by Rose Tremain
But the years dragged on. Designs for flying buttresses came and went. The tower’s circumference decreased, then expanded. Danish architects were dismissed and Dutch designers employed at twice the cost. There was demented Low Country talk of “narrow coaches” and “narrow horses.” But each and every time, even on the smart Dutch drawing-boards, the mathematics came out wrong and King Christian had to inform Anna Catherine that the tower would not be yet.
“When?” she would ask politely. “When will it be, my dear?”
He wanted to please her because she made him quietly happy. He boasted everywhere of her good sense and her good nature. To her father with his smell of gunpowder, to her mother with her face like a bird, he sometimes wrote sentimental letters of gratitude that he did not send. But he could not, in the end, give Anna Catherine her round tower. She died in 1611, at the age of thirty-seven, and never looked at the moon from her observatory nor met a dromedary in the desert of her imaginings.
Christian wept for a long time over her death.
It was a death that seemed to come very slowly, for no reason. It began as a falling into melancholy, visible in her grey eyes, which acquired a haunted look. She renounced her riding and her walks in the woods at Frederiksborg. Then she started to grow thinner and smaller, as though all the Hohenzollern blood was gradually leaving her veins. She became strangely inattentive to her children’s joys and woes.
Then, at last, she began to lean downwards. It was a perpetual leaning of her whole body towards the ground. And when Christian saw that she was doing this and couldn’t make her spine straighten nor hold her head high, no matter how hard she tried to do so, he knew that the “heaviness” in the earth, which no one had ever truly understood, was drawing her back into itself.
The old pug, Anders/Joachim, wheezing now and smelly, and given to ever more violent fits of sneezing, which disturbed its own sleep, kept watch on Anna Catherine’s bed and would not leave her. In death, her face was no whiter than on the day of the marriage, merely as pale and luminous as it had always been, as though, in compensation for the observatory that had never been built, the moon for ever lent it something of itself.
AT ELSINORE
Dowager Queen Sofie stares at her own face in a silver mirror. Her skin is hardening. There are ridges and patterns on it—patterns she would never have designed herself and about which she was never consulted. She applies a little ceruse to her cheeks, some white powder to her nose and her thin lips move silently, cursing time, the arrogant architect of her changed appearance.
Her mood was dark even before she looked in the glass. Christian had visited her for luncheon and the smell of roasted duck and frying cabbage had revived in her memories of King Frederik’s fatal greed, which left her a widow too soon, with her Queen’s crown snatched away. As her son’s teeth tore the flesh from the breast and legs of the duck, she watched him in horrified silence.
And then out of his mouth began to pour a torrent of lamentation. He told her that a huge explosion had occurred in the Numedal mine, killing the engineers, the people he called the “geniuses of the mine,” and scores of the miners, maiming others and halting indefinitely all work on the extraction of silver.
“The Isfoss,” said King Christian, “is become a burial ground and the ore is still locked inside the mountain. Denmark’s sufferings were about to end and now they are not ended. And what am I to do about the people of the Isfoss? I drank with them to the future. I told them they would have a share in the silver and now they have nothing—far less than they had before!”
Queen Sofie sat still, eating her little piece of flounder with its delicate bouquet of samphire. She made no comment on the deaths in the Numedal nor on the absence of silver, but waited, like one held by some peculiar enchantment, for her son to arrive at the reason for his visit. She knew that he had come to ask her for her gold.
Once the request was uttered, Queen Sofie felt a strange relief, of the kind that an actor feels when at last he is on the stage and the words of the play come easily to his mind. It was indeed as if she had prepared herself for this moment for a long, long while and now her performance would be faultless.
She took up the platter on which rested the flounder bones and held it out to him. “My dear,” she said calmly. “This is what I live on—fish from the Sound. These waters of Elsinore keep me alive. But as to gold, I have none at all.”
Christian looked down at the fish bones, almost as though he hoped to find something there, some sparkle of ore among the green samphire. His look became confused and he was about to speak again, when the Queen put down the platter and continued. “Most sincerely,” she said, “would I like to help you. There are a few pieces of silver—mirrors and candlesticks and a samovar given to your father by the Tsar of All the Russias—that you are welcome to take, if these might help you out of your immediate discomfort. I will ask the servants to bring them to Rosenborg. But as to any treasure, would I be dining on fish if I were a rich woman? I have some jewels, of course, but these were gifts from your father and I do not think it right that you take these from me.”
“I am not speaking of jewels . . .” said Christian.
“No, I did not think you were. You have made the assumption that there is some hidden store of riches at Kronborg. I suppose it was Kirsten who put about this story, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have only what was reserved for me, as the Dowager Queen, when your father died, and I must eke out my living with this small pension alone. Fortunately, I am not a person of expensive tastes nor appetites . . .”
“Mother,” said Christian crossly, “I have heard it said that you alone could save Denmark from ruin, if you so wished.”
