If We Were Villains: A Novel

The tiny fairy lights of a thousand candles flickered on the beach. Half the attendants held narrow white tapers in cardboard cups, and luminarias hovered at the end of each row like little spectral ushers. The fourth-year choral music students were gathered in a dense clump on the sand, singing softly, voices shimmering off the water, as if our capricious mermaids were in mourning. Beside them on the beach were an old wooden podium and a covered easel stand. White lilies bloomed at the base of each, their gossamer fragrance too delicate to disguise the earthy smell of the lake.

James and I filed down the center aisle through a thicket of whispers that parted reluctantly to let us through. Wren, Richard’s parents, Frederick, and Gwendolyn were seated on the first bench on the right—Meredith and Alexander on the left. I sat beside them, James sat beside me, and, when Filippa arrived, Alexander and I shifted farther apart to make room for her. Why, I wondered, had they put us at the front, where everyone could stare? The rows of benches felt like a courtroom gallery, hundreds of eyes burning on the back of my neck. (The sensation would eventually grow familiar. It is a unique kind of torture for an actor, to have an audience’s undivided attention and to turn your back on them for shame.)

I glanced across the aisle at the opposite bench. Wren sat beside her uncle, who so fiercely resembled Richard that I couldn’t help staring. The same black hair, the same black eyes, the same cruel mouth. But the familiar face was older, lined, and streaks of silver had crept into the sideburns. This, I had no doubt, was what Richard would have become in twenty years or so. No more chance of that.

He must have felt my gaze, the way I felt everyone else’s, because he turned suddenly in my direction. I looked away, but not fast enough—there was a moment of contact, a jolt of electricity that rattled me from the inside out. I breathed in at a gasp, the lights of the candles dancing in my peripheral vision. Why all these fires? I thought. Why all these gliding ghosts?

“Oliver?” Filippa whispered. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Fine.” I didn’t believe me, and neither did she, but before she could say anything else the chorus fell silent and Dean Holinshed appeared on the beach. He was dressed in black except for a scarf (Dellecher blue with the Key and Quill embroidered on one end), which hung limply around his neck. Besides that ribbon of color he was a grim, imposing figure, his beaky nose casting an ugly shadow across his face.

“Good evening.” There was a wilted, weary quality to his voice.

Filippa laced her fingers through mine. I squeezed her hand, grateful for something to hold on to.

“We are here,” Holinshed said, “to honor the memory of a remarkable young man, whom all of you knew.” He cleared his throat, folded his hands behind his back, and for a moment looked down at the ground. “How best to remember Richard?” he asked. “He is not the sort of person who will soon fade from your memories. He was, you might say, larger than life. It does not seem far-fetched to think that he is larger than death also. Of whom does this remind you?” He paused again, chewed on his lip. “It is impossible not to think of Shakespeare when one thinks of Richard. He has appeared on our stage many times, in many roles. But there is one role we never had the opportunity to see him play. Those of you who knew him well will likely agree he would have made a fine Henry Five. I, for one, feel cheated.”

Gwendolyn’s bangles jingled as she lifted her hand to her mouth. Tears rolled down her face, dragging long streaks of smeared mascara with them.

“Henry the Fifth is one of Shakespeare’s best beloved and most troublesome heroes, much as Richard was one of ours. They will, I think, be similarly lamented.” Holinshed reached into the deep pocket of his overcoat, feeling for something. As he searched for it, he said, “Before I read this, I must ask Richard’s fellow thespians to forgive me. I have never pretended to be an actor, but I wish to pay my respects, and I hope that, given the circumstances, both you and he will find it in your hearts to forgive me for my poor delivery.” There was a breathy murmur of laughter. Holinshed unfolded a sheet of paper from his pocket. I heard a rustle of fabric and looked sideways. Alexander had taken Filippa’s other hand. He stared straight forward, jaw jutting out.

Holinshed: “Hung be the heavens with black: yield, day, to night!

Comets, importing change of times and states,

Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky,

And with them scourge the bad revolting stars

That have consented unto Henry’s death.

