by Rose Tremain
When I returned to Rosenborg, after ordering the carriage to drive in circles for some time so that I could recover my Composure, Emilia told me that the King had been to my chamber and discovered my Absence.
Once again, I felt myself to be upon my Wire and fancied I could hear the wind come round me and begin to cause the Wire to sway and move, and I could feel all the colour drain from my face and my legs grow weak.
I ordered Emilia to make haste to bring water and soap, and with this I hurriedly washed all traces of Otto from my body. Then I put on a clean night-gown and got into my bed. “If the King comes again,” I said to Emilia, “let him come in. I will say that I went for a drive in the countryside to refresh my lungs. There is no Edict against breathing the night air.”
He did not come. Emilia quietened my Anxieties by telling me that the King had seemed confused and that she supposed he had been drinking (as is his habit more and more) and then by reciting to me some sweet Stories about her dead mother, Karen, who used to dance with her on the ice in winter and in summer make for her a hammock of silk to be strung between two linden trees, and rock her there and sing to her.
I could clearly see that, in every tender particular, Emilia’s Mother was a deal kinder to her daughter than I have ever been to my tiresome Children, and this observation might well have made me Hate Myself in the way that I am prone to do when I perceive my own Shortcomings. But I did not feel vexed, only sorry that I could not meet this dead Karen and by some miracle bring her alive again, so that she could return at last to the fruit fields of Jutland, to send the odious Magdalena flying back to wherever she came from, pursued by a swarm of bees.
In the early morning, I was once again put into a state of Terror by the sudden and unlooked-for arrival of Doctor Sperling. He brought with him his case of Instruments, the sight of which is enough to fill any woman’s heart with dread, so cold and cruel do these things appear.
“Madam,” he said, “I have been asked by the King to examine you. He has told me he believes you may be with child.”
“May be?” I said. “There is no ‘may be’ in the matter, Doctor Sperling. I informed His Majesty last night that I will give him a new child in the winter.”
The Doctor has small brown eyes that have no shine in them but seem quite dead, as if they might be stones. “Very well,” he said. “If you would lie upon the bed, then I will verify how far advanced is your pregnancy so that we may know the date on which the infant is to be born.”
For a moment I could not move, so great was my fear. But, as quickly as I could, I replied: “There is no need for any examination, Doctor. For was not the King away in the Numedal until the month of June? Thus, we can determine with great accuracy when the baby was conceived and we have only to count forward nine months to arrive at the date of its Birth.”
“Nevertheless,” said the Doctor, “I must make the examination, as commanded.”
I let my eyes rest upon the Instruments. Feigning an even greater terror of them than I already felt, I let myself begin to swoon and fall. “No!” I heard myself cry out, “I cannot submit! I swear if you do this I shall miscarry . . .”
At this moment the King came in. Seeing me fallen in a faint, he ran to me and lifted me up and called for Salts. Knowing that all depended upon this moment, I pretended to be unconscious in his arms until I smelled the Salts under my nostrils. Then I opened my eyes and clung to my husband and said: “Oh, my dearest Lord, help me. Do not risk the life of the child by letting the doctor put any cold metal into my body!”
The King held me to him and said: “So I did not dream it, then?”
“Dream what?”
“Dream that you came to me and told me about the child . . .”
“Oh, no, the child is real and no ghost nor dream, but please, Sir, I beg you, send the doctor away!”
I hung about the King’s neck as though I were his weakling Baby and he my wicked incestuous Papa. And in this mode I know that I can make him do almost Any Thing my heart can devise. In a very short while, I heard the doctor leave the room and close the door behind him.
And so the summer goes on in its heat and its plagues of flies. My belly begins to balloon outwards and my legs to ache. Were the child the King’s and not my lover’s, I declare I would seek out from Herr Bekker some deadly potion to rid myself of it. But, being Otto’s, I cannot do it harm. It was made in a moment of Delirium and I imagine that it will fly out of me on trembling wings of blossom.
GERDA (1)
Emilia Tilsen stands in the cellar, staring at the hens.
They come clustering to her and poke their beaks through the wire of the cage. She can see a solitary egg lying in the dusty earth. She has brought grain and a pitcher of water.
She opens the door of the cage and goes in and begins to scatter the Corn, and she likes the feeling of the feathered bodies round her skirt. It reminds her of going with Karen, as a child, to search for eggs laid carelessly here and there in the meadows and hedgerows, and of the joy of finding them and of Karen saying: “Well done, my peach.”
These hens are greyish-brown and speckled, with white neck feathers. Jerkily, their heads nod in search of the grain and, her task accomplished, Emilia is about to leave when she sees that one of the hens has not moved, but only sits in the dust regarding her with a clouded yellow eye. Emilia squats down, folding her skirts round her to keep them out of the dirt, and stares at the bird. Once, long ago in Jutland, Karen nursed a sick hen back to health with boiled nettles. It lived for a while in the house and sometimes, as it began to recover, acquired the habit of flying up onto the dining-table at mealtimes. They called it Gerda. Johann warned it that the only chicken he wished to see on the dining-table was one that was plucked and roasted.
