Once, when Ophelia was a wild-haired girl-child with none of her father's propriety, she burst into the queen's garden to see the queen -- but she called her 'the lady in the garden.' She asked so many questions and, for one idyllic afternoon, walked with a woman as close as she could imagine to a mother who patiently answered them all. Hamlet often complained of his mother, of her over-attentive care and how it shamed him in front of his father. But Ophelia envied him. Hamlet hated to feel like less of a man, but Ophelia had no one to teach her to be a woman. So quietly she kept teaching herself the names of all the flowers, with herbals pressed between her psalm-books.

She recognizes these plants from those herbals. Softly, she runs her fingers through a silver tangle of rosemary, releasing its familiar scent. "For remembrance," she murmurs.