by Rose Tremain
The King’s eyes study Peter Claire’s features once again with rapt attention, as though the lutenist were a work of art. “Well,” he says after a while, “I was wrong. I thought I must have dreamed you in the night, but you are perfectly real after all. I thought I had muddled you with the angels I was encouraged to imagine when I was a boy, and also with . . . But never mind . . . This is very much how I used to picture the angels—with features like yours. My grandmother used to tell me they rode about on the clouds. At Christmas they would fill my shoes with gold and silver. I think I have been waiting for one all my life and none has ever appeared to me. But now you have come, you and your lute. So I have decided to give you a task.”
Peter Claire says he is ready to undertake any task that His Majesty has in mind, but in the next minute the King falls silent. His eyes look tired and dreamy, as though he were on the edge of sleep, but after a few moments he rouses himself. He takes a sip of some white powder mixed with water in a glass. “For my stomach,” he says. “Plagues me day and night. Won’t let me sleep. A life without sleep begins to go badly. We lose the thread of things. This is what I always ask of music—to restore the thread to me. Tell me what you hope from it.”
This is a question that no one has asked Peter Claire in all his twenty-seven years. He stammers that through his playing he believes he can express something of himself that would otherwise have no voice. The King asks: “But what is that something, Mr. Claire? Can you define it?”
“No. Perhaps I would say it is what is in my heart . . .”
“Deeper. The human heart has too direct a conduit from the senses. Far deeper than that.”
“I don’t think I know, then, Sir.”
“Order. That is what we long for, in our innermost souls. An order that mirrors Plato’s Celestial Harmonies: a corrective to the silent chaos that inhabits every human breast. And music comes nearest to restoring this to us. Even to a man who has not understood the nature of his own dilemma: in sublime music, he will discover that his strivings may be subsumed beneath a wondrous calm and he will feel at peace. Is that not true?”
“It may be, Sir, except that I know that there are men for whom music does not seem to be a solace . . .”
“Perhaps they have no souls? Perhaps the devil stole their souls away when they were born?”
“Perhaps ...”
“Or they are still as children are, existing on the surface of the world and imagining there’s nothing beneath?”
“Or perhaps it is that they have not heard music sublime enough?”
“I had not thought of that, but it’s a reasonable assumption. Perhaps we should increase the number of public performances? Should we? I wonder if, in general, kings and governments are too stingy with music? I wonder whether we would have greater external order if the people could hear songs at the wash-house or pa-vans in the taverns?”
“You could experiment with that, Your Majesty.”
“Yes, I could. Very many of our citizens are full of sadness and confusion. They do not know how to be in the world. They do not know why they are alive.”
Peter Claire is not sure what he can say in reply to this. He looks down and his long fingers caress the neck and body of his lute. The King swallows the last of the white powder, belches loudly and puts down the glass. “I shall sleep now,” he says. “I did not get any sleep last night. I went to my wife for comfort at half past four, but she sent me away. I do not know what we are come to.”
King Christian still hasn’t mentioned the “task” he has in mind for Peter Claire, and now, as he settles himself for sleep, Peter Claire gets up, thinking that this is a signal that he should depart and leave the King alone. He stands for a moment hesitating by the bed and the King looks up at him. “Here is your task,” he says. “I want you to watch over me. I cannot tell you now if the task will be long or short, great or small, but I ask you this favour as I would ask an angel. Will you do it?”
Peter Claire stares at the King’s large, ugly face. He’s aware, in these moments, that something of great importance might be beginning, that perhaps, after all, he may not have come to Denmark in vain, and yet he does not know precisely what that something is. He longs to ask what King Christian means by the phrase “watch over me,” but is afraid to appear suddenly obtuse and worthless. “Of course I will do it, Sir,” he replies.
