by Rose Tremain
The days pass. The sun at the lute player’s window rises a little earlier each morning and is almost warm, now, on the glass. The root poultice lowers his fever just enough so that he can walk about the room.
He looks out of the window. He sees that all the beech trees in the park now offer to the wind branches heavy with green leaf, and this sighting of the spring in its flowering returns to him his sense of time: time beckoning him towards England; time taking Emilia further and further away . . .
When Kirsten visits him, he inquires after his trunk.
“Trunk?” she asks. “What trunk?”
“Sent here from the ship . . .”
“You expect such a thing to arrive? Have you not learned that there is no honesty on this earth, Mr. Claire? The contents of your precious trunk will long ago have been divided out, in the very port where you docked—or else, by some arithmetic that one cannot fathom, despatched to Turkey or even to the Caspian Sea! I should forget it if I were you.”
Her laughter is as her laughter always was—loud and vibrant. He looks at her standing by the bed, her eyes very large in her white face, her abundant hair held up by a silver comb. He remembers the King saying: “To plead with Kirsten is futile. Only if you have something she wants will she yield.”
“I regret the trunk,” he says, “for there are documents in it that might be of interest to you.”
“What documents?”
He watches her face. He sees her nose quiver for a moment, like a mouse smelling cheese.
“Those you once asked me to obtain—pertaining to the King’s finances.”
She hurls herself away from the bedside, taking out the comb to let her hair fall down her back, then gathering it up again in her hands. When she turns back to him she says: “The time for such an exchange has gone, Mr. Claire. Alas that it is so, but it is. Nothing in your trunk is of any value to me—and besides, I do believe you are lying. If you had anything worth talking about you would have whetted my appetite with it long before now.”
She goes out, letting the door bang, then closing it with the key. The lute player ponders the notion that those who most unerringly detect lies in others are very often liars themselves and wonders what edifices of untruth Kirsten has built around Emilia. To see beyond Kirsten’s constructions, he knows he must escape from Boller, but he cannot see, at present, how this is to be done.
He gets up unsteadily and walks again to the window, and looks at the sky, which is a blue so pale it is almost not blue, and at the feathery beeches fretting in the wind, and at the drop to the ground beneath the stone sill which seems too featureless and too steep even to dream of.
KIRSTEN: FROM HER PRIVATE PAPERS
I find myself turning the word SLAVE over and over in my mind.
There are people in Denmark who protest that the taking of Natives from Africa to work upon Cotton plantations on Tortuga, or to ship them as Ornaments to the Courts of Europe, is sinful; and so I think it is, for why should these people, because they are helpless, be made to travel away from their homes against their will and have wigs put on their heads or be scourged with a whip to gather the sticky puff-heads of cotton under a merciless sun? They might surely prefer to be left in peace, to sit in a Catalpa Tree or stroke a monkey or chew some magical root or just to be and not find themselves entirely at the mercy of Another’s Whim?
But then I reflect that, because the word SLAVE is applied uniquely to them and to them only, an Injustice is thereby being perpetrated towards other groupings, categories and congregations of people. For surely the condition of Slavery is spread through and through our Society, except that it is not termed Slavery: it is termed Duty. And chiefest among those who live in a condition of Bondage and yet call their bonds by sweet names such as Fidelity and Hope are Women. For are we not owned—as Drudges or Ornaments or a combination of both—by our Fathers and Husbands? Do we not labour and bring forth children and get no reward for this except the reward of the mewling child itself, which is no reward at all? Might we not as well pick cotton in the heat of midday as lie on our backs with our legs spread open to the branding iron? What wages have we deserved in all our terrible work and pain of the bed alone, and never got?
