by Rose Tremain
Peter Claire looks into the fire. What he wants to say is that, in his recent life, he felt himself emerge out of confusion and enter a transcendent state of happiness that had something of the divine about it, but that his route to it was not his music. His route was his love for Emilia Tilsen.
But the King has already said he does not wish to talk about love, so the lutenist can only reply in terms more vague than those the King invites: “William Shakespeare says that ‘the man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons.’ ”
“Does he?” says the King quickly. “Well, there is something revealing. For you know my wife cannot abide music. She cannot hear a melody. She cannot . . . but there we are, at one blow, back upon the subject I can no longer discuss. This is how the human mind destroys itself—by turning and turning upon the one thing that gives it pain. I think this is what poor Bror meant when he said those words: that Kirsten is dead to me because I shall never lie with her nor love her any more, but in some way that I cannot foresee I will have to endure this dying a second time.”
The King finishes his wine and calls for more. Then he requests that Peter Claire play “some fragment by that enigma, Dowland.” When the music ends, the King looks closely at his angel. “I hope you have not forgotten your promise?” he asks.
“No, Your Majesty,” says Peter Claire.
“And, alas for you, you must keep it until you are released,” says the King, as he rises and makes his way unsteadily to his bed. “Except that I shall not release you. There can be no leaving nor returning to England. You and I are alone on the glacier under the black sky and there is no escape. If you try to escape, the wolves that I heard will come down from the mountains and devour you.”
THE COOKHAM REVELS
Of all the counties in England, the easterly county of Norfolk, with its forests and marshes, its slowly moving rivers, its acres of plough, its miles of swampy lowland uninhabited by anything except the newts, otters and water birds for whom it is an unchanging paradise, is surely one of the most silent in the country.
Yet on the eve of the New Year 1630, bobbing like a boat on this ocean of quiet, is a bubble of noise more bright and intense than anything witnessed since the time when Queen Elizabeth made a Progress here with a hundred courtiers in attendance, and plays were performed and great suppers were consumed and dancing lasted until dawn: Mr. George Middleton is giving a party at Cookham.
The night is cloudless, cold, full of stars and a big pale moon. But now, in room after room of the big house, beginning in the kitchen where the roasting spits turn, and moving upwards into the halls and receiving rooms where the fires are fed with apple-wood and the candles are lit, then upwards again to the bedrooms where the house guests are brought basins of hot water and begin to wash and dress themselves by lamp light, heat comes and laughter begins. The revels are starting. Down the muddy lanes, carriages make a slow progress towards them. The dogs in the hallway sniff the altered air and sense that something unfamiliar is occurring. This will be the party that everyone in this little comer of England will always remember.
As George Middleton, attired in a wine-coloured coat (with more lace at his neck and wrists than he would once have considered appropriate), descends his stairs, sees his house looking more splendid than it has ever done and hears his hired musicians tuning their instruments in the grand withdrawing-room, he is struck by a sudden feeling of joy so absolute that he has to pause on the bottom step and hold on to the banister. For he is an ordinary man, descended from ordinary men. He is not used to such overwhelming sentiments. He wonders if he may be about to fall over or whether, indeed, the scene before him is about to disappear and he will find himself to have been the victim of a grandiose dream.
At this moment a servant approaches him and asks whether he would care to approve the temperature of the wines, and taste the punch that is to be served upon the guests’ arrival. No doubt George Middleton looks at the servant strangely—as he might look at a person who was not there at all—because the man asks anxiously: “Is anything amiss, Sir?”
“No,” says Middleton. “Not at all Nothing is amiss.”
As he goes with the servant to taste the wines and the last of the tall candles in the silver candelabrum in the dining-room are lit and the complicated business of plate warming begins in the kitchen below, the musicians strike up a lively courante and the sound of this music finds its way into the room where Charlotte Claire, assisted by one of the Cookham maids, is entwining some expensive golden ribbons into her hair.
The women pause in their task and listen. It is as if this music finally wakes in Charlotte the understanding that the dark days are gone and that what lies waiting for her is of a different order of existence. That she will dance with her fiancé, in the company of all his Norfolk friends, that she will become the centre of everyone’s attention, that she will witness George capering about the room like a man who has never been near to death, never suffered any agonies whatsoever, moves her to such a realisation of her own good fortune that she almost feels as if she might cry.
Yet what, she thinks, as the last of the ribbons is threaded through her dark hair, is one to make of life when it delivers such contradictory instructions? She had grown almost used to the idea that George Middleton was going to die and that she would spend the rest of her life in her parents’ house, in mourning for what might have been. And now she must adjust once again to a future in which there is to be a spring wedding and she is to become the mistress of Cookham and, at some time in the years that stretch ahead, the mother of George’s children.
She looks at herself in the dressing glass. Ever discontented because she did not possess her brother’s beauty, Charlotte Claire, on this night of George Middleton’s party, finds herself beautiful. As the laces on her dress are fastened and a simple rope of pearls put round her neck, she is overcome by a sudden urgent longing to be with George now, this minute, for the evening to begin, so that not a moment of it is missed or wasted. For what if it were—after all— to be the last evening of her life, or of George’s? What if there was, in the end, no prolongation of her future beyond this one marvellous night?
