Such Sweet Sorrow Read Online Free PDF

father’s death could have flown south, without our hearing.” Hamlet took a deep breath, nostrils flaring. “You’re clever. What do you suggest?” It was a common, albeit surly, way for him to concede he was out of his depth and—grudgingly—that his friend was the smarter of the two of them.
    “Your curse is proof enough that stranger things exist than we have dreamt of in our philosophies.” Horatio scowled and shook his head, scratching at his nape as he pronounced, “But it is an awfully big coincidence.”
    It was a terrible thing for a scholar to be confronted by that which he could not explain with his rational mind. Hamlet pitied his friend, for Horatio did not have seventeen years of experience reconciling the rational and supernatural, as Hamlet had.
    The more Hamlet ruminated on the solution to this puzzle, the more he recalled the sadness in Romeo’s eyes, the hopelessness that some might mistake for the weariness of a tired traveler.
    “There was something about him,” Hamlet began slowly, “A melancholy. It was far too genuine to be a forgery. I could believe that he was truly grieving his love.”
    “But could you believe he came all this way to try and raise her from the dead?”
    Hamlet considered. “I could… if you did.”
    “Let us speak with them. Proceed with caution, Hamlet, but I do not believe these men could be your uncle’s spies. After all, his majesty believed you to be in your bed last night. Why send an assassin to an alehouse, when he knew you to be asleep in your bed?” Almost the moment his sentence ended, Horatio’s shoulders sagged in defeat. “You cannot give up sleeping Hamlet, please don’t try.”
    “Just not sleeping in the castle.” Hamlet rubbed his jaw. “It is decided then. We will go and meet these Italian fiends and speak to them with words instead of steel.”
    Hamlet’s chambers were in a long gallery on the eastern side of the castle. He’d abandoned his place in the family quarters when his uncle had announced his intention to become king in Hamlet’s stead. Uncle Claudius had called him a “boy” and suggested that he “wait to come of age” before inheriting the throne. Hamlet’s mother, the queen, had turned on him, quick as the viper he’d believed had poisoned his father. She had been so eager to marry Claudius, she’d barely worn a scrap of black for King Hamlet. She no longer seemed all that concerned with Hamlet the younger, either. That had been proof enough that his place had been unfairly usurped. His uncle had not only stolen the throne, but Hamlet’s own mother, as well.
    In the intervening months, he’d made his new room a home for himself and his friend, and they’d spent many long hours in study and drink, content to be left alone by the rest of the castle. He would occasionally forget his sorrows and think himself back at the university with Horatio. In those moments of blissful denial, Hamlet would imagine his parents in Elsinore, his father stern but proud of his son the scholar, his mother loving. That woman had disappeared when the king had died, and Hamlet had become an orphan. He could not be blamed for savoring the past.
    Without the bustle of serving maids stripping beds and kitchen boys bringing breakfast to the royal family’s quarters, Hamlet and Horatio were free to sleep as late as they wanted, and as a consequence, the castle had woken hours before they had. Servants had broken their fast and now hurried about, sweeping the floors, beating the tapestries. Hamlet squinted one eye into the sunlight shining in a narrow shaft across his path as he realized his error. “I…may have told them to meet me at dawn. Do you think they’re still here?”
    “Do I think a man waited five hours for a chance to kill you?” Horatio’s disbelief changed mid-thought. “Actually…”
    “That’s enough from you, peasant.” Hamlet stalked ahead, through the dark corridors and down a curling stair. At the bottom, he