by Rose Tremain
“No,” said Johann. “I have not been severe enough.”
As for Johann aslsen himself, such deep confusions and contradictions racked his brain and body on the subject of Magdalena that he began to wonder if he was going mad.
If his first thought had been to repudiate her and send her back to her family, this was swiftly followed by a desire to keep her as his wife but under a new regime of punishment, in which he would make her suffer so cruelly that her spirit would be broken and she would come to live in fear of him and think only of doing his bidding, day and night, whatever that bidding might be.
He burned her dresses. He took back all the gifts of silver he had given her. He drove her from their shared bed to a room in the attic, where the rain and the snow leaked through the roof. He beat her. He drew blood from her ear. He streaked her arse with purple bruises. And he believed that, in this way, he could continue to live with her, to salvage his wounded pride, to carry on.
But then he found to his dismay that her body still excited him. The beatings he gave it only augmented this excitement, so that, little by little, power and mastery of these moments leached away from him and passed to her once again. Because, once excited, he found that he could not resist her, and that once he was there, in the place where he had to put himself, his excitation only increased when he thought of her seduction of Ingmar, so that the very thing for which he was punishing her became by degrees an ingredient in his own ecstasy.
Magdalena knew exactly what was happening. “Johann,” she would whisper, “what a man you are! As virile as your son . . .” And if at first Johann slapped his hand across her mouth when she uttered these words, she sensed that they nevertheless drove him on and that, just as she had tormented her uncle with the deeds of her cousin, so she would be able to reassert her mastery over Johann Tilsen by reminding him that his own son had spumed the young maids of the Tilsen estate to copulate with his stepmother.
When he left her, spent and tired, self-disgust would invade Johann aslsen. He could feel himself stooping like an old man as he descended the attic stairs. Sometimes he locked Magdalena in the attic room and took away the key. At such times he wished her dead. He began to think that Emilia had been right and that Magdalena had a witch’s powers.
If there was still daylight in the sky, he would saddle a horse and ride out into the woods and fields, and resume his search for Marcus’s body. The idea that it was out there somewhere, undiscovered, frozen, pecked at by carrion, caused him such torment, such feelings of loneliness and self-reproach, that he often rode blindly, no longer searching the hedgerows or the thickets but letting the horse take him where it would and hardly noticing the dusk as it began to fall. At such times, part of him longed never to return to the house, but to die like Marcus in some other world of his own devising.
It was the key to the attic which ushered in the next phase of alteration in the Tilsen house.
One day, when Johann was out searching for Marcus, Magdalena summoned Wilhelm to her bedroom. She had Ulla with her and the baby was drinking from the breast when the boy entered.
“Wilhelm,” said Magdalena, giving Wilhelm that radiant smile that used to haunt Ingmar’s dreams. “Do you fear that your father might send you away from here to Copenhagen like Ingmar?”
“No,” said Wilhelm.
“No.” She smiled. “You are quite right, for it would not happen, for the arithmetic is not appropriate. How many sons can any father bear to lose?”
Magdalena lifted Ulla off the breast and laid her down on the coverlet beside her. Slowly, watching Wilhelm the while, Magdalena took the large white breast in her hand and inserted it back inside her dress.
She gave Wilhelm the key to the attic room and the sum of five skillings. She told him to take the key to the village blacksmith and have him copy it exactly and then return and hide the replica of the key in one of his own boots and say nothing to any living soul about it. Then she asked him to sit beside her and she stroked his hair, which was not soft and curly like Ingmar’s but thick and springy like his father’s. “Such lovely hair!” she said. “I have always thought how very pretty it is.”
Wilhelm, aged sixteen, one year younger than Ingmar, the recipient of Ingmar’s confidences, Ingmar having recited to him in the dead of night the details of his initiation and even told him that he should go to Magdalena, too, “for this is what she loves, that there be two or even three of us and she will enslave us all,” took the key. He did exactly as he was told. He hid the key made by the blacksmith and waited until the next time Johann locked Magdalena in the attic and went out.
Then Magdalena called to him. He fetched the key from inside one of his boots, let himself into the attic and locked the door behind him. Magdalena lay on the bed with her skirt lifted to show a few inches of white thigh above her red stockings. She held out her hand to Wilhelm and told him not to be afraid.
But Magdalena, in her unstoppable greed for power within the household, now embarked with Wilhelm on actions so dangerous that even she, in the depths of the night, when the wind howled round the lonely Tilsen house, began to be frightened of what Johann would do if these things (which were not as tender as they had been with Ingmar, but more ugly and fierce) were revealed to him. Yet, the more vertiginous was her terror of Johann’s wrath, the more inventive did she become in her enslavement of his second-eldest son.
And as for Wilhelm, he began to believe that his life was doomed. To his lost brother in Copenhagen he wrote: Help me, Ingmar, for I am in mortal danger. I am doing what you did and I cannot stop. I want to stop, but I cannot, and I know that I shall die and go to hell unless I can be released from my affliction.
