by Rose Tremain
“In what condition is this man?” I asked.
“Babbling, Madam,” said the Coachman, “and in a Delirium, for he was hit about the neck and all his possessions taken from him, including his Instrument. But we took him up and set him in the coach with Samuel and Emmanuel, and they say that they talked to him in their language and brought down Spirits from the clouds to help to make him well.”
Peter Claire.
There is blood in his fair hair. His blue eyes are closed. His body, which was cold when he was brought in, now seems to be heating up to a great Fever.
For him to die would inconvenience me, for who knows if some would not say that I had killed him? Moreover, now that I have him here, captive entirely, I also hold Emilia’s Destiny in my hands and can do Any Thing it might please me to do to be revenged upon her.
Her absence, I confess, does weigh heavily on me, and when I sit alone by my fire I remember what a sweet Companion she was to me, one who—thought 1—would do whatever I asked. But then I understood that Emilia did not truly Love Me and this thought makes me so furious that I can imagine beating her head against the wall. And why should this Girl, who only pretended affection for me and did not really feel it, be given some Marvellous Future with a handsome husband, when I have lost everything that was ever mine and may never see my Lover again as long as I live?
I order that compresses be laid on the brow of the Lutenist and a little blood let from his arm, to lessen the fever, and it is not very long before he returns to consciousness. He stares at me, wondering, I dare say, by what means he was transported here.
Then he looks around his room, craning his neck up from the pillow, as if to see whether his beloved is lurking like a grey hen under the chest or behind the curtains. And so I say straight away: “Emilia is not here. She left me. For there was a Great Quarrel between us, and therefore in truth I have no idea where she is gone.” “I must find her . . .” says Mr. Claire weakly.
“Well,” I say, “I did hear some rumour that she was married and had gone away to Germany, but rumours in Jutland are like the wind, always whispering down our chimneys and through the cracks in our walls, so who knows whether this is true or no?” Then it is as if my words have brought about a sudden Pain in the lute player’s ear. He covers it with his hand and cries out, and because I am almost tempted to feel pity for him, I swiftly go out of the room, saying I will send the Doctor to him.
To cure me of my tender feelings I take up the King’s letters, knowing how they will put me into a fine Rage. And they do not disappoint me in this respect. For I see from them how the King’s heart has hardened itself against me so cruelly that no vestige of his former affection (not even the name “Mousie”) appears to remain, and though he has sent me my Slaves he declares that this is the last thing that he shall ever do for me and that, even against my Will, I shall be divorced from him so that he can take Vibeke as his new Wife.
That Vibeke Kruse, with her fat arse and her clumping ivory teeth, should take my place and be Almost Queen of Denmark is a Thing so Mortifying that I declare I shall never recover from the knowledge of it! What I imagined when I left was the King pining for me and sighing for ever over the loss of his Only Mouse. But it is not so. And so I conclude that there is Nothing in this world that has Absolutely and of Itself the power to endure.
I go to Vibeke’s former room, where Samuel and Emmanuel wait for me. I tell them that if they know the route to any Other Universe, then I should like to fly there on soft wings of blackest hue.
On the first day of May, Pastor Erik Hansen returns to the Tilsen house.
He had intended to wait until high summer before taking further his suit to Emilia, but now he knows that, in a short space of time, he has become accustomed to think of Emilia as his future wife and that therefore the gap between what is and what should be has grown intolerably wide. Disappointed that God took from him his first wife (whom he had loved very well), Hansen prays not to be cast out from happiness a second time.
To Johann Tilsen he confides that he will not demand any dowry for Emilia, that he will take her just as she is. He says: “I know that I am not a handsome man. I know that Emilia might prefer a husband with more hair on his head. But my very baldness she can take as proof of my honesty; for could I not cover it with a hat if I chose? And again, if she could see into my heart, I do think she would find there sentiments which might be described as handsome.”
Johann looks at Erik Hansen. There is a touching plainness—or even colourlessness—about him, as though he had always lived in a landscape within which he had to remain concealed. His small eyes are bright and restless, his gestures eloquent. He appears in all respects what he is: a man who has glimpsed—beyond the featureless land where he has resided—a future more enticing than any he had previously seen.
“Emilia has told me,” says Johann, “that she does not at present wish to marry. But she gives me no reasons, so we may perhaps assume that there are none—none specific that she can articulate— and that the ‘wish’ is no more than an indeterminate feeling.”
“Or else it may be allied to her desire to keep house here for you and to take care of Marcus and Ulla ...”
“No. I do not think it is that. I believe this disinclination has been part of her nature since her mother died, and it has never occurred to her to fight against it.”
Pastor Hansen presses his white hands ardently together.
“I beg you, Johann,” he says, “ask her to fight against it now! I
would do everything a man can do to make Emilia happy. She would have servants enough and I would not burden her too heavily with church work, and she would have a little parlour room which was my wife’s and would be hers entirely. This parlour is at present painted green, but if this colour did not please Emilia, why then—”
“You need say nothing more, Herr Hansen, for I am quite in favour of it,” Johann announces.
“And you will speak to her?”
