Gertrude and Claudius Read online

  Gerutha had remained the chief, tyrannically single topic of their delight because no brother or sister followed, as if a door had slammed shut in Ona’s womb. Within three years Rorik’s queen was dead, taking with her into silence her midnight cries of release from that captivity of concupiscence which Eve’s curious sin has laid upon mankind, and into silence also the soft Wendish syllables whose unemphatic mispronunciation of guttural Danish delighted him as much as any missaying of their daughter’s. Ona’s fingertips had been chilly, he remembered, and yet even Gerutha’s scalp, chalk-white in its parting, tasted of warmth. Whatever harsh or happy fate in this life befell her, she had been born of love.

  Rorik was entertaining his daughter within a small timber-floored and wainscoted oriel room recently built to adjoin the King’s bedroom, in this perpetually revised old castle of Elsinore. Lozenges of red afternoon sun lay on the broad planks of oiled fir, making good the designation of “solar” for these upper chambers devoted to private residence within a castle. The room’s shallow fireplace sported a plastered hood, in the most modern and efficient fashion. The luxury of a brocaded arras softened the stone wall facing the three-arched, two-pillared window and its view of the gray-green Sund that separated Zealand from Skåne. Skåne, which the Sweathlanders coveted, was a Danish domain, with Halland and Blekinge to the east, and to the west Jutland and Fyn, and to the south the islands of Lolland, Falster, and Møn. To keep intact such a realm, scattered and jagged like the broken earthenware of a dish just fallen to the floor, took all a king’s strength and cunning; accordingly, each new monarch ascended the throne through election by the provincial lords and, since the advent of Christianity, the great prelates. The inheritance rights of royal blood were diluted in Denmark by the ancient democracy of the (singular and plural) thing, the assemblies of freedmen that judged and governed the affairs of each locality and, above that, of the province. A king needed election by the four provincial thing, assembled at Viborg. These traditions enclosed the castle inhabitants as adamantly as the multiple walls themselves, the accreted keep, barbican, gatehouses, battlements, towers, barracks, kitchens, stairways, garderobes, and chapel.

  The chapel had seemed to the child Gerutha a doomed lost place, reached only after traversing in her freezing slippered feet the length of the great hall and a gallery and several small sets of stairs at an angle—an unheated high-roofed room smelling of a spicy incense that scratched her nose, and of the clamminess of disuse, and of the unwashed bodies of the holy men who in their robes shuffled through the service, lifting the circular pale wafer toward the circular white-glazed window high above the altar (so that she thought of the Eucharist as eating sky) while Latin was being chanted unintelligibly. Being in the chapel frightened her, as if her young body were a sin, to be avenged some day, pierced from underneath even as she sipped the rasping wine, the caustic blood of Christ, from the jewel-beknobbed chalice. The chill, the Latin, the fusty smells made her feel accused; her natural warmth felt chastened.

  Horwendil came from Jutland to pursue his suit. In acknowledgment of services rendered the throne, Rorik had bestowed upon him and his brother adjoining manors two hours’ ride inland. That of Feng was the lesser, with but ninety thralls, though the brothers had shared risk and hardship equally along the coasts of Norway and Sweathland. Feng was younger by a mere eighteen months, shorter by an inch or two, and darker and slighter. He seldom came to Elsinore, and spent much time in German lands, soldiering and spying for the Emperor, though the spying was given the name of diplomacy. He had an easy way with languages and also had served the King of France, whose province of Normandy had once been a Danish domain, in the heroic days before King Gorm, when every Dane was an adventurer. Feng’s free lance had even taken him even farther south, across those Pyrenees on whose other side a dry, hot, and bare land was besieged by infidels who wielded curved swords from the backs of long-boned steeds that flew like birds.

