Читать книгу Nightcap and Plume - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 5

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The King sat alone, the admirable M. Beylon, the royal Reader, had come with books, volumes of Catullus printed in Venice, from the royal library, and gone; the King was supposed to be writing verses, little odes, graceful and impertinent as butter flies, for the charming ladies who surrounded the Queen—the Queen, he had never come closer to her than the circle of her outstretched fan; she had been forced on him, on his parents, by the odious tyranny of the Diet. He loathed Denmark—the Northern Alliance it was to have been, to balance England against the Bourbons of France and Spain, Gustaf distrusted England, in everything he turned to France. The Queen was so quiet, the Queen, Sophia Magdalena, pretty, very dull and timid, he would have been sorry for her, even though his mother had skilfully trained him to hate her, had it not been for her brother. Kristian VII was insane, his English spouse had made a show of him before all Europe, putting a man of the people, the vulgar Stuensee, in his bed, on his throne. And now they had fallen, at the masquerade, the account of it lay in the letters under the King's hand. Struensee, after the bal paré, in rose pink silk and sables, fainting, cursing, thrust away to an icy cell, chained, she, in her bed chamber, seized by soldiers, as, in her night attire she tried to hurl herself from the window, dragged off, half naked, with her nursing child, Struensee's child, to prison.

Gustaf remembered her with disgust when, against his will he had visited Copenhagen; she had received him wearing male attire, Struensee had played the host, the wittol imbecile King had wept and raved in the background, the household was slothful, sluttish, bankrupt, the adulterers had leered and grinned, alone in her dignity was the Queen Dowager, stepmother to Kristian, and she had, as Toll had reminded him, purged the foul court. Gustaf shuddered; Struensee had been beheaded, a few days ago, the Queen cast off in utter disgrace; even her brother, the King of Great Britain, could not save her and from this tainted house of Oldenburg, that of the enemy Denmark, had come Sophia Magdalena, blonde as silver, too, as her wretched sister-in-law.

Gustaf tried to turn his thoughts, he had great concerns of his own to deal with, this stranger, that now, a man coming to tell him he knew this most perilous secret, the lives of all his friends hung by a hair. Yet he must think of that English queen—she had been fifteen years of age when she had reached Denmark, wearing a bloom coloured gown with white flowers, pale as moonshine, that had been near the time of his own wretched marriage, wretchedly celebrated, with saddle clothes on the walls of the makeshift ball room at Helsingfors and the old coaches that had been sent for firewood, brought back, without furnishing, to serve again—six years ago and still he could not look at her without thinking of those shabby expedients of the penurious government, of the forced marriage into a lunatic family. What poor policy that had been! The miserable union had done nothing to unite the rival branches of the House of Holstein. Denmark was resolutely his enemy still, all her designs directed against him; he should have married as his mother had wished, a Princess of her own determined, bold and brilliant race, that also of the Queen who had dared to overthrow Struensee. But Gustaf recalled how he had tried to placate his mother in favour of the sad little Dane— "She is rather pretty, not beautiful as you are, I can never love her as I love you—one can be kind, I entreat you to send me an affectionate word to encourage her."

It had never come. Ulrica Lovisa, so fascinating, admired, dominant and jealous had had no compassion for her son's despised wife, she had caught at the report of his first words to his bride—"Take care!" as he had assisted her from her coach step at Helsingfors, and Ulrica Lovisa had played sharp variations on this theme, in letters and by speech. "Take care, Madame! Do not coquette, do not stare, do not be awkward, do not be envious, do not be impudent!" The warnings were no more than sneers; spied upon and isolated, timid and de pressed, the young Queen moved among those who had no sympathy with her lack of wit and spirit. Only her husband was sometimes disturbed by her sorry position, as now. This stranger, Toll, who, formidable and downright as a messenger of the gods, had been an inspiration by his very dangerous bluntness and his self assured confidence, had spoken of Prince Karl's infatuation for Fersen's niece, Aurora. So much this Johan Toll knew then, too much; he meant that Karl might blab the secret of the re volt to a girl of eighteen years who would betray it to her uncle, Fersen, the enemy. Gustaf's delicate and fantastic mind viewed this prospect obliquely—a fair confidante, above the menace of Fate, the menacing chords, the soothing appeal, the sweet melody of the woman's love and prayer. If he, the King, was to go to her, the Queen, and say— "I hazard all to save Sweden, to save myself, the country from being a vassal of Russia, myself from playing the weakling before the world, will you stand by me?"

