by Rose Tremain
In this mood of optimism, Vibeke had lain down to sleep. She had listened to the psalms of the carillon and heard someone singing beside the lake. She had kept a candle burning to reassure her, if she woke in the night, that she was on firm ground and not being tossed about on the angry sea.
When she had come, after a few days, into the King’s presence, it was obvious to Vibeke straight away that the King remembered her and that he liked her. And what she had understood (perhaps because, by pure chance, the first task she was given was to bring him his cup of the healing water from Tisvilde ?) was that here was a man who craved kindness. He needed someone who would care for him. His war with Kirsten had almost killed him. What he wanted now was to be saved from dying before his time.
And so Vibeke, instead of trying to seduce King Christian (for she saw that there was really no need of this, because he had already decided she would be comfortable in bed), tried to console him. She relinquished her efforts to be beautiful. She did not care whether her stomach bulged or her chins trembled or whether she ate too much or whether her teeth sometimes had to be taken out in the middle of a meal, for she saw that these things, which might once have been important to him, no longer were. What was important to him was her companionship and her affection. Vibeke Kruse would look after the King of Denmark and attend to his needs—including his need for laughter and his need for solitude— and in time, perhaps, if she was able to restore in him his appetite for being alive, her great reward would come.
She quickly formed the habit of vigilance over King Christian’s sufferings. She noticed, for instance, that walking upstairs made him short of breath and even dizzy, and said to herself, Why should the King have to endure this when surely some means could be found to hoist him miraculously from the state rooms into his bedchamber? She remembered the clever trapdoor to the cellar at Rosenborg and the pipes and ducts that carried the sounds of the orchestra up into the Vinterstue. She reasoned that if music (which had no corporeal existence) could be made to travel so ingeniously, then surely some invention could be contrived to move the King’s body from place to place.
Vibeke stood in front of one of the King’s brocaded thrones and stared at it. She imagined how, if it were stone to be used in the building of a tower, it would be slowly hoisted into the air by the means of ropes and pulleys. She saw how light it was—even with the King seated upon it—compared with stone and how a very small quantity of ingenuity would be necessary to devise some means by which it could be lifted up and lowered down. She made little drawings with her calligraphy pen, showing a square cut out of the ceiling and the throne being swung aloft into the square, and when she had perfected these, to the point where she knew that at least they would amuse King Christian, she laid them before him.
He studied them with great care—with the same intensity with which he had once studied a quantity of buttons spread out on the floor and sheets of Italian parchment given to him for his inspection. Then he took Vibeke’s hand and laid it against his cheek. “This is well done, my sugar-plum,” he said. “This is very well done.”
At night, when the King was asleep beside her, Vibeke Kruse began to stare at the spring moon through the gap in the curtains.
It struck her, as it had never struck her before, as an object of extraordinary wonder and magnificence. She knew that its radiance was borrowed from the sun, but did not understand how this could be so when the sun had disappeared from the sky. She put this lack of such understanding down to her own stupidity, yet she also decided that, at some future time, she would like to see the moon more clearly and so—by means of a telescope—pass beyond her own limitations to arrive at comprehension.
The idea came to her to ask the King to build an observatory from which he and she could look at the moon and stars. She imagined how, in summer-time, they two would be alone up there with the sky and how marvellous this would be.
But then she saw a flaw in her plan. An observatory would, of necessity, be a very tall building and how was the summit of any tall building to be reached except by a terrible quantity of stairs? Such stairs could kill the King. And so all that might follow of happiness—for her and for King Christian—could be sacrificed to this whim of hers to understand how the moon came by its own brightness. “And that is folly,” Vibeke said to herself. “It is a folly such as Kirsten would have devised.”
But still, Vibeke found herself staring at the moon, as it waxed and waned and waxed again. With its visible features, it was like some acquaintance from the past who kept reappearing out of the darkness because it had more to say to her yet.
THE WHITTLED STICK
“No one knows,” says Johann Tilsen to the doctor, “how the marks on her body came there, for she refuses to tell us.”
Magdalena is lying in the bed. Blood flows out of her onto the white sheets. On the lower part of her abdomen are red bruises spreading slowly to purple.
The doctor looks from these to Johann’s face and says again: “I know that sometimes a man ... in a momentary loss ... in a spasm of anger he did not intend . . .”
“I swear before God that I laid no hand on her,” says Johann. The doctor then speaks so quietly to Magdalena that Johann cannot hear what he is saying and Magdalena does not reply, only shakes her head. So the doctor replaces her coverlet and he and Johann walk out of the bedroom, which has a potent smell in it of Magdalena, as though there were ten or a hundred Magdalenas lying bleeding there.
They go downstairs and into the parlour, and the doctor stands in front of the fire and his face is the grave face of a man about to deliver an angry sermon. “There has without doubt been some hurt to her body,” he says. “If she was not hit, then she fell from—” “She was not hit!” declares Johann again. “I have sworn to you, I did not lay any hand upon my wife.”
“Well,” says the doctor, “whatever has occurred, she will miscarry.”
