by John Updike
Warming sunlight struck gold from the unscythed grass. Rotting apples and pears filled the air with a scent of fermentation. His boots crushed fruit, pulpy and fallen, and left telltale impressions in the tangled hay. His pounding heart kept company with the cold, abstract resolve of his will. There was no other course, improvised and chancy though this one had had to be.
He heard footsteps above, within the wall—such closeness of timing showed the hand of Heaven. He crouched behind a wagon used previously to hold the orchard’s harvest of a month ago and now abandoned, with careless peasant husbandry, to the winter weather coming. He fingered the thick cross bulking in his doublet. The jade edges had been filed and the surfaces ground to the smoothness of skin and then incised in circular patterns like lace to the touch. He tried to think of fair and rosy Geruthe but his soul was narrowly, darkly intent upon the hunt, the kill.
The King emerged from the arched opening at the base of the bailey wall. His royal robes were brilliant in the low slant of sunshine. His face looked bloated and weary, naked in its ignorance of being observed. Fengon now slipped the vial from its socket and with a thumbnail worked at the stopper, a bead of glass held in place by a glue aged to the hardness of stone. Perhaps it would not come off; perhaps he must slink away, the deed undone. But away to what? Ruin, and not only for him—for one who had asked, Protect me. The bead of glass worked loose. Its film of liquid stung his forefinger.
From behind the abandoned, weathering wagon Fengon watched his brother shed a blue velvet robe and drape it over the foot of the pillowed couch set, as on a small roofed stage, upon the gazebo’s raised floor. The King’s surcoat was a golden yellow, his tunic snow-white linen. The cushions on his couch were green; he set his eight-sided jewelled crown on a pillow near his head and tugged up a blanket of dirty-gray sheepskin. He lay staring skyward while his folded hands fiddled upon his chest, as if revolving within himself the information that he had been cuckolded and must wreak a thorough vengeance on the criminals. Or perhaps the parley with the Polacks had gone disturbingly. Fengon feared the agitated monarch might not sleep at all, and pondered the possibility of rushing forward and compelling Horvendile to drink the contents of the vial, hurling the poison down his howling red throat like molten lead into the mouth of a heretic.
But suppose the assault fell short, and the King’s shouts brought help? Then a traitor’s cautionary public mangling would be Fengon’s fate. In Burgundy he had seen a staked plotter compelled to watch dogs gobble his unravelled intestines, there on the ground before him; the loyal crowd had thought this an excellent patriotic entertainment. In Toulouse he had been told of Cathars burned in bundles like fagots, only they burned more reluctantly, feet and ankles charring first. He understood from men who had survived torture that the spirit achieves another level, from which it looks down upon the body and its tormenters serenely, as from the lip of Heaven. In such a hovering mood he now waited, and when the sparrows and titmice above his head and about him in the twigs had ceased to mark his presence with twitters and scoldings such as would warn of a cat, he stepped forward to test if his brother’s long blue eyes were still open. Had they been, he would have pretended to have come to plead, and looked for an opportunity to force the poison.
But from the King’s belvedere issued, louder than the hum of wasps in the sugared grass, the rumble of snoring, of oblivious breathing. Fengon drew near, one tread at a time through the lank dying grass, with the unstoppered vial.
His brother slept in a familiar position, curled on his side, loose fist tucked against his chin, as Fengon had often observed when they shared a bed and then a doubly bedded chamber in lonely Jutland, where the winds made sleep fitful. Fengon had been, though younger, the lighter sleeper. Horvendile had daily exhausted himself in pushing ahead, in acting the elder and seizing his prerogatives in games and jousts, in exploration of the heath and the barren hilltops around them. Gervendile, bent upon raiding and carousing in imitation of the pagan gods, and with a wife who had withered to torpor in Jutie’s ceaseless wind, let his sons run to nature. In their abandonment Horvendile did parental service, commanding but leading, rebuking but bringing his slighter, less prepossessing brother along with him, across the lag of eighteen months between their births. Across the heather, through the thickets, in pursuit of game with slingshot and longbow, sharing the sharp air, the hurrying wide sky. Had there not been love in this, from both sides? Alas, love is so pervasive, so ready to arise from our childish helplessness, that it would freeze all action, even that act needed to save a man’s life and make his fortune.
