by Rose Tremain
Langton Smythe gives the King a supercilious look, the weary look of the English rationalist who does not (or pretends that he does not) hold with distant prophecies and clumsy superstition.
“Dare I say,” he says, “that large sums of money are likely to afford greater protection to you than a solitary lute player?”
King Christian ponders this, looking out of the window, where the sky is grey, where the lilac buds refuse to open, and says at last: “My nephew Charles has married a French wife and is disposed towards a Frenchified style. Why do we not offer him Pasquier?”
The Ambassador shakes his head. “I had the impression that he had set his heart upon Claire.”
“Then I am in a dilemma.” The King sighs.
Later that night, he asks Peter Claire to come and play for him and Vibeke.
Vibeke smiles all the while, showing her ivory teeth, and Peter Claire ascertains that she is a woman of little beauty, yet King Christian’s restlessness appears miraculously calmed by her presence.
He embarks upon a love-song—the first he has dared to play since the departure of Kirsten. He notes that as the sentimental words come pouring out, the King reaches quietly for Vibeke’s hand.
As the music ends and Vibeke retires, he is about to take his leave, when the King invites him to sit down beside him. With his habitual intensity, Christian examines Peter Claire’s features. Then the King says: “There is something the matter, Mr. Claire. Shall you tell me what it is?”
If Peter Claire longs to confide in someone, to describe the sudden and inexplicable silences and the tearing pain in his ear, which afflict him without warning and during which he feels himself to be excluded not merely from any future in which he can be happy but from the world in its entirety, he nevertheless decides that to admit these things to the King is impossible. For what sensible man would continue to employ a musician who may be in the process of losing his hearing? “There is nothing the matter, Sir,” he says. “Merely . . .”
“Merely?”
“I am sometimes haunted by ... It is sometimes borne in upon me . . . that I have neglected certain people who—"
“You mean your family in England?"
“Yes. But not only—"
“They write you letters begging you to go back for your sister’s wedding, is that it?"
“Yes."
“I understand that you should want to go to England. Why do you not ask your sister to postpone her marriage until . . ."
“Until, Sir?"
“Until ... I have become sure that I no longer need you."
Peter Claire leaves then and the King goes into his bedchamber, where Vibeke waits, with her hair in thick plaits, rubbing oil of cloves onto her gums.
As they part, both men reflect upon all that might have been said in this recent conversation and yet was not said; and this knowledge of what so often exists in the silences between words both haunts them and makes them marvel at the teasing complexity of all human discourse.
ALEXANDER
He arrives at dusk, up the same road that Herr Gade, the King’s representative, travelled with his meagre cargo of chickens and cloth.
His eyes are yellow and red, infected by the bitter cold and deprivation he has survived, and by all that he has seen on his journey through Russia. He stinks like the devil.
It is not Ratty Møller, this time, who is the first to see him. But the minute the people catch sight of him in the village, draped about with tom furs and with his hands bandaged, they guess who he is and lead him to Møller’s house. For any such person, they firmly believe, is Ratty Møller’s responsibility, not theirs. And all they can do is to wait to see whether Møller, with the few words of Russian he had managed to teach himself, can make sense of him.
His name is Alexander.
Møller banks up his fire, sits him beside it and takes the bandages from his hands, from which three fingers are missing, and cleans them and calls the doctor to examine him. Pus oozes from his eyes and down his cheeks into his thick beard. He has no word of any language except Russian and in Russian he cries out—for the pain of his eyes and his frost-bitten hands, and for the loss of his friends and fellow engineers who had started out with him from the Sayan Mountains and who did not survive.
The people of the Isfoss resign themselves to waiting. Will Alexander live or die? Will one solitary engineer have the knowledge required to reopen the mine? Will that knowledge remain tantalisingly locked away inside him because he has no way of explaining it?
