Ophelia

by Jackie French

  She reached for me. I sat on the bed and wrapped my arms around her. I had never touched her before today, nor seen her touched, except when the king had casually kissed her hand at banquets. Even when we ladies dressed her, we made sure only cloth touched her skin, not our hands.

  ‘Madam, do not worry. Please. Your son will be home soon.’

  I wanted to add, ‘Prince Hamlet will make a fine king,’ but I didn’t. The queen knew as well as I did that Prince Hamlet knew little about the land he was to rule.

  Which was why he needed a queen who did. A girl who knew the court and all its gossip; who had heard about the affairs of state as her father pondered them each breakfast time, and listened to his discussions with the queen. Me. Ophelia. Queen of Denmark.

  Queen Gertrude and I between us would ensure that every household had a dozen waxed wheels of cheese to feed them over winter, that enough hams and sausages dangled over the hearth to use as cudgels for the army if young Fortinbras invaded, as my father feared he would.

  I would wear gold at my coronation, I decided. Gold to match my hair; gold for sunlight, for summer cheese, for butter. The sunbeams would dance for us.

  But I couldn’t say that now.

  Queen Gertrude lifted her hands from her face. Her eyes were dry, her face anguished. ‘Hamlet must not be king,’ she whispered. ‘Not yet.’

  My dream cracked.

  I stared at her. ‘But he is king, madam.’

  You didn’t contradict a queen either. Shock made me bold. Hamlet had become king the moment his father ceased to breathe.

  Queen Gertrude lifted herself up. I propped pillows behind her. ‘My son has never ruled.’ She seemed to speak to herself as much as to me. ‘He hardly knows the kingdom. How can he be king?’

  ‘But Prince Hamlet is king,’ I said again.

  ‘He will be king,’ she corrected. She looked me full in the face. ‘Denmark needs a strong leader. A man who can command an army. A man the lords know and will obey. Not in a year’s time, but now.’

  ‘You mean in case young Fortinbras invades, Your Majesty?’

  Only this morning Father had received a letter describing the size of Fortinbras’s army, marching near our borders. Fortinbras, son of the dead king whose ghost I had once talked to. Or had I? It seemed a dream now. Must have been a dream. Surely ghostly kings did not truly walk, nor little girls talk to them?

  Young Fortinbras had not invaded Denmark — yet. An army could be put to many uses: its leader could hire it to a king, to keep order in his kingdom or to attack another. But the fact that Fortinbras had both a nearby army and a claim to Denmark’s throne was worrying.

  The queen’s voice was firmer now. ‘Fortinbras is less likely to attack if a strong king is on the throne.’

  ‘But we … I mean you, and my father and the other advisers, can make Prince Hamlet strong, madam.’

  ‘Not in time to stop an invading army. There is only one man who can be the leader we need now.’

  For the first time the queen didn’t meet my eyes. And all at once I knew.

  I asked anyway. ‘Who, Your Majesty?’

  ‘The king’s brother. Lord Claudius.’

  ‘But Lord Claudius isn’t even a prince.’

  Just as his brother hadn’t been a prince, or a king, until he’d won the kingdom in a drunken bet.

  The queen looked at me steadily, as if she truly wished to see my reaction. ‘No, Lord Claudius is not a prince. But he can be king if he marries a queen.’

  I kept my face expressionless. One learned that at court too. So that was why no one had called out, ‘Long live the king!’ Others at court must have thought of this too.

  ‘You would marry Lord Claudius for the sake of the kingdom, madam?’

  The queen looked at her hands, at the wrinkles and age spots. Then back at me.

  ‘I would marry Lord Claudius because I love him,’ she whispered, as if the walls behind the tapestries had ears. Which, in a palace where gossip ran faster than fresh cream, they often did. ‘I have loved him ever since I was brought to Elsinore to marry his brother. I had no choice then. But now …’

  Now you can have the man you want and still be queen, I thought. It would be hard to give up her seat by the throne to be simply the queen mother. And, I admitted reluctantly, the queen’s decision might save the kingdom from attack. She was no fool, this queen of ours.