LAMENT OF COUNTESS O'FINGAL—FROM HER NOTEBOOK ENTITLED LA DOLOROSA
I was the eldest daughter of a paper merchant, Signore Francesco Ponti, and lived my life in Bologna under his kind protection until the age of twenty when Earl O’Fingal entered our house and fell in love with me at first glance.
I was dressed in white. My black hair hung about my face in ringlets. I held out my hand to Earl O’Fingal, who was at that time aged thirty-two, and, as I watched him press it to his lips, I knew what was in his mind. Within three months I was his bride and he brought me here to live at his estate at Cloyne in the west of Ireland.
Earl O’Fingal, ever known to his friends as Johnnie, was the most proper man and I must faithfully give account of his propriety and of his tenderness towards me. He spoke with a soft and pleasant voice and, during the first year of our marriage, gave me patient instruction in the English tongue, laughing sweetly at my mistakes, and in the evenings, when we had no company at Cloyne, reading to me from the sonnets of Shakespeare, so that many of these great works have stayed with me and now in this sad time bring me comfort.
When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
That Johnnie O’Fingal loved me I never doubted, nor will I doubt it ever. Something of what he called his “vision” of me at Bologna remained always with him, so that even as I aged, I did not grow old in O’Fingal’s mind. When I came to thirty I was still the white-clad angel he had seen standing before my father’s fire, and my body, which by then had borne him four children, was still, to him, the perfect body of a girl.
But now I understand that in this affectionate delusion of his one may perceive the shadow or exemplar of the tragedy which began to unfold in the tenth year of our marriage.
Earl O’Fingal was twelve years my senior, but looked younger than he was. He was exceptionally tall, being, I think, about six feet and four inches, so that my father, while finding him an honest and charming man, did not particularly enjoy standing next to him and always preferred to conduct conversations with him sitting down.
He had most delicate hands. And these hands of his were restless and in a perpetual gesturing and folding and unfolding, almost as if they strove of their own accord to fly off his arms and have some other existence free of his body. His skin was very white and his hair not very abundant, but of a pleasing brown colour. His eyes were grey and lively. The people of Cloyne, because he was their Lord and Master, and because his father the late Earl had ever been a meticulous landlord and kept everything secure on the farms and in the cottages, would say to me, “And how does your handsome husband, Lady O’Fingal?” In truth, to my eye, “handsome” was not the correct word to describe Johnnie O’Fingal, yet for all that he was a moderately fine young man and, lonely as I was during my first years in Ireland, I grew very fond of him.
He was a kind father to our children, as patient with their lessons and with their childish ways as he had been with my instruction into the English language. Often, when I would sit at dinner with him in the lofty marbled room, or by the fire while he read the sonnets, I would find myself looking up at him and thinking that I had made a good decision in agreeing to accept him as my husband. I should here add another thing: Johnnie O’Fingal was possessed of a substantial fortune.
And now I must come to the great catastrophe. It began on a cold night of winter, when a storm swept round the house and I could hear the thundering of the sea very near us, as if i
t meant to come into our rooms and drown us all. Being afraid, I woke Johnnie, who rose up and lit a lamp for me and put a shawl about my shoulders. He told me that, as a boy, he often heard this same tumultuous sea, but knew that never in a thousand years would it reach to our doors, and so he calmed me and sat there in the lamplight holding my hand.
After a few moments he thanked me for waking him at that moment. When I inquired why, he told me that he had just had an extraordinary dream and that if he had slept through until morning it might have vanished away into that nothingness we call forgotten things.
Johnnie O’Fingal had dreamed that he could compose music. In this miraculous reverie, he had gone down to the hall, where resided a pair of virginals (of which he was an adequate player) and where we would sometimes invite the best Irish musicians of the day to entertain us and our friends with a concert, and had sat down in front of them and taken up a piece of my father’s cream paper and a newly cut quill. In frantic haste, he had ruled the lines of the treble and bass clef, and begun immediately upon a complicated musical notation, corresponding to sounds and harmonies that flowed effortlessly from his mind onto the page. And when he began to play the music he had written it was a lament of such grace and beauty that he did not think he had ever heard in his life anything to match it.
