Gertrude and Claudius (10 page)

“You confirm my worst suspicions. My son is down there on the Elbe learning how to
doubt
—learning mockery and blasphemy when I’m trying to instill piety and order into a scheming, rebellious conglomeration of Danes.”

“What else did Corambis say?” Geruthe mused, as colorful electricity played about her head. “Something about man being the measure of things, which makes a kind of sense, really, since men and women are right here all around us while God, though we can all feel He’s here
somewhere
, is a lot harder to observe. Still, you can’t help
wondering if people are ready to be the measure of things. We can hardly measure ourselves. We are the only animal that makes mis
takes.
”

“We must get Hamblet back, or the regional
thing
will choose another when I—if I were to— As I say, I have these uncanny spells of fatigue.”

“Normal aging, merely, darling. I too need a nap more than formerly. You’ll live another twenty years at least,” his wife told the King, whipping an especially impressive blue spark from her long hair, as if the thought were not entirely soothing to her. “You Jutes are tough as nails. Look at your brother. Five wounds in a Turkish ambush, and still he moves like a panther, with a bear’s thick head of hair.” It soothed her to mention Fengon, lately returned from his lifetime of knightly exile, and suddenly very attentive to those who lived in Elsinore. His scalp and beard, becomingly sprinkled with gray, flourished, whereas Horvendile’s curly pale locks, once so spectacularly Nordic, had thinned touchingly above his brow and at the back of his skull. His skull showed its mineral hardness, its marmoreal gloss.

“Yes,” he said loudly, stalking about and summing up: “My rogue of a brother returned and hanging as close about the castle as if he smells his future here, and Hamblet, who should be in residence cutting a successor’s stalwart figure, impressive and engaging yet not too much so, off instead in Wittenberg wasting his days in fruitless logic-chopping and his nights in whorish follies that might not disgrace a nineteen-year-old but sit sluggishly on a man ten years older.”

He was in his storming mode, like a sheet of tin shaken
behind the stage to signify thunder. Geruthe touched the back of her teeth with the tip of her tongue, not wishing to speak too hastily to this husband of such ponderous and firm impulses. She was conscious, more and more, of guarding and directing her exchanges with him, once so spontaneously confiding, even though he often gave her back but a grunt. “I do not think,” she said, “that our son has much taste for those crass pleasures you rather enviously indict him for. As he grew, his induction into the mysteries of nature seemed to be, as far as a mother could observe, attended more by wonderment and disgust than by delight. He does not delight in females as such; he has enough of the passive principle in himself so as not to be uncritically attracted to it in others. Only through a very young and delicate vessel might Hamblet’s fastidiousness be overcome. I have in mind—as I have mentioned, my lord—Ophelia. She is seventeen, the very age at which I was wed, and during his infrequent visits to Elsinore the Prince has paid increasing notice as her bloom has become conspicuous. This summer past, I believe, their relation advanced beyond that of a chaffing older cousin to his painfully shy and undeveloped adorer. She has become a beauty, with a sweet and impish wit, though still shy, as a maiden should be.”

Horvendile said, marching about their bedchamber as if in blind pursuit of a way out, “She is not merely shy; she is fey. Her brain holds a crack any ill circumstance might jar agape. Further, a prince should wed a princess and thus enlarge the throne’s connections and influence. To marry the daughter of one’s Lord Chamberlain is
unhealthy political incest. Corambis has so long flattered our ears with his counsels I have been considering his dismissal—to be phrased, of course, as his well-earned and well-rewarded retirement, perhaps to the little lodge by Gurre Sø, to whose enlargement and reroofing he has devoted so many trickles from the royal purse.”

This was unpleasant news to Geruthe, who saw Corambis as her ally, in an Elsinore that felt colder than formerly. She hid her surprise, protesting only, “Corambis advised not just you but my father, Rodericke. He is a living link to my girlhood, and the simple hearty days when the Norwegians were freshly humbled.”

“Exactly. He has grown too accustomed to basking in the King’s power. Long proximity to the throne breeds envy and presumption. His scheme of making his frail daughter, no sturdier than her mother, the next queen, depriving me of all possibilities of an advantageous alliance, I find treacherous. There are princesses east of Novgorod who would bring a dowry of Asiatic scope, in amber, furs, and tundra emeralds, to a Western alliance. Hamblet’s attachments are not sentimental affairs, but matters for deliberation in the most dispassionate counsels. Never trust an adviser with a marriageable daughter.”

