by Norah Lofts
“It is immensely kind of you, Mrs. Davies, to take me in like this at such short notice.”
“It was the least we could do. If I’d known...but it was a plain beef pudding, already on when we knew. I’d have had something fancier, more to your taste, if there’d been more warning.”
“Beef pudding is one of my very favorite dishes.”
“It’ll be a bit overdone; as a rule we eat at three...So as soon as you’re warmed through and Tom has seen to his horse.”
There was trenchancy about the last words. Mr. Davies took himself off and his wife offered Caroline a choice between the necessary house, a few steps from the back door and the chamberpot in the bedroom; she apologized for having no better arrangement and Caroline thought of Windsor and St. James Palace where, when there were large gatherings, ladies were accommodated behind screens set up in corners and by the end of the evening there was another odor added to that of powder, scent and pomade. She chose to take the few steps.
When she was back in the kitchen, Mrs. Davies, unaware of the rule that royalty directed the conversation, said, “I expect that, for all the to-do, this has been a saddish sort of day for you. I remember when I came out of Norfolk to marry Tom I was that cast down, I cried every day for a week.” And she had known and loved Tom, promised to marry him as soon as he had promotion, and had only moved from Norfolk to Suffolk. This poor child...
“Taking leave of my family was very painful,” Caroline said. To her dismay the tears against which she had been battling all day, won a near victory, thickened her throat and made the candles which Mrs. Davies was lighting one after another swim and dazzle.
“You get over it, you know. In the end home is where your baby is born. A bit like birds, women. Not so much the nest they’re born in as the one they help to make.”
Good, sensible woman; busy with her candles and saying such a comforting thing.
“I’m sure you are right, Mrs. Davies. You have children?”
“One, a boy,” Martha Davies said, brushing away—no need to discourage—the memory of the three who had died, one at birth, one of measles, one of croup. “He’s over at Bury St. Edmund’s, at the Grammar School; that’s how we have a bed to spare. He’s clever; could be a lawyer one day.”
She placed the most recently lighted candle on the table, spread with a stiffly starched cloth and set for three and then cocked her head, looking toward the door and listening. There was a sound of feet, of voices, soon torn away by the screech of the wind; then the door opened and Mr. Davies edged in, a trunk on his shoulder, and in his wake Alice. The fire flared, the candles flickered.
“This poor wench,” Mr. Davies said, pushing the door shut and slipping the trunk from his shoulder.
Alice gave him no chance to finish.
“Your Majesty, I knew you’d want your warm cloak; and between them they’ve lost the keys. I said break it open, but nobody dared. So I brought it along.”
“That was very sensible, and very thoughtful, Alice. Thank you. I shall certainly need my cloak tomorrow.”
There was a short, awkward little silence.
Why bring her in, Mrs. Davies demanded silently of her husband; if you’d sent her straight back to wherever the others are...I’ve set for three, and the bed for one and I know you. You’ll think you should walk her back in case she gets blown off the jetty. And the pudding’ll be ruined.
Mr. Davies wordlessly addressed his wife: Well, what could I do? She was nearly here, battling along, and it is a heavy trunk; and with this wind nobody with half a heart would wish a dog out in it for more than a moment.
Alice knew where, but for the mislaying of the keys and her own decision to take matters into her own hands, she would be spending the night; her waiflike posture was not entirely assumed.
Caroline said, “Mrs. Davies, if it were agreeable to you, I should like Alice to stay. I’m not very hungry, she could eat some of my share and sleep on the hearth, with my cloak for cover.”
“Whatever you wish, Your Majesty,” Mrs. Davies said.
“That’s settled then,” said her husband, with hearty relief. He sat, in careless man-fashion, a fourth place at the table and handed Alice a plate: “Warm that for yourself, and hands as well, my dear.” Alice was in, merging with her background, unobtrusive as a partridge in a stubble field, as was her habit.
