Free The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross by Peter Roman Page A

crossed the stage to me and took my hands in hers. They were cold to the touch but that didn’t matter. It was the first time I had ever held my daughter. She squeezed my hands and I squeezed them back. It was all I could do but I wanted to do so much more.
    “My lord, I have remembrances of yours that I have longed to redeliver,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper, as if her words were meant only for me and not the audience. “I pray you, now receive them.”
    “No, not I,” I said, the words spilling out of me over the words I wanted to say to her. “I never gave you aught.”
    I looked at Morgana in the audience as I said the next lines. My longing for her was as strong as ever, but my longing to kill her for putting Amelia in the play with me, for putting her in the role of the one I had to reject, it was running a close second. A very close second. Morgana nodded at me like she knew my every thought.
    “I did love you once,” I heard myself say.
    “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so,” Amelia said.
    “You should not have believed me,” I said. “For virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.” The words I spoke made me want to cry out in protest, but I couldn’t do that to the audience or the play. I had to stay true to my character, no matter how much it pained me. Now Amelia pulled away from me and we were separated again.
    “I was the more deceived,” she said, and I could see in her eyes the same pain I felt.
    “I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me,” I said. “I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven?”
    Yeah, it was almost like Shakespeare knew me.
    And with each word I spoke, I stepped back against my will, away from my daughter, until I stood at the edge of the stage and it was time for my exit.
    “Be all my sins remembered,” I breathed and then moved into the shadows, where I leaned against a wall and tried not to let anyone see my face.
    Luckily, that was my only part on stage with Amelia. The rest of her lines with me were divided up among the other actors. I suspected Morgana’s meddling. Sweet, beautiful Morgana. I stood in the wings while Amelia was onstage, and while I was onstage I looked at her in the wings. She hugged herself as she watched me. I wanted to talk to her—talk to her for real, not just deliver scripted lines—but I didn’t know what to say.
    I was so distracted I didn’t notice the curse until it was upon me.
    It was the end of the play, my duel with Laertes, who didn’t much care for Hamlet on account of Hamlet skewering his father, Polonius. The stagehands who had dressed me explained the director’s script called for Laertes and me to stab each other with our rapiers, and for Claudius and Gertrude to drink from the same poisoned cup, which was filled with cheap scotch to make them grimace. They started to explain how the scene was supposed to reflect the dual nature of existence, but I just nodded and told them I got it. I wanted this performance over with so I could go back to Morgana. I mean, talk to Amelia. I wanted it over so I could get the hell out of there.
    I went onstage and sneered a bit at Claudius, then argued with Laertes and moved things along to the duel. From the moment our rapiers touched I knew that’s where the curse lay. Mine rang hollow with the fake collapsing blade, but his had the solid sound of a true blade instead of the other stage sword it was supposed to be. I quickly hissed out the words of the counterspell, but not too loudly. I didn’t want anyone else to hear them. And I’m not going to let you in on them either. That kind of knowledge can be dangerous, and we can’t have every actor in an amateur theatre production muttering Witches’