by Rose Tremain
But now there is only this solid line of the Tilsens bowing and curtsying to Kirsten. Johann is smiling, the brothers blushing. Magdalena squats in an obeisance so low that she is almost tangled in her red skirts and Johann has to steady her and push her up again from the elbow. Kirsten walks slowly down the line, holding herself very tall and aloof from them all, so that she seems to Emilia to have more majesty about her in this cold room than she ever possessed at Rosenborg or at Boller. Separate from the King, separate from her mother, she appears queenly, magnificent, a woman to be worshipped. And Emilia sees how the family is filled with awe, how every eye follows Kirsten as she moves from person to person, how Magdalena has become short of breath . . .
Then, swiftly, Kirsten turns. “In the carriage,” she says, “we have some small presents for you, but here is the present I know you will treasure most highly: I have brought Emilia.”
And so they have to acknowledge her now. They too, Emilia knows, would like to pretend she was not really there—this ghost of Karen they long to be rid of—but, in front of Kirsten, they have to show her some graciousness. Johann holds her awkwardly to him and lightly touches her cheek with his lips that are dry from the excitement brought on by Kirsten’s presence. “You look well, Emilia,” he says. But this is all. This is all he can find to say to the daughter he no longer wants in his life, who, until recently, was far enough away from it to let him believe she would never return.
“Thank you, Father,” says Emilia. And she looks at him for a moment. His hair has become a little more sparse and she notices that his hands are trembling.
She passes on to Magdalena. She is drawn against her will into her stepmother’s pungent embrace and gasps there for a few seconds, as Magdalena’s arms encircle her, remembering how this smell of Magdalena always had about it something that sickened her, something from which she longed to escape. Magdalena, too, compliments her on her appearance and Emilia, in a voice that she can barely hear, congratulates Magdalena on the birth of Ulla.
Then she goes to Ingmar, who bows to her, as though she were a stranger, and kisses her hand. And the other brothers follow suit, bowing and hand-kissing—as if they imagined Emilia were not really their sister but some high-born gentlewoman of Kirsten’s to whom they would pledge allegiance for a day.
Kirsten watches all this and then exclaims loudly: “Oh, my dears, you must not hold back your joy like this! You must behave to Emilia as though I were not here. Why do you not embrace her, boys? Herr Tilsen, why do you not take her in your arms?”
She waits just long enough to see the discomfort come into Johann’s eyes, just sufficient time to read on Magdalena’s face a sudden cloud of confusion, and then, before anyone moves, she says quickly: “Oh, but of course, it is your natural modesty and becomes you, and I should never have embarrassed you with such an observation! The King has always said I was too sudden in my utterances, and he is right! You will embrace Emilia in your own time.” She reads, correctly, the relief in Johann’s look, in Magdalena’s smile, and then rushes on, while they stand there captive in the hall, hesitating, not knowing whether there is, after all, some further gesture towards Emilia expected of them. “But now I notice something puzzling,” she says, looking down the line of Tilsens. “Tell me, have I counted wrongly—for I was never as good at arithmetic as I would like—or is one of you missing?”
Nobody moves or speaks. Kirsten touches Matti’s dark curls and turns to him. “Was it for you that we sent the kitten? Are you the youngest of all the boys, or ... but no, no, now I remember that he is but five years old, the youngest. Is that not right, Emilia?” “Marcus,” says Emilia.
“Yes, that was his name,” says Kirsten, her most formidable smile rearranging her features into a sudden alarming prettiness. “So where is Marcus? I must certainly be introduced to you all.”
Magdalena looks at Johann. The younger boys look down at their newly polished shoes.
“Madam . . .” Johann begins.
“Perhaps he is out on his pony or playing with the kitten? Did he christen it Otto as instructed?”
“Yes,” stammers Johann, “the kitten is Otto. But we were obliged to send Marcus—”
“Marcus will not do his lessons,” says Boris.
“Only for a short while . . .” says Magdalena.
