Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  Magdalena is no longer in the bower, where the rushes are shiny with blood. She is walking towards the lake. On one side of her is Johann and on the other side of her is an old woman Marcus has never seen. They hold Magdalena up. Her skirts are tied round her waist and her bottom and legs are bare and wet with blood.

  She is led into the water. At the first lapping round of the cool water she lets out a kind of moan.

  Marcus presses himself into the shadow cast by the bower, as the sun begins to turn fiery over the oaks and pines at his back. He tries to make himself as small as a dragon-fly.

  The water is deep now, hiding Magdalena’s legs, and Johann and the old crone gently lower her deeper into it until she is squatting down, and Marcus can see her straining, just as if she were doing her business right there where the silver minnows and the frogs like to play. She clings on to her helpers while the old woman reaches down into the water with her arm and suddenly seems to be exerting herself, pulling and wrenching, as though she were trying to pull some giant turd or thing out of Magdalena, and Magdalena screams again exactly as she did before in the bower.

  She is not dead. She is laughing and crying both together. Then, she lies back in the water and lets herself float, and Johann and the woman wash her legs and her belly, and the place between her legs where the thing came out of her. And all three of them are happy now, you can tell, happy in the lake with the sun going down and Magdalena’s skirts breaking free of their knot and ballooning out into the water. Johann kisses Magdalena with his lips still swollen from the wasp sting and the old crone laughs like a corncrake.

  Dragon-flies can make a whirring with their lacy wings or they can be so still and transparent no one hears or sees them. And this is how Marcus is now, when Magdalena and Johann and the old woman return to the bower. Lying on the rushes, in the corner where they are still green and not stained with blood, there is a bundle wrapped up in some green cloth. Marcus had not noticed this bundle before, but now the woman picks it up and cradles it in her arms, and Johann and Magdalena bend over it.

  “Ulla,” says Johann.

  “Ulla,” says Magdalena.

  When they have gone, when the sun is just a streak of red and the mist is appearing over the water and encircling the island, Marcus-the-dragon-fly steps out of the shadows and creeps down to the lakeside. His shoes lie on the bank and they are wet, and there is blood on the ground near them.

  Slowly and carefully, he wades into the water, his hand searching among the bulrushes as he goes.

  And then he sees what he is looking for. It begins as a stem, a cluster of crimson threads under the water, and the threads go upwards to the surface of the lake. And on the surface is the thing, like a blood-filled fungus, the thing that came out of Magdalena’s body. It bobs and floats like a giant lily, and all around it is a frenzy of tiny fishes, nibbling at it and feeding. Even as Marcus watches, the thing begins to tear and break apart.

  He wants to return to the stables, to stroke the bay pony and go to sleep again standing up against its neck. But he cannot move. He tries counting, but he cannot think of any single number. What he thinks is, I will see this thing in my nightmares. I will always see this for ever and ever in my dreams.

  How I do loathe and detest Musical Performances!

  For years, when I was still in love with the King and obedient to him in all things, and trying forever to please him, I endured these Tortures with as good a grace as I could muster. But now, except on State Occasions when my presence is Absolutely Demanded, I do not willingly go to listen to the Royal Orchestra. ^^en the King devised his ingenious idea of letting the Musicians play in the cellar (and allowing their music to reach us only by means of ducts and tubes) I rolled around in a paroxysm of mirth and told him I thought this a Piece of Invention every bit as excellent as that of the Close-stool.

  On Friday last, however, I forced myself to attend a Concert in the Summer-house. I know not what was played. The Ayres had something melancholic and English about them, every one. But then I was not paying attention to the music. I was there to observe the Lutenist.

  Emilia was with me. I sat down beside the King, but he got up and left the moment he saw me, and the Performance went on without him.