Geruthe now put down her brush to turn away from the mirror and say to her husband’s face, “It is not any scheme of Corambis’s or mine. It is a natural trend we both have noticed, without our encouraging it—Hamblet’s fondness for this flower budded in his own court, while he has been mostly absent. On her side, how could she not be fascinated by our royal adolescent, as he
matured into so arresting and expressive a man, preeminently eligible and yet not spoken for? But she is docile, and will leave off all hopes, if her father so directs.”

“Let him so direct, then. She may be your age of espousal, but you were no pallid invalid, shrinking into your father’s shadow at a frown.”

“When it mattered, I was,” Geruthe retorted, her face growing warm, “as you well remember, having benefited by my surrender. Ophelia has more mettle and sense and reserve of passion than you have ever deigned to credit. She will breed stout progeny, my instinct tells me.”

Horvendile looked at her with those phlegmatic pale eyes that sometimes saw discomfortingly much. “Your instinct serves your desire, my dear. You read your old self into her, and would harmonize our only heir to an imaginary echo of your girlhood. Geruthe, do not seek in this brittle maid the means to your own late fulfillment, and the conquest of your own son. Tools twist in our hands when we misapply them, and give us a wound.”

Geruthe set down her brush with a smart click on the dressing table of briarwood and oak, where her aids to beauty—scarcely needed, though she was forty-seven—were arranged: the brush of black-tipped boar bristles, two ornate combs of ivory, an iron tweezer for the unwanted hairs that broadened her eyebrows and crept down her rounded temples, four toothpicks of which two were ivory and two were gold, some alder twigs whose ends had been soaked and beaten to form fibrous brushes for keeping her smile bright and the toothworm away, a soapstone jar of ground henna powder
and another of lapis lazuli with which to smudge her cheeks and eyelids on days of public ceremony, talc to suppress any coarsening ruddiness of complexion, and a “sweet coffer” of fragrant cedar holding perfumed unguents for softening her complexion and easing wrinkles from the skin around her eyes. She spied in her oval metal mirror a face with still a girl’s moist fullness, rosy at this moment with anger and startled guilt. She said to Horvendile, “I am merely offering thoughts on the matter that my lord himself raised—how to interest Prince Hamblet in this court and his own royal destiny. I am sorry that my motives appear so twisted, when to me they feel so straightforward and kindly meant.”

“Kind advice comes constantly to a king, and he learns to see it all in terms of the bearer’s own benefit.”

“And reaches the point where suspicion has whittled his heart to the size of the knob of his sceptre,” Geruthe responded hotly, “and his own child understandably refuses to come home.”

“It is not me he avoids,” Horvendile snapped. Then, fearful lest his queen take a hurt from the clear implication that it was she, he said in amends, “It is the—the general climate,” giving up on describing a local situation so elusively slack and malodorous.

“What ever happened to Bathsheba?” Fengon asked Geruthe. They were seated in a little-used room of Elsinore, where Fengon’s man Sandro, a slender honey-skinned native of Calabria, had persuaded, in very imperfect Danish, an unwilling servant to lay and light a
fire. The wood was fresh-chopped ash; the fire smoked; still, the two aristocrats hardly noticed their stinging eyes and cold feet, so intent were they on the intimations each was giving the other, beneath the surface of speech.

In mild panic Geruthe asked, “Bathsheba?”

“The little brown brancher I sent you many years ago, before heading south again. You have forgotten, so accustomed is a queen to gifts from near-strangers.”

“Near now, but no stranger ever. I remember. We were not a good match, Bathsheba and I. Her eyes, unseeled, took in too much, and she was forever bating—that is the word?—at bright objects in my chamber as they caught the sun. And she would hurl herself at sounds in the wall, mice or swallows nesting in the chimney, too faint for my ears. I could not reason with her.”

“Nor could one with any falcon,” Fengon said, in the casual, murmurous voice he used, she had noticed, only with her. Among men and servants he spoke up clearly, even officiously. He had put on weight, his voice volume. “Reason is not their path. In this they are like our deeper selves, over whom the brain would in vain set itself as master.”

