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“Why do you not simply kill the man?” Lady Macbeth asks.
Ophelia clutches at her cup. The spiced wine is hot enough to burn her skin, but leaves her fingers still cold as if she too is ready for the grave she feels half-in already. This may be the way of things in fey Scotland, but it is not the Denmark she wants to live in. “Have we not had enough death?”
Lady Macbeth sips her own wine. The sheen it leaves on her mouth is like rain on ice. “Brought to you by the mad prince, aye.”
Once Ophelia had loved him. If she thought the Hamlet she had known were in him still, when the wind blew any direction but north-northwest… But he is gone, that sweet and serious boy who had once plaited her a clumsy crown of flowers and smiled when she mended it before setting it on her head. He died with his father, perhaps. Or he killed himself along with hers.
“I want no more death.” Ophelia’s voice trembles. “I want—”
She wants the dead alive again, or the ghosts dead. She wants to hate Hamlet, but the memory of his small uncalloused hand against her own holds her back as surely as a physical grip.
“You cannot have it,” Lady Macbeth says. She sets down her cup and reaches across the table to cover Ophelia’s hand with her own. Her skin is no softer than Ophelia’s, cold-chapped despite every ointment they might try, but the very bones of her are stronger. “Do you understand, child? You cannot have it.”
“I want to know happiness again,” Ophelia whispers.
Lady Macbeth recoils as if Ophelia’s hand had scorched her. For a long moment the only sound other than their breaths is the crackling of the fire and the far-off wailing of the wind.
“Where is your mother?” Lady Macbeth asks, drawing her cloak tighter around her.
“She died of me.”
Lady Macbeth looks old, suddenly, old and tired, and the ghost of her touch is brittle and burns Ophelia like frost. “You have no nurse? No aunt?”
Ophelia shakes her head. “Only Queen Gertrude.”
“Will she tell you to kill her son?”
“Nay, my lady.”
“That’s weakness in a queen.” Lady Macbeth drains her wine and gets up to refill her cup from the pot over the fire. “If I had had a son—”
Ophelia’s cup has gone cold between her numb hands. She dares not move, hardly dares even breathe, as Lady Macbeth stands as if she’s been turned to stone, like some dark creature from the old tales touched by sunlight.
“I would have killed that son myself,” says Lady Macbeth at last, slowly, each word falling separate and heavy into the deadly stillness of the room, “before I let him trail such reckless death through Glamis and Cawdor. I would have told my daughter to do the same.”
Still she does not turn. A log falls with a riot of sparks, and she steps back and shakes her skirts out, but all Ophelia can see is the fragile sharpness of her—like steel forged too hot and cooled too fast, like a sword that will shatter in the wielder’s hand, and pray God it splinters in a friendly spar and not an earnest battle.
“You might poison him,” Lady Macbeth says finally. “Feed him the juice of the poppy, if you love him still, and let him fall deeper and deeper into sleep until he cannot rise again.”
“And then he will be dead,” Ophelia whispers. “And gone forever, just as my father is gone…”
“I can conjure nothing to compel you,” says Lady Macbeth to the fire. “I will not save you if you refuse to save yourself.” She turns then in a whirl of dark skirts and glittering hair. “But if you had a mother, she would tell you to avenge her husband’s murder and free the kingdom of its sorrow.”
“If I had a mother,” Ophelia says, meeting Lady Macbeth’s eyes—the grim blue of deep water, call it loch or fjord as you might—“I would not want her to counsel murder.”
It is Lady Macbeth who blinks first. “Then die for him,” she says wearily. “Die and be damned as you will. Let the land of the Danes rot from the inside out, and the mad prince slaughter all who he fancies might stop him—doubt him—fear him. How long will he let you live, sweet Ophelia, when you mourn him even now?”
“No.” Ophelia jumps up in protest, but it takes all her strength. The word can do no more than sigh through her lips again, “No,” and yet—
And yet.
And when she wakes from this dream, what then? Will Hamlet look at her as he did once, years ago when they were children, months ago when they were but a man and a maid? Or will he look at her still wildly as a hunted fox, with no sorrow or kindness left to him?
Lady Macbeth takes Ophelia’s hands between her own and kisses her on the brow. A valediction, a benediction, that should not come with talk of murder, and Ophelia’s eyes blur with tears all the same.
She closes them, and the tears slide hotly down her cheeks and melt away like morning mist.