Claudius and Gertrude notice his antics, of course, but other than speaking of it in hushed voices when they think no one else is around, they don’t do anything. Claudius’ inaction is easy to understand, I think; to him, it must seem as though Dane is acting out purely to reflect poorly on his uncle as the new headmaster. After all, if he can’t even control his nephew-stepson, how can he run an entire school? And it’s not as though that line of reasoning would be out of character for a teenager. Claudius’ lofty pretense that there’s nothing going on makes sense to me.
Gertrude, on the other hand, presents a puzzle. She’s clearly concerned for her son. Her blue eyes track his progress through a room, her hands fluttering helplessly at her breast whenever she witnesses one of his episodes. She’s too aware of her reputation to weep in public, but some nights the soft sounds carry through the old walls of the house.
On those nights, Dane flees the second level and comes to me, his dark grey eyes haunted by a pain deeper than just the reflection of his mother’s. Every time, I come face-to-face with the knowledge that I should turn him away. Father’s edict hasn’t changed. I made him a promise. And every time, I come face-to-face with the knowledge that I can’t ever turn him away. I made Dane a promise, too. I’m a liar with every breath.
Whenever he runs away from the muted proof of the pain he causes his mother, I open the door and let him come in. Somewhere within my father is a remnant of the man seduced by a feral beauty half his age, the man who offered to walk away from the job and school he loves because he thought it was the right thing to do. Somewhere in that echo I think—I hope—is a piece that understands why I can’t be a good daughter and close my door in the face of the pain that’s become a living thing.
During the days, Dane vacillates between hating me for walking away and pretending that I never did. Both take a strength he can’t find at night. When he comes to me for comfort, he’s just the boy who’s lost his father, who’s losing his mother. Sometimes it’s enough for him just to hold me, to fall asleep in my arms and know that I’ll still be there when he wakes up in the morning.
Then there’s the Dane who needs, whose teeth and hands summon bruises to my skin, whose lips crash against mine to capture the startled whimpers as his touch hovers between pleasure and pain. No matter which Dane comes to me in the night, I know the next morning I’ll find a letter or small gift tucked into the basket of flowers that Jack sets by my door, and always a flower that hides words behind a meaning. Years ago, Gertrude gave me a book with all the meanings; it’s gotten more use now than ever before. More than anything, those gifts show the Dane I know.
The Dane I miss.
As September passes into October, as his games grow more and more savage, he shows up at my door nearly every night. Horatio stays with him all through the days, and it makes me wonder if perhaps Dane is afraid to be alone. Like a music box wound too tightly, he seems constantly on the verge of flying apart. Sometimes I wish he’d confide his plans with us so we could help him. Other times, more selfish times, I’m glad he doesn’t. Nearly two months he’s been playing his deep-seated game, and so far as either Horatio or I can tell he’s no closer to whatever he seeks. If it’s proof he’s looking for, he’s chosen a very circuitous method of digging for it.
Dane performs and Claudius ignores, a stalemate that seems as though it may never end. One of them will lose his patience before too much longer, but I don’t think any of us—even Dane—looks forward to that moment.
But there’s a day, one single extraordinary day, when I don’t have to worry about Dane or Hamlet or Claudius, don’t have to dwell on the fact that Laertes hasn’t written once since he left for France.
October 26 dawns cold and crisp, with a heavy, drifting blanket of clouds that promises an evening storm. The rain will be half frozen, I think. Summer surrendered early this year, and autumn stands poised to do the same. Color gradually leeches from everything, leaving the school and grounds a study of soft blues and greys. When I leave my room for breakfast, there’s a note from Father on the door excusing me from classes.
I’m sixteen today. Today is the day I was born and the day I died, the day Mama died, the day Father had to watch Hamlet decide which of us to try to save. Father couldn’t swim, won’t learn now, and Mama had weighed herself down while only holding me loose in her arms. I was easy for Hamlet to pull from the water, but to actually save me meant a choice. Save the girl? Or fight to pull out the woman and likely lose them both? I wonder, sometimes, if Father regrets that choice, if he would have been better off if Hamlet had left us both to the gleaming towers and delicate bells of the City of Ys. Every day on this year, Father excuses Laertes and me from classes and spends the long hours locked away in his study with a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of misery to discover which will empty faster.
Always the whiskey.
Laertes usually sticks to my side like a burr in my skirt, but he’s thousands of miles away, and this year, this day, I can do whatever I want, go wherever I want.
Along with my usual basket of straggling hothouse violets and other flowers, Jack’s left me an extra gift: a crown of roses, deep peach at their throat but rusting up the petals to a cinnamon at the edges. It looks faintly ridiculous with the uniform, all midnight and ice blue and perfect pleats, but I wear it anyway. Today is the one day no one will ask if I’ve taken my pills, where I can leave behind shoes and socks and feel the earth beneath my feet, where I can wear flowers in my hair and no one speaks of faeries or madness.
I retrieve a picnic basket and cold lunch from the maids and sway along the chain to the middle of the lake. Mama’s already there waiting for me, her dainty feet dipped in the dark water. A matching crown sits atop her night-dark hair, thick locks pulled through the weave to anchor it in place. She laughs when she sees me and claps her hands like a child. Every year she spends this day on the island, like we did eight years ago before she cast us into the lake at sunset. This is the first time I’ve joined her there since that day.
