Music & Silence

by Rose Tremain

  “Emilia?” begins Johann. “What is happening?”

  But then he stops and stares at his daughter. For it seems to him in this instant that it is not Emilia’s face that he’s seeing; it is Karen’s face. It is Karen’s face looking up at him as she looked up on the day of her wedding.

  And perhaps Ingmar and Wilhelm and the other boys see this too, this sudden resemblance to Karen, for all of them are quiet, as though brought under a sudden spell, while Emilia and Peter Claire explain to them how each believed that love was lost, but that it was not lost after all, and the last of the afternoon sun shines through the window onto Emilia’s hair, making it seem more fair than dark.

  In the night, Marcus wakes his sister and says: “The voice is trapped in Peter Claire’s ear.”

  Emilia doesn’t question her brother. She lights a candle and together she and Marcus go to the room where Erik Hansen was lodged when he came wooing and where Peter Claire now lies with the window half open upon the summer night.

  They kneel by the bed, and Peter Claire takes Emilia’s hand, and it is Marcus who unwinds the bandage from around the Englishman’s head.

  Now that the coverings are gone, Marcus can hear the voice much louder than before and he thinks it is a voice in agony, a trapped voice, the kind of voice a creature would have if it were chained to a cot in a harness all alone in the darkness.

  He puts his ear to Peter Claire’s ear and listens. Now he can hear a tearing sound, as though the creature were biting the harness, trying to sink its teeth into the leather straps.

  He sees the wounded man tighten his grip on Emilia’s hand. And Marcus understands that there is no time to be lost. He lays his hands on Peter Claire’s shoulders and puts his mouth very close to the ear and begins to whisper into it.

  The musician can at first only feel the boy’s breath on his cheek, but then he becomes aware of a minute sound, wordless, the faintest pianissimo sending an almost musical reverberation into his head.

  The three stay absolutely still, heads close together, as though a secret were being passed around and around.

  After some moments Marcus stops, listens again. His face is pale, even in the warm candle-light, and there is sweat on his lip. “Deep . . .” he murmurs. “Lost . . . But I shall keep calling . . .”

  Now the sounds Marcus makes are louder. “I have found it!” he says at last. “It has heard me!”

  And what Peter Claire begins to hear is a commotion like the bubbling of a river, and out along the current of this river the slippery, shiny body of an earwig is carried and falls into Marcus’s mouth.

  Marcus feels it land on his tongue, the creature trapped in the dark, trying to eat its way out, the creature nobody could see and nobody could hear except him. He reaches up and calmly takes it out of his lips and holds it in his palm for the others to see.

  There is blood on its carapace. Its gossamer antennae search the air for direction and light. Emilia and Peter Claire stare at it in amazement and wonder. Then Marcus moves to the window and holds out his arm. “Earwig,” he says, “go out into the night.” And when it has crawled away, he turns to the lutenist. “Your wound will heal now,” he says.

  But Peter Claire barely has time to thank him, for straight away Marcus lies down where he is on the hard floor and falls asleep, like a child who has spent his night walking miles and miles under the moon.

  Emilia takes a blanket from the bed and covers him, but she cannot bring herself to leave the room. She tells herself that she must watch over Marcus and the lutenist agrees; Marcus Tilsen, worker of the strangest wonders, must be watched over until morning.

  And so Peter Claire and Emilia lie down side by side on the bed and wait for the coming of the dawn. He tells her that when they are married they will travel to England and sail into Harwich, where his father and mother long for his return. He says the chestnut trees will be in bloom in the lane that leads to the church of St. Benedict the Healer. He says: “There is a last sea journey to be made, Emilia, but I know we shall arrive.”

  The chestnut candle flowers are blooming now as George Middleton travels in an open carriage towards his wedding. Looking at these heavy white flowers, at the green gloves of leaves, he thinks how, year upon year, in their exaggerated show, these trees have seemed to invite some response from him and how he has never found one. But he has it at last. To Colonel Robert Hetherington, his best man, who rides with him in the carriage, he says: “Well, Hethers, the simple answer is Yes.”

  Colonel Hetherington is about to inquire what this floating “Yes” is attached to, but decides not to bother. All men are a little peculiar on their wedding day and George Middleton, formerly so dependable, so entirely at home as the bachelor of Cookham, has proved to be an utter fool for love. Not only does he tell a story about being restored to life by the placing of a cabbage on his stomach by his fiancée, he calls her “Daisy,” when her name is Charlotte, he has spent more money redecorating her boudoir than restocking his woods with game, he has said that no one in the world makes him laugh more than she and, for her sake, once summoned a troupe of thieving Romany Gypsies to play at his soiree. Eventually, thinks Hetherington, he will revert to what he was, but, for the time being, George Middleton is quite mad.

