The jester fell to the timber boards, on his knees, eyes closed, hands together.
“Dear God… if you’re listening, kindly get my murderous nephew out of my hair before he makes me as barmy as he is. Stick the boy on a boat to England. Have those brutes deal with him not me.”
His eyes opened, his hand went to his ear.
“What? What?”
Yorick frowned.
“Sorry. Nobody listening…”
“It’s Elsinore I wanted to murder,” Hamlet said in a low and toneless voice. His hand went out, made a tearing gesture. “That damned place. That world. If I could rip its heart out…”
“You with it? Me too? Ophelia. Your mother… everything?”
“Everything…”
Yorick looked up at him, serious in a flash.
“Then that’s what your uncle sees. He’s an intelligent man. He knows you better than you know yourself. That’s why you’re on this stinking boat to England.”
He got up from the floor and dusted himself down.
“What orders do you carry for the English court? What papers? Let’s see them.”
“Claudius didn’t give me any.”
The fool put a finger to his lips.
“Oh, right. That pair of chums he’s sent. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What do they have?”
“I asked. They said they had none except some papers of passage. The court documents have gone ahead.”
The jester bunched his big fists.
“What? He only decided to ship you off last night. How could he have dispatched the papers separately? There’s one ship left Elsinore for England this morning and we’re on it.”
“True.”
“Ergo… Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a pair of lying, toadying bastards. A king doesn’t send his heir to a foreign country without sealed instructions. It’s unthinkable.”
He slapped Hamlet on the arm.
“Time for a new talent, chum. To add to murder and the ripping out of hearts.”
“Which is?”
“You need to wait until those two are out of their cabin, puking or eating or mincing or whatever it is they do. And then…”
Hamlet waited.
“Then Prince of Denmark, you must learn to be a thief.”
“You, jester,” he said, tapping the harlequin jacket. “You…”
“No, sir.” The little man strode across the room and sat on the edge of the trunk. “This is your job. Your role in this drama. Your fate. Not mine.”
Ophelia had spent an hour patiently going through her father’s papers. The daybook. The records. The receipts and invoices. There was nothing there but the records of the state. Nor should she have been surprised. Polonius was cautious and secretive by nature. He would never have allowed evidence of black deeds to be found easily.
And yet… he was a pedantic, pompous man too. He would have wanted credit for his actions. Testament to them for posterity. He was too long-winded, too fond of his own voice to allow it to be silenced by something as primitive as death.
There was none of his odd, controlling personality in these documents. She couldn’t believe this would have satisfied him.
Ophelia looked at the study. Books on all three walls. Ledgers and records of meetings and decisions, all in her father’s careful hand. She’d taken every one off the shelf. Flicked through them as best she could and was close to giving up the fight when something caught her eye.
On the bookcase nailed to the northern wall by the window he kept the most tedious records of all: simple diaries of the comings and goings at Elsinore. Ambassadors received and dispatched. Nobility. Emissaries of the church. The occasional fleeing statesman from elsewhere seeking sanctuary.
A cunning man would hide his secrets beneath the thickest layer of tedium he could find. She snatched off the bottom shelf of books, found nothing. Then the middle. Polonius was a tall, stiff man. Sometimes she’d seen him reaching to ease his back when he finally retired from the office at the end of the night. She found a low stool, stood on it, removed the first few volumes at the top.
There was something behind just visible in the gloom. She got a candle, lit it, looked. Her heart fell. Nothing but a keyhole, small and damaged in the wood at the sides as if by clumsy use.
It was getting dark. She’d no idea how long it would take Voltemand to return. So little time, and nothing to do with it.
Half-running she returned to her room and went through the things they’d given her after her father was washed and prepared for the burial. Personal effects. Clothes, a chain of office, a watch. What she took to be a snuff box, one of the fashionable new items arrived from America via France and Italy.
A set of keys. All familiar, for the doors of the quarters. Then she looked at the snuff box again and saw an odd button protruding from the side. Tobacco was a disgusting habit. He’d always said so. And hadn’t the Pope recently threatened sanctions against any who took to the new habit of snuff?
She played with the button. A lever clicked and out of the side came a short brass key.
Back to the office, up on the stool. She reached in, just managed to find the slot, opened it. Put her hand through and took out a thick leather-bound volume that smelled of dust and age and him.
In the dying light of the afternoon Ophelia sat by the window, read and wept. This was his personal diary written at the end of each day. Every hateful thought, every caustic observation. He was here, still alive, full of an irascible contempt for all around him. Old Hamlet, Young Hamlet. Claudius, Gertrude and the members of the court.
And, at regular intervals, entries about his daughter. No love there. No love for anyone, she could see that. Polonius was a bitter, wicked old man who sat in judgement on the world he smiled at and pretended to serve. Old Hamlet, a vicious, cruel king, too bent on domination and foreign adventure to recognise the dissent and perils close to home. His son, an energetic warrior in spirit broken by his father’s neglect and reduced to the fey intellectual life of a student. Claudius, an unimaginative diplomat whose sole weakness was a lustful obsession with his own brother’s wife. Gertrude, the flawed queen tempted from her lawful husband by a persuasive and gentle suitor.
