Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  Wanting to eradicate the scent of Magdalena—from the bedroom, from the kitchen, from every bit of the house—Johann has packed a trunk with all her clothes and possessions, her scarlet skirts, her shoes, her book of recipes, her combs and brushes, her underwear, and despatched it by cart to the Børnehus in Copenhagen, to be disposed of among the poor as anybody sees fit. He has kept nothing, only her few jewels, to be given to Ulla when she is older and from which Magdalena’s presence seems already to have been eradicated, as though the brooches and necklaces had been torn from her long ago or else had never truly belonged to her.

  Now and then, Johann finds something that he has over-looked—a handkerchief, a ribbon—and these objects he simply throws away. Cakes are no longer made in the house, nor bowls of chocolate drunk in the mornings. The bower at the edge of the lake is tom down, plank by plank. The broken mechanical bird is reclaimed by Marcus. He lets beetles wander round in the cage, in case the bird should suddenly come to life and feel hungry.

  Now, in late April, instead of fine warm weather, a grey fog descends upon eastern Jutland. It blankets the Tilsen house, so that it feels closed off from everything and everyone outside itself.

  Emilia looks at this fog and feels a kind of gratitude for it. Because she no longer wants to inquire what is there in the wider world. She would prefer the wider world not to exist at all. She would like a rumour to arrive informing her that all the rest of Denmark had floated away into the sea.

  She has a role in this house and on the estate now: she helps her father to organise the running of it. He and she sit at the parlour table, writing out orders and settling accounts. They do not talk about the past, nor of the future—neither of Karen, nor of Kirsten Munk, nor of Magdalena—but only of what occurs from day to day, from moment to moment. And the notion that anyone from another part of Emilia’s life might find a way here through the thick grey mist seems at last so improbable to her that she no longer wishes even to think about it. That sometimes, in her dreams, she finds herself in sunlight by the aviary at Rosenborg is, she tells herself, just because the past can be stubborn and imperious, and refuses to let itself be forgotten down to its last dregs.

  But even the dreams come less and less. And when she wakes in the mornings and remembers that Magdalena is no longer alive, that Marcus is making progress with his lessons, that her father is as kindly as he used to be long ago, that Ingmar is returning from Copenhagen, that she is as useful in the house as her mother would have wanted her to be, then she knows that life can be endured precisely as it is.

  There is a kind of contentment in this, one that is affirmed by the perpetual presence of the fog, eclipsing both land and sky. And when Emilia’s hen, Gerda, wanders away into this shroud of whiteness and is not seen again, she resigns herself to the loss of the bird with hardly a moment’s regret.

  Acceptance, she thinks, is the harshest lesson life teaches and the one most important to learn.

  Johann Tilsen now decides that the daughter he has so much neglected should not pass the rest of her life caring for him and for her brothers; a husband should be found for her; she should be allowed a future of her own.

  No sooner has this thought entered Johann’s mind than he realises that he already knows the very man for her. He is a preacher called Erik Hansen, a courteous and kind person with long legs and arms, and wispy brown hair that blows straight upwards in the wind. Now aged forty, Erik Hansen is childless. His wife died in her twenty-eighth year. He has never had the demeanour of a man in search of a second wife, but Johann Tilsen feels certain that Emilia’s gentleness, her quiet prettiness, will prove irresistible to Hansen and that, in their future life together, he would care for her devotedly.

  He says nothing to anyone. He merely sends a letter to Hansen, inviting him to come to bless the Tilsen house, because he has “reason to believe that my dead wife’s spirit might be lurking in some corner of it and become noisy, and prevent us all here from living together in harmony.” He adds that, because Hansen’s church is some way distant and because the “accursed murk and haze hangs everywhere around us” he would be welcome to stay a night, “or more than one night, if you can spare us the time.”

  So it is that Preacher Hansen arrives like a shadow one afternoon as Emilia is staring out of the parlour window. One moment he is not there and the next he is fully visible and close up, as though he had fallen out of the sky.

