He's mad. He must
be mad; what could he be thinking, putting on an offensive thing like that before me, his father and the entire court? A player-king
poisoned by his brother, who snatches the crown...such a clever one, my son. Very
subtle in his art. Always ready with words to use as doves or daggers. Years of
schooling in Wittenberg have not helped; they breed blasphemy there like rats.
He has long fancied himself subtle, even as a child, but I could see right
through to his soul. A mother knows. But now the love between us is forgotten;
only the misty memory of it creeps through Elsinore like a ghost.
My skin crawls; it's chilly in this little chamber, but I
will call no servant to lay the fire. Rage will warm me, and I can wrap this
woolen night-robe around my shivering shoulders. It's a lovely thing, crimson-dyed, trimmed with black velvet and
diamonds. A wedding gift, still new. It'll enrage him to see me wear it. Good.
The diamonds on the sleeves throw the weak candlelight over
the bare room: the writing-table with its wine jug and cup, the carved walnut
chest banded with silver. And an arras, with a scene of...I squint a little,
for my eyes are no younger than the rest of me. I forget their names, but I
learnt the story of it during my first long winter here: a girl determined to
honor her murdered brother even on pain of death, her sister held back by her
duty to the king and state. Good dutiful daughters both. Either would be
preferable to what I've got.
A raging maniac, loyal to none but his own passions, who
only a few moments ago shouted nonsense to the king's back as we left the great
hall. I sent word with one of those silly fools who hangs about him as artfully
as a ball-and-chain - Rosenstern, I think his name is: "Bid the lord
Hamlet to attend me in my closet at once." Who knows whether he will come,
or how soon. Still I must prepare. The only other décor in this little chamber
hangs above the stone mantel: two gilt-framed portraits on either side of the
Venetian mirror, which is kind enough to show my eyes like two sunken
pitch-balls, hair springing from my head like wires. Wine; wine will settle me.
The pitcher clanks against the cup and the sweet dark drink stains the rushes
on the floor. Is it my hand that shakes so? I must settle myself, I must. In
smoothing my hair and cinching the girdle of my robe, I cannot quite keep my
eye from the portraits.
Yes, I kept them both. What of it? A woman is expected to
mourn her dead husband, and a queen is more than a woman; if I'd taken that one
down, they would have thought that unseemly as well. More whispering for the
back stairs.
Ah, Horvendil. I knew him before he was Hamlet, the great
scourge of the Polacks, uniter of the Danish territories. The man presented to
me as husband on my fifteenth birthday was merely governor of Jutland - a
middling office which he had to share with his brother Feng, no less. Our union
was to guarantee the alliance of that nothing little province with the isle of
Zealand and, across the sea belt, Scania. My father was nothing if not astute -
old Rorik Ringslinger never did anything without benefit for himself - though
he also reassured me that he had taken care to determine whether Horvendil's
manner was gentle. He did not give me to Feng, though he was the older of the
two; their mother had borne them in the January and December of the same year.
He said it was because Feng had a soldier's calling, and would be away too
often on foreign wars. I thought then - and, to be honest with myself, still
think it on dreamy midnights when the sighing and struggling has subsided -
that my father did not trust him.
A gentle man, or a restless one? You tell me which makes the
better king.
The pitcher clanks the cup again; sweet music. It's all very
well for a man wearing a gown and wig to ape a queen onstage, but what of what
the audience does not get to see? Why not begin at the beginning of the story?
A squeaking boy to play the role of a fifteen-year-old girl lying
half-smothered beneath the hairy bulk of a man two times her age. My father had
been right about Horwendil's manner, and I know he meant to be gentle. But such
a scene on stage would turn the tragedy into comedy; the gallery would see only
the heaving and snorting, and roar with merriment.
