Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  She will have conjured all the vanished people from wherever it is that they are hiding.

  As the miles go by, the sun disappears behind a grey blanket of cloud and Kirsten and Emilia see that the frost is gone from the fields and a slow rain is beginning to fall.

  Emerging from her silence, Kirsten says: “Now, Emilia dear, I hope you have our plan quite clear in your mind. When we arrive in the town, we shall stay inside the carriage and not show ourselves, and Mikkel our coachman will go on foot to inquire about Herr Haas and his loathsome house.

  “Once the house is found, Mikkel will go in with the pretence that he has brought a message to Marcus from his father. And only then, when Mikkel returns to the coach to tell us that Marcus is quite definitely there, shall we appear and show ourselves. For who knows what lies Magdalena may have told about us? She may have said we are witches who do spirit children away and drop them to their deaths from the clouds!”

  Emilia nods. “Magdalena is the witch,” she replies.

  “Quite so,” says Kirsten, “and therefore is full of cunning and inventions of a fiendish kind. For in telling us where Marcus has been put, did she not foresee the day when we should go after him and try to bring him out? And do not tell me that she has not done her best to prevent us. We know not how she has done this, but only can guess that she has. So we must outsmart her.”

  Emilia nods again, and now they see that the coach is arriving at the edge of the town and seagulls stand perched on the roofs and chimneys of the cottages in the rain.

  “Oh,” says Kirsten, “look at those patient birds who do not mind the wet. They put me in mind of one advantage to this journey: at least we have not had your hen to contend with in the coach!”

  The two women smile and then, without warning, Emilia sees Kirsten’s smile become suddenly contorted, and she clutches at the furs and tries to speak, but cannot, and Emilia holds her and begs her to say what is happening, while shouting to the coachman to stop. Emilia hears him call in the horses, feels the coach skid and slide on the wet road, and then, in a great release of breath, Kirsten screams out, “The child, Emilia! The child!” And as she does so, Emilia feels a deluge of warm liquid falling onto her shoes and prays it is water and not blood, and some of the furs slide away and become tangled round their feet, and Kirsten kicks out in terror and in pain, and Emilia has to strive to hold her still.

  “Don’t fear . . .” she hears herself say. “Don’t fear . . .”

  The coach stops at last and Mikkel’s face, red with cold, damp from the rain, appears at the door. He stares at Kirsten wrestling with her pain and at the water which carries in it flecks of blood, now spreading over the floor of the coach, and seems frozen, both by the cold journey and by the sight now confronting him.

  Show courage, Emilia.

  “Mikkel,” she says, as calmly as she can. “Go into one of these houses, where the gulls stand, and tell them that the King’s wife has need of a bed and of a midwife.”

  Mikkel doesn’t move. Rain drips into his eyes and he doesn’t wipe it away.

  Show courage, Emilia.

  “Mikkel,” she says again. “Go at once. Ask that a bed be made ready and a midwife called.”

  He goes at last. He says nothing at all as he goes but only holds his back, where it seems to hurt him. When he reaches the door of the cottage, he takes off his hat and shakes the rain away.

  The room is low and dark, lit by a smoky fire.

  The bed on which Kirsten lies is not a bed but a structure made out of hay bales lashed together and covered with linen. At her head is a bolster filled with straw. “Every time I move my neck,” she whispers to Emilia, “I hear a crunching. Will you verify, my dear, that there is no mouse nor bat nor anything eating my hair?”

  Emilia reassures her, smooths the lumpy pillow as best she can. When the pain returns, Kirsten clutches Emilia’s hand and her face contorts, as it did in the carriage. Yet between the spasms she returns to a self that is unafraid, almost sprightly, as though now that she is to be delivered of her baby her optimism is beginning to return.

