Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

“Emilia,” I say, “you must forget your Musician and I shall tell you why.” And then I go to my boudoir and fetch at last the sentences copied from the letter I found in Peter Claire’s room. I give the Paper to her and she reads.

  She does not move or look up, but continues to stand there, reading, as though the Paper were many thousands of words long and she could not come to the end of it, but must go on and on and on reading it until the light faded at the window and the owls began to call. So I reach out and take it from her hands and still she stands there, as if she had been made motionless by a Spell.

  I let the Paper fall. I go to Emilia and try to put my arms about her, to comfort her as she comforts me, but she is stiff and rigid in my embrace, and then she turns away from me without a word and I hear her going up the stairs.

  I allow a little time to pass.

  Then I go to her room and knock upon the door, as if she were my mistress and I her Woman.

  She calls to me to come in and I see her sitting by the window, with the hen, Gerda, on her lap. She is stroking the hen and the only sound in the room is the noise that the hen makes, which is low and murmurous, a little like the purring of a cat.

  “Emilia,” I say. “All men are liars. I know not one—including Otto who promised me more than he ever could give—who was not Perfidious. Only think of the way your Father has treated you and the cruelties the King has inflicted upon me. And so we shall live without them all! We shall be as we are: a Household of Women. No man shall cross our threshold any more. And I do declare we shall be happier than ever we were.”

  She makes no reply.

  I pour for her a little glass of cordial and hold it out to her, but she pushes it away.

  I wait in silence and the hen goes on with its own noise, while Emilia’s small hands caress the feathers of its neck and back. I reflect that I have never before sat in a room without talking, listening to a chicken, and I have to cover my mouth so that I do not burst into a fit of Laughter.

  And then Emilia says at last: “I shall try to forget everything. The only thing that I refuse to forget is Marcus. When shall we go again to Arhus ?”

  I drink the cordial myself. The thought of another freezing journey in a coach makes me feel seasick. I pour a little more of the cordial and gulp it down. Then I promise Emilia we shall go to Arhus in search of Herr Haas before Christmas. “And we shall bring Marcus out,” I say, “and he alone will be the man in our household.”

  Among all these sorry things, one matter, at least, gives me some Entertainment. My mother’s Woman, Vibeke, my former Woman of the Torso, has begun to appear at table and at other times in the day most gorgeously decked out in Expensive Dresses, as though she were Queen of Denmark.

  These dresses are very tight upon her, for in truth she is as fat as I am and can only control her gourmandising one week in seven.

  Yet I see that she thinks she is now a woman of Exquisite beauty on account of all these ruffles and bows and stiff petticoats and panels of velvet. It is as if she believed the dresses had transformed her Peasant’s face. And this gives me a nice amount of Mirth and does make me forget for a moment—when I observe Vibeke strutting about like the Tsarina of All the Russias—my great store of sorrows and fears.

  “Vibeke,” I say to her one supper time, when she is shimmering at the table in golden Broderie, “from where have you conjured these extraordinary new Creations of yours?”

  She looks hastily at my Mother.

  “Vibeke had very few clothes,” says Ellen. “And so I commanded some few new things to be made.” But then she looks away, as though she is abashed by some Scheme that is in her mind and which she would not have me discover.

  “How generous of you!” I exclaim. “It is merely a shame, when they must have cost you so much, that they were fashioned at least one size too small.”

  And I see the pain on her face and on Vibeke’s, and this little visible Suffering of theirs, which they tried to conceal but could not, gives me an unexpected Gladness of Heart that lasts for several hours.

  CONCERNING WHAT IS REAL

  With the silver and gold dalers struck from the melted plate, King Christian has been able to pay for the completion and fitting out of three whaling ships. He tells himself that when these giants of the deep are found, the tide of Denmark’s fortunes will begin to turn.

  Counting and re-counting his coinage, he despatches some money to the preacher Martin Møller, in the valley of the Isfoss, and informs him that a new company of specialists, possessing more knowledge than those who came with us before, will arrive next year and the mine shall be reopened and the silver shall at last be brought out.

