by Rose Tremain
And all her looks affirm this. She flashes fire at him. She gives him one of her boxes to carry as they begin to climb the stairs. She is like a mother who has discovered that her favourite son is lying to her and will not set him free from her anger until the lie is out. And all Peter Claire can do is follow, carrying the box. He feels small and weak. Seeing her striding ahead, with her firm step, her flying skirts, her dark hair escaping from its braids, he knows that part of him is once again—in this matter of moments—in thrall to the very thing he feared: Francesca’s power over him.
When they arrive on the top landing, not far from the room that Emilia once occupied, in which he found the hen and the grey dress, he dares himself to meet Francesca’s eye. She smiles and the smile is triumphant and says: It is not over, Peter Claire. Men may imagine that their actions have no consequences, but it is not so.
The King, plagued by pains in his stomach, keeps to his room and receives no one, so Francesca and her father dine, that night, with Peter Claire and the rest of the orchestra.
Jens Ingemann is affable, praising to the Italian guests the “great feeling for music in the Italian soul” and smiling at Martinelli and Rugieri. And Peter Claire notes how every man in the room is affected by Francesca’s beauty. They all know she is a widow. They wonder if she may remain among them here. None knows that Peter Claire was once her lover.
The conversation begins in English, eddies into Italian, thus disquieting Pasquier who tries French, to which Francesca can stumblingly respond, laughing at her own mistakes. Even Krenze, so often distanced from the orchestra’s sociability, strains to find his way through these alternating languages so that he is not excluded.
Sitting some way from Francesca, Peter Claire watches her accept, as though it were the common currency of everyday life, this international adulation. She is gracious and witty. The smiles she allows herself are serene, rather than flirtatious. In the candle-light, wearing a dark-blue dress, her beauty seems to have arrived at a moment of perfection. And it is as though she understands this. How long, say her looks and gestures in his direction, can you resist?
He turns away from her and talks to Ponti about Denmark; about the great forests which grow, it is said, in Jutland at a faster rate than anywhere else on earth.
“Tell me,” says Ponti, “how I am to win my concession from the King. What shall be my strategia?"
“Money,” replies Peter Claire.
“Money?”
“This is all—apart from the separation from his wife—that is on the King’s mind. You must offer as much as you can afford, Signor Ponti, for the acres of woodland and for the manufactory patents— money you will of course make back over time. And then you must demonstrate that the goods you produce will never be shoddy.” “What is ‘shoddy’?”
“Flawed, inferior, imperfect. You must guarantee the same quality of paper that you make in Bologna.”
“This I can. Shall I mention ‘shoddy’ to His Majesty?”
“Yes. Assure him you know his anxieties about it. And let him write on your vellum samples. King Christian has perfected an exquisite calligraphy and writing on good paper gives him pleasure.” Ponti smiles and nods. “I must know one other thing,” he continues. “If my mill is to be in Jutland, what difficulties of transportation shall I encounter?”
Peter Claire replies that he has never been to Jutland. He does not say that he has imagined it a thousand times, this wide, unpeopled landscape where Emilia’s footprints make patterns in the snow. He describes how it was occupied by Catholic soldiers of the Habsburg emperor for three years and how it is reported that the occupying armies built roads for their horses and cannon. “The soldiers are gone,” he concludes, “but no doubt the highways remain. And there are many great houses in Jutland, such as Boller Castle, built by the nobility. And the Danish nobility like to know everything that is happening in the world, Signor Ponti, lest by some misfortune they are excluded from it. And so they would not let themselves be cut off from the routes of news and information.”
Father and daughter retire to sleep as the church clock strikes midnight.
As Francesca leaves the room, she turns and gives to Peter Claire that same look that he recognises from their evenings at Cloyne. He has no defence against her invitation except to lower his eyes, pretend he has seen nothing, understood nothing.
And then, as the musicians fall to discussing the loveliness and intelligence of the Italian Countess from Ireland, he gets up and goes out into the cold night.