  ‘Hamlet will still be king one day,’ the queen added hurriedly, as if she wanted to convince herself as well as me. ‘Claudius has no children. And I am too old to bear him one.’

  How old was Lord Claudius? Sixty perhaps? An old man. But an old man could live for many years. And marry a young woman if his first wife died, who could bear children. Another insight I would not mention to Queen Gertrude.

  ‘My lady, what will Prince Hamlet say to this?’

  She lifted her chin. ‘Prince Hamlet has no lands of his own, no army. There is nothing he can do. As for what he will say …’ She met my eyes, then tapped me on the cheek. ‘You must persuade him, my child. Tell him he will be king when he knows the kingdom well enough to rule it.’

  And when King Claudius is finished with it, I thought. So this was another reason why the queen had sought me out alone.

  I wondered how even a queen could know a man would want to marry her if she had not talked about it with him first. The king had died only today, and with no warning. Then I remembered Lord Claudius’s face back there in the king’s bedroom, how he had failed to say the words ‘Long live the king’. Lord Claudius would not be surprised to be offered the throne tonight.

  Perhaps he and the queen had even discussed what might happen one day, if the king were to die of plague or out hunting. ‘What if he is gored by a boar?’ the queen might ask, her eyes as calculating as a lizard’s soaking up the sun’s warmth.

  Which was why I only almost loved her, for all she was as near as I had ever had to a mother.

  But I admired her, as a queen.

  ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ I said.

  Chapter 3

  The dead king lay in state for a sennight before the funeral, lying in ice in the palace chapel to keep his body fresh.

  It was a week’s travel from Wittenberg to Elsinore in summer, but now, in midwinter, drifts of snow blocked the roads, and ice winds kept ships from harbour. Prince Hamlet did not return in time for his father’s funeral, nor for his mother’s wedding three weeks after it.

  The queen did not call me to her during the week the dead king lay in state. I did not expect it. She would spend the time secluded in mourning. She knew I had other duties too, beyond attending her. Unlike Lady Annika, Lady Hilda and Lady Anna, I did not live in the palace, but in my father’s adjoining house.

  Sometimes I wondered why Father had not moved to a palace apartment after my mother’s death. Perhaps he had loved her too much to leave the rooms that she had furnished, the tapestries embroidered in her girlhood, her portrait in our hall. Or maybe he liked being lord of his own small kingdom each night.

  I wore the keys of our household, and unlocked the larder each morning to give the cooks the day’s saffron or cinnamon, Venetian almonds or Parisian chestnuts; and checked that the linen was aired, the cheese in the cellars turned regularly, and the brine in the barrels of salted butter changed each week. Ours were good cellars and I kept them well-stocked: three hundred cheeses, fresh and aged; five tons of salted butter; smoked sides of salmon, rows of hams and slabs of bacon; barrels of old brandy and new ale; crocks of honey; boxes of dried berries or hops; bunches of dried herbs hanging from the rafters — all sent from our estates.

  But I helped to dress the queen on the morning of the king’s funeral, in black lace, with a black lace veil across her face. I walked behind her, with her other ladies, wearing the black satin I’d inherited from my mother.

  I helped to robe the queen for her wedding too. A widow wears black for a year after her husband’s death, but black is bad luck for a bride. When
I reached the queen’s apartments, I saw the maids had laid out a new underdress of rich purple; purple satin sleeves, trimmed with ermine fur in black and white; and an overskirt of purple lace, trimmed with ermine too.

  A good choice, I thought, as Lady Anna and I lifted up the petticoat. A widow moves from black to purple in her second year of mourning; and purple is royal too.

  The maids sewed on the sleeves. Lady Annika woke up in time to drape the lace veil, and even smiled. If a withered winter apple smiled, it would look like Lady Annika.

  Lady Hilda gestured with her small fat hands to the maids to bring the mirror over.

  The queen stared at her image. ‘Is that truly me?’

  ‘It is, madam, and beautiful,’ I said.

  My father would have taken six pages to say the same. I had no taste for the long speeches of court. No one thought less of me for it. And it gave others an audience for their words.

  The queen turned and smiled at us. She’d had us dress in shades of lavender; not bright, but not full mourning either.

