A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) (17 page)

I retrieve a picnic basket and cold lunch from the maids and sway along the chain to the middle of the lake. Mama’s already there waiting for me, her dainty feet dipped in the dark water. A matching crown sits atop her night-dark hair, thick locks pulled through the weave to anchor it in place. She laughs when she sees me and claps her hands like a child. Every year she spends this day on the island, like we did eight years ago before she cast us into the lake at sunset. This is the first time I’ve joined her there since that day.

“Is it sweet sixteen, Ophelia?” she asks with a kiss against my cheek.

“The day is young.”

She just laughs again.

We spend the day together, just me and Mama on the island. She tells me stories of a hundred impossible things, and I count off how many of them I’ve seen. I dance around the circle of dead flowers as she waves her hands, and as the afternoon shifts to murky twilight, she whispers of old promises and a drowned city that waits patiently beneath the water. And once again, I tell her not yet. Not no—just not yet. My mother ran to the lake because she had so much emptiness only the water could fill. I don’t have that emptiness, not yet.

That emptiness is called Dane, and he burns like a star in the void where my heart should be.

Thunder rattles the chain as I cross the lake. The clouds have darkened through the day. They surround me like the halo of an angel bound in Purgatory, vague bruises reflected from a black mirror. Clean blue skies, ice blue, remind me too much of Hamlet’s funeral. This bruised world is where I belong.

With this early darkness, the cemetery is lit up with blue-white pillars that flicker in a way that has nothing to do with the wind tugging at my short skirt and long hair. The wind stings tears to my eyes, dries my lips until they crack and the taste of copper blooms on my tongue. The closer we come to All Hallows’, the more restless the ghosts become. For most of them, it’s the only day each year when they can leave their graves, see what’s left of their families or loved ones. They itch to be gone, to see more, to do more, even those whose families have long since become dust in the ground. Time passes differently for ghosts, I think. The years don’t mean what they should.

Nearly alone on the blessed side of the graveyard, Hamlet sits on the plinth of his massive headstone. The mottled grey marble gleams in his ghostly light, a dance of shadows across the darker veins of stone. A dark metal plaque affixed to the base proclaims his name and title; his dates of birth and death; and a graceful inscription in Latin that speaks to a life of duty, honor, and love. The right side is blank, waiting for Gertrude to join him one day. Atop the plinth, two tall angels in draping robes stand with their wings outstretched behind them, every feather carved in exquisite detail. The one guarding Hamlet’s body holds a claymore with Hebrew words carved down the length of the blade; beside it, Gertrude’s angel cups its hands to hold a dove poised for flight. The angels themselves are sexless, stone curls of hair over beautiful, androgynous faces, but there’s something of Hamlet in the one holding the sword, something of his sternness and quiet pride in the strong serenity written into the marble.

This ghost, this Hamlet, is not quite the Hamlet I knew, but he is so much closer than the one that rages through the night and drips poisonous revenge into Dane’s dreams. He greets me with a sad smile, a hand lifted not in a wave but in something more formal.

A little drunk with dancing and with Mama, I hop up next to him on the plinth, hissing as the cold stone stings the back of my thighs where the uniform skirt rides up. There’s a perfect hollow between the feet of Gertrude’s angel, just the right size to lean back against the angel’s knees and not feel like I’m about to fall.

His smile grows slightly at the sight of the crown of roses, and becomes a little less sad. “Happy birthday, Ophelia.”

“Thank you, sir.”

We sit in silence for a long time, both of us staring up the hill to Headmaster’s House and beyond that to the school. Lights blaze through the night, a spill of gold from scattered windows. Shadows weave across them from time to time as the people in a room cross before the glass. The school is full of life. Students gather for study groups or movie nights or forbidden parties, couples find private spaces or closets to grope and pant, the youngest ones race through the halls in complicated games that aren’t beneath their dignity yet. Even Headmaster’s House glows like a jewel in the moonlight; Claudius hosts yet another gathering with too much wine and laughter. I hope Father has found deep sleep within the whiskey bottle, or the sound of such merrymaking must be hell.

I’m rarely as good a daughter as he needs me to be, but I do love him. His pain cuts me, even when I’m not the one to cause it.