It is in memory of Gerda that Emilia, without hesitation, picks up the speckled hen, puts it under her arm and carries it out of the cellar. She takes it to her room—not to the chamber next door to Kirsten’s where she often sleeps now, but to the high, sparsely furnished room she was given on her arrival at Rosenborg. She fetches a bundle of clean straw from the stables and makes a nest for the hen in one corner of the room. Compared with the cellar, the room is light and the bird keeps turning its head towards the window, as though the sky were a phenomenon it could not begin to understand. So touched by the sight of the hen’s confusion does Emilia feel that she begins to stroke its neck. “Gerda,” she whispers. “Gerda . . .”
And then she falls into a kind of dreaming. She is wide awake and can hear the sounds of voices far below in the courtyard and a restless fly bumping from surface to surface in the room, but her head suddenly fills with an imaginary future.
She has become the wife of the English lutenist, and she and Peter Claire are living in some green valley she has never seen. Their house is filled with light. Children cling, laughing, to her skirts, and she takes their hands and brings them to a fine room with a polished wooden floor, where Peter Claire and his friends are playing music so tender and melodic that the children become grave and silent and sit down on the floor to listen, and she sits by them and no one moves.
This dream is so extraordinary, so filled with marvels, that Emilia tries to prolong it. She imagines the music ending and the lutenist crossing the room towards her, and gathering her and the children into his arms. And Marcus is there! He is a little older— perhaps six or seven—and he turns a cart-wheel in the room before running out into the garden, where his bay pony is waiting with its bridle of bells.
Death seems absent from this dream. What reigns in the house is order and harmony, and there does not seem to be any fear that these things will suddenly vanish. “But,” says Emilia to herself as the dream begins to slip away, “it is not real. It is all sentimental delusion. It should have no place whatsoever in your mind.”
And she gets up hurriedly and goes out into the park to search for stinging nettles.
But now, at night and at other times—in the middle of a meal or a game
of cribbage—her thoughts return to what was said by Peter Claire in the cellar. He declared a feeling for her. “Love,” he said, “is the word which seems to fit it.” Why did she not stay to hear more, to try to see or read in his eyes and gestures whether he was sincere? Was not her immediate assumption that a man as handsome as this must be a liar too hastily made and too unkind? Why did she force herself to be so curt to him, when everything spoken by him was courteous and tender, and she yearned to believe every syllable?
She disappoints herself. Truly, she has no idea what behaviour to put on. She is an ungracious, ignorant girl who knows nothing about the world of men and women except what she has seen in the Tilsen house and here at the court. In these places, lies and schemes fill up the very air of the rooms, but this may surely not be so in every household in Denmark? Why should a declaration of love of necessity be false? How would any wooing be able to progress at all if this were a universal truth?
Emilia stirs her nettle potion in a cup. She sucks a little of it into a dry straw, as she once watched Karen do, then opens the hen’s beak and tips the dribble of liquid down its throat. She repeats this laborious procedure until half an inch of the nettle potion has been swallowed. “Gerda,” she murmurs.
It is to Kirsten that Emilia eventually confides what took place in the cellar and how, in a moment of dreaming, she foolishly allowed herself to invent a beautiful future with the lutenist.
“What lutenist?” asks Kirsten crossly. “There was a lutenist here for years, but he was very elderly and I expect he’s in his grave now. You don’t mean him, I hope, Emilia?”
Emilia describes Peter Claire to Kirsten and sees her eyes begin to bulge. “Well,” she says, “I haven’t seen any such paragon at Rosenborg—not that I go to the concerts any more; they are too tedious and I only pretended to love music when the King was courting me. Are you quite sure you did not dream it all?”
“No,” says Emilia. “I did not dream it all, only the part of it that did not happen ...”
Kirsten gets up and looks out of her window. Her walking is beginning to be slow and she cradles her belly, as if it already weighs her down. When she turns round, she says: “Beware the beauties, Emilia. I have never known one who was not a dissembler. And as for the English: they have a reputation for coldness, but Otto has fought alongside them in war and he tells me they are the most devious fornicators of them all!”
“Well . . .” says Emilia. “I was very cool with him ... I promise you that I did not give him any hope and yet—”
“Do nothing,” says Kirsten. “If you should encounter him by chance, avoid his eyes. It would be intolerable that your heart should be broken, for what would you do then but leave me and go back to Jutland?”
“Oh, no, I would never go back to my father’s house, Madam.” “Nevertheless, I cannot risk any such catastrophe coming to me, Emilia. I will find out what kind of man the English lutenist is. I will uncover his secrets and then I shall report them to you, and we shall determine how to proceed.”
"FLYING TOWARDS RUIN"
No silver has arrived. Messengers sent to the Numedal have not returned.
King Christian lies in the dark and imagines he can hear his beloved country groaning deep in its heart, as though it were indeed a ship about to go down with all hands lost. And, on the horizon, an even blacker storm begins to gather . . .
