It was late when I woke. Now, so close to midsummer, the sun lingered long after honest folk had eaten their suppers. I peered cautiously between the stones of the battlements. There was no one to be seen, except a porter sweeping the day’s horse, goat and sheep droppings from the castle courtyard, and an ancient beggar picking her way around the market square, hoping for a dropped bun or turnip or a farthing lost among the cabbage leaves. I crept back into the stairwell, then stopped.
A noise, below. A rat? No, the clinking of a key.
I hesitated only a moment. If it was my unknown friend, I had nothing to fear. If not, I would pretend to be a lad coming down from admiring the view from the tower. ‘Key?’ I’d say. ‘What key?’ And then I’d run.
I rounded the last corner of the staircase as the door shut. The key scraped in the lock. I fumbled for my own key, tied in a corner of my shirt. I slid it in, trying to hear any movement outside. Footsteps, the swish of cloth …
At last I got the door open. I peered out, just as a skirt vanished around a corner into another corridor.
I stepped back quickly and locked the door again. It was a woman; I had been right. The corridor had been too dim to see the skirt clearly. It could have been silk or wool; queen or washerwoman.
I looked at what she had brought me. A closed pot of what smelled like fish soup. More bread, a hunk of aged Summer Mountain cheese, a small bowl of strawberries. Strawberries! Not a washerwoman then. Nor Gerda. No one in our house could have gone berrying in the forest, and to buy berries like these would have cost a silver piece.
The chamberpot sat where I had left it. I lifted up the cloth. Empty. For a second I thought it was enchanted. A ghost had spirited away the mess I’d left there. Then sense took over. This must be another pot, the other taken away. One chamberpot looked like any other. Even the queen’s was plain white china.
Her Majesty would not carry a chamberpot. But she had trusted maids who might. The queen need not even tell the maid why she must go to the small cupboard in the dusty corridor and leave food and a chamberpot. Queens were obeyed, not questioned, even if their excuse was thin. Who else could have brought me strawberries? Maybe she had not called me to her after my father’s death because she thought being in the chamber where my father had been murdered would hurt me.
It had been my father, I realised, who had warned me that Hamlet might have to make a diplomatic marriage, not Queen Gertrude. She might have thought — with reason — that this stranger son, so long a foreigner to his people, might do best with a bride from a family the people knew and trusted. She might have truly wanted me to be her daughter. Perhaps she hoped it still.
I slept the next night out on the battlements, wrapped in the cloak; it was all I needed in the summer warmth. Its cloth was dark enough to hide me. Whoever had left it for me had thought of that too.
I hoped rather than expected more food to be at the bottom of the staircase when I woke. It was. Bread and cheese — sheep’s milk again. Did whoever left it know I didn’t like goat’s milk cheese? And more fresh-made ale, with a small pot of stewed cherries. And this time, a ewer of water and a washcloth.
Two women brought all this, I thought, not one; unless she made two trips.
I realised something else too. My provisions came only when I was safely up above. Someone watched my tower.
Whoever my friend was, she didn’t want me to know her identity. How easy to call up to me: ‘Lady Ophelia! Your food is here.’ Or even, if she had been given orders and did not know my name: ‘Kind sir, do not let the ale go cold.’ But she came in secret. Knew my secret too. I had never told anyone that I came here, not since I had told my nurse about King Fortinbras, so many years ago. I had told no one I intended to hide. How could they know?
I shivered. Only ghosts could know I was here. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, who must truly walk these battlements. Old Fortinbras’s ghost. Did the two old enemies meet each other now, on top of the castle?
But ghosts did not carry chamberpots, nor rye bread. Nor could they hurt the living, except by poisoning their minds.
Poor Hamlet, pushed and harried by his father’s ghost. Doubt that the sun doth move; doubt truth to be a liar; but never doubt I love.
I clenched my fists with sudden resolution. I could do one thing, at least, hidden up here. I could summon the old king’s ghost tonight.
That, at least, I owed to Hamlet.
The midsummer sky was grey above me, just dark enough for pale stars to struggle through. I sat against the stones and hugged my cloak around me. I could just make out the watch on the main tower, their dark armoured silhouettes against the sky. An owl hooted in the forest nearby. Some poor creature shrilled its death; another owl’s meal. I tried to count the stars to pass the time, but gave up as clouds drifted past them like Lady Annika’s lace shawl. Surely it was gone midnight.
‘King Hamlet!’ My voice was low, but loud enough to call a ghost.
No answer.
I tried again. ‘King Hamlet! It is I, your son’s friend, who calls you.’
