Gertrude and Claudius (19 page)

His wolfish teeth showed a smile in the dark fleece of his beard, a flash of white like the white spot in his hair. “No man could have helped looking, my love. You were, are, sublime in every part.”

“I’m a fat spoiled forty-eight-year-old, but being called sublime feels somehow
right.
As a kind of
play.
Hamlet—big Hamlet—didn’t know how to play.”

“He played only to win.”

Gertrude suppressed the observation that Claudius, too, in his new majesty, showed an inclination to win. But, then, having spent her life in the company of kings, Gertrude knew that for a king losing usually meant losing your life. High position entailed a precipitous fall.

“I’m fond of him, actually,” Claudius said. “Young Hamlet. I think I can give him something he never had from his own father—he and I are fellow victims of that obtuse bruiser—that Koll-killer. We’re alike, your son
and I. His subtlety, which you mentioned, is much like my own. We both have a shadow-side, and a yen to travel, to get away from this foggy hinterland, where the sheep look like rocks and the rocks look like sheep. He wants
more
, to learn more.”

“I thought you said he doesn’t really go to Wittenberg.”

“He goes
some
where, and learns
some
thing, that gives him dissatisfaction. I tell you I
feel
for him. We’re both victims of Danish small-mindedness—Viking blood-hunger crammed into the outward forms of Christianity, which no one up here has ever understood, from Harald Bluetooth on; for him it was just a way to preëmpt a German invasion. Christianity turns grim in lands of frost; it is a Mediterranean cult, a religion of the grape. Truly, I am certain I can make the Prince love me. I appointed him my successor on my own impulse.”

“He may resent that he remains a prince, while you occupy his father’s throne.”

“How could he resent that? He was never
here
, he showed no interest in learning the art of rule—of all that threatens and upholds a government. Some whisper,” Claudius told Gertrude with lowered voice and subdued expression, “that he is mad.”

She shivered. “He is sane, and shrewd,” she said, “but still I cannot grieve on his absence. If he comes home, I sense that he will bring unhappiness.”

“But come he must, lest a rebel faction form outside Elsinore’s walls, and here is the scheme to bring him: marry me.”

Her impulse was to greet his words with joy; but these
disrupted times shaded their import somberly, and like little weights they took her heart lower. “My husband, your brother, is but two weeks dead.”

“Another two, and it will be a month—lag enough for such seasoned meat as we. Gertrude, don’t deny me the natural outcome of my long and perilous devotion. Our present situation, scattered awkwardly through Elsinore’s royal apartments, is too curious; we must sneak and tryst as if your husband’s ghost keeps jealous guard over your virtue. Our union will settle all jangling gossip and give Elsinore a solid base—a master and a mistress.”
And cement my hold on the throne
, Claudius did not say.

“I doubt it will settle Hamlet,” said the Queen. The name’s persistent doubleness—father, son; king, prince—brought a lump to her throat, as if it were too large to swallow.

“I wager the contrary,” said Claudius, bluff and head-long in his decisions as kings must be. “It will restore his mother to the highest status, and supply an uncle in place of a father. Our wedded example will strengthen and steady his courtship of Ophelia, which you and Polonius both desire—you for the sake of your son’s health and sanity, he to gain his daughter high estate. I do not begrudge the old man that boon of perpetuation; he served our own wooing well.”

His speaking brusquely of their “wooing” touched a sensitive area in Gertrude. Though she had been bold and brazen enough in placing herself at a lover’s disposal while still wedded to the King, when the ruthless irregularity of her behavior could be lightly scanned by her conscience as the enactment of a romance such as had
beguiled her betranced days of married boredom, her escapade took on a live soreness since the King’s death: she felt her fall had somehow caused the adder in the orchard to sting the sleeping cuckold. At the same time, Sandro had disappeared, and she wondered if there was a reason she didn’t know. Claudius, questioned, had said the boy had become homesick with winter’s onset, so he had let him go south, with a tolerant bonus. It was strange this had been done so suddenly, without her knowing. Claudius in his old guise had spoken to her with the careless freedom of one with nothing to hide; now there was a certain formality, a pregnant circumspection. Yes, it would be good to bundle and hide the whole affair—the lakeside lodge, the small troop enlisted in their deceit, the hectic gratification of belonging to two men at once, the pagan shamelessness—within the unimpeachable, unbreakable contract of a royal marriage. Blushing as if once again garlanded in virginity, Gertrude consented.

