Princes of Denmarke (page 51)
“When it comes to the perfidy and undependability of Danish princes for a girl, one needs look no further than Prince Hamlet of Elsinore,” thought Sister Augusta to herself on the way back to her nunnery.
She was an old woman now, and she stepped over the rocks and moss with care to not slip again. But she remembered being a young woman and how her bare feet knew all the moss-covered paths around Kronborg Castle of Elsinore, and she could run and leap and dance along them with the unbearable lightness of youth. After she had gotten herself to a nunnery and received her religious name, Sister Augusta had given up her previous life. But memories are funny, especially the ones that lodge in your body. Walking carefully along this coast, in this country, at this stage of life, under this name, her feet would not, could not forget how they had once danced along the path of a different coast, in a different country, under a different name, the one she was born with: Ophelia.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A different pair of feet was learning to walk because of a different prince, on the broad marble steps of a different castle that lead down to the sea. The little meer-maid, each step like stepping on the edge of a knife, was falling down, and getting back up again.
It’s not that the Prince of Kopenhagen didn’t like her. He liked her, he found her beautiful, he was happy to have her, but he wasn’t in love with her.
He was in love with a different girl, a girl he didn’t yet have, which was why he loved her.
He had washed up by a temple after the little meer-maid saved him from the wreck, and at the temple was a beautiful girl. Because she belonged to the temple, she would not be with him, so he craved her. To his joy because she is also the daughter of the neighbouring king, she is betrothed to him. This happy coincidence is like in a fairy tale, and filled him with anticipation.
In the meantime, he had the little meer-maid.
It was not about the buying or not of cows while the milk was free or dear, or other such agrarian logic in his mind. It was more basic than reason, more primordial than thought, and more innate than metaphor. Just as on the cliff tops of Rockcastle Rathen, the more Constantia von Cosel ran toward her toddler son to save him from tumbling over the precipices all around, the more the boy shrieked with laughter and struggled out of her grasp, pacing her heart to a frenzied hummingbird’s beat. But if she busies herself with her sewing, and assiduously not-notices the boy peeping around the stone door, he comes to her, all smiles, and throws his arms around her neck and climbs into her lap, displacing her sewing basket and making a boyish mess.
Were the little meer-maid to go back to the sea, the prince would suddenly feel her charm, her beauty, her erstwhile devotion. But she doesn’t know that, and he doesn’t know that, and story plays all over again, as it does every generation.