  And Emilia is immediately horrified—that a stranger could appear like this without warning—and when she hears him knocking at the door, she remains where she is without moving, only turning her face away from the window. She hears the man cough in the damp air. And then she hears the servant opening the door and letting him in, and she hears his voice, which is light, and his footsteps, which are cautious, and she prays that this man may discover, after all, that he is in the wrong house, and get back on his horse and be gone for ever.

  But he does not go. . Johann Tilsen brings him into the parlour and Emilia sees his face, which is pale, and his eyes, which are small. He bows to her and she has to rise and acknowledge him.

  Preacher Hansen. Herr Erik Hansen. Johann says his name more than once, seeming to make sure that Emilia takes it in. The stranger holds his hat in his hands, giving himself a penitent’s air.

  The buckles on his shoes are spattered with mud. He smells of leather and of his horse, and Emilia has to look away from him because he is part of all that should not be here inside this house; he is part of all that should have floated out to sea and gone down into the darkness underneath it.

  His rituals are careful and tidy. He goes from room to room with his small cross made of mahogany. He kneels on the floor, in the very centre of each room, and prays silently, first with his eyes open and then with his eyes tightly shut, as though there might be something in the room which he had glimpsed and did not wish to see again.

  He invites the whole family to go round with him, “to witness that there is no space unblessed,” and when he has been every-where—even into the room Emilia shares with Marcus, where his drawings of insects now cover the walls—Eric Hansen nods to Johann and declares: “I do not think that there is any unquiet spirit in here, Herr Tilsen. So you shall all live in peace.”

  “Where is that?” whispers Marcus to Emilia.

  “Nowhere,” says Emilia. “It is nowhere.”

  And Preacher Hansen overhears this, and turns to Emilia and smiles, and she sees that at least his smile is gentle and serene, so she supposes he can be borne for a day and a night, or however long it is that he must stay with them, if only he might scrub his body and put on clean clothes, so that he no longer smelled of his horse nor of anything living. She blurts out: “Now you should like to rest and to wash, Herr Hansen. Please let me show you to a room.”

  She sees her father nod and look at her approvingly. She glides away and up the stairs, and Erik Hansen follows her. And just as Johann Tilsen predicted, Hansen finds that he cannot take his eyes from her. She reminds him a little of his dead wife, who was graceful and quick in her movements, and whose hair was neither dark nor fair. And he understands on the instant that this is why Johann Tilsen invited him here: not because Magdalena’s spirit was rattling in the rafters or billowing in the curtains, but so that he could be shown the daughter, Emilia. Catching sight of his face reflected back to him in a window, Erik Hansen smiles at himself. He sees that his period of grieving is at last going to come to an end.

  He stays on.

  Somehow, the men contrive it—that the preacher should discover that he has nothing in the world to do but to be the guest of Johann Tilsen for several days. They make the fog their excuse. They say the roads are treacherous, that collisions occur on the highways because the mist muffles sound as well as sight. “So,” says Johann to Emilia, “Pastor Hansen will be made welcome here for a little longer and indeed I think his presence in this house at this time is beneficial to us all.”

  Beneficial. Emilia finds the word
empty of meaning, almost preposterous. She knows that this is where life has arrived—in the place where it started. Only the impossible can alter it: the revelation that Karen had not died; the arrival out of the white landscape of a man carrying a lute. Otherwise, it must remain absolutely as it is, with precisely the degree of sadness in it that it contains now, no more and no less. To suggest that anything or anyone is “of benefit” to it is like suggesting that a bird, by landing in a tree, does the tree some fundamental good.

  But she understands soon enough what the men have in mind and is not angered by it, because this is how these things go on, and is perhaps even a little touched by it—that her father should wish to find her a husband, that Herr Hansen should discover that he likes her. Merely, the men seem not to understand how utterly impossible it is. They are like innocent babes, knowing nothing. They make her smile.

