by Rose Tremain
Doctor Sperling’s expression is grim and yet at the same time his face seems to be struggling with a secret smile as he says: “Sir, unhappy as I am to trouble you with this matter, it has preyed so insistently on my mind that I cannot put it from me and so feel at last that I must speak to you . . .”
“Then speak to me, Doctor.”
“It is a matter that concerns your wife . . .”
“If it concerns Kirsten,” says the King, “then assuredly I must hear it.”
They walk on. The scent of the roses reminds Christian of his mother, who, when she was young, liked to have a bowl of roses in her bedchamber.
The doctor’s steps begin to slow and falter, and he masters his smile, to make it fade, as he says: “Sir, I must reveal to you that when I visited Lady Kirsten . . . although she would not submit to any examination . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, Your Majesty . . . because she fell prone upon the floor and was wearing but her thin night garment, I was able to make ...”
“Make what?”
“Make some anatomical observations, and I could clearly see ... or so it appears to me ... that the child shows itself already. And this I know, that no child in the womb makes itself plain in quite this way until approximately three months have passed, and thus I conclude ...”
The King says nothing at all, only paces onwards with his long stride, so that Sperling now has to perform a little skittering run to keep up with him.
They have left the rose garden behind and are walking under an avenue of limes, in their wide shade, where the air is cool. The King does not look at Doctor Sperling but at the lime trees, seeming to examine them for signs of death or weakness. When they reach the end of the avenue he turns to the doctor and says: “Thank you very much, Doctor Sperling.”
The doctor opens his mouth to qualify in greater detail what he has noted about Kirsten’s pregnancy, but the King holds up a hand to cut him off. “Thank you for your observations,” he says again.
Sperling looks confused (almost disappointed, as though deprived of the chance to recite some poem he had learned by heart) but he has no choice but to bow and retreat.
Christian waits until he is out of sight and then sits down on a stone bench that rests between two carved lions. He caresses his elflock. He looks back across the park to his beloved palace, his lit-tie Rosenborg, built for Kirsten, built in celebration of his love for her, and tears come to his eyes. He does not need to ask who Kirsten’s lover is. He knows. He saw her dancing with Count Otto Ludwig at Werden, during the time of the wars. He saw the rapture on her face and that was all that he needed to see. He weeps silently at first, then feels his whole body give way to a terrible howling, such as he seems to have heard inside himself for days and months, and which at last comes out.
He is far from the palace and no one hears him. He tries to wipe away his tears with his sacred lock of hair, but the tears are abundant and the hair is beginning to grow thin. He remembers his great speech, lying on the open bureau. In his mind’s eye he rolls it up, ties it with a black ribbon and lays it down in the musty depths of a closet he seldom visits.
GERDA (2)
Sitting down to compose a letter to his father and to Charlotte, Peter Claire unfolds the package of white ribbons and looks at them. One of the ribbons—the most costly of the purchase—has a gold thread running through it.
He knows, immediately upon taking up the ribbons in his hand again, that he is not going to send them to Charlotte. He arranges them carefully in the package and ties it up again. He has decided that the white and gold ribbons will be his messengers to Emilia.
He writes a simple note:
My dear Miss Tilsen,
These are the colours of my love.
Please tell me when I might walk with you in the park.
Your very sincere
Peter Claire, Lutenist
He knows where her room is, in the highest storeys of the palace, and he plans only to leave the parcel with the note outside her door, arriving and departing when he knows she is not there.
In the late afternoons she is almost always with Kirsten. He has caught glimpses of the two women doing their tapestry in the garden, or sitting at an open-air table, playing dice or cards, or perched—in these latter days of summer—each of them in front of a small easel, trying to paint flowers. This flower painting touches him so deeply that he almost cannot bear to think about it.
He chooses a day when they are at their easels, frowning at the difficulties of their work, and climbs the stairs to Emilia’s corridor. He tiptoes along it, hoping that no one will see him, and pauses outside her door. He can hear no voices or sounds except a dog barking in the courtyard and a few pigeons fluttering from turret to turret as the sun slowly loses its heat and starts to fall behind the west tower of the palace.
