Page 5 of Lady Macbeth

He goes into the room first and she follows. The tapers are still lit, though they are mostly burned down now, to stubby white ends that look like a beast’s dull teeth. Macbeth glances around, almost as if it is the first time he has seen this room, and then his gaze pins Roscille in place. Her arms are held perfectly straight at her sides, her fingers curled inward.

“Lord Varvek is an honest man,” he says. “So far I have been given no reason to think otherwise. You are beautiful, yes, there are none other in the world like you.”

Very slowly he is approaching her, until he has her white veil between his finger and thumb, and he is rubbing it like it is an amulet he wishes to polish.

“But is the rest true?” he asks. “Do your eyes, disrobed, cause madness in men?”

“The Duke would not lie to such an esteemed and valuable ally.”

Roscille thinks this is the right thing to say. She knows that Macbeth admires Wrybeard, for having defeated the Northmen and banished them from Breizh. In Alba, the Northmen are the most loathsome villains; the Scots have even made peace with Æthelstan, for God’s sake, and no one ever believed there could be any love between Scotland and England, much less a joining of the lion and the unicorn.

No, the Norse are the vilest enemy of all. Roscille worries again what has happened to Hawise.

“It would be unwise to do so,” Macbeth agrees. “And your father is reputed to be an exceptionally clever man.”

Clever indeed, to use his beautiful bastard daughter to secure a valuable alliance. After years of training her to be an ermine, he has pulled a magician’s trick and turned her into a pretty bird instead. Yet for months the question has been wheeling like a gyre, ever since the Duke announced her betrothal: Can the canny mind of a weasel exist within a bird’s fragile, feathered body?

Macbeth tucks his hand beneath the veil and runs a finger along her bodice. Roscille’s words spill out then, not at all as she planned them, but rather in a nasty rush of fear: “I know that there is a custom, in your lands. A wedding-night custom.”

His brows arch in surprise. He removes his hand. “What custom is that?”

Her breath squeezes through the narrow siphon of her throat. “It is said that the bride has the right to ask three things of her husband, before they share a bed.”

This is her slinking little rodent’s plan, cloaked in a girl’s shaky nervousness. She worried she would have to feign this nervousness, but right now it feels more real than the wisdom underneath.

There are not many books on Alba in the Duke’s library, but there is an abbey nearby, and one of the monks is from Scotland, and he knows its history and its rites. The day her father proclaimed she would be wed, Roscille ran to the abbey. She girded herself in the knowledge of this monk, and began polishing the talisman of her own strategy.

It is something she has clung to in dark hours, like a little girl and her straw doll, when the thoughts of her wedding night come. Part of her did not believe she would speak it out loud, that she would try—perhaps still she will be punished for trying, and it will be worse than it ever would have been before. But she must try, or she will lose her mind, too, the mind she has spent so many years trying to whet like a blade. She must keep something of her own, even if it is no more than the belief that, somehow, she may have stopped the ravishment that is to come.

But Macbeth only replies mildly, “And what would you ask of me, my lady wife?”

Roscille is stunned by his placidness. For a moment she freezes, waiting for a cruel rejoinder, the knife hidden in his sleeve. Yet no blades flash. She swallows.

“A necklace,” she says at last. “Gold, with a ruby inset.”

This was not part of her initial plan. This she fabricated only hours ago, at dinner, while watching her husband and his men. None of them wore gold or silver or gemstones, and she only has to think back to the whispers she heard in Wrybeard’s court to understand why.

There is no precious metal mined in Glammis. It is the remotest, most barren county of Scotland, its only virtues being its enviable position on the water, and the impregnable hills that surround it. All of Alba’s gold and jewels are mined in Cawder, and because she has listened for so long, she knows: The Thane of Glammis has many enemies, and the Thane of Cawder is one of them.

Macbeth will not suspect that she knows any of this. A necklace is a very common thing for a wife to ask of her husband, especially when that wife is only seventeen, and especially when she has been raised in a court known for its languid opulence. She will seem frivolous and vain and naïve. Not conniving.

Of course, it is well within her husband’s rights to simply laugh at her, or even to strike her for her frivolity and vanity and naïveté. But Roscille thinks of the white bird and she is sure, in that moment, he will not do any of those things. He cares for her honor, if only out of respect for his alliance with the Duke. She is not some spoil of war, like Hawise.

And Roscille’s value is in her face. She will be less beautiful with a bruised cheek, and he will be less illustrious in the eyes of his men, for having so rudely damaged this thing that is valuable only for its beauty. It would be like slashing a horse’s knees and then shouting, Well, will it not run? He would look barbaric. Worse, foolish.

Macbeth steps back for a moment, and his gaze goes elsewhere. He is not thinking of her anymore. He is imagining the campaign he will wage against Cawder for her gold and her rubies. He is thinking of the glory he will win, all the lands he will be ceded, the riches he will be heaped with, the praises that will be sung in his name. And then, perhaps, in the end he will place the necklace around Roscille’s throat, and she will be worth even more to him, because now she is the gleaming symbol that proves his might. He is, after all, a warrior at heart.

“A necklace of gold,” he repeats, at last. “Set with a ruby.”

She nods.

He is silent a moment longer. Roscille listens to the sea roaring beneath the floor. Finally, Macbeth meets her eyes, through the swaddling veil, and says, “It will add immensely to your beauty, Lady Roscilla.”

And then he turns and is gone. It happens so quickly that it stops Roscille’s breath and she collapses to the floor at last, onto the bear-rug, matted down beneath her bridal veil and lace, tucking her cold feet under herself, and pressing her hand to her mouth so no one will hear her sob.

She is not thinking of the necklace either, not anymore. She is imagining her lord husband’s throat opening under the Thane of Cawder’s blade, and his blood spilling, ruby-hued, before he can even gutter out a noise of shock.

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