These thoughts, which on occasion in the course of my Life have made my blood boil with Fury, are now most useful to me, for manifestly they contain more than a grain of Truth and so they ease my Conscience in all my dealings with my Black Boys. I embellish them further. I ask myself: “Is not the Servant (underpaid and enjoying no luxury whatever) Slave to the Master? Is not the Infant (racked by his wooden swaddling bands) Slave to Pain and Ignorance? Is not the Carriage Horse Slave to the whip? Is not the Body Slave to Mortality? Is not the bright Day Slave to the coming Night?” In each and every case, the answer is Yes. And so I see that all the world turns on a Prevailing Condition of Slavery from which there does not seem to be any escape. And this comforts me much. For, when I ask certain Things of my dear Samuel and Emmanuel, I am surely not—if my Thesis be followed to its Conclusion—committing any Wickedness whatsoever, but only being borne along on the great tides of Custom and Observance which have always and ever flooded the Earth and will do so long after I am dead and gone.
And indeed, in the matter of my Boys, it is surely I who am becoming Enslaved and they who are becoming Free, for with them lies all the power of their Magic.
They wait for me in their room (where all Vibeke’s dresses used to hang), which I have furnished with a hundred cushions, and they feast there on fruit and sweetmeats, and plump woodcock from the forests. They can weave spells by calling forth their Lwa, or Spirits, and I say to them: “Oh, my dear Children, my Beautiful Ebony Boys, my Handsome Young Stallions, do whatever you will! Do whatever it may please you to do with a woman who was Almost Queen, for truly I tell you that I am Weary of Everything in the World.”
And their eyes bulge with excitement and out of their throats come the strangest ululating sounds and songs, and their members grow so stiff that they can lift me up and I can balance my body upon them, upon their two members and upon nothing else, so that parts of me are anchored to the earth and other parts of me do seem to Float in the air. I have never experienced any such thing before, and when I float there I am in Ecstasy—more than ever I was in with Otto and his silken whips. And I know that this shall be the nearest I shall ever come to veritably Flying.
I could spend all day and all night in this room. The Magic is so strong that I never weary of the Feats we try.
To give my attention to the things of the World—such as the King’s letters and my need for money and furniture and jam, and the predicament of the English Lutenist—causes me great Irritation. I declare I am no longer interested in Any Thing which, formerly, I might have found Amusing. To have played a Game with Emilia’s would-be lover, who fell so marvellously into my net on his broken wings, would, before my Introduction into the Black Magic, have given me hour upon hour of mirth and delight. But really and truly, now I can’t be bothered with him. For what is he but a Slave to his love for Emilia? And how pathetic I do find this! I have it in mind to tell him that Emilia is Incapable of Love for Anyone except her dead Mother, but even to say this wearies me.
And so I come at last to a Resolution. I shall let the Lutenist go.
Let him find out for himself what Slavery to Love becomes! Let him see for himself what it is to be bound in Perpetuity to Another, from whom there is no escape—except in Deception and lying. Let him discover what Marriage is and how it may be a Stone chained to one’s ankles (once admired as delicate and curving in a sweet arc over a satin shoe, but now thickening and bleeding as the Chains chafe and bite) which in due time drags one down and down into the freezing darkness.
The Musician’s famous Trunk arrives at last, but I don’t even bother to ransack it to see what it contains in the way of Papers. I merely command one of the servants to take out of it a new suit of clothes and a coat, and give these to Mr. Claire and tell him tha
t he is Free.
I then order that a horse be given to him. (I do quite Draw the Line at giving him a Carriage, so he must lump what possessions he can upon the horse’s withers and think himself lucky.)
He is grown very thin indeed, so that his clothes hang poorly upon him. His head is bandaged, keeping the Poultice in place over his suppurating ear. And there is, I must admit, much human sadness in the sight of this bandage, so that I do think that, after all, it was my Kind Heart, touched by this Unexpected Pitiful Thing, and not any Nastiness or Vengeful Feelings in me on the subject of Marriage, which decided me to end Peter Claire’s Misery and lead him to his Heart’s Desire.
He is almost at the end of the drive when I open the front door of Boller and run after his horse. My hair escapes from its clip and billows about my face, half blinding me in the wind. I catch the reins of the horse and hold it still. Then, when I have recovered my
breath from my Burst of Running, I say: “She has not gone away, Mr. Claire. She is at her Father’s House. Ride east through the woods over there and you will find her.”
