by Rose Tremain
Naturally, if he is an honourable man, the act may cause him some few hours of Anguish, but what is this Type of Anguish compared with that which accompanies the loss of the Beloved, for whom the World contains no replacement? It is as nothing. It is as the snow, which lies up in great heaps and valleys and then is gone in a single day.
And so I begin to write:
Dear Mr. Claire,
I write to inform you that your letter, intended for Miss Tilsen, was put into my hands by the Letter-Bearer from Hillerød. In no wise intending any Harm or to Spy upon another’s words, but assuming only that any missive from the Court must be directed to me, the King’s wife, I opened the letter and began to read it ...
THE VISION
King Christian’s rooms at Frederiksborg Castle face north.
As winter comes on and he looks out at the shadow of the great building (with his own shadow contained in it, yet invisible to him) falling across the lake, and feels the chill in the walls that no sun will dispel until summer returns, he asks himself: Why was it designed like this?
He designed it. He had had a vision of what it could be.
He had looked at the old palace, built by his father, King Fred-erik, and at the water which flowed through canals and dams from as far away as Allerød to fill the lake, and at the miles of thick forest that surrounded these things and all the land that stretched over twenty-six parishes and seen that here, at Hillerød, he could build a universe in his own honour.
Taller than his father, larger, with a greater girth of body and spirit, Christian had always—since the days of the skyrocket—had a longing for things which were vast, which challenged the heavens, which could be seen from afar. And this is what he had dreamed of here: a monument to hugeness. On the great towers of his new palace he saw weathercocks, impossibly high and far away, turning on wings of gold.
He remembers now how his dreams for Frederiksborg preoccupied him. He remembers how, in a single night, he understood that the architecture must strive for order and unity, and proceed in a gradual way, like a piece of music, across the linked islands, towards a climactic structure, and how, at dawn, he woke his Dutch architect, Hans Steenwinckel, and showed him a flurry of drawings. “Hans,” he said, “we must respect what the land is telling us. The logical axis, the logical progression of the buildings, is towards the north, and so this is where the climax must arrive. This is the place that the King must occupy. Beyond it, there must be nothing else; only the light on the water, the diminuendo and then silence . . .”
At Frederikssund, ships unloaded bricks from Elsinore, lime from Mariager, timber, limestone and marble from Gotland and Norway.
King Christian used to go down to the port and stand high up, overlooking the quays, and see the thousand carts and wagons waiting to carry the pieces of his vision to the place where it would begin to rise from the ground.
One afternoon he rode from Frederikssund in the back of a cart carrying sheets of copper. He lay down on the metal, still bright and unweathered, and stared up at the sky and imagined the rain falling on it, and the sun and the snow, and saw in his mind’s eye the blue-green colour of the copper waiting within it for its private alchemy to begin.
This is how he arrived at the one idea that Kirsten had loved about Frederiksborg: its wild multitude of colours. To Hans Steen-winckel he said: “A castle is not part of nature. It must express not what is already there, but what I see in my mind.”
And the Dutchman had smiled and asked: “What is in your mind, Sir?”
A red that was not the red of the bricks, but something deeper, more scarlet or crimson, was there. Though he wanted the portals and niches to be graced with statues, he did not see them remaining white. “They will have struggled out of the stone, Hans,” he said. “But that is just the beginning of their life.”
And so Frederiksborg, as it rose in all its grandeur, had additional radiance gilded on every surface. The walls were the red of poppies, the creamy white of lilies. Golden monograms were sprinkled like pollen over doorways, windows and arches. And as for the statues: ambassadors from Italy, France and Spain all declared that they had never seen any cluster of figures so utterly fantastic, and the English Ambassador (accustomed as he was to the grey stone corridors of Whitehall Palace) admitted in private that he had to shield his eyes every time he walked past them.