There is a powdering of snow on the cobbles, but the night is clear and he begins to walk away from Frederiksborg, in the direction of Copenhagen, but not noticing, really, where he is going, intent only on the activity of walking, of putting distance between himself and the evening that has just passed.
His head aches. He feels no love for himself, finds his faint shadow on the snow irritating, like a too-insistent companion. He wants to stamp on the shadow—obliterate it. He knows that with regard to Francesca O’Fingal he is exhibiting the same cowardice he sometimes showed as a boy, when he preferred to run away rather than to submit to his father’s disappointment in him. He used to hide in the sand-dunes. He imagined the sand-dunes as a universe in which a boy might live for ever and never be found.
Now, as he trudges through the night, he imagines fleeing to the New World; just taking ship out of Copenhagen, retracing the first leg of his voyage to the Numedal and then in the Skagerrak seeing the ship turn westwards into the prevailing winds and falling southwards below Iceland into the Atlantic Ocean. He can form no picture of the New World, but only of the endless journey towards it. He can measure from this his own disinclination to arrive anywhere at all.
He does not know how long he keeps walking before a sudden tiredness overcomes him and he stops and looks up at the sky and the stars, which can guide mariners across the oceans but which are icy bodies in the black heavens, incapable of giving solace.
He notices then that, not far away down the road, is one of those small inns that never seem to close their doors and where men congregate, in these agitated times, to forget their poverty or keep at bay their demons, and he almost runs towards it, praying that somebody will be there at this late hour, that there will be a fire and a wooden bench on which he might lay down his head.
It is a low house, made of earth and bole wood, with a thatched roof. As Peter Claire goes in he smells pipe smoke and applewood, and sees the innkeeper in his apron talking with another man. Between them on the table stands a flagon of wine.
They turn and stare at him. They have heard no coach, no cart, no sound of a horse. The night has conjured the lutenist out of nowhere and the drinkers look startled.
Peter Claire apologises for the lateness of the hour, asks for ale “and a moment or two of rest by your fire,” and the innkeeper gets up and pulls out a chair for him.
Immediately the other man, who has drunk his fill of the wine, begins to hold him in conversation. “You did not see it, then, Sir?” he asks.
He is elderly, with a creased and blackened face that looks as if it had withstood storms of dust and avalanches of ice.
“See what, friend?” asks Peter Claire.
“In Copenhagen today. At Gammeltorv. The execution.”
The innkeeper, pouring the ale, looks over towards the table and comments: “Never will be such another, that’s what they say.”
Peter Claire holds his frozen hands out towards the remnants of the fire on its bed of soft ash. “Who was executed?” he asks.
“Young girl,” says the wine drinker. “Died, she did, as was judged she must, but was a long time dying.” And he shakes his head and takes another gulp of the liquor, and wipes his lips with the back of his hand. The innkeeper brings Peter Claire his flagon of ale, from which he drinks straight away. He does not know how far he has walked but, now that he is beginning to be warm again, he is suddenly aware how clamorous is his thirst.
“Do you know of He
rr Bomholt?” asks the innkeeper.
“No,” answers Peter Claire.
“One of the King’s executioners.” Then to the other man he says: “You tell the story. It’s your tale.”
The stranger rubs a grimed hand over his face, then fixes Peter Claire with a disconcerting smile. “Bomholt used to be good with the axe,” he says. “One of the best. But you know the executioners are paid per capita: so much for a hanging, so much for a beheading, so much for a flogging, so much for a breaking . . .”
“A breaking?”
“Of the bones. Like when we eat a chicken, snap, snap! You eat chickens, Sir?”
Peter Claire nods. He drains his flagon of beer.
“Bomholt’s greedy, then, you see. Wants his bagful of skillings like every other poor soul alive in Denmark today. Dreams of money and more money, and so he overreaches himself and damages a tendon in his arm. Spent the morning flogging whores. Eight of ’em, they say. Eight spheres of poxy flesh in one morning! And so his arm hurts. But he’s greedy, just as I said. Wants his execution, doesn’t he? Must have his purse for the beheading, his lovely beheading!”