“Souls can sunder, Ophelia,” whispers Hamlet. “In all our lessons of faith and doctrine, no mention was ever made of such a thing—that it isn’t merely the heart that breaks.”

“You are sorrow; he is rage.”

“And yet, we are the same person. We exist simultaneously, in two different forms; yet we are both Hamlet, both pieces of the whole that was.”

He looks so tired. This is the face of the Wild Hunt in the quiet moments, those breathless seconds where they slow to a walk and look to the greyhounds to see if they’ll jump off. This is the weariness without hope of relief.

“Dane can’t see you.”

“I don’t let myself be seen. Except by you,” he adds with a familiar gleam in his dark eyes. It’s fleeting, but the memory warns me despite the icy wind that shears through my skin to my bones. “It seems I have little choice in that regard.”

“Have you thought that it might help him?”

“I have thought.” His sigh trembles in a hackle-raising crack of thunder. A violent fork of lightning stabs the sky, so bright it leaves an echo against my eyelids. “I have thought and wondered and pondered, deliberated, debated, discussed … It seems I cannot help but turn it over in my mind and pray that my choice is the correct one, but the dead, Ophelia, have no business with the world of the living. You stand with a foot in either, but even you know to separate yourself on most occasions. Dane cannot be helped by seeing his father further destroyed in death.”

“Dane will destroy himself for this revenge.”

“My son made his promises.”

And promises, once made, must be kept, and if later you regret them, you should have been more careful in making them. Dane will always keep his promises, and I … it seems as though I will always break mine.

In the moment of death, or perhaps the moment of awakening, all that was good and true about the fifth Hamlet Danemark sundered from all that was hurt and betrayed. The sorrow, the dignity, the compassion, centered on this tired shade beside me, who even now bows his head against the weight of grief and a fathomless pain.

“I’m sorry.”

“We all are, or shall be.” He reaches out as if to brush against the crown of roses, but his fingers pass through it; in their wake, the petals he’s touched crack and wither.

The rain starts as I leave the cemetery, just a few scattered drops at first and then, without further warning, a deluge that stabs frigid knives into my skin. My hair, my clothing, clings to me, and I can feel the crown of roses slowly breaking apart under the onslaught. The cold takes my breath away, such a sharp contrast to the blazing star of my heart, and I can’t help but laugh. As I move along the path, my feet step in circles, in patterns, in a swaying dance that belongs around a corona of flowers back on the island.

In the lake, the bells pound and toll, swept by the storm that rages along the surface. They roll through my bones like thunder, like joy, and shriek against the night sky. On such a night, the gates were opened and the city drowned, but there are no more keys hidden away, nothing left to open, to drown.

“Ophelia!”

Everything has drowned already, and the water thrust away what it could not yet keep. We don’t die a second time; we go home. When it’s time. When what was borrowed has emptied away.

“Ophelia!”

All stars die. They burn and burn bright, and then, when they have consumed everything that can be offered, they fade and die and leave a black hole in their wake, a vast void, an emptiness of incalculable space.

“Ophelia!” A hand closes hard around my arm and yanks me against a firm chest; another hand smoothes along my cheek to lift my face.

Dane.

Water drips from the ends of his hair, traces in rivulets along the creases of the soaked black clothing he wears in place of his uniform. Knife-edged shadows skitter across the sharp lines of his face in a flash of lightning, illuminating dark grey eyes and a puzzled, uncertain smile.

“Dance with me.”

“You didn’t take your pills this morning,” he murmurs, but there’s no accusation there, only a kind of wonder I haven’t heard from him in so long. “I can tell. Your eyes … your eyes are so alive.”

“So dance with me.”

He actually smiles, and in that moment he looks so much like his father the star burns brighter in my chest. We nearly glow in the darkness, pale pearls that gleam in bursts of light. His fingers, long and elegant—his mother’s hands—trace my face, my lips. “You’re nearly blue.”

I’ve been blue before, when they dragged me from a lake that wanted to freeze us within its grasp.

Bending nearly in two, he catches me behind my knees and sweeps me off my feet. He cradles me against his chest, our breath mingling in a frosty cloud in the scant inches between us, and the rain slices the mud and grass from my bare feet. Laughter spills from my throat, and I lean back against his support, my arms spread wide to catch the frozen tears that fall from Heaven. The angels weep and the bean sidhe sing and for a moment they make nearly the same sound.