  Feng had not wed, though like Horwendil he was drawing near the age of thirty. Younger brothers, Gerutha thought, are like daughters in that no one takes them quite as seriously as they desire. Why had Feng failed to marry, when his dark-eyed, watchful demeanor bespoke longing? His eyes, it had seemed to her some years ago, when he and Horwendil had freshly come to Zealand to claim her father’s gratitude, had dwelt upon her with more than the passing interest an adult bestows upon a lively child. But she found it difficult to think of one man while another was upon her, and Horwendil was upon her, looming in his burgundy cloak and his shirt of mail, the fine iron links glinting like ripples in moonlight. He had brought her a present, two pied linnets in a withy cage, one black with white dabs and the other, the female, duller, paler with dark dabs. Whenever the captive birds fell silent, he would give the cage a shake and in alarm the poor things would run through their song again, a warbled cascade that always ended in a sharp upturn, like a human question.

  “Some day soon, Gerutha, you too shall sing of mated happiness,” he promised her.

  “I am not sure it is of happiness they sing. They may be crying out at their imprisonment. Birds may have as many moods as we, and but one fixed tune to express them.”

  “And what is your mood, pretty one? I do not quite hear you warble of our betrothal, which has been declared by your father, blessed by mine from beyond the grave, and applauded by every living Dane who wishes to see our race enriched by the merger of valor and beauty, the latter protected by the might of the former.” He spoke these rehearsed phrases steadily but softly, testingly, a gleam of teasing in his long eye, whose iris was so pale as to seem more mineral than organic.

  Gerutha said sharply, “I must suppose your figure of speech pertains to you and me. But I already enjoy, my lord, the protection of my father’s might, and believe that what you flatter me by calling beauty, possessed later rather than sooner, might ripen to my benefit and to that of my eventual consort.” She went on, taking courage from his presumption of having all the valor between them, “There is no fault I can lay on you, the model warrior by all accounts—the slayer of poor Koll with all due pagan courtesies, and then the unfortunate female Sela. You are an accomplished raider, leading your rabble to the happy slaughter of scarcely armed fisherfolk and monks quite naked save for their prayers. I find, as I say, no fault in your brave person, but in your approach to me, from on high, through the old sympathy of our fathers, I feel something of the pat and coldly expedient. I am just yesterday a girl, sir, and put forward my girlish qualms blushingly.”

  He had to laugh at that, as Rorik had laughed at her impudence earlier—a confident laugh, already possessive, exposing short, neat, efficient teeth. His rough pleasure quickened her blood with a pulse anticipatory of her being, her qualms crushed, thoroughly his. Was this the self-abdicating delight her nurses and serving women had already experienced and absorbed?—the complacence of the submissive prey, the female pressed into the mattress and basted like a spitted chicken between the fires of the nursery and of the kitchen. Gerutha as a ripening girl had pricked her ears at the tone of rank and torpid luxury with which women mated high or low spoke of the absent, omnipresent man, the “he” whose bulk intervened between their bodies and the universe. These women had grown sodden in having their lower parts cherished.

  “You protest too much,” Horwendil told her, with a dismissive tolerance of her resistance that affected her like an embrace. She shivered in the arms of this large man’s arrogance. He had an ardor for her that, even though cooled by calculation, was warm enough; his being was so much greater than hers that a fraction of his will overthrew all of hers. Bored with standing in the great hall, where she had received him, he slouched a buttock onto a trestle table waiting for its supper linen. “You are no girl,” he told her. “Your frame is stately and ready to serve nature. Nor am I fit to wait longer. My next birthday will finish my third decade. It is time I showed the world an heir, in proof of God’s favor. Sweet Gerutha, what displeases you about me? You are like this cage,
in which a full-feathered wifeliness beats to escape. Without immodesty, I tell you my person has been admired, my brow considered noble. I am an honest man, hard to those that defy me but tender with those that profess fealty. Our alliance is desired on all sides, and nowhere more than in my heart.” There was a glitter and clatter of fine links as he put his wide hand, callous from holding a sword hilt, upon his chest in demonstration—the broad chest which, in the popular account, he had daringly exposed to King Koll’s point, an opportunity the Norwegian’s years had slowed his seizing of by a fatal second. Horwendil was baring his chest again; she was stirred with a kind of pity toward her suitor, so defenselessly persuaded of his own merits.