“Why do you not speak to her yourself?”
“Oh, no. I cannot. I am too agitated. I wouldn’t know when to pause or cease. I might come out with a sermon . . .”
Emilia knows that Erik Hansen has returned. She sees his horse and hears his voice. She knows that it will not be long before she is summoned to her father and the wearisome question of this preacher’s attachment to her once again laid before her.
She finds it all repulsive, fearful. It cannot be endured. She wishes there were no such thing as marriage. She wishes she were old and grey, and could be left alone.
She puts on her cloak and runs out of the house. Though the spring chill persists day after day in the northerly wind, there is sunshine falling on the fruit fields as Emilia crosses them and makes for the forest, where the beech trees are at last putting forth their showers of green.
She wants the forest to hide her. She would like to become small and ghostly, as Marcus once was—become so insubstantial that no man would ever again think of her as having any bodily existence.
She makes her way to the tree where she found the buried clock and sits down under it, wrapping the cloak round her so that she becomes a shapeless form, and begins to weep. Her weeping is silent. Such song as the birds are making goes on uninterrupted. Near her feet, a vole scuffles in the old dry leaves.
Show courage, Emilia.
Karen’s voice now returns to Emilia in all its clarity, so real and near that it is just as if Karen were suddenly standing in the wood, looking down at her. And so she raises her head and looks up, then, feeling the sun on her face, tilts it and stares at the beech canopy which is still fragile as lace, with its glories to come. And it is in this contemplation of the arching trees, this patterning of the sky that speaks of spring and revival and all things returning and continuing, that Emilia at last understands what it is that her mother has always been trying to say.
Karen has never been talking about the kind of courage that has to be shown towards everyday worldly ma
tters. She is not now, for instance, urging her daughter to show fortitude in the face of this new destiny as the wife of Erik Hansen. On the contrary, Karen alone has understood why this is impossible and why it cannot be allowed to happen.
If Karen bided her time, not calling too loudly but waiting to see whether what was begun at Rosenborg might lead to any beautiful future, then this is further proof of the message she was trying to give. For only Karen, among all the people that Emilia knows, understands fully why a human life led without love is not worth living. And so she will not allow her daughter to live it.
Karen is saying to Emilia: “Show the courage to come to me, to wherever it is that I am. Have the faith to know that I will be here when you arrive, that ever since I left you I have always been waiting for you.”
Karen’s nearness now is such that Emilia stops weeping and finds herself filled with a strange lightness of heart, an excitement almost, a feeling of pleasure and relief such as people feel when they have searched for something through great tracts of time and come upon it at last in their own orchard.
Show courage, Emilia!
Why did she not hear what was being said sooner than this? But now it is so miraculously clear to her, it is as though it were written down everywhere in the forest and etched in the pattern of beech leaves against the sky.
She will not be the wife of a preacher.
She will not grow old running her father’s house and being a mother to Magdalena’s child.
She will join Karen. It will be she, at last, and not the clock, who lies under the green canopy of the beech trees.
And it will surely be simple, in the end? It needs only the purchase of a little pot of white poison, such as Kirsten got from her apothecary. And then it will be like arriving on a frozen river all alone and skating on and finding, at the place where the river turns, her mother’s hand held out, and taking the outstretched hand and then gliding away as they always did, the two of them together, arm in arm . . .
Later, when she gets home, she is summoned by her father.
“Emilia,” says Johann, “I have given thought to the matter of Herr Hansen’s proposal and I think that it is a good one. You believe now that you do not wish to marry, but examine your heart a little more minutely. I am sure there is a comer of it which would prefer to ...”
“Prefer to . . .?”
“Capitulate. You have struggled against me for so long and I think you are weary of it.”
Emilia goes to her father, who looks older now than he did when Magdalena first came into the house, and places a soft kiss on his cheek. “I will do whatever you ask,” she says.
He holds her to him, his eldest child, who still reminds him of his first wife and even smells like her and has the same laugh. “Good,” he says. “Then let me tell Herr Hansen that before the summer is over, you and he will be married. A June wedding would be fine, would it not?”
A June wedding. She sees the forest in her mind’s eye: she wears some gossamer dress; she is lying under the canopy, which is a darker, deeper green, and her corpse is in shadow, from the ribbons in her hair to her shoes of white satin. A few leaves, disturbed by pigeons, come drifting and floating down on her body like rose petals scattered by the wedding guests . . .
“I will think about it,” says Emilia. “I will think about a June wedding.”
“Well, do not ‘think about it’ too long. Herr Hansen is an honourable man, Emilia. And when you are married, why then your own life will begin.”
How strange, thinks Emilia afterwards, that this is what my father said—that my life would begin. How perverse people are in their thoughtless optimism. Only Karen sees everything clearly. Only Karen understands that the thing begun is going nowhere at all, but returning to the place where it first started.
This is the time that it will always tell.
“SOME LONG WAY NORTH OF HERE"
Peter Claire stares at the room.
