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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[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."

[chariestmaid]

Could she have been that for Hamlet? He often told her so. When he was in the earliest of his wild moods, before this last one -- when he was merely a fitful, fidgeting boy who couldn't meet others' eyes for long, and liked to talk to her because she didn't mind it. Before anyone could call what he had love-madness, and she wasn't its only cure.

It's pointless, to imagine herself back to the beginning and wonder what she could have done differently. As pointless as wondering what would happen if her mother was more than a grave and a vague, angelic image. Perhaps it's because she's her father's daughter, as prone to getting lost in abstractions.

But ... her brother seems to have found himself here. She nods again, silent, eyes on the house he built with his own hands.

[timebethine]

Laertes follows her gaze, and his heart aches with the knowledge that she's soon to leave him. "Wilt thou stay here, Ophelia?" he asks--then, hastily, "Only for tonight. Thou wilt return to Elsinore on the morrow. But tonight, stay with my family, and sup from our table. Wrap thyself in what cheer thou canst find here."

[chariestmaid]

"Please," she says, and laughs -- the paper-thin, crackling laugh that's half a sob of despair. "Please. Show me what cheer is possible."

[timebethine]

Laertes remembers suddenly that he'd meant to give her tea--he starts preparing it, clicking on the hot plate and filling the kettle from the sink. "I've learned here what joy can be crafted with mine own hands," he says, as he puts the kettle on the hot plate and returns to Ophelia. "Not only this house, although we cut and planed every timber of it and joined them together--so many people came to help us build it. Dear friends, and half-strangers, and even some whom I thought meant me only ill. They came to help us make a home here, and still they come to help us plant our garden or to share our meals. In Denmark, I was so lonely, and knew it not. Here, though ... here, I have so many friends. We were not meant to be China dishes upon a shelf, Ophelia; we were meant to be part of others' lives."