Claudius clapped his hands: a politic and lucrative bargain had been struck. The date was set. Messengers—to Wittenberg, to Laertes in Paris, to the capitals of friendly powers—were sent posting on their way. Even with so muted a celebration in prospect, a marriage draped in mourning, Gertrude found these narrowing November days brightened. What we once did imperfectly, we yearn to perfect in the second doing.

The guests were far fewer than when good King Roderick had assembled the flower of the Danish aristocracy along with officials from the farthest reaches of Danish
power in Sweathland and nether Slesvig. Colored wimples and diamond-patterned doublets had become fashionable, and asymmetrically colored hose, even on the old and staid. Heavy necklaces and chains of hammered gold were consigned to the garb of mayors and officials, and the bells Gertrude had worn about her waist when she was seventeen would be considered now a quaint relic. And either she drank less wine and mead than on that giddy, frightening, flattering first occasion, or her capacity for alcohol had improved. The words of the service, which she had been too excited to listen to the first time, this time struck her with their touching archaism, their talk of plighting troth and of no man putting asunder—“asunder” a word employed on no other occasion.
Until death us do part.
Gertrude wondered how soon that would be. How could it be at all? Yet an eternal parting had occurred, at a stroke, on the mild afternoon of All Saints’ Day, a serpent in the sunny orchard grass.

She and Claudius had debated the matter of music and dancing. Perhaps there should have been none, within a month of King Hamlet’s death. And yet life must go on, and some of the guests had travelled from as far as Holsten, Blekinge, and Rügen. Subdued music, the espoused agreed—a lute and a recorder trio, with a timbrel to keep the beat—might form a background, like a faded tapestry, to the midday feast, and if dancing was generated afterwards, let it occur. She and the King, to establish the propriety of a reserved celebration, led a few measures of the
ductia
, its slow gliding movements almost like a dirge, she thought, her vision hazed by the
smoke of the rushlights and the fires roaring in the great hall’s two barrel-vaulted fireplaces. Her weddings took place in winter, but to the verge of this December the snows had been but dustings. Heaven has been withholding. Claudius as he glided beside her, taking her hand and releasing it to turn and take the other, felt somehow removed by his having become her husband. His touch was rigid and tense with his new responsibilities. She had loved, when they had met dangerously in Gurre Forest, his relaxation into lawlessness, his abandon to the moment once he had achieved his goal—conquest of her, regardless of the consequences. Now they were living into an aftermath of consequences, treading in time to the timbrel, trying to survive the extinction of the adulterous, rapturous couple who had existed outside Elsinore’s walls. The seducer had become a public man, his far-off beloved a daily presence.

He let go her hand when the music paused, and left her to greet their guests, the high subjects of his reign. She watched him—the fur collar of his robe upright and its rim glittering as if with frost, the gold cross on his chest reflecting red flashes of firelight—move to Hamlet and Laertes, who had been talking together, bonded by their knowledge of the world south of Denmark. Laertes sported a dark goatee shaped like his father’s white one, and Hamlet had grown a red beard. A delicate beard, less curly than his blond father’s: its redness was a version of the pale coppery tint of her own luxuriant head, and of her tufts elsewhere. The gauzy beard repelled her; it seemed an intimate aspect of herself lodged within him,
which he had decided to flaunt. He was daring her, in the fullness of his thirty years, to assert maternal control over his face. She could no more do that than consciously control her disposal of herself in love and marriage. Always between them, mother and son, stood her failure to feel herself loved enough by his father—a transparent, unsayable obstruction through which he gazed at her as if through the caul in which he had been born. He had hurt her so much, being born. No person had ever hurt her as Hamlet had, while the Battle of Thy was being won.

She could see, from the twists of his beautiful, ruddy, almost feminine lips, that Claudius was speaking French to Laertes and German to Hamlet, establishing himself with them as another man of the greater world, though his languages might be rusty, not as supple and freshly acquired as theirs. She worried that Claudius, his cosmopolitanism already faintly dated, would be mocked; but both younger men responded, as best she could make out, courteously, in Laertes’ case with some animation, in Hamlet’s with an expression masked by that disturbing beard, still so sparse the pallor of his cheeks glanced through. She trembled in fear for her husband, drawing dangerously close to her son. Her son was his enemy, she could feel in her loins. Claudius’s hopes for winning the boy over seemed deluded folly to her, but, then, his courting of her, his impossible romantic love, had been carried through to this triumphant nuptial conclusion. To her relief, Claudius moved on, he had to greet everyone; he was the star, the center of the occasion, he had to parcel himself out equally. Gertrude knew how that was,
having been since birth a star herself, a king’s only progeny, the focus of envious and possessive eyes while still in her cradle.

