Page 19 of Lady Macbeth

Roscille opens her mouth to reply, but then the archway to the main hall clusters with bodies. Her husband is first and largest by far. Banquho is at his side, his right hand. Then comes a smattering of soldiers, dressed curiously unlike the Scotsmen that they are, bereft of tartan, their hair and beards short.

Then comes Duncane. He is so small and hunched that she nearly misses him among his men. Stoop-shouldered, he looks old enough to be grandfather or great-grandfather. His short beard is patchy and leaden gray. When he comes into the torchlight, Roscille can see the pockmarks on his cheeks, the red blisters on his nose, the rheumy brightness of his wind-scalded eyes. He stops a moment to cough. Two of his men help him up onto the dais, where he sinks immediately into Macbeth’s chair.

An t-llgarach, he is nicknamed in Scots. The wasting. There is no name for his affliction, and no cause. It is said he had the vigor of a man half his age until one day he was struck down, as if with a plague from God. But this cannot be divine punishment. It must be merely a cruel accident of nature. Duncane is God’s loyal servant and powerful soldier. Yet Roscille cannot imagine the man before her penning the vicious treatise she has read.

The fearfull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of the Wytches, or enchaunters, hath moved me to dispatch this following treatise of mine. My intention in this labour is to prove only two things: The one, that such devilish arts have been and are. The other, what exact trial and severe punishment they merite.

It is still a wonder to Roscille how Macbeth could be convinced to marry such a creature as her, and how he has the recklessness to show her openly to a king who abhors witches with every sickly drop of blood in his body.

Macbeth knows better than to grimace at seeing the king sit in his chair. He says, “My wife, the Lady Roscilla.”

Duncane lifts his bleary gaze to her. When he speaks, it is with a clarity that is belied by his weak state and by the dead skin gathered in the corners of his mouth.

“I do not know why you are moved always to marry such troublesome women,” he says. “But I trust you to keep your new wife as biddable as the first.”

New? Roscille’s mind stumbles through his words. She is Macbeth’s second wife? No one has told her this. Was her father even told? And what has happened—she must know, she must—to the first Lady of Glammis, the other Lady Macbeth?

“Roscille is docile as a lamb,” her husband says.

Her heart is beating fast at this revelation. There must be a reason such vital information was kept from her. Perhaps the first Lady Macbeth died of illness; perhaps her husband mourns too much to speak of her.

But Roscille cannot make herself trust such banal thinking. Not when her husband keeps a whole second world hidden beneath his castle, witches in chains, forced to parrot out his prophecies. He is slippery like the cold side of a cliff. And layered, like striated bands of erosion, green and white and rust-colored lash-marks of the sea. Each time she thinks she knows him, the water level lowers, and another shade is revealed.

Roscille is panicking silently, privately, when two more men enter the hall.

They are as different as the seasons of winter and summer. There is one shorter, stockier, with a copper-colored beard and hair. His face is pleasantly ruddy, as if his journey here was a vigorous one on horseback rather than sheltered inside a carriage. His gait is robust and eager. He clops to the dais and sits beside the king, cracking his proud jaw open with a yawn. He cannot be anything other than a prince.

“My Lord,” he says, nodding to Macbeth. “And Lady. Thank you for receiving us.”

“My son,” Duncane says, “Evander.”

Evander, the Latin variant of a common Scottish name. Iomhar, Ivor, he could choose to go by either. Yet the king chooses Latin. This is not insignificant.

The second man is a prince, too. The king has two sons. But this man does not walk in the assiduous manner of a prince, and he does not sit beside his father. Instead, he stands at the edge of the dais, dark where his brother is light, sallow where is brother is sun-reddened.

“My elder son,” the king says. “Lisander, prince of Cumberland.”

Lisander, too, is a strange name for a Scot. His mother (dead now, felled on the birthing bed), some half cousin of Æthelstan, was very pious. Æthelstan is now calling himself rex Anglorum, king of the English, and he has the dispensation of the pope to do it. Perhaps these names are to appease his dead mother’s people. In Angevin he would be Landevale, in Norse, Launfale. In Brezhoneg, Lanval.

He is very handsome. Tall, but not bulky. When he does move there is a stunning grace to his limbs that makes Roscille think of the capal-uisce, the water horse that takes the form of a man and seduces maidens to follow him into the drowning drink. (If the serpent-woman Melusina had a mate, it would be such a creature, she thinks.) The prince’s hair is black and shines like the sea under moonlight. His features are fine—almost delicate, in a way men usually are not.

It is a beauty that would be well appreciated in Breizh, or Anjou, or even Paris, a beauty that would make kitchen girls go weak in the knees, that would make them trip and stumble just to put themselves in the path of his gaze. But here in Alba, Roscille knows it must be the subject of disparagement and suspicion, even greed. What sort of man is twenty and bears no marks of battle? One whose crown has been given to him like a child is given a toy. One whose crown might be taken from him just as easily.

It is true, the prince has no scars Roscille can see. It is strange to look at skin so immaculate after spending weeks observing only her husband and his men, all of them scraggly and loutish with old wounds. The prince’s face is beardless, pale, and unmarred save for the deep, dark circles under his eyes. He looks very, very tired.

“My Lord.” Lisander nods to Macbeth. And then he turns to her. “Lady Roscille. What they say is true. You are so beautiful the moon itself is shamed from rising.”

Roscille. Her Brezhoneg name. Its familiar syllables have not caressed her ears in so long. If the Duke’s courtiers could see her now, they would know that she can indeed blush.

“I had not heard the prince of Cumberland was a poet,” she says, face warm.

“I am barely a prince, and even less a poet.”

The room falls into a discomfiting silence. Duncane’s succession is a matter still left unsettled, though it is a mystery as to why. Lisander is the elder; by the laws of any kingdom his head should be next to wear the crown. Yet Duncane has not proclaimed this.

Is he sickly? Roscille wonders. Like his father? But no, he cannot be. Duncane would swiftly have passed over an ailing son and onto the next. Even a bastard might be named, if the first legitimate child were so enfeebled—the Scots would understand; there is no pity spared for a crippled horse or a hen that cannot lay. Evander would have been named and all questions put to rest. But he has not been, and so despite his sallow, tired face, it cannot be that the prince of Cumberland is in ill health.

Banquho clears his throat, ending the unnerving silence. “My lords. I hope your journey was not too rough.”