It was all there, Elsinore in his venomous curt prose. Even, when she read towards the end, the means, the intermediaries, the plan by which the throne would change hands.
She shivered as she discovered the details. Felt a cold hatred for him when she went through the entries about herself. A daughter stayed blind to the darker aspects of family. That was duty. It came naturally. She knew he had no time for her but didn’t understand until this moment the contempt and disappointment he felt. She was no cowed, obedient servant as her mother must have been. Every question, every demand and last proof of her own identity seemed to him a rebuke, a denial of his position as father, ruler of the little kingdom behind the doors of their apartment.
And over the years, she now realised, that had turned to hate.
It was dark by the time she’d finished, weary, upset, wishing all this had stayed hidden. Some things were best left unsaid. Here was her father’s life, in his own hand, a testament to an existence spent despising others.
She thought of putting the diary back in its hiding place and throwing the blasted secret key in the counterfeit snuff box out of the window, to be lost in the wintry night. But then she’d disappoint another. Hamlet. The one man whose love she truly craved. Now more than ever.
There was a noise beyond the door. She closed her eyes and tried to think. Then she hid the book as best she could beneath her garments, waited for the footsteps beyond the door to recede, left the office, locking the door behind her, and scurried down the dark passage to her own bedroom.
Ophelia flew in, slammed the door behind her, put the book on her dressing table, wondered what to do.
Ordinary things, she thought. Bathe. Get dressed. Take dinner alone. Think.
And never read her father’s blasted private thoughts again. That way
lay lunacy, a real madness, not the feigned one of an indecisive man struggling to come to terms with a terrible truth.
“My lady,” said an amused and confident voice behind her.
Angry and frightened in equal measure she turned. Voltemand stood there smirking by the bed. He’d been there all along.
“These are my private quarters,” she snapped. “A gentleman doesn’t enter them without my bidding.”
He laughed, walked to the dressing table. She stood and blocked his way.
“But I’m no gentleman. I’m Lord Chamberlain. I go where I please. As did your father.”
“If I tell Gertrude…”
“She’ll shout and scream and make a million demands which Claudius will ignore.” He reached for the book. “You keep a diary?”
“It’s mine,” she told him.
“Judging by the cover you were writing it in the womb.”
“Get out!”
His hand rose, stroked her breast, his fingers curled around her throat. Close up, white teeth, neat moustache, cruel smile, he whispered, “You will bid me… enter, Ophelia. I assure you.”
He took her ear lobe between finger and thumb, bent down to kiss her. Stopped when the dagger she’d slipped from his belt reached his throat, the point pricking the skin.
“One last time,” she promised. “Leave me now. Or there’ll be another funeral in the morning. And the king will be looking for his second Lord Chamberlain in as many days.”
Voltemand retreated, still smiling.
“The harder the battle, the greater the satisfaction in victory. Another day, my lady. Not far off.”
Then, with a flourish, he was gone.
She sat on the bed, shaking. Found a flask of wine. Took a swig. Looked at the leather-bound book. Felt she could hear her father’s sarcastic laughter working its way out from the beneath covers.
In a fury she leapt up, ripped out the pages that mattered, hid them beneath her clothes in the drawers, and threw the rest on the fire.
There it crackled and spat and shrieked, burning on the logs and the embers, parchment pages turning in on themselves, blackening into nothing but ashes. In the end there was only the leather cover, reduced to a piece of hard, ebony skin.
This and a rotting corpse in the castle cemetery were all that remained of him now, and somehow they still seemed too much. She had what mattered. And when Hamlet returned they’d use it.
Heading north from Elsinore the waters had been millpond calm, and had stayed so as they neared Gothenburg where they pulled hard west across the Skagen spit, hugging the shore to keep a healthy distance between them and the coast. After that there was only the wide grey-green expanse of the North Sea, bleak, cold and churning beneath them. The vessel tossed relentlessly as the wind picked up, and Hamlet threw up over the side twice. He crawled back to his berth feeling weak and hollow, but the nausea didn’t return.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern took rather longer to settle. They spent all of the second day clinging to the rail, pale and greenish, but too desperate for air to heed the lashing of rain and sea spray. Their fashionable doublets with their slashed silk lining were already ruined, but for once they were too miserable to care. Everything they had been seemed forgotten. Their beards were left untrimmed, their hair tangled, the perfumes with which they usually dotted their throats and handkerchiefs abandoned, as was their clever banter, their elegant gait, their testing out of lines from popular songs... All gone.
They were like people Hamlet had only seen from afar, through the window of coaches or as he passed on horseback: vagabonds who didn’t give a tinker’s cuss for what anyone might think of them.
All of which made the leather satchel they had with them interesting. Hamlet hadn’t noticed it right away because it was small and unadorned. Then it struck him as odd that they would carry it about with them so religiously when everything else was discarded or abandoned to their cabin. He made a point of watching them from a distance, braving the gale and the slick, lurching deck to see if they ever got anything out of it: a tonic for their seething guts, perhaps.