At Boller, at the end of January, Kirsten Munk announces that she is tired of living in the dark, weary of the perpetual shadows and the dripping of the candles. She orders that the shutters be opened and all the drapes be drawn back. To Emilia she says: “We cannot live closed up like this any longer. If your father arrives, we shall have to hide Marcus in the cellar and that is the end of it. And we shall have no scruple about lying to Herr Tilsen, just as he lied to us.”
Marcus no longer sleeps on the cot in Emilia’s room. He has been given a small chamber “adequately far” from Kirsten’s, so that she will not hear him crying in the night. And this chamber is one of the few at Boller left by Ellen Marsvin just as she found it. The room is so tiny it is almost a closet and might once have served as a place where clothes were kept or ironed. Its walls are covered, from floor to ceiling, by strange and beautiful paintings. No one remembers who the artist was or why or when these murals were commissioned, but what they depict is a bright, fantastical landscape of flowers and leaves, and in among all the foliage the eye soon discovers a multitude of insects, much larger than life, creeping, darting and fluttering everywhere, so that to enter the room is almost to hear the buzzing of the bees, the whine of the wasps and the whirr of the dragon-flies’ wings.
When Marcus Tilsen first set eyes on these creatures, he appeared to forget on the instant his anguish at seeing his bed taken out of Emilia’s room and began uttering little cries of delight. He went to one of the walls and investigated it gently with his hands. His fingers first explored a beetle crawling upon a scarlet leaf, tracing the contours of its blue-black body, then moved to a moth, depicted with its wings folded, like a speckled arrowhead, on a clump of moss, and then to a bee in flight against a brilliant patch of sky.
Emilia watched him. It had always been true of Marcus that certain phenomena absorbed his attention so completely that he appeared lost in these things, almost to become them—the water of the horse trough, the song of the mechanical bird, the antics of his cat, Otto—and Emilia immediately understood that this room was to Marcus like a kingdom entire, where his mind would loop and turn in a perpetually repeated journey of discovery.
He moved from creature to creature and started to murmur to them, a soft stream of words, words that he still refused to utter when anyone
except Emilia talked to him, but which were there inside him, unforgotten. “Beetle,” he said, “on your red leaf blue body bright red leaf in the forest moth much softer made of dust all you things stay with me and do not be disobedient and when the night comes still stay with me and bee yellow and black you stay but buzz very quietly when the lady is sleeping . . .”
He wanted his bed put close to the wall, within reach of the beetle, the moth and the bee and not so far from one of the dragonflies that he could not stand on tiptoe on his cot and reach up and touch it. And the conversation with the insects that started the moment Marcus entered the room for the first time went on and on almost without stopping, so that he would wake and begin it immediately and fall asleep still whispering to them in the candlelight. He told them where to fly to and where to hide and whom to sting and how to search the sky for messengers. He asked them to hop off the wall onto his body so that they could be warm in his hand or make a nest in his hair. He counted them: one two three four five six seven spiders one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven ladybirds, one ant all alone.
Emilia said late one evening to Kirsten: “I shall use the insect paintings to teach Marcus arithmetic, and he and I shall make up stories about them, so that he will learn new words and new visions of what the world might be, and we shall make drawings of them with charcoal ...”
Kirsten’s expression was cross. “Emilia,” she snapped, “you know that Marcus is quite simple and backward, and that with such children it is better to let them alone in their own world, for they will never amount to anything.”
“Marcus is simple,” said Emilia, “because nobody but I has ever tried to understand him, but why should he remain simple all his life?”
“Because that is his condition.”
“But if I can start to teach him, then may not his condition be altered?”
“I do not think it likely.”
“Nevertheless, I must try . . .”
“And when, might I ask, will you indulge in this orgy of teaching? What time is available to you outside that which, as my only woman, you are duty bound to give to me?”
Kirsten had begun to flounce about the room, anger starting to course through every vein in her body, right down to the soft blue veins of her delicate feet.
Emilia knew Kirsten well enough by now to recognise the visible signs—the flaring of Kirsten’s nostrils, the intense brightness of her eyes, the strange gestures of her hands, which became like the supple, twisting and turning hands of an acrobat or a dancer. She looked at Kirsten calmly, pleadingly, and replied: “Early in the morning, before you are awake, or when you are resting in the long afternoons, then I will teach Marcus.”
“That is all very well,” snapped Kirsten, “but it might be that I wake early in the morning on the back or rack of some horrible nightmare and need you to comfort me, and then I shall call to you and you will not be there. And would this not be a dereliction of duty to the one to whom you owe so much?”
“I promise,” said Emilia, “that I will not neglect my duty towards you. I swear you shall not even notice that I am not there—”
“Of course I will notice that you are not there! Why should I not? I will admit, Emilia, that you are small and sometimes quite like a shadow, but you have never been what I would term invisible to me. On the contrary, not only do I see you, but I also see all that is in you. Never doubt it. I have always, from the very first, seen inside your thoughts. And what I am beginning to perceive is that you care far more for your little ghost of a brother than you do for me!”
Emilia knew she could only protest that this was not so, but that all such protestation would be in vain, because Kirsten had decided to be angry, because she needed to be angry, and so the anger had to come out of her and run its violent course. The servants could hear her screaming at Emilia from two floors below and Vibeke Kruse was woken from a reverie of a pie-eating contest by Kirsten’s tearful accusations of neglect and betrayal.
