Gertrude and Claudius (11 page)

“The living,” allowed Fengon, “make cruel demands.” To his manservant he said softly, “
Parti
,” and only when the dark young man, who moved with a disquieting
docile fluidity that awakened distrust in heavy-footed Danes, had slipped from the chamber did Fengon embrace Geruthe where she stood expectant, indignant and awed by the pit opening up beneath her but afire with the wish to have his lips—curved and cushioned almost like a woman’s, and shaping themselves for the pressure of hers in that dense black beard salted with gray—united with hers, so their breaths would each pollute the other’s, and the moisture they carried behind their teeth would thrust with their tongues into the other’s warm maw. He was solid as a tree, as a rigid young bear, in his diagonally quilted doublet, younger and smaller and firmer than Horvendile. And tasting not of rotting teeth and recent food softened with ale but of living wood, like a mandrake root when as a little girl she chewed and sucked it, excited by the almost-taste, the hint of sweetness coming from underground.

She broke off the embrace. She was panting, an immediate desire slaked but others crowding after it, a chain of shameless petitioners, making her dizzy. “This is sin,” she told her partner in it.

He took a dance step backward, his lips twisted by a triumphant amusement. “Not by the laws of love,” he rapidly, softly urged. “There are sins against the Church, and sins against nature, which is God’s older and purer handiwork. Our sin has been these many years one of denying our natures.”

“You think I have loved you?” she asked, not deaf to his presumption, though her body felt swollen and abandoned and longing for his arms as an animal hunted and wounded seeks the safety of the forest.

“I cannot believe—” he began carefully, sensing that she might seize the slightest affront as an excuse to flee his presence forever. “It is a possibly heretical article of my own faith,” he began again, “that a creator would not engender so fierce a love in me without allowing in its object the gleam of a response. Can prayer be so futile? You have always received my presence kindly, for all my sins of absence.”

Her heart, her hands were fluttering; she felt her life threatened with a large meaning, larger than any since she had been a little princess begging the crumbs of Rodericke’s love amid the tumble and alarums of his bawdy court. When you are small, the meanings are large; if in later life you lose childhood’s background of assured forgiveness and everlasting rescue, a swerving sense of largeness now and then nevertheless returns. “I can carry on this conversation,” she breathed to Fengon, “but not at Elsinore. Look at us, whispering in this cold and smoky nook while your man waits outside, thinking the worst! In these royal precincts nothing goes unobserved, and my own conscience grimaces at the least action that is not queenly. It was better, my dear brother-in-law, when I could cherish the image of you in a place that stretched me to imagine, and remembered fondly how you dared to tease a queen, in a voice pitched like no other she heard, than have you here and face your bold claims.”

He slumped to his knees on the stones at her feet, showing her not his face but his bowed head with its grizzled, thick hair and splash of white where a ground had been survived. “I make no claims, Geruthe. I am a
beggar sheerly. The truth is simple: I live only in your company. The rest is performance.”

“This is not performance?” Geruthe said dryly, brushing his tingling hair with a hand gone cold in the fatality of her commitment. “We must find a better stage—one not borrowed from our king.”

“Yes,” he said, rising and taking as practical a tone as her own. “My brother is my king, too, and that would gall even if I were not in the base position of desiring his wife.”

“Me—so far past my prime? Dear Fengon, did you not meet in those Mediterranean lands younger women to help you forget your plump and aging sister-in-law? One hears that blood runs hot and the nights are thick with the aromas of lemons and flowers, away from our sullen skies.” She was trying to move them off that treacherous, leaden ground where they had made, it was plain though unstated, an illicit compact.

He joined her in banter. “They are, and there were such women—women throng every land—but I am a son of the barren heath, and looked in vain for the northern lights in those skies where the stars hung close as fruit. Our lights move elusively, tantalizingly. In comparison, the hot sun and fat moon that encourage the southern races in their lucidity of spirit seemed—what can I say?—vulgar, blatant, coarse—”

“Unsubtle,” she provided, laughing at herself and at her harmony with this adorable villain. If the priests keep telling a woman that her lower parts are bad, then she must take a bad man as lover.