As of their own volition Fengon’s boots had silently slithered up the two steps to the platform where the King slept on his side, one ear up, his face slack. To pour the vial Fengon had to lift a lock of his brother’s fair hair, still soft and curled low on his head, where not yet thinned by age and the pressure of the crown. His was a tidy ear, square and white and plumply lobed, with a froth of gray hairs around the waxy hole. Fengon’s sucked breath caught in his teeth as he poured. His hand did not tremble. His brother’s ear-hole, the hole that had taken in Sandro’s poisonous words, a whirlpool that led to the brain and to the universe the brain constructs, accepted the pale juice of hebona with some, at the last, overflowing; Horvendile in his sleep brushed clumsily at the spot, as if at a wasp tickling at a dream. Fengon stepped back, clutching the emptied vial in his fist. Who was the Hammer now? His pounding blood made his muscles jump.
He did not dare reënter the spiral stair, so constricted and entrapping. At its head he might meet footmen, or the Queen with her ladies and musicians. Crouched low, he scuttled along the crooked bailey wall to where, as devious Corambis had promised, a stone chute emptied toward the moat but could be attained on the protuberances and chinks of the masonry and—Fengon gritting his teeth, holding his breath against the smell—mounted by pressing arms and legs outward and climbing. There was no ivy as when he had first scrambled up to Geruthe, but years of piss had eroded the mortar to create footholds; slime coated rocks in whose sunless crannies great white centipedes bred, daily supplied with noxious nutrient. The bright gap toward which Fengon squirmed upward was narrow but not narrower than Geruthe’s lancet window. He had wriggled through that and now this, like fatty smoke rising in a flue, like excrement reversing its course, sweating and grunting and begging God or the Devil that no hostler or guard be presently called by nature to this privy. If he were, Fengon’s dagger would have to come into play, one murder demanding another.
But his emergence from the garderobe was unobserved. He brushed at the noxious dampness on his tunic and breeches and flitted along the bailey and barbican walls to where his black Arabian still panted. He stood next to the horse, to merge his odor with its sweat. He shouted for a groom, to make a witness that he had freshly arrived at Elsinore. The vial and jade cross he dropped at first opportunity into the moat. Though at his later leisure he was plagued by remorse and fear of God’s creeping justice, Fengon felt no holy qualm just yet, in the fresh relief of his feat; his religion had become cold necessity, and his form of worship lucky acrobatics upon the bare bones of things.
The corpse was not found until another hour had passed and the unknowing Queen sent a man down to wake her husband. Horvendile’s body, frozen with unseeing eyes bloodied and bulged outward, lay covered with a silvery crust, leperlike, all his smooth skin turned loathsome, all his body’s liquids curdled. Fengon and Corambis, taking charge in the confusion, gave out the speculation that a venomous serpent nested in the unmown orchard grass had sunk its fangs into the fair and noble sleeper. Or else a distemper of the blood, long festering unseen, had abruptly broken out; the King had appeared joyless and brooding of late. At any event, amid this calamity the kingdom, its foreign enemies astir, must be administered, and the stricken queen comforted. Who better than the brother of the King, whose only son the Prince had been for over a decade immured in futile studies at Wittenberg?
III
THE KING was irate. “I command that he come back to Denmark!” Claudius announced to Gertrude. “His insolent self-exile mocks our court and undermines our fledgling rule. He stays away to do just that. Though we have named him the next to take the throne, our own seat thereupon having been, in part, compelled by his prolonged withdrawal from Denmark, and urged upon me by my colleagues on the råd and ratified by the thing, swiftly convened in Viborg—for all of this, he sulks in absentia and, when he does deign appear, seems skittish to the point of madness. So belatedly did he attend his father’s funeral, and so readily leave once the great bones were interred, that his friend Horatio—a capital fellow, I’ve asked him to stay as long as he desires, and to give the crown his counsel at his pleasure—Horatio never had the chance to greet him! His best friend was ignored, and the populace could take no impression of an apparition so fleeting. Hamlet plays the ghost, a presence spun of rumor, to spite me, for the people have ever had him in their favor, and his absence at Elsinore purposely saps our reign of credibility!”