  She sits up and examines the room in which she finds herself, where water is simmering in a pot on the fire and where a peasant woman, whose cottage this is, is tearing a white sheet into rags and fussing with some winter roots to make an infusion. Several times, Kirsten apologises to the woman for interrupting her morning and reassures her that all her children “have been born in a trice, so that I will not inconvenience you for very long.”

  The woman is old, with eyes that look as though they are turning to milk. “The King’s child!” she says. “My lady, I did not imagine the King’s child would arrive in such a place . . .”

  And Kirsten smiles at her and knows that this is why she has no fear; because the child is not the King’s, because it is the child of her lover and will resemble him and be born swiftly, on the waters of desire. Indeed, she’s excited, impatient to see it, talks to it as she sweats and strains: “Come on, my little Otto! Swim out of me. Swim into my arms.”

  The root tea is brought to her and seems to warm her body, right down to her feet. “Emilia,” she exclaims, “this tea is quite a marvel. Note down the recipe and we shall make it at Boller.”

  On the straw bolster, Kirsten’s hair unwinds itself, springing out from its pins and clasps, until it is like tangled golden thread heaped about her face, and Emilia looks at her and is once again struck by her magnificence. She resolves that she herself, from this moment onwards, will show more courage and endurance. Karen and Kirsten—two women so different from each other—have instructed her with their words and by example. She will not betray them.

  Now Kirsten is trying to reassure her about Marcus, saying that today’s journey has not been in vain, that they will return, that “nothing which is dear to you has been forgotten and Marcus must endure a little longer, that is all, just a little longer . . .”

  At this moment the midwife arrives. She is stout and rosy-cheeked, her starched collar and cuffs only a little dampened by the rain. She curtsies to Kirsten, and without any fuss marches to the end of the hay-bale bed, takes hold of Kirsten’s ankles and opens her legs wide. She bends and her head disappears under Kirsten’s skirts, where she squints at the birth passage, then inserts her hand full in and Kirsten lets out a cry which is both a cry of pain and a cry of longing to receive her lover once more in this place.

  The midwife’s practised fingers measure the degree to which the portal of the womb is opening. She finds it wide and can feel the child’s head pressing upon it, ready to be born. She extracts herself from the skirts and pushes them up, and Kirsten’s naked legs kick and push as the pain comes once more.

  The peasant woman brings the rags and a bowl of water, and lays them by the bales, made from grass cut in the hot summer of 1627, which is her only bed. And together she and the midwife and Kirsten and Emilia hold to each other’s arms, forming a human shape like a boat, and this boat moves and rocks as the midwife begins a chanting, which is the rhythmic song, like a song of the sea, which she sings when she knows that the child and its mother are as one in their struggle, and that the moment is coming and will be easy.

  The child is a girl.

  It is cleaned and examined in the low winter light. It is swaddled in the rags and laid on Kirsten’s breast.

  “Emilia,” she asks. “What name shall be beautiful enough?”

  THE SHIP ANNA-FREDERIKA

  It was a cargo vessel, built during the reign of Frederik II.

  It had never lived up to its graceful name. It was heavy and lumbering; a ship that nobody had ever really liked. It might have been taken out of service and broken up long ago had King Christian’s shortage of money not become so acute. Instead, its leaks were stanched and mended, its worn and faded decks stripped and revarnished, and it continued to plough its way across the Kattegat and round into the Baltic, ferrying wool and hemp to Finland and returning with copper and lead.

  Early in Nov
ember it had sailed out of the Horsens Fjord, bound eventually for Finland, with a cargo of sheepskins, rope and string, but carrying letters and packages as far as Copenhagen, where it would be reprovisioned for the first leg of its voyage through the Baltic.

  As the Anna-Frederika set out, a moderate westerly was blowing, but the wind veered and the sails of the ship began to be tormented by a rough gale from the north. They were strong sails, made by men who had heard and heeded King Frederik’s edict against shoddiness. The canvas bulged and strained, trying to contain the wind, but the ship became, in the words of the captain, “like an old drunk dame farting into her skirts.”