  She looks at Hansen, at his striding walk, at the pale skin stretched so tightly over his forehead and back across the dome of his skull to where the sparse brown hair so tentatively grows, and sees the stranger that he will always remain, the distance between him and her that will never ever be crossed. As a stranger he can be tolerated, but the idea that a proposal might suddenly, terrifyingly, come out of his mouth makes her feel sick. At all cost, she decides, this must be prevented.

  She decides to take Wilhelm into her confidence. She doesn’t tell him that she fell in love with a man named Peter Claire. What she says is: “Wilhelm, I prefer not to try to love any man. Will you go to Father and explain this to him?”

  Wilhelm takes his sister’s hand. She never knew about him and Magdalena, so it is the original Wilhelm that she knows, the Wilhelm who was a boy and innocent of any deception and any crime, and this fact alone makes Emilia precious to him. “I suppose you must marry,” he says sadly. “Someday . . .”

  “No,” says Emilia.

  “And what if you change your mind, Emilia? Then I shall have been your spokesman, only to look foolish in the end.”

  Emilia smiles and says quietly: “I shall not change my mind.” But this—despite efforts by Wilhelm which are valiant and stubborn on his sister’s behalf—is exactly the opposite of what the men decide. As Erik Hansen gets onto his horse at last and rides away into the mist, both he and Johann say to themselves: “All things are susceptible to alteration. The day will come when Emilia Tilsen will change her mind.”

  WHAT HAPPENED AT LUTTER

  The dream is familiar to King Christian.

  It begins with the arrival of a ragged man he does not recognise, yet from whose blue eyes gleams out a fragment of the past, like a single shard from some beautiful mosaic whose overall pattern (into which the shard once fitted) has long been forgotten.

  Christian stares at the eyes in a face which is brown from the weather, creased with time. The stranger says he works as a stableman. He wears a frayed leather jerkin and breeches. His arms are bare and his boots are worn. His fair hair is long and tied at the nape of his neck with a greasy ribbon. He says he has come to offer his services to His Majesty’s army, to serve in a regiment of horse, because he knows horses as thoroughly as he knows his own name.

  “What is your name?” asks the King.

  There is a moment’s hesitation, then: “Bror,” says the stranger. “Bror Brorson.”

  With the uttering of these words, the King feels a violent heat come into his body, as though all that had happened through thirty years—all the marvels and all the sorrows—were being poured into him all over again, as burning oil and boiling water into a cauldron. He cannot move, cannot speak, cannot do anything but gape and nod, and then at last he holds out his hand and Bror takes it and kneels down and presses it to his lips.

  It is at this moment in the dream that the King is sometimes able to wake up, while his army is still camped at Thuringia, before anything else happens, before the things that followed happen a second time. And on this particular cold spring night, in his room at Rosenborg to which he has returned with Vibeke, he wakes, very hot as he felt himself to be in his dreaming mind, and rouses Vibeke, who is lying quietly beside him, and whispers: “The dream was beginning again. It was beginning again . . .”

  “What dream?’’ asks Vibeke gently, sitting up and taking the King’s hand.

  “Bror Brorson,” says King Christian. “My dream of Bror.”

  Vibeke Kruse has never been and nor will ever be a sophisticated woman. Her refusal to aspire to any profound wisdom—a refusal much mocked and derided by Kirsten—stems from her unspoken belief that the kind of homely proverbs and axioms with which her mind overflows provide her with sagacity enough. Kirsten laughed repeatedly at these, but Vibeke didn’t care and still continues to offer her sayings to those in need of counsel or comfort.

  And this, now, she sees is just such a time, for the King is anguished and feverish. He asks her to stroke his head, from which his elflock has unravelled itself, so that a long damp thread of hair is wound about his neck like a black rope. Vibeke lifts the hair carefully and smooths it onto the King’s shoulder. Then she says: “A dream told is a dream forgotten.”

  King Christian is silent. If he reflects, not for the first time, that women so often express things carelessly, seeming to have no conception of what might follow from the particular words they have chosen, he nevertheless soon passes away from this observation to something else, to something he would later identify as “a feeling of being tempted” or “a sudden feeling of longing to unburden myself of these terrors.”