The man pauses to laugh and his laugh turns to a cough. He spits into the sawdust. “And so,” he goes on, “I witnessed this. I was standing in the front row of the crowd. The girl is brought out. To die for her lewdness, that she’d done the deed seven times with her brother-in-law! And lays her head down on the block. And all the crowd wait while the priest says a prayer. And then Bomholt steps forward with the axe. He tries to raise it high, to bring it down clean, first time. But he can barely raise it at all! He jabs it down and it cuts, but the cut isn’t deep. So he tries again, tries to raise the axe, but cannot, and so it goes on, jab and jab, cut and cut, five or six times, but still the girl isn’t dead. And what then, my friend? You know what happened then?”
Peter Claire shakes his head.
“Bomholt runs away. He drops the axe. And the girl is screaming like a corncrake. And people in the crowd were fainting . . .”
Peter Claire stares numbly at the man, at the smoky room. “What then?” he asks weakly.
“I finished her,” says the man proudly. “One blow. Clean and sure. And got a purse for my pains.” He slaps his knee. “One person’s torture is another’s gain, eh, Sir? We always knew the truth of that. Didn’t we?”
When Peter Claire asks the King whether he will grant an audience to the paper manufacturer from Bologna, King Christian’s weary brain finds a sudden unexpected refuge in a vision of impeccable calligraphy, the letters aligned in perfect symmetry. “Yes,” he says. “Send him to me.”
The King, seated in a chair by his bedroom fire, discovers that he is wearing his night-shirt beneath a cloak of leather. He cannot remember when he last ate or what it was that he was thinking about when the lutenist came in or whether any music has been played or not. He looks down at his legs and sees that they are bare and the veins in them swollen, as though worms writhed just under the surface of the skin. He asks Peter Claire to wait, to bring some furs to cover him, to comb his hair.
“What was I doing?” he asks as the comb begins to scratch his scalp.
“When, Your Majesty?”
“Just now. Before you mentioned the paper manufacturer?”
Peter Claire replies that he was listening to a pavan for solo lute by Ferrabosco and had declared that the piece reminded him of a voyage to Spain, where the evening light was the colour of jade and the women smelled of cloves.
Christian smiles. “I have lost my reason,” he says.
When Francesco Ponti arrives, the King finds that a consoling normality still surrounds him and he asks him to be seated.
Signor Ponti executes a low bow and then turns and the King sees before him another figure, a dark-haired woman, who is introduced as Ponti’s daughter. “Forgive me please, Sir,” says Ponti, “but I have no Danish and my English is not exact. My daughter Francesca will be our interpreter.”
King Christian looks at Francesca, who curtsies to him. He sees features he wishes to describe as “brave.” He notes eyes of great intensity. He sniffs the air of his room, imagining that this woman must, like the beauties of Santander, smell of doves or of some other lingering spice. And her presence reminds him that the world contains a diversity he had allowed himself to forget. He has been mired up in his fortress for too long. It is this imprisonment that has made his mind feeble . . .
Ponti has carried a large box into the room. From this he now takes out a collection of leather binders.
“My father would like to show you some samples of his paper, Your Majesty,” says Francesca, who is nervous, but does not let this show in her voice, which is strong. “The manufactory Ponti is known throughout our country for the quality of its paper and parchment. From its inauguration, the manufactory Ponti has set itself against the production of shoddy merchandise.”
The King nods enthusiastically. “Good,” he says.
One of the binders is set upon a low table by the King’s chair. It contains four sheets of clean, cream-coloured paper of an admirable smoothness and King Christian leans forward to inspect them, rubbing between thumb and forefinger a corner of one of the sheets. The touch of the paper is pleasing.
“My father has named this sample Carta Ponti Numero Due. It is not the finest, but it sells widely.”
“Yes,” says the King. “I like its cleanness.”
“It is a very hospitable paper.”
“Hospitable?”
“To the ink. A client of my father’s, a cartographer, once said his pen was enamoured of the Numero Due, didn’t he, Papa?”