For each one resembled a jewel. When the sun came round and touched the lapis lazuli blue, the emerald green, the topaz yellow and the ruby red, a blinding brightness shone from them—exactly as King Christian had planned—which spoke of something ostentatious and bold hidden in Denmark’s character that had never been sufficiently perceived before. What this “something” heralded nobody could quite say, until one perspicacious ambassador from France declared at last: “What emanates from the lips—and even from the gilded arses—of these sculptures is the sound of rude laughter.”
Now the King gets into a boat and rows himself out onto the lake and looks back and inspects his vision.
It took years to complete. Hans Steenwinckel died and was replaced by his son, Hans the Younger, who was quarrelsome and vain. The poppy-red brickwork still has to be repainted all the time to combat the enviousness of the winters, which prefer it to fade to what it once was.
Christian lets the small boat bob aimlessly on the wavelets. He stares at the great castle. Still, it is mighty. Still, its reflection in the water is breath-takingly deep. Still, its northerly crescendo touches him. Yet something has changed since those far-off days of his dreams and plans: he no longer knows what Frederiksborg is for.
He reminds himself that it was a vision within another vision— of Denmark’s ancient head holding itself up, crowned with gold. But how does it sit now with that ideal?
He feels seasick. He feels that on the wind that troubles the lake there is the smell of death.
That night, as a northerly rain storm hurls itself against his window, the King works late, trying to bring order to his mind by answering letters that have been long outstanding.
Among these is the letter from Martin Møller, begging King Christian to rescue the people of the valley of the Isfoss before the winter. And Christian comes once more upon the sentence “You gave us visions of what might be” and is moved by it afresh, and falls into a contemplation of how the works of man, for all that he knows to what sad ends they may come in time, still enflame him with such a stubborn, unreasoning gladness—as though men were boys perfecting a beautiful calligraphy, as though they were the deer of the forests kicking up their hoofs at the smell of spring. He smiles at what Møller has written, then quickly takes up a pen and (in his still exquisite handwriting) begins:
Dear Herr Møller,
Oh, if I could return to the day when I met my Mouse, Kirsten!
Oh, if I could bring back into my heart that first vision I had of Frederiksborg!
Herr Møller, all life is an unravelling towards catastrophe. In our acceptance of that inevitable catastrophe lies our only chance that we may survive it, that we may move out from the great northerly shadow of all that we could not achieve into the clear water beyond. And so begin again. And always again . . .
The King knows that this letter is not finished, but these first few sentences seem to have exhausted him, as though the very phrase “begin again” had taken on shape and form, and become a hill that he could not climb or a glacier that he could not cross.
FRU MUTTER'S BED
The spirit of mutiny among the musicians has abated.
In Frederiksborg they are better housed, in slate-roofed buildings in the Middle Holm, where they have each been given two rooms instead of the meagre one they occupied above the Rosenborg stables.
They play mainly in the church, perched up on the gallery, where the winter light streams in through the tall, decorated windows, assembled round the fine organ made for the King in 1616 by his brother-in-law, Esaias Compenius of Brunswick. And it is as if the presence of this organ gives them
legitimacy, as if they have at last come into a place where music is publicly honoured. The humiliations of the cellar begin to fade from their minds, and because the acoustics in the church are so fine, they are once more enraptured by their own sound.
Jens Ingemann, who has known many Frederiksborg winters, who has seen the Great Hall filled with people dancing and has conducted galliards for two Kings of France, likes the feeling of prominence that the gallery gives him. More visible here than at Rosenborg, he comes to performances looking smart in a new cambric coat and his white hair has been neatly cut. Though he keeps a stem eye on Rugieri and Martinelli, though he looks at Krenze with distrust, his habitual irritability has diminished. And like the musicians themselves, he recognises that, here, the playing of this little orchestra has about it an aching sweetness to which every listener is susceptible.
This is not a season for entertainments. The King is not in the mood for these things. But very frequently he summons the musicians late at night and they play for him alone, in whatever room he wishes to sit and hear them. And he congratulates them. He tells them that, if he is not mistaken, they are approaching some kind of perfection.