Møller, who has to care for him, who is woken in the nights by his screaming, tells the people that he believes Alexander will not recover. His body is wasted. On a slate, the Russian draws pictures of dogs lying in the snow, of men hacking the flesh off the dogs and eating it. Among his few possessions is a silver cross, which he lays on his lips before he sleeps.
The preacher asks the people to bring whatever food they can spare, to trap birds in the forests so that he can make a nourishing broth of sparrows. The doctor mixes a paste of mercury to lay on his eyes.
Alexander’s furs are taken away to be washed in the river and sewn together again. He is wrapped in clean linen, and as Møller performs this task he thinks how strangely the Russian’s body and his thin face and dark beard resemble those of the Christ of his own imaginings. And so he begins to pray ardently for the man’s recovery. That a kind of resurrection—one that would make good all the sacrifices made in the name of the silver mine—might take place there in his own house fills Ratty Møller with a sudden hectic excitement.
As the days pass, Alexander does become a little stronger. He is able to walk to the window of Møller’s room and look out at the road. Yet the sight of the road seems to afflict him and the preacher gradually understands that it is not the road itself but the absence on it of his lost companions which torments him. Tears are mingled with the putrefaction that still leaches out of his eyes. He will smite his own head and his chest, and babble out his sorrows in an incoherent language Møller has no hope of understanding. And there seems to be a question hidden somewhere in all this.
“Tell me,” Møller is able to ask in Russian. “Tell me what it is.” Then Alexander will sometimes kneel at Møller’s feet and even place his head on the stones of the floor, but all that Møller can comprehend is the Russian’s agony of spirit.
One day, Alexander takes up the slate again and draws another picture of flesh being eaten. He turns the slate round and shows the picture to Møller. And the preacher who has struggled for so long to save the villagers of the Isfoss by bringing back the silver mine stares at this picture in horror. But then his look softens to one of pity, for now he has understood—on this cold April day in the year 1630—that the limit of that struggle has been reached. He lays his hand on Alexander’s head.
Gently, with the help of the doctor, Møller leads the Russian to the church, where the sole thing of beauty and value is an oil painting of a crucifixion on the rounded ceiling. And Alexander, no longer weeping or crying out, kneels under this and Møller calls upon God to “forgive His servant Alexander for the means he had to use to stay alive and grant him rest.”
Soon after this, Møller calls a meeting of all the people in the village of the Isfoss.
He addresses them gravely. He reminds them that before the discovery of the silver in their beloved mountains they were content. He says that he has come to believe at last, after what
Alexander has suffered, that the price already paid for the continuation of the mine is too high and that nothing more should be undertaken in regard to it. He says that certain dreams and longings can bring forth more suffering than they could ever cure. He says that it is now his opinion that the mouth of the mine should be sealed for ever and “any tree that will cling to the rock” be planted there, so that a generation from now no one will know, except by the graves round about, that anything was ever discovered there.
As the people begin to murmur and complain, as Ratty Møll
er knew they would, he says: “Consider now what the mine is. You will say that the mine is a stocked larder, the mine is a suit of fine clothes, the mine is the return of the King, the mine is companionship and revelry, the mine is music played under the stars. But since when was it these things?”
A shout of protest goes up. “It was these things!” insist the villagers of the Isfoss. “The moment of the mine was the greatest time we have ever lived through. And it will come again! It must come again!”
“This is exactly what I believed,” says Møller calmly. “I lived from day to day in expectation of the moment when the mine would be reopened. But I was wrong to do so. We were all wrong.” The people mumble crossly among themselves. Then they ask: “What about Alexander? If today he is strong enough to walk to the church, then tomorrow he will be strong enough to start work, and by the time the weather is warmer—”
“No,” says Møller. “I tell you that Alexander has done everything a man can do and he can do no more.”
Still the people call out that Alexander is their last hope and that Ratty Møller has no right to deprive them of hope.