  This time, the King will put his trust in Russian engineers. He understands that those Danes he once referred to as the geniuses of the mine are lost because their genius was not sufficient to the task. Now his chancellor tells him that only in Russia is “the secret of silver understood.” It is understood because generations of tsars have willed it so, have built domes of silver, and spires and entire rooms. They have spun dresses and coats out of silver filaments. They live in a silvered universe. Next to God, it is in silver that they place their trust.

  And so men are even now travelling across land from the Sayan mountains thousands of miles away, travelling in sledges and on snow-shoes to arrive in Denmark as the spring returns. And they will be taken to the Numedal as the cataract of the Isfoss begins to flow once again, and with their knowledge they will bring the mine back to life.

  To Martin Møller the King writes:

  All that remains to be resolved is the question of language. If you yourself, in your loyalty to your people and to me, your King, would find some means of learning the Russian tongue, then when these men arrive—if they are not blown into the sky by freezing winds or buried alive in the drifting snow— why then you shall interpret what they say and give orders to the miners who can be hired round about. And you shall earn my everlasting gratitude.

  But still, with some dalers safely locked in his treasury and with his whale strategy and his new silver strategy being put slowly into place, King Christian’s mind turns upon his need for more money and he cannot rid himself of the belief that at Kronborg, beneath his mother’s State rooms, there is hidden a quantity of treasure so vast that, if he could only come by it, he would at a single stroke be released from his yoke of poverty.

  The King arrives at Kronborg early in the morning, almost before it is light.

  Queen Sofie, whose face has not yet rearranged itself to meet the day after a troubled night, sits by a silver samovar, drinking tea. The plaits of her grey hair have no spring nor shine in them and appear almost as though they did not grow from her head but had been attached to it by means of clips. Christian reflects that she is elderly and solitary, and should be left alone, and, for a few moments, he falters in his intention.

  Then he yawns, as though he might be as tired as she, as though he has made the journey unwillingly, and says: “Mother, I am here because the time has come when we must all make sacrifices for Denmark. And so the moment has also arrived to relieve you of a treasure for which you no longer have any need.”

  She sips her tea. Her face betrays nothing. Her hands do not tremble as she holds the cup. “The story of my ‘treasure,’ ” she says, “was put about by your wife and is her invention. I have nothing. I live on fish out of the Sound. I am surprised you are not more adept at recognising Kirsten’s slanders, for you yourself have very frequently been the victim of them.”

  Though the King would prefer it if Kirsten were not mentioned, if her name and her behaviour would slip silently away from everybody’s mind, he is able to control the small spasm of agony that this remark brings and to say calmly: “I know that there is gold at Kron-borg. If you will show me where you keep it, I shall take only what is needed—for my whale boats, for my new expedition to the silver mine, for my unfinished buildings in Copenhagen—and leave you enough to last out your life.”

 
; Queen Sofie wishes to say that “enough” cannot be measured by anyone but her. “Enough” is presumed to be finite and is not. “Enough” is a mountain whose summit can never be reached.

  But she keeps silent. She touches the samovar to see whether it has kept its heat and then she says: “Furniture and pictures I have. And tapestries. Is it these you are intent upon stealing?”

  “No,” says Christian with a sigh.

  “Then what else? Spoons? Fans? My jewellery?”

  King Christian gets to his feet. “I have brought men,” he says. “We shall search your vaults.”

  “Ah, the vaults,” says Queen Sofie. “You wish to take away my wine?”

  It is dark in the vaults. It is a darkness by design.

  The men hold high their torches and the King walks slowly along, examining the kegs of wine on their blocks, of which there are a great number. He pauses at random and orders that the tap on now this keg and now that be turned—to see that wine really does flow from it—and so the smell of wine begins to compete with that of damp and tar.

