Ophelia

by Jackie French

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  It was as if he hadn’t heard. ‘But fouler still the crime done to me. Murdered, by a brother’s hand. Oh, horrible! Oh, horrible! Most horrible. The royal bed of Denmark now a couch for damned incest —’

  I raised my voice to speak over him. ‘I know all about that.’

  He stared at me. Had anyone ever interrupted him before, as king or ghost?

  ‘Attend me well,’ he whispered harshly. ‘For you must help to avenge what you will hear —’

  ‘You are going to tell me that your brother poured poison in your ear while you slept. And your wife then married him.’

  ‘Yes! Foul and poisonous incest.’

  ‘But what you don’t know,’ I said, ‘is that your son is sent across the sea to England, where he may be killed.’

  He floated a little further away. ‘What is it you say?’

  ‘Your son is in danger. Might lose his life. Has lost all happiness because of you.’

  He loomed above me again, the far-off stars shining like red points of anger in his eyes. ‘How dare a girl speak to me this way!’

  I put my hands on my hips. ‘I had a father once, but not like you. If my father’s ghost should walk — which it will not, for he was a good man and sits now in heaven — he would give his children words of wise counsel, treasures dropped from years of wisdom, not bluster of revenge.’

  ‘You dare to argue with me!’

  ‘I do! Why did your wife so quickly turn to your brother for comfort? Why did Denmark’s lords accept him as king?’

  He swooped around me, his ghostly hands stretched out as if to wring my neck. I did not flinch. Those fingers had less strength than mist.

  He kept circling, so close I felt I breathed in his cloud. Was he trying to make me fall off the battlements? I would not back down.

  At last he surged a little way beyond the tower. The dim sparkle of his eyes glared at me. ‘I am the king!’ he howled.

  ‘You were the king. And so was King Fortinbras, whose kingdom you took as a prize for a bet. Does King Fortinbras torment his son like this?’

  His eyes blazed silver from his shades of grey. ‘I must have revenge!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Murder is foul, most foul, unnatural —’

  ‘So is a ghost who torments his son.’ I stepped towards the ghost, my toes at the edge of the battlements. I could feel the updraught of the warm stones below. ‘Promise me you will not torment your son when he returns. Leave him in peace, and your kingdom too. Promise me!’

  ‘I must be —’

  I fixed him with a glare. ‘All you must be, Your Majesty, is burned in fires each day, as you have said, for your sins. Would you add to your life’s sins after death by hurting those who act from duty and love of you? One person loved you — one only — and you torment him! Save yourself a day, a year, of sulphurous flames and leave your son alone.’

  ‘A girl to so assault me! A very shrew.’ The ghostly voice was almost sulky.

  ‘Go,’ I said. ‘And may heaven send you finally to rest.’

  He floated beyond the battlements, slowly fading. I thought I heard one last ‘Remember me.’ But it might only have been the wind.

  Chapter 23

  King Hamlet’s ghost did not haunt my tower again. Nor did the people cry out Laertes’s name.

  Fear and boredom mixed make the worst of potions. I slept. I used the chamberpot. I ate and drank, and was grateful to my unknown benefactor for all. Try as I might, I could not catch her at it. At last I accepted that trying to was poor gratitude for her generosity.

  I watched the life of the town and castle from the battlements. Egg-sellers came to market, and men with loads of hay; a herd of geese was driven up the road, destined for the palace kitchens. The king and queen led the court past the quiet graveyard to church, and back again. The queen sat in the royal garden, while her ladies stitched.

  Once, the king rode out to hunt, returning with stag and wild boar. At least, I thought, that means he doesn’t expect to run into a rebel army led by Laertes, or an English army with Hamlet at its head. There was venison on my bread the next morning, but that told me nothing of who had brought it. Lords, ladies and servants alike ate the king’s leftovers.

  I was almost used to sleeping in the stairway now. Inactivity was harder. I sat and thought. I dozed and watched. Night and day made little difference. Mostly, I watched the marketplace, the palace gates. In the quiet times, I watched the royal garden, remembering how I had first met Hamlet there. I gazed at the graveyard too, thinking of my father, how Hamlet had killed him with no more compassion than if he’d killed a rat.

