of ladies most deject and wretched

[chariestmaid]

The first feeling is fury. When Ophelia wakes from a warbling, uncertain dream like the reedy call of a recorder, there are tears in her eyes, but she can tell they're tears of anger. Ophelia would always cry, whenever she tried to argue on her own behalf, always broke down and bit her tongue before she got another word in. But if something saddened her, she could never summon tears. Her father didn't believe her because of it — she doubted her own feelings, doubted they counted if she couldn't express them appropriately. Hamlet could, he could swear his love with all the holy vows of heaven, before he ripped up his own words and threw them back at her.

And now her father’s left her, to weep herself to sleep. All propriety, all decorum left with him, not that it was been enough to cover her. He put his jacket on her shoulders instead of his arm, and turned his back to her, to go with the king.

Fury fades, and what remains is a drowsy numbness, a sense of wrongness as she sees herself as if from the outside: a missing cog in a breaking-down machine. What should she be feeling now? Ophelia doesn't know.

Hamlet was right, she thinks. She wasn't made to live in a court. She should have been a convent girl. She should have worn a veil, so no man could ever see her face, nor smear the paintings from it.  The chariest maid, her brother once said, is prodigal enough if she unmask her beauty to the moon. She keeps her eyes down, lest the moon catch her crying, or her angry tears unmask her.

When she looks up again, she's still clutching her father's jacket, thinking of the shame she'll bring when she's found out of doors. How did she come to be in these woods? It’s a quiet relief, after the stone walls of Elsinore, to see so much green.

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[timebethine]

He bends his head to rest his brow against hers. "This place has stripped me of ceremony, along with every care but thy happiness. Tell me, Ophelia, wherefore thy tears?"

[chariestmaid]

“When we were children,” she continues, as if he had said nothing, “the other maids would mock me by telling me lies, because I was too credulous. Do you remember? Father would not let you confront them, since they were ladies, and you had to be a gentleman.”

For a flickering moment, she fears her brother won’t understand her, he’ll doubt her like Hamlet did, Hamlet who’d always understood. Hamlet who knew how much she hated to be tricked, that hot flush of shame going back to her childhood.

She shuts her eyes, and says, “I didn’t care. I just wanted my brother with me.” Not to shout at silly girls who found her manners funny, but to stand by her side, so she wasn’t alone. How long has she felt so alone?

[timebethine]

Quietly, "I'm here now. I would I had been beside thee then."

[chariestmaid]

She wants to tell him everything that happened while he was away, but she can't. The words won't come. Thinking back, it all seems so jumbled and impossible, as impossible as the queen taking Ophelia's hands and giving her the blessing to love that her father forbade her. "Tell me," she says, tentative, as if learning a language anew, "how thou hast been."

[timebethine]

"I've been well," says Laertes, still softly. Words have always come easily for him, with her; he has always known what to tell her that she should do, because he's heard it from their father a thousand times. To speak of himself is harder. No one has ever given him the words for it. "I've been--I've been here a year; that house thou seest behind me, I've built with mine own hands--Ophelia, I'm married, and I have a daughter--"

[chariestmaid]

“A daughter!” she laughs. This is surely some fairyland, where time passes strangely — “How old?” she asks.

[timebethine]

"She's just turned two--we adopted her as a foundling. She's so quick, Ophelia. She knows her numbers to ten, and she can speak almost in full sentences now, and she loves more than anything to help me in the kitchen." He draws back at last to smile, and his face is bright with unrestrained, ardent joy. It is, perhaps, the first time in a long time that Ophelia has seen her brother with his expression unguarded.

[chariestmaid]

"In the kitchen! Hast thou turned cook?" She laughs, and unlike her other laughs, manic and joyless, this was one has something like true happiness -- or at least the reflection of happiness, the silvery moon to her brother's sun-like smile.

[timebethine]

"I have--cook, and baker, and farmer besides. Come, see our garden--" He takes her by the hand and tugs her around the house, over the brick patio with its sturdy pergola and toward the garden: the thick and leafy cabbage and kale, the twining squash and bean vines, the tomatoes and peppers laden with ripe red fruit. Closer to the house, there are beds of herbs--fennel, dill, and rosemary jostling with thyme and sage, buckets spilling over with nasturtiums and parsley and basil and marjoram. It's clearly a kitchen garden, rather than a gentleman's, but there's a kind of lush beauty to it all the same.

