by Beth Trissel
Will gestured at the Aussie. “Nora Wentworth, Mr. and Mrs. Patterson, meet Lyle McChesney, my particular friend.”
The big man appeared ready to fall off his cycle but he said nothing, only stared at Will. Julia did the same. Will had either had a stroke of genius or been struck mad.
His grandmother narrowed her eyes at him. “Really, William. The brick mason?”
Lyle stuck out his chest indignantly. “Only my day job, Ma’am. I’m a trained Shakespearian actor.”
At the word, Shakespeare, Nora was transformed. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place, William? Oh, never mind that now. Do you play Hamlet, Mr. McChesney?”
Lyle grinned wolfishly. “None better.”
“William will play the melancholy Dane, but we are in need of a Laertes. Do you fence?”
“Doesn’t every true actor?”
“Ah, yes,” she agreed with a sigh of rich satisfaction. “Spoken like a real trooper. Then it’s settled.”
“What is?” Mr. and Mrs. Patterson chorused.
“Why the play. What else? Douglas, you will play the uncle,” she informed Mr. Patterson.
Beefy face flushed, he gaped at her.
“Do stop gawping, man. You act, don’t you?”
“Once.”
“Resume the art. It will do you good.” Mrs. Wentworth swiveled her head at Will. “Rehearsals begin this evening, sir,” she added as though bargaining with him in that odd way they had of relating.
He gave a nod.
“What about Nelle?” her mother wailed.
“There aren’t many roles for women but I expect we can find her something,” the eccentric woman said distractedly.
“Not that,” Mrs. Patterson emphasized. “I thought we were here to discuss Will and Nelle’s possible nuptials?”
The imperious Nora gave an impatient shrug. “Now? Don’t be ridiculous, Loraine. We’ve Hamlet to produce and a ball to get underway.”
Julia looked on in disbelief. Will seemed to have gained a reprieve with his grandmother, though he still had considerable explaining to do to her, if that were even possible after his behavior––or lack of it.
“Miss Morrow,” his grandmother summoned.
She startled. “Yes?”
“Come back and finish your brunch. You too, sir. Nelle had to leave. We have the room to ourselves. It’s the perfect time to go over your lines. Douglas, dash round to the nearest bookstore and purchase the play.”
Clearly, no match for such an indomitable force, Mr. Patterson wore a defeated look. “Perhaps I’d best get several copies.”
“Excellent, Douglas. Just the sort of initiative we need.” With that, the regal old girl extended her arm to Julia. She took it––she didn’t dare refuse––and they swung back toward the inn. William and the addled Loraine fell in behind, but not before Julia had let him know with a sharp glance just where he stood with her.
Chapter Ten
A motley troupe of players and non-actors collected in the great hall, a mix of employees and friends coerced into this drama by the relentless Nora. Grudging as the participants might be, the old lady was in her glory. Despite his annoyance at having this production thrust at him, Will was glad to see her so energized, like an ancient vessel rigged out with fresh sails skimming over the sea under a new wind. She sat tall and straight in a high-backed Queen Anne chair, the mink draped over her shoulders, the versatile cane in her aged hand. Will didn’t doubt she’d use it now to direct the cast clustered around her like some bizarre gathering of courtiers.
Lyle was the most unlikely of them all, and yet, the only one here apart from Will with the most actual experience. And he was a good actor, confound him, much as Will hated to admit it.
Julia sat huddled in a chair looking strained and vulnerable. She bore an unsettling resemblance to Ophelia, almost as if Shakespeare had written the lines with her in mind. If only Will could have five minutes alone with her he could sooth her troubled spirit, he was sure of it, but they hadn’t had five minutes. She’d been silent and tense on the drive back to Foxleigh and he hadn’t been in the mood to talk it out with her then. Now, he wished he’d exerted himself.
Eyes bright, his grandmother tapped her cane. She wasn’t concerned about Julia, or anyone else for that matter. Nothing and no one was paramount to her except this play, and she was single minded about getting it off the ground.
