Claudius nods sharply. “So be it.”
“Come, Ophelia.” Father urges me to my feet, then leaves me against the wall so he can scuttle around and collect the letters and the prayer book whose spine is now cracked and bent from its abuse. “We have hours yet before dinner; you can rest. Rest will do you wonders.”
But before we can climb the stairs in the house, Claudius says he needs him in the office, and rather than my clean, sterile room, I flee to the greenhouse where even on a Sunday Jack works to keep the plants alive out of season. The violets struggle and try, but they’re never strong within the glass house. I curl up in the warm, damp soil of their bed, let their elusive perfume conceal every other scent from me.
Jack doesn’t say a word. He tucks a white tea rose behind my ear and covers me with a burlap sack in place of a blanket, then goes back to work.
The pixies never dance in the greenhouses. There are never any footprints, no glitter to light fires in the air.
I’m almost asleep when I feel hands gently lift me from the earth. Drugged by the peace of the plants caught between living and dying, I don’t even struggle, just let the arms cradle me and turn my cheek against a shoulder. I take a deep breath, but all I can smell is the ghost of violets. A second pair of hands swipes a cold cloth across my face and legs where the soil clings. They brush the earth from my sweater and skirt, from my hair, and take care not to dislodge Jack’s rose.
Dane and Horatio.
Safe in their care, I turn my face deeper into Dane’s shoulder and let sleep claim me the rest of the way.
CHAPTER 28
One of the maids wakes me up hours later so I can shower. “A gift,” she tells me quietly, nodding to the garment bag draped over one arm. “From young Master Danemark.”
Dane bought me a dress?
I don’t remember him and Horatio bringing me back to my room, placing me in my own bed, and the sense of displacement makes me briefly nauseous. The hot shower helps, even as it brings new bruises into stark relief. There’s a particularly dark one where Father’s thumb dug into my collarbone, darker than any of Dane’s, darker even than my eyes in the mirror. When I leave the steam-filled bathroom, cold air stabs against my skin with a ripple of goose bumps in its wake.
The dress, out of its protective plastic and laid out across the neatened coverlet, makes me laugh. It’s a beautiful creation, stiff plum silk with a delicate pattern of drifting cherry blossoms picked out in embroidered silver, cream, and pale blush pink, and though the knee-length skirt is wide and whispering against an underskirt, the top closes tightly around me, sleeveless with a high mandarin collar and silver cord fastenings.
He bought me a dress to hide the bruises.
And the class ring, back in its proper place against my breastbone, but I’m fairly sure the bruises were his main concern.
A fresh basket sits on the floor outside my door, full of straggling hothouse violets. They’re a pathetic bunch, limp and faded, like they never had the strength to bloom into their full color. A note from Jack, scribbled nearly illegibly across a scrap of paper, sits curled in the throat of the healthiest flower: these are the last. The last violets until spring thaws the earth to let him plant outside, because the violets never want to live caged within glass.
The impulse is born from the star of my heart or perhaps from the part of me that’s my mother’s daughter, but I sit at my vanity and knot the violets into a crown in my hair, twine the remainder through the length. So I wore my hair to Hamlet’s funeral—the Headmaster loved violets—and Gertrude smiled to see them.
Will she smile now?
There’s nearly a full week of pills in the compartmentalized box on my nightstand. Dane threw away all the forgets, the days past where I was a bad daughter to my father, but he forgot the pills I’m supposed to take in the future. The pills that get refilled, that my father thinks he checks.
Or perhaps he merely left the decision up to me.
I open the lid for each day and separate out the little pink pill, then empty the rest into my hand. It’s almost more than I can hold, a tower of chemical lies in my palm. I could split them back into their days, replace them in their little boxes, a reminder of the obedience I owe my father. I could choose to take them, to keep my thoughts whole rather than leave them to splinter and crack down the seams.
Or I could be the person Dane needs.
The person my mother made her promises to.
The person who feels the lake, cold and empty, press against the blazing sun in my chest.