He carries me into the house, through the garden door and up the servants’ stair to avoid the party. Water drips and pools behind us with every step. I shiver in the sudden loss, the sudden warmth. The dim lights hurt my eyes. Dane takes me straight to my room and closes the door with a soft, careful kick. He doesn’t put me down until we’re in my bathroom and in the standing shower.

There used to be a bathtub, but Father had it taken out before I was allowed to come home from the cold place, because he thought the tub was too much like the lake.

With a twist of his wrist, the water pours over us, sharp and cold at first, and we’re back outside in the storm and the lightning, but then it warms and soothes, and the storm is only something to hear. He’s still smiling though, like he’s discovered something wonderful, and I twine a hand through his hair and pull his face down to mine so I can taste his joy.

He’s startled—I’ve never kissed him before, always he’s been the one to kiss, to start—but it’s only a moment and then he’s kissing me back, his hands tugging at our sopping clothing and dropping them to the tile with wet slaps of fabric. The hot water streaks across his skin with a pale flush, and I follow it with my hands and suddenly he groans and presses his weight against me, the crucifix digging into my shoulder.

My mother’s laugh echoes in my ears, a sharp arrow that darts around the narrow space between my body and Dane’s, and I follow its path until he sets his teeth into my neck to stifle his cry. He drops to his knees, his face pressed into my stomach, and as the water cools around us, the laughter recedes until there’s nothing but the sharp sting of bruised and broken skin; his gasping breaths; and that beautiful, terrifying sense of wonder.

CHAPTER 21

The next morning, Father and I both take pills with our breakfast. There are pills at Dane’s place setting but no Dane or Horatio. They’re up on the widow’s walk, where Dane has the portable microphone for the intercom system and greeted everyone at four o’clock with the strident cries of a rooster. And three hours later, he is still doing it because he’s broken the lock to the control room so Claudius and Father can’t get in there to turn off the system. Horatio, I think, is just there to make sure Dane doesn’t do something stupid like jump off the railing.

It’s Saturday, though, with no classes to distract anyone from the noise, and I think it’s Claudius who’ll break the stalemate. He grits his teeth even as he sips his tea, and every time a fresh peal comes through the speakers, his grip tightens so on the delicate porcelain cup that it trembles from the strain.

If Dane threw in a hyena laugh just to mix things up, I think the handle of the cup would break.

The fact that I wish he’d do it is proof enough to me that I shouldn’t skip my pills twice in a row, and I dutifully swallow them one by one under Father’s approving gaze.

Someone, probably Reynaldo, got him started on the aspirin last night. He has a headache, but he isn’t actually hung over.

After breakfast, Father and Reynaldo retreat to Father’s study. I drift after them for lack of anything better to do; it’s a vague thought that perhaps I’ll ask permission to use the computer. I don’t have any papers that require it, but perhaps Father will let me search maps of Paris to see my brother’s new haunts—not that I have any letters to tell me where those haunts might be.

Father has left the door open; neither man sits in the well-worn leather chairs around the broad desk. Reynaldo stands on the visitor’s side of the wood, the edge level with his chest. He wears lifts in his shoes to try and disguise how short he is, but he doesn’t know how to walk in them so he ends up hunched and waddling like a duck. That might be part of why he always looks like he’s scowling even when he smiles.

After digging through the massive stacks of paper on the desk, Father hands him a large manila envelope. “There’s money in there, in addition to what I’ve added to his card; make sure he gets those letters please. Perhaps our previous ones have gone astray.”

He’s sending Reynaldo to Paris?

I can’t help but smile. Reynaldo has been Father’s stooge nearly all my life, but I cannot be comfortable around the leering man. He is more careful in his expression when Laertes is here to glower at him, but these two months have been filled with lascivious looks and wicked smiles that make me very glad I have no skill at reading men’s thoughts.

“Before you meet with my son, Reynaldo, I would have you do a few other things first.”

“Sir?”