The battlements showed a distinct absence of ghostly king.
‘King Hamlet!’
No answer. Perhaps summer’s darkness was too thin for a ghost to appear. Did ghosts get bored in summer, with so few black hours when they could haunt?
I called again, and again. I called till the moon hid behind a shawl of cloud. My eyes began to close … The clouds thickened into shape. A man peered at me. No, not a man — a ghost. He wore the same crown that now King Claudius wore, with the gold doublet and hose I had seen the old king wear, though both were grey now. Even their embroidery was grey. The black and white beard was grey too. His grey eyes that had once been blue stared at my face.
I scrambled to my feet. I tried to curtsey, then found I had no skirts to hold. I made a clumsy bow instead. ‘Your Majesty.’
He floated further off and still said nothing. Even as I watched, he began to fade. Would he speak only to his son?
‘Your Majesty,’ I said urgently, ‘I am Ophelia, your son’s affianced wife.’
Was I? I wasn’t sure. Officially I was dead, and Hamlet exiled. There had been no bridal contracts planned. But the ghost heard enough truth in my voice to float closer.
I should be scared, I thought. I had always been nervous around the old king, a man who threw his baked carp at a servant because the sauce was too sweet, then had the man hung by his thumbs for three days. Sometimes I still dreamed of his screams. A man who watched his hounds rip open a deer’s throat; while the deer’s blood flowed, at least the rest of us were safe. But even a mortal girl is stronger than a ghostly king.
‘Remember me!’ The ghostly voice was hoarse, but still that of the king I’d known.
‘I remember you,’ I said.
The grey crowned head loomed above me. ‘I am thy Hamlet’s father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, confined all day to waste in fires, till the foul crimes I have done are burned and purged away.’
‘I know,’ I said.
It was as if he hadn’t heard. ‘But fouler still the crime done to me. Murdered, by a brother’s hand. Oh, horrible! Oh, horrible! Most horrible. The royal bed of Denmark now a couch for damned incest —’
I raised my voice to speak over him. ‘I know all about that.’
He stared at me. Had anyone ever interrupted him before, as king or ghost?
‘Attend me well,’ he whispered harshly. ‘For you must help to avenge what you will hear —’
‘You are going to tell me that your brother poured poison in your ear while you slept. And your wife then married him.’
‘Yes! Foul and poisonous incest.’
‘But what you don’t know,’ I said, ‘is that your son is sent across the sea to England, where he may be killed.’
He floated a little further away. ‘What is it you say?’
‘Your son is in danger. Might lose his life. Has lost all happiness because of you.’
He loomed above me again, the far-off stars shining like red points of anger in his eyes. ‘How dare a girl speak to me this way!’
I put my hands on my hips. ‘I had a father once, but not like you. If my father’s ghost should walk — which it will not, for he was a good man and sits now in heaven — he would give his children words of wise counsel, treasures dropped from years of wisdom, not bluster of revenge.’
‘You dare to argue with me!’
‘I do! Why did your wife so quickly turn to your brother for comfort? Why did Denmark’s lords accept him as king?’
He swooped around me, his ghostly hands stretched out as if to wring my neck. I did not flinch. Those fingers had less strength than mist.
He kept circling, so close I felt I breathed in his cloud. Was he trying to make me fall off the battlements? I would not back down.
At last he surged a little way beyond the tower. The dim sparkle of his eyes glared at me. ‘I am the king!’ he howled.
‘You were the king. And so was King Fortinbras, whose kingdom you took as a prize for a bet. Does King Fortinbras torment his son like this?’
His eyes blazed silver from his shades of grey. ‘I must have revenge!’
‘Why?’
‘Murder is foul, most foul, unnatural —’
‘So is a ghost who torments his son.’ I stepped towards the ghost, my toes at the edge of the battlements. I could feel the updraught of the warm stones below. ‘Promise me you will not torment your son when he returns. Leave him in peace, and your kingdom too. Promise me!’
‘I must be —’
I fixed him with a glare. ‘All you must be, Your Majesty, is burned in fires each day, as you have said, for your sins. Would you add to your life’s sins after death by hurting those who act from duty and love of you? One person loved you — one only — and you torment him! Save yourself a day, a year, of sulphurous flames and leave your son alone.’
‘A girl to so assault me! A very shrew.’ The ghostly voice was almost sulky.
‘Go,’ I said. ‘And may heaven send you finally to rest.’
He floated beyond the battlements, slowly fading. I thought I heard one last ‘Remember me.’ But it might only have been the wind.