by Rose Tremain
It has the scent of the forest in it and of summer fruit. It contains no less the scent of the lost past, when, at State banquets and religious feasts, men used to gaze with longing at her golden hair. And all these remembered smells are pure and not sullied by anything else.
The Queen tips away the wine and goes to the second barrel, pours and sniffs again. She tests five barrels, and the wine in all of them betrays not the mildest scent of degradation. From the last barrel, she pours a brimming cup and drinks this down. Her daring has worked. The bags lie in the wet darkness and are safe and intact.
Queen Sofie takes up the candle again.
She walks behind the casks and lifts down an iron bar from the wall. The candle is set once more on the tarred and dusty floor, and the Queen now begins to scrape carefully away at the tar, as though she were a peasant woman with a hoe and the cellar floor a plot of earth where precious seedlings grew.
She can hear a rustling in the cellar as she works and hopes that it is mice and not rats who have made nests in here for the winter. But nothing, today, makes her afraid. Her daring and resourcefulness have ensured her future peace of mind, and the excitement she feels when, after several minutes’ hoeing with the bar, a miraculous gleam of gold appears beneath it is as intense as that which her lovers once felt when they touched her flaxen hair.
The tar and dust not only cover the gold ingots, but serve as the mortar that holds them together. Where once this floor was made of bricks, now it is made of gold. When King Christian came to search Queen Sofie’s vaults for the treasure he knew was there, he was standing directly upon it.
The Queen digs up one gold ingot, cleans it with some rags and, hiding it beneath her skirts, scuttles up to her bedchamber with it and closes and locks the door. She lies down on the bed and places the ingot on her stomach and caresses it with her hand.
This action, this stroking of her gold, is so soothing that Queen Sofie quickly falls into a dream-filled sleep. Voices which she recognises but to which she cannot give names ask her what she will buy or get with her ingot and she replies that she wishes to buy happiness, but does not know the precise form and shape of it. “Is it possible,” inquire the old, insistent voices, “that the precise form and shape of happiness is the ingot itself?”
And so she wakes and looks at her gold brick and understands— as, in all truth, she has done for some time—that there will never be anything that brings her more satisfaction than what lies heavy, here and now, on her ageing body. The time is past when gold can be exchanged for anything more marvellous than itself.
Meanwhile, seated at a French escritoire in her room at Boller, Vibeke Kruse, biting her lip like a child, labours to complete the calligraphy exercises set for her by Ellen Marsvin.
Ever ashamed of her handwriting, in particular her failure to make the letters u and n distinguishable from one another and to give any grace to her g’s and her y’s, she has recently been scolded by Ellen for this weakness and sternly told to correct it.
So she is doing lines of n’s, g’s that join and loop with each other, u’s that remind her of knitting unravelling. It is dull work, dull and difficult for her, but she perseveres because, at any moment, Ellen Marsvin is going to come in to examine what she has completed.
There is an ache in Vibeke’s mouth. She would like to complain to somebody about this, but she does not, just as she does not complain about the calligraphy exercises. Because both these things form part of the great plan Ellen is making for her. The success of the plan depends upon silence.
Vibeke puts down her pen and probes her gums gently with a forefinger. What the finger finds there—the thing that is the source of the soreness that almost makes her weep—is a scattering of new teeth.
They are made of polished ivory. They lie in the gum sockets where her own teeth have rotted away and fallen out, and are kept in place by means of silver wire attached tightly to adjacent molars. The tooth sculptor charged Ellen dear for these adornments to Vibeke’s mouth and so Fru Marsvin will not listen to any complaint about the discomfort they cause and what difficulties they create at mealtimes. Indeed, Ellen has snapped that this discomfort is all to the good if it means that Vibeke is afraid to eat. Let her not eat. Let her at last get thin! For only when she can go about with grace in her expensive new gowns, only when her handwriting has improved and her smile is once again devoid of gaps, can the plan at last be implemented.
Ellen Marsvin comes into Vibeke’s room and closes the door behind her.