Before I can change my mind, I cross to the bathroom and drop the pills into the porcelain bowl. Ripples dance across the surface, distorted where they cross paths with each other.
If Father comes to check that I’ve taken my pills, he’ll see that the rest of the week is gone. He’ll know I’m not taking them.
He’ll send me back to the cold place.
The star lodges in my throat, choking and painful, but it forces back the nausea that always accompanies the panic. Dane won’t let him take me. Dane needs me.
And perhaps, after the scene he just witnessed—what he put me into—Father will forgive me this week with a few lectures.
There’s a knock on the door, soft and polite, and I know who it is before I even get there to open it: Horatio. He wears his suit from the wedding, the shoulders not as loose as they were before, and I wonder how much he’s grown in the past few months without my noticing. Physically, anyway; I can see from his eyes how much he’s grown in other ways.
But he smiles and his eyes light up, despite the concern that still lurks in the deeper shadows of the rich greens and browns, and he kisses my cheek in greeting. “May I escort you to dinner?”
“Dane?”
“Finalizing a few things with Keith. And …” He shakes his head with a small sigh. “Well, plotting something else, anyway. He’ll be in rare form this evening.”
“Are we doing dinner up at the school?”
“No, here in the house, the play as well. They’re performing in the parlor, I believe.”
I take his arm and let him lead me down the hall to the grand stairs. “Do you think this will ever end?” I ask in a whisper. “Do you think we’ll ever get our Dane back, without the games and the need and the mania?”
“They’re a part of him; they always have been.”
“But now they’ve consumed him.”
“I don’t know. For anything legal to happen, he has to provide a great deal of proof. And for anything illegal …”
“We might lose him.”
“Exactly.”
“But we can’t exist in a stalemate forever.”
“Can’t we?” There’s no joy in his face at this, no cleverness or delicate teasing. “You live in a kind of stalemate, Ophelia.”
Not anymore. Now the pills are gone, and all the things they’ve kept at bay will come rushing in to fill the void.
Ros and Guil meet us at the bottom of the stairs. Ros gives us a jerky nod of acknowledgment, but Guil ignores us entirely. Without Dane to impress, we’re not worth his attention. Father enters next, his suit still rumpled from the afternoon and his tie lopsided in its knot. He smiles to see me on Horatio’s arm. He’s always liked Horatio, admired him even. It takes a great deal of courage and strength and hard work to succeed as a scholarship student at Elsinore Academy, and Horatio has always risen to that task with grace and integrity.
In so many ways, Horatio really is the best of us, and I wonder if he won’t pay the highest price for what Dane has drawn us all into. Those of us half drowned already don’t fear the water, but for someone who has always sailed in sunlight … Horatio has no place in the darkness of pain and poison.
Gertrude joins us on Claudius’ arm, elegant in a sapphire sheath and a collar of sapphires and diamonds that glitter fiercely in the light from the chandeliers. Dark pink marks mar the skin at the base of her neck where the heavy weight of the necklace digs into tender flesh, an unacc
ustomed weight that has her careful in how she moves her head. At her side, Claudius wears an ice-blue tie against a crisp white shirt and charcoal suit. The school crest gleams from the tie tack. It’s less than subtle, especially when combined with the silver and sapphire of Gertrude, more suited to an official gathering with donors or the Board of Governors or even ambassadors from universities or other preparatory schools. For such a small dinner, it smacks more of defensiveness than of pride.
By the third time we’ve been called to the table, it’s obvious that Dane doesn’t intend to join us for the meal or at least doesn’t intend to sit down with us. Claudius forces a smile onto his face—it doesn’t reach his eyes, never reaches the emeralds that hide his thoughts—and leads us into the private dining room.
Glasses of wine sit at every place, even mine, and Father nods his permission. Horatio sits beside me, a buffer between me and the rest of the room. I haven’t eaten today, and I know I should; the food looks and smells wonderful, and I’m aware of the hollow feeling in my stomach that will shortly turn to pain, but it all turns to ash in my mouth until chewing is a Herculean labor that makes me want to gag. If I could deafen myself in some manner, I might be able to eat, but I cannot close my ears to the conversation that robs me of all appetite.