He gazes at me, quite stupidly, as though he cannot bring himself to believe me. And I don’t blame him, for I have told him so many falsehoods; so I smile at him and add: “I had it in mind to play a long Game with you—to its bitterest end. But I find simply that I no longer have the stomach for it. So God speed you, Peter Claire, and will you tell Emilia that, in spite of all, I have not thrown away the painted Eggs?”
THE VOICE THAT CANNOT BE HEARD
Emilia has her pot of poison now, white as snow. Unable to pay the money demanded by the apothecary, she has given him, in exchange, the only thing of value that she owned: the stopped clock. The apothecary, so accustomed to working with his scales and measures, held the clock in his hands, as if the value of all things could be measured in weight alone. Then he wound it up and shook it, and this shaking of the clock set it ticking and the hands moved on from ten minutes past seven.
Everything moves on; always, on and on.
The air has begun to smell of early summer. Erik Hansen has been told by Johann that Emilia has agreed to become his wife and keeps asking when the date of the wedding is going to be set. “Emilia will set it,” replies Johann, “as soon as she is ready.”
As soon as she is ready. As the days have passed, taking her forwards, hour by hour, towards her only destination, Emilia’s dreams and reveries of Karen have increased and Karen has moved nearer to her, always nearer, away from shadow and silence, taking on colour and substance and voice, so that now she no longer seems ghostly but just as she used to be when she was alive and lay on her day-bed in the afternoons, listening to Emilia’s songs.
Emilia settles herself there, on the floor near the day-bed. She closes her eyes. She asks Karen to give her courage. Because when she looks at the poison, she feels afraid. To imagine her own heart stopping and all the world that she knows going on without her is still a fearful thing. So she whispers to Karen: “You must help me. You must be the one to tell me when the day, the hour, has arrived . . .”
One morning, Emilia is alone in the schoolroom with Marcus. Johann and the elder boys (including Ingmar, recently returned from Copenhagen) are out working in the strawberry fields. Half completed in front of Marcus is a charcoal drawing of a striped lynx and Marcus tells Emilia that he is pleased by the way this drawing makes the animal look real. He has named the lynx “Robinson James” because, although it is there on the schoolroom table, he knows that it really lives in America and might therefore have an English name. “Robinson James,” he says to Emilia, “was in the New World before anyone knew.”
“Knew what, Marcus?”
“That the New World was there.”
Marcus talks all the time now, as though endeavouring to make up for his years of silence. Little by little, he is emerging from his locked-in world, where Despair was a village, where Beyond Despair was a wind-swept plain. His harness is a memory and that memory itself is beginning to disappear—as if the harness might never have existed and the sounds it made, the chafing and squeaking, might have come from somewhere or something else. All that separates him from what Johann calls “an absolute normality” is his stubborn, continuing ability to hear the whisperings and mutter-ings—inaudible to everyone but him—of the creatures of the fields and forests. When he lays his head on the earth it fills up with sound. He cannot let it lie there for too long, for then he feels himself begin to lose hold of his thoughts and to imagine himself perched with a starling on an elm twig or burrowing with a mole into the crumbly earth or even flying with a bee in circles above the white-currant flowers. And it is difficult to get back from these places. When he returns from them he feels as feeble and small as a glow-worm facing out the darkness with its miniature light.
Looking at Marcus’s drawing of the striped lynx, at its eyes, which in nature would be yellow and bright, Emilia understands suddenly that it is staring at her with impatience, that the world is getting weary of her procrastination, that the time has come.
She takes up Marcus’s hand and kisses it. She wants to whisper some final words to him and is considering what these words should be when she hears the sound of a horse approaching the house. Marcus hears it, too. He scrambles down from the work table and runs to the window. He tells Emilia that a man is riding into the yard.
