“Oh God,” I said. “Me.” Half asleep, half dressed. Him. Heart hammering, crouched on the floor. “You didn’t tell me.” I didn’t realize until it was out of my mouth that that alone was worse than any of the rest of it. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to know,” he said. He took another step toward me, and this time I didn’t move back. “Filippa—maybe she’s crazy, I don’t know, nothing fazes her—but you? Oliver, you—” His voice failed him, and in its absence he gestured at me again, but it was a thought I couldn’t finish for him.
“I what, James? I don’t understand.”
He let his hand fall back to his side, and he gave me that same helpless, hopeless shrug. “I never wanted you to look at me the way you’re looking at me right now.”
And maybe there was a kind of terror in my expression, but not for the reason he thought. I looked at him in the cold moonlight, frail and small and scared, and the thousand questions that had come thronging around me every time I looked at him since Christmas melded and fused and shrank until there was really only one.
“Oliver?”
“Yes,” I said, that single word accepting everything at once. I couldn’t remember when he’d started crying, but tears glistened on his cheeks. He stared at me, mistrustful and confused.
“It’s okay,” I said, to myself as much as him. I glanced back toward the FAB, calmed somehow as I heard Hamlet in my head again: The readiness is all. “It’ll be okay,” I said, though I’d never been less certain of anything. “We’ll sort it out, but now we have to go back.” I had no idea what “it” meant or what he thought it was supposed to mean. “We have to go back and act like nothing’s wrong. We’ve got to get through tonight, and then we’ll worry about it. All right?”
Relief—hope—something—finally warmed his face. “Are you—”
“Yeah, I am,” I said, the only possible answer to whatever he wanted to know. “Let’s go.” I turned toward the FAB. He caught my arm.
“Oliver,” he said, a question clinging to the end of my name.
“It’s okay,” I said again. “Later. We’ll figure it out.” He nodded, eyes darting down, but I felt his fingers tighten on my arm. “Come on.”
He followed behind me as we ran back to the theatre. We slipped in through the side door and separated as I went to the wings and he went the other way, toward the bathroom, to wipe all evidence of distress from his face. In that one brief moment, I actually wondered if “okay” or something like it might still be possible. But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.
SCENE 6
The second half of the show moved swiftly, recklessly forward. I was as mad and distracted as Tom o’ Bedlam should have been, but Frederick and Gloucester must have noticed a change, for they were both eyeing me suspiciously by the end of the fourth act. Act V opened with James directing the movements of his army. He spoke with undeniable urgency—perhaps as desperate as I was to close the show, sequester ourselves in the Tower, and figure out what to do next. He spoke shortly to Wren, seemed not to see her, and treated Frederick with the same cold apathy. Camilo approached, flanked by Filippa and Meredith—who looked guilty enough that I believed she might have poisoned someone. I lurked in the shadows upstage, waiting for my entrance and the end.
Filippa grew quickly ill and reached for Camilo’s arm to steady herself.
Filippa: “Sick, O, sick!”
Meredith (aside): “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.”
James (to Camilo, throwing down his glove):
“There’s my exchange. What in the world he is
That names me traitor, villain-like he lies.”
His voice rose to call me from my hiding place. The heralds were summoned, the trumpets sounded; Filippa collapsed and was carried offstage by a bevy of second-years.
Herald (reading): “‘If any man of quality or degree within the lists of the army will maintain upon Edmund, supposed Earl of Gloucester, that he is a manifold traitor, let him appear. He is bold in his defense.’”
I breathed in through the scarf tied over my mouth and nose to disguise me, then entered upstage, one hand on my sword.
Me: “Know my name is lost;
By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and canker-bit.
Yet am I noble as the adversary
I come to cope.”
Camilo: “Which is that adversary?”
Me: “What’s he that speaks for Edmund Earl of Gloucester?”
James: “Himself. What say’st thou to him?”
I spoke a litany of his sins to him, and he listened with keen and intimate attention. When he replied, it was without his usual malice, his usual arrogance. His words were thoughtful, humbly aware of their own falsehood.
James: “Back do I toss those treasons to thy head;
With the hell-hated lie o’erwhelm thy heart,
Which—for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise—
This sword of mine shall give them instant way
Where they shall rest for ever.”