  As he gave the order to drop the topsails, he saw that the shrouds of the mainsail were frayed and torn. He swore under his breath and shouted for this to be reefed before its great weight began to uproot the main mast and send it crashing down upon the deck. “When we reach the sea of Sams0,” he snapped to the boatswain, “you and your men will weave some new strength into these ropes and you will do it speedily, so that we can go on.”

  The ship surged forward, pushing at the water, trying to ride the swell, but it was as if the old, ungainly body of the Anna-Frederika was racked with so many pains that it wanted the sea to release it from any further endeavour; as if it was only waiting for a far-off towering wave to break over it and take it down into the calm and silent deep, to where the whales of King Christian’s imagining lurked in the darkness.

  The captain cursed his ship. He tried to stop his ears to its sighing and creaking. He did not want to die. In his rage, he ordered the boatswain down into the hold to “filch rope from the humdrum cargo for which we are all risking our benighted lives.”

  The darkness of the hold, and the cold there, and the feeling that it always had for the crew of being a place unfit for any man to be: these things impressed themselves more strongly than they had ever done upon the boatswain as he climbed down into it with his lamp held high.

  But as he began to search for the bales of rope, he became aware of something else, something he had not anticipated: the cargo in this hold was stinking. It was a stench so foul, so suffocating and terrible that the man stood and held to a post, gripped by a sudden sickness. Sweat poured off his face and down between his shoulder-blades. He tried to master the sickness, but it would not be mastered. He vomited and his body convulsed, and his lamp fell from his hands and smashed on the floor.

  He wiped his face on his sleeve. He spat into a tarred gulley where stale sea water from a hundred voyages had collected. He stood still, holding fast to the timber, trying to recover. He knew that the faint light still in the sky far above made it possible for him to move around the hold, to search both for the rope and for the source of the smell, yet his body felt so weak he could barely raise his arm or continue to stand upright.

  He shivered. He made himself begin to grope forwards. With every step that he took he expected to find corpses. The ship continued to roll and lurch, and it seemed to the boatswain, as he staggered about, fighting to find air that he could breathe, that hell lurked down there in the Anna-Frederika, and that this hell had claimed him and that nothing in his life would ever again be sweet.

  He tried to banish this feeling with thoughts of summer mornings off the island of Gotland, of the scent of linden trees in his childhood village of Vinderup, of his young daughter who smelled of linen still warm from the iron, but now he knew that he was losing his grasp of what was or what might be, that his steps were turning in a meaningless dance, that his daughter had vanished to a place he could not reach, that the light in the sky had gone out. He fell onto a pile of sheepskins and he felt the stink of them take him into itself and drown him.

  Only when the northerly began to die down and the familiar shape of Sams0 was visible on the horizon did the captain look round for the boatswain and see the doors to the hold still open.

  With the dropping of the wind the smell began to seep upwards onto the deck and members of the crew stood at the hold mouth, covering their faces and looking down in confusion.

  Two men were ordered to bring the boatswain up.

  He was not dead, but his skin was the colour of lard and his pulse was so faint it was almost impossible to find it. He tried to speak, but his jaw was locked. On his clothes and in his hair the stench in the hold travelled up into the body of the ship.

  He was laid in his bunk, where the captain stared at him, holding a handkerchief to his own mouth, cursing the storm, cursing the King for not giving him a seaworthy ship, cursing fate that had brought some unknown pestilential thing on board his infernal tub.

  The boatswain died in the night. The hold was closed and padlocked, and covered with a tarpaulin roped to the deck. The tom shrouds were mended with odds and ends of cord and string. The Anna'Frederika limped on towards Copenhagen.

  The following day, the two crewmen who had brought the boatswain out of the hold succumbed to death and the captain ordered that all three bodies be tipped into the sea off Hessel Island.