“Oh, dear,” says Kirsten. “Now I am even more confused than I was. Do be plain. We brought a little ball of wool for Otto, did we not, Emilia?”
Emilia nods. She knows that she is about to be told something she will not want to have heard.
It is Magdalena who utters the words. “Alas,” she says, “we tried all that we could try, as a kindly family, for Marcus, but we did not succeed in making him . . . amenable to the world. He is in the care of Herr Haas. We believe that through hard work and study, he will be cured.”
“Cured of what?” asks Kirsten.
“Of his wickedness,” replies Magdalena.
A silence falls. Kirsten looks at Emilia, whose face, turned imploringly towards Kirsten, is as white as moonstone.
“Oh, I am sorry to hear this,” says Kirsten, with her beautiful smile vanished and gone. “I know from experience that children may sometimes be prone to dreaming when they should not, but wickedness—surely Marcus is not wicked. And who is Herr Haas? I do pray he may be a kindly person.”
“Oh, yes,” says Johann hastily.
“A schoolmaster, is he? Could he not come here to tutor . . . ?”
Again, a look passes between Johann and Magdalena. And now Emilia feels that her promise to Kirsten of neutrality is breaking apart and cannot be kept, and that there is no need to keep it because the things they came to remedy cannot now be remedied, nor may ever be. Her hands fly to her face and she cries out: “Father, what have you done to Marcus?”
“You heard, Emilia dearest,” says Kirsten quickly. “Marcus is with a certain Herr Haas. But of course we must be told what manner of man he is.”
Johann steps nearer to Kirsten, as if his words were for her only and not for Emilia, but he sees Kirsten reach out to Emilia and put her arm about her shoulders and draw her to her, as a mother might draw to her shoulder a darling child.
“He is at Arhus . . .” said Johann.
“It is only and entirely for his own good . . .” says Magdalena.
“He would not do his lessons . . .” repeats Boris.
“Oh, but look,” says Kirsten, “how Emilia is ready to weep! I hope you are not going to tell us that at Arhus, in this house of Herr Haas, there is anything that would make her unhappy?”
At this moment, a single shaft of sunlight falls across the table laid next door for the elaborate luncheon Magdalena has prepared. And Magdalena turns her face towards it, knowing suddenly that Kirsten will not stay to eat it. “Marcus,” she announces coldly, “has been sent to a house of correction. He will return when he has learned to distinguish truth from falsehood, but none of us knows how long that will take.”
THE EXPEDIENCE OF DISGUISE
At the beginning of November, cold rains sweep down on Denmark from the Norwegian sea.
Dowager Queen Sofie walks out in the rain with her head wrapped in a shawl and looks down into the pit that has been dug to house her treasure.
Her eyesight is no longer good. She can see some creature trying to hide in the furthest comer of the pit and mumbles out loud, “What is that thing?” But it does not move and so she cannot tell what it is. She reflects that this is what happens when a woman grows old: she becomes incapable of seeing clearly what is going on right in front of her eyes. And so the people around her can take advantage. They can lie. They can say that a snake is a sliver of bark or a sliver of bark is a snake. They can pretend that everything is safe and in its place, when really, little by little, it has all been spirited away.
Queen Sofie can see, at least, that the pit looks desolate, even ridiculous. That she could ever have imagined bringing out her treasure and laying it down in this muddy hole in
the earth strikes her as laughable, as the kind of idea a peasant might have. As she walks away (clutching the shawl round her chin, just as a peasant woman might clutch it) she wonders if she is becoming feebleminded. “But how,” she murmurs, “can the feeble mind recognise its own decline? If the mind can summon the thought that it might be growing feeble, is this ability alone proof enough that no such thing is occurring?”
She rages against these confusions. She rages against the freezing rain which shows no mercy.
Later that day, when she has rested, Queen Sofie goes down once more—for the tenth or twelfth time that week—to her cellar.
