by Rose Tremain
But for all this, he is a kind and practical man. He straightens up and strides quickly to where Charlotte is standing, making the window-panes misty with her weeping. He lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I was too hasty with my ‘Tosh,’ ” he says. “Yet I feel . . . doubtful on the subject of premonition, that is all. But listen to me, Charlotte. Let us go together now at once to my bureau and write a letter to your brother in Denmark, begging him to return for our wedding. Come, dearest heart. And then soon we shall have his reply.”
For a moment Charlotte does not turn, but only continues her crying. For she knows that this fear of hers has found its way to a place very deep inside her, from which it cannot be drawn out except by the arrival of her brother, sound and well, in England. No writing of letters will assuage it. No feeling of George’s that it is misguided will lessen its grip upon her mind.
But yet, the near presence of George, his tobacco smell, his largeness, always work a kind of magic upon her. She cannot not turn around and let him kiss her cheek and begin to smooth away her tears with the palm of his wide red hand.
And so she clings to him and the feeling of ice begins to leave her body, and yet she still murmurs, “Poor Peter. My poor Peter . . .”
“Hush, Daisy. All will be well.”
“Oh, pray,” she says. “For I could not bear it and Mama could not bear it.”
“Nor your dear papa either. But it is not so. Nothing has happened.”
He is wrong. Charlotte knows that he is wrong. But she says nothing more. She lets George kiss her salty lips and together they go down to the bureau, whose walls are certainly not blue but neatly upholstered with dark-brown leather. And the room smells of pipe smoke and paper and ink. It smells of men and all the rational, calm, unhurried business they undertake.
Charlotte sits down on an oak chair. She watches gravely as George begins to sharpen a white quill. “You write to him, George,” she says. “For I cannot. Plead with him—as your future brother-in-law—to come home. Say he must do it for my sake.”
A PROPHECY REMEMBERED
King Christian is trying to pray.
He kneels in his pew in the chapel at Frederiksborg, which he ordered to be decorated like a jewel box, with a balustrade and ceiling of ebony, embellished with silver and ivory ornamentation, and the side walls hung with biblical paintings mounted on copper plate. He has always found this sumptuousness useful in his communion with God. For his gaze is more easily lost in the contemplation of beautiful things than in that which is plain and of no account, and so his mind is thus “released into prayer”—or so he has often claimed.
For this reason—more than for any omnipresent worries about sacrilege—he has not pillaged his own pew, as he pillaged his plate room, for rendering into dalers. Indeed, he has left the entire church untouched. For when he raises his head and looks out and up, he wishes to rediscover all the splendours that he once imagined and let his eye meander there at will. What exists beyond the jewelled pew is as important to his concentration as that which is in it.
He is praying for God’s protection. For in recent days the words of the old prophecy, the one made by Tycho Brahe when Christian was born, have returned to his mind and add themselves to the unease which comes and goes from him all the time.
It was foretold that at this age of fifty-three, in this year that has just begun, the King’s life would be at risk. It was foretold that when this year ended, he might no longer be alive, and that such sorrows as Denmark had already endured during his reign might be magnified a thousand times. The King asks himself can prophecies, which derive from signs glimpsed in the stars, in the arrangement of the heavens themselves, be overturned by any human means? But not merely this: can God Himself, creator of the world, alter that which flies about the universe in showers of silver and may be the currency of the devil?
No answer comes. And Christian reminds himself that certain things—howsoever slavishly man might try to follow Cartesian principles in their analysis, however hard he struggles to dissect and realign them—are simply not susceptible to being known.
When the King walks from the chapel to his rooms, it is getting dark and he reflects upon the vain struggles of the March days to suggest the arrival of a new season when the night still seems to fall so fast upon the afternoon.
As he sips a cup of hot wine, King Christian is informed that Ellen Marsvin, Kirsten’s mother, has arrived at Frederiksborg and is requesting an audience. He finds himself smiling. “Tell her,” he says, “that no one can intercede on Kirsten’s behalf. For not only have I despatched her from here, but I am beginning to succeed in banishing her from my heart.”