  Emilia sat to the other side of me and, although she remained as still as she was able, I who know her well could feel in her—at the sight of Peter Claire—an abiding anguish, a continuing Agitation of her spirit. And I here admit, I do sympathise with her state of discomposure. For Peter Claire, this Lutenist who pretends to love Emilia, is without question one of the most Delectable young men I have ever laid eyes upon. Happily, I would take him to my own bed. Indeed, only thoughts of Otto—of the soft down on his belly, of the blond fur on his chest, of his silky Member and his exquisite tongue—prevented me from falling into a Reverie over this person and laying plans to lure him to my room. I am a fool for yellow hair. I do not know why I ever married this dark and mournful King— except that to marry the King did seem to me a most Miraculous Thing when I was young. Yet now I yearn for men who taste of sunlight, who have the blue of the sky in their eyes. And this Musician is just such a man . . .

  “Emilia, Emilia,” I said as we made our way back to the Palace, “oh, beware this creature! Promise me that you will do nothing, say nothing, and agree to no meeting nor Assignation of any kind until I have put in train my Investigation.”

  “Investigation?” said Emilia.

  “Why, yes!” I replied. “For never in my life have I known a man as handsome as this who did not have three or four Amours going on all at one time. And alas, this may almost certainly be the case with your Lutenist. Do you wish to be the paltry Fifth Amour in a crowded and deceitful life?”

  Emilia looked crestfallen as we made our way through the Rose Garden, but I took her hand and said gently: “Emilia, my dear, I am thinking only of you. How may one judge between Actual Sincerity and that which is False? A man such as this, whom women love at a glance, will be very practised in honeyed speech and lovesick poetry.”

  Emilia nodded sadly. When we were once again in my apartments I assured her that I would be her advocate and intercede with the King on her behalf. “By winter-time,” I said, “perhaps you shall be a bride!”

  And Emilia smiled and thanked me, and told me I was good.

  I am not good. I lied to her about my advocacy.

  The truth of the matter is this: were Emilia’s suitor to prove worthy of her and love her to the ends of the world, I could not and would not let her go.

  For I have come to believe, in my fearful life on the Wire above the chasm, that Emilia Tilsen is the only person who holds me aloft. Even Otto’s absence I can bear if I am with Emilia. Even that. For her voice calms me, her drawings of flowers touch my heart, her ruses at cards entertain me and her very presence in my room engenders in me feelings of tender affection that I have not felt for any living being since I was a child and was given a white dog called Snowdrop which I carried about the house in my skinny arms.

  How could I give Emilia up?

  How could I bear to return to my former Loneliness among my angry and hard-hearted Women?

  Must I see the autumn return and go alone to my dangerous Confinement?

  Shall I endure the winter and not hear Emilia’s voice in my room, nor see her sweet face? And know once again, as the wind blows from the north and the snows lie outside my door, that I am Hated and Detested, as I have always been Hated and Detested in this jealous world?

  No. I shall not. I cannot let this happen to me!

  Now, my Investigation has proceeded a little . . .

  My loyal spy, James the Marker, having ascertained for me which room is occupied by the Lutenist, I waited until I knew the Orchestra to be embarked on some Repetition of their tedious melodies with Jens Ingemann and then brazenly took myself to the stable block, pausing not once to look to the left or to the right of me, but just Going On as I, as King’s Consort, have every right to do.


  No one stopped me nor asked me where I was going. I found the Lutenist’s room, and quickly entered it and closed the door behind me.

  My heart was beating fast, not from any fear of discovery, but from a delicious mounting Excitement, akin to that which I feel when I am journeying to visit Otto, and I do declare that, had I been born poor, I would have taken up the Art of Burglary right willingly—and may do so yet if my fortunes change.

  With slow and careful Method, I searched the room.

  It did not seem to me to be the room of a vain man. The clothes I found were simple and dark with not much embroidery upon them and this caused some small disappointment. (Vanity, in men, is such a strangely disarming and intoxicating thing.) However, there were several fine buckles upon the shoes and some leather boots made in London of such an admirable softness and I could not refrain from imagining Peter Claire’s shapely legs inside them.