Resting his body, down the whole length of it, where it aches and sweats, he is grateful to be in a bed with a warm coverlet, with the coming and going of servants who bring him refreshing cordials and morsels of food he cannot eat. He knows that, left out on the road where he fell, he would be dead by now.
But he is Kirsten’s prisoner.
She has told him as much, laughing all the while. Too weak to move, to protest, he is at the mercy of her whims and desires, whatever these may turn out to be.
She visits him every day, sweeping into the room, smelling of some pungent spice, and laying her cool white hand on his forehead. “Exceptional!” she says of his continuing fever. “If they sent you spinning round the earth, you would glow like a comet, Mr. Claire!” When she leaves, she turns the key in the lock behind her.
He dreams of Emilia. Here at Boller, in the place where he thought he would find her, she returns to him as the dead return, confined to pathetic gestures of sadness or reproach, an insubstantial spirit who pales and fades with the coming of the light. And the idea that she might, in fact, be dead brings to him such a feeling of horror that he covers his face with his hands and finds himself praying: “Let anything in the world happen, but not this.” For he is still moving towards her. This is what, in the depths of his fevered brain, he feels he is doing. The loss of his lute, the theft of his money and of the King’s button bag, the pains in his body, his incarceration at Boiler: these things constitute an interlude in his search for her. Somehow he will recover sufficiently to resume it.
But where is he to go? He knows her father’s house is in Jutland and he asks Kirsten how near it is to Boller.
“Oh,” she replies, “some long way north of here. I don’t know precisely where. But anyway, I don’t think she is there, Mr. Claire. Rumour had it that she was married, as I told you, and gone into Germany. Perhaps she is a little mother by now? She used to have a chicken for a pet, you know!”
He replies that he knows only too well, that he can never forget the sight of Gerda nesting in her room. And then he wants to say to Kirsten: Why did you hide my letters from her? What spite in you used innocent Emilia in your schemes of bribery? Do you not know how rare is love, that you could trample on it so? But he keeps silent. Kirsten shelters him in his weakness and now is not the time to find himself put out into the cold.
A doctor has dressed the wound on his neck and put his nose very close to the ear which now causes the lutenist almost constant torment and from which his hearing has almost gone. The doctor informs Peter Claire that he can smell something which he does not like. “Tell me what it is,” says Peter Claire, but the doctor replies that he does not know but will try to “flush it out, Sir, flush it clean away.”
Into the ear the doctor pours hot oil of cloves. It bubbles like a cauldron in the lute player’s head and he cries out as his world begins to go dark. Then the cauldron settles to a manageable simmer and the doctor prods the ear with a reed and, as he withdraws it, remarks upon a gob of pus on the end of it. “Some foul infection you have, Sir,” he says triumphantly. “Very choleric in appearance. I will consult my books as to how I shall make it yield.”
The loss of the King’s button bag begins to torment Peter Claire. To have stayed for so long at King Christian’s side and now to find himself without any single possession by which he can be remembered strikes him as wretched. Already, during the voyage of the Sankt Nicolai, he had begun to form the habit of putting his hand into the bag and letting the buttons cascade through his fingers. This fingering of the buttons was oddly consoling. To feel how the precious and the valueless lost themselves in each other to form something else, upon which it was impossible to put any price, made him smile with pleasure. He determined that he would never travel without the bag, that this gift would be a constant reminder of the King who had mistaken him for an angel and who had always striven (despite every set-back and every disaster) to understand in what currency human happiness resided.
He remembers the stars over the N umedal; he remembers the so
ngs played in the King’s chamber as the dawn came up; he remembers the concerts in the summer-house, the half-told tales of Bror Brorson, the immoderate drinking and feasting, the weighing of silver, the discussions concerning Descartes’s cogito, concerning the power of the sea, concerning betrayal and the obstinacy of hope.
And he understands that whatever his future holds, nothing in it will resemble his time with the King of Denmark. He thinks that, if it were not for Emilia, he would ask Kirsten to send him back to Copenhagen, where he would try to persuade His Majesty to despatch another of the musicians to the English court in return for the money promised. And then happily—if a lute could be found for him—would he go down to the cellar and play, in the knowledge that the man who listened up above, with his sad face, his faulty digestion and his bursting heart, was one of the few on this earth who understood the importance of music in human affairs.
But he cannot go back. While the tearing goes on and on inside his ear and his body’s heat is such that he feels himself becoming thin as a reed among the pillows and bolsters, he is trying to assemble a plan. But what plan can a man make without money and possessions? He lacked the means of all persuasion. Surely, one of the servants might know where Emilia was to be found, but how was that knowledge to be obtained? And how, when he had no coat to put on his back and no horse to ride, could he travel the length and breadth of Jutland, or even make the journey to Germany?
Then, at last, he remembers his trunk. The captain of the Sankt Nicolai promised to send this onwards to Boller. In it are clothes and books, some silver boot buckles, a dressing mirror, sheets of music—a hundred small artefacts susceptible to barter. And so he waits patiently, immersed in his feverish dreaming, for the trunk to arrive, while the doctor wraps his ear in a poultice of buttercup root and he fancies he hears in the night a wild wailing coming from somewhere within the house.