She crosses to the escritoire and stands behind Vibeke, looking down at her work, which still has a hopeless naivety about it, as though Vibeke were learning to write her alphabet for the first time.
“Look!” says Ellen impatiently. “The heads of your g’s are all of differing sizes, when they should be of uniform size. Do another line.”
Vibeke dips the quill in the ink and recommences so quickly and obediently that several n’s in the line above are smudged.
Ellen notices that the little finger of Vibeke’s right hand is stained black. And though her struggles have something irritating about them, Ellen Marsvin nevertheless feels, at the sight of this ink-stained finger, a tenderness towards Vibeke that she can only express by laying a gentle hand on her hair. “It will come right, Vibeke,” she says softly. “When the spring arrives . . .”
“I trust it will,” says Vibeke, pausing in her g’s and turning round towards Ellen.
“We need a little more time. That’s all. How are your teeth today?”
Vibeke wants to reply that the silver wire has been twisted so tightly that she fears it is cutting into the polished surface of her own undecayed teeth, and that the sockets where the ivories lie are red and sore. But she says only that she is getting acclimatised to these new sculptures in her mouth and that oil of cloves is effective against pain.
“Have courage,” says Ellen, as Vibeke goes back to her writing. “Everything will be well in due time and when everything is well, then it will be very well indeed.”
Liking the neat—almost poetic—convolutions of this last sentence, Ellen Marsvin looks round Vibeke’s chamber with a satisfied smile. This room contains within its four walls all the secret “ingredients” of her plan. And in her plan a future full of consolations lies silently waiting.
JOHANN TILSEN’S DISCOVERY
As the cold of January deepens and ice forms on the water in the well, Johann Tilsen pursues his search for Marcus.
He rides out alone. He wraps a scarf round his nose and mouth, so that the freezing air is filtered by cloth, but his breath trapped inside the scarf condenses to water and the water turns to ice and the skin of his face begins to burn.
He is terrified of finding Marcus’s body. He admits to himself that he is searching in the hope that he will not find.
He is almost grateful for the snow which has fallen, several inches deep, and which would freeze the corpse and even cover it sufficiently to hide it until springtime. Yet, where the snow has drifted and piled up, Johann Tilsen digs with a spade and with his hands, all the while praying that nothing will lie underneath the drifts but the fallen leaves and the earth.
As he continues his arduous exploration, he tries, now and again, when the agony of the search and the pain of the cold become almost too terrible to endure, to comfort himself with the idea that Marcus has somehow found the “other world” he used to speak about, that it exists somewhere—not merely in the child’s confused head.
But Johann Tilsen is a rational man. He knows there is no “other world” this side of death. His visions of Marcus on some sunlit plain or prairie are mere delusions. On one of these icy mornings he will find him.
A lonely, hunched figure in the white landscape, Johann Tilsen looks at his life and begins to see in it signs that he cannot read. Until this winter, until the disappearance of Marcus, he always believed that he was in control of his own destiny, because he prided himself that he could see what lay in people’s hearts.
Now he senses—for no reason that he can determine—that this ability has deserted him. Under his own roof, in the thick air of the parlour, in the erotic darkness of his bedroom, something has changed or shifted, a “something” that he cannot precisely describe, but which is there nevertheless.
It has to do with Magdalena. Johann Tilsen stares at his wife— when he makes love to her and when she is sleeping—trying to see what it is that has altered, but it eludes him. Her behaviour is exactly as it ever was. She is tender towards him and ever concerned for his welfare. It is still easy to pleasure her. And in bed she continues to do whatever he asks, whatever his fancy conjures.
And yet, she is altered.
How can it be that alteration shows itself, but resides in no particular thing and cannot be defined?
“Magdalena,” he whispers one night, as, with his member still inside her, he feels her drift towards sleep, “what are you hiding from me?”
She does not move. After a while, she replies: “You are my husband, Johann. You see all that I am.”
“I see what you are,” he says, “but I do not know what you are. And this has begun to torment me.”