•  •  •

Geruthe called Corambis to her on a day when no summons from the King could disturb them. Horvendile was inspecting his troops at the Spodsbjerg garrison, showing himself in full armor, keeping up their morale for the clash, which he said was inevitable, with young Fortinbras and his Norwegian renegades. Geruthe could breathe for a few days. The near presence of her corpulent, war-minded spouse lately had begun to squeeze her lungs; just the thought of him brought a furtive lump to her throat.

The Lord Chamberlain had seemed old to the newly deflowered bride of seventeen when this official, then lithe and just forty, had skied across twelve leagues of fresh snow to confirm the evidence of bloodied sheets; but to the matron of forty-seven he seemed not much older than herself, though his next birthday would be his seventieth, and his unkempt goatee had become quite white. “Dear friend,” she began, “you alone in this court have seen through my queenly comportment to the restlessness in my heart.”

His moist lower lip slid about thoughtfully before he pronounced, “Many have perhaps glimpsed it, but only I have been privileged to discuss with you a certain mild disquiet.”

“Mild grows wild with the years. A modest chafing ends in convulsions.”

“Unease, Your Majesty, is the human lot, even for the most exalted. The pampered foot most feels the pinch.”

“Don’t scold me. I believe you love me,” Geruthe said, her hand of its own nervous will dipping toward his knee where he sat in his accustomed three-legged chair, with its pinnacled upright slat that no one could safely lean back on. “And from those we love no shame should shield us.” Her hands, having not quite touched him, flitted to indicate the thick stone walls around them. “Elsinore has been a dungeon to me ever since I watched my father die within it. He had pledged me to continue as its mistress. It is not natural to live where we have lived since birth: our spreading roots must snake through heaps of old debris. I had hoped the years would ease my sense of obstruction, as the ears become deaf to a daily repeated sound, be it the cry of rooks or the rattle of fellies on cobblestones; but it has not proven so. My old age approaches. My beauty—which reflected more a simple health than any special grace—is faded, and I have never lived for myself.”

“For yourself?” Corambis prompted, rolling his wet lips as if to get the savor of the elusive concept.

“I was my father’s daughter, and became the wife of a distracted husband and the mother of a distant son. When, tell, do I serve the person I carry within, the spirit that I cannot stop from hearing, that sought expression with my first bloody cry, burst as I was into the air from my mother’s torn loins? When, Corambis? What I need—it really need not shock you—”

The elder statesman tutted fussily, readjusting the extravagant scalloped sleeves of his houppelande. “But, beloved Geruthe, how do any of us define ourselves
but in relation to others? There is no unattached free-floating self. By a parallel litany I am the parent of a distant son, Laertes being set upon self-improvement in Paris, and of a very present daughter, present to my concern as a replica of her mother, imperilled by the same otherworldly beauty. I am, to continue this relational way of speaking, Magrit’s widower and the obedient servant of my king and, by effortless and proper extension, of his consort, my most excellent queen.”

There was a little sting in this laborious protocol, implying the priority of a king over a queen, as if Corambis cagily felt an awkward importunity coming.

She came out with it, then. “I need a place of my own,” she told him. “A place to be, however you construe the term, ‘by myself,’ when my duties permit, away from these crowded halls of Elsinore, yet not so far away that a half-hour’s ride will fail to bring me safely back. You once advised me to read and embroider less, and to exert my body in sport more. The place I picture would be embedded in nature, free of the constant witness that attends royalty, where in solitude and salutary idleness I could reclaim the poise and piety that befits a monarch’s loving consort.”

Corambis listened, head tilted, his lower lip slack, in an attitude of, she felt, rising resistance, as her specific request drew nearer. “Dear old friend,” she made herself go on, with a drop into throaty, rapid intimacy that was in part truly impulsive—impulsive affection conjured up by deliberate recall of images from the days when he was still lithe and she lissome—“you know how conscientiously
I have trimmed my feelings to suit the demands of Denmark. Is this nation, in all its scattered islands, too small to afford me a single hiding-space? If I cannot have it, then I may be galled to hate this entire polity that hems me in.”

Corambis had come fully alert, sensing the danger in her mood. “I cannot imagine Geruthe hating anyone, even those who restrict her liberty. Cheer and generosity have ever been your habit. As a baby rosy in the crib, you would laugh and offer your toys to an onlooker. Of late, my daughter has received from you many benefices of kind attention. She regards you as almost a mother.”

