by Rose Tremain
“Of course we must talk,” he has said. “Only you must understand that my time is not my own, Francesca, music rehearsals are long and I am often called, at any moment of the day and night, to play to His Majesty alone.”
“Why alone?” she has asked and seen him blush as he answered. “The King has a nickname for me. He calls me his ‘angel’ . . .” “His angel!”
“You may certainly laugh. Go on. The German viol player, Krenze, finds this exquisitely funny, and so does everyone else. And of course it is. But I cannot allow myself to find it amusing and nothing else. I made the King a promise and I have no choice but to keep it.”
“What promise?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“And why have you ‘no choice’?”
“Because I have sworn . . .”
“And when you have sworn, your word is your bond? What did you ‘swear’ at Cloyne, Peter Claire?”
“What did I swear, Francesca?”
“When we heard the owls calling. You said to me that if I should call to you, you would come.”
Peter Claire looks at her. He cannot remember saying these very words, yet he can remember feeling some such thing, that he would always let her—the first woman for whom he felt an overwhelming passion—summon part of himself. So once again he has to look away from her, pretend he has been distracted by something outside the window, or recalled to his mind some errand on which he has forgotten to go. He knows that in all his dealings with her he is being cowardly. He wishes the days would pass and that she would be gone.
He agrees to the ride.
He agrees because he likes the idea of galloping fast through the Frederiksborg woods, to their limits and beyond, as if running away from his life. If he cannot escape to the New World, such as he dreamed of on the night he heard the story of the execution, at least he can ride until he’s exhausted and find some kind of oblivion in that.
He chooses strong horses, giving no thought to how Francesca will manage her spirited mount, because in his imagination he has already left her far behind and is alone in his own part of the forest. And he rides on until he knows that he’s lost. And in this feeling of being lost is a kind of rapture.
Francesca wears a riding cloak and hat of black velvet.
Under the lightless sky, her face appears pale, her eyes large, her lips dark. She instructs the groom to spread out her cloak behind her and Peter Claire notes the care with which the man accomplishes this task, as though his hands had never touched velvet before, never saddled a horse for any woman as beautiful as Countess O’Fingal.
This beauty of hers—which she perfects first in the rearrangement of the cloak and then in the way she sits tall and straight and unafraid on her horse—Peter Claire sees as a studied reproach to him. It asks him how he can be so miserly as to resist her. It reminds him that enchantment very often triumphs over scruple and will continue to do so for as long as the world lasts.
They ride fast, just as Peter Claire had imagined they would, except that Francesca keeps up with him stride for stride, and when he glances at her he sees that she is almost laughing, and this remembered sound of her laughter is as potent as music.
So it is he who reins in his horse first and slows to a canter and then a trot. They are approaching a clearing, to which Francesca gallops on. She doesn’t stop, nor even slow down, only calls to him to catch her up again. Clearly, the speed of the ride thrills her and she wants to go on at this daring pace.
And thus the gallop now becomes a kind of chase, in which Peter Claire has to use his whip, and it seems to him that Francesca, with her cloak billowing out in the air, is determined to outdistance him. For a moment, as the path turns northwards, he considers letting her go and idling here until she chooses to return, but pride forces him to keep following, pride and a kind of rising elation and a sudden insatiable curiosity, as though the Countess were leading him to some destination that only she is capable of finding.
His horse begins to sweat, but Peter Claire knows it will not falter when it starts to tire. These are the same Arabians the King uses for the tilting competitions, descendants of those he once rode in these woods with Bror Brorson. They are as edgy and strong as dancers, with sinewy hearts and delicate feet. They will let themselves be ridden until they fall.
And the woods themselves, so beloved by Christian for the wild boar hunts, spread out for miles around Frederiksborg. The paths go on and on. A man could ride in them all day and not reach their limit. So Peter Claire understands that there will be no reprieve— not yet—on this winter morning. There are only those things which define the moment, those things which play with time, giving it a frenzied, dreamlike acceleration: the spur, the whip, the pumping blood, the pursuit.
