It was too much for Bertie to hope that she"d finally found her mother after all this time, but the scrimshaw wouldn"t let her doubt the truth. Ophelia slowly aged beyond her written years, until nothing was left of the bewildered, heartsick young girl betrothed to Hamlet. Even when Bertie let go of the medallion, time-pa.s.sed remained etched on Ophelia"s face, lines carved in ivory.
"Who"s my father?" Bertie strained her eyes against the dark that would steal away the details of this most important moment. "Tell me, please. I want to know everything."
"I"ll do better than tell you." Ophelia smoothed a hand over Bertie"s cheek. "I"ll show you."
"Show us what?" Ariel said, arriving with the fairies.
"Yeah, what"s going on?" Mustardseed demanded.
Bertie turned to them, numb from the shock. "Ophelia"s . . . she"s my . . ."
But Ophelia didn"t let her finish. "Don"t spoil it for them."
"Spoil what?" Peaseblossom asked, looking as alarmed as anyone wearing that many sequins could.
"We have a show to put on," Ophelia said. "Ariel, take the fairies somewhere with a good view of the stage. You won"t want to miss this."
"What don"t they want to miss?" Bertie desperately wanted to drag Ophelia back to her Dressing Room, to ask her seventeen years of questions, but the orchestra was playing a vaguely familiar overture. Ophelia guided her through the pitch-black; Bertie knew every creak of the Theatre"s wooden floorboards, and so she panicked. "Why are we onstage? What about Hamlet?"
"Take your seat," Ophelia commanded instead of answering either question.
Bertie reached out her hands, locating the edge of a ma.s.sive armchair. "But-"
"Do as you"re told." Ophelia"s tone was stern. "I"ll be right back."
Bertie almost succ.u.mbed to a fit of hysterical laughter at Ophelia"s first parenting attempt, but as quickly as could be managed in a ball gown, she obeyed.
Ophelia returned and put The Complete Works of the Stage into her hands. "Hold this."
Bertie recoiled from its soft glow. "Why are you giving me The Book?"
"You need to read from it." Ophelia gave Bertie"s knee an encouraging pat. "That"s how the story goes."
Bertie started to protest, started to slide down, but the whirring noise of the curtain opening pinned her to the worn brocade. A million watts of light hit her as the audience burst into applause. The overture faded in antic.i.p.ation of the opening line; Bertie could hear the rustle of silk as ladies shifted in their seats, the staccato cough of a gentleman clearing his throat, then the expectant hush of the audience.
"Pssst," Ophelia signaled from the wings.
Bertie squinted at her, trying to suppress how ridiculous she felt with her high-heel-shod feet dangling over the edge of the enormous armchair.
"Open The Book," Ophelia prompted with an accompanying gesture.
Something black and oily slid through Bertie"s veins. She nearly choked as it crawled up her throat. "I"m . . . I"m afraid."
Four tiny lighting specials zigzagged across the stage and alighted beside her.
"Ready," said Peaseblossom.
"And I!" chorused the boys.
"We"re right here," Ariel said in an undertone as he entered from Stage Left.
A spotlight tightened in on the group. The fairies watched her, Ariel watched her, the audience watched her.
"I don"t know if I can do this," Bertie whispered.
"Yes, you can." That was Peaseblossom.
Moth nodded. "You"ve wanted to know the truth for a long time."
Ariel leaned forward until the strands of his windblown hair coiled over her arm. "Everyone is waiting, and they"ve paid to see a play."
"They came to see a dazzling new production, not the unremarkable story of some n.o.body!" But Bertie opened The Book, feeling as wooden as one of the mannequins in the Wardrobe Department. Her breath came in short little pants. She forced herself to focus, to turn the page. Even after so many surprises, it still chilled her to see her own handwriting in The Book.
"How Bertie Came to the Theater," she read with a quiver in her voice, "A Play in One Act."
Glorious illumination poured over Ophelia, who now wore a green dress. The flowers woven into the filmy overlay were embroidered with brilliants.
"My mother was an actress, and surely she was the star," Bertie said, her words a spirit returned to haunt her. "She was an ingenue on the rise, a society darling."
"Not really," said Ophelia, "but close enough. I didn"t have as many lines as some of the other female Players, but I made every one of them count."
"t.i.tled men filled her dressing room with roses and sent jewelry that sparkled like the night sky," Bertie continued. The spotlight expanded to include dozens of flower arrangements and heaps of diamonds. Glitter drifted from the rafters until the very air shimmered. Bertie stared at the scene, transfixed. "It"s just like I imagined."