Peter Claire writes to his father, to tell him about the splendours of Frederiksborg and the sublime acoustics in the chapel (which I do pray you could hear, Father, for I know you would marvel at it) and to inquire after the health of George Middleton. Of Emilia he makes no mention, only adding, at the end of the letter, that the King's wife is gone into Jutland and will not be seen here this winter.
No reply to his passionate letter has come from Emilia.
Each day he hopes for an answer to arrive and each day he is disappointed. Yet he refuses to believe that Emilia’s sentiments have undergone some terrible alteration now that she is away from him. He saw in Emilia Tilsen a person who would not be diverted from the course she believed to be right. He saw in her a steadiness of purpose, a fierce determination beneath the gentle exterior. Her behaviour with regard to the hen—taken from the cellar and nurtured back to health in her room—confirmed these things. And surely, if her heart were truly engaged, she would not betray it? He cannot imagine any other possibility. He is sure he is not wrong.
Yet still there is silence.
Meanwhile, a different letter has arrived—from Countess O’Fingal.
As Peter Claire reads of the planned visit to Copenhagen of Francesca and her father, he reaches up unthinkingly to his left ear, where he half expects still to discover the jewel bought from the Gypsies and given to him as a token of the Countess’s love. And then when he remembers that he took it out and sent it to Charlotte, he feels relieved. Though his love affair with Francesca preceded his meeting with Emilia, he cannot prevent himself from feeling a kind of guilt about it, as though it were a betrayal and a costly one, which could, in the end, separate him from everything that he has planned.
Yet he also recognises that mingling with this guilt is a seductive memory of the Countess—of her large, supple body, of her wild hair, of her laughter hurled in the face of the wind, of the pleasures she chose to bestow. To all of this, he owes something of himself. He feels that he is in her debt and always will be, and that this must ever be recognised and acknowledged. Though his heart has led him elsewhere, he decides that he must not run away from a meeting with Francesca. He decides, in fact, that he must behave towards her as honourably as he can.
And so, one night, when he is alone with the King, playing his lute in the almost dark of the royal bedchamber, he begins to talk about paper manufacture and Francesco Ponti.
“I cannot afford Italian paper,” says the King.
“Why, Sir? Because I have seen Signor Ponti’s paper and I would say that it is the finest in Europe.”
“I can afford nothing: no paper; no money for new mills. I can barely afford to entertain this Italian gentleman of yours to supper.” Peter Claire smiles and the King takes the smile for some kind of refutation. He gets out of bed and walks to his study next door, and returns with a sheaf of documents, which he throws down in Peter Claire’s lap. “Read!” he says. “It is all set out there: what I owe, what I have lost, what I dream of and cannot have. No king was ever as humiliated by poverty as I have become. And from where will any help come?” -
Peter Claire looks down at the papers, written in the King’s own hand, and sees column after column of numbers. By each number is inscribed the name of a manufactory and the commodity that it produces: silk, linen, thread, buttons, lace, wood, paint, veneer, lacquer, ivory, wool, lead, slate, pewter, hemp, tar ... and on and on, listing all that a country has need of if it is to thrive in the world of commerce. The list ends with an ornately inscribed minus sign against a sum of dalers so colossal that Peter Claire stares at it, finding himself wondering whether it really has a bearing on the list that has gone before, or whether it has not arrived on the page by a peculiar accident—from some other realm of mathematics which has perfected the feat of flying from one document to another by undetectable means.
The King registers the lutenist’s disbelief and says: “You see? And now you want to add Italian paper!”
Peter Claire looks up. He is about to speak, when the King says: “In what were once my mother’s quarters here, what we used to call Fru Mutter’s Sal, there is a silver bed. It was her marriage bed when she married the King my father. And now I am going to have this precious object taken away and melted down and turned into coins. I am going to requisition and destroy the bed in which I was conceived! So you see to what desperate measures I resort. Before the wars with the League, there were more dalers in my treasury than Denmark knew how to spend, and now there is nothing!”