Johann’s hands are trembling. He runs his fingers through what remains of his grey hair. “What do you mean?’’ he asks distractedly.
The doctor stares at Johann Tilsen. He has known him for several years and has always considered him a good man. “She will lose the child,” says the doctor again and, seeing Johann look bewildered and frightened, adds: “Perhaps she did not tell you?”
“No,” says Johann bleakly. “She did not tell me.”
“Well. There you are, Johann. Who can say why she did not tell you. But at all events, I am certain that the child will be lost.”
The doctor leaves then, saying he will return.
Johann Tilsen sits down. He stares into the parlour fire, and Marcus comes to him, carrying his cat Otto, which he puts in Johann’s lap, like a gift. Then he stands, holding on to his father’s shoulder, and says after a while: “Is Magdalena going to die?”
The cat purrs softly. The flames of the fire are bright.
“I don’t know, Marcus,” says Johann.
After several hours, Magdalena’s body yields up the tiny foetus and the thing is taken away by the doctor and put into a sack and buried in the ground.
But the bleeding does not stop. What quantity of blood, Johann asks himself, is in her, that so much can flow out?
Magdalena whispers in a fragile voice the things that are on her mind: she tells Johann that Ingmar should be brought back from Copenhagen, that he has been punished enough. She says that a kindly nurse must be found to care for Ulla. She asks Johann to forgive her.
“Forgive you for what?” asks Johann.
“You know for what,” she replies and closes her eyes, effectively preventing him from saying anything more.
Though Emilia sits with Magdalena, even spooning broth into her mouth and undertaking the task of rinsing and replacing the saturated rags pressed between her legs to try to stanch the bleeding, none of the boys comes near her. Boris and Matti do sums at the schoolroom table, silently covering page after page with numbers, while Marcus lies on the floor beside them with his Pictures of the New Worl
d, drawing stick insects and moths, and stalks of Indian corn.
Finding them there, so good and quiet, so apparently engrossed in their work, Johann asks them where Wilhelm is, but they say that they don’t know. His room is empty and he has not been seen since lunch-time, when he refused to eat, saying he had a pain “somewhere in me. A pain of sickness.”
Johann goes in search of him and finds him at last, sitting on a step in front of the stables. Wilhelm does not look up when his father approaches him. He is intent on a task and his eyes never leave it. He has taken a long stick from the pile intended for staking out the rows of raspberry canes and, with a heavy knife, is carving simple patterns in it. His fingers are cut here and there, and a little blood seeps into the newly revealed white wood of the stick, but Wilhelm ignores this. And when Johann speaks to him he continues with this work of whittling the hard wood, fingering the grey-brown of the sections he will leave uncut, turning the stake in his hands, verifying that the patterns he is making run evenly around it.
“How’s your sickness?” asks Johann. “Has it passed?”
“No,” says Wilhelm.
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t be out here in the cold?”
Wilhelm makes no comment. He merely goes on with his work, as though he were racing against time, as though the task had to be accomplished before the sun went down. And it is only at this moment and not at any moment before that certain thoughts enter Johann Tilsen’s mind with regard to his second son, and he stares at Wilhelm, as he sits there with his knife and his stick, and he weighs up the consequences of putting to him a single question.
And it is as if Wilhelm can hear the question before it has been uttered, because Johann sees in his lowered eyes a sudden terrified blankness, so that he is sure that Wilhelm is no longer really looking at the length of wood in his hands, not even at the ground strewn with shavings light and dark, but is staring inwards, imagining the seconds which are about to arrive now and which, if they do, will alter both their lives for ever.
And so they are frozen just as they are: Johann looking down at Wilhelm; Wilhelm gaping at the ground. The seconds pass and gather into a minute. The minute passes and more seconds accrue. The day is silent and still, with not a breath of wind to move the trees.
Then, quite suddenly, Johann turns and begins to walk away. Over his shoulder, he says quietly to Wilhelm: “Don’t stay out in the cold, Wilhelm. It were better that you came back to the house.”
Only when Johann is completely out of sight, out of earshot, does Wilhelm plead with the empty air for understanding. “I did not mean to kill her,” he whispers. “Only to make some mark—so that she would always remember me, above my father and above my brother. Remember me, Wilhelm. And say to herself that I was the one, the best.”
Even baby Ulla is quiet. A visitor entering the Tilsen house on this day might never know that anything terrible was occurring.
Boris and Matti go on with their sums. Marcus converses with the stag-beetle he keeps in a moss-lined box. Otto the cat sleeps by the fire.
But in the room with its suffocating smell, where the doctor and Johann and Emilia wait, the agony of Magdalena is moving towards its inevitable end. She has drifted into a white sleep. When the doctor lets blood from her arm “to distract the flow from the womb and make it stop” she barely stirs.
For a while, Johann held her hand and stroked it or gently laid his palm on her cold brow, but now, as the day folds in upon itself and darkness comes, he retires to a little distance from her and only looks at her—just as if she were already dead and all that remained of her in the bedchamber were memories of her scarlet clothing, the sound of her night-time pissing into her pot that could sometimes arouse him, her legs fastening his body to hers, her dirty talk, her laughter, her pride.