She hurries now, inserting her feet into white satin shoes, snatching up her fan and, stealing one last look at herself, prepares to go down towards the music, towards the marvels that await her.
The hall is decked with garlands of holly and yew, and Charlotte’s dress, made of satin and velvet (the kind of dress that this daughter of a country parson might wear only once or twice in her life), echoes the red and the green of the branches cut from the Cookham woods. These strong colours flatter her white skin and echo to advantage the darkness of her hair.
Though tempted to pause and show herself to her parents, who are putting on such meagre finery as they possess in the adjoining room, Charlotte doesn’t stop to do this, because she must be at George’s side now, she must be reassured of the living warmth of his hand, hear his voice, his laughter . . . She must make certain that he is really there.
He is just returning to the hall as she begins to descend the staircase. He stops and one of the dogs lollops to him and he scratches its neck as he stares up.
A woman almost devoid of vanity, Charlotte Claire now finds that this exquisite progress, down towards George’s adoring eye, can be savoured like no other moment in her life, that each step she takes seems to enhance her awareness of her own perfection. She can only guess at what George Middleton is feeling and her assumptions, if the truth could be faultlessly expressed, in fact fall far short of the reality.
For George Middleton knows that whatever may lie in wait for them, he will remember this moment of Charlotte’s descent of the staircase at Cookham for the rest of his days. “Daisy ...” he murmurs. “Oh, Daisy . . .”
He holds out his hand and she takes it, and he holds her to him and whirls her round like a little girl, and kisses her neck and her cheek and the lobes of her ears. “How beau
tiful you are!” he explodes and holds her from him, at arm’s length, like a painting that enraptures him. “No dress could suit you better. None. That dress has been waiting for you for twenty-two years.”
Charlotte smiles and, still holding fast to his hand, looks approvingly in her turn at her fiancé’s burgundy coat and his bold flourishes of lace.
George Middleton begins to laugh. “Daisy,” he says, “I see from your gaze that you are a little astonished.”
“Yes,” says Charlotte, “but only because I am used to the everyday George . . .”
“Tell me truthfully, do I appear as though I had fallen through a hole in a white blancmange?”
“No!” says Charlotte. “Not in the least, my dearest. I would have said a queen of puddings!”
And they shriek with mirth and embrace each other as children sometimes embrace their toys, with an unfettered abandon.
For hour after hour the coaches wait out under the stars and the horses stamp, and even the creatures of the woods creep to the wood’s edge to see what it is that disturbs the habitual quiet of the Cookham night.
Midnight comes and toasts are drunk, to the New Year, to the phenomenal success of the cutting for the stone that has saved George’s life, to the skill of the surgeon, to the fortitude of the Middleton family, to God’s kindness in sparing a precious life, and lastly to the future of George and Charlotte, to the spring wedding that cannot come too soon.
And then the music resumes and more wine is brought to the tables, and more puddings and sweetmeats and sugared plums, and the guests loosen their corsets and refill their glasses and their plates, and mop their brows and take their partners for yet another dance.
To the coachmen gathered in the kitchen, eating pies and drinking beer, the servants report that “nobody shows any sign of leaving,” and so the party taking place down there becomes louder, merrier and more flirtatious. Impromptu jigs are danced in the pantry. The supplies of beer diminish. The carcasses of roast lamb and suckling pig are picked clean. An entire batch of mincemeat tarts, destined for the tables upstairs, is suddenly discovered to be missing.
George Middleton knows nothing of all this, but he would nevertheless approve it, because there is nothing, on this night, of which he is able to disapprove. Even those neighbours of whom he is not particularly fond. When he looks at them hopping in a jig or endeavouring to bow gracefully in a minuet, his heart forgives them their futile and irritating habits, their habitual disputatiousness, their past attempts to marry him to their ugly daughters. Indeed, he finds that he loves them. He even loves their daughters. He and Charlotte pass from table to table and hands reach out to them, and they seize these hands with an unconcealed show of affection. “Daisy,” says George, “you have enabled me to adore the world!”
Enfolded in this wave of light, knowing few people but content to talk to whoever sits by them, the Reverend James Claire and his wife Anne are as happy as anyone in this company. It is as though these revels, in their magnificence (which is nevertheless a magnificence of a reassuringly plain and English kind), are, moment by moment, anatomising for them the person and character of their future son-in-law. They see that George Middleton has amplitude and grace. They understand that he has a gift for laughter. If they ever doubted his generosity they do not doubt it now. And what is the whole evening but an expression of George’s love for Charlotte? James and Anne Claire, in seeing this love displayed before them, know at last that their second child, who always appeared to them less marvellous than the first, has arrived in her own time upon the threshold of a marvellous era.
But George Middleton has saved the most memorable moment of the evening until last.
Towards one o’clock, as the moon lies behind the tall cedars and the frost hardens the ruts in the muddy lanes made by the carriages, a painted cart pulls up in the driveway. Out of it climb five men dressed in the bright embroidered clothes and outlandish hats worn by the Romany Gypsies.
