by Rose Tremain
“Well,” I said. “Make haste, then, my dear Stefan.”
He seized my arm and hustled me into a small chamber, really no bigger than a Closet, and I could not help but notice that a quantity of brooms and pails and feather dusters resided there, but I did not for long dwell on these, for no sooner had Otto’s hand pushed up my skirt and begun to caress me than I came swiftly to
tors to the house that he had not expected—and then swept past us and up the stairs. We heard the door to his room open and close upon him.
Peter Claire told me that the morning had passed quite well. From the few bars of the remembered melody that Johnnie could play for him, Peter tried to hear in his heart the continuation that would be at one with the beginning. He arrived at length at three of these continuations. He made notations for them and played them both upon the virginals and upon the lute. Johnnie listened attentively. He knew that none of them corresponded to what he had heard, but he did not immediately reject them. He knew that the very /act that a continuation could exist was important and so he let the lutenist experiment with them for a while.
Then, in the afternoon, he grew impatient with them. He declared that all were “as cold as the moon compared with the sun that was in my mind” and refused to listen to them any more. He paced the library, tearing books from the shelves and throwing them to the ground. He opened the window and let out a wailing into the bright afternoon.
Peter Claire began to be afraid.
He started again—on a fourth continuation. Johnnie’s anger abated. He sat still once more and listened. He picked up some of the books from the floor and returned them to the shelves. He admitted there was “some beauty” in this fourth continuation and thus began to copy it, note by note, upon the virginals, while Peter Claire struggled to find pleasing harmonies on the lute. They worked together until early in the evening when, at the moment of my return from the river with the children, Johnnie decreed that with each playing of it this fourth continuation grew more and more earthbound and stale. He ordered Peter to abandon it. By now, both men were too tired to go on.
In the space of one month, fifty-nine continuations were begun and abandoned. As time went on the number of hours Johnnie was able to work diminished. In mid-afternoon he would walk out of the library, go to his room and fall into a heavy sleep that would last until the following morning.
And so a new phase of our story had its beginning here. For, once the children had gone to bed, I found myself very frequently alone with the lutenist. I invited him to dine with me. After dinner, we sat by the fireside and I told him about my life in Bologna with my father the paper merchant and he told me about his childhood in Harwich and the sorrows of his father the minister at his son’s refusal to follow him into the Church. The company of Peter Claire was so pleasing to me that hours would pass and seem as moments.
As the evenings grew lighter, we took to walking together after supper in the perfumed air of the Maytime dusk. We saw the apple blossom and the cherry blossom holding within themselves their white light in the diminishing day. We went down to the sea.
We discussed Johnnie O’Fingal’s dream and the fragile chance that this riddle, which had caused so much suffering, would ever be solved. I told Peter Claire that I wished him to stay on, no matter how distant that solution might seem. I said to him: “My only hope is in you. ”
And so it was that, even as we talked about my husband’s plight, with the waves breaking and gathering, breaking and gathering, before us and the colours vanishing from the world, we put our arms around each other and stood together, not moving, only feeling the heartbeat of the other and the welling up of a passion which we knew to be against all laws of loyalty and right feelings, and which must therefore never find its ultimate expression.
We did not even kiss. My longing to kiss and to be kissed by the exquisite mouth of Peter Claire (five years my junior and in my pay as teacher to my husband) was as great as any longing I had known in my thirty years on this earth. Yet I did not yield to it and nor did Peter force me to it. It was as if we both knew that with a single kiss our mouths would breathe the fatal syllables of the word “surrender.”
Forwards into history went the story of the explosion of Christian’s skyrocket in the courtyard of the Herredag. After it, the nobility did not dare, any longer, to ignore the uncrowned King. Indeed, so uncertain were they about what he would do next that they wanted to keep him within their sights at all times. In their jostling for power and aggrandisement, they now regarded him as a wild creature. They did not know which way he would dart, nor how many of them he might pursue into the briar patch of disgrace. For they had not reckoned with their future King’s stubborn disposition and his troubling imagination that seemed at this time, since the saving of Bror Brorson’s life, to take flight into realms where nobody could follow it. He did not appear to see the world as it was, but as his mind reconstituted it. One perspicacious member of the Rigsrad likened the boy King to “an artist who works upon an invisible canvas.”
At one session of the Herredag documents known to be the work of a forger were shown to Christian. He was told that the date inscribed within the watermark pre-dated the founding of the paper mill from whence the document supposedly originated. Members of the Herredag prided themselves on thus revealing a forgery through their detailed knowledge of the nation’s commerce and sat around the large table wearing smiles of satisfaction upon their faces. The forger, dressed in ragged clothes and with his hands manacled together, stood haplessly before them.
Christian held the forged documents up to the light. He let his mind float along the edges of the counterfeit watermark. He saw only its extraordinary perfection. He wished his father alive again so that he could show it to him as an example of supreme Danish craftsmanship, devoid of all shoddiness. He turned to the assembled nobility and said: “I find this work to be very beautiful and true.” Then he looked towards the forger in his rags and said: “Punishment will serve no purpose. You have a skill, Sir, and will serve your country with that. A position will be found for you at the royal printers and you shall begin work there tomorrow morning.”