  Today was not a market day. All the deliveries to the palace were done by the time its clock chimed nine. A mob of children played tag about the square, squealing and laughing. They were barefoot, in rags, but apple-cheeked, well-fed. They would not laugh if war came to Denmark. Rebellions could last for years. Fields would grow weeds because their farmers were bearing swords, not ploughs. Pigsties would go untended …

  A woman called, and the children ran inside a cottage just outside the castle walls. The marketplace was strangely quiet, and the road too, quieter even than a Sunday. I turned to look out the other side of the tower, and saw my brother.

  He was kneeling beside my father’s grave; dressed in black velvet, not travelling clothes, there on the grass in quiet prayer. After a time, he stood and made his way slowly back into the palace.

  I leaned against the tower stones, stunned. How long had Laertes been in Denmark? I had been so sure he would arrive with an army, or call the lords to war. Perhaps even as I played mad, he was riding up to our front door.

  Was Laertes my unknown friend? No, surely not. He would have told me to come home. Because if he was safe at Elsinore, so was his sister. I could creep back to my rooms and find a dress, make myself known. There was no danger now.

  Or was there? Laertes knew nothing of King Claudius’s crimes, but I did — and the king knew it. Would I put Laertes in danger if I reappeared?

  Even as I thought it, two men entered the graveyard carrying spades. They began to dig what could only be a grave, close to my father’s, but beyond the churchyard fence. My heart beat louder than a drum. Was the new grave for my brother? Had Laertes rebelled, been captured, paroled to say his prayers at Father’s grave, and was now to be executed, cast into unsanctified ground?

  No. I had never seen a rebellion, but I suspected they caused fuss. The biggest fuss I had seen from my tower had been a cackling herd of geese.

  I lay flat on the stones, watching the gravediggers as I tried to work out what must have happened. How had I missed Laertes’s arrival? He must have been hailed by all those who called for him to be king. How could I have missed that? He must have arrived when I was pretending to be mad. He must believe his sister dead, and by her own hand. Dead for love; my madness caused by Hamlet’s unfaithfulness and his murder of my father. Laertes must have accepted the king’s word that Hamlet had killed our father. Why should he not? For indeed that was what had happened.

  I must go to my brother. I had caused him pain too long. But not in daylight, when someone might see me in boy’s clothes and make the scandal worse. I would go tonight, creep along the corridor, scratch at his chamber door. I would tell him everything: how Hamlet had pretended to be mad; how Claudius had poisoned the old king; how I had faked my drowning. I would look to him for guidance.

  Perhaps my pretended madness would serve us well. The king could pass off anything I said now as madness too. That made me safe. I could leave Elsinore. Leave all the plots behind. Stay at our estates a season, and then, when memories had faded, I could marry perhaps. Or count cabbages if no man was willing to marry Prince Hamlet’s leavings, a girl who once was mad. Crabbed and confined my life would be, but what chance had I ever had of much else? Except my dream, once, to be a queen.

  And Hamlet? Perhaps he was already dead at the English king’s hand, as King
Claudius had demanded. Perhaps he languished at the English court, pleading for the army that surely no wise king would give him. If the English king wanted Denmark, he could lead his own army here. He had no need of Hamlet, cast out of his own land for the murder of his lord chancellor, tainted with madness. Poor Hamlet.

  My hand froze to the stones. For just as I thought his name, there he was, walking through the churchyard gates with Horatio.

  He wore travelling clothes but carried no luggage, nor were his men with him. He was entering the castle grounds discreetly, via the churchyard, not by the main entrance. But he must surely know he would be seen.

  Even as I watched, he stopped to talk with the gravediggers. He seemed strangely smaller, dimmer, than the man I had known. Had I given him false glamour, imagined him to be the prince I dreamed of? Or had the last months’ troubles worn him away, as water washes away the soil after the grass has been eaten by too many goats?

  I tried to see his face, read his demeanour. He seemed to jest with the gravediggers. He threw a ball into the air and grabbed it, grinning.

