Ophelia

by Jackie French

  ‘Oh, God!’ He stared up at the grey unyielding sky. Snow hung among the clouds, ready to fall. We should go back. But this could not be talked about within the palace walls. Hamlet still stared up at the sky. ‘How stale and weary is the world.’

  What use were words now? I stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. It was the kind of kiss my nurse had given me.

  He pulled me to him. I felt the warmth of his body through his velvet, through my fur. How was it I could not feel the cold, but could feel the heat of him?

  He kissed me, in desperation at first, and then with something else. I had known kisses all my life, but none like this. It was … wet. He invaded me, like Fortinbras’s army, marching across our border. I did not like it. But I did. When at last he pulled away, I panted like a fox running from the hounds. I wanted more …

  This time I moved to him. His hands touched me, burning my breasts through the leather, fur and velvet. He pulled me down with him till I kneeled on the snow, his body pushing mine …

  ‘Ophelia!’

  I was so deep in passion it took moments to find myself again, to stumble to my feet. ‘Laertes!’ I blinked at my almost-stranger brother, his bearskin dark against the snow-clad trees, too dazed to say more.

  ‘My lord.’ Laertes bowed to Hamlet, coldly furious. ‘I watched you leave the palace for the woods with my sister — alone. I thought perhaps you had lost your way. It has been so long since you have walked our land.’

  Hamlet reached again for my hand. He pressed it once, then let it go. He too was panting. ‘Not lost, I think, but found.’

  I waited for him to claim the right to kiss me in the snow. As soon as he told my brother that we would be married, all would be well. Laertes would smile, and hug me, and kneel to Hamlet as his prince. I waited for his words.

  The locket burned against my breast, with the same heat as his hands. A locket, not a ring. If Hamlet had meant to claim me as his wife here in the forest, why not a ring?

  A crow called, triumphant, beyond the frozen stream. Perhaps it had found the beast’s guts from the king’s last hunt. Another answered it. Still Hamlet did not speak.

  He has not claimed his kingdom, I thought, and nor has he claimed me now. And perhaps both were wise choices. Maybe Hamlet intended to ask my father’s permission to marry me before he claimed me to my brother. He would have my help to sit upon a throne, and Laertes’s and my father’s, if only he would claim me.

  Hamlet looked at the sky, then at the stream. He did not look at me.

  Deep inside me, a small illusion broke. Hamlet had been born with a head to bear a crown, but did he have the stomach to be king?

  Suddenly our love seemed to shrivel like a mushroom in the heat. So much wild talk — of murder, love and passion. How much was real? How much was shock and grief?

  ‘Sister?’ Laertes offered me his arm. ‘It will be dark soon.’ He glanced back at Hamlet. ‘I would not have you lost among the snow.’ I brushed the snow from my dress and took his arm numbly.

  We walked through the woods in silence. Laertes lifted the branches for Hamlet to pass under, then me.

  ‘I … It is a fine day,’ I said at last.

  A foolish remark. I sounded like a child. Neither lover nor brother answered.

  We reached the road. A carter with a load of turnips stopped so we could walk past him. Faces peered at us from farmhouses, and then from the market stalls. Curious faces, smiling. They had seen me walk into the forest with Prince Hamlet; now they saw my brother bringing me back.

  All at once I was angry. What did Laertes, this brother who had so recently remembered he had a sister, think he was doing by humiliating me so? A man could love and kiss and even tumble in the hay, and no one thought anything of it. Laertes had baskets of lovers in Paris. Cartloads! I had heard Father questioning his servants. No doubt when he returned to Paris he would be at it again, like a spring bull among the cows.

  No, my brother had it wrong. All would be well. I was no light-of-love! I was the lord chancellor’s daughter. Hamlet had said he loved me. He would speak to Father today; and tomorrow the court would rejoice for us. Hamlet would dream of our marriage bed — I flushed, thinking of it too — not ghosts and poisoned ears.

  We stepped up to our front door, Hamlet preceding us. I waited for Hamlet to ask leave to speak to my father.