Caroline’s pudding was served on a plate of such quality and beauty as to deserve comment anywhere, fine porcelain, clear apple green in color, painted with bright birds and flowers. Mr. Davies told how he had picked it up on the beach, not a hundred yards from the house, the sole survivor, he reckoned, of a crate from China. It was so like a picture, Mrs. Davies said, that usually it hung on the wall in the parlor. “And we don’t use these as a rule, either. They were my grandfather’s.”
She pointed as she spoke to the wine glasses, sturdy rather than elegant, and again her husband responded to something in her voice.
“The wine,” he exclaimed, jumping up. “A lot of people, Your Majesty, seeing a wine like this on my table might think it ill come by, but the truth is, wine merchants know what we save them and are generous, some of them, at Christmas.” That led the talk to the subject of smuggling—Mr. Davies had some lively little tales. Then Caroline complimented Mr. Davies on his wine, and Mrs. Davies on her pudding. “The best I ever had.” That sounded such an obvious thing to say in the circumstances, that she added, “I honestly mean that, the very best.”
Alice had once eaten a better one. There was a butcher who sometimes sent the orphanage a basket of odds and ends. One such offering had been made into a pudding which was put to boil in the wash house copper, and Alice was told to see that the fire below was kept burning. And an elm had fallen, as elms often did, without any warning, clean across the door, barring her in, denying access to the woodpile. The copper had a wooden lid which she had broken by jumping on it; she had wrenched the legs off the old rickety benches on which the wash tubs stood; the tops of the benches and the tubs themselves defeated her; so she had fed her apron, her dress and her shoes into the fire. That was the best pudding she had ever tasted, but she did not mention it. One of her varied reasons for going to Denmark was to get away from her foundling past; in a strange land no one could note and remark that she had no family, nowhere to visit, even on Mothering Sunday.
The amiable, easy, aimless talk, helped by the wine, ran about the table where a Queen, a Customs Officer and his wife, and a foundling serving maid sat. Intimate with none, Mamma had said; but here in this warm kitchen, with the wind howling outside, there was an intimacy of a kind which Mamma could not have disapproved; just Alice, faithful and unassuming, and two kind people who had offered her their best and whom she would never see again. My last night in England, she thought, when Mr. Davies said, as the blast struck and the whole house seemed to shudder, “Ah, that’s the last of it. It’ll turn now and Your Majesty will have smooth, swift passage.”
Alice and Mrs. Davies cleared the table. Caroline said to Mr. Davies, “Would it be possible for me to write a letter?” He looked pleased, “I always told Martha it’d come in handy sometime. Ill fetch it.
It was a box, which, opened out, made a writing desk; its sloping surface, covered with red leather, unmarred by ink or a dropped blob of sealing wax. Silver-topped ink pot and sand shaker and a little plaque, “To Thomas Davies, from his friends and colleagues in the Customs Service at Lynn upon the occasion of his Marriage, July 3, 1749.”
“Martha said a chair would have been more useful. And what writing I do, I do at the office. So you’ll be the first to use it, and the last. I’ll have,” he said, with the first sign of diffidence he had shown so far, “another little plate done. And it’ll be an heirloom.”
She wrote to Edward: “I have just time to write you these few lines from England,” she began and paused. Had the wind served she should by now have been well out to sea, the lest wrench over. It was still to come, the misery of severance from
all she loved and knew and liked. Resolution and calm and the courage she had enforced upon herself, fell away and the tears crowded as she wrote that if patriotism consisted of love of one’s country then she could claim that virtue.
They had left her alone long enough to write a much longer letter, and when they returned they ignored her emotional state. She said on impulse to Alice, “You know, for you, Alice, it is not yet too late. I can manage if you decide to go back to London tomorrow.”
Alice said, “If you go, I want to go. And if you’re a Dane now, so am I.”
When the Davies reminisced, as they often did, for despite their unruffled demeanor, this was the highlight of their lives, never to be forgotten, when they said how pretty, how grateful, how gracious, and how easily she’d fitted in, the Queen of Denmark, one or the other was certain to say, “And her serving girl was so fond of her, it shows what a nice, proper lady she was.” Mr. Davies said that Alice’s words had called to mind something he’d heard somewhere; could be out of the Bible.
