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.

Comments

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Susan gives her a sharper look, assessing. At her feet, the grasshopper leaps from the jar; she leaves both behind and moves a step or two closer. "It needn't be," she says, once she's close enough to see the tear-tracks on this woman's cheeks; there have been any number of times that Susan has bitten the proverbial head off anyone who's tried to placate her in her grief. "What's wrong?"

[chariestmaid]

The sound emerging from Ophelia's throat is all animal pain -- it feels like something separate from her, some wild creature clutched to her breast so no one can take it from her. Like the kittens she kept hidden under her bed as a child. (They never would have stayed hidden, without her brother’s help, because she was too young and foolish to hide when she cared about something.)

She coughs through the sound, and beats at her heart. She bites down what she wants say, the words of an old tune she heard when she first thought she might be in love. By gis, and by Saint Charity, alack, and fie, for shame … She doesn’t want to say something girlish and foolish, the kind of thing her father would chastise her for saying, like, “Prince Hamlet does not love me.” It doesn’t capture half of why her heart is breaking, but it’s what spills out of her mouth nonetheless.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

Prince Hamlet. Susan's heart leaps, then sinks. All too clearly she remembers the visit of a different sister, one whose bright-shining torch also got snuffed far too early. There are others here today, and so Ophelia surely cannot stay. Laertes will be beside himself. She shall need to apprise Lancelot of the situation tonight, and together they will need to devise a way to comfort Laertes tomorrow. If he was miserable when he first learned of Ophelia's death, surely that misery will be trebled to have been able to hold her for one day only. Her default solution - familiar pastries for a sweets-loving Dane - shan't work; she imagines they'll turn ashen in his mouth. Lancelot will surely have ideas though; she'll only have to press a little for him to remember that his ideas are good.

She sets these thoughts aside for the time being. Even if Ophelia shan't be around for very long, it won't do to focus on the looming pain Laertes shall feel tomorrow when Ophelia's pain is right in front of her. The other sounds Ophelia is making, the animal sounds of grief, are ones Susan knows well. Susan feels them in her heart. "How perfectly dreadful," she says, crossing over to stand closer. "Is he being jolly horrible about it? So many men often are."

[chariestmaid]

"I know not how men are. My father --" Her father who isn't here, his coat sitting on her shoulders. Apparel proclaims the man, he liked to say. Appearances matter, often more than realities. "He told me to think myself a baby. And here am I, wailing like one."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"A baby! Whatever for?" Susan - who is, fundamentally, a girl's girl - is fully prepared to levy the considerable strength of her baseline, omnipresent ire against any man who has treated this woman she's just met ill enough to have her in such a state. "You needn't worry about being upset, not here. Goodness knows I've been beside myself a time or two. Come. Might I offer you some tea? Or perhaps something to eat?"

[chariestmaid]

Later, the sheer gratitude at another woman’s kindness will strike her. Some small part of it strikes her now, and she can only say, “Her Majesty likes tea.” And then, “Yes. Please.”

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Come along, then, let's get you all sorted out." Susan offers Ophelia her arm. "I'm called Susan."

[chariestmaid]

"Ophelia," she says mildly, and slips her arm through Susan's. Contact, human contact -- it soothes her somewhat, and she fights back the welling frustration that her own father couldn't give her this much.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"It's lovely to meet you, Ophelia," says Susan, turning them toward Thomas's lake-house and starting off. He certainly shan't mind if she uses his office, and anyway it's closer, appointed with the relevant necessities, and just as bullyable as the rest of this place. Plus there's the added benefit of being closer to Laertes's cabin there. Since Ophelia is surely only here for the day, Susan oughtn't monopolize terribly much of her time. "And welcome to this little world."

[chariestmaid]

"Is it a world entire?" asks Ophelia. Not the town outside the gates, not the nearest city, or continent. Somehow another world is easier to believe.

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"A terribly small one, for a world, but yes. We've a modest population, but a good one."

[chariestmaid]

"Like a nunnery," she says, then laughs. "Or a fairy-land."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"We haven't nearly as many dryads as the fairy-lands I've visited before," says Susan, dropping her voice into a conspiratorial whisper. "But there is a queer magic here." She wishes Ophelia could come to enjoy that magic, instead of just visiting for the day. "I can show you some, if you like, once we've got our tea going."

[chariestmaid]

"Magic," she repeats, half-disbelieving -- or not disbelieving as much as wary to be fooled. People always thought her credulous. That's why her father had to warn her away from so many things, why her brother was always angry on her behalf, before she even realized she'd been mocked.

But she wants to see it. Susan doesn't seem cruel. If Ophelia is credulous, so be it. "Then we had best start the tea."

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"Indeed we must," says Susan, patting Ophelia's arm where it's linked with her own. "Do you see that building there, by the lake? It was the office of my friend Thomas for a good while. He was a proper magician detective - still is, I expect, but he's been away for some time now. I make sure it's maintained, though, and it's got such a lovely proper tea service."

[chariestmaid]

"A magician detective," Ophelia repeats, letting the idea sink in, impress its native ink on her. "What does he do? ... Did he do?"

[quote_gentle_unquote]

"If I'm honest, we mostly discussed London and tea and rationing." There's no way Susan is going to overwhelm Ophelia with stories of books about residents if she's just going to be here for the day. "I understand he does rather a lot of magic, and in London, uses it to aid the solving of crimes."