As all subtle people, he liked direct and unexpected action, both for its own sake, and because in him, it was always suspect; since no one ever believed he could be simple, simplicity served him very well as a card to play, sometimes it had been the only one in his hand. Therefore this thought appealed to him, but he rejected it, she was too overshadowed by the spectre of the maniac brother, by the dissolute Queen of Denmark, now awaiting her doom, by the plebeian blood of Struensee, freshly shed on the scaffold.

He listened for the knocks; not to-day, then, not to-day, the masquerade would be prolonged, more games and balls and dramas, more frolics and laughter, while underneath the dangerous intrigues went on; he recalled the royalist plot of sixteen years before, engineered by his mother and some royalists—men the stamp of the Sprengtporten and this Toll, to assert the Royal authority; it had failed, leaving the King weak, helpless, contemptible, the rebels had been tortured and beheaded.

Gustaf shrank, most from the thought of the torture, if this plot failed, he would not live to know his followers were being mangled on the rack or wheel.

His body chilled in the elegant chamber he had furnished with so accomplished a taste, blue, green, shades of Northern skies and oceans, mountain pines and seaweeds, adorned with the flowers that bloomed soon after the snows dissolved, those blossoms that might have been gathered in Hyperboreous, the fabled land beyond the Frozen Pole, beyond the scourge of the East wind.

The stranger had warned him of Baron Pechlin—his most dangerous enemy— "And I have so many of them." He knew this, he was fooled in nothing; he had never even tried to win Karl Pechlin so well he understood the man. A soldier and a politician of various talents, of no conscience, of no party, so powerful that he was termed "King of the Riksdag," cunning, bold, cool, indifferent to money or power, caring only for intrigue and so never to be bought wholly by anyone though taking money from all; the Tzarina must have lavished fortunes on him and he would betray her whenever it amused him to do so. Gustaf himself intended to spend most of the expected French money on corruption in the Diet, but he did not intend to offer a dollar to Fersen or Pechlin, the Count was too honest an opponent, the Baron too base. The King closed his brilliant blue eyes, and without that uncommon light, an azure that astonished beneath the mobile brows, his face had a still look, as if he suffered a secret wound in silence.

Soon he must ring for candles, go lightly to the supper table, distribute his papers of verses; the ladies would not recognize his paraphrases of Catullus, but there were a few moments yet.

The roses were no more than a trellis across the window, the sun was sinking behind the granite rocks, the dark pine forests, the broad blue lakes of Stockholm, behind the Riddarsholm Church with the tombs of Kings and heroes, of the women who had shared their thrones, their destinies, perhaps their secrets, the corded, tasselled drums, the fringed standards, and faded banners, the wooden horsemen, blue-armoured in the dusk, the shot riddled coats, buff military jerkins, not satin garments, strewn with silk flowers. The women intruded on the King's reflections, his mother, Ulrica Lovisa, sister of the great King of Prussia, who had educated him with such passionate pains, whose jealous love was always about him like an acrid incense, yet whom he would not trust with his secret, the shrinking wife, whose light hazel eyes sometimes turned on him a glance of resigned despair, Aurora Lowenhjelm, hoping to marry Prince Karl but in the enemy's ranks, Caroline Matilda, travelling now to Zelle where another woman who should have been a Queen lay buried after a long captivity, Caroline Matilda's great grand mother, Sophia Dorothea, better not to think of her, and her mad Swedish lover, murdered, too. If the orchestra played the Iphigénie overture to-night Gustaf would picture their phantoms, the madmen, the wanton women, the sacrifice of youth and beauty—for what?