“I need you to inquire after his behavior,” Father tells him, a sigh heavy in his voice. “Find out what other exchange students are there, where they tend to spend time outside of classes. He’ll more likely spend time with them than with his French classmates. When you question them, you can freely say that you know his father and family, and thus know him. Am I making myself clear?”

“Perfectly.”

I lean against the doorframe, mostly lost to the shadows of the hall.

“I want you to tell them wild stories, Reynaldo. Say that he’s wild and half drunk, and whatever stories and lies you wish to add there. None, if you please, that will permanently tar his reputation or damage any useful contacts he may be making—nothing that will dishonor the Castellan name or the one who will be responsible for it when I am gone. We both know he is young and his hormones … in any case, assign to him whatever wild tumbles are popular to teenagers of his type.”

Reynaldo shakes his head; he doesn’t entirely see where Father is going with this. “Like gambling? Or …”

“If you wish, or fighting or drinking, swearing inappropriately, you may even go so far as to say he goes whoring if you wish.”

“Sir!” A blush spreads across Reynaldo’s olive skin. “Surely whoring would damage his reputation!”

“I think you misjudge the French.” Father adjusts the rimless glasses on his nose. “At any rate, to say merely that he works his way through women is not such a scandal as to say he is addicted to it in some way or to imply that there is some perversion in his tastes. To have a healthy appetite for sex is a hallmark of youth. What you must do, Reynaldo, is spin these stories in such a way that they seem only a reflection of his sudden independence, not a general flaw of his character.”

“Sir—”

“Why do I ask you to do this?”

Reynaldo sighs with relief. He doesn’t like appearing stupid, doesn’t like having to ask for explanations that Father is only too willing to give.

At length.

Interminable length.

“Yes, sir, I would know that, please. What you ask seems rather extraordinary.”

“I want to know the truth of what my son is doing in Paris, Reynaldo.” Father adjusts the glasses again, though they can hardly need it so soon, and sinks down into his chair. The leather bears worn patches on the back and arms where his weight has rubbed away the darker color. “Asking him for a report on his behaviors is unlikely to yield that result, but he must be doing quite a bit that he cannot manage even a single line of e-mail in all this time. So. Ask those he spends time with, but not in such a way that invites dishonesty. If you paint him with all these vices, and they agree with you—surely it must be true. But if they protest your descriptions, then they know him for a good boy. We will have the truth of it with Laertes none the wiser.”

It isn’t hard to imagine Reynaldo stalking along Parisian cafés in search of any friends Laertes may have made. The fact that he’ll look ridiculous won’t occur to him—he takes himself far too seriously for that—and for whatever tact he may employ, he has no idea that the other students will just tell my brother when next they see him. It’s impossible not to relate that a strange American man, barely five feet tall, came to them and made all sorts of horrendous accusations against Laertes’ character.

I press a hand against my mouth to hold back a giggle. He seriously expects to go up to a table of American teenagers and talk about “whoring”?

Father knows his duties as an administrator very well, but he knows far more about paper than people. Such a plan can’t possibly work. It might even amuse them to string him along with even worse stories.

Dane would do that.

If even just one of those exchange students is like Dane, the others will follow his lead as he spins horror stories of sexual diseases and drugs and absinthe, as he tells a spellbound stooge of gambling dens where Laertes loses all his money to brawls. Add in a few rumors about unexplained corpses and Reynaldo might just die of joy at the prospect of sharing such awful tales.

I have to tell Dane and Horatio.

I’m actually at the front door before I catch myself. Whatever grace I gave myself yesterday, whatever gift of disobedience I gave myself to celebrate my birthday, ended when Dane left my room still with that look of wonder and joy in his eyes. It’s one thing not to push him away when he comes to me; it’s another thing entirely to seek him out away from Gertrude and Father.

Even when one is thousands of miles away, Father still feels like he has to know every detail about his children’s lives. He has to take away the locks, the chances for privacy, for secrets, and yet …

I trace my hand along the curved pattern of teeth in the side of my neck, shiver at even this slight pressure against the bruised, fragile skin.

Father wants to know so much.

Or rather, he thinks he does.

Because if he actually knew, if he knew how Laertes spends his days and nights, knew that this semicircle of pain keeps the sun burning in my chest, there wouldn’t be enough whiskey in the world to dull the pain.