  If George Middleton could know to what extent Colonel Hetherington mocks him he would not greatly care. He would willingly admit that lovers are foolish and that the world, which pants so relentlessly after amusement, loves to make buffoons of them and see them toppled from their clouds and fall to earth, like Icarus, with an ungainly splash.

  But like all who believe themselves enamoured, he imagines that his love for Charlotte Claire will last for ever. Marriage, he thinks, is not an end but a beginning. Still to come are the thousand nights of rumpled tomfoolery with Daisy, the hundred summer picnics at Cookham, where, round and round the green lawns, first a clutch of elegant baby carriages will be wheeled and then, as time passes, children’s voices will begin to be heard calling in the Nor-

  folk air: boys running after ball and hoop, girls tangling their petticoats with skipping ropes . . .

  George Middleton can see all these things as clearly as though they had already happened. As the carriage draws up outside the church of St. Benedict and he shakes the hands of the cluster of friends waiting for him, he is wearing on his round face a smile of such ridiculousness that one of the group, Sir Lawrence de Vere (recently married, himself, to a widowed Italian Countess, now pregnant with her fifth child), bursts out laughing and says: “I am glad to see you find it funny, Middleton, for of course it is!”

  And then, in the shadowy church, cool in its body of stone, there is Charlotte, lifting the veil from her face and turning towards her “dearest George.” Invited by her father to take up his bride’s hand, George Middleton seizes it almost roughly in his desire to press it to his lips and a noise like a cry escapes from him, a noise no one (not even he) has ever heard him make before. He sees Hetherington turn worriedly towards him, and even Charlotte, who is seldom surprised by any word or exclamation of his, casts him a look of shock. And he thinks, God only knows exactly what that was, but it felt like my heart shouting.

  Some weeks later, describing the wedding to Charlotte’s brother Peter and his wife Emilia, both George and Charlotte will say that they remember little of the ceremony itself—only this peculiar noise which George made and which has never been heard since.

  But they remember walking out into the May sunshine, where the guests showered them with flower petals, and how, at this moment, a breeze sprang up and the drifts of falling blossoms from the chestnut trees were blown onto them too and joined the soft cascades of the thrown flowers.

  Each to each, they recall it: “Do you remember, George . . . Do you remember, Daisy ... it felt as though we were walking through scented snow?”

  A LETTER FROM KING CHRISTIAN IV OF DENMARK TO KING CHARLES I OF ENGLAND

  To my dear Nephew,

  Today arrives in a Span
ish chest the one hundred thousand pounds in gold so kindly given to me by Your Majesty in exchange for my lutenist, and I send you the deep gratitude of a loyal uncle.

  While I admit that I have found no satisfactory replacement for the lute player and that, in consequence, the harmonies made by my orchestra seem to me less sweet than once they did, I nevertheless wish you joy of him and pray that, if any trouble come to Your Majesty, his playing may temper your anxiety or soothe your sorrow—just as it sometimes did for me.

  And I shall admit, I did like Peter Claire very much, not only for his playing but for that he reminded me of my childhood, when I thought that angels would fill my shoes with gold and when my friend Bror Brorson rode with me in the forest of Frederiksborg.

  Yet let me say at once that this very good sum of money brings more consolation to me than you can imagine, so that my head is straight away boiling with new schemes and plans for my continuing restoration of Denmark to her former glories and beyond.

  And I shall describe to you which scheme I love the most. It is my plan for a great observatory to be built here in Copenhagen.

  It was suggested to me by my wife, Vibeke. She said: “Oh, why do you not build a tower, higher than anything that stands hereabouts, and put at its top a large telescope, so that we may go there together to regard the unchanging order of the heavens and listen to the music of the stars and discover for ourselves how the moon comes by its brightness?”

  I said: “Of course these are the things we long for, to comprehend what the moon may be and to hear the one sound from which chaos is absent, which is the sound of the universe itself. Yet, Vibeke, imagine all the stairs that we shall have to climb to reach the summit of such a place! I am too old and fat for so many stairs!”

  But Vibeke declared that she too had a detestation of stairs and was not thinking about any stair whatsoever, but was dreaming of a fine curving carriageway, moving upwards, round and round, but gradually, so that horses and carriages could ascend it, and we ride in comfort in those carriages and are brought without any effort to the very top.