He is about to set down the little package of ribbons outside Emilia’s door, when he hears another sound, which his long hours in the cellar enable him to identify easily enough: it is the noise of a hen coming from within the room.
Deciding that he has mistaken the room, but unsure whether Emilia must occupy the chamber to the right or to the left of this one, Peter Claire knocks tentatively on the door. Getting no answer (only a continuation of the hen’s small murmurings, which sound to him always as if these birds are perpetually on the edge of a contented sleep) he opens the door and goes in.
The room is plain and bare—not unlike his own sparsely furnished chamber above the stables—but hanging from the door of the wardrobe is a grey dress he recognises as Emilia’s and on a small dressing stand have been placed those simple articles of vanity that any young girl desires to own: a silver mirror and hairbrush, a cake of Spanish soap, a bottle of orange-flower water and a porcelain dish holding two or three silver clips and brooches.
On the narrow and tidy bed lies a small velvet pillow and on this Peter Claire sees the speckled hen sitting, as if upon a nest, and blinking nervously at him. In the far corner of the room he notices a heap of clean straw and a bowl of water. A few white chicken feathers litter the floor like blown thistledown.
Closing the door behind him, Peter Claire now allows himself to take in the place where Emilia sleeps and dreams, and has her private moments of washing and dressing. He stands absolutely still.
The presence of the chicken, though it makes him smile, only contributes, in him, to a growing feeling of enchantment. The room is warm in the late afternoon sun and Peter Claire has no wish to move a step from where he is. In the very air, in the shelter
of the grey dress, in the quietude of the dressing stand, in the hen’s own tuneless music, appears to reside the one element (that has no substance and no concrete form) after which the human mind yearns always and which it so seldom finds: happiness.
Peter Claire does not know how long he stays in Emilia’s room. At last, he makes himself leave, places the gift of ribbons outside the door and goes back into the other world, where the day is coming to a clamorous ending and the dusk is descending, and the palace chefs are preparing supper.
Emilia does not return to her room that night. Kirsten is feeling restless and sick, and wants her to sleep near her in the next-door chamber. In the small hours of the morning she is woken by Kirsten’s cries, which come out of nightmares Kirsten tells her are “more terrible than any I have ever had.”
She orders Emilia to prepare a vomit. “By this odious means,” she says, “we shall bring the terrors out of me.”
Emilia mixes the powders as instructed and, as Kirsten retches into the bowl that Emilia holds, Kirsten clings to her arm and weeps. “Oh, smell the fear!” she cries. “Take it away, Emilia! I am poisoned with fear!”
The night is long. Emilia’s head aches as the sun begins to appear at Kirsten’s windows. Seeing her mistress peacefully asleep at last, as the Woman of the Head, Johanna, comes in to set out the combs and pins for Kirsten’s hair and the ceruse for her pale cheeks, Emilia escapes to
the stillness of her high room and to her morning task of dosing Gerda with the nettle potion.
While Gerda is cared for, the package of ribbons, unopened, and the note, unread, wait on the dressing stand.
But then at last she turns to them. She remarks for the second time that Peter Claire has beautiful handwriting. And the note has, beneath its apparent simplicity, an ardour which Emilia finds enthralling.
When she discovers the white and gold ribbons, her heart begins to beat wildly. Slowly, she picks up her silver mirror and, on hanging it on the wall, stares at herself. She knows now that some-thing has happened. She begins to weave the white ribbons in and out of her brown hair.
LETTER FROM COUNTESS O'FINGAL TO PETER CLAIRE
My dear Peter,
I learn from your father that you are at the Danish court.
How splendid that must seem to you in contrast to your sojourn at Cloyne. I expect that all of what passed between us has been obliterated by those things that are happening to you now, but I still find myself wondering whether you ever think of me, as I think of you. You know that we women are such fools for memory; I declare we do walk backwards through life, with our faces turned towards the past.