  For he has never been able to talk about what happened after the arrival of Bror Brorson at Thuringia in his ragged clothes, after the kissing of his hand. It is as though he had never ever had the right listener or as though no listener had ever understood the real task, which was to ensure that the telling of the story did not hurt the King so fearfully that he would never recover from it.

  He knew that Kirsten (or at least the Kirsten she had become by the time these things occurred) did not understand them. He had indeed wondered whether Peter Claire, the “angel” whose features resembled Bror’s, might be the one to whom the story would be told and whether it would turn out to be this very duty and no other that he had in mind when he commanded Peter Claire to watch over him and not desert him. But somehow that day— that moment that would be like no other moment—had never arrived.

  Now King Christian looks at Vibeke, feels her comforting hand on his brow. It is the middle of an April night, silent as the tomb. And it seems to the King as though everything is in suspension, as though Denmark were holding its breath, waiting for him to admit what he has never ever been able to admit except to himself in the dark recesses of his mind—that he was the one who was responsible for the death of Bror Brorson. Long ago, he and Bror, the only members of the Society of One-Word Signatories, had sworn to protect each other always and at all times from acts of cruelty. And then, when the time came, Christian discovered too late that his promise had been broken.

  Vibeke lights a candle. “Thus,” she says quietly, “Bror Brorson joined your army at Thuringia, before you went south to fight General Tilly?”

  The King nods. A moment passes before he can speak. Then he says: “I commanded that he be given armour. I said he could not fight in a regiment of horse wearing those rags of his.”

  “No. I should imagine he could not . . .”

  “He told me that he did not need armour. He said that death could not come to him if he was at my side, because I had fought death in the Koldinghus school, so that, with me, death was already dead. And he said, too, that God was on our side, that our war against the Catholic League was a just war and what did the just need with metal gloves, for God would surely protect his servants?

  “But I could not bear the look of Bror in that jerkin with his bare arms and his boots all worn away at the heel, so I said, ‘Bror, you cannot fight with me unless you wear armour.’ And so he was given a back plate and breast plate, and a helmet and all the cumbersome metal cove
ring of a cavalryman, and he was armed with a pair of pistols and a sword.”

  The King pauses here and Vibeke wipes the sweat from his brow.

  “If only we had been as strong as I believed!” Christian cries out. “But my ally, Prince Christian of Brunswick, was weaker than he ever admitted. He himself was dying, of a great worm that gnawed at his bowel, and hundreds of his men were not even properly armed but had to fight with iron-bound sticks, and so his troops hung back while we went on, and the truth of the matter was that my army faced General Tilly almost alone, Vibeke, almost alone!

  “I thought we could win the day, because Tilly had isolated himself from General Wallenstein, but Tilly somehow had word of what numbers I brought with me and so he sent a messenger to Wallenstein’s rear requesting that eight thousand of his men turn and march north to face me as I came on. But I could not know this early; I only knew it late. And then I ordered the army to wheel round and fee back to where Brunswick was. And despite this, Tilly’s forward guard harried my rear and we had to fight as we fed on, and I knew that sooner or later we should have to turn and face them and those coming to them from Wallenstein, and that a great battle would be fought.”

  Again, the King stops. He looks at Vibeke’s face, softly lit by the candle, then beyond the candle into the dark of the room.

  He goes on: “I took up a position outside the village of Lutter. I had high ground in my favour and woods where I could hide my cannon and my musketeers.

  “Tilly marched on towards me. The date was the twenty-seventh of August 1626, and I can say that all the worst sorrows I have had to endure in my life began with that day.”

  Vibeke watches the steady burning of the candle and waits. The heat of the King’s body is such that her own night-gown is drenched, where he leans against her breast. She notices that Christian’s voice is becoming dry and rasping, as though there were insufficient spittle in his mouth, insufficient breath in his lungs. She wonders if he will end the story here, if he will decide that, after all, he cannot go on. “I know,” she says gently, “that Danish lives were lost at Lutter . . .”