`I observe that of their nature babies are bound to cause torment to all around them," says the voice of the petulant and scheming Kirsten, unfaithful wife of Christian, King of Denmark. She has just given birth to the child of her lover, a German mercenary. "The noise they make is infernal. The stench of them is scarcely to be endured, for they are ever spewing out strands of pearly vomit or straining until their eyes start from their heads to produce farmyard motions . . . In short . . . my affection, such as it is, for Dorothea rests only on the plain fact that she is Otto's child and therefore a Memento of my Lover."
"She amuses the reader: she is outrageous and magnificently daring," says Rose Tremain (56), of Kirsten, an historical figure whose story she recreates with gusto in her latest novel, Music and Silence. Tremain, a softly spoken Londoner in a cosy partnership with the biographer Richard Holmes, insists that no, Kirsten is not her own alter ego: "People ask me if Kirsten is my secret fantasy. I'm not bothered by that."
Kirsten, deprived of her lover Otto by the jealous king, amuses herself with her two black slave boys, Samuel and Emmanuel. "I reflect that Slaves are not supposed to utter any Criticism of their Mistress's body, or even to notice such a thing as Pendulousness. They must do my bidding and that is that. And so I shall have some Pleasure with them and then perhaps matters in general may go on a little better."
"Kirsten isn't a bit PC. That's just the way it was in the 17th century," says Tremain, comparing Kirsten with another character in Music and Silence called Magdalena, who seduces two of her own stepsons under their father's roof. But the novel is not just about bawdy wickedness. It is a complex system, as the title suggests, of antitheses. Balancing Kirsten and Magdalena we have the virtuous, motherless Emilia and her suitor, the angelic English lute player, Peter Claire. The scene is Denmark, the time 1629-30, and King Christian's domain is on the brink of economic collapse. His private life is in tatters and he is haunted by early, happy days when Kirsten loved him - a time before he betrayed his boyhood friend Bror. In an attempt to offset the chaos of his life, the king retreats into the orderly world of music, courtesy of his own hand-picked, cosmopolitan orchestra. The catch is that the orchestra must play in a freezing cellar, so if the King grows bored or restless, he can cut off their music in a trice simply by kicking shut a trapdoor.
"Books always have a nugget that starts you off," explains Tremain. "For me this point of departure was the cellar. I was on a trip to Copenhagen and somebody told me about the cellar at Rosenborg. I loved the image of creative people in the darkness - the contrast between them and the rich, powerful person listening in the warmth and light of the room above." In addition to listening to his musicians, the king escapes from torment by filling his mind with visions of potential perfection. One of these is a silver mine where he is sure his engineers will find riches galore. In reality the quest goes tragically wrong; the miners are killed in an explosion and "the music of hope" which surrounded the mine is extinguished. The antithesis of King Christian, with his need for certainty and logic, is Emilia's persecuted youngest brother, Marcus, who is guided purely by instinct, and who communes magically with real and imaginary insects. This division between reason and instinct is one which Tremain seeks to resolve in her own life.
"I used to teach creative writing at the University of East Anglia, but then I started worrying that it was having a bad effect on my work. "The analytical side of my brain was becoming too bossy, and I was afraid it would start to censor the dreamy side. You need both sides to be able to write." She doesn't really miss the teaching, but keeps in touch with some of her students. These include Andrew Miller, whose first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the lucrative IMPAC prize earlier this year. "It's a beautiful book," says Tremain. Like Andrew Miller, Tremain has written two historical novels, but she dislikes being pigeonholed in this fictional category. "I have written a total of eight books, so it's maddening to be limited by that definition. My American publishers can't grasp the idea that I don't always write historical novels. As a writer I need my freedom." She gives her books different settings because: "I want my writing to take me to places I wouldn't dare to go, somewhere out of my day-to-day existence." She admits that writing historical fiction has certain advantages, such as "not being tied by the tyranny of our day-to-day social and cultural world." This gives the book a longer shelf life: "My other period novel, Restoration, which I wrote 10 years ago, is still in print in several languages." The Booker-shortlisted Restoration has also been made into a film starring staring Sam Neill, Meg Ryan and Hugh Grant: "I had nothing to do with the screenplay, and although I liked the film, I felt the writer had never really found the heart of the novel. Maybe some other organ, like the liver!" She is currently working on a screenplay of her novel Sacred Country, about a girl who believes she's really a boy, spanning the years from 1950 to 1980.
When it comes to writing historical fiction, research is necessary at first: "I have to do research in a scholarly way. Then I lay it aside and let it become mine. This alchemy has to occur, otherwise it remains simply data." For Music and Silence, she was most inspired by visual art: "I worked a lot from portraits: of Christian and Kirsten, and coronation scenes; paintings of Copenhagen." In spite of the "disguise" of writing about a different period with historical characters, she admits: "I write out of my own mindset. I can do only that. Ironically, the invention of the disguise serves to reveal even more of who I am." She started writing when she was ten:
"I had a very vivid internal life, and I turned it into mad stories. My life went a bit peculiar at that time because my father left and I was sent to boarding school. Up to then it had been an ordinary easy middle class English life. "Then my world collapsed. It's a bit like what happens to Marcus in Music and Silence when his father remarries and his sister goes away. Like Marcus, when the trauma came, I went into my own world."
Music and Silence is published by Chatto and Windus at £16.99 in UK