  ‘You are my flowers,’ she said. She kissed me on the cheek. ‘And you are the fairest flower of our court, dear child.’

  The maids opened the door. We ladies-in-waiting held the queen’s train above the stone floor of the corridor. Our own trains trailed behind. I would need to make sure my maid Gerda washed mine once the day was over. Castles breed dust, no matter how often they are swept; especially in winter, when soot from fires and torches and candles thicken the air.

  The torches were lit along the corridor now, to hunt away the winter dark. The sun would rise only a handspan above the snow-lipped horizon today. Footmen opened the doors before us, down the stairs, across the great hall, through the receiving chamber to the chapel.

  The chapel doors exhaled incense and perfumes and a faint scent of old closets. The guests stood: the women in grey silk and lace — we had been whispering the favoured colour for the past week; the palace women sewing, sewing, sewing, the dye vats bubbling — and the lords in grey satin. My brother, Laertes, his ship just back from Paris where he lived most of the year (and enjoyed himself too freely, my father feared), stood in the front next to Lord Claudius. He wore grey satin trimmed with lace and diamonds, and his hair was curled neatly. Laertes was almost a stranger to me, but I was glad to have a brother here, and a handsome one.

  ‘Your Majesty.’ My father bowed at the chapel doors. A lord chancellor did not give a queen away, like her father would have, but he preceded her up the aisle to the altar, giving the ceremony his blessing.

  Father bowed to Lord Claudius, then took his place beside my brother.

  The queen’s eyes met her lord’s. I saw her flush. I had not realised that women her age could love as the young do, until I saw it then.

  Lord Claudius smiled. I tried to read his expression. Was it love? No, I thought. It is the look of a man who has played a game of chess and makes the final move to win.

  The priest began to speak. And when the chapel doors opened again, Lord Claudius was king.

  It was a fine banquet. Torches flared across the palace courtyard, driving away the afternoon shadows. Three oxen turned on spits, their dripping juices flaring in the cooking fires, for the townsfolk and ships’ crews and any farmers who had travelled through the snow to join the celebrations. A cartload of barley bread was parked next to the fires, for them to eat with the meat, with barrels of ale, and minstrels paid to sing the new king’s virtues. Laughter and music echoed up to the palace.

  Inside the banquet hall, servants carried in whole roast boars with gilded tusks, venison with the deer’s antlers also painted gold, and roast geese with berry sauce.

  I glanced at the queen as the geese were set on the tables. Boar and venison were wild meats, but goose in midwinter meant we were eating birds that were being kept for spring.

  I’d rather have had bread and cheese. And be doing something, even inspecting the linen for frayed edges, instead of hours of eating.

  Still, a royal marriage feast did not happen often. The kingdom was prosperous. There would be enough geese left to lay eggs for goslings in spring. I ate my goose, my slices of boar, the almond custards dyed gold with saffron, and spiced almond cakes. And if the marzipan table centrepiece of the castle, towns and fields had been used three weeks before at the dead king’s wake, stained black then and now covered with gold leaf, there was no one who would mention it openly.

  Nor did anyone say aloud that if there must be a marriage, a quiet one was more fitting than this finery.

  But perhaps the queen and her new king are right, I thought, as the next course was carried in: a whole stuffed pike with crabapple sauce; rose hep jellies; rows of gilded roast ducks and capons. This feast was to show that Claudius was king indeed.

  The last sparks of afternoon sunlight wandered through the windows, lighting a jewel here, a silken headdress there, brighter than the torches. The fires roared deep red. The tables were dressed with gold and green and red: bread like golden sheaves of wheat, red marzipan cherries, green-painted apples. If my lady could not wear colours to her wedding, she had them all around her now.

  The musicians played. No grey and lavender for them, but reds and greens too. I sat at the high table, with grey-haired friends of my father either side of me. Across from me, my brother flirted with Lady Hilda, showing all the charm he had brought back with him from Paris. I loved my brother with a sister’s duty. When he winked at me, I suddenly realised that I liked him too.