She has had a new idea. It was born out of the recognition that a queen might easily be mistaken for a serf by the simple wearing and clutching of a shawl. She has understood the ease with which dis-guise can be achieved. And this, she has now determined, is what is needed here. Her gold will stay in the cellar, but it will be disguised as something else. Certain small inventions—of marvellous simplicity—will deflect attention away from what it is to what it seems to be. Then, if her son should send men to search Kronborg for her hidden treasure, they will go down into the vaults and be as near to it as she is now, as she stands with her lamp at the door, but they will not see it. They will report that there is nothing there, only a few casks of wine.
She smiles. She has heard that the contents of the plate room at Rosenborg have been melted down. What more is there to melt now, save the crown itself? Yet the King is given up to his dream of the whaling ships, declaring that out of the sea in which Denmark is floating will come the creatures that will save her. If Christian will sacrifice the royal gifts of thirty years, including those that were given to him on his marriage to Anna Catherine, why then he will sacrifice anything for this and have no scruple about taking from his own mother all that she has left by way of consolation.
But now, it will not happen. If the Queen has worried that her mind is becoming feeble, at least she finds it still capable of invention. And with invention she will preserve her money store.
The following day she takes a carpenter and a bricklayer down with her to the vault. Into each of their hands she places a golden daler, then bolts the door, locking the three of them in.
Holding her lamp high, so that her lined face looks spectral in the darkness, she tells these men that she is about to give them certain orders, which they must obey to the letter and ask no questions. “And if,” she whispers, “you tell any man or any child or woman or any mortal upon this earth by word or by paper what these orders are—and rest assured that I shall know if you do this, for there is nothing that blows on the air in Denmark that does not come eventually to my ears—why then your houses shall be burned and your families put out to beg on the streets and you shall be imprisoned here in the darkness for the rest of your lives.”
The men gape. They clutch their pieces of gold. Both fear and excitement assail them and they pray there is no crime against God nor man about to be asked of them.
“Swear,” says Sofie, “that you will do everything that I ask.” “We swear,” say the bricklayer and the carpenter.
More gold is promised to them. They are told to begin work that night and continue without rest until their task is complete.
KIRSTEN: FROM HER PRIVATE PAPERS
In this miserable November, with the day not far off when my child and Otto’s will be born into the World, I do find myself in a Horrible Dilemma.
I marvel that I can consider it a Dilemma. Were I to act in my own interest and consider nothing but this, there would be no Dilemma at all, but rather and only a Piece of Fine Fortune and Luck, from which I would immediately seek to gain the great Advantage that I do spy in it. That the very notion of this wretched Dilemma comes into my mind at all does, I suspect, suggest that certain Changes have come about in me that I had not noticed until this moment, viz., I am becoming More Charitable.
The quandary is this:
—I have perceived at last how I can secure an Ally at the Court, who will help me in my dealings with my Husband’s enemy, King Gustav of Sweden.
—I also perceive that I cannot make use of this Ally without causing hurt to Emilia.
What am I to do?
The predicament has been precipitated by the arrival of a letter.
It was addressed to Emilia and the bearer of it had come from Hillerød and so I knew, because the King has removed himself to Frederiksborg, that it must be from the English Lutenist.
With a sharp Silver knife given to me by Otto, I lifted the seal, taking care that it did not break in two, and began to read. It was night-time, with all at Boller (including the fat Vibeke, who goes wandering about the house at strange times of the day and night as though she were a Sow nosing about for Truffles) silent and in their beds.
My candle-light gave to the paper a kind of soft colour, as of honey, and to the words a black intensity, so that it seemed to me that I might run my tongue across the sentences and lick the words away and that to taste them would be marvellously sweet.
For this letter contained an outpouring of Love such as I once read long ago when I was seventeen and the King began to woo me by every Means and sent messages to me day and night and which, in their Degree of Longing, moved me first to laughter and then to weeping and then to an Answering Longing of my own. Because, in a bitter World, these feelings surely have a Rarity, like to certain species of birds that do hide themselves only in banana trees or in the freezing air above the clouds and are seldom seen. And so we listen and do hear their song and only afterwards—when all that they sang of is quite vanished and lost—do we wish we had not done so, for we miss it so.