  But he now knew that he and the Anna'Frederika were doomed. As he predicted, the ship was quarantined off Copenhagen. Those who survived the period of the quarantine would be taken ashore, but the Anna'Frederika and its cargo would be burned at sea.

  In the days that ensued, watching his own body and those of his fellow officers and men for signs of sickness, the captain’s restless and anxious mind sometimes turned to the sack of letters lying in the hold with the infected skins, and to their recipients who would never receive them now, and he wondered if, among all these papers, there were written any words which were not ephemeral and idle, but on the contrary of vital importance in a human life.

  He meditated on the capriciousness ofchance, which was as invisible as the wind and which, like the wind, could not be brought to any order, not even with prayer. In this, he thought, all men are sailors, like us. But the observation did not bring him any comfort.

  And what the captain of the Anna-Frederika did not and could not know was that among the letters destined to be burned was the long communication from Kirsten Munk to Peter Claire in which she had tried to blackmail the English lutenist into becoming her spy. It had no destination now except the all-consuming fire.

  HARD GROUND

  George Middleton’s submission to the surgeon’s knife, and to the pincers which brought out of his bladder a stone so heavy it was as if some crystal from the earth had found its way inside him, was exceptionally courageous. The surgeon himself remarked on Middleton’s stoicism while in the very epicentre of his agony and, when the operation was done, Middleton was sufficiently himself to thank the surgeon profusely for saving his life.

  Then he lay in his bedroom at Cookham Hall and wondered if his life had been saved or not.

  The continuing hurt to his stomach and to his nether parts, where the knife had filleted its way in between the anus and the cods, felt so great and the fever on him so capricious that he could not imagine ever rising from his bed. Indeed, the man that he had been—who rode every day about his park and his farms, who would dance a caper when guests and musicians came to Cookham—appeared to bear no resemblance to the man he was now, and to realign the one to the other seemed to him an impossible task. Part of him understood that he was dying.

  He longed to see Charlotte. He longed to cram into an hour a lifetime of tender words. It did not matter if those words were not elegant nor very sensible. It did not even matter if, having found their way through the fog and damp of his fever, they came out in some kind of embarrassing confusion. What mattered was that they be uttered and that Charlotte hear them and remember them after he was gone.

  He sent a coach to Harwich, and Charlotte and her mother Anne arrived at Cookham Hall on a cold December night.

  When his “dear Daisy” came into his room and stood by his bed, holding his hand, George Middleton let out a sob of joy. And this sob, which was not so much a cry as a great outpouring of wonder at the sight of his fiancée, awoke in Charlotte
such a storm of weeping that, as she laid her head down in the crook of Middleton’s arm, both the sleeve of his night-shirt and the linen sheet which covered him quickly became limp and warm with her tears.

  “Daisy . . .” said Middleton.

  But she could not speak. Her heart told her that some things in a life are unbearable. If George was going to be taken from her, she knew that she would not be able to bear it.

  “Daisy,” said Middleton again, as he stroked her hair, “be brave, my dear darling thing.”

  “I cannot,” she cried. “I cannot remember what bravery is nor how one goes about it.”

  George Middleton found himself smiling. He knew that part of his reason for wanting to go on living resided in his continuing wish to hear utterances of this kind. It was as if Charlotte amused part of him that had never ever been amused before. “See now, my dear girl, what a thing you have caused! I am laughing. Since you came in a mere few seconds ago, I declare my pain is on the run!”

  She kissed his head and his face and his ear, and then his black moustache very lightly. Then she looked at him. She could see his pain and knew that what he said about it running was a lie. Even in the soft lamplight he looked pale, where before he had always looked pink and ruddy, and his eyes were as glittery as marbles, yet the lids appeared very heavy on them, as though at any moment he would slide away from her. “George,” she said, “I shall not leave you. I will sit here until you are well and I do not care if I become part of the chair.”

  But he wouldn’t let her keep a vigil. He said, “My dove, if you do this, we shall both become convinced that death is in the next room.”