Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  James Whittaker Claire

  KIRSTEN: FROM HER PRIVATE PAPERS

  I declare that no time in my life was as difficult as this is!

  Small wonder is it that so many women exchange reality for the oblivion induced by strong liquor or—as I have heard is now the craze up and down the Kingdom—dance themselves to death. For a woman’s life is for ever and ever hedged about with Complications and she must, through every hour of her waking, be attending to one or other of these and trying what solutions she can. There are days, I swear, when I am so Exhausted in my body and in my mind that I long to lay myself on my bed and never wake again.

  Before the King’s return from his Norwegian Mine, when I would open my eyes each morning and ask myself what Thing awaited me in the coming day, and then remember that I would spend some hours with Otto and be borne away once more upon the wild gallop of our passion, with my lover’s member bucking into me in the manner of a Stallion rearing up and coming into a Mare, and the pain of the silken Whip lashing my buttocks, why then I would find the World to be a fine place. But alas, alas, that time is past! I am left with the pain and bloating of my pregnant state and with the terrifying need to disguise it from the King until sufficient time passes that I may pretend that the Child is his. The Child will be my excuse and he will have to honour it. He loves Children and has brought more of them into the world than I can count. That this Child will be a Rhenish boy with flaxen hair and golden skin, and a nature greedy for love, will make no difference. He will believe that it is his.

  Meanwhile, the Count cannot visit me here and I dare not—lest all my plans are discovered and come to nothing—creep out of the Palace to any secret rendezvous with him.

  Yet, we exchange letters. My old friend James, the Tennis Court Marker, who long ago stole an indecent kiss from me in the Summer-house and has therefore been in Thrall to me ever since, has agreed to be emissary and to travel between Otto’s dwelling and Rosenborg with letters hidden in his work bag.

  We write in a kind of code, muddling German, French, English, Italian and Latin words. The Names we have given each other are Stefan and Brigitte. Stefan’s occupation is that of Jockey. ( Oh, a Jockey, Otto, mein lieber!) Brigitte is the daughter of a Tanner. (Ah, and she knows how the hides are to be flayed, mon trés cher Comte!) And between them both, in all the words that pour from their pens, there is not one sound grammatical construction. Brigitte and Stefan are, in truth, aberrant confectioners, making of language a cake that no one in the world finds beautiful but they.

  Yet nothing much—aside from this correspondence—remains to give me any pleasure or mirth. The days pass, that is all. Summer brings its golden heat. I dream of Otto’s mouth. I send Emilia into the gardens to gather flowers to scent my lonely rooms . . .

  And nor do Matters with my Mother and Emilia’s family go on quite as we would wish them.

  Ellen Marsvin has visited the Tilsen household twice now and on neither occasion has she been able to set eyes upon little Marcus. Yet she has, notwithstanding her failure as our spy in Jutland, demanded and got from me my Woman of the Torso, Vibeke Kruse, to have as her own Maid of the Wardrobe. It is a Mystery to me why she wants this Woman. Vibeke is of a solid temperament and does not take offence when I berate her—as Johanna does—yet her duties in the Wardrobe are not performed so excellently that they could not be done by some Local Woman at Boller, and she is moreover very given up to her Love of Sweetmeats, so that she is to be found very frequently stuffing herself with sugared damsons and quince tartlets and spoonfuls of Apricot Cream. Thus, she is costly, and it causes me not the least disquiet to send her away. I marvel only that my Mother insisted so upon this subject and do begin to wonder whether she does not have some Secret Plan concerning this fat Vibeke.

  But I do not miss her one jot. Truly, I am tired of all my Women, with their sulking and complaining, and whenever they come into my Sight I long to have them removed from it again. I would like to send them all away and keep only Emilia to care for every bit of me. Yet my clothes and jewels, being but fabricated and inert, do need this Coterie of the Disaffected to starch, iron, polish and steam some irritable life into them. There are days when I am laced into petticoats so angry and stiff that my feet could leave the ground and they would yet hold my body upright. My ruby necklace is put upon my neck still hot as blood from its furious shining.