  She said impulsively, as if indeed trying to break from a cage, “Oh, if I could but feel that, and hear your heart make its vows! But you seem to come to me conveniently, out of a general political will more than a personal desire.” He had removed his helmet and his curls were fair as poplar shavings, a dazzling tumble to his mailed shoulders. She took a step toward him, and he leaned forward as if to give up his perch on the table. “You must forgive me,” she told him. “I am awkward. I lack instruction. My mother died when I was three. I was raised by servants and those women my father had about him for other reasons than to nurture his lonely daughter. I felt a mother’s absence cruelly. Perhaps it is unfeeling nature itself I protest against—if I do protest at all.”

  “How can we not protest?” Horwendil said to her, impulsive in turn. “Sent from the abode of angels to live on this earth among beasts and filth, and sentenced to death in a misery of foreknowing!” He had ceased slouching and stood close before her, a full head taller, his chest broader than her embroidery loom, his underjaw sparkling with pale bristles whose half-scraped state bespoke a hurried, apprehensive morning; he had mounted early to ride two hours to press his suit. A certain broad softness in him, this Nordic beau ideal, showed least becomingly in the double-chinned underside of his jaw, and Gerutha wondered whether she, when they were wed, might tease him into growing a beard, such as her father wore.

  Of what he had said, she liked the sudden warmth, but something in the sense of it troubled her: his vehemence confessed an otherworldly scorn and disregard hidden until now behind a warrior’s stoic front—a bitter drop in the juices of his youth. He was not even in this moment of confiding focused on her: he saw her as part of a brocade, a bride of silver threads, rather than as a statue, a stone angel or painted wooden Mary, with a weight akin to a man’s.

  Now, brought near to her in the course of his spontaneous disavowal of the world—of any world but the one he was determinedly making—Horwendil embraced Gerutha, and yet did not stoop to a kiss, merely bringing his taut, decided lips close to her eyes while his hands, clasped at her back, locked her against him. She struggled a bit, writhing, but the jingle of her girdle bells recalled her to the absurdity of resistance, in the witness of those in attendance upon this interview—her handmaiden, Herda; Horwendil’s squire, Svend; the castle guards posed motionless against the hall’s stone walls, beneath the great oak rafters—ghosts of the forest from whose anciently painted and carved forms hung tattered, faded banners won in battle by Danish monarchs long since entombed within history. She felt caught in the stillness of a patterned weave, her thumping heart flattened among its threads. Only the little finches, the pied linnets, stirred, emitting in their hungry rotation, perch to cage floor to perch again, broken phrases or peeps of song. She rested her pounding head and flushed face on the cool iron mesh of Horwendil’s chest, and a linnet loosed a long riband of melody cinched by a blissful tightening within Gerutha’s ribs. There was no escape. This man, this fate, was hers. Like a tightly swaddled baby, she was secure.

  Yet even now, at the fought-for moment of her surrender, her suitor thought of others. “They feed on the seeds of flax and hemp,” Horwendil said, of the birds. “Linseeds. Any seeds coarser, they fall sick in protest.” She tipped up her face to remind him who she was, and he quizzically brushed the knuckles of one hard hand against her cheek, where his mail had gouged in red the gridded impression of its links.

