He looked at me with sudden kindness as I clasped his hands. “We all have to die, Maria.”
“But not before our time, sir, if I may say so. Now, enough of this chatter. They say the players are to come again. Imagine being able to remember all those words! And say them in public! As if they really meant them, too. But perhaps it’s not such an achievement. My Lord Polonius tells me he was a noted actor in his youth. If he ever was young, that is.” I sighed. “Well, I must see they are well lodged and well fed. The poor lads, spending all their time on the road...”
The next thing Polonius and Claudius were plotting fairly turned my stomach. Gertrude was to send for Hamlet and tell him to explain his behaviour. There had certainly been a few moments of oddness during our conversation, but on the whole he was no madder than you’d expect any king to be, with all that inbreeding. But apparently he and Ophelia had had a huge argument, ending in her tears. By some coincidence Polonius had heard it all. Coincidence? I doubted it, especially when I heard his next move. I knew Gertrude was worried about him — were not we all? — but no decent mother would have wanted an extra pair of ears at the interview. Yes, my husband was to secrete himself in the room and spy.
“You cannot do that,” I expostulated as we made our way down to the evening’s performance by the players. “It’s a betrayal of trust!”
“My dear Maria, madness in great ones must not go unwatched.”
“But by his mother, not by the Lord Chamberlain.”
An unpleasant smirk played about his lips.
“And what if he doesn’t confess all? What then?”
“Then he will be sent to England. They owe us tribute and will do the king’s bidding instantly.”
“And what is his bidding?”
The old man’s face closed. “Only His Majesty is privy to that,” he lied, his fluttering left eyelid giving him away.
Hamlet sent to England? The king’s bidding? I must slip away from the play and search the king’s study.
Hamlet to be beheaded! That was what the document on the king’s desk said. Instantly. As soon as he set foot on English soil. Without even time for shriving. Even as I reeled, desperate to warn the good young man, I heard voices and — just as if I were my husband — I hid behind a pillar. Something had truly enraged Claudius: I could hear him in the corridor outside, screaming with fury at Gertrude, who, lacking the backbone of a flea, was yes-sir-no-sirring him like a very drab. But then in he marched, with those two blowflies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he grabbed the letter and pressed it into their hand.
I must warn Prince Hamlet! But how could I do that, when I knew he was closeted with his mother?
I used the secret stair behind the arras, meant to be used for a rapid escape in time of attack. As I ran, I drew from my pocket my scissors. There was just a chance that if Polonius felt their blade at his throat he would believe he was threatened by a man and I could drag him away. Once he was safely bestowed in our chamber, I could run back to Hamlet and get him out of Elsinore via the same staircase. He was king, by every right but anointment. He was my liege lord and he had to be saved, even if I lost my life in the endeavour.
It wasn’t I but Polonius who died. As soon as Polonius felt the blade, he screamed. I slit his throat. My lord must have thought he was threatened by an assassin, and ran his sword through the fabric. Again and again he jabbed, till, fearful for my life, I backed into the secret doorway.
When Hamlet pulled back the arras, he assumed it was his blade that had killed the rash intruding fool. I wanted to step forward and explain, but, one of his fits of madness upon him, he turned from me and berated his mother in such terms that I could not stay to listen. So I turned and ran.
Would staying have made any difference? It seemed at the time that even if I had confessed to the murder, even if I had been hanged for the offence, Hamlet would have been despatched for England. All I could do was slip a hasty letter in his pack, warning him what was planned and telling him to insert on the death warrant their names, not his. For my own protection, I asked him — if he survived — to pretend he had a premonition, and acted of his own accord.
I told myself that this way I could be there to support Ophelia and even Laertes when he returned posthaste to find his father dead and his sister in strong hysterics. As usual, they all indulged her every whim. I advised bloodletting and a lowering diet. They allowed her to roam free and to harm herself. All Laertes did was raid my chest of herbs and simples, claiming he could not sleep for grief. Now that he sleeps forever, I know his true motive for the theft. It was to poison the rapier with which he was to stab Hamlet in a fencing match.
Oh yes. Thanks to my message, Hamlet dealt summarily with the two supposed friends and returned to claim his inheritance. He came back on the worst possible day: that of Ophelia’s funeral. Yes, the silly girl, with no one to curb her wantonness now her father was gone, had got herself pregnant by one of the serving men and drowned herself when the pennyroyal I’d given her did no good. No one could tell Laertes: He would have killed every last man in the garrison in revenge.
I spoke long and stern to Gertrude. There was no one else to convince her that Hamlet was a true loyal son to his father and that her husband was a cheap usurper. And I think at the end that she believed me. Did she not, even in the throes of death, accidentally poisoned by a draught Claudius had prepared for Hamlet, try to protect her son? Even though to do so was to betray her husband? At least she died with Hamlet’s name on her lips.
My dear sweet prince died nobly, in his beloved Horatio’s arms. And then in marched Fortinbras. In the miserable bloodbath that was the court, he silenced all by asserting his rights over the country.
And over me.
“In my country,” he said, in that strange guttural accent of his, “it is the duty of the conqueror to take to wife the widow of the vanquished. You are the senior lady of the court. I claim you as my prize.”
So I ended with the prince Ophelia would have adored. As marriages go, it was neither bad nor good — a matter of convenience. I never wanted for anything, but have never been truly happy.
There are times when I wander the battlements, hoping to hear the ghost of Prince Hamlet assuring me I am forgiven. I know he’s visited Horatio. As he himself pointed out, however, spirits speak only to the pure. So some days I think he judges me as I judge myself. As a failure. But then Horatio will remind me what the prince once said to him:
There’s a divinity doth shape our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
Copyright © 2006 Judith Cutler
The Alimony Prison
by Lou Manfredo
Story writer Lou Manfredo hails from Manalapan, New Jersey. He has not previously appeared in EQMM, but he has a story, “Case Closed,” in the award-winning crime anthology Brooklyn Noir (Akashic; 2004), which has also been selected by editor Joyce Carol Oates for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005.
In the roaring, wild year of 1927, the Alimony Prison, nestled discreetly on Greenwich Village’s MacDougal Street, was arguably the classiest speakeasy in all of New York City.
The brainchild of an ex-prize-fighter and professional gambler named Dominick Cosenza, the speak included among its considerable boasts the very finest Canadian and European booze, the smoothest, hottest New Orleans jazz, and the cleanest, most enthusiastic Hell’s Kitchen hookers.