[chariestmaid]

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.

[timebethine]

Quietly, "I've never forgotten thee. Not for a day. Not for an hour."

[chariestmaid]

"My forgetful brother," she says, voice and eyes filled with warmth. She breaks off a sprig of rosemary, and threads it through his hair.

[timebethine]

For that, he has to draw her into an embrace again, tucking her into the warm compass of his arms and kissing her thick curls. He's too used to hugging men taller than himself, now; her smallness is shocking, and the shock washes over him like dread. "Wilt thou come inside with me, and let me make the tea, and tell me all of thy troubles?"

[chariestmaid]

"I will come inside, and drink thy tea," Ophelia promises, soft and fond, "but must I weigh thee with my troubles? 'Tis a poor recompense for a brother's hospitality."

[timebethine]

"Nay, I have none of mine own; thou canst be an anchor to me."

[chariestmaid]

"Lest thou wanderest off to sea, adrift on thy own happinesss." Even softer, she says, "Thou didst warn me of this unhappiness. 'Tis why I am shamed to tell thee. Our father bid me break with Hamlet, and he took it ill. They say he is mad because of me."

[timebethine]

Laertes reaches out to take both of her hands, thumbs pressing in the hollows of her palms. His heartbeat is loud in his ears, his throat tight and thick with panic. "What happened, Ophelia?"

[chariestmaid]

"He is as they say," she says, and lets that suffice. "But he loves me no longer. Mayhap he never has."

[timebethine]

Rage rises in Laertes's throat, thick and acrid. If Hamlet were here, he thinks, Laertes would demand satisfaction--face him down with a blade and all the hot bile surging within him, and force him to apologize or to bleed. A vicious part of him has been craving a slight that he can avenge; it seems so long that he's carried his anger at Luo Binghe, unsatisfied, hooded and tame like a falcon whose claws were meant to rend.

But Hamlet isn't here. Ophelia is. Ophelia is here, in this miraculous place where lives are remade. "He hurt thee," he says, hushed. "Didst love him."

[chariestmaid]

"I know not." She laughs, hollow, at herself. "To hear our father tell it, one day I will learn all I thought was love was child's play, an empty game without consequence." Her anger must be twin to Laertes's, born of the same voiceless, choking shame -- she swallows it back. It's unfitting, unfilial. But why did the silly game of her feelings only become deadly serious when the prince might have returned them? Why did everything change, and how was she still left humiliated and unloved at the end of it? Had she really fooled herself so thoroughly? (She must have. He said I loved you not.)

[timebethine]

"Our father has forgot much of love," says Laertes, and presses her hands. "He was mad with love for her, in their rosy youth; he sickened with it, and could neither eat nor sleep, and raved or muttered to himself by turns--in all things most distract. What man so deeply pierced by Cupid's arrow could bear his lover's death? An he counseled thee that love was empty, a mere bauble to cast like a die on the hazard of advancement, it was to protect thee from suffering as he did ... or because his grief turns all thought of love to ashes in his breast."

[chariestmaid]

He understands. Of course he does. Yet in the height of her agony, of all ladies most wretched and deject, she thought that no one possibly could. Not even her brother — her dear, shy brother, shy as her despite the larger tether he could walk with, whose own fears spoke loud in his own warnings to her. Best safety lies in fear. It’s what both of them were taught. It’s what both of them inherited, from their father and their mother’s death.

“Thy love has made thee wiser,” she observes. Soft, she asks, “Hast thou seen heartache, too?”

[timebethine]

He thinks of Claudius and Galahad, held apart by a gulf of memory and duty; he thinks of the two of them bridging that gap together, with flowers and pledges and the witnessing eyes of their friends. "Seen it, ay--and seen it mended."

[chariestmaid]

She nods, accepting it, accepting the possibility offered inside it. "Mayhap I am here to mend. As," it chokes her to admit, but it's true, "our father could not. I would I had met her." Their mother, who died the hour she was born.

[timebethine]

"I remember her only a little," Laertes admits. "But I think that, had she lived, our father's strictures would have been tempered with human kindness. I think ... I think he needed her to tell him when he had left the world of passions and practicalities and entered into a world of abstractions."