“Is it sweet sixteen, Ophelia?” she asks with a kiss against my cheek.
“The day is young.”
She just laughs again.
We spend the day together, just me and Mama on the island. She tells me stories of a hundred impossible things, and I count off how many of them I’ve seen. I dance around the circle of dead flowers as she waves her hands, and as the afternoon shifts to murky twilight, she whispers of old promises and a drowned city that waits patiently beneath the water. And once again, I tell her not yet. Not no—just not yet. My mother ran to the lake because she had so much emptiness only the water could fill. I don’t have that emptiness, not yet.
That emptiness is called Dane, and he burns like a star in the void where my heart should be.
Thunder rattles the chain as I cross the lake. The clouds have darkened through the day. They surround me like the halo of an angel bound in Purgatory, vague bruises reflected from a black mirror. Clean blue skies, ice blue, remind me too much of Hamlet’s funeral. This bruised world is where I belong.
With this early darkness, the cemetery is lit up with blue-white pillars that flicker in a way that has nothing to do with the wind tugging at my short skirt and long hair. The wind stings tears to my eyes, dries my lips until they crack and the taste of copper blooms on my tongue. The closer we come to All Hallows’, the more restless the ghosts become. For most of them, it’s the only day each year when they can leave their graves, see what’s left of their families or loved ones. They itch to be gone, to see more, to do more, even those whose families have long since become dust in the ground. Time passes differently for ghosts, I think. The years don’t mean what they should.
Nearly alone on the blessed side of the graveyard, Hamlet sits on the plinth of his massive headstone. The mottled grey marble gleams in his ghostly light, a dance of shadows across the darker veins of stone. A dark metal plaque affixed to the base proclaims his name and title; his dates of birth and death;
and a graceful inscription in Latin that speaks to a life of duty, honor, and love. The right side is blank, waiting for Gertrude to join him one day. Atop the plinth, two tall angels in draping robes stand with their wings outstretched behind them, every feather carved in exquisite detail. The one guarding Hamlet’s body holds a claymore with Hebrew words carved down the length of the blade; beside it, Gertrude’s angel cups its hands to hold a dove poised for flight. The angels themselves are sexless, stone curls of hair over beautiful, androgynous faces, but there’s something of Hamlet in the one holding the sword, something of his sternness and quiet pride in the strong serenity written into the marble.
This ghost, this Hamlet, is not quite the Hamlet I knew, but he is so much closer than the one that rages through the night and drips poisonous revenge into Dane’s dreams. He greets me with a sad smile, a hand lifted not in a wave but in something more formal.
A little drunk with dancing and with Mama, I hop up next to him on the plinth, hissing as the cold stone stings the back of my thighs where the uniform skirt rides up. There’s a perfect hollow between the feet of Gertrude’s angel, just the right size to lean back against the angel’s knees and not feel like I’m about to fall.
His smile grows slightly at the sight of the crown of roses, and becomes a little less sad. “Happy birthday, Ophelia.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We sit in silence for a long time, both of us staring up the hill to Headmaster’s House and beyond that to the school. Lights blaze through the night, a spill of gold from scattered windows. Shadows weave across them from time to time as the people in a room cross before the glass. The school is full of life. Students gather for study groups or movie nights or forbidden parties, couples find private spaces or closets to grope and pant, the youngest ones race through the halls in complicated games that aren’t beneath their dignity yet. Even Headmaster’s House glows like a jewel in the moonlight; Claudius hosts yet another gathering with too much wine and laughter. I hope Father has found deep sleep within the whiskey bottle, or the sound of such merrymaking must be hell.
I’m rarely as good a daughter as he needs me to be, but I do love him. His pain cuts me, even when I’m not the one to cause it.
“Souls can sunder, Ophelia,” whispers Hamlet. “In all our lessons of faith and doctrine, no mention was ever made of such a thing—that it isn’t merely the heart that breaks.”
“You are sorrow; he is rage.”
“And yet, we are the same person. We exist simultaneously, in two different forms; yet we are both Hamlet, both pieces of the whole that was.”
He looks so tired. This is the face of the Wild Hunt in the quiet moments, those breathless seconds where they slow to a walk and look to the greyhounds to see if they’ll jump off. This is the weariness without hope of relief.
“Dane can’t see you.”
“I don’t let myself be seen. Except by you,” he adds with a familiar gleam in his dark eyes. It’s fleeting, but the memory warns me despite the icy wind that shears through my skin to my bones. “It seems I have little choice in that regard.”
“Have you thought that it might help him?”
“I have thought.” His sigh trembles in a hackle-raising crack of thunder. A violent fork of lightning stabs the sky, so bright it leaves an echo against my eyelids. “I have thought and wondered and pondered, deliberated, debated, discussed … It seems I cannot help but turn it over in my mind and pray that my choice is the correct one, but the dead, Ophelia, have no business with the world of the living. You stand with a foot in either, but even you know to separate yourself on most occasions. Dane cannot be helped by seeing his father further destroyed in death.”