  He pauses, takes one of the torches himself, as though only he could use it to illuminate the things he is certain must be there. He looks down at the floor. The dust and grime on it are thick, so that the bricks appear black. He begins to search for some trap in the floor—such as he has at Rosenborg in the Vinterstue—leading down yet further into the rock on which Kronborg was built, but through all the cellar there is no sign of one.

  He sits down on a wine barrel. He wonders, for the first time, whether the story of the Dowager Queen’s treasure was not simply one more falsehood with which it amused Kirsten to taunt him. He sends his men to search the rest of the castle, but he doubts that they will find any hidden treasure in bedrooms and closets, and he requests that they do not disturb too greatly the order of the rooms.

  He is silent, gazing about him, warmed by the torchlight, aware of his own shadow on the wall. A hundred times he has seen the underground gold in his mind—the glint of it, its marvellous weight and solidity. But there is nothing here: only the dust of the years and a store of wine kept too long in the old kegs.

  As the coach takes him back to Frederiksborg he considers how the lies told by his wife and by his mother have, over the years, competed with each other to confuse and ensnare him, so that, in very many matters, he no longer knows what is real and what is illusory.

  On Christmas Eve, Kirsten says to Emilia: “I believe I shall put out a shoe for Saint Nicholas to fill! Grown-ups have a far greater need for gifts than children and I do not know why this is not more widely recognised. I shall ask the Saint to bring me Otto.”

  And the two women laugh at this, but then Kirsten announces that she is retiring to bed, to spend her afternoon dozing and dreaming, and Emilia is left alone.

  The day is grey and cold. Emilia puts on a cloak and asks Ellen if she may ride one of the horses in the park. Ellen and Vibeke are playing cards and Ellen barely looks up as she replies: “Take the grey. The others will be too strong for you. Your turn, Vibeke.”

  Already, as Emilia mounts the horse, her spirits rise. She spurs the grey to an amiable trot and feels bright blood begin to come to her cheeks. She imagines the day when she will be riding away from Boller for ever, far away from the Tilsen fruit fields. And at the end of her journey her lover will be waiting . . .

  For notwithstanding Peter Claire’s silence, notwithstanding her knowledge of his former liaison with Countess O’Fingal, some part of Emilia’s mind stubbornly continues to believe in the existence of his love for her. It just has not reached her, that is all. It has not reached her because it is somehow confined elsewhere. She cannot necessarily say where this “elsewhere” might be. Lately, she imagines that it is the cellar at Rosenborg, deserted now, as the King has moved to Frederiksborg, but containing in its darkness words and thoughts which will one day be uttered again. As time passes, the cellar becomes less and less a cellar in her imagination and more and more a chamber in the lutenist’s heart.

  She knows that all of this is whimsical, capricious. She knows it belongs to that side of her nature that Marcus shares—their tendency to dream and to invent—and which her father mistrusts and fears. For the hundredth time in her short life Emilia wishes her mother were with her. Karen would help her know what to believe and what to ignore or forget.

  Emilia guides the grey horse into the forest, which runs along the boundary of Johann Tilsen’s land.

  She reins in the pony and dismounts. Then she leads him forward, under beech and oak, until she comes to the fence which divides the two estates. She does not pause, for she knows exactly where she is. She ties the horse to the fence and climbs over it.

  It is as though her thoughts about Karen have led her here. It is almost as though Karen is with her and protects her or makes her invisible, so that were Johann or Ingmar or Magdalena to ride by, they would not be able to see her.

  Emilia walks to the foot of the tree where, long ago, Karen showed her some object buried in the ground. She finds a flint to use as her trowel, kneels down and begins to dig among the fallen leaves and beech husks, down through the peaty earth that sends forth its scent of other seasons once witnessed and now past, until her hands touch something solid and heavy.

  She digs more carefully now, more slowly. She is faintly aware of a light snow beginning to fall through the canopy of bare branches above her, but gives this little attention. Her knees are damp. Pheasants squawk from the Boller boundary. Rooks call and circle above their roosts. The sense of Karen sheltering her, smiling now at what she’s doing, is so strong that she almost expects to raise her head and see her mother returned to the world.