I found this dream so wonderful that I immediately said: “Well, why do you not go down now this moment and see whether, when you sit at the instrument, you can remember the tune?”
“Oh, no,” he said, “what we can achieve in our dreams seldom corresponds to what we are veritably capable of.”
But I pressed him. Ever since that night I have wished that I had not done so.
Urged on by me, Johnnie descended to the hall and woke a servant to come and make up a fire. He remained there, sitting at the virginals, for the rest of the night and, when I went down at breakfast time, I saw him lit by a glance of sunlight falling from one of the high windows in the wake of the storm. His hair was wild. On the floor was a quantity of crumpled paper, scratched with lines and notes.
“Well, Johnnie?” I said.
He reached out and seized my hand. “Listen!” he said. “Listen.”
He began to play a melody of strange and haunting sweetness, reminding me somewhat of music I had heard long ago in Bologna, composed by the great Alfonso Ferrabosco. I sat there in silent wonderment. When the playing ended abruptly I cried out, “Go on! It’s beautiful, Johnnie. Play me all of it.”
But he could not go on. He told me that these few miraculous bars had come to him within fifteen minutes of sitting down at the virginals, but that every attempt to progress beyond them had resulted in something mediocre, spoiling what had gone before. I told him that this was because he was tired and suggested that he return to bed and sleep for a while, and recommence when he was rested. I caressed his head, smoothing his hair. Two of our children had come down and were gazing in perplexity at their dishevelled papa. And then, much to their consternation—for this was a thing they had never beheld and thought perhaps never to behold in their lives—Johnnie O’Fingal put his face into his hands and wept.
EMILIA TILSEN
She was born in Jutland. Her father, Johann Tilsen, is a rich landowner with a passion for summer fruit. He felled forests of beech and oak in order to lay out plantations of blackcurrants and loganberries. Emilia’s baby breath had about it the sweet scent of strawberry pie.
She is the eldest of six children and the only girl. On and on went the births of brothers. They exploded into the world, screaming and kicking. They fastened their gums to their mother’s breasts and milked her so violently that she felt wounded and took to lying down on her linen-covered day-bed through all the hours between feeds, just to regain her strength.
Emilia would sit by her on the floor. She would sing her peculiar little songs of her own invention. U}What is the sky made of I do not know/Sometimes it is made of dancing snow." She would lay kisses on her mother’s hands.
And Emilia’s mother, Karen, grew accustomed to her daughter’s gentle, talkative presence and began to love her more than anything or anyone else in the world: more than her husband Johann; more than their fine house and the perfume of the fruit fields; more than the acres of beechwoods that remained; more than all her boisterous sons. Lying on the day-bed, she would look into Emilia’s grey eyes and at her long hair neither dark nor fair and say: “We shall never be parted. We shall always sit like this together in the morning room. When you marry—for love, my darling, and not for money or land or tide—we shall build a house for you and your husband within sight of this window and so we shall see each other every day.”
So Emilia grew up in the shelter of Karen’s love. They walked together on the beautiful land, going slowly, arm in arm and talking as they went, while the brothers ran and tumbled along ahead of them, drawn on by Johann’s purposeful stride and by their archery games, and their dogs and their lessons in falconry. At bedtime, they brushed each other’s hair and said their prayers side by side. God, bless and keep from harm my beloved daughter, Emilia. God, please bless and keep from harm my beloved mother, Karen.
But God did not hear. Or, if He heard, He did not oblige.
Two days after the birth of Marcus, her last son, Karen Tilsen died in Emilia’s arms. It was a February morning and all the grey sky that hung above the world seemed on the instant of death to come pouring into the window in a never-ending, suffocating stream and enter Emilia’s being and obliterate it. She was fifteen years old.
