is the element in which Denmark floats and which gives him hope, and the man laughs again, almost doubles up with his mirth, and then coughs once more and spits once more and shakes his head, as though the thing which had been said might be the funniest jest he had ever heard told.
King Christian sips the icy rainwater from a wooden cup. He looks at the peasant’s wrists and his hands the colour of bone protruding from the sleeves of a knitted jerkin so alive with holes the mice might still be scampering through the wool. “Tell me,” says the King, “how your wife came to be in prison.”
The man points to his bed, which is a pile of straw, no more and no less, and again this obstinate laughter of his wells up in him and sears his lungs. “Sheets!” He guffaws. “She stole sheets from Herr Kjaedegaard’s laundry! Oh, but not to barter, Sir, not for any profit, but only to know what it felt like to sleep between them!” The King nods gravely as the cottar is seized by a violent coughing and choking.
Christian plucks at Peter Claire’s sleeve and tells him to play something “soft and quiet for this suffering man,” so he adopts his habitual leaning posture over his lute and begins a slow pavan, and the peasant, whose life has no music in it except the singing of the birds, stares at him in awe and crosses his arms in front of his chest, as though he fears his heart might escape through his rib-cage.
When the music ends the King rises and the peasant kneels, his lungs quietened by the pavan, and kisses the King’s outstretched hand in its fine kid glove.
“Those objects displayed for sale on your crate,” says King Christian, “will you sell them to me?”
A smile returns to the man’s face, threatens to break into laughter. “What would Your Majesty need with an old wheel, a length of string?”
“Well, let us see. The wheel to remind me of destiny? The string to measure my own height and girth, to see whether I am grown larger in my kingdom, or begun to shrink?”
“Hal That’s a fine story, Sir. That’s a piece of convolution.” “You do not believe me?”
“I believe you, Your Majesty. But only because I know what oddities lie in the mind. My wife was going to return the sheets, when she had had her night between them, but the justices of the Herredag did not believe her. But they should have believed her and then she would not be in prison and forsaking her cat.”
Now it is the King’s turn to smile. “What is her name?” he asks. “Frederika Manders. And she slept on straw all her days and did not complain and now she still sleeps on straw in her dungeon in Copenhagen, but whether she complains or not I cannot say, nor whether she is living or not. This I cannot say either.”
The King puts a purse into Manders’s hands. He announces that his wife Frederika will be pardoned and sent back here to her plot of turnips, if indeed she is alive. And then, before Manders can stammer his thanks, the royal party walk out into the bright light of the March morning and the peasant watches, grinning, as the men take up the wheel, the head of the broom, the broken pot, the stone pestle and the piece of twine and stow these things away in their carriage, and then they are gone.
That night, by the fireside of an inn, where the rooms have a lingering smell of horses, which the King finds agreeable, and when everyone but he and Peter Claire and the landlord have gone to bed, Christian turns the stone pestle over and over in his wide hands. He has been drinking for five hours. “The pestle is quite large,” he says. “Not as perfectly rounded as a grinding pestle should be. It might have served as a cudgel. Manders, for all we know, killed his wife with this and invented the story of the sheets.”
The logs of the fire smoulder and fall and flare again. A clock ticks. The landlord wipes the beer slops from the table tops and begins to sweep the sawdust from the floor. This man longs to whistle, but knows he must remain silent until the King at last retires to sleep.
“Many times, you see,” says King Christian, “I imagined putting an end to Kirsten’s life. I could perfectly envisage taking her head in my hands and crushing it against stone . . .”
Peter Claire says nothing.
“She met her Count at Werden,” the King goes on, “when we were still at war. I wanted her to be with me while I was fighting and so she was at Werden that night, when I had fallen into a ditch of thorns and could not get out, for I had broken my foot, and the ditch was deep so that I was concealed in it and not taken out of it until nightfall.
“Count Otto Ludwig fought on my side. Our army relied on German mercenaries, we had to pay with gold and silver. And he was one of them—who fought for gold and not for Denmark’s dignity and faith.