  To hell with the Women! At least God gave me Emilia, whose sweet disposition, I do swear, is a weapon against my encroaching Madness in the midst of all my deceptions and double-deceptions.

  I try to comfort her on the subject of Marcus. I tell her that we must be patient. But one day she says to me: “Madam, I had a dream that he was found drowned in the Water Trough.” And I can detect that she is distracted by worry for him. When she is reading to me her eyes will suddenly stray from the book. When we play cards she sometimes loses all account of who is winning.

  I try to soothe her fears by taking her to buy presents for Marcus, just as I promised. So far, we have despatched a Mechanical Bird (which is wound like a clock with a key, and then opens its beak and lets forth an icy trill), a Sailor’s hat, a pair of scarlet boots and a kitten. I have written to my Mother to tell her to inquire after these objects on her next visit to the Tilsen household and ask that they be brought to her sight. The kitten’s name is Otto.

  My one and only wickedness in this dreary month concerns my Slaves, Samuel and Emmanuel.

  As requested, the King gave them to me, to serve me only and do my bidding and no one else’s. That they are not paid, but do veritably live the life of Slaves—except that they wear fine clothes and are not Chained Up—wakes in me a peculiar excitement. That this feeling is a Reprehensible Thing, I am very sure. But yet I feel it. And I do believe that it has to do with the crude fact that I, in my duties as the King’s Consort, do feel myself to be in the Position of a Slave, because I have no power of my own except what I can exercise through my body or through my Cunning.

  This excitement of mine is a peculiar Phenomenon and I shall tell no one about it, not even Emilia, for I am sure she would not like to hear it. But I will now avow that, on Monday of this week, when I was dining quite alone in my chamber, and these two Negro boys were kneeling by my chair (Ambassador Langton Smythe has calculated that they are aged between fifteen and sixteen years) carrying aloft for me plates and baskets of delicacies, from which I could pick and choose with my slender white hands, there started to stir in me a little worm of Pleasure.

  And I began a conversation with myself, one part of me saying: “Kirsten, are you not a Shameful Degenerate Person to feel such a thing within your body?” and the other part asking: “^^at is a Slave for, but to do your Every Bidding, Kirsten, no matter what that bidding may be?”

  I rose to my feet and went to the window, drawing the thick drapes on the summer evening. Then I went to my door and locked it.

  Speaking in English, which is the only language—aside from their own tongue, which is most strange and wonderful—that Samuel and Emmanuel understand as yet, I commanded the Boys to lay down their platters of food and to take off all their clothes. I said this very kindly, smiling at them all the while, lest they began to be afraid I was about to strike them or hurt them in some way.

  They feigned not to comprehend what I was asking of them, but I repeated the command and sat down, waiting on my chair, while they slowly removed their velvet coats, their satin waistcoats, their jewelled turbans, their coloured shoes, their lace shirts and their silk breeches and stockings.

  They stood there in their undergarments. As children, I am sure they had run naked in the wild surf of their island but, at the Court of King Charles in London, had been taught, no doubt, to cover themselves at all times and never stand unclothed in a room, not even when they were alone.

  I indicated that they should remove their cotton pantaloons. And so they bent to do this and, when they stood up, were revealed to me in all their dark, shining beauty. I noted th
at their members were large and mannish, and a desire to reach out and touch them was so strong in me that I felt that ache which comes into me when I dream of Otto.

  I knew that a Spirit of Wickedness was in the room. This Spirit has played with me all my life since I was a child. Through thirty years, it has played with me and taunted me, and does not let me rest.

  I thought for several moments that it would again vanquish me. I knew that, whatever lewd command I might give, my Slaves would force themselves to obey me, through fear of being cast out into the world with nothing, and so for a space I let my mind boil in a magnificent stew of Carnal Entertainments.

  But, in the end, I did not utter my thoughts. They were within a breath of forming themselves into words and something stopped them. And I declare it was Emilia who stopped them. For into me came an awareness of the shame I must later feel in her innocent company if I should trespass upon the bodies of my Slaves. And so

  I stepped back from wickedness. I thanked Samuel and Emmanuel for showing me “this graceful form and shape of yours, such as I have not laid my eyes on before,” and told them, with the gentleness of a Mother, to get dressed.