Then, at last, ahead of him as he turns a wide corner, he sees that the Countess has pulled up her horse and dismounted, and is unfastening her cloak and laying it on the ground. She stands, triumphant, waiting for him.
He leans on his horse’s neck, trying to catch his breath. And, as Francesca seems to have predicted, he can’t take his eyes from her. She removes some fastening from her hair and it falls free, just as she wore it at Cloyne, when they ran along the beach, following Giulietta’s hoop.
Laughing, she says: “Did I tell you I had a suitor? His name is Sir Lawrence de Vere. Did I tell you that he is very rich and that I was thinking of marrying him?”
Perhaps it is the laughter or perhaps it is the mention of another man, but it is at this moment that Peter Claire knows that he has lost the battle to resist Francesca. He will go to his mistress now and she will be his mistress again and his desire for her will put everything and everyone else from his mind.
When he kisses her he knows that the kiss is a kind of submission. Peter Claire submits not only to Francesca’s will, superior in the chase to his, but to the past. It is as though the intervening time between his departure from Cloyne and this moment in his second Danish winter had not existed or, if it had existed, had contained in it nothing of any importance.
When they return, in the early afternoon, and hand their horses to the grooms and part with a polite formality, Peter Claire goes to his room, banks up his fire and lies down, fully clothed, on the bed.
He closes his eyes and is asleep in minutes, but then, in minutes again, is woken by a knock on his door.
He can barely move.
He calls for the visitor to enter. A black-clad servant comes in, hands him a letter and withdraws.
Peter Claire stares at the letter. For one heart-stopping moment he wonders whether it is from Emilia Tilsen, but he quickly sees that the handwriting is of a sophistication he does not imagine her to possess and notices that the letter is bound by an elaborate seal, almost grand enough to be the King’s own.
His tiredness is such that the task of lighting a lamp feels almost too difficult to accomplish. He craves a deep and dreamless sleep more than he has ever craved it in his life. He is nearly ready to lay the letter aside, to be read later when his head is clear again, when a little time has settled on the events of the morning.
Yet he does find the tinder-box and the taper, and puts the taper to the wick. Letters are like warnings of fire; the mind knows that it must attend . . .
Dear Mr. Claire [he reads],
What manner of man are you?
To whose letters do you make answer if you choose to disregard such an Important Communication from the King’s Consort?
But let me remind you again of the ways in which you put yourself and your Aspirations in Peril if you will not speedily answer me, telling me that you will execute the Commission that I have given you. Indeed, I shall list the ways:
Your letters to Emilia Tilsen, my Woman, shall never be given to her. You may write Every Day and Every Day shall your Words be Intercepted, just as all those you have already set down, charming and ardent as they are, have been Intercepted and now moulder in an Iron Box and do not see the light of Day and are not heard and shall
never be heard by Emilia unless perchance, when I am dead and she an old Crone, she may find them there and realise what her Life might have been, if only you had not proved so False and Full of Pride . . .
The Lutheran preacher, Ratty Møller, stands at his window.
His small house lies by a narrow road at the apex of a hill and every morning, as the steep road emerges out of the darkness, while Møller eats a bowl of bread and ewe’s milk, he stares at it.
This staring at the road has become so ritualised a part of Ratty Møller’s day that, very frequently, long minutes pass in which he forgets what it is that he is hoping to see. His bright, darting eyes contemplate that which is already there: the sparse trees petrified by the frost; the ruts in the snow and ice made by carts and wagons; a solitary bird turning in the stillness. And these things enter his consciousness and remain there, but they remain just as they are, without any addition.
