Page 55 of Lady Macbeth

“It was as I said,” she whispers. “The men came. Fléance fought them. I did not know it then—it must have been his fellow conspirators, in disguise. I began to suspect it, in your absence. It was Banquho who refused to torture the prince. I thought that they might be working against you. When I confronted them, they beat me.”

It is the best story she can manage, in these circumstances. It allows her both innocence—I did not know; I could not imagine the treachery—and wiles—I began to suspect it, that they were working against you. She occupies the space Macbeth wishes her to occupy. Clever but not too clever. Working always for his advancement, his preservation, his pride. And perhaps when Fléance accuses her of adultery, Macbeth will have her story already in his mind, and reject the tale this chained boy tries to spin.

Macbeth’s face darkens. “You should have told me at once. A husband and wife should have no secrets from each other.”

Roscille flinches. “I am sorry. I feared their private retribution.”

A moment passes, and then Macbeth takes her face between his palms. He turns it over. Like she is a shell tossed to the tide, her skin worn to translucence.

“You have nothing to fear from them,” he says. “You are my wife and you are a queen. Fléance will be killed, and this treachery will die with him. You can feed a dog from your hand all your life, and still one day it may decide to bite.”

Dogs do not bite without cause. They are thinking, feeling creatures. But Roscille does not dare to say it.

“Well,” Macbeth murmurs. “The witches spoke of sons, and this prophecy was not for Banquho’s ears alone. It has been beneath my attention until now—but I will not allow my line to end. You will lie with me every night until my child grows in you. If it is a girl, it will be snuffed out before it can make its way into the world. You are to bear me a son only. Do you understand?”

There is not a woman alive who is ignorant to this. Roscille does not know how many times she has watched this play out before her eyes: A woman falls pregnant. Her husband puffs his chest, swanning the proof of his virility around the court. And yet—there is the waiting, the vulture that watches from its remote perch. Everyone sees him but they do not speak of him. The man may choose to turn his eyes away as well, to luxuriate in his pride until the child’s birth, when his honor will either be augmented or stripped from him entirely. There is no honor, after all, in a seed that sprouts daughters.

Or he will do this: There is always a woman in the castle who sees things which are beyond the capacity of mortal eyes. She can feel a swollen stomach and know from its shape whether the child inside is boy or girl. And then, the blankness on the would-be father’s face, the few long seconds before his body can display his mind’s relief or fury, before he either embraces his wife or yanks her roughly out of the room. She will weep, and he will not care. If he is kind, he will merely force the foul-tasting herb mix down her throat, until the girl-child leaks out from her legs like a monthly blood. If he is not kind, he will shove her belly-first down the stairs, an easy dive, a descent smoothed by the thousands of women who have made this same fall. If her teeth or nose break, this is an acceptable casualty. She will wear these wounds shamefully, and the husband will keep his head down, until the memory of this episode fades, until there is another belly, swollen with the hope of a son.

Roscille says, “I understand.”

Her husband is not a kind man.

“Good,” says Macbeth.

His large hand curls around the back of her skull. He pulls her into him, and then places a kiss on her forehead. Roscille waits there, silent, her skin turning to bark, her arms to branches, her hair to leaves, Please please please, leave me alone, let me go, I am just a dead thing—living, but dead—and can foster no new life inside of me. The pain no longer feels like a protest. It is merely pain. She feels as alive as a tree and as dead as a stone.

Her mind is escaping her.

At last, Macbeth lets go. Roscille watches as he limps down the hall, the blue-black stain behind his knee spreading, growing, blooming.

Roscille goes to her chamber—well. Not her chamber, anymore. She is her husband’s bedmate now. The bear-rug is not her bear-rug. The small narrow bed is where Senga sleeps alone. She finds her handmaiden there now, sitting in the room’s single chair, embroidering a bolt of gray fabric.

When she sees Roscille, she rises, dips her head, and says, “Lady.”

How quickly she has learned to be deferent, to be a slave. Roscille feels the bile rising from her empty stomach to her throat.

“Please,” she says. “Call me Roscille.”

Senga’s brow furrows as her Scottish mouth forms the Brezhoneg sounds. “Roscille.” She pauses. “But you are still my Lady.”

“I hoped to be your friend.”

What a foolish hope. Roscille has never had a friend who was not tied by duty to her side. The other women in Wrybeard’s court cringed from her, as though witchery were catching. Men, of course, do not make friends of women. They make wives or whores or servants, and since Roscille was a noble lady, the Duke’s daughter, she could be none of those. And after the stable hand, the boys were wise to stay away. Hawise, her only friend, yoked to her with a long chain of fear that began with Hastein and flowed through the Duke.

Senga regards her curiously. She stands, laying the unfinished embroidery over the arms of the chair, then sits down on the bed. She pats the mattress beside her. “Sit, then. Friend.”

Roscille approaches her. She sits down on the bed that was once her bed, her smallest comfort. Its softness against her skin now feels like a punishment—undeserving skin, still gruesome with scar tissue, black pits of dried blood like a scattering of leeches. She draws in a breath and moves her hand to lift her veil.

“Do not be afraid,” she says. “My gaze does not induce madness in women.”

“I am not afraid.”

Cool air on her cheeks. Relief, like a parched mouth sipping sweet water. She knows she is still trapped, but even horses run in spirited circles around their pens, imagining freedom.

Senga watches her with narrowed eyes, and Roscille watches her back. She is older; Roscille cannot tell by how much. Her hips have the width and laxity of past childbirth. How long ago? Roscille wonders. How many children? She is old enough to have had five or six or even seven children. Roscille, at seventeen, is late to it; she could have filled a lord’s castle with sons by now.

Yet this is as foreign to her as the Northman tongue. Her mother died when Roscille slipped, blood-glazed, from between her legs. There was the blind midwife who nursed her, a name Roscille has now forgotten. Hawise was still a girl and virginal.