Gertrude was not yet accustomed to hearing her lover speak like this, at such length, with such pomp. Even in their privacy now he spoke as if there were others about them, courtiers and emissaries, the human furniture of rule. Two weeks had passed since her husband had perished in the orchard, unattended, unshriven, like some nameless pauper who eked his living on a Baltic beach, or like some soulless little rag of a woodland prey snatched up in sharp talons. Already Fengon, to her eye, had become bulkier, more majestic. He had named himself Claudius at the coronation, and Corambis, following his master into the imperial dignity of Latin, had taken the name of Polonius. “I think he means no harm to you or to Denmark,” she began, half-heartedly defending her son.
“Denmark and I, my dear, are now synonymous.”
“Of course—I think it’s wonderful! But as to little Hamlet, there have been so many sudden changes, and he really did adore his father, though they weren’t much alike, in subtlety or education. The boy needs time, and he feels at ease in Wittenberg, has companions there, and his professors—”
“Professors professing seditious doctrines—humanism, usury, market values, the monarchy as something less than the pure gift of God—the boy is thirty, it’s time he came home to reality. Do you really,” he went on, in a tyrannical accusatory vein that reminded her sadly of his predecessor on the throne, “think he is in Wittenberg? We have no idea if he is or not. ‘Wittenberg’ is just his word for ‘elsewhere’—elsewhere than Elsinore!”
Gertrude blurted, “It’s not you he’s avoiding. It’s me.”
“You, his own mother? Why?”
“He hates me, for wishing his father dead.”
The King blinked. “Did you?”
Her voice was thickening; the habit of tears had been reëstablished in her eyes these two weeks, and now she felt them warmly gathering once more. “My grief wasn’t enough to suit him. I didn’t want to die myself—to throw myself on his father’s pyre, so to speak, though of course they don’t have pyres any more, that was barbaric, these poor drugged slave girls.… And I couldn’t stop myself from thinking that now there was no chance of Hamlet’s, my husband Hamlet’s, finding out about us. I dreaded that, though I pretended not to, I didn’t want to worry you. I was relieved. I hate myself, admitting it. Even dead, Hamlet has a way of making me feel guilty, for being less good and public-spirited than he was.”
“Yes, well. I lived with that all my life—you just married into it.”
“Now little Hamlet has it, that same gift. Of making me feel dirty and ashamed and unworthy. I have a confession. No, it’s too terrible to say.” She waited to be coaxed, then went on, uncoaxed. “All right, I’ll tell you: I’m glad the child isn’t at Elsinore. He would sulk. He would try to make me feel shallow, and stupid, and wicked.”
“But how would he know … anything?”
How like a man, Gertrude thought. They want you to do everything to them, but then are too fastidious to name it. Claudius just wants things all to go smoothly, now that he is king, the past sealed off, history. But history isn’t dead like that; it lives in us, it got us here. “Children just know,” she said. “We’re all they have to study at first; they become experts. He senses everything; I’ve terribly disappointed him. He wanted me to die, to be the perfect stone statue of a widow, guarding the shrine of his father for him forever, because it has his childhood sealed up in it also. Adoring his father for him is a kind of self-adoration. They were two of a kind—too good for this world. The night we were married, Hamlet didn’t even look at me naked. He was too drunk. You, bless you, looked.”
His wolfish teeth showed a smile in the dark fleece of his beard, a flash of white like the white spot in his hair. “No man could have helped looking, my love. You were, are, sublime in every part.”
“I’m a fat spoiled forty-eight-year-old, but being called sublime feels somehow right. As a kind of play. Hamlet—big Hamlet—didn’t know how to play.”
“He played only to win.”
Gertrude suppressed the observation that Claudius, too, in his new majesty, showed an inclination to win. But, then, having spent her life in the company of kings, Gertrude knew that for a king losing usually meant losing your life. High position entailed a precipitous fall.