One afternoon, in particular, I shall never forget.
It was a fine blue day and we walked on the beach with Luca and Giulietta, and found on the tide a quantity of pink shells like babies’ toes.
And then you and Giulietta sped off over the sands with her hoop, each with a stick, and on and on you ran and the hoop sped before you faster and faster, but still you kept it bowling and still it did not tremble nor fall and you were like the flying spirits of the wind, dark and fair, against the blue sky.
Now I must tell you what came to pass after you went away.
My husband began to move towards death. And it was a death such as I pray never again to witness in my life.
Johnnie O’Fingal died by slow degrees. Day by dawdling day Death tightened its hold upon his voice and began to choke it, so that to make any word or sound come out, my husband had to summon all his forces and all his breath, and his eyes would almost seem to move forward under the lids (so that Vincenzo could not go near his papa without the
terror that an eye would come out and lie suspended on his cheek) and the blood pulsed crimson in his face.
And it was not merely that language was leaving him. In this long-drawn-out strangulation of his vocal cords was a pain like fire.
“Help me!” he would try to say. “Help me!”
But there was no help. There was laudanum, that deadly ether, only that. And Doctor McLafferty said to me: “What do we hear along this path of life, Countess, but the eternally repeated cry, ‘Help me, help me’?”
We did not know when death would come.
Maria who I do think loved her father most—his Sweet Mary—clung to me and cried, “Oh, Mama, the pity of it!” and said her prayers aloud with Giulietta. But the boys— when Johnnie’s voice was quite used up and gone, and the breath in his body seemed to be no more than might keep a sparrow alive and he lay there in silence gasping for the sweet air—kept asking me: “Why did these things happen to him, Mama?” And I said I did not know.
“Is this what a man’s life must be like?” they asked, weeping.
And I said I did not know.
He is buried at Cloyne.
I remember some words my father said: “Francesca, you must not prevent a man who has seen paradise from trying to go there again.”
I pray that this is where he is.
I am alone with the children here. The estate passes to Vincenzo on his maturity, but I shall live in the house until that time and I have enough money to set all to rights among the farms and tenant cottages. And the people of Cloyne are good to us and I am not very often alone.
But I felt impelled to tell you what has happened in this household and to ask you, Do you still wear the ear-ring that I gave you?
Wherever you are, Peter Claire, know that I passionately loved you. I suspect that you do not particularly wish to hear this and that I am still looking backwards, as we women are so inclined to do. But for this fault, I ask your forgiveness.
Francesca, Countess O’Fingal
THREADS OF CRIMSON
Johann Tilsen notices that the flies and insects in Jutland, in this hot summer, seem to be more venomous than they have ever been. His neck is swollen and red where a horse-fly has punctured a blood vessel; at night, the infernal whining of mosquitoes seems to be part of a sudden feeling of apprehension that he cannot account for.
In the meagre portion of the bed left to him by Magdalena’s voluptuous body he finds himself lying with his arms shielding his face. The mosquitoes feast on his elbows, where the sleeves of his summer night-shirt fall back towards his shoulders. The lumps they leave there (the pink and yellow colour of a strawberry before it is ripe) he anoints with vinegar, but the itching is brutal nevertheless. And while inspecting boxes of blackcurrants being sent over to Boller, he is stung by a wasp on his lip.
This sting is a final humiliation because he knows it makes him look ugly. To Magdalena he says: “I am being persecuted! God is sending me torments out of the sky.”
But Magdalena is neither a sentimental nor a superstitious woman. “What a baby you are, Johann!” she says. “Nothing but a baby, with all your little needs and hurts.”
The only place where the insects do not come is by the lake. In the hot afternoons, the boys Ingmar and Wilhelm, Boris and Matti swim here and Magdalena sits in a bower Johann has made for her out of wood and rushes, and watches them and smiles to herself, imagining the lessons she will one day give them in secret.