PART TWO
ROSKILDE; NOVEMBER 1, 1766
Denmark began at Altona and thereafter the inns grew worse and even the establishments of local nobles where she and her suite received hospitality overnight seemed dark, bleak, cheerless.
This inn, ten miles away from Copenhagen was the last stop for a change of horses and other necessary purposes, and it was a poor place indeed. Caroline washed her hands in a cracked basin and dried them on a threadbare towel and looked around for a glass. There was none. She reminded herself that she must not make comparisons; plainly Denmark was a poor country; therefore the welcome accorded her all along the road was the more creditable and touching. In places there had been red cloth laid down in the streets, girls dancing and scattering flowers, deputations of burghers bringing gifts. And almost everybody was very handsome in the same kind of way, as though all related; fair hair, blue eyes, often offset by weather-darkened skin, and almost everybody seemed tall.
Frau von Plessen, the Danish Mistress of the Robes who had assumed office at Altona when her own suite bade farewell and turned back, said, “Had I but known, Your Majesty, that this place would be so ill-provided, I would have kept out a glass. But there is no time now. We have just received a message. His Majesty intends to ride out to meet you at Roskilde. Six miles away. But you look very well, Your Majesty; very well indeed…
Frau von Plessen ran a cool, horse-dealer’s eye over her Queen and was satisfied that with this pretty, amiable, healthy young creature in his bed, His Majesty would no longer seek his pleasures in dubious ways and dubious places, Frau von Plessen was a patriot who would unhesitatingly have given her own life and that of any number of other people for the good of Denmark and the welfare of its King; austere and puritanical herself, she doggedly excused the excesses and scandals of the last ten months; Christian was young, his upbringing had been faulty, his friends were chosen; at a time of life when even the steadiest and most carefully reared young men kicked over the traces a bit, he had come into supreme power; naturally it had gone to his head. Like many of her stamp, Frau von Plessen had a firm, somewhat romantic, somewhat exaggerated belief in the influence which a “good” woman could exercise if she chose, but she was realist enough to know that there must first—especially with a seventeen year old—be an appeal to the eye and the senses. As she had made her first curtsy before her Queen at Altona she had thanked God, and at the same time felt that had the business of choosing Christian’s bride been left to her she could hardly have done better. Frau von Plessen’s relationship with her God was occasionally subject to such blurring of identity.
“I had hoped,” Caroline said, “for an opportunity to change my clothes and have my hair redone before meeting His Majesty”—before facing what must surely be the most crucial moment of her life. She had already in her mind selected the gown she would wear, the most beautiful one in her wardrobe, the bodice and panniers of white silk embroidered with roses and peonies in their natural colors, the underskirt the color of the palest of the roses; in that dress, bejeweled, her complexion enhanced by the cosmetics from Edward’s box and her hair fresh from Alice’s hands, she would have felt something of the necessary confidence.
“His Majesty,” Frau von Plessen said, “is sometimes sudden in his actions.” Immediately, as though in excuse, she added, “Roskilde is, for us, a place of significance. Our Kings are buried there. Since the tenth century.”
Like Westminster, Caroline thought; and reflected that she should be pleased and flattered by Christian’s decision to receive her there; it was silly to rely too much upon clothes.
She would have been surprised, and disconcerted, could she have known that her doubts about her clothes and general appearance were shared by Baron von Dehn, the Viceroy of the Duchies, who had received her at Altona and was escorting her to Copenhagen. Baron von Dehn was an honest, upright soldier who every night of his life thanked God—his commanding officer—for having posted him to Schleswig-Holstein, well way from the capital, the Court and the King. At such distance the Baron could be far more loyal than was possible when he came into contact with Christian and was visited by such shocking thoughts as, If he’d been my son, I’d have knocked the nonsense out of him; or, If he were under my command, I’d order fifty lashes. Baron von Dehn was not unaware that Christian’s governor, Count Reventlow was said to have used the strap freely; if indeed he had, then he had not, in Baron von Dehn’s opinion, laid it on hard enough.