A candle still flickers at the bedside. Magdalena sits up, thus separating her body from Johann’s, and blows out the flame.
They lie in the dark and she reaches out and takes his hand. “Johann,” she says, “if you are tormented, it is not because of me. This search of yours for Marcus is doing you harm.”
Johann is silent. There is some truth in what Magdalena has said; the hours he spends alone under the grey sky have certainly weakened him, both in body and mind. “Yes,” he says, “but it is not this. Something has happened in this house. I feel it.”
They hear the shriek of a night bird. Magdalena doesn’t speak, so that Johann’s last utterance and the shrieking of the bird seem to linger there together in the darkness for a moment and then die suddenly, as an echo dies.
“Magdalena . . .”
“Hush, my dear,” she says. “Nothing has happened. Sleep the sleep of the just.”
When he wakes in the morning, Johann believes he knows where Marcus’s body can be found. A dream has revealed it to him. And the place was so obvious. It was staring at him all the time and he did not see it.
He says nothing to Magdalena. He goes out as soon as he has drunk his coffee, as the boys prepare for their lessons and Magdalena gives her orders to the kitchen maids.
He takes an ice pick with him, slung over his body. When he’s fed and watered his horse, he picks up a blanket from the stables, one that Marcus’s bay pony sometimes wears, and attaches it to his saddle. He rides eastwards, across all the strawberry fields, towards the summer pastures, towards a low, white sun struggling to climb above the skeletal oaks and beeches on the Boller boundary.
When he reaches the first of the pastures he dismounts and ties up the horse, and takes the blanket and the tools with him.
Now he stands, looking down at the water trough. He can hear Marcus’s voice in his mind, fragile as a distant bell: My mother can see me from the cloud where she lies and when it rains on the water in the horse trough, that is her crying for me just in that little place . . . And he can hear himself scolding: I do not know what to do with you, Marcus. I am in despair . . .
The heart of Johann Tilsen is filled with terror as he scrapes the recent snow off the thick ice of the trough.
This ice is not transparent. It has thickened to solid whiteness. What lies inside it cannot yet be seen.
Johann shivers in the cold. He takes up the pick.
But then he pauses. What did he imagine he was going to do with the pick? Smash indiscriminately into the surface of the ice? The trough is deep, but the little body would have floated. Johann runs his bare hands over the ice. The surface is perfectly smooth. It is like a clean slab of cold stone. Though his hands burn, he keeps them there, as if in an attitude of benediction. What he feels is shame.
He remounts the horse. He will go back to the house and fetch more delicate tools—fine chisels and hammers—and with these he will uncover the body without damage to it. And then he will lift it out gently and wrap it in the blanket, which still smells of the bay pony, and carry it home.
The summer pastures are a long way from the house, and when Johann Tilsen arrives back there his feet and hands are so numb he decides he will warm himself by the fire for a few minutes before setting out again.
He walks into the parlour and sits down.
Damage.
The word taunts him. His own hypocrisies fill him with disgust. Marcus Tilsen was damaged long ago—by his own father’s indifference. Nothing and no one else is to blame but this.
Johann stares at the fire. He is about to get up to go in search of the chisels when he becomes aware of the sound of weeping. He lifts his head. The weeping is coming from above him, from the room where he and Magdalena sleep. Yet he knows it is not Magdalena. Magdalena does not cry like this.
Silently, Johann Tilsen gets up and silently he goes up the stairs. In the time to come he will ask himself why he chose to walk so quietly, to tiptoe like a thief, and he has no answer except that this is what he knew he had to do.
As he approaches his bedroom, the weeping, he realises, is very loud, an abandoned, almost uncontrolled wailing. “Magdalena . . .” moans the voice. “Magdalena . . .”
The voice is Ingmar’s.
Johann Tilsen opens the door and goes into the room. Mag, dalena is sprawled on the bed in a white petticoat that has been pushed up to her waist and its bodice opened. Ingmar Tilsen, naked except for his shirt, lies between her legs and weeps in his delirium, clinging to her like a man drowning, his dark head laid on her milky breasts.