  Sheets of music lay around, but I paid them scant attention. I have never been able to understand how anyone can conjure a tune out of black scratchings like mouse droppings upon paper. Perhaps, if the scratchings themselves were more pleasing, then the melodies would be better? Or perhaps it would make not the least difference? I admit that I know nothing in this whole tedious matter of Music.

  I was looking for letters and at last, in a low drawer, I found one. But it was not a love letter, only a missive from the Lutenist’s Father telling his son about the death of the local Choirmaster and begging him to come home to take up this lowly position. I mused for a moment upon what answer Mr. Claire had given to his parent. For who in the world will exchange a position in the Royal Orchestra of Denmark for that of Choirmaster in some provincial English see? I do declare the Lutenist’s Father is a fool and has no knowledge of the world whatsoever.

  I was returning this pitiful missive to its drawer, and beginning to feel disheartened that my Investigation had yielded me nothing of any use in my strategy with Emilia, when I noticed that beneath the bed, lying in the dust, as if hastily put there out of sight, was a second letter. Lifting it carefully and forcing myself to remember its exact position on the dusty floor, I took it up and began to read . . .

  So now I have it.

  Peter Claire was the lover of an Irish Countess. Recently widowed, she clearly wishes that he would return to her.

  I took up a pen and one of the sheets of music from the bottom of a pile. I turned the sheet over upon its blank side and carefully copied out certain sentences of the Countess’s, viz: Do you still wear the ear-ring that I gave you? and 'Wherever you are, Peter Claire, know that I passionately loved you, the while privately thinking how ordinary and dull the language of love so often sounds and glad in my Heart that Otto and I do not bandy these kinds of sentimental words, but instead trade the most delectable Insults.

  But my thoughts run on. If I judge rightly, this Countess is a woman of some standing, left comfortably rich by the Earl and young enough to marry a second time. A man like Peter Claire, with his eye on advancement and fame, would do very well to put himself under the Patronage of such a person and so be free from all worries of a financial nature and free to play or compose wherever he will. (He will not stay in Denmark long. The English musicians never do. Something calls them home to their flat and misty isle.)

  And so I conclude that this is what he will do. I have no need to invent any story whatsoever, for surely this letter that I hold in my hands sets out the Lutenist’s future? Emilia Tilsen is a mere sweet girl whose looks fill him with tenderness, but before the year has turned he will leave her. He will return to Countess O’Fingal and make her his wife.

  Choosing my moment with great care, I will in time show Emilia the sentences I have copied from the letter and inform her that Peter Claire’s destiny lies not in Copenhagen but elsewhere, in a place that I have never heard of, called Cloyne.

  THE QUIET SOUL

  When King Christian is anxious, as he is now, he sees her in his dreams. It’s as if she has understood the torments and humiliations Kirsten has made him suffer with her German lover and has arrived at his side to console him. Console him with what? She was pious and soft-spoken, and conversed more frequently with God than with him. She loved her pug dog Joachim. She was tall and sinewy and white, and sat very well on her horse. She bore him six children. She was his first wife.

  Her name was Anna Catherine of Brandenburg, of the House of Hohenzollem. He married her as soon as he was crowned, when the two of them were twenty years old. Her title, Queen of Denmark, always gave her pleasure and made her smile, as though, whenever it was publicly spoken, someone had whispered into her ear a story that amused her.

  At the time of the marriage there was plague in Germany, so Christian and Anna Catherine were married in Jutland, and the marriage was meant to be quiet and orderly, but a violent storm blew down from the Skagerrak on the morning of the wedding and the sky turned as black as night, and the air was filled with flying weathercocks and tiles and rain.

  In the darkness of the palace at Hadersleben, the skin of the young Queen’s face had a luminous white sheen to it. No more light fell onto it than onto the other faces, yet it stood out very plainly and Christian found himself wondering whether, in the very pitch of night, with the curtains of the bed drawn round them, he would turn and see this shining moonstone next to him on the pillow.