“I hope it isn’t Pastor Hansen,” says Emilia.
“No,” says Marcus. “It is a wounded man.”
The wounded man dismounts and looks around him. Marcus sees him look up at the schoolroom window and raise a hand in a greeting, and Marcus waves back.
Emilia has not moved. She wills the stranger—whoever he may be—to turn round and ride away. She thinks: How black my heart has become, blacker than stone. Such a heart must be made to stop.
But then she hears her name called out. Her name comes echoing in from outside, from the air which was silent.
“Emilia!”
She remains absolutely still. The heat of her body increases so swiftly, violently, that she puts her hands to her face, to cool her burning cheeks.
Marcus says: “He is calling you.”
She says nothing. For what is there to say when she refuses to let hope return? Refuses utterly.
“He’s calling out, Emilia, Emilia . . .”
She will not look up or move or do anything except lay her burning face in her hands. Nothing and no one shall turn her aside from the future she has planned. Nothing and no one. Show courage, Emilia.
Marcus sees her obstinacy, her immovability. He hears the horse sigh, hears the sighing and desperation in the call of the wounded man. And so he runs out into the sunshine, to bring him in, to ask, in the voice a doctor might use towards a patient: “Would you like to see my picture of Robinson James, the striped lynx?”
And the man says: “A striped lynx with an English name?” “Yes,” says Marcus, “because he is in the New World.”
And the man replies: “I am from the Old World, but I too have an English name. I am Peter Claire.”
Emilia waits alone. She does not straighten the folds of her frock nor smooth her hair. She is still moving, moment by moment, towards her solitary bed in the forest and will not be turned aside by this, which might be only an echo, a chance resemblance to something she knows is past and gone.
And when she hears the man come into the hallway and approach the schoolroom, she feels herself trembling, that is all, just trembling a little for fear of what happens to the human heart in certain conditions, if its defences falter, if courage fails . . . but only shivering very slightly, shivering in this great surge of heat, her mind and body host to sudden contradiction . . .
Marcus leads him by the hand—as if he had known him all his life. “There is my lynx. And here is Emilia.”
Only now does she look up.
The face and body are thinner. The bandage flattens the abundant yellow hair. He carries no lute.
“Mr. Claire,” she say
s at last in a whisper. “Some hurt to your head . . .”
“No,” he replies. “My ear is damaged a little, that is all. Nothing compared with the pain of losing you. Nothing.”
Marcus now watches as the wounded Englishman crosses to Emilia, who has at last stood up, and puts his arms round her. He expects his sister to draw back from him, as she always draws back from Herr Hansen when he tries to embrace her, but she does not. She lets herself fall towards the wounded man and lays her head on his breast.
Marcus Tilsen prefers this man to Pastor Hansen, much prefers him, not just because he is tall and is far younger than the pastor, but also because what he can hear now is a voice inside the man whispering to him (to him alone, to Marcus Tilsen) as the vole and the beetle and the butterfly whisper to him on summer days, and the voice is agitated and frail. It is the first time that this has happened, that a voice has come to him from inside another person, and Marcus knows it must be important.
Marcus runs out towards the strawberry fields. The pigeons gossip in the trees; the frogs chatter from the brimming ditches.
When he finds his father, he tells him that a new husband has arrived for Emilia, a wounded husband with an English name and a voice that cannot be heard—not even by the man himself—but he, Marcus, hears it and knows that he will be able to talk to it and hear it answer.
“Marcus,” says Johann, “what in the world are you talking about? You are making no sense, boy. Slow down. Tell me again what has happened.”
But all Marcus can find to use are the words he has already said. The only witness to the arrival of Peter Claire, he has seen the truth of what this stranger is: he is Emilia’s husband. No other possibility but this exists and this is the only way he can explain it.
So all Johann Tilsen can do is to call the other boys to him, and they return together, half walking, half running, like a posse of men in pursuit of a thief. And they come clattering into the schoolroom and see Emilia and Peter Claire standing hand in hand before the fire.