  I caught my breath. That was not a ball. It was a skull.

  Not a black mood then, but a too-merry one. How could a man joke with death so close to my father’s grave? Not to mention the grave of the poor wretch who had their skull dug up today. I shivered. The last shreds of my love blew away with the wind. I could pity Hamlet. I could not love a man who played with death.

  Movement caught my eye, by the palace stairs. A procession emerged. Laertes and three of his friends carried a coffin between them. Behind them came the king and queen, her arm on his. They were followed by the ladies and gentlemen of the court, in solemn black, the women scattering flowers.

  Who was in that coffin that Laertes carried so grimly, with such ceremony? Who was to be buried outside the churchyard, but so near my father’s grave?

  And then I realised.

  It was me.

  Chapter 24

  Who looks closely at a drowned body that the fish and eels have nibbled for over a week? Not my brother, and certainly not the queen. They had looked for Ophelia’s body in the water. They had found a body, so it must be her.

  ‘The river is where all bad girls go to be cleansed,’ Gerda had told me. ‘Death cleans all.’ I shuddered. What poor girl lay in that coffin? Had her family thrown her out? Her lover spurned her? At least she would have a grave now.

  Or perhaps it was not a girl. Perhaps a beggar, old and feeble, had fallen in the stream. A cut-throat might have tried to hide the body of his victim in the river. The king should use our troops to hunt down cut-throats, I thought, instead of attending the court to make a goodly show.

  I stared at the king below me, the queen, the funeral procession. Part of me wanted to call out, ‘Grieve not! I am here.’ But the scandal would last a hundred years. ‘Do you remember Lady Ophelia, who cried out at her own funeral?’ people would say. ‘Dressed as a boy, showing her legs and all!’ No. I must keep to my plan. Go to my brother quietly tonight, so we could work out the safest way for me to reappear.

  The church bell tolled once. Once for a woman, twice for a man. It began to toll again, marking the years of my life: one, two, three …

  Hamlet and Horatio stepped back behind one of the larger gravestones. The funeral procession reached the grave just as the sixteenth bell rang out. Its echoes shuddered across the graveyard. Even the crows in the yew trees were quiet now.

  The pallbearers strapped ropes around the coffin, and lowered it into the grave. The priest took out his book. His words floated up to me from the silence of the graveyard. Even the marketplace behind me was silent. The kingdom knows the court is in mourning today, I thought. That is why it is so quiet. Even the horses’ feet will be muffled, just as when the old king died.

  Queen Gertrude and King Claudius stood side by side, their ladies and lords behind them. The queen wore black, looking more sombre than she ever had after her first husband’s death. The king wore black as well: black clothes, black shadows under his eyes. He seemed almost skeletal, as if worms were eating at him from inside.

  Was it guilt? Were the pressures of kingship heavier than he had thought? Did King Claudius worry that Laertes might lead a revolt; that Gertrude might discover his plot to kill her son?

  The priest’s words ended. He crossed himself, then stepped back from the grave.

  My brother put his hand on the priest’s arm. ‘Surely you can give her more ceremony than this?’ His words were faint, but clear.

  The priest shrugged. ‘Her death will always be suspicious. All we can do is this: her virgin rights, the bell and burial.’

  ‘Can’t you do more for her?’ Laertes cried.

  My heart tore at his anguish.

  The priest lifted his chin. He would prefer to see me in an unmarked grave, I thought, buried at night, to shame my sin.

  ‘No more can be done,’ he said firmly. ‘We should profane the service of the dead to sing a requiem and give such rest to her as to peace-departed souls.’

  I thought Laertes might strike him.

  ‘Lay her in the earth,’ my brother ordered, each word cold and distinct. ‘And from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring! I tell you, churlish priest,’ he made the word sound like an insult, ‘my sister will be an angel in heaven when you lie howling below.’

  The queen stepped forward quickly. She laid a hand on Laertes’s shoulder; of comfort and, I thought, restraint.

  ‘Sweets to the sweet,’ she said, looking towards the coffin in the grave. ‘Farewell.’

  Lady Annika handed her a bunch of flowers. The queen scattered them into the dark hole.