She cleared her throat. “All right, folks. Let’s begin,” she said in an unusually strong voice. “Thank you for taking part in this momentous occasion.”
A polite round of applause followed, and she paused to nod graciously before continuing. “For those of you new to the play, I will give you the setting.” Here, the old lady came into her own, bent forward, her tone filled with mystery. “Imagine if you will a handsome young prince called Hamlet. His father is dead, and Hamlet’s grief is black. Rather than opening with the funeral, though, we shall commence with the haunting.”
Anyone in the assembly unaware of a ghostly presence in the play perked up. And everyone seemed more attentive, despite themselves, as the story teller wove on.
“We shall have props later, but for now, envision this hall as a dark medieval castle in Denmark at the dead of night. Hamlet has heard his father’s spirit roams the battlement at this haunted hour. He and his friends are there watching for the royal specter. We will make do with one friend until I can recruit others.” She swept her hand at them. “William, Dave, center stage.”
Will knew his lines but Dave, the gardener whom his grandmother had pressed into playing Horatio, held a dog-eared script in his callused hand. He bent his red neck over the pages and squinted. “Which is me, Mrs. Wentworth?”
“I’ve marked your part,” she told him. “And we’ve abbreviated the lines, a sort of condensed version.”
Shakespeare would turn in his grave at the butchering she’d done to his work, but there was nothing for it other than to enter into the spirit of the evening. Will strode to the middle of the hall, his mind only half on the play. He was suited for the part of Hamlet, though, feeling brooding enough.
He glanced around as if seeing only dark battlements and rubbed his hands together, blowing on them. “‘The air bites shrewdly. It is very cold.’”
Dave nodded, his head ringed with the hat hair effect left from his gardening cap. He rubbed a grizzled chin with thick fingers, stumbling as he spoke in his Southern twang. “‘It is a nipping and an eager air.’” He paused. “What does that mean?”
“He agrees with Hamlet that it’s cold,” Will explained. “My line. ‘What hour now?’”
Glancing at his wrist as though that would enhance the scene, Dave drawled, “‘I think it lacks of twelve.’”
Will shook his head at him. “No watches then, Dave.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Their director interrupted at this point. “Let’s get on to the ghost,” Nora said in her erratic manner.
Dave adopted a bug-eyed expression Will supposed was intended to mime fear and pointed shakily. “‘Look, my lord, it comes.’”
Will raised his eyes to the second floor landing where Joe, the other gardener, stood beckoning to him with white fingers. The lime dust powdering him from an application to the lawn lent some credibility to his ghostly effort, but not a lot. Will pressed his fist to his mouth, partly to keep from laughing, and then dropped his hand so as not to muffle the words.
“‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us...be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d, bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell. Thou comes in such a questionable shape. I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, father. What may this mean that thou should revisit us?’”
Dave grabbed his sleeve. “‘It beckons you to go away with it, but do not go.’”
A nice touch, Will conceded. He shook Dave off. “‘It will not speak, then I will follow it.” Leaving Dave, he dashed up the stairs.
“Skip ahead to the parts I specified!” his g
randmother called out.
Will stumbled as Joe lunged at him, more in an attack mode than as a fearsome specter, and gripped his shoulders.
“‘I am thy father’s spirit doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires,’” Joe declared in his gravelly bass voice.
Will recited his part automatically, his chief concern escaping this ape-man unscathed. Joe was a hard worker, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Moaning as though he were portraying Jacob Marley, he gave Will a teeth-rattling jar. “‘If thou didst ever thy dear father love––’”
“‘Oh, God,’” Will said, both as Hamlet and himself.
“‘Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder,’” Joe demanded.
“‘Murder?’” Will echoed.
Jon tightened his hold. Surely, he was the most hell-bent ghostly king any actor had ever portrayed.
