The Swedish Cavalier Read online

  By the same author

  THE MARQUIS OF BO LIB AR

  LEONARDO’S JUDAS

  BY NIGHT UNDER THE STONE BRIDGE

  SAINT PETER’S SNOW

  LITTLE APPLE

  Copyright © 1980 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag G.m.b.H.

  Translation copyright © 1992 by HarperCollins Publishers and Arcade Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  FIRST NORTH AMERICAN EDITION 1993

  First published in Austria in 1936 under the title Der schwedische Reiter

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Robert Reed

  Cover illustration by Tamara de Lempicka: La Dormeuse, c. 1933. From a private collection. © 1993 by ARS, New York/SPADEM, Paris.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-885-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-506-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  Foreword

  Maria Christine, née von Tornefeld, formerly von Rantzau, subsequently married to the Danish privy councillor and envoy extraordinary Reinhold Michael von Blohme, was a much-admired beauty in her youth. Half-way through the eighteenth century, when she was in her fifties, she wrote her memoirs. This brief work, which she entitled The Colourful and Richly Populated Tapestry of My Life, did not appear in print until the beginning of the nineteenth century, several decades after her death, when one of her grandchildren published it for the benefit of a small circle of readers.

  The book was not wholly undeserving of its ambitious title, given that its author had seen a good deal of the world in turbulent times. She accompanied her second husband, the Danish ambassador, on all his travels, even to the extent of visiting Isfahan and the court of the notorious Nadir Shah. Her memoirs contain many passages of interest to the modern reader. One of the early chapters gives a graphic account of the expulsion of Protestant peasants from the archbishopric of Salzburg. In a later chapter the author relates how the copyists of Constantinople, deprived of their livelihood by the introduction of a printing press, rioted in the streets. She vividly describes the activities of the faith healers of Tallinn and the violent suppression of that fanatical religious sect. At Herculaneum, to cite her own words, she viewed the first “subterranean discoveries of statues and bas-reliefs sculpted in marble” not that she grasped the significance of the said finds–and in Paris she rode in a carriage that covered eleven-and-a-half French miles in just under two hours “without horses, solely by means of its own internal momentum.”

  Maria Christine von Blohme was acquainted with some of the leading intellectuals of her century. Crébillon the Younger, whose mistress she may briefly have been, she met at a masked ball in Paris. She conversed at great length with Voltaire during a masonic function at Lunéville and met him again in Paris some years later, on the day of his admission to the Académie. Also among her friends were a number of scientists such as René de Réaumur and Herr von Muschenbroeck, the experimental physicist who invented the Leyden jar, and there is a certain charm about the story of her encounter with “the celebrated Kapellmeister from Leipzig, Herr Bach,” whom she heard play the organ in the Heiligen-Geist-Kirche at Potsdam in May 1741.

  What makes the strongest impression on the reader, however, is that part of her memoirs in which Maria Christine von Blohme recalls the father she lost at an early age–the father whom she refers to as “the Swedish cavalier” and speaks of with rapturous, almost lyrical affection. His disappearance from her life and the singular and mysterious circumstances surrounding that tragic event cast a shadow over her girlhood.

  Maria Christine states that she first saw the light at Kleinroop, her parents’ Silesian manor house, and that all the local nobility forgathered there to celebrate her birth. She preserved only a vague recollection of her father, the “Swedish cavalier.” “He had frightening eyes,” she writes, “but, when he looked at me, it was as if the heavens had opened.”

  When she was six or a little older, her father left his estate to serve “under the baneful banner of Charles XII,” the Swedish king who was famed throughout the contemporary world. “My father came of Swedish stock,” she writes, “and all my mother’s pleas and lamentations failed to dissuade him.”

  Before he rode off, however, Maria Christine surreptitiously sewed a little sachet of salt and soil into the lining of his coat. This she did on the advice of one of his two grooms, who had commended it to her as a proven and infallible means of sealing the bond between two people for ever. More will be said of Herr von Tornefeld’s grooms at a later stage. Maria Christine relates that they taught her to swear and play the jew’s harp, but that the latter skill had been of scant use to her in adult life.

  One night some weeks after her father had gone off to join the Swedish army, the little girl was roused by a tapping on her bedroom window. Her first thought was that it must be “Herod, a kind of legendary or ghostly king” who often haunted her nightmares, but it was her father. She was unsurprised, having known that he would come perforce, compelled to do so by the salt and soil secreted in his coat.

  Whispered questions and words of endearment were exchanged. Then they both fell silent and he cupped her face between his hands. She wept a little, partly from joy at their reunion, but also because he told her that he must go away again.

  Her father stayed for barely a quarter of an hour, then vanished into the night.

  He returned, but always under cover of darkness. Sometimes she awoke even before he tapped on the window. Sometimes he would come two nights in succession, but it might be another four or five nights before he came again, and his visits never lasted longer than a quarter of an hour.

