by Norah Lofts
When the gods call they send a messenger; she had hoped that Baron Juel-Wind was that messenger, coming to tell her that on some day in this month of buds and flowers unfolding, she would follow, or precede Johann to the block. I am the guilty one...
“Your Majesty will be addressed ceremoniously,” Baron Juel-Wind said, “and a proper suite will be in attendance.”
He thought that she looked very ill and very old; in the little time since he had seen her last she had aged by twenty, thirty years. Beauty, youth, vigor all vanished; and who would plot to put such a completely discredited woman, prematurely aged, back into any position of power Nobody, he thought, need fear plots on her behalf. Let it not be forgotten that she was the King’s first cousin; the King was lunatic and lunacy ran in families. It could be, he thought, noting her apathy at the reception of what after all must seem momentous news for a woman who had lived for more than a week under the shadow of imminent, ignominious death, that she was demented too.
He had just thought that when she said, “My daughter, the young Princess, will she be allowed to accompany me to Aarbourg?”
“No, Your Majesty. The Princess Louise-Augusta will join her brother, the Crown Prince.”
Well, better so. It is an acknowledgement of her royal blood. And better for her in the long run to be thought of as the daughter of the King of Denmark than as a bastard, father beheaded, mother dead of misery and shame.
Nevertheless she cried as she held the child for the last time. She cried a good deal now, making up for the time when, as a girl, she had cried little; Mamma had disapproved, Edward had been inclined to jeer and Louise had cried enough for two.
Taking his leave, his errand done, Baron Juel-Wind said, “Her Majesty looks very ill. I doubt if her stay at Aarbourg will be long.”
The Castle Governor, instantly on the defensive—for who, in these upset times, knew friend from foe?—said, “I assure you, Her Majesty has had every care and consideration; a well-set table twice a day...what more can I do?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing,” the Baron assured him, hastily. “I was merely remarking...”
Now, doomed not to die in a fashion that would have been some kind of expiation, she lived in an unending nightmare. Mantel still made the brews that he had learned from his grandmother, and sometimes she slept a little, saw Johann handless, headless and woke screaming. Mantel said that when the lime trees bloomed he would gather enough to stuff a pillow for her—nothing like a lime pillow as a cure for sleeplessness. He made little strips of toast, English fashion, and presented them to her, with fresh-made tea; his eyes were like a spaniel’s, pleased to retrieve—look-what-I-have-brought-you. To please him, poor faithful fellow, she ate mouthfuls of toast and sipped the tea. All waste. Any day now, which day, what day she did not know, but soon, with the opening and flowering of the year, Johann would go to his terrible death. And then she would die, too...
COPENHAGEN; APRIL 28, 1772
Struensee had believed for a short time, immediately after his arrest, that the people would rise in his favor. They had not done so. The scandal had momentarily swamped what feelings of gratitude had been entertained and there had been shock and disapproval. Ordinary men had a living to make; busy all day and asleep all night they had no time for meddling in affairs; they were unaccustomed to taking action, even on their own behalf, and, perhaps most important, they had no leader. The new government had taken the precaution of temporarily arresting men like Count von Bulow, and Baron Schimmelmann who believed in the Queen’s innocence, and therefore, by implication, in the innocence of Struensee. So nothing was done.
But, when it came to the creation of the scaffold the authorities ran into a little trouble.
On its three landward boundaries the capital had broad allées, spread with gravel and bordered by trees. They were used by soldiers for exercises and parades, by citizens for walks and by itinerant entertainers and salesmen.
In mid-April the authorities commissioned a master carpenter to build, in the eastern allée, a wooden structure, twenty-four-feet long, twenty-four-feet wide and twenty-seven-feet high. It was to be soundly built and quickly built; if he and his apprentices could not complete it by the twenty-fifth of the month, he could subcontract; expense did not matter; time did. Also needed, a mile away, in the westernmost were two poles, each surrounded by four wheels.
By this time the sentence passed upon Struensee—and upon Count Brandt who was convicted of being his confederate, and of having laid disrespectful hands upon His Majesty—was known, and the carpenter suspected the purpose of the work he was asked to do. He remembered that Struensee, whatever else he had done, had passed the act that forced noblemen to pay their debts like anybody else. Several jobs, the payment for which he had never hoped to see, had been promptly paid for and the carpenter did not intend to have any hand in the erection of what he judged to be a scaffold.
“It can’t be done,” he told the minor official who had been put in charge of the job. “All my boys have an annual holiday—in April. And I couldn’t do it alone, not with my back as bad as it is.”
The word had spread. In the whole city of Copenhagen, no carpenters, their journeymen or apprentices would work upon this structure. They all had excellent excuses; holidays, other urgent jobs, a remarkable number of crippling ailments. Wheelwrights were similarly unemployable. The minor official, intent upon promotion, sought further afield for labor and said that the structure was to be the beginning of a pleasure house, a stage where puppet shows and other popular entertainments would take place in the coming summer. The scaffold, he saw, must be erected. The wheelwrights’ work was less essential. In almost every coachhouse some old vehicle stood rotting and it was easy enough to borrow eight wheels. Their condition was not important. What they were to bear was not heavy.