“I give myself that right,” says Møller, still calm and unmoved by the shouting. “To weigh this man down with your longings for something that he cannot undertake is a cruelty and a sin, and I tell you we shall not commit it.”
There is an uneasy silence while the villagers, sensing Møller’s implacability, consider what he has said. They mutter among themselves: “What is the Rat talking about?” “Who gave Ratty the power to decide the fate of the mine?”
And then they shout it out: “By whose authority do you crush our ambition? By the King’s? You’re a poor preacher, no better than any one of us.”
“I agree,” says Møller, “certainly no better than any one of you. Much more culpable than you. For I was the one who wrote to the King! Remember that and never forget it. The mine would be slowly fading from your hearts, from your memories, by this time, and we would be returning to what we once were, if it had not been for my intervention. And I apologise to you for keeping alive this false hope. I ask your forgiveness.”
When the meeting breaks up there is no agreement, no resolution. Feelings against Ratty Møller, as he makes his way back to his house at the apex of the hill, run high. He does not know how much or for how long he will have to suffer for what he now believes is right. All he knows is that he has not erred in this judgement. And when he sees Alexander, alive still, but with all his terrors and regrets held locked in his own language, and thus deprived of any true friendship and understanding, he tells him that he will not give way, that in this house the engineer can struggle to live or decide to die, just as he pleases, but that nothing more on earth will be asked of him.
“A LITTLE GOLD, A VERY LITTLE . . ."
Ellen Marsvin finds the former Woman of the Torso engaged on a homely task: she is mending a tear in the King’s night-shirt.
“Vibeke,” Ellen sighs. “You really must now put from you the habit of mind of a serviteuse. Let some washerwoman do this lowly task of sewing. You are to be the King’s companion, not his maid.”
Vibeke nods, but she doesn’t put away the shirt, only spreads it out on her knee and caresses the soft fabric tenderly with her hands. “To mend the shirt gives me pleasure,” she says. “So I shall mend it and that is that.”
“No,” says Ellen sternly, “that is not that. For in mending nightshirts and performing menial chores of this ilk, you will little by little become degraded again in the King’s mind to a mere woman, and this was not the aim and object of the plan.”
Vibeke raises a hand to her lips. “Fru Marsvin,” she says, “pray don’t make any more allusion to any plan. For when I think that . . . when I remember that ... all these things might be perceived as mere schemes, I feel so ashamed ...”
“What in the world can you mean, Vibeke?” asks Ellen. “For you know full well that a scheme is precisely what it was. And Good Lord but it has been a long time a-hatching and has entailed enormous expense—dresses and writing lessons and teeth—and even, I dare say, suffering on both our parts, and—”
“I know it,” replies Vibeke, “but now I would like to unknow it.” “How peculiar you are! When there was never a plan that was so marvellously laid, so magnificently brought to fruition . . .” “Please stop!” says Vibeke. “Please do as I ask and never more mention any word that has about it the idea of cunning and calculation. For if it may have been these things which began it, it is not these things which carry it on. That the King should discover our scheming would be a sorrow such as I could not bear.”
Going nearer to Vibeke and whispering, Ellen continues: “Whether he discovers it or not is up to you. It depends upon how well you are now able to play your part, Vibeke.”
At which statement, a tear escapes from one of Vibeke’s round blue eyes and begins to meander down her cheek. “It is not a part,” she says sadly. “I thought it would be, but I was wrong.” And she picks up the King’s shirt again and holds it to her face. “He is good to me and I know that I make him happy, after all his sufferings with your daughter. And I would do anytaing for him, anything in this world . . .”
Ellen is silent for a moment, watching more tears roll down Vibeke’s face, to be wiped away by the night-shirt. Then she begins to laugh. “Well, well, indeed, Vibeke, I don’t quite know what to say.”
“Say nothing, then!” says Vibeke passionately. “There is no need.”
Ellen is still smiling to herself as she takes her leave of King Christian and orders her coachman to drive her to Kronborg.