  And so it went on for months. In retrospect, Maria Christine found it hard to explain why she should have kept her father’s visits from everyone including her mother. She thought it possible that “the Swedish cavalier” had sworn her to secrecy, but she may also have feared that no one would believe her–that people would laugh her to scorn and dismiss her nocturnal experiences as dreams or figments of the imagination.

  During the very period when “the Swedish cavalier” was appearing outside Maria Christine’s window at dead of night, news of his rapid advancement within the Swedish army was transmitted by couriers from the army in Russia, who paused to change horses at Kleinroop Manor.

  His bravery had brought him to the king’s notice and earned him a captaincy in the Westgota Cavalry. He had since been appointed colonel of the Småland Dragoons. His dash and daring in that capacity had assured the Swedish forces of victory at Golskva, after which battle the king had, in the presence of the entire army, kissed him on both cheeks.

  It saddened Maria Christine’s mother that “her dearest love and confidant should not have informed her par écrit” how he was f
aring in the Swedish army. “However,” she said, “doubtless he finds it impossible, while in the field, to write so much as a single line.”

  Then came a summer’s day, a day in July, which imprinted itself for ever on little Maria Christine’s memory.

  “It was about noon,” she wrote forty years later. “We were standing in the garden, my mother and I, at the spot where a statue of a little heathen god lay toppled in the grass amid raspberry bushes and dog-roses. My mother, who wore a gown of lavender blue, was scolding the cat for having robbed a bird’s nest, but the cat sought to play with her and arched its back so comically that she could not forbear to laugh. Just then we learned that a Swedish courier was in the courtyard.

  “My mother hurried off in quest of news and did not return to the garden. Within the hour, however, all the folk on our estate were talking of a great battle at Poltava in which the Swedes had been defeated and their king put to flight. Then they told me that I was fatherless. Herr Christian van Tornefeld, my father, had fallen at the very outset of the battle, unhorsed by a musket ball, and had been buried three weeks before.

  “This I could not believe, for it was but two days since he had tapped at my window and spoken with me.

  “Late that afternoon my mother sent for me. I found her in the ‘Long Room.’ She was no longer wearing her gown of lavender blue, and I never saw her attired otherwise than in widow’s weeds from that day forward.

  “She took me in her arms and kissed me, unable to speak at first. Then she said, in a tearful voice, ‘Child, your father has fallen in the Swedish War. He will never return. Join your hands and say a Paternoster for his departed soul.’

  “I shook my head. How could I pray for my father’s soul when I knew that he was still alive? ‘He will return,’ I said.

  “My mother’s eyes filled anew with tears. ‘He will never return,’ she sobbed. ‘He is in Heaven. Now join your hands and do your filial duty: say a Paternoster for your father’s soul.’

  “Not wishing to aggravate her sorrow by disobeying her, I prayed, but not for the soul of a father who was still alive. I had caught sight of a funeral procession coming down the highroad. The coffin reposed on an open cart, and the dead man’s sole attendants were the waggoner, who was whipping his horse along, and an elderly priest.

  “It was for this poor man, who may well have been some old vagrant on his way to burial, that I said a Paternoster, entreating God to grant him eternal salvation.”

  Maria Christine von Blohme concludes her account thus: “But my father, ‘the Swedish cavalier,’ never returned. Never again did his gentle tapping rouse me from my slumbers. As to how he could have fought and fallen in the service of Sweden and, at the same time, have so often entered our garden at night and spoken with me, and why, if he had not been killed, he never returned to tap at my window, that circumstance has remained a dark, dolorous, and unfathomable mystery throughout my life.”

  What follows is the story of “the Swedish cavalier.”

  It is the story of two men who met in a farmer’s barn on a bitter winter’s day early in the year 1701. Thereafter, having struck up a friendship, they trudged on together along the highroad that led from Oppeln, through the snow-clad Silesian countryside, to Poland.

  THE SWEDISH CAVALIER

  PART ONE

  The Thief

  THEY HAD SPENT the day in hiding, but now that darkness had fallen they were making their way through a sparse pine forest. Both had good reason to steer clear of people and remain unobserved. One was a vagabond and thief who had cheated the gallows, the other a deserter.

  The thief, known locally as “the Fowl-Filcher,” endured the discomforts of their night march with ease, for he had gone cold and hungry every winter of his life. His companion, Christian von Tornefeld, was in wretched spirits. He was a year or two younger—almost a boy. The previous day, while they were lying hidden beneath a pile of rush mats in a farmhouse attic, he had boasted of his courage and fantasised about the fame and fortune in store for him, He claimed to have a cousin on his mother’s side who owned an estate in the neighbourhood. This cousin would be sure to take him in and provide him with all he needed to get him into Poland: money and clothing, arms and a horse. Once he crossed the border, all would be well. He’d had enough of serving in foreign armies. His father had left Sweden because the king’s ministers had deprived him of his crown lands and made a poor man of him, but he, Christian von Tornefeld, had always remained a Swede at heart. Where did he belong, if not in the Swedish army? He hoped to distinguish himself in the eyes of young King Charles, whom God had sent to punish the great for their perfidy. Charles had been only seventeen when he won his world-famous victory at Narva. Yes indeed, Christian von Tornefeld declared: war was a fine thing provided a man had the right brand of courage and knew how to put it to good use.