"That," said Ariel, "is not in the script. Keep going."
Ophelia sat down at her dressing table. "It got old, to tell you the truth, with Hamlet sulking all the time. I wanted to go dancing. I wanted to live, just a little, before I died. But every night was the same routine. "Into the water with you, Ophelia. Suck the water into your lungs, Ophelia. Let them drag your limp carca.s.s across the stage, Ophelia." And those boys are rough with their hands, let me tell you."
She powdered her nose pale green and twined bracken in her hair.
"That is not how I pictured it," Bertie said.
"Shhh," said Peaseblossom.
Hamlet entered Stage Right and stalked into the spotlight. "G.o.d hath given you one face, and you make yourself another."
Ophelia turned to look daggers at him. "Are you calling me a harlot?"
"Maybe." He managed to slouch without leaning on anything. "Maybe not."
"Say what you mean for once!" Ophelia yelled at him. When she threw her silver-backed hairbrush at his head, he yelped and fled.
Bertie had a terrible thought. "Please tell me Hamlet"s not my dad."
"Shhh," Ophelia admonished, along with half the audience.
"But-"
"Maybe," Ophelia said at the top of her lungs to discourage further interruption, "I looked elsewhere. Maybe I got sick of the accusations, sick of being Polonius"s daughter, and Laertes"s sister, and Hamlet"s girlfriend. Maybe I wanted, for a short while, simply to be myself."
A stranger in black strode forward to meet Ophelia at Center Stage. She accepted his hand as the orchestra launched into a new song: a tango.
Goose b.u.mps rippled down Bertie"s arms. She danced it with my father.
Ariel"s hand twitched involuntarily, tightening over hers. "The music"s the same."
As was the ch.o.r.eography. Bertie could only hope she"d managed to perform it with half as much grace.
"Back to the t.i.tled gentlemen," Ophelia said over the bandoneon"s song. "One of them must have captured my heart. Was it a young lord with a castle on the hill and a coach-and-four?"
A spotlight came up on an aristocrat with a greasy moustache and pallid complexion. He stood on a platform Stage Right and couldn"t seem to get down.
"Oh, please," said Ophelia just as The Stranger dipped her low with a dexterous flourish. They reversed and slinked across the stage. "Was it the powerful businessman with a keen eye for finance and a generous nature?"
Another spotlight, this time on a florid gentleman stuffed into a too-tight three-piece suit.
"Not likely," said Ophelia. "Men like that always smell of bacon."
The Stranger whirled her back to Center Stage in a complicated series of turns that left Bertie dizzy all over again. With Ophelia cradled in one arm, he produced a single red rose from thin air. Bertie"s breath caught and Ariel swore softly when The Stranger used the flower to trace the planes of Ophelia"s face, the curve of her breast, the length of her body. The Stranger helped her to stand, and Ophelia gave him a smile that shot Bertie with equal parts wistful longing and jealousy.
To look at someone, anyone, like that! To be so very sure . . .
"It was another," Ophelia said. "Someone without name or coin, but who had instead a heart filled with love for me. I left the Theatre to be with him." She left him standing Center Stage and approached the oversize prop version of The Book that rested atop a pedestal. "n.o.body ever gave me credit for the way I was written: always drifting between the worlds of life and death, air and water." She opened The Book to the middle, took a deep breath, ripped out a page, and held it up for everyone to see. "But it was I who figured out how to walk the ragged edge."
Ariel let out a slow breath. "Well done."
Ophelia folded the large piece of parchment and slid it into the pocket of her dress. "I left the Theatre and traveled to a small cottage by the sea."
The scenery started to change to the train station.
"No, wait. That"s not right." Ophelia tilted her head to one side and thought for a moment. "Was there a train? I don"t remember that bit." The train backed offstage. "I think it was a boat. No . . . perhaps a wooden cart?"
Both a boat and a cart tried to slide on Stage Right, colliding in an explosion of wood and dust.
"It doesn"t matter how I left." Ophelia held out her hand to The Stranger. "Just that I left. I didn"t take anything with me. Not my print Sunday dress, not my silver hair comb. Just my page from The Book."
The Dressing Room set disappeared as The Stranger lifted Ophelia off the stage with a puff of wind. They landed on the red-carpeted runner and ran, hand in hand, for the Exit door.
"Wait!" Bertie slid off the chair and nearly fell down a rabbit hole. One after another, more trapdoors opened around her, all over the stage, until nothing remained of the boat and cart crash save a few stray splinters. By the time they slammed back into place, Ophelia and The Stranger were gone.
