Page 13 of Lady Macbeth

Fléance hesitates. She does not. She sees the blood spray, speckling her gown with red. It comes in such quick spurts that it slicks the grass under her feet, but Roscille does not have to witness the horror long, for Fléance gives a furious growl, the base anger of being wounded so suddenly and remorselessly, and then he drives the spear-shaft hard against her temple.

Her vision turns white. Heat spikes through her skull, following a straight path from one temple to the other, as if the pain is an arrow, cleanly slicing the muscle and meat of her. And then there is only the fuzzy, star-pricked darkness.

Dusk, in Glammis: purple light spread through the irregular pattern of clouds. A grayish, bruised miasma, like smoke from a cauldron. Roscille stands against the wind, so that her own veil does not choke and blind her.

Fléance is at her side, hand resting on his sword’s pommel. The barbican grinds open, and the war party floods the courtyard, all these loutish, scraggly men boasting their victory, tartans torn, blood still in their beards. It is the blood of many: some soldiers, some not, anyone unfortunate enough to be found in the path of Macbeth’s army. All blood spilled at Roscille’s orchestration. She looks down at her hands, as if she might see them stained, too. But they are white, cold as they have always been, which is almost more sickening, somehow. She looks up again, and searches for her husband among the returning men.

He cleaves through the crowd, nearly twice as big as the next-biggest man. His hair is matted with dried blood, but the first thing she notices is that he bears no new scars. It announces clearly that the Thane of Cawder is dead, and that he did not protest his end too much. Macbeth did not even have to imagine his own death, his own absence from the world. As if this is a thing most men are capable of imagining.

He dismounts with a thud that seems to crack the earth. His legs are bare between the cuff of his boots and the hem of his tartan, and Roscille sees that his knees are bloody, too—a dense, dark blood, which has come from deep inside the body. She knows the difference between the thin, bright-red blood that surfaces easily, which can be drawn from any prick of a blade, and the blood that flows black and thick near the heart.

Macbeth’s smile is all teeth. He approaches her, something gleaming between his large fingers.

And then—the smile is gone. The gleeful light in his eyes goes dark. The languid, preening victory of his gait turns stiff, muscles tensing. He grasps her face roughly in his hand, turning it to the side, so that he can look at the bruise on her temple. Even beneath the veil, it pulses a fresh and garish violet.

“Who has done this?” Of course he recognizes immediately that the bruise has been made by the thrust of a spear-shaft. He has delivered the same wounds to countless women before her, the ones who spat at him as he burned their huts and snatched the meat from their larders. Still holding her face, he whirls toward Fléance.

“My Lord—” Fléance begins.

But Macbeth sees his scar, too. Roscille struck cleverly and struck true: The mark cannot be fully hidden beneath the collar of his jerkin. It snakes upward, along the side of his throat, still gruesome with old blood and the sloppy dark stitches that Roscille sewed herself, trembling as the needle worked its way through gristle and fat.

“There is treachery in Glammis,” he snarls. “I have known it—now there is proof. Tell me, now. Who has made this despicable assault on my wife?”

Fléance starts to speak, to explain, and Macbeth listens, though all the while he is opening his other hand and showing the necklace with its thick, heavy chain. He unwinds it, slow and deliberate. Roscille says nothing, her cheekbone burning from the unremitting press of his thumb.

A ruby gleams at the necklace’s center. When he clasps it around her throat, the metal is hot, from being held so long in his hand. Macbeth lets go at last and steps back, appraising her. But the pride he should feel at robing his beautiful wife in beautiful things is sullied by that ugly bruise on her face. He makes a wordless noise of disgust.

“Tell me,” he says again. “Who has done this? I will kill him. I will kill his sons. His line will end at the point of my sword.”

“The men were masked,” Fléance says. “I could not see—”

Macbeth draws himself up to his full, obscene, horrifying height. “Did they not strike you a near-death blow?”

“They did,” Fléance says hesitantly.

Roscille notices Banquho peering over his Lord’s shoulder. His gaze skims across his son, eyes fixing on the throat-wound that Fléance wears openly. Pride flickers in his eyes. Brisk, but unmistakable.

“Perhaps the traitors will not speak,” Macbeth says. “It is no matter. There are rites which can be performed. Your blood will speak for them.”

Act II

Thane

of

Cawder

Four

The chancellor is the highest and holiest of the Druides, and he comes all the way from Moray, where the king keeps his court. Such grave matters and such gruesome rituals cannot be left to the discretion of just any priest.

Roscille is not presented to him, not introduced, but she sees him from the parapet as he enters the courtyard. He is on horseback, flanked by three soldiers in Duncane’s colors. He wears robes finer than her bridal linens, and his gray beard is braided with fillets of gold. This is when Roscille begins to feel the floor slip out from under her. She feels as if she is plunging down the sheer face of the cliff, down to where Hawise’s body likely lies, where the eels are sucking dead flesh from her bones.

The chancellor is imbued with Duncane’s royal authority and the pope’s holy authority and the celestial authority of God himself, and any of them alone would be enough to divine her secret treachery, but all three together will not only discover but also punish her, such that even her flimsy alliance with Fléance will not save her. Fléance will face judgment, too.

Banquho and Macbeth are greeting the chancellor, but their words cannot be heard from such a distance. Roscille is trying to listen anyway, so she leaps in surprise when, suddenly, Fléance is at her side.

“You must not go near the hall when the Druide is here,” he says. Close to her ear, his voice is a rasp. “Whatever you must do to stay away, do it.”