  ‘I thought I should have seen you Hamlet’s wife,’ she added, and her voice broke. ‘I hoped to scatter flowers on your wedding bed, sweet maid, not on your grave.’

  The stones themselves were not as cold as I. Had Queen Gertrude really wanted me to be Hamlet’s wife? Or was it said merely to appease Laertes?

  Her grief was real; I could see it by the way she turned her face away, to let the tears run from her eyes unseen. Queens did not cry, or not in public.

  Laertes stared at the flower-covered coffin. ‘May treble woe, ten times treble, fall on that cursed head whose wicked deed deprived you of your sense!’ he said. All at once he leaped into the grave. I heard his feet thud on the coffin. ‘Stop throwing in the earth,’ he shouted, ‘till I have caught my sister once more in my arms! Then pile it upon the quick and the dead.’

  I held my breath. If Laertes wrenched the coffin open now, he would see it wasn’t me. I wondered what would be more scandalous: my brother shouting, ‘This is not my sister’s body! Where is my sister?’ or me, shrieking down at him, ‘I am up here!’

  ‘Who yells so in such grief?’ Hamlet asked, advancing across the churchyard. He gazed at the astounded faces: his mother’s, breaking into sudden joy; the king looking as if a wolf had bitten him; the courtiers staring open-mouthed.

  ‘Yes, it is I!’ Hamlet announced, with more dramatic flourish than any of the actors in his play. ‘I, Hamlet the Dane!’ He leaped into the grave too.

  Wonderful, I thought. Three in a grave, and not one of them the person who is meant to be there.

  ‘The devil take your soul!’ shouted Laertes. He grabbed Hamlet by the throat.

  Hamlet thrust my brother’s hands away. ‘Take off your hands! Though I am not angry or rash, yet I have something dangerous in me which you should fear.’

  ‘Part them!’ shouted the king.

  The queen pressed her hand to her heart. ‘Hamlet!’ she cried.

  Horatio bent down into the grave and grabbed Hamlet’s arm. A couple of courtiers slid down and held back my brother.

  ‘Good, my lord, be quiet,’ panted Horatio.

  Hamlet scrambled out of the grave. No man can look dignified, I thought, scrabbling in the dirt. He glared down at Laertes. ‘I will fight you on this issue till my eyelids no longer wag.’

  ‘My son
, what issue is that?’ cried the queen.

  ‘I loved Ophelia!’ Hamlet shouted. ‘Forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum. What can you do for her?’

  The king moved closer to my brother as he also scrambled out of the grave. ‘He is mad, Laertes.’ The king looked like a man in shock, trying to hold himself together.

  ‘For the love of God, be patient with him,’ pleaded the queen.

  She put her hand on Hamlet’s arm. He hardly noticed her. He stared at my brother, his voice raised to a scream.

  ‘Would you weep for her? Would you fight? Would you fast? Would you tear yourself? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do it!’

  I couldn’t see how eating a crocodile would prove he loved me. The one thing Hamlet could have done, but hadn’t, was to speak to my father and claim me, in the eyes of God and of the court. Had he not done that to save me from the enmity of the king? Or was it to keep open the page of history that said, ‘Prince Hamlet married an English princess, and then became the king of Denmark’? Hamlet hadn’t even had the honesty or compassion to tell me why he did not marry me.

  The queen looked pleadingly at the king, then at Laertes. ‘This is only madness.’

  I agreed. No one had asked Hamlet to eat a crocodile. Where would he even get one? It was as melodramatic as pouring poison in someone’s ear.

  Just shed a few tears for me, I thought, almost forgetting I wasn’t really dead. Is that too much to ask?

  The queen whispered to the king. I strained to listen. But the courtiers were speaking now, and Laertes was yelling, and Hamlet too, and poor Horatio was still trying to calm Hamlet down. The sounds were too muddled for me to make out what anyone was saying.

  Slowly, the crowd moved away, back to the castle. Horatio guided Hamlet, who was still shouting. The king and queen stood either side of my brother, as if to stop him strangling his prince.

  So much for my funeral.