  And it was then, my dear Charles, that I remembered how my first wife, Anna Catherine, had once asked me to make this very same thing, this internal pathway to the heavens, and how I had tried with all my might and main to get it built, but how the designers could never arrive at a plan by which it could be safely held up and endure the passing of time.

  But time has moved on, and with it man’s cunning and skill.

  Today, I have been informed by my architects (who are Danish men of ingenuity) that if the central pillar be of sufficient strength, then there is no reason why such a masterpiece could not be built and endure. And so I have commanded that new sketches be made and all the new mathematics of the scheme be put in hand.

  And when at last this tower is completed, then I think people shall come from all over the world to see it and to note how, in Denmark, we build structures that have nothing of shoddiness or weakness in any part of them.

  When I was a child, the astronomer Tycho Brahe prophesied that this year 1630 would be a year of danger for me and that I might not survive it. And, I shall admit, there are some dark nights—when my digestion plagues me with its old pains—when I almost feel that death might creep unseen into my room.

  But yet not many such moments. And rather, it steals upon me that what I have endured in recent years, both in the wars and in the battles with my former wife Kirsten, was a true trial of my strength and my will, and now this time of misery is replaced by a time of grace.

  History teaches us that all such feelings of good fortune should be treated with suspicion and are but interludes: brief moments between one winter and the next, between the wars that are past and all the wars yet to come.

  But Vibeke tells me that I should not torment myself with this observation, but rather go forward as if this cessation of sorrow were destined to endure through a fine variety of changing seasons. And I do think that she is right.

  I do not know how long it shall take to build my observatory. But when it is finished you shall visit us here, and with Vibeke and your Queen we shall ride to the top of the tower and there dine upon the sky—upon the dusk the colour of blueberries and upon the full moon, like a sweet round pot of cream.

  From your affectionate uncle,

  Christian IV

  Rosenborg, September 1630

  KIRSTEN: FROM HER PRIVATE PAPERS Last night I had a dream.

  I was standing in the pew of a Church. Some Choir was singing, but I paid little attention to the Music. All that I could feel and know through every pore and hair of my Being was the gaze of my lover Otto, which, from the opposite Pew, fell upon the white skin of my neck and on my milky breasts above the lace of my russet gown. And what I felt was such Wonder at my own Power over this man that I thought I would fall down in a faint.

  But only then did it come upon me in the dream that the man was not Otto, the gaze was not his: it was the King’s. And so I woke myself in horror. For I saw that I had confounded one Love with Another, so that the two were indistinguishable, each from each.

  And therefore where, I ask, is any Truth or any Absolutely Known Thing in all the Universe, if two feelings held in Implacable Opposition in my heart (the one of Yearning and the Other of Loathing) can merge and become one and the same in this dream of mine?

  Can it be that Time unfolds upon us such a Relay of Wonders that they constantly overtake each other in our Memories? Or is it, rather, that those things we termed “Wondrous” never were any such thing, neither the first Wonder nor the second, nor Any Thing which came afterwards, and all that we veritably inhabit is Fold upon Fold of Desolation?

  I know not the answer to this. They say that Music, to reach into a Human Soul, depends upon Expectation born of Memory— that certain notes will follow in sequence after certain others—and so we hear the thing we call Melody flowing through Time. And if Memory be faulty—as I do think mine must certainly be—then we shall remain all our lives Indifferent to Music.

  I am not merely Indifferent to Music; I detest it.

  When I was at Rosenborg, if the Orchestra was playing beneath us and the King left our State rooms on some Matter of Business, why then I would walk immediately to the trapdoor, through which the droning sounds of strings and flutes came surging up the ducts and pipes, and with my vengeful foot kick it shut.

  And so I imagined with great Relish and Satisfaction that with the downward draught of the heavy closing trap the candles set upon the music stands in the cellar would be blown out and the foolish Musicians would find themselves, on the instant, in silence and darkness. And I would smile.

  But I do also see that this Fault or Weakness within my Memory may be the Thing which leads me perpetually into a very lamentable Confusion. And I feel this Confusion spread to all Things upon the Earth, so that that which was once Inimical to my soul is confounded with all that dazzled it and I know not where to go or what to seek after, nor whither my Life is headed.

  All I can do is to return to my Boys, Samuel and Emmanuel. They are the Children of Spirits and not tethered by any Expectation to this Loathsome World.

  I take their hands in mine, the Black upon the White and the White upon the Black, and I say to them: “Give me the Wings of Angels, the Wings of Demons. Lift me up and let me fly.”

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Part One: Copenhagen, 1629

  Part Two: Frederiksborg and Jutland, 1629-1630

  Part Three: Silent Spring, 1630

 

 

 
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