Press
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© 1947, 1974 by Janet Lewis Winters
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First Swallow Press / Ohio University Press edition published 1983
Printed in the United States of America
Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper Ī
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.
The trial of Sören Qvist / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8040-1144-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4054-9 (electronic)
1. Qvist, Sören Jensen, –1626—Fiction. 2. Denmark—History—Christian IV, 1588–1648—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3523.E866T7 2013
813’π iv.52—dc23
2013016753
To Maclin Guérard
Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition
The story of the Parson of Vejlby is famous in Denmark. Steen Steesen Blicher (1782–1848), himself a Jutlander and a Parson, tells it in his Knitting Room Stories.
I first came across it myself in a volume by Phillips called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. The only date I have been able to find for Phillips is the year 1814, when “Chief Baron Gilbert was superseded as an authority on the English laws of evidence by the books of Phillips.” He may have found his account in the story by Blicher, although I think, from certain differences of detail, that he had another source, possibly the same one Blicher had. At all events, I am sure that the story of Sören Jensen Qvist is, in its main facts and in many of its details, and even in some of the speeches of important characters, history rather than fiction. It would be impossible as well as foolish to attempt an archeologically correct version of the legend. However, I believe that there is nothing in my account of the Parson of Vejlby which might not have happened as I tell it. He is one of a great company of men and women who have preferred to lose their lives rather than accept a universe without plan or without meaning.
There was said to be, before the presence of the Germans in Denmark, the cross in Aalsö churchyard which the Parson of Aalsö raised to the memory of his friend. I trust that it is still there.
J.L.
April 11, 1946
One
The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward. The air was clouded with dampness. It was late November, late in the afternoon, but no sunlight came from the west, and to the east the sky was walled with cloud where the cold fog thickened above the shores of Jutland. There was a smell of sea in the air even these few miles inland, but the foot traveler who had come upon sight of the inn had been so close to the sea for so many days now that he was unaware of the salty fragrance.
The inn was familiar to him, and he thought he remembered what lay beyond the turn of the road as it circled the wooded hill and disappeared in shadow. Something in the aspect of the inn was also unfamiliar to him as he stood looking down at it from his side of the hollow where it lay shrouded in its own exhalations. The sign of the Golden Lion still hung above the door, although much of the fine bright yellow paint was gone from the wood. The last pale flakes were in tone now like the beech leaves which clung to the saplings at the edge of the denuded forest. When he had last seen it, the paint had been as fresh as buttercups. That was in the heyday of the king’s loves, when the inn had been named in honor of the king’s bastard children, all Golden Lions, the illegitimate children of the king being still more noble than the legitimate children of most people. Now that the king was old, and Denmark shrunken and impoverished by his reign, some of the Golden Lions had indeed shown themselves most noble. Others were quarreling among themselves. But here even in Jutland, which had suffered most from the King’s wars, the reign of Christian the Fourth was still considered glorious. Even the wayfarer looking down upon the Golden Lion, when he thought of the King, thought of him as splendid. Failing in health, blind in one eye ever since the great naval battle of the Kolberger Heide, and now turned sixty-nine, Christian was, in this year of 1646, even more the hero of his people than in his lusty and extravagant youth.
But there was more than loss of paint from the sign to change the appearance of the inn. The traveler had remembered it with an open door, light streaming out generously upon the road before it, and with people coming and going. This evening the door was closed and all the windows were shuttered. There was no one in sight. Something about the shape of the inn seemed changed, as well, but after slow searching in his memory the traveler concluded that it was not the inn itself, but its background and setting, that had suffered loss. Surely he could remember a small wooden dwelling just beyond the innyard, and another across the road from it, but these were gone now. The inn was no longer one of a group, but solitary.
This matter of closed doors and shuttered windows was not new to him since he had first entered the outlying districts of Jutland. He had come through inhospitable and half-deserted country. He had passed farms but poorly under cultivation, and farmhouses still unroofed in which the thick grass of Jutland grew above charred timbers fallen into the dwelling rooms. But he had somehow taken it for granted, in his slow mind, that when he reached his own county and his own parish, things would be as they had been, the doors open and the people kindly.
He went down the slight hill, limping, because the heel was gone from one boot, and the sole of the other had loosened, letting enter the sand and fine gravel. He approached the inn, and knocked. The Golden Lion hung above his head without creaking, so still and heavy was the air. A fawn-colored hound with a tail as long as a whip crept round the corner of the building and stared at him suspiciously with pale yellow eyes, then, hearing the door start open, turned and ran, the long tail curled under its belly. A young woman with a good tall figure, a firm bosom and straight shoulders, came out of the inn and closed the door behind her, holding one hand still upon the latch.
With her came the aroma of the inn. It clung to the heavy serge of her garments, and she stood before the stranger in a sensuous aureole of warm air. The smell of beer, of wood smoke, of roasting meat and fish, of wool and leather impregnated with grease and sweat, all the fine compounded flavor of conviviality and food assailed the nostrils of the stranger with such a promise of good things behind the closed door that the walls of his stomach drew together painfully. She waited for him to speak, hugging her arms against the cold. The stranger took off his wide-brimmed felt hat and held it under his right arm as he inquired humbly
