A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) (21 page)

His fingers tighten around mine, but don’t press. He could so easily make me press the handle down; it wouldn’t even take much to do it.

But he doesn’t.

He just watches me, his hand warm against mine, and waits for me to make the decision.

Which, more than anything, makes me decide. Dane and Horatio are the only ones who respect my decisions, who give me the space to make them, even if I never say what they are. They don’t make them for me and simply assume that I’ll obey, that I’ll follow along with no will and no mind as I so often do. Under Dane’s steady regard, in light of his patience as he waits for me to make my own decision, I take a deep breath and shove my weight down against the steel handle.

Sound rattles around the small bathroom as the pills disappear in a swirl of water, accompanied by Dane’s rich laughter. It takes several flushes for all of them to disappear.

Then there’s nothing left, no trace of forgotten days or chemicals or the hope of being a good daughter.

Dane gently pushes me back against the door, leans against me until his warmth seeps through my skin to join the inferno in my heart. He fumbles at the back of his neck, and then he’s kissing me, hot and sweet, and something snags in the fine hairs at the nape of my neck. A small weight settles between my breasts.

For a blinding, searing moment, everything is right.

When he pulls away, he presses his lips against my forehead, the top of my head.

His fingers tremble against a ring of silver studded with a dark sapphire and two rectangles of icy-blue aquamarine. I bring my hand over his, press against it until his fingers splay across my skin, the ring against his palm. I’ve felt this phantom weight for two months, this piece of me so violently torn away, this piece of Dane that costs no pain to bear.

“The play’s the thing, Ophelia,” he whispers against my temple. “The play’s the thing.”

I tilt my head back against the door and capture his haunted smile in a kiss. I’ll never be a good daughter, never be what Father, what Laertes, needs me to be.

But I can be what Dane needs.

Just by being myself, no chemical lies, by being a night-dark bruise against moonlight skin, I can be what Dane needs.

Which means I can be what I need.

I can feel the toll of the bells in my bones.

PART IV

CHAPTER 27

Dane sprawls across my bed as he watches me pull my sweater back into place, his eyes following my hands as they drape and knot the scarf around my neck. The gun sits on the mattress beside him, all six bullets pulled from the chamber to puddle in a curve of the coverlet nearby. He picks at my cold breakfast, grimaces with each swallow of rubbery eggs and soggy toast, and I know he’s only doing it to make it look as though I’ve eaten.

The slight pressure of his ring against my sternum feels right, like it belongs there and I’ve been incomplete in its absence. Even with the chain through it, the ring is too big for any of my fingers, but I try it on each one as I tell him of the traps his uncle sets for him. He’s already figured out the one that involves the Toms, but there’s another one yet to spring, and that weapon is me.

He laughs at that and pulls me to him on the bed to tease me breathless with kisses. He says he knows what he needs to do, that I need to trust him just a little longer. His fingers trace the bruises through my scarf when he tells me that there’ll be a dinner tonight, a special one followed by a play, purely for the denizens of Headmaster’s House. This is why he sent for Keith—and why I gave Keith the syringe—but I don’t ask him for details. After all, I’m part of the audience, part of the trap, and I’m a terrible liar.

One by one, he loads the bullets back into the chamber and tucks the gun into the back of his waistband. The gun’s hidden entirely by his jacket. I should ask him why he even has it, but I don’t. I’m not entirely sure I want to know. Whether he aims it at himself or his uncle, I don’t want to know, don’t want to wonder or fear or anticipate. He kisses me once more before he pulls the wooden wedge from under the door and leaves me with a delicate bouquet of primrose blossoms.

Eternal love, or so Gertrude’s book tells me.

I open my Bible and composition book and arrange them across the bed to give an excuse for the rumpled covers. In another school it might be calculus or physics, something both challenging and useful, and chemistry and home economics wouldn’t be nearly the same class. But I’m a sophomore girl at Elsinore Academy, so it’s Old Testament Studies and only the math needed to manage household accounts. I can feel the ring against my skin with every breath, every motion. I’ve only just pulled out my current assignment when Father pushes open my door.

“It’s time, Ophelia, come along.”

Obediently, I slide off the bed and back into my heels to follow him into the hall.

“We’ve received an invitation for this evening, along with the Danemarks,” he informs me. “It seems Dane wishes us to see a performance he’s arranged, and the Headmaster has consented. To be active in something with other students, perhaps it will do him some good.”

When did Dane get the clasp repaired?

It didn’t occur to me to wonder at the moment he replaced the chain around my neck, but I remember the clasp breaking when he ripped it from me, the only time I have ever tried to walk away. He had to have gotten it repaired at some point and then wore the ring around his neck rather than on his finger where it belonged.

He was waiting for me.