“‘Now, Hamlet, hear me,’” he growled, like a hit man about to eliminate him if he didn’t take heed. “‘Tis given out that sleeping in my orchard a serpent stung me. The serpent that did sting that father’s life now wears his crown.’”
“‘Oh, my prophetic soul––my uncle,’” Will said.
“‘Aye,’” Joe groaned. “‘That incestuous, adulterous beast with witchcraft of his wit and traitorous gifts. While sleeping in my orchard, my custom always in the afternoon, thy uncle stole with juice of cursed hebona in a vial and in the porches of my ears did pour the leprous distilment.’”
Joe clutched him by the throat. Was Hamlet ever so beset upon?
With a credible effort at lamentation, Joe roared in mock agony, “‘If thou hast nature in thee bear it not! Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest. As for thy mother leave her to heaven and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her. Fare thee well. Adieu, Adieu. Hamlet, remember me.’”
Joe released Will and he staggered back, gasping for breath. But the prophetic plea coupled with the warning of treachery struck him as significant. He sensed it had to do with Cole. Was there something more he should do about his distant cousin? Cole had been struck down with a sword. Everyone knew that, didn’t they? Or was there more to the story? Some crucial aspect left untold?
Unless Cole’s accomplishments had been exaggerated over the years, he was an outstanding swordsman. Come to think of it, how had he fallen so easily under his attacker’s blow?
Will had scant time to dwell on the mystery. Their director rapped her cane.
“Excellent, gentlemen! Now, let’s rehearse the scene between Laertes and his sister, Ophelia. Mr. McChesney and Miss Morrow center stage.”
Lyle ambled out into the middle of the hall in his sleeveless muscle shirt, worn jeans, and boots. His bare arms bulged beneath the covering of reddish hair and he had the neck of a bull. In total contrast to Lyle, Julia rose and drifted out onto the floor in a white sundress that draped her enticing figure with girlish charm. Her hair hung around her in a silken sheen and she looked every bit the innocent character she portrayed.
Laying his hand on her shoulder, Lyle spoke in earnest tones far removed from his usual banter as he cautioned her. “‘Perhaps Hamlet loves you now, but you must fear. His greatness weighed, his will is not his own, for he is subject to his birth. He may not as unvalued persons do carve for himself, for on his choice depend the safety and health of the whole state. Therefore must his choice be circumscribed.’”
This was eerily like Will’s predicament with Grandmother Nora adamant about his own marital choice.
“Jump ahead to the scene where Laertes bids Ophelia goodbye!” she directed.
Lyle circled his arms around Julia in what was supposed to be a fond embrace, but pulled her closer than Will thought he had any business doing. That damn Aussie could feel her soft curves against his bulging chest.
Lyle ran his fingers over Julia’s rippling hair. “‘Farewell, Ophelia. Remember well what I have said to you.’”
She lifted her face. “‘Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key of it.’”
“‘Fare thee well.’” Lyle bent his head and kissed her full on the mouth.
Julia seemed as startled as Will was angry. He charged toward them with everyone looking on. “You’re supposed to be brother and sister, for Christ’s sake!”
Lyle frowned at him, still circling her waist in that infuriatingly possessive manner. “It was a brotherly kiss.”
“Like hell it was,” Will growled, clamping his fingers into Lyle’s solid flesh and jerking his arm away. Balling up his fist, he drove it into Lyle’s shoulder. His jaw was next. “Keep your hands off her.”
A loud rap of the cane, and his grandmother interceded. “Enough, William! In times past a kiss on the lips didn’t mean what it does today. I’ve seen Laertes and Ophelia portrayed this way.”
Not with Laertes exuding lust, Will hadn’t. Lyle dropped his arms from Julia and Will let it pass. For now.
“Let’s move on to the scene in Ophelia’s chamber when Hamlet first pretends madness with her,” their director decreed.
Why Hamlet had hidden behind false insanity rather than simply striking his uncle down in the first place, Will had never understood. But to his satisfaction, Lyle stalked to the sidelines. Will took his place beside Julia and gazed down into her upturned face. “‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.’” Shakespeare had the most unusual way of speaking about a woman’s reproachful eyes. And Julia’s were plenty reproachful.