  He turned and bowed to me, then lifted my hand to kiss it. ‘My lady, may this warm my soul until we meet again.’

  ‘I … I hope it does,’ I said.

  The footman opened the door for us. I waited for Hamlet to walk inside, so we could follow him. Instead, he turned and walked back across the courtyard towards the palace.

  I stared after him, my skin as cold as it had been hot in the glade.

  ‘Go to your room and change,’ said Laertes softly. ‘I will see you then.’

  Gerda helped me remove the damp furs and silk, and dressed me afresh. I wished I could have warmed my mind as easily.

  Why had Hamlet not spoken?

  Perhaps he intended to seek out Father in the palace? Perhaps even now he was asking for my hand in marriage? But surely he could have said something — anything — to my brother, to assure him his intentions were honourable?

  ‘I will go to see your father now.’ That was all he had to tell Laertes. Or even, ‘I will say more when your father has given me the right to claim you.’

  But he’d said nothing. And a small space in my heart seemed empty too.

  Chapter 10

  I was dressed in lavender when I met Laertes in the corridor. He had changed as well, into his travelling clothes. He opened the door to our sitting room for me. I glanced at him. He didn’t seem angry now, or not at me. He looked serious, with eyes of warning.

  ‘My bags are packed,’ he said. ‘Write to me, with every ship the winds let sail.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said automatically.

  I didn’t know what to feel. I wanted to be furious, but I was grateful too. For I had forgotten myself out there in the snow with Hamlet.

  ‘For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour …’ Laertes looked at me, as if he was trying to find the right words too. ‘Hold it a toy in blood, sweet, not lasting. No more.’

  I sank onto a cushion next to him. Hamlet had trusted me with his life’s secrets, but I could not tell my brother that. ‘No more than that?’ My voice sounded like a mouse, hoping for cheese.

  Laertes shook his head. ‘Perhaps he loves you … now.’

  I opened my mouth to say he did. Laertes held up his hand. ‘The safety and health of this whole kingdom depends on his choice. His will is not his own.’

  His words blew the warmth from my limbs and heart. Laertes was right. How had I not seen it? Of all the girls in Denmark, I should have known that a prince cannot always choose his bride. How many times had my father told me of royalty’s arranged marriages? Father had even planned a wedding for Hamlet, years ago, with a princess from England, though it had come to nothing when she died a child.

  I was a suitable bride in peacetime. But what if Fortinbras changed his mind and invaded? Denmark would need allies. And this king and queen had only one son: one chance to ally with another house, to have another kingdom lend us armies.

  Hamlet must know it too. Must also know that if he married a princess from England or the Low Countries, King Claudius would find it harder, even impossible, to disinherit him. Was that why he had not spoken back in the glade, was not speaking to my father now?

  Laertes was still talking. I tried to listen, but my thoughts were too heavy to bear much more.

  ‘You must weigh the loss of your honour if you listen to his songs, or lose your heart, or open your chaste treasure.’

  I blinked. My chaste treasure? My brother thought I had tumbled in the snow with Hamlet; given him the first entry a husband would expect. Pig slops to you, dear brother! I thought. You do not know me. I had walked with Hamlet believing he would propose to me, kissed him because I believe
d he would ask to be my husband.

  Laertes bent towards me, as stern as Nurse when I was four years old and had thrown my porridge down the privy. ‘Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister. Keep out of the danger of desire … A maid is overgenerous enough if she unmasks her beauty to the moon …’

  My anger grew. Anger at myself — I had been a fool, had not seen that love may not lead to marriage. A green girl, dreaming of being queen. Anger at my brother too. Was Laertes my father to drone on and on like this? And how was I supposed to keep my beauty hidden from anyone but the moon, if I was a lady-in-waiting to the queen?

  Buckets of pig slops, I thought. Why must I pretend I felt no passion, had not the wit to understand the kingdom, just because I wore a skirt, not hose? I sat with my hands in my lap, to stop them shaking.

  Finally, his lecture drew to a close. I forced myself to smile sweetly. I chose my words carefully to show him that I too could use courtly speech, find a hundred words to decorate what could be said in half a dozen.