They do not go into the house but, seemingly oblivious to the cold, set up upon the stone terrace that skirts the south side of Cookham Hall a single music stand.
The noise and dancing inside the house are still loud and the Gypsies wait quietly, holding their stringed instruments, unseen by any except one or two of the coachmen who have come out to put blankets on their horses.
There is a pause in the revelling and George Middleton appears, shakes the hands of the Gypsy music makers, presents them with a thirty-shilling purse and a bottle of plum brandy, and goes back to rejoin the party. Almost nothing is said, because everything has been agreed in advance. And when George returns to the heat and noise of the withdrawing-room he merely sits down beside the Reverend Claire and begins a conversation with him about Peter and their shared hope that Charlotte’s brother will return to England for the wedding in April.
Only very gradually then do the guests become aware of a new sound, a sound that floats into the rooms from the darkness outside, and slowly conversations subside and heads lift and ears strain to find the source of it. And people fall silent, listening to the playing of the Gypsies, and a different mood overtakes them, a mood of wonder and yearning, and they mop their faces and straighten their clothes, and discover that their bodies are tired, that they can barely move, and all they wish for is the continuation of this altered kind of melody which, after all the laughter and feasting, allows their hearts to leap up so that they almost feel they are no longer at a party but somewhere else, somewhere that transcends time and place, somewhere they have always longed to be and have never found themselves until now.
Charlotte, who is sitting beside her mother, drinking a cooling goblet of lemonade, puts a tender kiss on Anne’s cheek, then gets up quietly and goes to where George is, and he takes her hand and, without speaking, the two of them go into the hall and then out into the night.
They stand by the front door, with the warmth and light at their backs and before them a terrace and garden, whitened by the frost but almost dark now as the moon falls behind the trees, behind the hedges, and vanishes. They take deep breaths of the icy night. They look upon a world suspended in a magical stillness, and the beauty of the old Romany ayres, that have crossed seas and empires to arrive in this quiet comer of England but still have in them the spirit of the Orient, fills their hearts.
STORY OF AN EXECUTION
Peter Claire stares at his own face in the mirror.
He is trying to see what others see there, to objectify his own features. The light on them is cold and hard.
His blue eyes, unblinking, are like the eyes of a map maker who, struggling to see in his mind the real plains and rivers, the real deserts and cities that lie behind his map, finds that it is far more difficult to recall them than he imagined.
Where is the truth about himself?
If King Christian chooses to see him as an angel, is it because there exists in him—within his nature, which is fearful and choked by an enveloping pessimism—something essentially virtuous? Can the King—with his store of years, with his long experience of men’s good deeds and men’s evil—see into his soul? Peter Claire moves his head, stares at his left eye, at his cheekbone shiny and pale on this January morning. When Emilia Tilsen remembers this face, what does she see there? The features of a vain seducer? To recollect that he once believed it was she alone who revealed to him his own best nature embarrasses him now. For what is she saying, through her silence, but that she has realised that she cannot love him? And if she cannot love him—she, who is loyal even to Kirsten, who can feel sorrow for a speckled hen—why, then, he is not worthy to be loved.
Peter Claire puts down the looking-glass and glances at his lute, propped against a chair. Before he met Emilia he knew himself to be happiest, most perfectly at peace with the world, when he was playing. Yet music is an abstraction. What does the lute player believe he is expressing? He struggles for precision, but is convinced that through that precision something of his heart can be heard.
How deluded is he on this matter? The heart of John Dowland was black. He was judged to be the greatest musician in England, but what filled his soul, by all accounts, was bitterness and loathing.
Peter Claire sits down and stares at the wall. For the first time in his life he feels that he would rather die than live until next week. He listens to the wind in the trees outside as though he hoped to detect in its sighing the stealthy arrival of an executioner.
She is pale from the long days and nights of travelling. She is taller than he remembers.
Francesca and her father look at him searchingly as in turn they take his hand, as if immediately trying to read what is in his mind.
With their eyes upon him he instructs servants to show the travellers from Ireland where they are to stay at Frederiksborg and explains to them hastily that the King, in this cold winter, is in poor health and often unable to grant the audiences he has promised. “He will see you,” he says, “of this I am sure, but you may have to be patient for a few days.”
“Of course we shall be patient,” says Francesca. “And indeed, I think that a virtue can be made out of any delay. For while it lasts we shall have time to accustom ourselves to how life is arranged here. Isn’t that true, Father?”
“True,” says Ponti. “Truly.”
“And more than this,” Francesca goes on, “if the King is ill, then perhaps Mr. Claire’s duties in the orchestra may be light and so he will be able to spend time with us ...”
“Well . . .” begins Peter Claire.
“Also true,” says Ponti.
They are following the servants out of the cold sunlight into the corridors of the palace. Peter Claire is about to explain that King Christian often has more need of his musicians when he is ill than when he is well, but cannot find the words, because he knows that Francesca will only despise them, seeing them for what they are— his excuse to neglect her, to flee from any association with her that might remind him of what he once felt. At this moment in their lives Peter Claire understands that Francesca O’Fingal can see deeper into his heart than anyone, including himself.