Emilia tried to pacify her with words, but the only words Kirsten required were those she herself commanded: “Say you will not do any teaching of Marcus! Say you will not go into that Insect Room to do drawing with him, when it is with me that you once used to draw when we were at Rosenborg!”
But Emilia would not retreat from her plan. So Kirsten began to sob, to pretend that she could not breathe, so horribly was she choked by her misery, and Emilia had to go to her and try to put her arms round her, to find herself pushed away so roughly that she fell backwards against a chest.
“Do not come near me!” screamed Kirsten. “For you are like all the rest of the world who hate and despise me and wish to see me ruined and dead! Oh, Mother of God, where is Otto? Where is the one and only living soul who can find it in his heart to love me?”
“I love you,” said Emilia softly.
“But not enough, for then you would not have suggested abandoning me so that you may make pictures of wasps and stories of snails or whatever other horrible creatures slink and scuttle across those walls!”
Emilia waited.
At last, Kirsten said: “I was born with a demon. I was born a veritable insect. My sting will kill me.”
Placing one of the servants in her room, in case Kirsten wakes and calls for her, Emilia rises at six, when it is still dark and before any fire has been lit at Boller, and takes a lamp and works with Marcus until the dawn arrives at the window and it is time to begin the normal routine of the day.
He doesn’t complain at being woken so early. He does not even seem to notice that it is still dark outside. With his measuring rod, he calculates the distance between a butterfly and the branch on which it will alight, between an earwig and the trumpet lily into which it will crawl. He counts the stripes on the wasps and the spots on the ladybirds, the tracery of veins in the flies’ wings and the number of legs on the centipedes. He lists the colours of the flowers and the different names by which they are known.
He begins to copy them, helplessly at first, seeming not to understand that his charcoal will very often make marks that he has not intended, that it is not enough for him to see a thing in his mind for it to appear on the paper.
But Emilia shows him how to proceed very slowly, looking constantly at the object, seeing it again and again and again, so that the eye guides the hand. And, after a while, his drawings take on an unexpected kind of beauty, so that a dragon-fly appears very vast and near, and the world towards which it is flying much smaller and further off, and a feeling of air and movement and space is by this means (all unintended as these means are) present in the picture.
Marcus talks as he works. He tells Emilia that at night he can hear the walls whispering to him and that he knows this is the language of the insects and that if a boy listens to the language of the insects for long enough then he will understand it. And when he can understand it, then the insects “will come to him and obey him.”
“If they will ‘obey him,’ ” asks Emilia, “what commands will he give them?”
“Be good. That is a command. And do not wake the Lady Kirsten. And do not dream.”
“ ‘Do not dream’? What are these insects dreaming of, Marcus?”
“Of a plain dreaming of that plain.”
“What plain?”
“My plain which is called Beyond Despair where the buffaloes are.”
The lessons and the drawings and the voices that he hears in the wall, these things define Marcus’s existence now. He no longer cries for his cat. If he wakes in the night, he talks to the insects until their answering whispers lull him to sleep again. He dreams he is a crimson leaf, a bud of blossom. The paintings are more real to him than what he sees outside the window and he is slowly coming to believe that, one day, he will “go into” the world of the insects and live there and be small like them, and shelter from the rain under a mushroom.
Whenever he is with Kirsten or with Ellen and Vibeke, he returns to his habitual silence, so that all three women complain
about his continuing strangeness and no longer attempt to speak to him. They are almost as stern with him as Magdalena used to be. They wonder how much longer they can endure him at Boller. Indeed, their mutual detestation of Marcus’s irritating ways seems, as the month turns, to create a diminution of the former antagonisms between Kirsten and her mother. Vibeke, tying and untying curling papers in her hair, remarks: “I don’t understand why you are both so craven. Marcus Tilsen isn’t our responsibility. He should be returned to his father without delay.”
Kirsten weeps a little. She stares at her own face in the glass, white and fat and no longer beautiful. She weeps a little more. She brushes her hair so hard that thick strands of it are tom out by the brush. All life is a torment of one kind or another. The kernel of anger in her heart against Emilia begins to swell and harden.
It bursts open on a February afternoon.
It reveals itself in ways that even Kirsten did not expect.
Kirsten has closed the curtains of her room against the bitter frost that lingers in the air. She returns her bedchamber to its closed-in state, where no light exists except the firelight and the yellow candles, and in among the flickering shadows she lies down naked in her bed to contemplate the ruins of her life that has no sport in it and no excitement, and no wildness and no love.
She finds her magic quill and begins to console herself by stroking her lips and her nipples with this when there is a knock at the door.
She has a vision of her beloved Count Otto Ludwig entering her room, swearing and cracking his whip, and unbuttoning his breeches.
But it is Emilia who comes in and asks her tenderly whether she has need of anything.
Kirsten sits up in the bed. Her lips are wet and her nipples are hard and rosy in the lamplight, and her anger is as hard as the husk of a nut. “And if I have no need of anything,” she says, “where will you go and what will you do this afternoon?”
“Well . . .” begins Emilia.