“Dane will destroy himself for this revenge.”
“My son made his promises.”
And promises, once made, must be kept, and if later you regret them, you should have been more careful in making them. Dane will always keep his promises, and I … it seems as though I will always break mine.
In the moment of death, or perhaps the moment of awakening, all that was good and true about the fifth Hamlet Danemark sundered from all that was hurt and betrayed. The sorrow, the dignity, the compassion, centered on this tired shade beside me, who even now bows his head against the weight of grief and a fathomless pain.
“I’m sorry.”
“We all are, or shall be.” He reaches out as if to brush against the crown of roses, but his fingers pass through it; in their wake, the petals he’s touched crack and wither.
The rain starts as I leave the cemetery, just a few scattered drops at first and then, without further warning, a deluge that stabs frigid knives into my skin. My hair, my clothing, clings to me, and I can feel the crown of roses slowly breaking apart under the onslaught. The cold takes my breath away, such a sharp contrast to the blazing star of my heart, and I can’t help but laugh. As I move along the path, my feet step in circles, in patterns, in a swaying dance that belongs around a corona of flowers back on the island.
In the lake, the bells pound and toll, swept by the storm that rages along the surface. They roll through my bones like thunder, like joy, and shriek against the night sky. On such a night, the gates were opened and the city drowned, but there are no more keys hidden away, nothing left to open, to drown.
“Ophelia!”
Everything has drowned already, and the water thrust away what it could not yet keep. We don’t die a second time; we go home. When it’s time. When what was borrowed has emptied away.
“Ophelia!”
All stars die. They burn and burn bright, and then, when they have consumed everything that can be offered, they fade and die and leave a black hole in their wake, a vast void, an emptiness of incalculable space.
“Ophelia!” A hand closes hard around my arm and yanks me against a firm chest; another hand smoothes along my cheek to lift my face.
Dane.
Water drips from the ends of his hair, traces in rivulets along the creases of the soaked black clothing he wears in place of his uniform. Knife-edged shadows skitter across the sharp lines of his face in a flash of lightning, illuminating dark grey eyes and a puzzled, uncertain smile.
“Dance with me.”
“You didn’t take your pills this morning,” he murmurs, but there’s no accusation there, only a kind of wonder I haven’t heard from him in so long. “I can tell. Your eyes … your eyes are so alive.”
“So dance with me.”
He actually smiles, and in that moment he looks so much like his father the star burns brighter in my chest. We nearly glow in the darkness, pale pearls that gleam in bursts of light. His fingers, long and elegant—his mother’s hands—trace my face, my lips. “You’re nearly blue.”
I’ve been blue before, when they dragged me from a lake that wanted to freeze us within its grasp.
Bending nearly in two, he catches me behind my knees and sweeps me off my feet. He cradles me against his chest, our breath mingling in a frosty cloud in the scant inches between us, and the rain slices the mud and grass from my bare feet. Laughter spills from my throat, and I lean back against his support, my arms spread wide to catch the frozen tears that fall from Heaven. The angels weep and the bean sidhe sing and for a moment they make nearly the same sound.
He carries me into the house, through the garden door and up the servants’ stair to avoid the party. Water drips and pools behind us with every step. I shiver in the sudden loss, the sudden warmth. The dim lights hurt my eyes. Dane takes me straight to my room and closes the door with a soft, careful kick. He doesn’t put me down until we’re in my bathroom and in the standing shower.
There used to be a bathtub, but Father had it taken out before I was allowed to come home from the cold place, because he thought the tub was too much like the lake.
With a twist of his wrist, the water pours over us, sharp and cold at first, and we’re back outside in the storm and the lightning, but then it warms and soothes, and the storm is only something to
hear. He’s still smiling though, like he’s discovered something wonderful, and I twine a hand through his hair and pull his face down to mine so I can taste his joy.
He’s startled—I’ve never kissed him before, always he’s been the one to kiss, to start—but it’s only a moment and then he’s kissing me back, his hands tugging at our sopping clothing and dropping them to the tile with wet slaps of fabric. The hot water streaks across his skin with a pale flush, and I follow it with my hands and suddenly he groans and presses his weight against me, the crucifix digging into my shoulder.
My mother’s laugh echoes in my ears, a sharp arrow that darts around the narrow space between my body and Dane’s, and I follow its path until he sets his teeth into my neck to stifle his cry. He drops to his knees, his face pressed into my stomach, and as the water cools around us, the laughter recedes until there’s nothing but the sharp sting of bruised and broken skin; his gasping breaths; and that beautiful, terrifying sense of wonder.
CHAPTER 21
The next morning, Father and I both take pills with our breakfast. There are pills at Dane’s place setting but no Dane or Horatio. They’re up on the widow’s walk, where Dane has the portable microphone for the intercom system and greeted everyone at four o’clock with the strident cries of a rooster. And three hours later, he is still doing it because he’s broken the lock to the control room so Claudius and Father can’t get in there to turn off the system. Horatio, I think, is just there to make sure Dane doesn’t do something stupid like jump off the railing.
A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) Page 17