Father’s talking, but I can’t hear him over the endless, joyous whisper of the star in my heart that murmurs Dane’s name to dispel the darkness.

We walk away from the house, up into the school proper and into the portrait hall. Father sits me gently on one of the padded benches beneath Iphigenia Danemark, the only headmistress we have ever had. She led the school while her husband fought in the First World War, then stepped aside when he returned, just a wife and hostess again. I meet her painted blue eyes and try to see if she ever regretted that, but it’s only paint. Father presses a book into my hands. Claudius walks in, greets Father with a nod and me with a gimlet stare that would peel flesh from bone if I weren’t so used to Dane.

I run my fingers over the gilt lettering on the leather cover. A prayer book?

“It will give you a reason to be off on your own,” Father answers my unspoken question. “Certainly we often use the appearance of devotion and faith to hide deeper quandaries, so even the Devil may shape a prayer to go undetected.”

Claudius winces.

“We will be in the security room,” continues Father, oblivious as ever. “You have nothing to fear, Ophelia; we’ll see everything on the cameras. We will resolve this in a short time.”

“He’s nearly here,” Claudius reminds him. Without another word, they disappear behind the heavy navy blue tapestry picked out in silver, white, and ice blue.

There are four tapestries in the hall of portraits. Three of them conceal alcoves with comfortable benches, very popular with students for stealing some privacy with significant others. The fourth opens into a narrow hallway that leads directly to the security office. The hall of portraits is just off the main hall and the grand double doors that front the school, so they use this hall to respond quickly to any unauthorized guests at the front door. The red eyes of the cameras wink at me from the ceiling. Father and Claudius watch even now.

With one fingernail, I separate the gilt-edged, tissue-thin pages and let the book fall open across my lap.
Oh Merciful God, take pity on those souls who have no particular friends or intercessors to recommend them to Thee, who either through the negligence of those who are alive or through length of time are forgotten by their friends and by all. Spare them, O Lord, and remember Thine own mercy when others forget to appeal to it. Let not the souls which Thou hast created be parted from Thee, their Creator. May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

Dane’s smile tugs at my lips, the smile that delights in irony and words and meanings, in inversions and subversions and sometimes even perversions, all the many angles and shadows and shades of words, words, words.

The prayer for the forgotten dead.

But Hamlet isn’t forgotten, and Mama didn’t stay dead. We name them in our prayers to work against the sins they accumulated in life, the faults left without expiation and absolution, but one’s a morgen and one is split into two ghosts released from the cleansing flames of Purgatory, and the prayers do nothing for them.

Spare them, O Lord.

A shadow falls over the pages, and I look up to see Dane reading the words upside down. He meets my eyes and raises a questioning brow. Hidden from view by his body, I shrug delicately, and a fleeting smile flashes across his face.

“The fair Ophelia,” he greets sardonically, his voice just loud enough to be picked up through the security mics without straining. He tucks a delicate cluster of love-lies-bleeding into one of the pins holding my hair back from my face. “Do you remember my sins in your prayers, nymph?”

I don’t count his sins because I bear his pain. They’re different tasks. And so far as my father knows, as far as Claudius knows, I haven’t been alone with him in two months. “Hello, Dane,” I reply, trying to be what anyone else would call normal. “How have you been?”

“I humbly thank you. Well.”

Father has tucked a reminder into the book—between the last page and the back cover are several letters Dane wrote me that I had to turn over to Father. I rub my fingertips along the heavyweight paper, gather the letters into my hand. I hold them out, slightly to the side so they can point to the flashing light of the opposite camera. His eyes follow the progress, and he nods to show me that he understands. “I have letters of yours that I have wished to redeliver. Please, take them back.”

“No, not I,” he says lazily and backs three steps away. “I never gave you anything.”

“You know right well you did, and with them, words so sweet as made the letters even more precious. But now the sweetness is gone, and so I ask you to take them back.” I press my hand against my heart, my palm over the ring. One of the pages slices my lip and the taste of blood blooms on my tongue. “Rich gifts grow poor when givers prove unkind.”

He grins at me, the expression hidden from our audience. I’ve known that grin for as long as I can remember: come and play. “Are you a virgin?”

“Dane!”

“Are you beautiful?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

He snatches the letters from my hand and tosses them up into the air. The pages separate, float down like feathers from an angel’s wings. “If you are both chaste and beautiful, you should admit no interaction between your chastity and your beauty.”

“Could beauty have better interaction than with chastity?”

“The power of beauty will sooner transform chastity from what it is to a whore than the force of chastity can translate beauty into its likeness. It is easier to fall than to fly.” He crouches before me, traces my face with one strong hand, and I want nothing more than to close my eyes and lean into a touch that has nothing to do with pain or sorrow, even if it is for a game. But there’s an audience and a script I don’t know and now isn’t the time. “I did love you once.”