And Emilia understands, by this discreet removing of himself from her, that Johann wants Magdalena to die, that at the age of forty-eight he is exhausted and longs now for a life in which he does not have to consider her.
Magdalena says nothing more to Johann. Noisy all her life, she drifts towards death with barely a murmur, and when the moment has come and gone, and the doctor has been paid and the sheet pulled up over Magdalena’s dark hair, Johann and Emilia go down without speaking into the parlour, where Wilhelm crouches now, banking up the fire.
Johann sits down in his accustomed chair and the family gather round him. Only Wilhelm, preoccupied with the fire, remains a little apart, and Johann, when he looks at him, notices that he has chopped the whittled stick into three equal pieces and is feeding these to the flames. And the boy does this heedlessly, as though the stick were a length of kindling, as though all his work upon it, to alter it from stick to ornament, had never ever existed.
A ROYAL DILEMMA
April arrives.
Hoping for the scent of lilac, King Christian goes out into the gardens, but he sees that the cold still clenches the buds and he must wait a while longer to savour any real perfume of spring.
If this disturbs him, if the notion of a season unnaturally retarded by the weather makes him remember once again how this most dangerous of years might bring about all manner of things he did not expect, he does not let himself dwell upon it. Indeed, he has made himself a promise that he will no longer dwell upon anything that he finds troubling, because he has been made aware, in the days that have passed since the return to the palace of Vibeke Kruse, of an accumulation of pleasurable feeling in him which he can describe with only one word: happiness.
It is so long since the King has felt himself to be happy that he has almost forgotten how a man is to behave in this state without seeming foolish. He is tempted to forgo all other pleasures, to set aside all matters of business, in order to pass the time lacing and unlacing Vibeke’s dresses, tickling her feet to make her laugh, summoning pots of cream to spoon into her mouth, letting her massage his aching shoulders, and his belly being slowly cured of its pains by the healing waters of Tisvilde.
But not only does Christian not wish to look foolish, he never again wishes to be a slave to love, and so he rations his time with Vibeke, letting her remain unvisited sometimes when he would like to go to her and—rather than spoil her as he spoiled Kirsten— contenting himself with the giving of occasional small gifts of no particular value.
Vibeke’s delight at these objects, which might be a satin bow or a lace handkerchief or a little box of mother-of-pearl, touches him profoundly. To live (as he did with Kirsten for so long) with a companion who seemed never ever satisfied with anything except those commodities which had cost too much, for which the sacrifice—in money or in honour—had always been too great, now strikes him as a fearful thing. And so he hardens his heart still further against Kirsten, proceeding with the divorce and deciding, although the warm weather has not yet arrived, to return to Rosenborg, so that there, in the palace he built for Kirsten and which in his mind has always been synonymous with her name, Vibeke Kruse can replace her as his wife.
He summons Jens Ingemann and tells him to prepare the orchestra for a return to Copenhagen.
Ingemann bows, nods and then asks quietly: “Are we to be in the cellar again, Sir?”
“Of course you are to be in the cellar!” barks the King. “How else is the magical music to be achieved?”
“No. There is no other way . . .”
“And I wish the spring and summer to be filled with songs! Start practising pieces that are lively and gay, Herr Ingemann. No more sad ayres. Let Pasquier send to France for the latest dances.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Ingemann is getting old, the King reflects. Perhaps the damp and cold in the cellar give him rheumatism or catarrh? But this cannot be helped. The hidden music of the Danish court is a source of wonder to all who come to Rosenborg and wonder is a fugitive thing. Ingemann is about to leave, when the King calls him back and says: “One other thing, Musikmeister. If I am not wrong, something has happened to Peter Claire. He has moments of abstraction. What might
be the cause of these?”
Jens Ingemann replies that he cannot say, that the English musicians have always been unfathomable to him and that this one is no exception.
It is in the King’s mind to send for Peter Claire, when a letter from his nephew, King Charles I of England, is put into his hands.
Courteous and affectionate, this letter is nevertheless a teasing document. It offers King Christian the considerable sum of one hundred thousand pounds to help Your Majesty in your continuing poverty since the wars, but upon one condition. King Charles requests the return to England, on perpetual loan or pawning to us, of your excellent lutenist by the name of Claire. It gives no explanation, no embellishment to this request. It simply states that the money will be brought to Denmark upon my having sight of Claire here at Whitehall and looks forward to hearing the sweet solo sound he is reputed to make upon the lute.
King Christian sends immediately for the English Ambassador, Sir Mark Langton Smythe. “Ambassador,” he asks, “how has this idea come into His Majesty’s mind? Did you put it there when you were in London?”
The Ambassador replies that he only mentioned in passing the sweet sound of the lute player, thinking it to be of no account, and was surprised to find the King “so struck on the instant with the idea of having him at Whitehall.”
The King sighs. “You must understand,” he says, “that I cannot let him go. When I was born, it was prophesied that this year, 1630, would be the most dangerous of my life. I may not survive it. But I believe that I should keep about me each and every person who assists and does not impede my progression through the days. And Peter Claire is one such.”