Polonius, twinkling in a flowing new houppelande, came up to her and, having noted the direction of her gaze, said, “Our king bears himself well, as one long accustomed to preëminence.”

“I confess I did not know,” she said, “he would measure up so willingly. I thought he was a wanderer, a well-born vagabond.”

“Some men, Your Majesty, wander in order to return with sufficient strength to achieve their long-nursed goals.”

Gertrude did not like to think that Claudius had, like his brother, sought the throne. She preferred to think it had fallen to him by unhappy accident. True, he had shown initiative and singleness of purpose in seeking endorsement from the
råd
and election from the four provincial
thing
, and had by swift letter elicited allegiance from the bishops of Roskilde, Lund, and Ribe; but she ascribed all this to the good cause of stifling chaos in the wake of calamity. In those stunned days after Hamlet was found dead, and not only dead but hideously transfigured, like a long-buried statue disintegrating in shining flakes, Gertrude had been directing her attention elsewhere, inward, to her ancient task of mourning, of shouldering bereavement. For almost the first time in her life since the onset of menses she had felt transformed by illness, unable to leave the bed, as if her proper place were beside Hamlet in his clay grave, in the loathsome burial ground outside the walls of Elsinore, where mist clung to
the tufted soil and the shovels of chattering gravediggers were always pecking away at the underworld of bone. Thus isolated, visited only by Herda, who had her own reasons for grief, for Sandro was gone and her belly was swollen, and by her whispering ladies-in-waiting, whose faces were rapt with the thrill of the recent horrific event, and the castle physician, with his dropsical bagcap and bucket of writhing leeches, Gertrude played doctor to her own spiritual symptoms, wondering why her grief felt shallow and tainted by relief. The King’s weight had been rolled off her. He had never seen her as she was, fitting her instead into a hasty preconception, his queen. It did occur to her, later, that in this interval some other queen might have been forwarding her son’s claim to the throne. But Hamlet had attended his father’s burial and disappeared again. Her maternal instinct told her that the throne of Denmark with all its petty, bloody taxes on the soul was an acquisition he would snub. Nor had Polonius in his renewed dignities advanced the Prince’s cause: there smoldered an animosity between them, a dislike passed from father to son. It was all, while she sickly dozed, and listened to her female visitors’ own complaints, too entangled for her, like a basket of embroidery thread a kitten has slept in. When she stirred again, a presentable widow, all had been settled elsewhere in Elsinore and King Claudius approached her begging for her hand. She could hardly deny him; he had adored her from afar and, come closer to flesh out his fantastic image of her, had proven entertaining and responsive to the realities of her person. She would train him out of his over-estimation gently, day by day, keeping alive the cherished
little princess he had revived. It was too soon to marry him, perhaps, yet what else was she to do? Bereaved queens sometimes entered nunneries, but nuns seemed unhappy women to her—married to a preoccupied God and as sallow and shrewish as sublunary neglected wives. She liked the luxuriant, silky-stiff texture of Claudius’s beard, the nutty scent of his bare chest. She liked his vagrant, insolent energy, now harnessed to the performances of kingship.

This wedding night was very different from her first. Then the groom could not stay awake, now he could not rest, though the celebration, relatively muted, had subsided in a flurry of polite departures, and the midnight bells had, like a crowd dispersed but returning to search for a lost glove or purse, reappeared as a lonely single clang, and then two. He had made love to her triumphantly, his nutty smell becoming mixed with an odor like the brackish scent close to the shore of the gray-green Sund. Surges of sensation in her lower parts lifted her so high her voice was flung from her like a bird’s lost call; yet still, their wedded desires so gratified, he could not sleep. In the heated space of their curtained bed she could not drop off, feeling his male sinews still taut in him. Each time her thoughts had begun to dissolve into rumpled nonsense—reality’s patterns folded chimerically—an abrupt motion of his beside her tugged her back into the clear night.