  Not long after this, when I had unlocked my door and Samuel and Emmanuel had departed, Emilia came to me to ask if I wished her to play dice or cards with me before the night should come. Then she stared at my face and said: “Oh, Madam, you look flushed. Is there some fever come upon you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do believe there is. I am much given to these sudden fevers, but they pass. In a little time, Emilia, they always pass away.”

  A SMALL SQUARE OF DUST

  Peter Claire walks alone in the streets of Copenhagen.

  From the noisy commerce of the city, from the rattle of carts and carriages on the stone flags and the cries of the market traders and the flurrying of birds and the carillons of the church clocks, he is trying to pluck out answers to the hundred questions that occupy his mind.

  He walks north-east towards the water. As always, people stare at him as he passes. The stares of the men are curious, confused; the stares of the women soften to entranced contemplation. It is not unusual for people to stop and try to hold him in conversation, pretending that they recognise him or mistake him for a friend they had once known. And today, as he meanders slowly through the crowds, a beggar woman claws him with her grimed hand and whispers in his face, “The lives of the Golden Ones are the shortest. Lay money down against your brief time.” He gives her a coin, then quickens his pace as he hurries away.

  Now he stands on the quayside and sees gulls circling the basin and a warm wind from the south setting the boats tilting and tugging gently at their anchors. He is reminded of Harwich: in the salt

  smell of the air, in the echoey cry of the gulls, in the slap of water against the wooden jetties.

  But he does not think long about his family. His thoughts fold and refold themselves around Emilia Tilsen, yet do not arrive at any clear understanding nor any certainty. It is as though he has been set the task (once teasingly given to him by his sister Charlotte) of fashioning a table napkin into a water-lily, and indeed he can hold the image of such a lily in his mind, yet no one has shown him how this feat might be achieved. He folds, unfolds, refolds. No lily emerges.

  Adhering to the Cartesian principles discussed with the King in the Numedal, he once again sets out the one thing of which he feels himself to be certain. He expresses it thus: I experience an almost perpetual longing or fierce inclination to come into the presence of Emilia. Upon her approbation appear to rest all my hopes of future happiness .

  The gulls call to the clouds, the wind ruffles Peter Claire’s hair and blows a few strands of it into his eyes. He asks: 'What is such a longing? How may it be defined? Is it a true need or only a chimera or fantasy? Is it a longing of the body only, or of my whole being?

  What he seems to know is that it is a longing unlike any other he has felt. When he walked with Francesca O’Fingal by the sea at Cloyne he longed to possess her. But it is not mere physical possession of Emilia that he craves; it is something else, something more absolute. It is, he tells himself, as if I believed that while I beheld Emilia, during every mote of time that I could capture her within my sight, nothing could harm me or bring to me any suffering. It is as though I imagined that, as long as I was with her, I would not die ...

  Yet still no concrete revelation of any incontrovertible truth appears to him. Could it be that what he thinks he feels is merely a delusion born of his solitude and of his long separation from both his family and the Countess? Will he wake tomorrow, or the next day, to find that it has vanished?

  He has encountered Emilia only once since the day when he talked to her in the garden. They came face to face in a corridor of the palace and they stopped, and Peter Claire reached out and took Emilia’s hand. “I must speak to you,” he said.

  Emilia looked at him with her little worried frown and he could not tell what the frown signified. And having said that he wanted to speak to her, what was it, after all, that he hoped to say? Part of him wanted to tell her that he was writing a song called “Emilia’s Song,” but he found he couldn’t bring himself to admit this—in case (as seemed to him very likely), when the song was completed, it turned out to be a hopelessly mediocre thing. So he repeated his one utterance again: “I must speak to you!” But having said this, he was at a loss. He felt himself to be incapable of following the single phrase with anything else. All he could do was press Emilia’s hand to his lips and then turn from her and walk away.