Mrs. Edith entered. Or rather, Not-Mrs.-Edith: a Player wearing a mask of the Wardrobe Mistress"s face that exaggerated her severe features.
Another Masked One, Bertie thought. Another person who knew the truth.
Not-Mrs.-Edith walked on stilts that towered over Bertie"s chair. Every footstep echoed through the auditorium.
"Ophelia?" she called, scattering foot-long straight pins all over the floor. A ma.s.sive staircase appeared Center Stage in an explosion of ribbons and lace. Not-Mrs.-Edith clomped up to a gigantic door inset with bubbled gla.s.s and lettered in black gobbledygook. She hammered on it with a pair of scissors as big as hedge clippers. "Sir, Ophelia"s left the theater!"
"I"m sure she just chose a different bathtub tonight, Mrs. Edith." Not-the-Theater-Manager"s great booming voice shook the room from floorboards to ceiling. "Inquire of the Company. No doubt she"ll turn up." The amplified scritch-scratching of a fountain pen commenced.
"Sir, did you hear me?" said Not-Mrs.-Edith. "I don"t know how it"s possible, but one of Players has left the building!"
The pen fell silent. "Are you certain?"
"Yes, sir."
A very long pause, and then, "Yes. Well. The show must go on, obviously. We can"t spare anyone to go search for her. Perhaps I should engage the gendarmerie."
"But, sir-"
"Ever so sorry, there"s nothing more I can do!"
The stairs clacked over to become a slippery-smooth slope. Not-Mrs.-Edith slid all the way to the bottom, petticoats over her head and long stilt-and-striped-stockinged legs kicking, until she fell with a shriek through yet another trapdoor that opened at the bottom.
When the lights dimmed beyond the average blackout, Ariel"s hand found Bertie"s, but his winds were sucked into the void, along with the fairies" light.
"What"s happening?" Peaseblossom whispered, reduced to a tiny, disembodied voice.
"I . . . I don"t know." Bertie held her breath until a pinp.r.i.c.k appeared on the back wall. The spotlight flickered and swelled.
When it was large enough to hold her, Ophelia stepped into it, alone. She had changed into a gray velvet gown trimmed with shadows. In the shifting light, Bertie could hardly focus her eyes as the water-maiden flickered in and out of existence, disappearing time and time again into her lost recollections.
"Where did he go?" Bertie"s words were thin silver strands that spiraled out like candy floss before breaking.
Ariel nudged her. "That"s not the line."
Bertie had to strain to make out the words in The Book. "I like to imagine she was a simple person with an uncomplicated life."
"Oh, it was uncomplicated," Ophelia said, crossing downstage. "I just don"t remember much of it. I know there was water . . . there"s always water, filling up my head and pouring into the holes in my memory." She brought the single red rose from behind her back, and the blotch of color made Bertie"s eyes tear up. "Then he brought me back here and left me with only this rose to remember him by."
"Who was he?" Bertie whispered.
"He was supposed to be my handsome prince. He was supposed to be my happily ever after." Ophelia tore a handful of petals from the flower and scattered them around her. They drifted to the stage, flecking the cobblestones like droplets of blood. "I don"t remember how long I was gone, or where I went. But I remembered the drowning, so I returned to the theater to drown one last time."
An ivory gauze curtain skimmed across the stage, as graceful as any of the dancers. The lights faded up to reveal it was painted to look like the Theatre"s facade as it appeared on the scrimshaw. Bertie could see the extent of the detail work now that it was magnified a thousandfold: Previously hidden faces peered from the dome above the ticket booth, tiny renditions of the fairies scampered in wrought iron, and the statues of the Muses each wore a variation of Ophelia"s face.
The lights shifted to the set behind the curtain, the curved lines and crosshatches fading as though erased. With the noise of rushing water, the scrim opened, and Ophelia stood in an enormous replica of the Theatre"s lobby. She curved her arms around a belly heavy with child.
Not-the-Stage-Manager appeared. "How did you get in? We don"t want any riffraff here."
"I"m not riffraff. I"m the daughter of Polonius, the sister of Laertes, the betrothed of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." Ophelia fell to her knees, burdened by the weight of her many names, weighted down by the many parts she played. Red rose petals began to fall from the flies.
Not-Mrs.-Edith strode out on her stilts to lift Ophelia in her arms as the lights faded to black.
An unseen clock tolled midnight.
There was a long, high cry.