  The Hohenzollerns fled from the plague and came flocking to Jutland in their wide capes and tall hats. The men were large and smelled of something strong and acrid, like gunpowder. They were proud and noisy, and roared at their womenfolk, but their womenfolk were like the sky which is impervious to the clamour of the thunder, like the sun which glitters in the water that the storm has left behind. And King Christian prayed that Anna Catherine would prove to be like that, with that kind of serenity.

  On the wedding night, tired after the hours of feasting, the young King and Queen lay together with their hands lightly touching and talked until morning, and went to sleep in each other’s arms.

  Anna Catherine told Christian that she had a wanton fondness for pearls, that the forests of Germany held within them “a more beautiful silence than is to be found anywhere else on earth,” that her little pug’s name was Anders but that she called him Joachim for a reason she had not fathomed.

  Christian talked about his programme of building, about his armouries, fortifications, palaces and churches, about his ships which kept the country afloat and about his dream of a great canal that ran from R!Z!m!Z! to the Baltic Sea.

  Near dawn, when their eyes were closed and they were almost sleeping, he said: “We know that bodies fall towards the earth, but we do not know what is the nature of the thing called ‘heaviness.’ ”

  He said he wanted, in his great reveries of construction, to “defy this heaviness and let the cities of Denmark move outwards into the sky” and the new Queen replied that she considered this was a marvellous idea.

  When Christian woke up, in the mink-dark of the curtained bed, he did not at first remember where he was nor who was with him. Then he saw Anna Catherine’s face, very white and still, like an egg laid impertinently on the lace bolster.

  Now, in his dreams, he is visiting the brickworks at Elsinore.

  He is giving orders that more men must be hired, that production must be trebled, because he knows that all over the country his building projects are falling behind and his unfinished churches, warehouses and manufactories are being left roofless to the elements.

  And then—as though he had suddenly become a warlock whizzing through stardust and landing on mountaintops or on the decks of his mighty ships—he is at Bredsted, where the dykes have begun to break up. He is staring at the sea, trying to match its fury with his own. Cartloads of rock are arriving and Christian begins to shout to the drivers of these carts, to the poor mules who struggle to haul them along over broken pathways, to the air that is filled with sea-birds and to the tumbling waves: “What the sea has taken, we shall reclaim!”


  But he hears his own exhaustion in his voice. His tonsils are sore. He feels his own mortality in all his sinews, knows that the tasks awaiting him are always greater . . .just that small fragment greater . . . than his ability to solve them . . .

  He expects to wake, then, with this familiar sense of things diving and falling away into ruin to haunt him through another day, but he does not wake. He fys off once more. He finds himself in the old nursery at Frederiksborg, where Anna Catherine is sitting with the two little Princes, Christian and Frederik, and the pug Anders/Joachim snuffles and sneezes by the fire.

  Anna Catherine often visited the nursery. The love of her children did not wax and wane as Kirsten’s did, nor ever dissolve into cruelty, but was an abiding thing, and to watch her there, holding the children on her knee and whispering stories to them in the candle-light, always calmed King Christian, and he would sit down beside her and listen to her quiet voice and know that this was a different way of talking to the world and that even a king can find instruction in a certain sort of quietness.

  She asked him to build a fine observatory in Copenhagen. She said she had had a dream of a round tower, with an internal pathway of brick, wide enough for a coach and pair, spiralling round and round up to a platform at the top from which she could look at the moon.

  “Why do you wish to look at the moon?” he asked.

  “Everything that God has made I would like to look at,” she said. “I have never seen a dromedary nor a volcano nor a tree of palms, nor a bird of paradise. If I should live long enough I should like to look at these things, too.”

  So the King began to commission drawings for the tower, liking the wild idea of the spiral road and already imagining the sound of the hoofs clattering and slipping on the steeply sloping cobbles.

  But the architects puzzled over it too long. The weight of such a road, over such a width, they said, would always be too great for the centre-post to bear. He sent them back to their drawings. The word “always,” he told them, was inadmissible. There was a solution to everything in the world and there was a solution to this.