  ‘I shall the effect of this good lesson keep as watchman to my heart. But, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven while, like a puffed and reckless libertine, he himself the primrose path of dalliance treads.’

  It was a speech worthy of our father, as long-winded as an autumn gale. Laertes looked at me, surprised. See, I thought, your little sister can spout words too. And sense.

  Suddenly he grinned. ‘Oh, fear me not!’ And we were laughing — at each other, at ourselves. I knew that Laertes would still lift every skirt in Paris, if he could. And he knew that now I would not mistake a prince’s passion for honourable love.

  He hugged me, and I hugged him back: my warm and solid brother, Laertes, who did not see ghosts or talk of vengeance. And who, for all his dallying in Paris, had more wisdom than I, a girl who had wandered in the woods unchaperoned. He was right, and I had been wrong. And I forgave him for being right.

  A footman opened the door. Father swept in, his ermine cloak almost touching the floor, in the fur-lined boots I had reminded his servants to make him wear, to stop the ache of his bones in the cold. I gazed at his expression, hoping that after all he had come to tell me Hamlet had asked for my hand.

  No, that was not the face of a man who had given his daughter to a prince. His face was as watchful as if Fortinbras’s army was below the castle.

  Laertes stood. ‘A double blessing is a double grace,’ he said, and winked at me. Courtly words always pleased our father. ‘Two parting speeches give more grace than one. Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well what I have said to you.’

  I smiled back, realising that I would miss him. Indeed, it was good to have a brother.

  ‘It is in my memory locked,’ I promised him. ‘And you yourself shall keep its key.’

  ‘Farewell,’ he said again. The footman opened the door for him, then shut it behind him.

  Father looked at me sharply. ‘What has he said to you?’

  ‘So please you,’ I said cautiously, ‘something touching the Lord Hamlet.’

  Father sat down heavily on the chair Laertes had just left. ‘Well thought! I have just been told he has given private time to you, and you have been most free and bounteous.’

  My last hope that Hamlet might have spoken to Father in the palace vanished. So Father was worried too. And, as was his way, would express it in a whole book of flowery words. I sat and watched my hands and waited for the words to pass.

  At last he said, ‘What is between you? Give me the truth.’

  ‘He has made many tenders of his affection to me,’ I said carefully, glad he did not know of the kisses in the snow.

  ‘Affection? Pooh! You speak like a green girl. Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?’

  ‘I do not know, my lord, what I should think,’ I admitted.

  Father, of all people, would know whether Hamlet might indeed marry me, or was bound to do his duty elsewhere.

  ‘Then I must teach you! You are a baby to think these tenders are true coin. Tender yourself more dearly, or you will tender me a fool.’

  Despair flooded me again. Father was right. I had been a fool. But I’d had reason to think that Hamlet was truly courting me. ‘My lord, he importuned me with love in honourable fashion.’

  Father snorted. ‘Ay, fashion is a good word for it.’

  ‘And he has given almost all the holy vows of heaven.’ All except two, I thought: the two that mattered most. No vow to be betrothed to me; and no vow that made him my husband.

  Father raised his hands as if speaking to the ceiling. ‘Traps to catch unwary birdies! I know, when the blood burns, how generously the soul lends the tongue promises. But these blazes, daughter, give more light than heat.’

  More words. Words and words and words. I’d had too many words today, and with too little substance — from Hamlet too. But at least my father’s long speech gave me time to think. They did not know me, my father and my brother. All they saw was the girl, her clothes and manners, not the soul who lived beneath. I thought they didn’t really know any woman, not truly. But they did know the ways of men, and nations. I had only been allowed the crumbs of knowledge that fell from their table.

  Had Queen Gertrude felt like this married to Hamlet’s father, cut off from all but the crusts of Denmark’s politics? Could she really have plotted with King Claudius, hoping for the life she had been denied, as girl and wife and mother?