“Save Denmark from ruin!” Queen Sofie let a rill of icy laughter escape from her throat and held out her thin arms. “If there is ‘ruin,’ my dear son, then it comes from within—in the habit of grabbing and spending that infects our times. Let the nobility look to their own recklessness and the burghers to their petty greed. Let the nation be shamed by its fat belly. Why do you not draft an edict against luxury? It is to the conscience of the elevated classes that you should be speaking, not to me, for I have nothing.”
As soon as Christian had left, Dowager Queen Sofie took up a lamp and descended to her cellar. A chill of early autumn was in the house and the air of the dark store where her money lay was so cold that she could see her own breath as she prised the lid from a barrel and ran her hands through the gold coins brimming there.
In her gold lay all the passions of her past and all the consolations of her future. The soundless augmentation of its value was the only thing left on earth that could thrill her. She would defend her treasure with her life.
But now, as she stood there with her lamp and saw her own ghostly shadow on the wall, she knew, suddenly, that it was not well enough hidden from the world. Until today, she had thought it perfectly safe, but it was not. For if Christian so chose, he could send men to search the castle. With picks and axes they would break the locks on the cellar door and up into the pitiless light of day would come the barrels and the piles of ingots. She would try to preserve and defend them, but she would be told that they were forfeit, by the King’s command. From that moment her existence would cease to be anything but heartache and terror.
So now, with her ceruse and powder on, she lies on a day-bed and dreams of a pit dug deep into the granite foundations of Kronborg. She herself, under cover of the long Danish night, would bury her gold there, ingot by ingot, sack by sack. With her own hands she would shovel earth over it and then command that it be filled in and covered over like a grave, and in time grass and weeds (and even trees) would grow in the earth and no one but she would know where the pit was nor what it contained.
Could anything or anywhere be more secure than a pit in the stony earth? “Only the sea” comes the answer. “Only a burial on the ocean floor,” too deep for the fishing nets and the keels of the men o’ war. But what good is a
hiding place that she herself cannot reach? She imagines herself swimming down into the depths of the Sound, nudged by a shoal of flounder, without breath, without light, to haul a bag of coins back into the air and she shivers with dread. Yet even this, if it were humanly possible, she would do rather than let her life’s hoard be taken from her. And with this determination visible upon her face, she falls into an anxious sleep.
The following day she gives orders for the digging of the pit. It is to be outside the battlements of the castle, within the shadow of a coppice of elm and oak.
She does not refer to it as a pit, but she orders that it must be deep. She pretends it is to house the foundations of a small summer-house, a bower where, in her old age, she will sit and knit—as she once knitted secretly with her maid on the little island at Frederiksborg—and watch the sun come up or go down as takes her fancy and slowly prepare herself to meet her God.
Her workmen tell her that a simple summer-house has no need of deep foundations and can be set upon the ground just as it is. For a moment, Queen Sofie looks at them in consternation, but quickly says in a strong voice: “The feet of my bower must reach down into the earth, to the place where all of us shall lie in due time.” And they nod their heads and ask how deep it is to be, and Queen Sofie answers that it must be as deep as a man or woman standing upright, “so that they shall appear in my mind to carry the bower aloft upon their heads.”
Work begins and will not be long to complete, but no sooner is it started than doubts about the pit begin to give the Queen nightmares. For how can a pit outside the battlements be guarded? She cannot put a guard upon an empty piece of ground without arousing suspicion. In the night the guards could bring torches and begin to scrabble beneath the grass . . . Word would pass among the burghers and peasants of Elsinore that the Queen’s gold lay out under the open sky for anyone to take. One day she would go there for a bag of coins and dig down and down, and find nothing but the black earth and the worms.
Her mind is tortured by the impossibility of finding a true haven for her gold. The eyes of men see everything. Everything and nothing. Denmark’s plight surely stems from their blindness and their wavering wills. Their own immediate longings and desires put them into a trance of irresolution.
Queen Sofie holds her head in her hands, feeling the bones of her skull. The keys to her treasure house are hard and cold against the puckered skin of her breasts, as cold and hard as her unyielding purpose.
Beyond the vegetable garden at Rosenborg stands the King’s aviary. It is tall and airy, and made of iron. Golden pheasants perambulate round it, as if measuring and remeasuring its dimensions with their trailing tail feathers. High above them fly bullfinches, yellow-hammers, starlings and parrots. On the ornate roof flutters a flock of white doves.
It is here, in the lacy shadow of the aviary, that Emilia has agreed at last to meet Peter Claire. And so he waits, watching the birds, but half turned towards the direction from which Emilia will arrive. The afternoon has been warm, but now, at five o’clock, there is that faint, glittery chill in the air that warns of autumn, that speaks to the human heart of endings and departures.
And Peter Claire is filled with the certainty that no more time must be lost in his secret courtship of Emilia Tilsen. He knows now that he did not come to Denmark to play his lute, nor even to take on his role as the King’s angel. He came to Denmark to discover his own worth, to understand what he might be capable of, and Emilia is the mirror in which he has set eyes on his own goodness.
The blue is being bleached from the sky, the circling doves an exemplary white against its aspiring whiteness, and Peter Claire is moved by the feathery beauty of these shapes and colours.
As for Emilia, this is the invitation—the summons—she has been waiting for.