  The thief had made no comment on this. In his days as a farmhand in Pomerania he had earned eight thalers a year and been compelled to surrender six of them in taxes to the Swedish Crown. As he saw it, kings were sent to earth by the Devil, to trample and oppress the common man. He did not prick up his ears until Christian von Tornefeld began to speak of his all-powerful “arcanum,” a thing that would commend him to His Majesty’s precious and most noble person. The thief thought he knew what such an arcanum must be: a piece of sacred parchment bearing words in Latin and Hebrew that would ward off all ills. He himself had once possessed one and would carry it in his pocket when haunting fairs and markets in quest of a dishonest living, but someone had talked him into selling it for a counterfeit florin. The money was long gone and his luck had turned sour.

  Now that they were trudging through the snowy pine woods, their faces lashed by a storm wind laden with hail, Christian von Tornefeld had ceased to speak of war, his courage, and the King of Sweden. He toiled along with his head down, whimpering softly whenever he stumbled over a root. He was hungry. His only nourishment in recent days had been a few turnips and beechnuts grubbed out of the frozen ground. Even worse than his hunger, however, was the cold. Tornefeld’s cheeks resembled a deflated bagpipe, his fingers were blue and stiff, and his ears hurt terribly under the scarf wound round his head. His thoughts, as he tottered along through the blizzard, were not of his future prowess in battle but of thick gloves and boots lined with hareskin, and of a makeshift bed of deep straw and horse blankets with a warm stove very close at hand.

  It was daybreak by the time they left the forest behind them. Field, pasture and wasteland were covered with a thin layer of snow. Black grouse whirred overhead in the pallid morning light. Isolated birch trees loomed up, their branches dishevelled by the gale, and a white wall of swirling, billowing mist veiled the eastern horizon. Whatever lay beyond it—villages, farmsteads, moorland, ploughland, forest—was hidden from view.

  The thief looked about him for some place where they could lie low during the day, but there was nothing to be seen: no house, no barn, not even a ditch or sheltered spot among trees and bushes. He did, however, catch sight of something else and knelt down for a closer look.

  A patch of trampled snow and ashes showed where several horsemen had dismounted and bivouacked. From the marks left by carbine butts and entrenching tools, the thief’s practised eye deduced that the men who had warmed themselves at the fire were dragoons. Four of them had ridden north and three east.

  So a patrol had passed this way. In search of whom? Still on his knees, the thief glanced at his companion, who was sitting huddled on a milestone beside the road, shivering with cold. He looked so disconsolate that the thief knew he must say nothing about the dragoons or the youngster would lose heart completely.

  Christian von Tornefeld sensed the older man’s gaze upon him. He opened his eyes and rubbed his freezing hands.

  “What have you found in the snow?” he demanded in a fretful tone. “If you’ve found a turnip or a cabbage stalk you must share it with me—that was our agreement. Didn’t we promise to help each other and share and
share alike? Once I reach my cousin’s estate

  “I’ve found nothing, God save you,” the thief broke in. “How could I have found a turnip in a field sown with winter wheat? I wished to examine the soil, nothing more.”

  They spoke Swedish together, for the thief hailed from Pomerania and had worked as a farmhand on a Swedish landowner’s estate. He scraped away some snow and picked up a handful of earth, which he crumbled between his fingers.

  “It’s good soil,” he said as he walked on, “red soil such as God used to create Adam. It ought to yield two score bushels to every one of seed-corn.”

  The farmhand had reawakened in him. Having followed the plough as a lad, he knew how land should be treated.

  “Two score bushels,” he repeated, “but in my opinion the lord that owns this land employs a bad bailiff and neglectful farmhands. What goes on here, I ask myself? Why such wretched husbandry? They began the winter sowing far too late. Then came a frost and the harrowing had to wait. What’s more, the wheat is frozen in the soil.”

  There was no one at hand to hear. Tornefeld was shuffling along behind, groaning at every footsore step.

  “Good ploughmen and harrowers and sowers aren’t hard to come by hereabouts,” the thief pursued. “I suspect his lordship saves on wages—he hires cheap hands who aren’t worth their keep. Any field used for winter sowing should be higher in the middle, so that the rain drains off down the furrows. The ploughman failed to heed that golden rule. He has ruined this field for years to come—it’ll be thick with weeds. Here, on the other hand, he has ploughed too deep and turned up poor soil, do you see?”

  Tornefeld neither saw nor heard anything. He couldn’t fathom the necessity for trudging onward, ever onward. It was broad daylight and time to rest, but still they continued on their endless way.

  “His lordship’s shepherd is cheating him too,” grumbled the thief. “I’ve seen all kinds of dressing on these fields wood ash, marl, shavings, garden compost—but not a smidgen of sheep dung. Sheep dung is good, and of benefit to any field, but I suspect that the shepherd sells it on his own account.”