These ideas, these fancies, these provocations: where did they come from?
Word passed among the nobles that Christian absorbed them from his friend Bror Brorson, who had no learning and could not write properly, and who saw the world through ignorant eyes.
Bror was still at Frederiksborg because Christian refused to be parted from him. Those courtiers who hunted with the boys marvelled at Bror’s daring on a horse, at his perseverance in the chase, at his disdain of the scratches and wounds he sustained while in pursuit of the boar and at his extraordinary beauty. He now wore his fair hair long and, as he rode, it would fly out behind him. His skin was brown from the hours he spent in the open air. His eyes, once shadowed by illness in the cellar of the Koldinghus, now reflected the blue of the sky. But as time passed the whispering of the nobility against him grew louder. Bror did not hear it. Christian did not hear it. Yet it was in the wind.
And so another case came before the Henefug over which the young King-in-waiting presided. The accused man was a tailor’s assistant. Over weeks and months this man had succeeded in manufacturing a lead stamp which could set down upon any paper a perfect rendition of his employer’s signature. Making use of the stamp, the tailor’s assistant wrote letters and despatched money orders to numerous cloth merchants, commanding bales of wool and fustian. The cloth he sold (at favourable prices) to a French seamstress making costumes for circus performers and travelling players. And with the money thus obtained he acquired, in secret, a wild Arabian stallion.
“A wild Arabian stallion?” said King Christian to the man. “How strange a thing to buy with ill-gotten gold. What can a man such as yourself, who has no park in which to ride it and no groom to undertake its breaking, want with such an animal?”
“Nothing,” said the tailor’s assistant. “I wanted nothing from it except to go an
d look at it. I have dreamed of Arabian horses all my life, not to ride them, but only to contemplate them, because they are beautiful.”
Christian heard the members of the Herredag dissolve into spluttering laughter, but he himself let no smile pass across his face. “What is the name of your horse?” he asked.
“It has no name, Your Majesty,” said the man. “I have tried to think of one, but no word in our language presents itself to me as fine enough.”
“And if we send you to prison, what is to become of it? Who will feed it and care for it?”
At this moment, the tailor’s assistant prostrated himself upon his knees. Would King Christian himself not take the beautirrl creature as a gift and let it be schooled in the park at Frederiksborg and let it bring him honour and glory at the tilt ring?
The courtroom grew silent. The nobles of the Herredag stared at Christian in horrified anticipation that some new and ever more lunatic perversion of justice was about to escape his lips. And—as they perceived the matter—they were right.
“The name of the horse shall be Bror,” announced the boy King. “Let him be taken to Frederiksborg this very day. And if you sign your promise to return the stolen money to your master, you shall be free.”
The Herredag erupted in fury. It was almost as if a second skyrocket had exploded in the grand hall, sending burning ash down upon every head.
The following day, very early in the morning, while Bror Brorson lay asleep, Queen Sofie entered his room. She jolted him awake. “Bror,” she said. “Get up. I am commanded by Christian to tell you that you are to ride at once with the groom to Copenhagen, where a great surprise awaits you. You must not wake a soul, but go down into the yard where the groom is waiting. Put on your hunting clothes and take your whip and that is all.”
Bror did not know what time it was, but only understood that it was very early because the sun was not yet risen above the lake.
He did as he was ordered and rode out of the gates of Frederiksborg as the palace clock struck five.
On the road to the city, in the hamlet of Glostrup, his companion the groom reined in his horse and Bror saw that one of the royal coaches was waiting there under the shade of a linden tree. The groom told Bror that this coach would carry him the rest of the journey, so the boy dismounted and got into the coach, and watched as the groom turned and led the two horses back in the direction of the palace.
But the coach never arrived at Copenhagen. It carried Bror Brorson back to his home in Funen, and many years would pass before King Christian was permitted to see him again.
Letters were sent from Frederiksborg, an extraordinary quantity of letters in which Christian declared that he was lonely in the world “without my dearest friend and fellow One-Word Signatory, Bror.” But no reply ever came. And Christian did not really expect one, knowing as he did that Bror was incapable of writing it.
AT THE ISFOSS
The convoy has arrived in the icy valleys of the Numedal.
Every house within five miles of the mine has been requisitioned by the royal party. The former occupants of these places now sleep in their hay lofts or in their barns with their animals. They puzzle over their fate. The King has promised them that they will share in the silver, which is to be hacked and blasted from the rock. Their dreams alternate between their shining future and their lost past.
The largest house, the one King Christian occupies, stands near a waterfall. But it is a waterfall that does not move. It is frozen. The King stares at this phenomenon. He tries to imagine in what passage of time the alteration from roaring water to silent ice occurs. His mind wakes up the cataract and sees the unstoppable forward motion of the river, carrying everything with it as it reaches the lip and falls and keeps on falling. At this moment in its history it is as though the river will move and fall for ever.
Then Christian imagines tiny crystals forming on the surface of the water as the temperature in the air begins to drop and all along the banks the willow branches are furred with frost. The surface crystals become larger. They are like glass and they break into pieces in the downrush of the rapids and are thrown upwards for a second with the white foam, before falling back and being carried onwards by the lower stream.