  More food, enough to stun an elephant: peacocks with gold feathers; roast swans with red-dyed apples. The lord of the exchequer passed me stewed figs with minced chicken, then carp in a mustard sauce. Lady Annika’s eyes closed in a doze. If no one woke her, she would soon be face down in the lingonberry sauce. Lady Hilda’s face glowed with goose grease, her cheeks red from too many pastries.

  I glanced at the queen. She laughed as Lord Claudius offered her a leg of pheasant, whispering a joke into her ear.

  Not Lord Claudius. The king.

  Another tune. I wondered if there would be dancing. At a wedding, the bride led her ladies, but we had not prepared a set. A widow did not dance for a year at least. But then neither did she wed …

  ‘Some hare, my Lady Ophelia?’

  For a moment I thought the lord of the exchequer had said ‘hair’. I stifled a giggle, for he had little hair to offer me.

  ‘My lord, I thank you,’ I began, then stopped.

  The hall fell silent. The musicians lowered their tabors, mandolins and finger drums. Lady Annika woke, blinked, stared.

  A young man strode through the hall between the tables. He wore black: black cloak, black boots, black feather in a black velvet cap — a crow among the grey silk doves of court. He was dressed for travel, not for feasting. Behind him came his attendants, less richly dressed than him, in deep black too. A mob of crows, come among the revellers.

  Prince Hamlet. The man I had dreamed of marrying.

  No, I admitted, I never dreamed of marrying this man. How could I when I hadn’t seen him since he was a boy? I’d dreamed of marrying the prince. And here he was. Still a prince, not a king.

  He looked … startled. No more than that. Perhaps he had been gone so long he thought Denmark mourned in grey and purple, not black, that the townsfolk sang and feasted every afternoon. He reached the middle of the room, then stopped and gazed around.

  What is he waiting for? I wondered. And then I knew.

  Prince Hamlet waited for the court to rise, to bow or curtsey to the ground towards him, their new king. He waited for the trumpets to blow the royal entrance march, for men to cry, ‘Long live the king!’

  Surely the queen had sent messengers, I thought, to tell her son what she planned. Surely his uncle, Lord Claudius, had sent a letter …

  Or not. A prince warned that his kingdom was no longer his own might have brought an army home, like young Fortinbras, rather than the band of black-garbed servants we saw here.


  My heart leaped out to him, his face white with travel and weariness, so alone in black among the silken greys. Of all the court, only Prince Hamlet did not know what had happened in the kingdom he had thought was his.

  He stood there for perhaps ten heartbeats. And then he understood.

  He gazed at the lords and ladies at the high table, at King Claudius, at his father’s crown shining on his uncle’s head, at his mother sitting at his uncle’s side. He stood still and silent, as if the ice outside had claimed him for its own.

  The queen stood and extended her hand. Her voice would have sounded welcoming and carefree to any who did not know her well. ‘Hamlet, our son, and the sun of our winter lives. Your stepfather, the king, and I bid you welcome to your home.’

  He did not take her hand. Nor did he draw closer. ‘My stepfather, madam?’

  ‘Your uncle, now your loving father.’ For a pinprick of a moment the queen’s voice held steel. ‘And now your gracious lord.’

  King Claudius stood. A more courteous host, or uncle, would have stood at once to welcome a nephew, now a son, home. He would have stepped forward to embrace him. Our new king had sat those long seconds to show Hamlet — and the court — that he could.

  ‘A fond welcome to you, Prince Hamlet.’ Was there a slight emphasis on the word ‘prince’? ‘We feel sorrow that you missed our wedding, but joy that you are here now to see our happiness.’

  ‘Indeed, sir, I see too much, and all lit by your gracious presence too.’

  Prince Hamlet looked around the room again. I held my breath. This was the time for the lords to rise and bow to him; to show they supported the old king’s true heir and not the man who sat beside the queen. Surely some, at least, would stand for the true heir to the throne?

  The room was silent. No one moved. Prince Hamlet had no supporters here. His every friend was at Wittenberg or standing, puzzled, behind him. Had his attendants also thought they were coming to their master’s kingdom, with posts of glory promised to them? Prince Hamlet was what he had always been: a king’s son. No, he was less now: a king’s stepson. Prince Hamlet was a king’s heir only if he kept the new king’s favour. No more than that.