  • • •

  Horwendil the Jute was in the main gentle, as he had promised, and rueful and preoccupied to a brutal degree he did not—she said to herself, needing to think kindly of him—realize. Their wedding took place in the white depths of winter, when the affairs of war and harvest slept, allowing the crown’s guests to travel a week and abide at Elsinore for two. The ceremony consumed a lengthy day, from her dawn ablutions and a cleansing mass administered by the Bishop of Roskilde to the uproarious feast at whose climax the guests were feeding, as best Gerutha could tell through her bleared eyes, chairs and stools to the great hall’s two roaring blazes, in opposite round-arched fireplaces. Flames leaped like tormented men; smoke escaped the opposed flues to lay a haze above their heads. She had been weighted down with so many necklaces of hammered gold and precious stones and such a stiff wealth of velvet and brocade that the nape of her neck and the small of her back ached. Enough dancing and wine had freed her body to an animal heedlessness. She was now seventeen; she moved through the flicker of firelight and the touch of damp hands, male and female in the chain dances, slithering hands greasy from the feast, while the players of lute and recorder and timbrel sought to press their fragile tunes through the shuffle and heave of drunken Danes. Gerutha, the music entering her bones, felt her hips swing and heard the festive bells at her waist ring and clink. Her coppery pale hair, in this last night before she must don the wife’s concealing coif in public, floated through air lit by dozens of greasy rushes diagonally thrust from the walls like bundled spears spitting fire, as if laying seige to the celebrants. In the stately procession dances, the bride and groom led; the steps were taught to them in turn by a Frankish mime with bells in his cap. Dancing was a new and clumsy thing; the Church was reluctant to pronounce that it was not a sin. And yet song and celebration were what the angels did.

  In giving his parting blessing, her father looked for the first time in her eyes feeble—his visage yellowed by the heroic intake of mead expected of a king, his frame bent under the great load of royal hospitality, his gaze rheumy or tearful in parting. Did he see her, his child now wed as he had demanded, or did he see fading from him the last living remembrance of Ona?

  A sleigh trimmed with reindeer horns and holly branches swept them from Elsinore to Horwendil’s estate, called Odinsheim. The snow dragged at the horses’ pasterns so that the two hours’ ride took half again as much, while the icy night hung on its shattered pivot above them, in a crackle of stars. An oblong moon burned on high; its reflection rode along over the bare fields stippled with stubble, the tufted glazed swamps. Gerutha drifted in and out of flickering dreams, relishing the solidity of her husband’s broad body beneath their overlapping robes of wolfskin. He talked for a time of the celebration, who was there and who not and what their presence meant in the net of noble fortunes and alliances that held Denmark precariously together. “Old Guildenstern was saying that King Fortinbras, replacing Koll in the lists of Norse ambition, has been raiding the coast of Thy, where it is most barren and least defended. The Norwegian needs a chastening, lest he seek to take Vestervig and Spøttrap, with the fertile lands of the Limfjord, and set himself up as Jutland’s true ruler.”

  There was a timbre in Horwendil’s voice, relaxed and confidently paced, an easy public copiousness of speech, which he did not evince in his preoccupied, reedy-voiced conversations with her. With her, once his suit met no more resistance, he was measured, polite, and conventionally loving, or else actually curt, as he hurried through Elsinore’s corridors on business. He had readily made himself much at home in the castle. “Your stalwart father appears no longer strong enough to lead an army, yet he remains too proud to delegate authority.”

  “He has now a son-in-law,” Gerutha drowsily murmured, “whom he esteems.” Horwendil’s wine-soaked breath bit like acid into the expanse of the starry night, the snow, th
e reflected light of the gibbous moon. The higher it rose, the smaller and harder and more brilliant it became. It looked less like a lantern than like a stone flung up into the sun’s rays from within a shadowed grove.

  “Esteem is good, but it does not transfer authority. When Fortinbras knocks, esteem cannot bar the door.”

  He waited for a reply, but there was no reply. Gerutha was asleep, returned by the motion of the sleigh to the rocking of the nursery, wherein her mother’s slim dark hand had melted on the cradle’s edge into the wrinkled claw of her ancient nurse, Marlgar, and the little princess’s dolls with their faces of stitches and charcoal lines had the presence of real persons, and names—Thora, Asgerda, Helga. In those childish fits of fancy and domineering that enact a miniature tyranny, she would send them on trips, marry them to heroes concocted of painted sticks, toss them to the floor in dramatic deaths. In her bridal dream she was with them again, in her little vaulted solar under her nurse’s eye, but they were bigger, twitching in a dance, their bodies bumping against hers with equal size, their faces giant, with bunched-cloth noses and eyes of clay beads; hungry and lonely, they wanted something from her, something they could not open their stitched mouths to name, something they and she knew she could provide, but not yet, she was begging, not yet, dear ones.…