Yet later he changes his mind and sends for Ellen. Ambitious and proud though she is, he always admired her, and her once-beautiful face, which wears the imprint of all her worldly strivings yet still has about it a fragile serenity, touches him more than it should—as though she might be a long-lost sister he had always liked.
And so they sit like old friends by the fire and drink the spiced wine. Neither the name of Kirsten nor the fatal syllables of the word “divorce” pass their lips. They talk about money and the sacrificing of Iceland, about the engineers from Russia who may surely be nearing the end of their long journey to the Numedal, about the preacher there and his letters, which mourn the absence of hope in the valley of the Isfoss.
And in this way the conversation turns towards the future and how it can be perceived when the duration of it—which once appeared so infinite—is now likely to be brief. Ellen tells King Christian that she will fight “to my last sigh, to my very last glimpse of any brightness” to stay alive and to hold on to what she has, and the vehemence with which she says this amuses him because it is exactly and precisely what he expects from her. He tells her that, if the prophecy of Tycho Brahe comes to pass, his own future “hangs by a little thread” and the tomb already stands open, waiting.
Christian has taken to drinking the waters from the well at Tisvilde, to try to cure the pains in his stomach and bowel. Great barrels of it are brought to the palace on carts and kept under lock and key, in case they should be tampered with and ordinary water substituted for the healing kind.
The King tries to imagine the “Tisvilde nectar” draining slowly through his body, carrying away with it the sources of his agony. When several days have passed without any sudden feelings of sickness, he declares that this is the thing that will make him well. “Perhaps,” he adds, “Tycho Brahe foresaw the agitation in my gut and that it could be fatal. But now, with the magic of Tisvilde, I shall vanquish it.”
A cup of the water is brought to him five times a day, the last before he goes to sleep. He savours its purity on his tongue, declaring he will drink no more wine, no more strong ale, but only this, until his digestion is comfortable once more. And in this fanatical observance of a routine devoid of any merriment he perceives a truth about himself: he has no wish to die. His work as Denmark’s King is not complete and he does not want to desert his post.
One night, as he makes himself comfortable in his bed and is waiting for the water to be brought to him, he sees a young woman come into his bedchamber.
She is plump, with a rosy skin and dimples in her cheeks, and it is by these dimples that he recognises her as someone he once knew, but whose name he cannot remember.
She curtsies to him and sets down the water cup with a dimpled smile, and she comes near enough to King Christian for him to catch the scent of her, which is like the scent of plums or damsons, which once, when he could not find admittance to Kirsten’s bed, made him think of visiting this homely girl and taking her in his arms.
And then it comes to him: she was one of Kirsten’s women. She was known as the “Woman of the Torso.”
She is about to leave, when the King calls her back. He says he cannot remember half of what he should remember in these recent times and one of these lost things is her name.
“Fnzlken Kruse,” she says. “Vibeke.”
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That people disappear from a life and then one day are rediscovered, either they themselves or others very like them who are their ghosts or substitutes of the mind—this is a thing King Christian has ever been conscious of. And because these substitutions or reappearances have always seemed miraculous to him, he endows them with importance and is inclined to believe that God has sent them to perform some particular duty with regard to him.
Such is his feeling when he sees Vibeke Kruse standing in his room, when he smells her scent of plums and remembers her plump breasts, which he once strangely imagined as having the softness of feathers, as though he would be holding in his hands a pair of white doves and feel the beating of their hearts.
He invites Vibeke to sit down by the bedside. He asks her where she has come from and imagines some fanciful answer, such as From an Aspen Tree or From the snows of Mont Blanc or From out of the sky. But she says, simply, that she works for Ellen Marsvin now and has accompanied her here “to pay our respects to Your Majesty on our way to Copenhagen.”
Strangely, it does not enter the King’s mind that if Vibeke works for Ellen, then she is also in the household at Boller where Kirsten is still staying. Indeed, he gives no thought to Kirsten, but is entirely captivated by the presence of Vibeke, so much so that he forgets to drink the water, forgets that the hour is late, forgets everything but his desire to keep her by him.