Marcus comes to the lake, too, but he does not swim, and Magdalena does not look at him and he does not look at Magdalena. He spends all his time staring down into the shallows.
Sometimes Marcus catches minnows in his hands and examines their silvery bodies for a moment before throwing them back into the water. He sees frogs and a black water snake, which he tries to trap. The snake mesmerises him, as though it were a messenger, like the one sent to him from Copenhagen. He imagines this thin snake slithering down the cleft between Magdalena’s breasts and biting her stomach. To Marcus Tilsen it is as if the creatures of the lake were all trying to talk to him and listen for his commands. He counts them and whispers to them in a voice that no one else can hear.
Then, one afternoon, while Ingmar and the other boys are swimming far out towards a little island where willows form a cave of darkness under their trailing branches, and while Marcus is singing to a swarm of tadpoles, imagining them as a cluster of musical notes, Magdalena suddenly screams. Her body, in the bower, goes rigid and then slack. On her face is a look of astonishment.
Marcus stares at her. He hopes that in a moment she will lie completely still. Emilia told him long ago that people can die in an instant, in the time it takes to count to two. After that, there is nothing to be done except to dig a hole in the earth and put them in it. Marcus muses that the hole someone would have to dig for Magdalena would be very large and deep. It would be terrible to have bits of Magdalena—a hand or a piece of skirt—still showing after she was meant to be in her hole. But the earth of the fruit fields is soft and digging there wouldn’t be so difficult and then, next year, gooseberries could be put in over the top of her and no one would remember where she was or even that she had ever existed.
Magdalena is calling to him, but he has not heard. He turns and looks out at the lake, and sees his brothers arrive at the island and begin to climb out among the willow caves. They have not heard her calling, either. Her face is bright red now and she is clutching her belly and screaming again. She is no longer sitting on her little seat, but lying on the floor of the bower among the rushes. Her legs twitch.
“Marcus!” she screams. “Marcus!”
Now, he thinks, now, if I had that black snake, I would carry it there, stroking its head, and lay it down on her and it would disappear under
her clothes like a trail of wet soot, and then in a moment she would certainly stop screaming and be quiet—just as she so often tells me to do when my harness is put on, or when Otto is thrown out of doors into the cold night . . .
“MARCUS!”
The rushes where she lies are wet, as his own cot is often wet in the darkness or in the daytime when he’s there alone in his harness, which squeaks and cries.
“MARCUS!”
He looks back towards the island, but he can’t see any of his brothers. They have disappeared among the trees. He begins to count. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine . . . Perhaps, sometimes, dying can take a while and you can probably still piss onto the rushes and cry out just before it happens. Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen . . . But now, on the wet rushes, with her legs sticking upwards and her face turning scarlet and her eyes screwed into puffy slits, she looks so horrible that Marcus can’t bear to watch her any more.
He splashes out of the shallows and begins to run. He runs right past the bower without looking at Magdalena. Even without his shoes, he can run fast because he is as light as the wind.
He hides in the stables.
His head fills with counting.
The bay pony swishes out at the flies with its tail and Marcus leans against its neck. The straw is scratchy on his naked feet.
The smell of the stables is so lovely that Marcus wishes he could sleep here instead of in his room where the walls are always dark in their comers and the damp-wool stench of his bed makes him long to fly out of the window and be with the owls under the stars and the moon . . .
When he wakes, he knows that whatever was happening to Magdalena must have ended because he has a feeling of something ending. Perhaps Johann has arrived at the lake, and Ingmar and Wilhelm are digging the hole in the soft earth and putting Magdalena in it, with nothing showing or sticking out? Perhaps, when Magdalena is buried and gone, there will be no more harness and Otto will sleep with him in his cot, and Emilia will come home?
Slowly, flitting from tree to tree, from hedge to hedge, Marcus makes his way back to the lake. On the mossy path he makes no sound and he stands by the bower like a ghost that no one sees.