Although Dowager Queen Sofie always detested Kirsten, or perhaps because she detested Kirsten no more and no less than Ellen detested her, and because she and Ellen Marsvin have always seen eye to eye in their belief that the King had to be managed if the women were to have lives they could bear to lead, she still regards the younger woman as an important ally. And when Ellen is announced at Kronborg, Queen Sofie goes down and greets her warmly.
The samovar is brought and the heavy curtains drawn against the darkening afternoon, and the two women sit listening to the sighs and gurgles of the samovar, and amusing themselves by chopping lemons into half-moons and star shapes, and setting them floating on their tea.
The servants are sent away and Ellen talks and tells the marvellous story of the plan, beginning at the very beginning, with the day when she decided to take Vibeke into her household at Boller and ending with the words she has recently heard from Vibeke’s own mouth on the subject of devotion.
And Queen Sofie listens intently, congratulating Ellen from time to time “upon understanding so perfectly the importance of small matters, such as calligraphy,” and eventually, when the story is concluded, pouring herself yet more tea and saying: “Now, at last, things shall go on better with my son, Fru Marsvin. I feel it will be so. And I shall be left in peace. And I tell you, my mind is much soothed by this, for you know the recent times have been very hard to bear, with the King sending men here and coming himself to search my vaults. There is nothing in them, of course. But it was once put about that I was accumulating treasure here ...”
“Oh, yes,” says Ellen. “I think it was my daughter who put it about. But she could never ever distinguish between truth and falsehood, not even to herself.”
“Of course, I have a little gold, a very little. No woman should embark upon old age without something ... in the case of emergencies. ”
“I agree,” says Ellen. “How wise you are.”
“I am, am I not? For even the mother of a king, in these restless times . . .”
“Yes, no. Exceptionally wise. And you must yield up nothing.” Then Ellen lets a long sigh, a deeper more mournful sigh than any produced by the samovar, escape from her and says: “You know, Your Highness, that all I possessed is at Boller. And now my daughter has turned me out of my home and usurped my furniture and my pictures, and I do not really know what is to become of me.” Queen Sofi
e appears shocked. “Oh, my dear,” she says, “how very fearful. How could this possibly have happened?”
“I do not know. I suppose that everything moves in a circular way. The King threw Kirsten out, and with good reason, and so where can she go but to me? And because she is still the King’s wife, she can do almost anything she pleases—or fancies she can. And thus I am homeless. Even my cellar filled with jam made by my own hands is commandeered . . .”
Queen Sofie looks aghast at this accumulation of horror upon horror. “Oh, dear!” she says. “Oh, especially the jam! Fru Marsvin, we shall act immediately. I was about to say that I will despatch men to put your daughter out of Boller, but instantaneously a better plan comes into my mind. Why do we not merely send for the jam and for such possessions as you dearly love, and house you henceforth here with me at Kronborg? I live very simply. I eat fish from the Sound. But perhaps you will not mind this, for I do not deny that I am often lonely ...”
Ellen Marsvin protests just enough at this show of generosity to convince the Dowager Queen that she really is doing her ally the greatest of favours, but then agrees to everything that is suggested, and the two women sit back contentedly and listen to the breakers, lifted by the rising wind, beginning to batter the Kronborg shore.
“There will be storms, no doubt,” says Queen Sofie after a while, “but here we shall be safe. Here, we can keep an eye on everything that happens.”
And Ellen Marsvin agrees.
With the death of Magdalena, once her body has been taken away and laid in the ground, a feeling of calm descends upon the Tilsen house.
It is, thinks Johann, as though we have all gone through a peculiar illness, an infectious fever which agitated us, almost killed us, and now the fever has abated and we are convalescing. We are still fragile (Wilhelm and I, especially). We tire easily. We do not ride out as frequently as we used to do. We talk quietly at mealtimes. But we know that the fever will not return and that in time we shall be completely well again.