“I do love Ophelia, and not merely, as I have been unkindly told, because I fancy my young self in her. I was never so rare as she, nor so shy. I see in her the healing simple whereby my Hamblet can be cured of his coldness, and with him this whole chilly kingdom. But I must save myself,” she hurried on, “at least for intervals of privacy more precious than I have been able, I fear, to convey to you.”

“You have conveyed enough.”

“How strange, that a queen must beg what a peasant wench need only go to the haymow to secure! How foreign this passionate whim of mine must appear to a man, who has only to wrap his cloak about himself, turn his back, and will that the world be banished! You have, Corambis, purchased and improved a mansion on the shore of Gurre Sø, secluded in the Gurre Forest and provided with all the daylight comforts a visitor would need.”

“Not a mansion, Your Majesty—by no means a mansion.
Hardly a hut, in fact. A disused hunting lodge, rather, built of wood, battens and shakes, the old roof of thatch, the new of slate, built when there was more plentiful game near Elsinore, but thereafter disused, as I say. A curiosity adjoins—an ancient small round tower, of possibly religious purpose, a shrine or chapel erected by rogue anchorites before the great conversion under Harald Bluetooth, or perhaps a religion of an altogether different sort, lakes being often regarded as holy. I have incorporated, rather snugly if I do say so, this relic in the structure overall, filling the gaps in its archaic stonework with modern brick and mortar, refiguring the absent roof in slate and stout rafters, as I said, and supplying the chamber’s single gap for a window with the latest and most costly contrivances in fenestration—leaded glazing in the shape of diamonds and discs, and a casement, iron-hinged and levered, that can be latched and securely shuttered or else opened to the air and view of water, dependent on the whim and convenience of the occupant. This fanciful retreat of mine receives small use as long as Elsinore requires my presence, but my conception was that it could be my final home, when the cares of public service have been at long last lifted and I retire to terminal philosophy and holy exercises. It is, as you say, secluded, but near—a quarter of the way to Odinsheim, a half-hour’s ride from Elsinore without stretching the horse.”

Odinsheim and Lokisheim
, both he and she thought. “It is in short a foretaste of Paradise,” Geruthe said, “prudently and deservedly prepared in advance of Judgment Day. Indeed, I have seen it, Corambis, one day this
autumn when Herda and I took your dear Ophelia riding, to brighten her wan cheeks. She showed it to me with the glee of a girl and a dollhouse—all fitted with the latest contrivances for light and fire and water, yet faithful to the rugged old Norse manner, bristling with antlers and furs, not another dwelling even in sight save for the church whose staved steeple hangs inverted from the lake’s far shore, and not a sound but the mutter of wavelets, the chatter of birds, and the furtive traffic of woodland small fry, chasing or being chased. In such a place I could restore my lost composure. My question of you, most dear old friend, is this: Might I not, some two or three occasions in a fortnight, repair there for an afternoon’s repose, carrying embroidery or a saint’s life to occupy my hands and eyes, or else in idleness laying my hands upon my lap and absorbing goodness from the inhuman lake and woods? I need peace, and Elsinore does not play host to peace. Now that the middle point of my life, however generously we estimate it, has been surely passed, I crave something, let us call it rectitude if not holiness, that will fortify me for what of earth is left. Do grant your queen the brief loan of your haven. Few would know; Herda would come with me, and my personal guard, the most obstinately loyal and mute in our garrison, to put the seal on the solitude and secrecy I seek.”

She cut the long speech short there, though her nerves had pushed her tongue on and on, so perilous did her mild lies—containing, like all good lies, some truth—sound in her ears, and so fearful of Corambis’s response
was she. It irritated her, even, to be at the mercy of her father’s and husband’s servant, a royal henchman, who in his habitual caution was making her beg unduly for a very modest favor. He should be flattered by this opportunity, though irregular, to serve her.

Corambis eyed her out of his head, squarishly round like a hollowed-out pumpkin, with a stare pinched by the effort to betray no expression. “The King—would he be among those kept ignorant of your whereabouts?”