by Rose Tremain
Moving slowly, as old men move, he takes up a lamp and makes his way to Kirsten’s chambers. In the little ante-room next to her bedchamber he pauses, for he sees that a bed has been positioned across the door to Kirsten’s room and that, on the bed, the young woman Emilia lies asleep. He stares at the bed and at the sleeping girl. Why has the bed been moved in front of the door?
He stands still, holding his lamp, and Emilia wakes and gasps with fright at the sight of his giant presence looming over her.
Then he hears Kirsten call her from within the room and Emilia stands up on the bed holding on to the door, blocking his way.
“Sir . . .” she stammers.
Still, he says nothing. Part of him yet seems to exist in his dream of Bror and is incapable—because of what he saw when Bror Brorson lost his life—of uttering any words.
Kirsten calls again and Emilia curtsies to him awkwardly, with her feet still tangled in the sheets, then she goes to open the door to Kirsten’s chamber and enters. She closes the door. Christian can hear his wife’s voice raised and now he knows why the bed is where it is. Emilia has been instructed to bar his way to Kirsten.
He puts down the lamp, stoops and, with one strong movement of his arm, lifts Emilia’s bed aside. Then the door to Kirsten’s room is opened again and Emilia stands there in her night-shift, babbling nervously about her mistress’s “frailty,” her mistress’s “melancholy state.” The King tells her he does not wish to hear one word more and moves forward to push past her. With a look of terror on her face she says: “You must not go in, Sir. I have been ordered to say that no one is to go in . . .”
He stares at her. She has a simple kind of beauty that reminds him of Anna Catherine and he does not wish to hurt her. But now it comes to him that this moment on this night, when visions of Bror’s death are like a wound in his brain, is the very last moment in which he is capable of forgiving Kirsten.
Something of this resolution and intensity of feeling communicates itself to Emilia. She stares at his suffering face, at his eyes which have seen wars and piracy and drownings and the deaths of children and beloved friends. “Sir,” she pleads, “I beg you . . .”
“No,” says Christian.
And now he walks past Emilia into Kirsten’s bedchamber, closes the door behind him and turns the key in the lock.
Kirsten appears terrified, as though he has come to kill her.
She screams and clutches the sheets to her, covering her pregnant belly. Her frizzy hair is wild and her face white, and her mouth is wide open.
Christian tries to comfort her. He calls her his “beloved Mouse” but she does not seem to hear this. He takes her hand and kisses it, and she snatches it away. When her screams subside they turn to pleading. “Don’t hit me . . .” she begs. “Please . . .” There is sweat on her forehead. She says she will scream until the palace guards come running, till everyone at Rosenborg is awake, but still he tries to calm her, wiping away the moisture on her face, smoothing her hair. “I am your husband,” he says. “And tonight you must comfort me.”
“No!” she screams. “I shall wake the pastry cooks. I shall wake the stable boys. I shall wake the whole of Denmark!”
“Hush,” he says. “Master yourself, Kirsten. I have come to love you, that is all.”
But now her terror seems to turn to something else, to a fury so fierce that her hazel eyes bulge out of her face like venomous blisters. “You know that there is no love between us!” she yells. “Why do you persist? Why do you not leave me in peace?”
“Because I cannot,” says Christian. “Because I must have a wife who is a wife and if you will not let me lie in your bed—”
“Do you threaten me? How dare you force yourself on me when I am not well! It is you who should master yourself and your desires. Have I not suffered them enough in fifteen years?”
Always, in her fury, she appeared beautiful to him and even now, when what she is saying insults and wounds him, he longs simply to take her, to spread her thighs and show her that for ever and always his strength will be superior to hers and that for ever and always his man’s needs will find their satisfaction in her body.
He tries to prise the sheets from her grip. With his other hand he explores beneath them, finding her leg, moving his fingers slowly upwards. And in this fight with her he knows that already the dreams of Bror are fading, that the solace he sought is beginning to come.