For the first time, I think I know the edges of what hate feels like.
There’s something shameless about the way Guil flatters Claudius. Something equally shameless about how Claudius just smiles and accepts it as his due. Ros fidgets and laughs nervously and knocks his glass so many times the tablecloth is stained purple in a wide swath around his place, as uncomfortable here as he is anywhere. Guil takes in the crystal and china and silver with an acquisitive eye.
“His father’s business is hemorrhaging money in lawsuits,” Horatio whispers. “They’ve been selling things off for a couple of years now to try to keep it quiet.”
Which explains why his clothes look almost but not quite right for the company he keeps, like cheaper copies of the real thing. Which explains why he so desperately needs Claudius’ gratitude.
Claudius still has his business ventures, however secretive he may keep them. Does Guil hope to be placed there? However lacking in subtlety his actions towards the school and Gertrude have been and are, Claudius is nearly inscrutable when it comes to his businesses. Even Dane doesn’t know the names of them or what they do. Transport? Sales? Services? Claudius’ fortune is vast, perhaps equal to Dane’s inheritance from his father, but he never speaks to how he acquired it.
I think of the early morning phone calls, the friends in England who owe him a great deal, wonder if the hardness in his eyes came from business or if it was always there, and decide that Guil will be eaten alive if he tries to enter into such a contract.
The thought should fill me with remorse or at least give me a moment’s pause, but instead it fills me with a feral sense of satisfaction.
Because Guil knows nothing of friendship.
He calls Dane his friend even as he reaches out blindly with the knife to stab anything he can manage to find, and he knows nothing of what it means to be a friend, to have a friend. Ros is at best a lackey, a nervous shadow that follows along where he’s told and by simple virtue of his anxious bumbling makes Guil look better than he is. They arrived only last night and have barely even spoken to Dane, but already Guil speaks confidently of a cure, brags that their connection will yield the truth before there is even cause for further concern.
Gertrude latches on to his words, believes them because she needs to, but Claudius is amused by them and Guil doesn’t see it. Claudius thinks Dane is simply acting out, being an ass because he can. For Gertrude’s sake, he phrases it as an intercession, but he doesn’t actually expect the Toms to achieve anything. He doesn’t think he has anything to worry about. Thinks his secret is safe.
And the Toms are, as ever, clueless.
I push the food around on my plate even though I can sense Father’s worried regard. Unobserved by any of the company, Horatio slips a bread plate from the table and sets it in my lap on top of my spread napkin. Then it’s a game, to make the food vanish to the plate without anyone seeing it on the way down, and suddenly Father relaxes because he thinks I’m eating.
“Promise me you’ll get some bread from the kitchen later,” Horatio whispers.
“If there’s a chance.”
“If there isn’t a chance, I’ll bring it to you myself.”
If Dane burns a star in my chest, what does he do to Horatio? Horatio, who loves me as a friend and loves Dane as so much more; Horatio, the best of us. Since that night on the widow’s walk, he’s had a Saint Anthony medal attached to his crucifix. The patron saint of lost things. How lost you have to be to fall under his purview. Does Horatio pray to Saint Anthony for our sakes? For the lost souls that wander around in their bodies because pain keeps stabbing in to keep the emptiness from crumpling in on itself?
When dessert comes, he starts a steady flow of words, a soothing waterfall of his rich voice and the love he has for his family as he relates the latest e-mails from his parents and siblings. His voice, soft and strong, drowns out the others, and I’m able to enjoy the white chocolate mousse and swirls of raspberry jam. For all that he almost never gets to see them, Horatio’s love for his family is a palpable thing, a balm against bruises and knives and guns that wait to go off. He tells me of his sister’s straight As, of the early college interest in her, of his father’s offer of a better job that could mean his mother could go down to working only one job instead of three. He talks about the soccer scholarship that lets his brother on the school team, of the surprise funds sent by Gertrude that lets another sister look forward to a fashion internship in the city come the summer. By the time he’s finished telling me of his youngest brother and his science fair volcano fiasco, I’m nearly in tears from laughter and all of my mousse has been eaten.