He looks at her full lips, her comfortable chins, her wide haunches, her ordinary brown hair, her hands like the hands of a peasant girl, and says suddenly: “I am tired of pretence.”
ROPE DANCERS
On a bright morning, Peter Claire hears the noise of heavy wheels on the cobblestones outside his window and other sounds—the playing of a little reed pipe and the jingle of a tambourine—that are unfamiliar. He looks down and sees a cavalcade of men, women and children running along beside covered wagons, and people from the palace coming out and greeting them like old friends, and pressing food and flagons of ale into their hands. And then a shout echoes round the courtyard and is carried inside the palace, and is repeated along corridors and bursts forth into chamber after chamber: “The rope dancers have arrived!”
They draw an instantaneous crowd to them—as though this moment had been anticipated for months, as though nobody at Frederiksborg had anything to do on that March morning but stand in a circle and stare at the new arrivals, and wait to see what marvels were about to be performed.
And already some magic is taking place. The children have begun tumbling, cart-wheeling and leap-frogging round the circle, fast and effortlessly, their limbs bending and springing to straightness again, like the branches of willow saplings. As they leap and whirl, wooden poles and planks, coils of rope, baskets of brass
hinges and hooks are lifted out of the wagons, and a vast contraption, like the twin masts of a ship, begins to rise up in the great courtyard between the chapel and the Princess wing.
The King himself appears and stares at it. By his side is Vibeke Kruse, her hand held tightly in his, her face festooned in an enormous smile that reveals her new ivory teeth. These teeth shine in the sun. Not far from Vibeke, Ellen Marsvin silently watches and nods her satisfaction.
When another cart arrives, forth from which steps a black bear, to be led round on a chain, Peter Claire goes down to join the watchers, and in through the palace gates now come a great crowd of traders who have followed the performers all the way from Copenhagen with their baskets of cake and cheese, their tubs of oysters and whelks, their metal trinkets, their trays of bootlaces and knives. “Now,” says Krenze’s voice very near to Peter Claire, “see everybody scrabble for trash and suck oysters for breakfast! I ask you, how is mankind to be endured?”
When Peter Claire makes no reply, Krenze continues: “I should like to see the bear leading the little man by the chain. That would be an entertainment I should stay to witness.”
Peter Claire turns to the German viol player. On his lips is some rebuke to Krenze’s abiding cynicism, but the rebuke never shapes itself. Instead, Peter Claire recognises that he, too, is looking at the scene in a kind of misery, that he is indifferent to the cart-wheeling children and the sad-eyed bear, that even the great edifice going up by means of ropes and pulleys dismays him.
He says quietly: “Once the dancers are balanced on their rope, the crowd will long only for them to fall.”
Krenze looks at him with approval mixed with surprise. “You are learning,” he says. “I think at last you are learning more than angels are supposed to know.”
Peter Claire is silent. But, now that he is talking to Krenze in the midst of this odd, noisy scene, there is something else that he wants to tell this stern, unyielding man, something else that has been coming and going in him for a while and which has begun to make him afraid. “Krenze ...” he begins, but the German, thin and agile as an eel, is no longer there beside him and, when he looks all around for him, Peter Claire cannot see him anywhere. The crowd of traders and bystanders has swallowed him up.
Peter Claire’s eye falls on the King, holding Vibeke’s hand. He recognises Vibeke as one of Kirsten’s women and wonders for a moment whether—if she is returning to Boiler—she might be the means by which he could send a letter to Emilia. But this thought falters and breaks apart. For what is to be said to Emilia now? That his faith in her was always fragile? That, not trusting her love for him, he was lured without protest to the bed of his former mistress?
He begins to wander among the crowd, searching perhaps for Krenze or simply searching for something that will alter his morbid perception of the scene. He notices that the sun is almost warm. A girl in red offers him a dish of sweetmeats, but he passes on without stopping. He remembers the white ribbons, intended for Charlotte, and how, at the aviary, he saw them threaded into Emilia’s hair.