In her walks and wanderings with Kirsten, in her submission to Kirsten’s warnings about the perfidy of handsome men, her eyes have nevertheless remained alert for any passing glimpse of the lutenist and each sighting of him has reawoken in her precisely those feelings of agitation and yearning she once thought would always be absent from her life.
In obedience to Kirsten, she has tried to put Peter Claire from her mind, even to pretend that he had already returned to England and that she will never see him again. But he has refused to go.
And she has known that, before the summer ended, there must surely be one more conversation between them, a conversation in which something important will be said. The white ribbons have been eloquent and scarcely a day has passed when Emilia hasn’t held them in her hands or pressed them against her face. But ribbons can say only so much. Emilia has begun to long for the words and the touch of the man.
Now, as she walks towards the aviary along the aisles of the vegetable garden with its borderings of box, its smell of fruit and earth, she is barely surprised by the daring she discovers in her own nature, by the speed with which she runs towards love. Everything that was meek in her and obedient and self-effacing seems in its turn effaced: the Emilia who moves towards Peter Claire is the Emilia who disobeyed her father, who refused to soften her heart towards Magdalena. It is the Emilia who skated helter-skelter on frozen rivers. It is the Emilia (even if she does not know this) whom Marcus sees in his confused head, the Emilia who sends messengers to him across the sky.
She has put the white ribbons in her brown hair. Kirsten is sleeping and will not wake till the darkness announces the nearness of supper time and the consolations of the evening. In this small gap of time, Emilia hopes that life will change.
When she arrives there, as the doves wheel and settle on the aviary top and look down on what is taking place, there is no moment of courtesy or chivalry, no hesitation nor sudden faintness of resolution, because the time for these things has passed. Peter Claire and Emilia Tilsen—dreamers in their separate rooms all summer long— meet as lovers at last, and when she feels his arm go round her waist and pull her to him, she knows he will kiss her and that she will not resist.
His lips are dry, hot as the burnished skin of his face. And when they touch hers, the kiss is like a sleep into which she falls and from which she would like never to wake, but only to go deeper and deeper into this repose. And the lutenist understands that this is what she wants, not a kiss of tenderness, not an insubstantial caress, but the kiss which is all-consuming, which marks an ending of all that has been and the beginning of all that is to come.
And when she breaks away and looks into his face the words come easily to him, so easily it is as though they were already half uttered and only needed the warmth of her body against his to come out. He asks Emilia to be his wife. He tells her it is for her that he has been searching, that he can imagine no future in which she does not play a part. Such is the passion of his declaration that it pulls her like a magnet towards him again, towards the blissful sleep of the kiss, and only after this, when breath and light return, does she say without hesitating: “Yes.”
Then they stand just apart and stare at each other, and wonder whether they feel as Adam felt and as Eve felt when they contemplated themselves in paradise, and knew that, of all the wonders God had created, the man and the woman were the most extraordinary. They do not feel the shiver of autumn in the air. They are only distantly aware of the luminous sky and the white doves. One of the golden pheasants lets out a loud, irritable squawk (as though it thought that it, with all its superior finery, should be the object of their rapture) but they pay it no attention. They are face to face with all that they have longed for through the summer and they let it hold them perfectly still, as though caught in a trance, as though they might stand that way for ever.
THE FISHMONGER'S CART
In the night that follows this afternoon of the meeting between Peter Claire and Emilia, King Christian has a dream about the death of Bror Brorson.
This dream, which returns to him three or four times a year, always fills him with such horror that he finds himself almost unable to breathe. He has to get out of bed and
light lamps and open the window onto the night air, and, after a while, the feelings of dread and repugnance begin to recede.
But on this night they do not recede.
Christian sits by a candle, unmoving. One window is open on the darkness and he finds himself listening for sounds from the park—for some nocturnal bird, for some breath of wind agitating the trees—to return him to normality and sanity. But the night is silent. It is almost as if there were no night, no park, no trees, no sky that will slowly lighten, but only the intimation of an absolute dark making its progress across time and drawing him deeper and deeper into itself.
He wishes he were a boy. He wishes he were riding with Bror in the woods at Frederiksborg. He wishes that he were not alive in this particular time.
An hour passes. Still the image of the dying Bror fills his head with terror. He wonders whether he will send for Peter Claire and see if music can comfort him, but on this night it isn’t music that he wants. He wants Kirsten. He wants to lie with her as he used to lie and hear her laugh when he calls her his Mouse. He wants her to be kindly towards him, to kiss his head, to tell him that she loves him.
He gets up. He knows that she does not love him. He knows that the child she is carrying is the child of her German lover. These things are stored in his heart, waiting to overwhelm it, waiting for the moment when it says “Enough!” But still, as summer becomes autumn and the Count’s child grows in her womb and the prospect of another winter stares before them all, his old longings for her are always with him, as though his body had not yet understood what his head understands. And tonight he wants her, not merely as his mistress, but as a child wants his mother, to soothe him to rest, to take away his nightmares, to tell him that all will be well. He feels that nothing and no one else is able to give him any consolation.