Møller used, at one time, to put into the landscape a man riding into the village of the Isfoss wearing a brocaded cloak and boots of Spanish leather, but now he no longer remembers to imagine this person. He watches the road and the trees and the January sky, and this is all. His thoughts go elsewhere—towards some petty task awaiting his attention, or towards the words of a sermon half completed. The man in the leather boots has faded, vanished.
And so it is with astonishment—almost disbelief—that Ratty Møller sees approaching one morning just such a person, on a chestnut horse, and cloaked in red and wearing on his head a tall plumed hat.
Møller goes closer to the window. He rubs at the mist formed by his breath on the glass and back into his mind pour all his old hopes for the people of the Isfoss: that the King would return with everything necessary for the reopening of the mine, that the village would come alive again, that there would be songs at midnight and pigs roasted on the fire . . .
Behind the man in the tall hat two wagons appear. The carthorses strain and slip on the icy hill, and the wagons lurch. But they come on. And Møller, who lives these days on a diet of carrots, turnips and onions, augmented only sometimes by rabbit meat or a roasted mistlethrush, imagines the wagons filled to overflowing with smoked hams and live geese, fat squares of butter packed in ice, Portuguese lemons, dried flounder, jars of cocoa and cinnamon, sacks of nuts and grain.
Møller puts on his black coat and his scuffed black shoes, and goes out into the road. He raises his arms in a joyous greeting and the man on the horse removes his hat as a sign of salutation to the preacher.
“Welcome,” says Møller. “Welcome, Sir.”
Though the man’s bearing is upright, he stumbles as he gets down from the horse and almost sinks to his knees. He says that the voyage has been long, that it sometimes seemed to him that the journey would have no end. And Møller replies that this was how it has seemed to them, the villagers of the Isfoss, that the waiting would never be over.
The man strokes his beard, to remove some of the ice crystals from it, and says: “The King’s heart is as large as his kingdom. It is merely his purse that is small.”
The wagons are parked in the middle of the village.
One by one, the villagers come out—men, women and children—to stare at them, and each individual begins to speculate upon their contents. If they all imagine a store of food to last the winter and bring to an end the hunger that snaps and claws at them even in their dreams, they also conjure from the silent wagons all the things they have ever longed for: bales of linen and coverlets of fur, pewter plates and jars of green glass, barrels of Rhenish wine and Spanish Alicante, bottles of ink, flintlock pistols, copies of Mercator’s Atlas, pouches of tobacco, stringed lutes, cards of lace, balls and skittles, quivers of arrows, skates, monkeys that will dance on the end of a chain . . .
But what people long for is seldom what actually arrives. So of course there are no green jars, no wine, no lace, no capering monkeys. In fact, at this very moment, the King’s representative, standing beside Ratty Møller's fire, is explaining how much—of all that the King commanded to be sent to the Numedal—has been lost.
“It is embarrassing to tell you this,” says the representative, whose name is Herr Gade, “but when we set out, we carried far more than your people will find in the wagons now.”
“Why?” says Møller.
“We had more than a hundred live pullets in wicker cages, but a fox got into the carts one night and killed thirty of them, eating only their heads and gizzards, which was all the beast could draw into his mouth through the basketwork. We packed the bodies in snow, but we had to throw them out. Even in this cold they began to stink.”
“The waste . . .” says Møller sadly.
“And then, because the crossings were so hard and the journey so much longer than we imagined, some of the dalers and skillings intended for you had to be used to buy oats for the horses and summon blacksmiths to mend their shoes and to hammer rivets into the wheels of the wagons. There is a good supply of money left, but it is less than the King hoped to bring you ...”
Møller nods. “And the corn seed?”
“Well,” says Herr Gade, “again, because of the long passage of time from our starting out to our arrival, some of the grain had to be given to the remaining pullets, to keep them alive for you. If you seek to apportion blame, Herr Møller, blame the northerly winds, blame God who sent them.”
“I am a preacher,” says Møller. “I am not in the habit of ‘blaming’ God.”
“No,” says Gade. “No. Of course not. All I mean to emphasise is that the shortfalls are not our fault."