The King’s decision to meet and to greet his bride at Roskilde was typical of his vagrant and inconsiderate fancies; naturally he was anxious to see her but it would not have hurt him to have waited three hours and given the poor child a chance to rest a little, to change her clothes and compose herself. The Baron thought his new Queen very pretty and her simple good manners and cheerfulness in the face of weariness and discomfort had endeared her more to him every day; but she was very young and Baron von Dehn was man of the world enough to realize that youth in itself was not a thing to appeal to a seventeen year old; he had decided to have a private word with the Mistress of the Robes, who was an old friend of his, and to tell her to choose a dress, a way of doing the hair, of using every possible aid to beauty that would make Caroline look older, more sophisticated, more...It was difficult to find the exact word, but women understood these things; a hint would have sufficed. The truth was that an old reprobate would have been enchanted by Caroline because she was young, a young reprobate would probably need something more...subtle. It was a pity that at their first meeting the Queen should be wearing a severe, and now somewhat creased, traveling outfit and a little hat which made her look even younger than she was. But there was no help for it. He devoted himself, as the carriage rattled and bumped along, to allaying the nervousness of which he recognized the signs. He saw her as a young conscript about to face fire for the first time.
Caroline was nervous; she was also extremely cold. Mamma had been right about the climate; only just November and as cold as England in mid-winter. And Frau von Plessen, in the most respectful terms, had advised against the wearing of the sable cloak; people all along the route, she said, were waiting to see Her Majesty and this they could not well do if she were huddled in furs. Also, she begged leave to point out, the groups of young girls who welcomed their Queen with songs and dances were wearing their white summer dresses. Caroline thought rebelliously that the girls were moving about, singing alone could be a warming exercise, and they were used to the Danish weather; but she had caught the veiled rebuke and decided to yield gracefully. This hardly seemed the moment to put into practice her secret determination not to be dictated to by her Mistress of the Robes; nor was she blind to the fact that Frau von Plessen was an intimidating personality, somewhat resembling Mamma in her confident manner, her aura of rectitude. So Alice, in the rearmost carriage, rode warm and snug, obedient to Caroline’s order, “Wear it yourself, Alice,” an order which Frau von Plessen deeply deplored but hardly dar
ed to countermand: and Caroline shivered as apprehension and chill exacerbated one another.
At the last moment something, long training in the art of self-control, a natural ebullience of spirit, the mere certainty that there was no escape, came to her rescue and she became calm in a very curious, indeed interesting, fashion. One moment there she was thinking herself into composure and courage, reminding herself of other ordeals safely survived, recalling Mamma’s panacea for shyness and self-consciousness—think of other people, not of yourself; and the next she was completely calm and composed, outside herself, watching herself, as though from a considerable distance and as little concerned as though what was happening was happening to another person.
There was an open square, with red cloth in the roadway, hushing the hoofs and the sound of the wheels; there were crowds of people, and many soldiers. There was a dark, ancient-looking building, its steps laid with the same red cloth, an anteroom hung with faded tapestries and lighted by candles; Frau von Plessen, wearing an anxious expression tweaked the little hat, spread the skirt, stepped backward. There was a high double doorway, a soldier in charge of each half of the door and beyond a huge room into which the cold winter daylight streamed through tall windows upon a group of men ranged in a semicircle behind two who stood a little to the fore—His Majesty of Denmark and a short, somewhat deformed youth beside whom the King looked taller than he actually was.
Caroline made the most profound curtsy. Shivering in the carriage over the last mile, she had wondered whether, on her shaking legs, she could perform creditably. Now, watching herself, she knew it well done; the heavy cloth skirt in a perfect circle, knees steady, face parallel with the floor; a daffodil bowing to the wind and then rising to stand and await the reciprocal bow, the approach, the words of greeting. Caroline had been ten years old when she had witnessed her brother George’s reception of his bride, so disappointingly plain of face, so Caroline, watching Caroline, knew what to expect.