“And that evening at Werden, I could not dance, because of the pain to my foot. And so my wife danced with the Count. And when I saw her dancing with this man, I knew that whatever she had felt for me was transferred to him—in that one night—and that where I had been rich an hour before, suddenly I was poor. That was when it first came to me—that I might kill her—and perhaps I should have done it then and spared myself four long years of pain.”
The King is now half lying on a wooden settle. Peter Claire is perched on a stool not far from the King’s knees. The King belches, then looks at him intently as he asks: “Must love always end in a ditch? What do you believe, Peter Claire?”
Peter Claire’s mind conjures up Emilia Tilsen’s face. “I believe,” he says distractedly, “that it is constantly subject to change.”
King Christian is still staring, without blinking, at Peter Claire, and the lutenist expects him now to question him on his own feelings (perhaps those for the Irish Countess who so lately charmed everyone at court?), but the King veers from this, gulps more wine and says: “Those sheets. When Manders and his wife lay down in them, did they turn to each other or were they each contented simply by the feel of the sheets?”
Peter Claire is about to reply, when King Christian cuts him off. “The answer is unknowable, of course.”
The King closes his eyes, as if he did not wish to think about the great quantity of unknowable things in the world. Then he opens them again and says: “Kirsten has asked me to send her the black boys. I know why she wants her slaves. I see right through her, to the marrow of her bones. She wants to see what it feels like to sleep between them!”
The King’s roaring laugh is hollow and loud, and startles the innkeeper out of his sawdust reveries. And, still shaking with wild amusement, His Majesty’s huge body rolls slowly off the settle onto the floor, the wine spilling and splashing his doublet. He brings up a gobbet of spittle and aims it at the fire.
Peter Claire and the innkeeper help King Christian to bed, where he falls asleep at once.
The English lutenist goes to his own room, where the hard bed is too short for him, so that he cannot stretch out properly. He lies in the dark, with his knees drawn up to his stomach, thinking that for Emilia Tilsen this bed would be exactly the right size.
LIMBO
As the King continues to travel northwards, so Ellen Marsvin and Vibeke Kruse at last make their departure from Boller and begin their long journey to Frederiksborg.
In the jolting coach, Ellen looks at Vibeke, already pale with sickness, and wonders whether her plan will come to fruition or whether, after all she has expended in time and money on Frøken Kruse—on dresses and calligraphy lessons and ivory teeth—their combined hopes will be dashed.
But Ellen Marsvin is a woman of courage. The idea that the plan may fail and that she will then be forced back upon the meagre resources that she already possesses does not frighten her so much as intrigue her. Whatever hand life deals her, she will shape that hand to what advantage she can. Part of her longs to find herself, like Jesus Christ, in the wilderness, with nothing surrounding her but stones and scrub, and then, by her own resourcefulness, to find some means of survi
val—preferably that very means that nobody but she would have thought of. She would contrive to make jam out of bark. Her daughter, her servants and her friends would have imagined her dead, but she would not be dead. She would walk out of the wilderness and back into life as though nothing had happened at all.
It is Vibeke, not Ellen, who dreads humiliation and failure. And this anxiety, combined with the sufferings of her stomach, makes every moment of this voyage a torment to her. She stares up at the underbellies of the soft white clouds. She longs to unfasten her clothes, remove her teeth and lie down on a cloud and never wake until her marvellous future lies neatly spread out before her. She feels angry with Ellen Marsvin for having embroiled her in a scheme destined to falter and come to grief. She cannot remember ever having felt so wretched.
“Endure, my dear,” says Ellen, as they board ship at Horsens. “No destination is ever reached without a little suffering.”
But the crossing is rough and Vibeke watches the contents of her stomach float away on the black waves and feels her skin become old, like the skin of a corpse. She imagines dying in this cold sea world, in this salt limbo that divides one part of Denmark from another, and feels that this is where she has always been—in some interim place between departure and destination. She served Kirsten only in expectation of some better employment that never came. She submitted to Ellen’s regimes only in the belief that Ellen’s plan would make everything worthwhile, and now she does not know whether it will bring her what she hopes for or leave her with nothing. And in some corner of her being not preoccupied by bilberry cakes and vanilla syllabubs, she hoped for love. But on this subject, too, Ellen was always severe. “Vibeke,” she would say sternly, “love does not enter into it.”