Both men are silent for a while, Peter Claire still contemplating the documents he has been shown. Among the conflicting thoughts that run through his mind is the possibility that the King will soon try to save money by sacking his orchestra.
When Peter Claire is dismissed at last and goes to his bed, he is unable to sleep, but sits awake by his candle. His thoughts thread in and out of each other like coloured veins through marble. He imagines a journey to Jutland and Emilia running towards him down an avenue of limes. He imagines a forest of fir being felled and a vast paper mill rising out of the sandy soil. He imagines Francesca walking on the beach at Cloyne. He imagines Emilia turning in the middle of the avenue and running away from him and never looking back.
The first frosts have come.
As Kirsten gets into the coach, she remarks to Emilia: “This air kills.”
The coachman covers their laps with furs and they set off from Boller, travelling north, as a yellow sun rinses out the mist and reveals the clean, glittering whiteness of the woods and fields.
They are going in secret to Herr Haas’s house, the house of correction, to look for Marcus. Though Kirsten usually likes to talk and chatter on journeys, to keep tedium and discomfort at bay (“because what is all travelling but a persecution of the bones and the stomach?”), she is silent on this icy morning, noting the beauty of the landscape through which they pass, yet understanding how spiteful is this December cold and letting this remind her of all, in a gilded life such as hers should have been, that is so very unkind.
Otto is still in Sweden and her plans to be reunited with him are not advancing as they should. Her letter to Peter Claire— which surely has reached Frederiksborg by now?—has received no answer. The idea that the lutenist may have shown it to the King leaves her feeling so terrified that she dare not even think about this.
Nor does she dare to send word to Otto. In despatching to her some (but not all) of the furniture that she requested from Rosenborg, the King has warned her that “all and every thing of yours shall be forfeit and you shall be cast into prison if any word from you reaches Count Otto Ludwig. You are to conduct yourself as if he did not exist in the world. You are to conduct yourself thus for as long as your life shall endure.”
Her life endures. This is all that it is: an endurance. And when she
thinks of how glorious it once seemed she feels a great welling up of rage which threatens to suffocate her. Then she howls and clings to Emilia.
And she knows this howling of hers is a terrible sound and that it frightens Emilia, but she cannot keep it down and she wonders if she is not beginning to lose her reason. “I am mad!” she wails. “Emilia, I am mad!”
But today she is quiet, lost in her contemplation of the frost, of the winter, which has begun to make her afraid.
The carriage jolts onwards, the horses sneezing and panting, the hands of the coachman numb, the wheels turning and turning, and all the landscape, as Kirsten perceives it, mute and indifferent to their passing.
In Emilia’s mind is the anguished thought that everything is vanishing away: people; places; the things to which she clung. That which has not yet gone will soon disappear, just as the road on which they travel will vanish under the snow. If Marcus is not found today, in what place will he continue to exist? In memory. In some hoped-for future. But where now?
And her lover? For this is how she thinks of Peter Claire—as though she were his mistress or his bride, and had known everything that love could be. He is at Frederiksborg—or so she assumes—but to her he has gone into an empty space like a hole in the sky. And because no word comes from him she can’t summon him to her any more. His features, all angelic as they are, are fading from sight.
She doesn’t speak of him and nor does Kirsten. Sometimes she is tempted to ask: “Those words you said on the night we left in the fishmonger’s cart. Those words about the ‘Irish whore’: tell me what you meant and what you know.” But she doesn’t ask, in case in them—in the answer that would come—there is finality. In Kirsten’s silence on the subject Emilia has begun to read such an ending, but she refuses to let it be confirmed.
Now, as the coach goes on towards Arhus, she remembers her mother’s injunction: Show courage, Emilia. She understands that, since the visit to her father’s house, she has let herself become frightened. Only for Kirsten does she seem able to be courageous, understanding that Kirsten’s troubles are as deep, as abiding, as her own and that, without Kirsten, she would indeed find herself in an empty world. Kirsten’s will, she sometimes thinks in admiration, keeps them both alive. If all should come to rights some day, then Kirsten will have engineered it.