“Yes,” says Ponti and smiles.
And this notion of the amorous mapping quill amuses the King. He imagines the cartographer working on and on, barely stopping to slumber or to eat, his rivers and deltas ever more minutely etched, his renditions of ships and wavelets becoming ever more elaborate and fantastical. “This is what we need in Denmark!” he says. “For men to love their work once again.”
A great variety of samples are laid before King Christian. His hands caress them. He brings them close to his face and smells them. He notes that Signor Ponti is deft as a magician, conjuring more exquisite binders out of his box than appear at first to be in it and snapping them open with a graceful movement of his hands. And Christian finds himself enjoying this, as he might enjoy some new entertainment, where the performers were well rehearsed. Indeed, when the box is finally empty and he has inspected all the different specimens of paper, he recognises that for a full half-hour his mind and his body have been at peace.
He calls for wine for his guests and for maps of Jutland to be brought, and these he unrolls before Ponti and Francesca. “Forests!” he announces, noting, as he runs his hand across the map, the lumpy quality of the Danish parchment, but nevertheless admiring the bright colours the artist has decided to use. “And much of these are mine: crown lands which the nobility cannot touch.”
The Italians stare at the quantity of tiny emerald-coloured trees with which the map maker has covered almost half the land and at the abundant lakes and rivers which thread their way, like a tangled necklace of aquamarine, through the acre upon acre of bright-green woodland.
“Go to Jutland,” says the King. “You will see how the terrain encompasses both timber and water in great quantities. I will send a surveyor with you. And then you will return and tell me if the Carta Ponti Numero Due and Numero Uno can be produced from Danish trees. I am interested only in paper of this kind of quality— with which my own calligraphy can become infatuated. If you can make this, I will give you the patents for your mill and we shall work out what profits shall be yours and what shall be mine.”
Signor Ponti beams. Already, he allows himself to imagine the Ponti watermark surfacing on Danish documents of State, on almanacs and sheets of music, on handbills and architectural drawings, on the endpapers of learned books, on love letters and wills. He even contemplates the delicious notion that
the word “Ponti” might become so synonymous with fine paper that, in due time, Danes would refer to it thus: “Bring me a sheet of ponti, Sir” or “The unhappy lover crumpled the piece of ponti and cast it into the fire.”
And the King, too, is smiling. His brain feels clear. It is as though, on the clean sheets of paper, he has already begun to write down a future from which heartache and poverty are suddenly, unexpectedly, absent.
CHAMBERS OF SOLACE
Dowager Queen Sofie is in her cellar.
As always, she has closed the heavy door behind her and, with only a candle to light her way, she walks slowly down the line of wine casks, seeing whether she can memorise what lies concealed in each one.
Her coins were patiently sorted: golden dalers, golden rose-nobles, silver dalers, silver skillings. They were placed, in small quantities, in pigskin bags, tied up and sealed with wax. The bags were then immersed for a day and a night in basins of water, to ensure that they did not leak. Where leaks occurred the bags were opened and re-sealed, and afterwards placed, one by one, into the barrels.
Then came the moment of ingenuity. The casks were filled with wine.
Queen Sofie dared to let her coinage lie in soft sacks drowned in liquor, knowing that even if, over time, the skins might rot and the money tarnish, its value would remain. Moreover, the extent to which the skins were or were not decaying, the extent to which minute particles of the precious metal were or were not leaching out, could be measured simply by pouring off some wine and sniffing it. Queen Sofie has a nose so sensitive she had always been able to verify the late King’s infidelities by a mere whiff. He’d had an aromatic beard. Proximity with it had always divulged to the Queen more secrets than Frederik II could ever have imagined.
So now Queen Sofie sets down her candle. She has brought with her a little cup and she stoops by the first barrel, turns the tap and lets a dribble of wine run into the cup. Then she plunges her nose right into the vessel and breathes in the bouquet, flaring her nostrils right and left, right and left. Wine cannot dissemble. It is tainted or it is not tainted and she is as good a judge of this as any connoisseur from Burgundy.