Nothing.
They had it with them the next day too, trading the case between them when they went to piss or puke over the side, never leaving it more than a couple of feet away. It was hard to imagine why such tedious correspondence as warrants of passage would need this kind of care.
“Feeling better, lords?” Hamlet had called to them. “We’ll be there in a week if this wind holds.”
They didn’t respond except to nod miserably. Guildenstern attempted a wan smile, then pretended he couldn’t hear over the gale, and returned to staring at the dark, foaming water. They had been too seasick to sleep, and were now close to exhaustion, particularly since they hadn’t kept down any food since leaving port.
Tonight then, Hamlet thought. That would be the time.
He’d been serious when he said he hoped the voyage would be brief. These were dangerous waters, and not only because the sea itself was treacherous and brutally inconstant. The trade routes were dogged by pirates, privateers from England often operating unofficially on behalf of their king, others from Ireland or Scotland, sailing from the howling wastes of the Orkneys or Faroe Islands. There had been reports of merciless and efficient Turkish pirates coming up from Algiers...
Hamlet went back to his cabin and watched the darkening sky through the porthole.
“Your chums stumbled off to bed an hour ago,” Yorick announced from the shadows. “They looked distinctly peaky to me.”
The prince just nodded.
“What if they wake up?” asked the jester. “Will you serve them the way you did Polonius?”
Hamlet gave him a dangerous stare.
“What?” Yorick protested. “It’s all right for you to think it but not for me to say? Apologies, Your Travesty. I forget my place.”
“I’m not looking to kill anyone tonight. I just want to see their orders.”
“Right. But you didn’t answer my question. What if they catch you snooping? Embarrassing that. For a prince, I mean. A thief or a clown on the other hand…”
“Are you volunteering to do it for me?”
The dwarf held up his hands.
“Already been there. I told you. Burglary’s not in my contract. Besides, I don’t have the heart for secret nocturnal prowling or the head for state politics. You’re on your own this time, chum.”
“Then leave me be.”
“Fine. Try not to kill anyone this time, shall we? Accidentally or otherwise.”
Hamlet watched him shrink into the shadows, then brooded for another hour. When the darkness seemed complete he went out and began to pick his cautious way across the deck.
Two days of listless inactivity and she was bored. Ophelia had sent Gertrude a note asking for new quarters, received nothing by way of reply. Voltemand had lurked, pestered her from time to time in the apartments. But pressed no further. This was not, she felt sure, reluctance or a change of heart. Simply a question of time.
The winds of war were starting to blow around Elsinore. Rumours were sweeping the castle suggesting Fortinbras’s forces had no intention of going to Poland, whatever the ailing Magnus in Norway thought. One day soon they would turn north from Copenhagen and march straight to the high-walled castle by the sea, camp outside its battlements and wait for the kingdom of Claudius to fall.
Then midway through the morning, when she was wondering whether she ought to learn to sew as her father had so often demanded, there was a knock on the door. A messenger with a letter newly arrived on a ship from Lübeck across the Baltic.
Ophelia paid him and retreated to her bedroom. The seal on it was her brother’s. It appeared unbroken, but then with her father’s spies they usually did.
She lay back on the bed and broke the wax, saw the familiar slanted handwriting of her brother, could feel his fury in the words.
The Inn of The Three Wise Virgins, Lübeck, Thursday
Sister...
Scarcely am I gone from Elsinore and dread news reaches me here on the way to Paris. They say our father is dead. Worse, I hear the manner of his death. The king may be keeping it quiet – for which outrage he will answer – but I’m told he died at Hamlet’s hand.
What do you say about your lover now? The murderer of our father? What words of excuse or justification do you have?
Or have you finally seen Hamlet for the treacherous lunatic he truly is?
I am a son and I know what I must do. Anyone implicated in our father’s death – prince, king or whoever, will answer for it with their lives the moment I return. Which will be soon.
I talked long with our father about your perfidious, immoral dalliance with the prince. I know – even if you don’t – how much it hurt him. The idea that his own daughter far from being the chaste and modest young woman she pretended was nothing more than a hussy for the court.
These crimes against him I may one day forgive. But warn your lover of my coming vengeance... and this I swear: your blood will mark my sword as easily as his.
Find yourself a forgiving husband. A village idiot somewhere. Or a convent where you can spend your days in solitary silence for all the sins you’ve committed.
Do that yourself or I will command it on my return. In my grief a righteous anger burns. Hamlet shall bear the brunt of it. But you too, should you be rash enough to stand in my way.
Our father’s dead. I will exact a bloody retribution for his murder. Mark those words. Think on them. Expect me in Elsinore soon. Then we’ll have a reckoning, you and me and him.
Your brother who once loved you.
Laertes
The ship had only four cabins, two for the captain and his first mate, two for wealthy passengers who wanted some vestige of privacy. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern shared the one on the port side. There was no lock on the door, but Hamlet listened for a long moment, eyes clenched shut, before trying it.
It opened with a low squeak. He froze, poised to run if he heard anything from inside. They would never know it was him. They might guess but they couldn’t possibly see.
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