The execution was timed to take place so early in the morning, when it was hoped that the crowd would be small, that the soldiers and sailors who were to surround the scaffold moved into position by torchlight. But the word had gone round, and long before it was light enough to see the Town Commandant could sense the presence of a great multitude, ominously quiet. When the sky in the east brightened and the dawn of a clear April day broke, he could see the massed faces, all pale in the new light. Even the weathered faces of soldiers and sailors looked pale; probably his own did. He feared a demonstration and was glad that he had insisted upon so large a force being called out—even the young cadets from the military academy. Between six and seven thousand men, all armed, some mounted, made a barrier between the scaffold and the crowd, but even so they were outnumbered, three, four, five to one. Best, he thought, to intimidate the people immediately; he had three hundred dragoons and he ordered them to make and keep clear a space between the outer rank of service men and the front rank of crowd.
Daylight brightened; in the trees the birds stirred and began to call. A carriage brought Dean Hee, also looking pale. He had been on his knees most of the night praying for the souls of the men who, whatever their offenses, must be reckoned among those for whom Christ died. The executioner and his assistants arrived and the crowd made a sighing sound, like wind blowing through a cornfield.
Then came the carriage in which the two condemned men sat, guarded and manacled.
Now, thought the Town Commandant, it will come if it comes at all. He gave a signal and the dragoons stopped pacing and each one swung his mount around to face the crowd.
Brandt was embittered, but resigned. He had invited trouble by throwing in his lot with an upstart with a head full of idealistic notions and absolutely no sense. He was believed to have been in Struensee’s confidence in amorous as well as other spheres, and that was unjust, would presently be seen to be unjust. Not that that made any difference now. What did matter was that he should not disgrace himself, his family or his caste by showing the slightest fear at the crucial moment. It should not be too difficult. He came of a long line of brave men, many of them soldiers and any soldi
er going into battle faced the possibility of being horribly wounded and left alive with the pain. This would be short and sharp; two blows, the last one final. There would be a great crowd and he would show them how a gentleman should die.
Struensee was not resigned, though; like Brandt, he was embittered, not by the injustice of his sentence but by the obvious ingratitude of the people for whom he had worked so hard. He had been the People’s Friend and the people were prepared to see him butchered. Like Brandt he blamed himself; he’d been a fool, throwing off so many of the conventional, accepted ideas, but retaining one, a sentimental belief that one woman was preferable to others, that copulation was not in itself sufficient.
When he thought of his right hand and all the patient skill it had acquired and of the muscle, ligaments, bones and veins...when he thought of his head, all he knew, all he planned, all he had been, could have been, should have been, then he rebelled against the waste of it all. But worst was the fear. He’d never seen animals on the way to the shambles without a feeling of shuddering pity; he had for years been almost a vegetarian. When he thought of the block, black horror engulfed him. When he thought of Caroline he saw her as his partner in folly, the instrument of his undoing. Two years ago, almost to the day, on just such a day as this promised to be, they had ridden together along the western allée, where tonight this body of his would lie, hacked into joints, meat on a butcher’s slab.
He knew that he would have lived like a monk, lived on bread and water, slept on the bare earth for the rest of his life, in order to have had the rest of his life. He would have been happy to be stupid, ugly, poor, despised, so long as he could see the dawn, the dusk, the change of seasons. He knew—who could know better than a doctor?—that all men must die, but not like this; in the fullness of time, a life’s work done; the bones weary; the mind ready for rest in oblivion.
Brandt went first, carrying his well-bred, insouciant arrogance to the end. When the shackles were struck from his wrists one of the executioner’s assistants went to help him out of his jacket Brandt said, “Stand off, do not presume to touch me.” Dean Hee spoke to him and Brandt nodded and smiled, a gentleman agreeing to take wine, to participate in a game of cards. He rolled back the right sleeve of his shirt, laid his head on the block, his hand beside it, bore the two blows which his limited imagination had foreseen, and was dead. Not a tremor; not a flinch.
He’d died as a man should. God give me strength to do likewise.
But Johann Frederick Struensee, you cast away God years ago, when you were a pious little boy, shocked to learn that many of those who prayed “Give us this day our daily bread,” seldom had bread at all, lived on seaweed, boiled nettles, goosegrass. Rousseau and Voltaire his priests, Reason his deity, the good of all men his aim, love his undoing. And nothing to lean upon now.
Fifteen steps up to the scaffold; Enevold’s blood still steaming in the fresh morning air; the crowd watching, silent and passive. Dean Hee, futilely attempting to make a routine out of a massacre. “Are you very truly sorry for your actions? Do you leave this world without hatred or malice against any person whatsoever?”
Stamping the passport for admittance to a Paradise that did not exist.
Agree; get it over with.
He had to be helped out of his jacket; other hands rolled up his sleeve. When his right hand was severed he jerked so violently that his head moved and the last, merciful blow, though it severed his neck, went a little awry, leaving his chin on the block, glued down by Brandt’s now coagulating blood.