England ne’er lost a king of so much worth.”

He frowned, crumpled the paper and returned it to his pocket.

“Dellecher never lost such a student,” he said. “Let us remember Richard well, as he would have wanted. It is my honor to unveil for you his portrait, which from today forward will hang in the lobby of the Archibald Dellecher Theatre.”

He reached over to pull the limp black cloth off the easel. Richard’s face emerged from behind it—it was his Caesar portrait, what it had looked like before it was recolored and resized—and my heart leapt up into my throat. I felt myself step off the dock again, plunge down into the frigid water of the lake. He glared across the beach at us—imperious, enraged, in some abhorrent way alive. I gripped Filippa’s hand so hard her knuckles went white. Holinshed was wrong: Richard didn’t want to be remembered well—he had never been so forgiving. He wanted to wreak havoc on the rest of us.

“I can only say so much on Richard’s behalf,” Holinshed went on, but I barely heard him. “I did not have the privilege of knowing him as well as many of you. So I will step aside, and let someone nearer and dearer speak for him now.”

He finished without any grander gesture and retreated from the podium. I glanced down the bench in dismay, but Meredith hadn’t moved. She sat, ashen-faced, with Alexander’s left hand in her lap, clutched tightly between both of hers. Four of us were linked now, like dolls in a paper chain. I could feel Filippa’s pulse between my fingers and loosened my grip.

A soft susurration made me look the other way. Wren was on her feet and moving toward the podium. When she got there she was barely visible, a pale face and fine blond hair hovering just above the microphone.

“Richard and I never had siblings, so we were closer than most cousins,” she said. “Dean Holinshed was right to say that he was larger than life. But not everybody liked that about him. I know actually that a lot of you didn’t like him at all.” She looked up, but not at any of us. Her voice was small and unsteady, but her eyes were dry. “To be perfectly honest with you, sometimes I don’t—didn’t—like him either. Richard wasn’t an easy person to like. But he was an easy person to love.”

On the bench across from ours Mrs. Stirling cried silently, one hand clutching the collar of her coat. Her husband sat with his fists balled up between his knees.

“Oh, God,” Alexander muttered. “I can’t do this.”

Meredith dug her fingernails into his wrist. I bit my tongue, clenched my teeth so tight I thought they would crack.

“The idea that I would have to … let go of him, before we were old and falling to bits, never even occurred to me,” Wren went on, picking her words one by one, like a child stepping from stone to stone to cross a stream. “But it doesn’t just feel like I’ve lost a cousin. It feels like I’ve lost part of myself.” She let out a tragic sort of laugh.

James grabbed my hand so suddenly that I started, but he didn’t seem to see me. He watched Wren with a kind of desperation in his expression, swallowing repeatedly, as if he might be sick at any second. Filippa trembled on my other side.

“Last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I reread Twelfth Night,” Wren said. “We all know how it ends—happily, of course—but there’s sadness there, too. Olivia has lost a brother. So has Viola, but they handle it very differently. Viola changes her name, her whole identity, and almost immediately falls in love. Olivia shuts herself away from the world, and refuses to let love in at all. Viola is trying desperately to forget her brother. Olivia is maybe remembering him too much. So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?” She looked up from the sand and found us, gaze drifting from face to face. Meredith, Alexander, Filippa, me, and finally James. “You all know that Richard refuses to be ignored,” she said, speaking to us, and no one else. “But maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least, that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story. Hamlet says, Absent thee from felicity awhile. But just awhile. The show’s not over. Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight. The rest of us must go on.”

She stopped, stepped back from the podium. A few hesitant, heartbroken smiles had appeared in the audience, but not for any of us. We held one another’s hands so hard we couldn’t feel them anymore. Wren walked back to her bench on unsteady legs. She sank down between her aunt and uncle, stayed upright for a second or two, and then collapsed into her uncle’s lap. He bent over her protectively, tried to shield her with his arms, and soon they were both shaking so badly I couldn’t tell which one of them was sobbing.