He whispers her name: “Kirsten . . . Mousie . . .”
And then she hits him. Her balled fist slams into his head, just above his ear. He stares at her. Her face, in that instant of the blow to his skull, undergoes some alteration that he could never have imagined. Her mouth gapes, her cheeks are too fat, her breath stinks of cheese, her forehead is too high, too white, too stuffed with her wickedness.
King Christian recoils. His hand relinquishes her leg, knows that it will never again find its way to that private place that has tormented him for so many years. She is ugly and she is treacherous, and her body heaves with a German child, and he can no longer endure her.
Roughly, he pulls her to her feet. She shrieks for Emilia, whose small fists are beating on the bedroom door. “Kirsten,” he says, “pack your things. You are leaving. You are leaving Copenhagen and I swear on the souls of my children that I shall never let you return!”
And suddenly she is silent. Her gaping mouth hangs there, wet and foolish. He knows that, for a second, she considers pleading with him, considers becoming what, in an instant, she can be-come—soft and seductive, turning him round her finger, making him light-headed with her words like honey—but then she decides against this. She turns away, her head held high. She understands that the time is over for these games and strategies. All that has passed between them is over. It is the dead of night in their dead love and there is nothing that she can do but gather her few precious possessions to her and go away.
King Christian wakes servants and goes down with them to the stable yard. He is about to rouse the grooms and the coachmen, to tell them to prepare two carriages, one for Kirsten and one for her women, when he sees a large covered cart standing in one comer of the yard, a cart such as tradesmen and farmers use for the transportation of goods and workers in the fields.
“^^at cart is that?” he asks and is told that it belongs to the fishmonger, a certain Herr Skalling, who is in the habit of visiting one of the chambermaids overnight. And Christian imagines this man, naked with the maid, coming to Rosenborg for his sport, just as Count Otto Ludwig of Salm came brazenly to Kirsten’s bed, and he feels his anger harden and his disgust intensify.
He orders that the fish cart be requisitioned and that “four mismatched nags” be found to pull it. Kirsten will be sent away in disgrace, in a cart smelling of fish. And this will be his last sight of her, as the cart is borne away, as it shakes and rattles on the flagstones, as the light comes up on its humiliating progress.
Grooms stagger out onto the cobbles, pulling on their clothes. Horses are brought out and given water and, as the commotion intensifies, lamps are lit in the rooms above the stables and heads lean out of the upper windows.
One of these watchers is Peter Claire. He sees the King, surrounded by servants clutching lamps, standing in the middle of the yard, shouting instructions for the four horses “of four colours” to be brought into the traces of the cart, and he hears the fury in the King’s voice and knows that something unlooked-for, something terrible, is occurring. He dresses quickly and arrives in the yard as the horses are being brought towards the shafts of a ramshackle conveyance: a bay, a piebald, a chestnut and a grey. The harnesses rattle and clink, and the hooves stamp the ground, striking sparks from the stones.
The King’s presence seems large, casting a wide shadow as the lamps move around. Peter Claire doesn’t approach him, but asks a thin man what is happening.
“That’s my cart,” says the man. “The King has confiscated my cart.”
“Why?” asks Peter Claire.
/> The man is small and sinewy, and has a face that seems worn down by weather and by care. “For his wife,” he says. “He is sending his wife to hell in my fish cart.”
As the cart moves towards the main entrance of the palace, Peter Claire follows it. He stays in its shadow, not daring to come to the King and understanding that no words of his will influence what is happening, but knowing beyond all doubt that if Kirsten is leaving then she will take Emilia with her.
Through his head race wild schemes of kidnap and rescue. But he knows that he can do nothing. Everyone and everything, on this strange night, is subservient to the King’s design and nothing will prevent what is to come. Unseen, however, he goes into the palace by a side entrance and, as he approaches Kirsten’s rooms and hears her screeching at her women, he calls Emilia’s name.