The two dowager Queens of Denmark—he saw them, too, they were known to be admirable, they upheld what he prized above life, majesty, honour, decorum, dignity, the regal power, but they were ambitious, contriving, without compassion. These crowding shadows of women must be dispersed when he was so deeply engaged in the affairs of men; he sighed and his lids fluttered as he unlocked and pulled open a drawer in the desk; her letters must be re-read until the next came; on top of the packet lay a case of white velvet; had he unclasped it he could not have discerned the features of the miniature, only the sparkle of the cold emeralds with which he had edged the oval, he did not need to stare at her painted likeness, nor to read her memorials sent with such secrecy, under feigned names, to safe addresses—The Hague, Amsterdam, Berlin, and so brought by a banker's courier, or a merchant's traveller to an agent in Stockholm.

Gustaf caressed the smooth paper; a friend had penned them to her dedication, only, here and there on the margin of the gilt edged sheets she had added some hurried sentences to emphasize the text. These epistles that so powerfully moved the man who laid delicate fingers on the covers, the seals, the superscriptions that he might once again touch what she had touched, did not deal with love, but he loved the writer and she loved him in a fashion neither his mother nor his wife could have understood; it was a passion that might have aroused ridicule among the stupid, amazement among the wise. What he held was a closely reasoned political treatise, expressing the noblest, most enthusiastic, romantic and generous sentiments possible to the human heart and mind. She knew his secret, she applauded his enterprise, she admired him, as she admired abstract courage, honour, chivalry. He would save Sweden, he would be a monarch who would satisfy the new faith, the new hope of mankind, without her ardent encouragement, perhaps he could not have undertaken this mighty enterprise.

He had been in her loge at the opera house, when the messenger, riding post from Stockholm to Paris, had come to tell him that his father was dead and he was King; she had turned to him, the rich pearls of the House of Egmont about her frailty, like tears on a lily and had whispered—"now."

He had understood her; the moment had come for him to put into practice the burning compassion for enslaved mankind they had professed together, the doctrines of Voltaire, Rousseau, the brave, bold schemes that were in the air for the betterment of humanity, the casting off of chains, the opening of dungeon doors, the unmasking of clerical hypocrisy, of political corruption—"now."

It had meant leaving her, perhaps he would never see her again; when he had left Paris a year and a half before this eve of his crowning she had retired from her dazzling existence of great lady, great beauty, and since lived in retreat with Madame des Mesmes, indifferent to the apathy, the sneers of Versailles, as she had been indifferent to luxury, to flattery, to pomp. She had dared to be chaste, to treat her narrow, scintillating world as a comedy to be smiled aside, to think, to feel for those beyond the palace gates, she had pleased the fastidious taste of Gustaf even more than had the other fashionable women who sent him reports from France. She had never been a coquette and now all frivolities displeased her; in these formal letters ad dressed "Your Majesty" she wrote of what the ideal ruler might be, and shrewdly, with expert insight as became the daughter of the Marèchal duc de Richelieu, the heiress of the Guises, and the wife of the first noble of the Spanish Netherlands.

The King locked up his treasures; it was possible he would disappoint her eager pride in him, if the shot or the steel was for him, she would not flinch from fate, nor would he as he fell, yet neither believed in any other life, religion to them was superstition, stoicism and humanism sufficed their idealism. "The last farewell" he thought, rising in the dusk that filled the room with an even blue grey gloom as if the waters without the palace had risen and overwhelmed it; there was one secret that Toll did not know, the secret of Jeanne d'Egmont...the money, the money, if that did not arrive within a few days, it might indeed be too late for her to see her noble designs fulfilled; she was languishing, close to death.

He walked across the darkened floor to the vase of flowers, lilac, flowers and leaf, white tulip, white rose, and round the bouquet a tinsel ribbon, those of the new Vasa order, her colours, he always wore them, a knot of green, lilac, silver, was in his buttonhole.

Two knocks on the door; the King waited; the good Elis entered; the French plenipotentiary had arrived, bruised with rough travelling, he had made excuses for to-day. "And I can take none," said Gustaf. "Leave the formalities, yes—we under stand one another very well. To-night, after supper, I shall inspect the opera house—ask M. de Vergennes to accompany me."

When he was alone again he turned restlessly about the dim chamber, putting his hand in his deep pocket where lay a small white glove..."If Vergennes has not brought the money."