“‘Good my lord, how does your honor for this many a day?’” she asked.
“‘I humbly thank you, well.’” He started to walk away as the script decreed.
She hastened after him as she had in the hall the evening before and caught his arm. Warmth charged through him at her touch.
“‘My lord, I have remembrances of yours that I have longed to redeliver,’”
She reached into the bodice of her dress, reminding him of the mounded breasts he’d come excruciatingly near to seeing, and drew out the black velvet ribbon and gold heart he’d given her that morning. The delicate jewelry draped her slender fingers as she held it out to him.
“‘I pray you now receive them,’” she said with a hint of frost in her lilting accent.
Why couldn’t she have used costume jewelry? Will didn’t want his gift back anymore than Hamlet had. “‘No. I never gave you ought,’” he denied in Hamlet’s words.
Julia challenged him as she had the night before. “‘My honored lord, you know right well you did. And with them words of so sweet breath composed as made the things more rich. Their perfume lost, take these again.’”
Her memory of the newly acquired lines was amazing, as was her convincing delivery. More than acting was at work. Will took the jewelry and slipped it into his pants pocket intent on returning it to her later. Then, as Hamlet, he launched into pretended madness, raving at her, all the while wanting to kiss her protesting mouth. Hamlet paused in his ranting long enough to say, “‘I did love you once.’”
Her eyes skewered him. “‘Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.’”
Will had no heart to utter the cruel lines he must hurl at Ophelia next. Hamlet should have been taken out and whipped, the way he treated that poor girl.
Instead, Will did some adlibbing of his own and took Julia tenderly in his arms. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear, pressing his lips to her glorious hair.
“You hurt me,” she said softly.
Her pain was his.
“William, do get on with it!”
Loudly, for all to hear, he said in a tortured voice, “‘You should not have believed me.’” Releasing her with wrenching reluctance, he paced around and demanded, “‘Where is your father?’”
“‘At home my lord.’”
Will glanced at the corner of the room where Jon, acting the role of Polonious, stood partly hidden behind the damask drapes as though in Ophelia’s ch
amber.
“‘Let the doors be shut upon him that he may play the fool nowhere but his own house!’” Will shouted, taking satisfaction in that line after all of the blabbing Jon had done earlier to Lyle.
His grandmother stopped him there.
“Let’s run through the banquet Hamlet’s traitorous uncle is throwing with his deceived mother, the queen. Mill about everyone, smile and laugh. You’re to be eating, drinking, enjoying yourselves. We shall have musicians on the night of the play. Fire-eaters would be an authentic touch, don’t you think, William?” she suggested hopefully.
A chaotic scene of costumed circus performers tossing back their heads to gulp orange flames and the fire department charging into Foxleigh with a large crowd in attendance chased through his mind. “I’m drawing the line at drummers and pipers, Ma’am. The fire marshal would never allow real flames in a play.”
She drew her mouth together, and then shrugged. “As long as we have real swords. Now for the banquet scene.”
Newly cast actors rifled through their scripts to find the right page. The words of the robust scenario fell around Will more or less accurately, depending on his grandmother’s amendments and the players’ grasp of their parts. He delivered his lines with the requisite passion, all the while yearning to be close to Julia. His chance came as the banquet unfolded during Hamlet’s farewell to Ophelia––ironic that his pretense of insanity led to her genuine breakdown.
Will approached Julia, seated at the side of the revelry, and knelt by her. “‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’”
Her glance reminiscent of this morning’s censure, she replied, “‘No, my lord.’”
“‘I mean my head upon your lap?’”
“‘Ay, my lord,’” she agreed.
He laid his head on her knee. “‘Do you think I meant country matters?’”
She rolled her eyes. “‘I think nothing, my lord.’”
He smiled. “‘That’s a fair thought, to lie between a maid’s legs.’”