But it is Kirsten who appears. She wears a black gown and, in the first light of day coming through the windows of Rosenborg, her face has the pallor of a spectre and in her hand is a silken whip, with which she hits out at the wall. “Lutenist!” she screams. “Go and fornicate with your Irish whore! Emilia is mine, and she is all that I have now and no man will ever take her from me!”
Yet still, in defiance of the wild woman and her weapon, and the spite in her voice, he calls to Emilia again and for a moment she is there: she carries an armful of Kirsten’s clothes and she looks at him in the half-light but says nothing. Then Kirsten strikes his arm with her whip. “Go away!” she yells. “Go back to Ireland, for you will never see Emilia again!” The whiplash stings and Peter Claire clutches his arm and he feels his breath leave him for an instant, and when he looks up again Emilia is no longer there.
Just after five o’clock on this chill September morning, the fishmonger’s cart, containing Kirsten and Emilia and such possessions as they have been able to assemble in the time allowed to them, is driven out of the gates of Rosenborg.
All the other women have been left behind and now stand in a shivering cluster by the gates, watching the cart go swaying down the drive and out of sight. When it has gone they do not move, but stare distractedly at one another. Not far from them, Peter Claire looks wretchedly upon the coming day.
But the King pays none of these people any attention and does not linger. For there now comes upon him a feeling of exhaustion, of tiredness in his whole being, such as he has never known. He goes directly to his bedchamber, closes the window and, still wearing his clothes, falls into a deep sleep, completely empty of dreams.
PART Two
FREDERIKSBORG AND JUTLAND, 1629 - 1630
THE INSECT ROOM
It is not that the cataract remains frozen. (Since April, the torrent flows and over its glassy lip the flotsam of summer falls with the white water—pollen and dust, mayflies and seeds. And now the first leaves of autumn float on the surface of the river.) But it is as if no one hears the sound of the waterfall.
They stand to the north of it, where the graves have been dug for the men who arrived from elsewhere, the ones who had nothing, no papers, no wives, no belongings to speak of, the ones whose bodies could not be returned to wherever they had come from because no one knew where they had come from. These were poor men who had heard rumours that there was work in the silver mine. They had walked through the snow and ice, and were hired by the engineers. When they died in the explosion, those parts of them that could be found were buried here at the Isfoss, in the rock that had killed them. Wooden crosses were bolted together by the coffin maker and planted round with stones, and inscribed with the names that people knew them by: Here lies Hans, who died at His Majesty’s mine on the second day of August 1629. Here lies Mikkel. Here lies Niels. . .
Mainly, it is women who are seen on the hillside, staring at the fallen rock and at the mouths of the tunnels where the remains of the dead were at last brought out into the light. And what they
hear is the deathly quiet all around them, which is the quiet of the vanished. They are the widows or mothers of the men from the Numedal. They stand motionless in their black clothes, remembering the day when the King arrived and told them they would share in the riches to come, and how these dreams of wealth took hold of their imaginations, and how they pressed their husbands and sons to abandon what work they had to become miners.
Visions of silver had illuminated the darkness of their low rooms. At mealtimes, silver was what they talked of. They examined the men’s hands for traces of silver dust as they came home from the day’s work. And there is scarcely one of them who does not possess a fragment of rock veined with silver ore, smuggled out inside a boot or even secreted inside a man’s body, to be evacuated into a pot like a petrified stool.
The women held these fragments on their open palms.
“This?” they asked. “This speck of rock?”
“Yes,” came the replies. “And I could be imprisoned for the taking of it, so keep it hidden out of sight and never speak of it until the mine is exhausted and all the engineers are gone.”
The mine is not exhausted. This is one of the reasons why the widows and grieving daughters stand and stare at it. In the silence that is broken only by the cry of the eagles who sometimes turn in stately circles above them, they look at what cannot be seen, at the secret of the mountain. As winter comes on again the snow will fall and cover the place where the men went in and never came out alive. And the snow will freeze into a glacier and none of the few travellers who come this way will ever know what wealth is locked in there behind the sheets of white.