And a new sound comes: two drummer boys, wearing frayed and tattered uniforms, begin a dry rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, on small drums hung round their necks, indicating to the crowd that the masts are in place and the rope strung between them, and that the time is coming when the first of the dancers is going to step out into the void.
Now every eye stares up.
The dancers are silhouetted against the green copper of the steep roofs. Their feet, in soft slippers, are not as other feet but like gloved hands that can hold and cling. Their agility on the rope is such that the rope is almost forgotten and all the spectators see are the dancers pirouetting in the air.
Yet all Peter Claire thinks about is that they are perpetually poised in that moment before precipitation. The moment does not pass and vanish away but is constantly and always repeated.
And underneath the performers is nothing to break their fall: no net, no mattresses laid out, not even a heap of straw. The boy drummers beat out a fast roll. The reedy pipes are silent. The rope dancers spring onto each others’ shoulders and the wind that turns the high weathercocks ruffles their hair.
Such bravery as this begins to work a subtle alteration in Peter Claire’s mood. It is as though the daring of the rope dancers annihilated his own inertia by reminding him of what unexpected feats men can choose to perform, if only they dare. The sight of them begins to buoy him up and he turns his thoughts again to what hopes for happiness—if any—remain for him and Emilia Tilsen.
He has just begun to tell himself that these might rest absolutely and only upon his own courage, when the thing he was going to mention to Krenze occurs again: the world goes almost silent. The drums still rattle, the people gasp and cheer, the wind sighs round the steep roofs, but these things are barely present to Peter Claire. They have moved away, as though up into the sky, and what has replaced them is a sound inside his left ear, a noise like the tearing of rags, and with this internal sound comes a sharp and vicious pain.
The lutenist clasps his head in his hands. The pain and the sound of tearing intensify to a point where he wants to cry out—to beg someone to help him, to make the moment pass away. But it does not pass away
. It goes on, as the rope dancers climb down and take their bows, and people begin to clap. He looks around wildly. He cradles his ear with his hand (the same ear in which he used to wear the Countess’s jewel) and he remembers the silence which fell on Johnnie O’Fingal. He finds himself jostled as the people surge forward to lift up the dancers and carry them shoulder-high round the courtyard. No one pays him any heed. The bear is being led away.
Then the tearing sound stops and the pain starts to recede. Like a spring breaking and bubbling up out of the earth, the external noises in the courtyard come pouring forth again. They deluge the lute player’s head: the bird notes of the pipe and the bell notes of the tambourine, the “bravos” of the crowd, the laughter of the dancers and the four-part laments of the street traders: “Cheeses! Oysters! Sweetmeats! Knives!”
Suddenly, Krenze is at his side again. The German makes no mention of the fact that Peter Claire’s hands are still clamped to his head. “They were not bad,” says Krenze, as the people sweep the performers on and on round the masts and back again. “Not bad. They knew their own capacity.”
VIBEKE'S INVENTIONS
On her first night at Frederiksborg, Vibeke Kruse, recovering slowly from the journey, had carefully unpacked her wardrobe of sumptuous dresses and, as she smoothed out the creases, thought to herself: The secret of a successful life is not to die before one’s death.
She admitted to herself that in her long war between her love of sweetmeats and her desire to be beautiful, in her struggles with the calligraphy pen and with the vicious silver wire of her new teeth, she had very nearly succumbed to a morbid perception of herself as a person of no worth, whose future could only be solitary and bleak, and who might as well die young. Yet she had managed to battle on and, now, here she was at last, at Frederiksborg, where Ellen Marsvin was already gossiping with the King and laying the foundations of the plan.
It was outlandish, Vibeke knew, Ellen’s conviction that the former Woman of the Torso would be the one to supplant Kirsten in the King’s affections, but then so were very many ideas (such as the notion that knitting had once corrupted the souls of women or that a hen could become as devoted to a human being as a dog, and yet both of these had been part of the life that Vibeke had seen) and thus there was no more reason to suppose that the plan would never come to pass than to suppose that it would.