“I’m fond of him, actually,” Claudius said. “Young Hamlet. I think I can give him something he never had from his own father—he and I are fellow victims of that obtuse bruiser—that Koll-killer. We’re alike, your son and I. His subtlety, which you mentioned, is much like my own. We both have a shadow-side, and a yen to travel, to get away from this foggy hinterland, where the sheep look like rocks and the rocks look like sheep. He wants more, to learn more.”
“I thought you said he doesn’t really go to Wittenberg.”
“He goes somewhere, and learns something, that gives him dissatisfaction. I tell you I feel for him. We’re both victims of Danish small-mindedness—Viking blood-hunger crammed into the outward forms of Christianity, which no one up here has ever understood, from Harald Bluetooth on; for him it was just a way to preëmpt a German invasion. Christianity turns grim in lands of frost; it is a Mediterranean cult, a religion of the grape. Truly, I am certain I can make the Prince love me. I appointed him my successor on my own impulse.”
“He may resent that he remains a prince, while you occupy his father’s throne.”
“How could he resent that? He was never here, he showed no interest in learning the art of rule—of all that threatens and upholds a government. Some whisper,” Claudius told Gertrude with lowered voice and subdued expression, “that he is mad.”
She shivered. “He is sane, and shrewd,” she said, “but still I cannot grieve on his absence. If he comes home, I sense that he will bring unhappiness.”
“But come he must, lest a rebel faction form outside Elsinore’s walls, and here is the scheme to bring him: marry me.”
Her impulse was to greet his words with joy; but these disrupted times shaded their import somberly, and like little weights they took her heart lower. “My husband, your brother, is but two weeks dead.”
“Another two, and it will be a month—lag enough for such seasoned meat as we. Gertrude, don’t deny me the natural outcome of my long and perilous devotion. Our present situation, scattered awkwardly through Elsinore’s royal apartments, is too curious; we must sneak and tryst as if your husband’s ghost keeps jealous guard over your virtue. Our union will settle all jangling gossip and give Elsinore a solid base—a master and a mistress.” And cement my hold on the throne, Claudius did not say.
“I doubt it will settle Hamlet,” said the Queen. The name’s persistent doubleness—father, son; king, prince—brought a lump to her throat, as if it were too large to swallow.
“I wager the contrary,” said Claudius, bluff and head-long in his decisions as kings must be. “It will restore his mother to the highest status, and supply an uncle in place of a father. Our wedded example will strengthen and s
teady his courtship of Ophelia, which you and Polonius both desire—you for the sake of your son’s health and sanity, he to gain his daughter high estate. I do not begrudge the old man that boon of perpetuation; he served our own wooing well.”
His speaking brusquely of their “wooing” touched a sensitive area in Gertrude. Though she had been bold and brazen enough in placing herself at a lover’s disposal while still wedded to the King, when the ruthless irregularity of her behavior could be lightly scanned by her conscience as the enactment of a romance such as had beguiled her betranced days of married boredom, her escapade took on a live soreness since the King’s death: she felt her fall had somehow caused the adder in the orchard to sting the sleeping cuckold. At the same time, Sandro had disappeared, and she wondered if there was a reason she didn’t know. Claudius, questioned, had said the boy had become homesick with winter’s onset, so he had let him go south, with a tolerant bonus. It was strange this had been done so suddenly, without her knowing. Claudius in his old guise had spoken to her with the careless freedom of one with nothing to hide; now there was a certain formality, a pregnant circumspection. Yes, it would be good to bundle and hide the whole affair—the lakeside lodge, the small troop enlisted in their deceit, the hectic gratification of belonging to two men at once, the pagan shamelessness—within the unimpeachable, unbreakable contract of a royal marriage. Blushing as if once again garlanded in virginity, Gertrude consented.
Claudius clapped his hands: a politic and lucrative bargain had been struck. The date was set. Messengers—to Wittenberg, to Laertes in Paris, to the capitals of friendly powers—were sent posting on their way. Even with so muted a celebration in prospect, a marriage draped in mourning, Gertrude found these narrowing November days brightened. What we once did imperfectly, we yearn to perfect in the second doing.