But the women know. They are the ones who made the exchange. They know what the men died for. And they want it all to come back again: the noise and magnificence of the mine. They want it to come alive once more, just as it was, with the shouting of the engineers and the whistle warnings of each explosion, with the hammer and shriek of the hundred picks at work and the songs at evening, and the tankards of ale in the rough hands of their menfolk, and the huge figure of the King passing among them and even sitting at their own firesides, talking of Denmark and Norway, and the great kingdom and all the prosperity to come.
They stand and listen, as though for some music emanating from the earth, which no one but they can hear. It was the music of the mine. It was the music of hope. They heard it for five months and then came the explosion, which happened with no warning. They yearn to hear it again, but know that it will never come.
The Lutheran minister who visits the widows and children of the miners is a man so thin and small that he has the nickname of Ratte, or “Ratty.” His name is Martin Møller. In his wooden pulpit he has to stand on a footstool to look down on his congregation. And his sermons cause him anguish, week by week, for he is not a man who likes talking, except soundlessly to God. He often wishes that he did not have to preach or comfort, but only to think. When he is in a person’s house he is often so quiet that the person forgets that he is there.
But these days, since the tragedy in the Numedal, Martin Møller has begun to talk a great deal. He understands that a terrible wrong has been done here and, instead of retreating into ever more implacable silence, he has given himself the role of spokesman for the bereaved and afflicted.
God tells him that it is not just, it is not right, that the King should let the mine be closed and forgotten, and the people abandoned to their grief and poverty. The villagers of the Isfoss were willing to re-imagine their lives for King Christian. Yet no reward except a few dalers of wages ever fell into their hands, despite all the royal rhetoric about riches and prosperity. And how are the widows to live now? asks Martin Møller of anyone who will listen. They try to grow onions and cabbages in the frozen earth. They go into the hills and gather firewood. Their children steal and beg. They have nothing.
And there is no word from Copenhagen; no representative. Every morning, Martin Møller looks out of the window of his house and hopes to see some stranger arriving, dressed in livery with boots of Spanish leather. And he also hopes to see, in that stranger’s saddle-bag, a piece of paper wit
h the royal seal upon it, on which there would be written some promise of compensation, or, better still, a heavy cart lumbering along in the representative’s wake, filled with sacks of coins and with gifts of wool and cloth, of flour and wine, of oil and sugar.
“Ratty is deluded,” say the mothers and widows among themselves. “No such person will ever come. The King does not care whether we live or die. If we were in Denmark itself then it might be different, but he is impervious to suffering in Norway.”
But Ratty Møller is determined that these people shall be remembered. And who will speak for them if he does not? It is as if he has been saving all his words and all the breath in his small frame for this hour. Scuttling from household to household, his nose somewhat pink from the chill in the autumn air, he tells the daughters and the widows and the ragged waifs of children that he will travel himself to Rosenborg if the need arises (and this despite his terror of the sea) but meanwhile is finding some means to get a letter to the King.
And in this letter he pours out his heart. He describes the horrors that he witnessed at the mouth of the mine, and the misery and suffering that followed. He informs the King that a diet of onion soup induces melancholy and that melancholy leads in a short time to despair. If you had. not come here and given us hope, Sir, he writes, then surely we would have lived out our lives without any complaint. But you did come. You lifted us up. You gave us visions of what might be. And so, in our wretchedness, it is to you that we must make supplication . . .
He begs the King to return to the Numedal. He describes himself at his window, waiting and watching for the man in the boots of Spanish leather, who never arrives. He speaks of his own smallness in relation to the window-sill. He says he is a nobody, a poor minister, a lonely man, a rat. And yet, he writes, I dare to speak directly to my King and I dare believe that he will hear me and I dare believe that he will answer my prayer.