The light is beginning to go from the sky when Johann returns to the water trough and the same bird that called in the night has begun to call again, more insistently, as though impatient for the darkness to come.
The air is so cold that every breath gives Johann pain. But he works on, almost oblivious to the freezing dusk, concentrating only on the task of chipping away at the ice, fragment by fragment, like a sculptor who knows that within the block of marble the human form he has seen in his mind lies waiting.
The shards of ice bounce and fly. The sound of the chisel is loud in the silent afternoon. The horse sneezes and stamps.
Piece by piece, the oblong of ice in the trough is chipped away. Johann Tilsen finds acorns and leaves within it. He remembers Marcus staring at these floating things, prodding them with a stick, more intent on them than on the words Johann was uttering: That water is not for you, Marcus, it is for the horses. Come away . . .
Even when darkness has fallen, even when the ice is no deeper than a man’s hand, Johann Tilsen keeps working. Not until his chisel strikes the stone base of the trough does he stop and sink down on his knees and rest.
ANGEL DESCENDING
In his new mood of strange optimism, due, it appears, to the arrival of the paper manufacturer from Bologna, King Christian has ordered Peter Claire to take Signor Ponti and his daughter to Copenhagen to show them the buildings he is proudest of: the Børsen with its twisting spire, modelled on the King’s own elflock, with stalls in it for forty merchants; the old smithy which became the Holmens Kirke for the sailors and ship workers of Bremerholm; his dear palace of Rosenborg, flower of his love for Kirsten.
The symmetry of these buildings, their impeccable brickwork, the delicacy of their spires and towers, have impressed Francesco Ponti. But the Italian notices, he says, some contradzione between the King’s unkempt and unhappy appearance and the neatness and optimism of his architecture. To Peter Claire, he asks: “What is this man?”
They have left Rosenborg and are in one of the buildings that form a protective wall around the T0jhushavn, the deep-water harbour, where the Tre Kroner now lies at anchor. They gaze down on the great ship, moored near a cluster of smaller vessels, and Peter Claire remembers the voyage to the Numedal and the music played under th
e stars on the quarterdeck. He gestures towards the Tre Kroner. “In some ways,” he says, “King Christian resembles this ship.”
“The large one?”
“Yes. It’s the biggest ship of the fleet, as strong as anything you will ever encounter on the oceans. I have sailed in it and I know how mighty is its sail power and how strong its construction. Yet you see its bright colours and all the intricate gilt work? The King’s desire for the golden things of the world sometimes obscures the strength that lies beneath it.”
“ ‘Golden things’?” asks Ponti. “What is this?”
“Luxury,” says Francesca.
“Not only that,” says Peter Claire. “I mean that he is a dreamer.”
There is a short silence before Francesca looks at Peter Claire and says: “A king should dream. Those who do not dream make nothing.”
“I agree,” says Peter Claire quietly. “But of course not all the King’s dreams have been realised—and nor will ever be—and this is what makes him dejected.”
Francesca doesn’t reply. Their high view of the T0jhushavn, with the swaying masts beneath them, has a strangeness about it that hypnotises them. It is as if they were not anchored to the earth at all but were balancing on the ships themselves, and yet securely, like birds, with their power of flight ready to save them if they should fall.
While Signor Ponti consults with His Majesty’s surveyor, Francesca asks Peter Claire to take her riding in the woods of Frederiksborg. She tells him she has been in closed-in spaces—ships’ cabins, jolting coaches, high lightless rooms—for too long and yearns to breathe “an air that is like the air of Cloyne, cold and beautiful.” He hesitates over this request, just as he has hesitated in his mind, since Francesca’s arrival, between taking her in his arms and trying to find the words to tell her about Emilia.
And he knows that the Countess has noticed him hesitating, not knowing the reason perhaps, but has watched him move towards her and move back, take a breath to speak and then remain silent, catch her eye and then suddenly look away. Several times she has begged him to talk to her.