Ratty Møller goes to the window and looks out at the familiar road he has watched for so long. Bitterly he thinks, What are a few pullets, a few sacks of Corn, a few coins, in return for the hope that was kindled and then dashed, for the lives that were lost? And now, nothing more will arrive upon that road until the winter is past.
“There is a little beer,” says Herr Gade, “and cloth. Woollen cloth made at the Børnehus looms. Of a serviceable brown colour and quite warm.”
“And silver needles with which to sew it, I suppose?” says
Møller bleakly and cannot resist turning to witness the representative’s discomfort at his sour jest.
Herr Gade looks down, as if to inspect his boots, the soles of which are almost worn away from the pressure of his feet upon the stirrups. He takes a long breath before he says: “His Majesty told me to remind you that he is sending for engineers from Russia.”
Ratty Møller looks up now at the King’s representative, to whom, as the head of the community of the Isfoss, he must offer a bed for the night and food that he does not possess and courtesy that he does not feel. And he lets a sigh escape from his small person. Having longed so ardently and for so long for Herr Gade’s arrival, he wishes suddenly that the man with the tall hat and the scarlet cloak would vanish away.
The cloth, the grain, the money and the pullets are counted and distributed among all the families. This arithmetic, however many times it is done, reveals that not one family is entitled to an entire pullet and so it is decided, once the representative and the wagon drivers have departed—back along the deserted roads, back towards the darkness of the sea—to pluck and cook all the birds on a vast fire out under the stars and hold a feast.
Tables are set in ten houses and the grain milled and bread baked.
The smell of the roasting chickens lures everybody outside, and the villagers warm themselves by the fire and drink the King’s beer and begin to talk once again of the future the King will send.
This future, although it is not identical to the past, when the mine was working and when men secreted in their bodies pieces of rock shot through with veins of silver, nevertheless resembles it. And already the people of the Isfoss begin to imagine the Russian geniuses of the mine travelling towards them on elegant sleighs drawn by dogs like wolves, dogs with soft tails and yellow eyes, dogs which can move across the deserts of ice much faster than the speed of spring.
From that long afternoon when Johann Tilsen searched for Marcus’s body in the water trough and did not find it, and instead discovered his eldest son in bed with Magdalena, life in the Tilsen household began to undergo a progressive alteration.
Ingmar was sent away. Johann Tilsen paid to have him apprenticed in Copenhagen to a friend of his own youth who made medical instruments. Ingmar was given no money and no provision was made for where he would stay in the city. “You have made yourself an orphan” was what Johann said to him. “So now you must fend for yourself.”
Magdalena tried to intervene secretly and pressed a purse containing five dalers into Ingmar’s hand, but Johann had foreseen this and made his son empty his pockets before the cart took him away. Johann threw the purse containing Magdalena’s money into the fire. “This is whore’s gold,” he said, “and you shall not have it!”
The boy did not cry or complain or protest. His face was a white mask of anguish. As he sat in the cart waiting to leave he looked neither at his father, nor at Magdalena, nor at his brothers, who, in the case of Boris and Matti, did not understand why he was leaving and, in the case of Wilhelm, understood only too well.
Magdalena couldn’t stop herself from sighing at the sight of the light snow falling onto Ingmar’s soft brown curls, as the cart lurched off and disappeared down the drive. Of all the lovers she had known in her life, beginning with her uncle and her cousin, perhaps Ingmar Tilsen had moved her the most: the way he clung to her and cried, the way his lips fastened themselves on her breast, the way he smiled his secret smiles at mealtimes. And the thought that he would be cold in Copenhagen, and friendless, and have no kitchen to come to where he could lick sugar and butter from her fingers and when Christmas arrived be absent from the table when the goose was brought in made her heart break. “He’s still a boy,” she said to Johann. “With a boy’s fantasies, that’s all. You have been too severe.”