She is eighteen now. She is small and silent. A miniature portrait of Karen hangs on a velvet ribbon round her slender white neck, and this is the only possession for which she has any feeling.
The person she is fondest of is her youngest brother, Marcus. Very often she whispers to him: “You killed my mother, Marcus,” but he still does not understand exactly what she means. He clings to her, hoping to find out, and she sits him on her knee and holds him close to her, because he smells like Karen, almost as if he were still part of Karen’s body. She sings to him and takes him skating in the frozen winter. She informs him that Magdalena is a witch.
Magdalena arrived as housekeeper for Johann after Karen’s death. She has dark hair and wide hips, and Emilia asks God to come through the window and smite her with swords. She imagines Magdalena’s severed head bouncing down the wooden stairs and shattering on the flagstones of the hallway. She pictures black blood flowing out of Magdalena’s eyes.
But Johann, from the moment he saw Magdalena, wanted to possess her. On her very first morning, some three months after the death of Karen, he followed Magdalena to the linen closet, bolted the door, positioned her wide hips over a linen chest and entered her from behind. She did not resist him but on the contrary murmured that she had never experienced anything she liked more than being taken in this way. When Johann had finished, even as he buttoned his breeches and was still staring with amazement at Magdalena’s colossal arse, he said: “As your employer, I wish to do this from time to time. It will cause you no pain, I promise, but on the contrary become a pleasant part of your duties, and duty may in the end be transformed into something else.”
Within a year, he married Magdalena. At the wedding, Emilia looked away from the couple and out at the grey sky that had come into the room on the morning of Karen’s death and taken away her being, and she asked the sky to brew up a whirlwind to snatch Magdalena from the face of the earth.
But Emilia waited, and still she waits, and the whirlwind doesn’t arrive. The years go on. The strawberries and the loganberries come into flower, and the summer rains fall and the fruit starts to swell and turn red and purple and is gathered, and the leaves droop and discolour and drop, and still no whirlwind pounces on Magdalena and hurls her into the clouds.
A baby boy is born to Johann and Magdalena and dies in hours. Emilia prays that Magdalena will die in its wake but, once again, her prayers are not heard. Johann’s obsession with Magdalena’s bottom knows no res
t and he becomes careless of when and where he takes her, so that one hot afternoon, as Emilia walks with little Marcus by a lake, they suddenly come upon Magdalena bending over in the water, splaying her legs, then lifting her skirts to reveal her white moons of flesh, and then, as they watch, Johann wades towards her, naked except for his shirt and in a state of gross arousal. Three-year-old Marcus laughs and points. He does not know what he has just seen. Emilia covers his eyes with her hand. Magdalena and Johann turn and stare accusingly at the children, then squat down and hide the lower parts of their bodies in the water, Magdalena’s skirts billowing round her, red as blood. “Go away!” Johann shouts.
That night, Emilia decides that her life has become unbearable. Inside her hatred of Magdalena, concealed from her at first but now becoming visible, something else is beginning to grow: a hatred of her own father. She thinks it may have no bounds. No bounds.
She falls asleep in a sweat of loathing and confusion, and has a gentle dream of her lost mother. She recognises this pattern of feeling: anguish followed by calm. She remembers that this was how she held to existence for fifteen years: ill or troubled, perplexed or sad, she would seek out Karen and Karen would talk to her and stroke her hair and hold her small hand in hers, and after a while she would arrive again at normality and serenity, and know that she could proceed with her life.
And now Emilia wakes weeping because the dream was so fine and so real, and all through it she was skating with Karen, arm in arm, skating on and on down a long frozen river, and their two breaths made a single cloud that danced along in front of them, and the sound of their skate blades cutting into the ice was like a kind of singing. “Show courage, Emilia,” Karen said to her.
What did this mean precisely? What kind of courage is her mother asking of her? Emilia lies in her narrow bed wondering. She cannot imagine any future in which she can be happy.