“A queen in a castle, I discovered, is in poor position to acquire a daily supply of fresh-killed meat. At night her soft but incessant cry—lamenting her loss of freedom, as I imagined it—kept me quite awake. Horvendile’s chief falconer took my starving pet into the royal mews, but there existed in those perches an already established order to which the other birds of prey, broken to human use, were not willing to admit our half-wild Bathsheba. The falconer was fearful she would be slaughtered, her throat slashed or her back snapped, in the necessary
interval when the birds are unhooded and permitted to use their wings in the mews’ high vaults. Thinking that Thord—yes? that was his name?—might take her back, I rode to Lokisheim with a pair of guards, and found only the boy, the pale-faced limping boy—?”

“Ljot,” Fengon supplied, his sable eyes swarming with glints, feeding on her every motion and inflection and lineament, so that Geruthe, as she talked, felt her tongue and gestures slowing, as a musician drags his tempo when overly conscious of being listened to. Her skin prickled beneath her heavy diapered surcoat, laced in front, over a blue cotehardie brocaded with silver thread. Could any woman, let alone one of forty-seven summers and no longer lean, withstand the pressure of attention so avid? She was used to being admired but not consumed by eyes like this.

“Little Ljot, yes,” Geruthe agreed, hurrying on, through those unsatisfactory events of more than a decade ago, when Fengon’s slightly sinister gift had enlisted her in a secret of sorts, though Horvendile had been made aware of his brother’s curious present and laughed dismissingly: “As soon give a man a spinning wheel,” he had said, “for all the use to be gotten from it!”

She went on, seeking to match the cautious tone of the man she was with, “He said that Thord had fallen sick, of age and the cruel demands of the birds, and your flock had been yielded up, on your instructions in parting, to a dealer from Nødebo in such precious and precarious fowl.”

“I did not expect to return soon,” Fengon told her. “I had taken a vow.”

“What sort of vow?”

“A vow of renunciation.”

“What were you renouncing, may I ask?”

“Who better to ask? I was renouncing the sight of you, the sound of you, the faint but maddening scent of you.”

She blushed. He had a way of insinuating the unspeakable, yet at her prompting, so she could not fault him. “Surely there was no need,” she did protest. “A man is entitled to lend his sister-in-law attendance, if it is done respectfully.”

“My thoughts did not exclude respect, but were more than that. They frightened me in their vehemence, their possession of all my waking minutes and then, hideously warped, of my dreams. In my dreams, you were wanton, and I wore a crown. My qualms were perhaps dynastic: I feared that in my love of you and envy of him I might injure my brother.”

Geruthe stood, partly in alarm, partly to stir herself, in this cold and smoky room, into warmth. “We must not speak of love.”

“No, we must not. Tell me the fate of poor forlorn Bathsheba, too wild for her lady and too tame for nature.”

“We took her, Ljot and I, to your field, where I had seen you demonstrate falconry, and set her free.”

“Free? But what did freedom mean to her? Death in the talons of a bigger, wilder raptor utterly unspoiled by man’s hand.” He had stood, too, so as not to loll in the Queen’s presence.

“It was not my hand that tamed her,” Geruthe said. “We undid the jesses, and at first she flew low, dipping as if she were trailing a creance that would pull her back at will, and then, feeling no tug, she beat herself toward Heaven, and by lifts and lilts explored the breadth of its corridors, yet kept banking obliquely back to be above us, circling quizzically, as if unwilling to give up a connection she had known. She descended it seemed to take my wrist again, but I threw my gauntlet of padded chamois into the tall grass, where she eyed it in flight, as if thinking to retrieve it; but no, then she swooped away mewing, toward the Forest of Gurre in the direction of Elsinore.”

“You remember it as if painted on your memory. And did she ever reappear at Elsinore, on your windowsill perhaps?”

“No, but she haunted my thoughts there, as I realized that she had been dear to me, though her value had been eclipsed by the trouble she caused.”

“Needing to be fed, you mean.”

“And to have her messes swept and scoured and her feathers checked for mites and lice, and the general
worry
of her.” Her torso twitched in indignation as if to ring a girdle of bells. “You had burdened me, it seemed, with a representative of yourself, that I dare not neglect, so to keep you alive, whether in the hazards of your travels or in my cherishing memory was unclear.”