I swallow hard. To hear such a word in a game … perhaps the pain is still here after all. “Indeed, you made me believe so.”

“You should not have believed me; virtue cannot remove the corruption innate in us. I loved you not.”

“The more deceived me,” I whisper, and his fingers brush against my bleeding lip in apology.

It’s the only warning I have. He seizes me by my upper arms and yanks me from the bench, the prayer book dropping to the floor in a blasphemous heap, and spins me around. Just as suddenly he drops me atop the prayers, his chest rising and falling in sharp pants, my hair in a night-dark cloud around me.

“Go, Ophelia, go! Someplace clean, someplace honest, to a convent go! Why would you breed a race of sinners?” He drops to his hands and knees over me, his entire body trapping me in place, and his face hovers barely an inch from mine. His hands gently pin my wrists over my head, too gently to bruise or hurt. “I’m not much for virtue myself, and yet I could accuse myself of such things it would be better had my mother never borne me.” He leans forward, kisses the words into my skin and the silk that hides the bruises. “I am very proud.” He rolls his hips against mine and swallows my gasp with another kiss. “Revengeful.” Another kiss. “Ambitious.” A kiss. “I have more sins at my command than thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to perform them. What should men such as I do as we crawl between Heaven and Earth? We are absolute bastards; believe none of us.”

He pushes away from me, rolls to his feet in a graceful surge, and paces wildly about the space. “Away to a women’s college, Ophelia. It is the only place for beauty and uselessness to go hand in hand. Where is your father?”

I watch his progress through the space, still propped on my elbows. He knows exactly where my father is—what possible purpose can he have in including his audience? But he watches my face and expects an answer, so I stammer the first lie that comes to mind. “At … at the house, Dane. He’s at the Headmaster’s House.”

“Then I hope all the doors shut and lock upon him, that he can play the fool nowhere but in his own house. Good-bye!” He leaps for the door, then slowly turns on one heel. He seems to look at me, but he watches the swiveling camera. With a swift pounce, he drags me to my feet and against the wall, my back pressed against the edge of the tapestry that hides the hall. “For love of her father, Jephthah’s daughter never married, but perhaps, for all his foolishness, your old man is no Jephthah, so if you should marry, I’ll give you this plague for your dowry: even if you’re as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, still you won’t escape slander. Never marry, Ophelia. Farewell—or, if you should marry, marry a fool.”

He leans into me, every line of his body defined against mine, and I bite my lip against a gasp. He enjoys this game. My father and his uncle are only a screen away, only the position of his body keeps the cameras from seeing every detail, but he slides his hand under my skirt anyway, his breath warm against my ear. “Marry a fool, because wise men know well enough what monsters you make of us. God gives you one face, and you make yourselves another; you dance and you sway; you nickname God’s creatures and claim ignorance of all the ways you provoke and excite and tempt us.”

Heat sears my chest with each movement of his hand, each gesture tied to the flares of flame that leap from the surface to reach the source of the pain and pleasure. “I’ll have none of it, none of that which made me mad,” he laughs. “I say we’ll have no more of marriage! Those that are married already, all but one, shall live, but for all the rest, they must stay as they are.”

He kisses me hard to swallow my cry, then abruptly shoves me to an ungainly heap on the tile. We both struggle for breath, staring hard at each other, and he lifts trembling fingers to his lips and sweeps them away in a sardonic salute. “Go, Ophelia.”

Fire dances before my eyes so I can’t even watch him leave. I fold in on myself, clutch my skirt about my legs, and feel the sun expand even further. Inch by inch, the star claims more of me, burns away the darkness and the emptiness that the lake waits to fill, but stars … they fade, they die, they collapse. They devour and they die and if all of me becomes this blaze of pain, what will be left of me when it’s carried past its time?

I gasp for air, but the fire drowns me; panicked tears scald my cheeks. Even away from the lake I still drown, again and again I drown and die only to have the air forced back where it doesn’t want to be.

“Ophelia!”

Hands grip my shoulders and I recoil, but they hold too tightly, fingers digging into my collarbones, more bruises to cover, to hide, until my entire body will be painted by them. Father pulls me against his chest, and I sob into his rumpled coat. I’m not even sure why the tears have come, but they choke me as surely as hands at my throat, with far more pain than Dane’s touch has ever caused me. Father rocks me slowly, hesitantly, back and forth like a child.

Claudius stands over us, his hands clasped at the small of his back in that vaguely military stance he always adopts when his face is as blank as is ever possible to be. He shakes his head slowly, his emerald eyes hard and unforgiving. “Love?” He snorts eloquently. “If that was love, give me hatred; at least it’s honest.”