  Emilia lifts out the object, which is about the size and weight of a brick. The damp earth has coated it like a skin. She has to prise the soil away with her nails. And then, number by number, she sees a clock face appear: a casing that was once shiny brass; roman numerals in black enamel on a white ground. And she remembers . . .

  She is four or five. Karen digs the hole at the foot of the tree. She is talking about time. She is saying that Emilia is too young to understand. And then she takes the clock and turns the hands, and shows Emilia where they are pointed and says: “This is the time that it will always tell.”

  The clock is placed in the earth and Emilia and Karen cover it with handfuls of soil, and then with leaves and husks, and it becomes invisible . . .

  Emilia stares at it. The clock is stopped at ten minutes past seven. This is the time that it will always tell. But what does it signify? What happened at ten minutes past seven that was so important to Karen that she buried a valuable clock in the beechwoods?

  Emilia continues to clean the clock face, using handfuls of dead leaves, to bring the beginnings of a shine to the glass. And it is only now, aware that a little unexpected moisture is helping her in her task, that she notices the snow falling fast and laying a thin white dust over the forest floor.

  She stands up. She is poised between two resolutions: to take the clock and keep it among her few possessions or to return it to the earth. She cannot decide which is right, and it is as if the fastfalling snow is warning her that she must hurry, she must replace the clock or she must take it, but she must go back to safety inside the Boller fence, find her pony and ride back before darkness begins to creep on, before she loses her way in the snow and the fading light.

  And it is now, during these quickly passing moments of her indecision, that she hears a noise behind her. She does not turn at first, because the noise is so fragile, so almost not there at all, that she both does and does not notice it, and she is so preoccupied by the clock and its significance that the sounds of the forest have no immediacy for her.

  It is a whisper.

  There has been no sound of any footfall, any scuffling of leaves or breaking twig.

  Emilia turns. She holds the clock to her chest. The ticking that she hears is her own heart.

  Someone was whispering her name. E
milia.

  But she is alone with the tall trees, with the snowfall, with the faltering light. Nothing moves.

  Some way off, she hears the grey horse whinny. But she stays a moment longer, staring deep into the wood, clutching the clock, which she will take, yes, certainly take now, because it is something she can care for and cling to, her mother’s clock, but intended to be hers, because no one else ever knew that it was there . . .

  Emilia.

  And then there is movement. From behind one of the stately beech trunks a thin figure creeps out. It comes towards her. It is so small, so light, that it seems to walk quite silently and to leave no impress on the ground as it moves. It is Marcus.

  Emilia sets Marcus on the horse and wraps her cloak round him. Using the stirrup strap, she fastens the clock to the saddle, and they ride very slowly—so that neither they nor the clock shall fall— back to Boller. The snow keeps falling and is now lying thickly on the park.

  Emilia talks to Marcus, telling him he is safe now, that whatever he has endured, it is over, he will not go back to Arhus, to Herr Haas, to any house of correction, he will come to Boller and meet Kirsten and little Dorothea and the speckled hen, Gerda . . .

  But Marcus doesn’t reply. He says Emilia’s name, over and over, in his small whispery voice, but this is all. He clutches the horse’s mane.

  From time to time, as the dusk comes on, Emilia looks behind them, half expecting to see, in the swiftly gathering shadows, the pursuing figure of her father. Once, she imagines she hears him— his big horse, the smack of his whip, his flapping cloak, his breath in the cold air—and urges the grey to a fast trot. But then the sounds vanish and there are only the rooks calling and the soft thud-thud of their own progress. “Boller is a wonderful place,” she whispers. “In the garden are pools with coloured fishes swimming and in the larder are two hundred pots of jam.”

  Kirsten is still in bed when they return, but asks Emilia to come in. In a voice that is thick, as though she had been drinking, she says she has been playing with a magic quill given to her by a German sorcerer. “Imagine,” she says, “that one’s only pleasure is to be got from a feather!”