Hamlet Read Free Page B

sounded vague and fretful. “He killed me as I lay in the orchard. He poured poison into my ear.”
    The young prince could think of nothing to say. His father was like an old man complaining that someone had taken one of his slippers. Yet he was talking about death. Death and murder.
    “The night is fading away. I have a long way to travel. I leave you to your responsibility. I go to mine.”
    Hamlet shook his head, not so much to stop the ghost leaving as to save his father a little longer from the awfulness of which he had spoken. He reached out with his right arm. But without success. In front of his eyes, the ghost evaporated. For a few moments there was a smell, obnoxious to the nose, sulfur mixed with the mustiness of his father alive, then not even that.
    Hamlet, frozen to the spot, had to be turned and made to walk and talk and breathe again by Horatio and Bernardo. It was as though he had gone through a door to some terrible place and they had to reach through it themselves to pull him back. The excitement they felt earlier was gone; now they were frightened for the prince. They plied him with questions to which he made no reply. “Was it your father? Did he speak to you? Did you say anything? He looked like he was talking! What did he say? Were you scared? Why did he come here? Does he want something of you?”

Her Majesty Queen Gertrude was looking up at her new husband and at the same time fingering the pepper pot. She appeared as glacial as ever, her fair skin coldly beautiful, her eyes steady. Her hair, hinting of red, was swept back from her face, giving her a high forehead and allowing her strong, clear eyes to meet the gaze of anyone in the room.
    Some forty guests were seated around the table in the state dining room, not the great hall used for official banquets, but the less formal one on the ground floor of the royal apartments. Pale sunlight through the stained-glass windows cast colors from hunting scenes on the king’s face, but all the warmth in the room came from the log fires burning in vast fireplaces at each end.
    The luncheon was over, and Claudius’s speech was drawing to an end. Bearded, beefy, red-faced, slightly hoarse, he was not a natural orator, more at home in the hunting field, but he had a forceful style of speaking that commanded respect. Shorter than most men, yet with a big head, he compensated for his height by standing on his toes, leaning forward as though he were looking for a fight. He was fifty years old, balding, with watery eyes, yet Claudius still had a sensual quality that attracted women, in a way that his dignified older brother had never understood.
    On the king’s other side was Polonius, his chief adviser. Polonius gazed steadily at Claudius. His expression was composed and calm. His hands were in his lap. Although he had written the speech, he listened to it now with the demeanor of a man who was weighing every word.
    Horatio, at the foot of the table, trying to look interested in Claudius, took a moment to look around. He noticed Gertrude’s unconscious fiddling with the pepper pot and wondered at it. She had always been so punctilious when it came to table etiquette. She snapped at him or Hamlet when they fidgeted during speeches. Especially Hamlet. “You will have to listen to thousands of speeches,” she had told him. “Many of them boring. But the fate of Denmark may one day depend on your manners. A yawn at the wrong moment can be a grave insult.”
    Polonius was the exemplar today, Horatio thought. Not a flicker of movement. Other men his age were beginning to tremble, but not Polonius. Those sharp eyes and big ears had seen and heard many secrets, and his crafty brain processed them to his advantage. He had served five kings, and each one had found him indispensable.
    I bet he was an old man when he was twenty, Horatio thought. Not so many wrinkles, maybe, but I can’t see him playing football or getting drunk or going in a farting competition. The