Father pays us half attention, and I can see the thoughts written plainly across his face, but he’d be disappointed if he knew the truth. I love Horatio, as he loves me, but it’s a very different kind of love than what we both bear for Dane. Horatio’s the better person, the better choice, would make a better boyfriend and better husband, but hearts want what they want, and ours both beat for Dane.
The sudden slam of the door opening makes Ros drop his glass again. This time, rather than simply sloshing, it hits the table at an angle near the curved base of the goblet and snaps neatly from the stem. Dane stands in the doorway in an elegant tuxedo, even the shirt black beneath the bow tie and cummerbund. A black scarf of softest wool hangs from around his neck, the fringed edges nearly to his knees, and a floor-length impresario cape swirls around him with the force of his entry. He even has a top hat perched atop his sable hair.
He surveys us all with a scowl that abruptly morphs into a manic grin. “Come, come!” he cries, clapping black-gloved hands. “You’re all late! The show is ready to begin!”
“There you are, Dane,” Claudius replies calmly. “How are you?”
“Excellent! I eat the chameleon’s dish, air all promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.”
The lines around Claudius’ eyes deepen, but he knows if he appears less than mild, if he shows his perturbation, Dane wins this round. “That isn’t an answer, Dane. Your words are not mine.”
“No, nor mine now.” He turns from his uncle to pin my father with a mocking smile. “Sir, I heard a most strange rumor; is it true you once performed in university?”
“That I did,” answers Father, oblivious as ever that he is the source of anyone’s amusement. “I was thought quite a good actor then.”
“What did you perform?”
“Julius Caesar; Brutus killed me in the capitol.”
“It was a brute part of him to have done so.”
Horatio rolls his eyes and helps me slide my plate of hidden food to the floor.
“Well? Are you coming, or aren’t you? The players wait upon our arrival!” He
spins in a great circle, his cape swirling around him like a dervish’s skirt, but there is nothing of prayer and meditation in his movement. He bounds from the room, singing “It’s a Small World” in German and leaving us all staring after him.
Horatio sighs and shakes his head. “Exit, pursued by a bear,” he mutters, and I laugh and accept his aid in standing. The others follow and together we enter the parlor that Horatio tells me has been locked all afternoon.
The small dais Claudius erects for gatherings has been extended into a stage two steps high that marks barely ten feet across, the ends hidden by hastily mounted curtains. Hothouse flowers cover the front and back of the space, perhaps three feet deep, and around the Hellene chaise that stands as the only furniture. Within the audience space, there are only three chairs, two of them nearly thrones side by side, the other more simple and placed slightly behind and to the left.
Horatio and I sink to the thick carpet to the right of the chairs. Ros and Guil hesitate, looking about for more seats, then reluctantly follow suit on the left. They aren’t comfortable on the floor.
But then, Dane knows that. It’s exactly why he’s arranged it this way.
Gertrude sits in one of the quasi-thrones and pats the air to her open side. “Come, Dane, sit by me.”
“No, good mother,” he says shortly and drops to the carpet beside me. “Here’s metal more attractive.”
“The games I can handle; the puns may kill me,” murmurs Horatio, and I bite back a smile.
On Gertrude’s other side, Father nudges Claudius and whispers something, more proof for his theory, I think.
Plopping his hat atop Horatio’s head, Dane sprawls out across me, his head pillowed on my thighs. “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?”
“No,” I retort, aware of Father and Claudius watching.
But he doesn’t move. “Do you think I meant country matters?”
“I think nothing.”
“It’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs.”
Heat floods my face, burning the skin like the star burns my breath. “You’re merry tonight.”
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