The three hundred horses of the Dragoons, the horse of the Town Commandant and the humbler steeds between the shafts of the various vehicles, became restive, disliking the smell of spilt life. All the little birds took wing.
“Both died, truly repentant,” Dean Hee said.
It went off without a hitch, the Town Commandant thought, with great relief.
The executioner decided that his assistants could deal with the disemboweling and the hewing into four quarters.
The crowd dispersed, peaceably.
The bits of what had once been men were heaved into a cart which trundled off to the western allée, along which, on just such an April day, two years ago but for two days, Struensee and Caroline had ridden to their doom. On each post a head, and a severed hand, as the law decreed; on each wheel one quarter of a carcass. The little birds who had greeted the spring morning with song stayed aloof, but the flesh eaters to whom there was but one season, that of hunger, swooped in and picked the bones as clean as those of the skeleton from which Johann Frederick Struensee had learned the principles of anatomy at the University of Heidelburg.
At Kronborg Caroline woke from a dreamless sleep induced by one of Mantel’s brews. Light showed behind the curtain’s edge and the birds were singing. Another day to be lived through with nothing but despair and remorse for company.
Then there was something new, a paralyzing fear such as she had never known or imagined. The worst nightmare had not terrified her so. She was alone in the barely twilight room, shut in with something so unspeakably evil, so threatening and so real that she wanted to ward it off with her hands, but they could not move. She tried to call out and no sound came. She lay, helpless, sweating and shivering, waiting for whatever it was to strike. It came close and fell upon her and as the fear had been all consuming, so was the pain; not in any one place, not with bruising or burning or the agony of childbirth, simply pain all over and all through.
Death; this was death; accept it, give way to it, be glad of it...
Mantel always came first, padding softly in case she should be asleep, poor lady; she never once had been on any morning since they had come here. He would draw the curtains, inquire if she had slept at all, regard her with grave concern, paler, thinner than yesterday?, make some remark about the weather and then go down to make a pot of tea.
This morning there was no sound from the bed and he withdrew quietly. The last draught had been effective and she was short of sleep. He took up a position outside the door so that he could guard her from the first clattering maid, the first dilatory lady. “Her Majesty is still sleeping.” He was about the only person in the place who now used her title without hostility and a covert sneer. She was divorced, she was deposed, she was disgraced; why should she still be addressed as though she were Queen?
She was still asleep at ten o’clock and at eleven when the Castle Governor came to make his daily visit, to ask if she had any complaints. Today it was also his duty to tell her the news, brought from Copenhagen by courier, that the sentence upon Count Struensee had been carried out. Dry disciplinarian that he was Lieutenant Colonel von Hauch was not an unkindly man and was not unwilling to defer this unpleasant task for an hour or two.
But Mantel was growing anxious; there was nothing noxious about the draught, an infusion of bruised willow bark and dandelion leaves with enough honey and rum to render it palatable. Nothing there to hurt anyone. Was there? Was there?
The lady-in-waiting whom he liked least came back for the third time and said crossly, “Unless Her Majesty wakes now we shall hardly have her dressed in time for dinner.”
“Her Majesty has slept badly all these weeks,” he said. It was only a half protest.
“That is no reason for delaying everybody and everything. Go in and draw the curtains.”
However careful one was they rattled. The bright sunshine of a perfect spring morning made its way through the narrow, deep-set window and fell upon the bed.
For a moment Mantel thought his mistress was dead, her face was so changed; all the marks of misery and hopelessness that marred her face and aged it by twenty years in three months were smoothed away; she looked peaceful and happy. All her woes over. Then he saw that the sheet—grayish-looking, wet-looking—rose and fell as she breathed.
He said to the lady-in-waiting at the doorway, “Her Majesty is sleeping peacefully.”
High heels clattered on the stone between doorsill and carpet “You
r Majesty! It is almost midday! It is time you were awake.”
Caroline opened her eyes, seemed to be confused for a second or two and then said, as she said every morning, “Good morning, Mantel.” She smiled, the first time he had seen her smile at Kronborg. He bowed and wished her good morning.
She looked toward the other side of the bed; one of her ladies; she’d been too sunk in apathy and despair to bother about their names; this was one of the most hostile; but in this awakening she, too, must be smiled at.
“I shall be ready to be dressed in about half an hour,” Caroline said.
“As Your Majesty wishes,” the lady said; the flounce her skirt, the click of her heels expressed displeasure.
“Your Majesty will take tea?” Mantel asked, watching for, apprehensive of, the moment when she should come to her full senses and that old, troubled mask fall into place again.
“It’s late isn’t it?” He thought she was referring to the difficulty—how could she know?—of getting a kettle boiled in a kitchen where bad-tempered cooks were preparing dinner.
“I’ll manage,” he said.
“I’ve been away a long time, Mantel. To a very far place. I wish I could tell you, but there are no words. I can tell you, though, that everything is all right. No need to be sad any more. Just a frontier to be crossed.”