Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

startled guilt. She said to Horvendile, “I am merely offering thoughts on the matter that my lord himself raised—how to interest Prince Hamblet in this court and his own royal destiny. I am sorry that my motives appear so twisted, when to me they feel so straightforward and kindly meant.”
    “Kind advice comes constantly to a king, and he learns to see it all in terms of the bearer’s own benefit.”
    “And reaches the point where suspicion has whittled his heart to the size of the knob of his sceptre,” Geruthe responded hotly, “and his own child understandably refuses to come home.”
    “It is not me he avoids,” Horvendile snapped. Then, fearful lest his queen take a hurt from the clear implication that it was she, he said in amends, “It is the—the general climate,” giving up on describing a local situation so elusively slack and malodorous.
    “What ever happened to Bathsheba?” Fengon asked Geruthe. They were seated in a little-used room of Elsinore, where Fengon’s man Sandro, a slender honey-skinned native of Calabria, had persuaded, in very imperfect Danish, an unwilling servant to lay and light afire. The wood was fresh-chopped ash; the fire smoked; still, the two aristocrats hardly noticed their stinging eyes and cold feet, so intent were they on the intimations each was giving the other, beneath the surface of speech.
    In mild panic Geruthe asked, “Bathsheba?”
    “The little brown brancher I sent you many years ago, before heading south again. You have forgotten, so accustomed is a queen to gifts from near-strangers.”
    “Near now, but no stranger ever. I remember. We were not a good match, Bathsheba and I. Her eyes, unseeled, took in too much, and she was forever bating—that is the word?—at bright objects in my chamber as they caught the sun. And she would hurl herself at sounds in the wall, mice or swallows nesting in the chimney, too faint for my ears. I could not reason with her.”
    “Nor could one with any falcon,” Fengon said, in the casual, murmurous voice he used, she had noticed, only with her. Among men and servants he spoke up clearly, even officiously. He had put on weight, his voice volume. “Reason is not their path. In this they are like our deeper selves, over whom the brain would in vain set itself as master.”
    “A queen in a castle, I discovered, is in poor position to acquire a daily supply of fresh-killed meat. At night her soft but incessant cry—lamenting her loss of freedom, as I imagined it—kept me quite awake. Horvendile’s chief falconer took my starving pet into the royal mews, but there existed in those perches an already established order to which the other birds of prey, broken to human use, were not willing to admit our half-wild Bathsheba. The falconer was fearful she would be slaughtered, her throat slashed or her back snapped, in the necessaryinterval when the birds are unhooded and permitted to use their wings in the mews’ high vaults. Thinking that Thord—yes? that was his name?—might take her back, I rode to Lokisheim with a pair of guards, and found only the boy, the pale-faced limping boy—?”
    “Ljot,” Fengon supplied, his sable eyes swarming with glints, feeding on her every motion and inflection and lineament, so that Geruthe, as she talked, felt her tongue and gestures slowing, as a musician drags his tempo when overly conscious of being listened to. Her skin prickled beneath her heavy diapered surcoat, laced in front, over a blue cotehardie brocaded with silver thread. Could any woman, let alone one of forty-seven summers and no longer lean, withstand the pressure of attention so avid? She was used to being admired but not consumed by eyes like this.
    “Little Ljot, yes,” Geruthe agreed, hurrying on, through those unsatisfactory events of more than a decade ago, when Fengon’s slightly sinister gift had enlisted her in a secret of sorts, though Horvendile had been made aware of his brother’s curious present and