He tries to understand how poverty has crept in where it should never have been. He berates himself for his mania—in his desire that everything in Denmark might be of the best quality and free from shoddiness—to employ foreign craftsmen. For now these same people grow rich and coffers of Danish silver and gold are shipped away to France or Holland or Italy, and only a poor fraction of it is left behind.
Yet all cannot be blamed on the foreigners. When Christian goes into the houses of the Danish nobility, what he sees is indulgence and luxury and waste on a scale so enormous that it takes his breath away. Men pick their teeth with silver and toss the picks away into the fire. Their rooms are lighted with two hundred candles. They keep llamas and ostriches in gilded cages for their amusement. They feed swan meat to their dogs. Their wives take up the new French fashion for wigs, and the French wig makers are become the new darlings of their world, and are paid with lascivious kisses and velvet purses full of dalers. The cribs of infants are fashioned from ebony . . .
All this must end.
King Christian gets up and calls for servants to light lamps, and
he settles down at his bureau. He takes up his pen and begins to write.
He writes a momentous speech. The night has almost gone by the time it is finished. He intends to summon an Extraordinary Meeting of the Rigsrad and shock the self-satisfied nobility with the vehemence of his words. He will demand that every one of the nobles attend the meeting, yet even now, after his long hours of work, as he reads through the speech, he already hears in his mind the excuses of his chancellor: “. . . you know it is summer, Your Majesty, and somewhat close in Copenhagen. Many of our councillors are gone into Jutland for the cooler air . . .”
Christian feels anger in him like a sickness, like a physical agony that must rise up and come out. “I have called you here,” the speech begins, “because I am in despair. I am your King. I am King of Denmark. But what is Denmark today? Where is it today? I tell you, my friends, that it is a sorry land. I tell you that it is flying towards ruin!”
But what will be the fate of these words? Who will hear them and take action? Christian imagines the faces of his councillors, like fat pink potatoes balanced on their starched white plates of ruffs. These men—those of them who will bestir themselves to come to the meeting—will listen to the speech, but no hint of worry or anguish will be visible on their faces; the universal patronising smile will quietly announce their knowledge of their own immovable power and their indifference to anything but their own comfort and their own arithmetic.
Always, King Christian has had to fight the nobility in the Rigsrad in asserting his power against theirs, but where once this battle—which began so long ago with the explosion of a skyrocket outside the Court House building—enthralled him, now it causes him bitter pain. For the truth is that these men no longer give him the respect he once commanded. His troubles with Kirsten, impossible as they are to conceal from the wider world, have belittled and weakened him in their eyes.
Choked by this knowledge, which will mean that his great speech will go unheeded and that nothing will be accomplished, the King imagines raising his wide fist and bringing it crashing down so hard on the council table that the papers he has brought with him lift into the air and a heavy gold and emerald ring one of the noblemen has taken off to relieve his fingers of its weight bounces upwards and lands on the floor. Immediately this man begins to scrabble after the jewel.
“Leave the ring!” King Christian shouts. “There shall be no more stooping after gems and riches! We are become a class of people enslaved to excess and every one of us should bow down to God in shame. But I am God’s minister on earth and I hereby announce to you today that our vainglory has had its season and is past.”
Here, the King takes a breath. Will he have the councillors’ attention at last? He goes on. He warns them that a weak Denmark will no longer exist but only be “a nameless land under the sway of Sweden.” He asks: “Shall your King rule over a desert? Is this the future that you would lead me to? Imagine this desert. If I were to pick up a handful of this desert soil, what would I find? I tell you that I would find the dust of regret, the sand of remorse. And no amount of weeping will make this desert flower and become what it once was. What it once was will have disappeared for ever!”
He pauses here. Will there be silence in the room? And if there is silence, what will the nobles be thinking? Christian puts his large head in his hands. He knows that his speech is doomed and will never be made. He was going to ask for a law to be passed against futile vanity, but how can he expect the Rigsråd to ratify such an e
dict when they know that Kirsten is indifferent to what she has called “the supposed poverty of Denmark,” indifferent to how and where money is to be found to pay for her clothes and trinkets, her coterie of women, her suppers and entertainments? There will never be any such law while Kirsten remains at Rosenborg and this is the heart-breaking truth of the matter.
The King gets up wearily. He notices that the sunrise at his window is serene and lovely. Nature knows nothing of a country’s ignominy.
He summons Peter Claire, who is still wiping the dust of sleep from his blue eyes.
The lutenist is ordered to play quietly and the King hears himself ask the young Englishman if he should sack all the foreign musicians and replace them with Danes.
Peter Claire looks at him with alarm, but then he recovers his composure enough to say: “This measure would save you money, Your Majesty, but I do not think that you would be happy with the result. The sweet complexity of sound made by this orchestra lies, I am sure, in the variety of our origins.”
The King lies down in his bed. Already, with the music playing and with his angel by him, he feels calmer and, after a little time, he falls asleep.
When he wakes, he is told that his physician, Doctor Sperling, wishes to see him. Bread and cream are brought to him, but he has no appetite and sends the food away.
He has a longing to be out in the air and orders the doctor to walk with him in the park, where the day has continued fine and his favourite roses are still in bloom.