  No. I knew the queen. Even if she had dreamed of what might happen if she was free of the old king, she would not murder him. Nor did I think she’d be quiet if she suspected Claudius had. The ghost had lied. Or Hamlet had imagined the ghost, a figment of his grief. The whole plot was as fantastic as a play.

  As fantastic as a girl who had dreamed she might be queen because a queen had smiled upon her, and a prince had murmured words of love. I had taken those smiles and words and put my own meaning on them. Father was right, under all those words. My dreams of being queen were no more real than Hamlet’s nightmares of his father’s ghost. Stupid, dreaming girl. How could I have thought myself so wise and been so foolish?

  Father’s speech was drawing to a close; I knew the signs. He looked at me now, not as if he was making a declaration to the council. ‘I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth have you give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.’ He regarded me sternly. ‘Look to it, I charge you.’

  ‘I shall obey, my lord,’ I said, and bowed my head, a dutiful daughter. And, one day perhaps, if I could repair my reputation now, some man’s dutiful wife. But not a princess, nor a queen.

  I felt as empty as a sausage casing when it has been emptied of its meat, and as useless.

  Chapter 11

  I did not sleep that night. Nor did I go to my tower on the battlements, where the ghost had bred my foolish hopes. Had King Fortinbras been trying to revenge himself on the House of Hamlet through me?

  No. My ghost had been a good man, who had made one mistake. Nor had he ordered me to try to become queen. I had done that myself.

  I turned restlessly in my bed cabinet. Did Hamlet love me? Yes, I thought so. But perhaps he thought that as the lord chancellor’s daughter, I would know he was not free to marry me, with Denmark under threat of invasion, and his own position so uncertain. He must have thought me willing to give myself to him for love; not just my body, but my reputation and my life. He could not know that a ghost had once given me a dream of being a queen.

  Or perhaps, in his anguish, he had thought more of himself than me. My heart settled like a lump of butter in a bucket of whey.

  Hamlet believed what he wanted to believe. Claudius had stolen his crown and his mother. Hamlet would have been all too willing to believe the ghost’s lies.

  And they must be lies. Queen Gertrude might love unwisely — had loved unwisely; she had told me so — but she had lived with that love for twenty-six years and kept her virtue. Nor could I blame her for taking the throne with F
ortinbras threatening the kingdom. Her hand was steadier than Hamlet’s would have been; as was King Claudius’s. The queen had saved Denmark from invasion. A woman like that would not kill her husband, nor her king.

  The ghost had lied. Or jealously imagined himself betrayed by his brother and wife, who still had the gift of happy life. Whichever it was, it was done from malice, not from love. Hamlet had been a fool to trust him. And I a fool to trust Hamlet …

  I dozed at last; and in the morning let Gerda dress me. I even ate a slice of toasted cheese. I waited for a messenger to call me to attend the queen, as usual. But no one came.

  At last, I took myself to the stillroom. Better to do something than sit brewing the same thoughts over and over. If you cook hops more than once, they lose their strength. Thoughts thought too much grow weak too.

  The footman came while I was simmering a tonic for a maid with the flux: rose heps and dried mint in barley water with a little chamomile.

  The footman bowed. ‘My lady, Prince Hamlet waits for you below.’

  Every doubt rose in me again. I wanted to see him; longed to see him, despite what he had cost me. Hamlet needed me. He also needed my loyalty, advice, a steady mind. But Father had forbidden me to see him. I had caused too much gossip already and possibly damaged my father’s position at court, and certainly my own. What husband would want the prince of Denmark’s leftovers?

  I had to choose: my father’s will, or Hamlet’s. And it must be Father’s. I could trust Father’s love for me. I could not trust the prince’s.

  I thrust away an image of Hamlet’s anguished face, the memory of his skin on mine. I tried to call up anger instead. Hamlet had as good as abandoned me there in the forest, I told myself again, failing to claim me before my brother, turning love to shame. He had called me his wise counsel, but I had not been wise. At heart, I had still been six years old, dreaming of playing princes and queens. Hamlet was older than I; he knew the world. I might be a wise sixteen, but I had walked innocently into the woods yesterday. He had not.