It's always murder and death, wantonness and lust. That's
all they understand. No one would watch a play about the pain and terror of
childbirth, the loneliness a warrior-king's wife must endure. Off gaining glory
and trampling the Norwegian forces as my first and last child slipped into the
world on a river of blood. We must secure our little prince's kingdom, he said
later, but of course that was an excuse. Such father-son handdowns are
preferred by the Germanic folk, but not here in Denmark. There was no reason to
be certain the child would live, let alone one day be approved by the electoral
which had confirmed Horwendil as king after his victory over Norway. That was
when my husband changed his name. If he'd truly done it all for the security of
the little creature mewling at his nursemaid's dug, he would have sent
Fortinbras's head on a spike back to his silly sister-regent. She might have
miscarried the arrogant whelp who even tonight paces at our very borders,
sniffing like a hound that scents blood.
That part, too, missing, cut from the tale as pages from a
book. He pours the vial in the sleeping king's ear, snatches up the crown, and beskue, he's the king now. No electoral
approval, no enemy at the gates, no prince uninterested and untrained in
statecraft, hundreds of miles away.
And no player-brother looking into the player-queen's eyes,
seeing what she needed and knew not how to ask for. Telling her that he'd done
it for her, her above all. And that joy at finally being seen, desired, valued,
welling up and flowing out, washing away the crime to make the land green and
soft once again.
Shall I tell him this? Will he even listen? There's a
clattering below; even through the heavy door the sounds of shouting, of
nonsensical notes played on a pipe still come through, though I must hold my
breath to hear them over the air pounding my ears. He will come; he dare not
fail to come. I can be patient; I can wait.
I waited three decades for him who my son calls uncle. Does
it not strike you as odd that the player-brother skulked around for thirty
years before finally pouring his poison? Clever and daring as he is, do you not
think he would have found a way to get crown and queen much earlier than that,
perhaps even while the princeling was but a boy? And that player-queen, a lad
in his twenties with evening stubble showing through his paint...the kind who
play old women! I have filled and rounded with the years and am no longer the
stick of a girl shuttled off to a distant territory while my brother Wyglef was
crowned king of our land. I shall tell my son that some women ripen like apples
in their autumn, that not all are like that simpering girl who her father hopes
to marry to him. The foolish thing has probably yielded to him already, though
surely not out of lust; she thinks more of having coaches and servants than of
the poetry he writes to her. It would suit her foolish old father's ambitions
for her belly to swell with a prince's seed. As if farming out semi-royal
bastards weren't a tradition.
Indeed, I have conjured the old fishmonger, for when I open
the door to call for another pitcher, he is waiting outside, ready to scuttle
in here to blather something about how a queen should address her own son. He thinks I cannot speak. But if I can get
him off-balance at the beginning, I can best him. I know him. Once when the
nurse had a fever I held him to my own teat, his small wrinkled lips smacking
and sucking for hours until the milk finally came. I will be strong yet
sorrowful, will shame him for this dishonor to his father and to me.
Because, since I cannot bear a falsehood, or even a guilty
secret, I must amend my earlier words: I waited three decades to marry him. But
I did not wait for his pleasure, or mine. He was away so much, fighting
alongside the English, overseeing the Jutish regions, that we seldom had a
night steal together after that first time. And it wasn't adultery; the night
before I pledged my troth to Horwendil, Feng came to my outer chamber - I no
longer remember on what excuse - to find me weeping with fear and loneliness.
He comforted me. The next night I was still raw, and bled a little, which
satisfied my husband. And late that autumn, my son was born. He has never
thought to wonder at his own copper-gold hair against his father's sable.
Before my own hair turned the color of old pewter (which in truth goes well
with my skin and makes my eyes like the sea on a cloudy day), it was pale as
well.
The portraits waver a little; does one move? No, up close
they're simply paint on wood. Two brothers. One's beard may be copper-gold and
the other's sable, though the brows, noses, and cheekbones are similar. My son
thinks he is very clever, and he's largely right. But he fails to see what is
in front of him while he flails after phantoms.
The pitcher one last time. The two faces look on, and I know
not what either would say to me now. My own face, tinted the color of blood
rubies, looks at me from the swirling cup and then drains away.
I hear him coming.
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