The Lutenist declares that since Emilia’s departure from Court, he does not sleep, but only settles nightly into a dream of you, which is not a veritable dream, but a waking reverie of all that I long for and all that my heart and mind can imagine. And in this reverie, my enchanted Emilia, you are my wife and I am your husband and together we walk into our future, and all that we take and all that we give makes us yet more fair in each other’s eyes, so that the world, beset for always by cruelty and striving, by vanity and decay, does also show us marvels excellent and fair . . .
None but the most hard-hearted (among which I might once have counted myself) could fail to find some grace in these sentiments. And when I add to them the Remembrance of what a handsome Countenance the writer of them wears and how exquisitely yellow his hair does happen to be, I do understand that great good fortune beckons to Emilia, and that to withhold it from her is a Vile Act.
However, it is now that my Dilemma appears. For do I not have a Weapon trained upon the heart of the Lutenist? I am sure that no one knows of this letter except him and me and, most naturally, he will wish the thing to come at length to Emilia for whom it was intended and not stay hidden in my Dressing Closet. So I reason thus: would he not do Any Thing that I ask of him in order that this letter (and others that he may contrive to send) do reach their destination? And because he is much admired and trusted by the King, is he not my Perfect Man for the execution of my Plans regarding Otto?
All that I need to do appears before me with Perfect Simplicity. I must write a letter to Peter Claire. In this, I inform him that I cannot approve his love for Emilia, nor find myself willing to permit any word of his to reach her. I will say that she is my Woman and must serve me for as long as I shall require and never Marry— for this is her lot—and he must strive to forget her.
Only then, when he shall be wondering how he can vanquish my stem ruling, shall I come to the Real Matter of my letter. I shall ask him if he will find and send me, in secret, certain Papers from the King’s own bureau, in which are set out his fevered Calculations concerning the Finances of the Nation and which do, in their desperation, reveal to all a Sorry State. And then I shall promise that, upon receipt of these papers and if they be Satisfactory and the Right Papers entirely, his own letter shall be given to Emilia.
Really and truly,
this is an Excellent Plan. For with these papers once in my hands, the day surely nears when my Rhenish Count will be returned to me, or I allowed to go to Sweden to live with him. For what would King Gustav pay for such knowledge? I know I am not mistaken when I answer that he would think my Safe Passage to Sweden but a small price. And so my future becomes bright once more. When I wake in the morning, I shall find Otto by me and stroke his fair hair to set him prancing into the day . . .
Yet what if the Lutenist is obstinate and will not do as I ask? What if his Loyalty to the King overrides his Love for Emilia, so that both Loves are doomed and she has nothing and I have nothing, and we are condemned to grow old in Solitude together at Boller, playing Beggar-my-Neighbour?
How shall Emilia be comforted?
And how shall I find any rest or Consolation?
Oh, Lord, but I am tired and it is late! Late in this winter’s night. And the years turn and turn, and cannot be slowed or halted.
The rain has ceased.
The park at Boller has one great tree whose leaves, in late autumn, are purple and shine like precious stones in the sun.
And when I note the beauty of this tree, for all that the Winter begins to tear at it, I find my own passion for Life returning. And I know that I cannot waste my remaining years alone, but must go to my Lover. There is no future for me but this.
And so my mind devises a Good Stratagem. I shall write as I planned to the Lutenist, but I shall feel no Remorse or Guilt. For what did at first appear to be a Betrayal of Emilia, I do find, with thinking on it, that it is No Such Thing. On the contrary, by testing her lover in this way, I am rendering her a Great Service, for which she will sooner or later thank me!
For if Peter Claire truly loves her, why, then he will think nothing of taking from among the King’s Papers a few pages of Arithmetic that His Majesty might never miss. He will but wait out the right time and then do what I ask.