  Later, in his room above the stables, he despised himself for his faltering and cowardly behaviour. He sat down at his bureau and began to write Emilia a letter. But, like his song, he made no progress with the letter and soon abandoned it.

  Emilia, who has never been vain, who has never thought to consider herself pretty, now spends long minutes staring at her face in the glass.

  A small nose, soft grey eyes, a mouth of surprising sensuality, a pale complexion: what do these ingredients add up to? Is she ordinary? Or has she, without noticing it, become quietly beautiful? She moves her head this way and that, sees in her profile the profile of her mother and so concludes, “If I am like Karen, why, then, I am fair.” But is this true?

  She turns away from the glass. The hours that Kirsten Munk spends each day examining her own reflection have taught Emilia that when a woman keeps staring and staring at herself, she is trying to see herself through the eyes of her lover. If she finds fault, it is not the fault itself, but rather her lover’s pitiless regarding of that fault that she sees.

  So what is she, Emilia, doing wasting time gazing stupidly at her own features? She is behaving as though she had a lover, when the truth of the matter is quite otherwise. She passed a few moments in the garden with the handsome lutenist, and in a passageway, one day, he seized her hand and held it for an instant to his lips. Such fugitive encounters go on, no doubt, day after day and year after year inside the royal palaces. They signify nothing. They are fleeting abstractions that form in the rarified air and evaporate like the scent of the lindens.

  Emilia remembers that, as she put her flowers into the lutenist’s arms, she felt as though something—some understanding or agreement, something more than just the flowers—passed between the two of them. She finds this memory so thrilling that it almost makes her dizzy. But who, in reality, is to say that there was any such understanding? For what is life but successive alteration? Even those things which—like Johann’s love for his wife Karen—have seemed to be unalterably so may in time appear never to have existed at all.

  She tries to put the whole matter from her mind. She tells herself that a man such as this (who may also be vain and shallow and without any compassion) will fabricate a hundred “understandings” of this kind in a single year.

  Emilia resolves that she will return to her former way of thinking about her own life, in which the love of a man played no part at all. She goes to the looking-glass one la
st time and covers it with a shawl.

  My Dear Miss 'Olsen [says the note which arrives two days later],

  There are matters upon which I wish most urgently to speak to you.

  I shall wait for you in the cellar where we play (below the Vinterstue) at seven o’clock on Friday morning.

  Be assured how greatly I honour and respect you, and please believe me when I promise you that you have nothing in the world to fear from such a meeting.

  Peter Claire, lutenist in His Majesty’s orchestra

  Emilia reads the note a number of times.

  She then folds it and puts it away in the drawer where she keeps the laces and ribbons for her petticoats, and resolves to forget it. After a few hours have passed, she goes to the drawer and takes

  out the note and rereads it five more times. Again, she folds it carefully and puts it away, and closes the drawer firmly, as though with this one movement she were locking it and throwing away the key.

  That afternoon, Kirsten says to her: “Emilia, your thoughts are not on this game. You have given away your jack of hearts when you know perfectly well that I hold the queen.”

  And so Friday arrives.

  Peter Claire longs for it to come and he also wishes that its coming might be for ever postponed.

  He is in the cellar at ten minutes to seven. He walks to the open spaces in the walls through which the snow came sifting in winter and looks out. The air of the early morning is gentle and warm.

  He then wanders about the cellar, breathing the resinous smell of the wine casks and reading the marks and labels on them. No sooner has he read them than these marks and labels undergo a transformation and reformulate themselves into questions:

  What shall I do if she does not come?

  If she does not come, am I to conclude that she feels nothing or only that she is afraid?

  All year round, it is cold in the cellar, yet Peter Claire feels too warm. He sits down on the chair that is habitually his when the orchestra plays or rehearses and tries to breathe slowly, so that when seven o’clock arrives she will find him calm and serene. And then, in the middle of the time when seven o’clock should still be some way off, it arrives. The church clock strikes. It seems to Peter Claire that the church clock has treacherously swallowed three or four minutes of his existence in its haste to get to the hour.