Motion is slowed as the glass crystals expand and deepen, and icicles form at the lip of the fall. In the tiny icicles lies the coming metamorphosis of the waterfall into the frozen cataract, the lsfoss. They acquire thickness, length and weight. The water is transparent clay, moulding them, layer upon layer, and as the layers accumulate, so the sound diminishes. Now, in the surrounding cradle of hills, the roar of the river has become muffled. The human ear has to strain to hear it. And then, in the space of a single night, it falls silent.
All this Christian turns and measures in his imagination. Time after time he sets forth the sequence. And yet it continues to amaze him. There is a part of his mind which still cannot adequately explain it.
Krenze had remarked to Peter Claire that the King’s heart would “burst” among all the travails that awaited him in the Numedal. And it has been true that since the arrival of the convoy he has scarcely ever been still, but always rushing from one place to another, supervising the hiring of men, the acquisition of timber and tools and horses, the design of new buildings, and the first encroachment of the life-blood of the hills, the cutting of the veins of silver ore.
Christian’s hands caress and explore the rock. To the geniuses of the mine he remarks that “nature locks away her secrets like a courtesan, to tease us with longing” and to the miners with their picks and chisels he thunders: “Break up the mountain! Tear out its heart! I want the Numedal here in my arms!”
The King barely sleeps. At night he lies on a wooden bed and listens to the wolves howling, and feels intensely the pain of his love for Kirsten, which was once reciprocated and is no longer, and all that he can see in his future with her is sensual craving unsatisfied and affection tearing at his heart.
He does not know that Kirsten has taken a lover. The palace servants wish to protect him from unnecessary suffering. No rumour of the flayings with silken whips and the foul-mouthing of Kirsten by Otto and Otto by Kirsten has reached his ears. But he does not need to know these things to understand that Kirsten Munk has repudiated his love and is bound upon some other course. He wishes he were a wolf, with a wolf’s habitation in a forest under the stars and the voice of a wolf to howl with.
He sends for Peter Claire.
The lutenist looks pale and does not sing well because he has a cold.
Like the King, Peter Claire stares at the Isfoss.
Unlike Christian, he can imagine it in no other way than in its present soundless and immobile form. To his lost Countess he writes an imaginary letter: My dear Francesca, I have arrived at a place where time has stopped at winter and will never move on. I call it the Place of the Frozen Cataract. I do not know how long I shall survive here.
He has dreams of his mother’s baking in the vicarage kitchen, of the quayside at Harwich on a summer morning as the herring fleet comes in, of his sister’s gaiety and fondness for dancing, of his father in his robes, moving towards his pulpit and looking down upon his congregation, and searching for his son’s face and never finding it. And words spoken by his father return to him. “Peter,” says the Reverend James Claire, “when you find yourself at odds with life, strive not to fight with fortune but fight instead with your own weaknesses.”
And so he resolves to endure. He and Krenze try to warm themselves by playing jigs and capers, and moving in small circles as they play. The owner of the cottage where he sleeps likes these lively tunes and is amused by the sight of the German and the Englishman cavorting in his yard. Soon afterwards, he brings Peter Claire a coverlet of rabbit skins to lay upon his bed.
Not infrequently, his sleep is broken by a summons to the King.
One night he finds Christian alone and seated by a dying fire. His elflock has been unbraided and a few strands of limp brown hair han
g down almost to his waist. As Christian talks, he runs his hands through the hair, combing it incessantly, as though this combing of his lock soothed his mind. “I sent for you because my head is boiling with confusion,” he says. “So can you tell me ... you who resemble the angels of my boyhood dreams, who resemble a friend once dear to me ... can you tell me how confusion is to be unravelled in the mind of man?”
Peter Claire looks into the embers of the fire, like one expecting the answer to lie there in the ash. He knows that he must speak, but moments pass and he can find nothing to say and he feels the King begin to grow restless and cross. Then he remembers the King’s lament that no great philosophers remained in Denmark and so he says: “If Monsieur Descartes were sitting with you now, Sir, he would say that confusion can be unravelled only by reducing the complex to the simple.”
The King looks startled, as though, after all, he had not expected an answer to his question. “Ah,” he says. “Yes. So he did say that. But his method: what was his method? I once knew it and now it has gone from me.”
“Well, Your Majesty,” says Peter Claire, “he suggests that we should reject as false everything that we cannot directly know. He had in mind those things we believe we have learned, but are unable to verify.”
“Now I remember why I had forgotten the Cartesians! For what is truly verifiable, I ask you? Only mathematics! Two plus two will always and evermore equal four, but how is this going to resolve what boils in my brain?”
“It cannot. But if you can come by one incontrovertible thing, something with the manifest truth of two plus two or of the cogito itself, then, based upon this one incontrovertible thing and proceeding only from it, you might be able to find a pathway through what at present seems confusing.”
There is a long silence in the low-beamed room. No wolf is heard, no cry of an owl, no human sound. The fire has lost all its former shape and structure, and is only a heap of cinders with a red glow at its heart.