Page 56 of Lady Macbeth

She thinks of the rumors of Senga, the reason she was cast out of her village, threatened with a shaved head and a wimple and a scapular and ceaseless repentance to God. What did she seek in these couplings—pleasure? What man has ever been punished for that? Love? Is that a sin? Roscille presses her hands flat against her thighs. There is a humming from somewhere deep inside her, the memory of the dragon’s strength and muscle as it bore over her body—this is all she has now; the memory.

“Is it possible,” she blurts out, “in Alba—a marriage for love? A child born not out of mere obligation?”

Senga’s eyes soften, then harden, then soften again. “You are seventeen, yes? Barely more than a child yourself. Your life…Well, you are a noble lady, so you know this. Your husband’s whims will shape all your years to come. That is the way. I cannot imagine it is so different in your country. But you have a choice. You may pretend love is the reason you submit to him, why you bear his son, and even if it is not true at first, it will be true someday; you have the strength of mind to fashion it so.”

“Was it love you sought, when you lay with those men?” Roscille flushes at the boldness of her own question.

Senga’s eyebrows dart up her face. A moment passes, then anger. “Have you ever met, Lady, a woman with three children or more?”

Met, Roscille thinks, never. But she has seen them, from a distance. Peasant women, their eyes cast on the muddy ground, ushering their dirty-faced broods. If there is a father, he stands at a distance, observing grimly, then turning to slouch toward the fields for labor. Sometimes Roscille cannot find the father, and the children clamber up their mother, clinging to her hips like growing vines. And there is always the curled lip, the scoffing, why did she not keep her legs closed, she has more children than she can afford, she may as well go peddle herself, now.

“I have not,” Roscille admits.

“Well,” says Senga, “now you have. There are four, and thank God all are old enough to work, so they do not miss me much. Perhaps they are better for it—their mother, the village slattern. They love me but I shame them. And they shame me, too. You want to know why, but there is no reason that would absolve me. I thought you would have sent me to a nunnery.”

“A man would not have to answer for it.” Roscille pauses. “He would never imagine being asked why.”

“So what does it matter? Love, greed, need, appetite—they are not the purview of men alone.”

“Love is not as easy to smother as the rest.”

Roscille stares into the middle distance for a long time in silence. She imagines herself lying on that soft grass again, nose-to-nose with Lisander, like an amulet unclasped, two matching halves facing each other.

“I am sorry,” she manages. “I do not want this for myself, these stupid girlish hopes.”

Astonishingly, Senga takes her hand and brushes the hair back from Roscille’s face. So tenderly; she has practiced this gesture many times upon her own children.

“Do men not hope?” Her voice is soft. “They imagine themselves mighty and clever and virile and powerful. This hope of yours is quite small by comparison.”

Small, yes. But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green matter with her teeth.

Macbeth comes into the room and Roscille immediately dries her tears and puts on her veil. Her husband’s face is nothing. The ghostly smudge of a thumbprint on a windowpane. He holds a length of white fabric in his hands.

“Come, Roscilla,” he says, in this hollow nothing of a voice. “There will be a council meeting.”

She rises and approaches him without a word. The mattress crumples as Senga moves, as if to reach out for Roscille and keep her from leaving. But Macbeth’s presence crushes them both into silence. Roscille looks down and waits for her husband to open the door, to turn into the corridor, so she can follow.

Instead, he says, “Wait.”

Her mind is a smooth channel through which such brusque directives flow easily. She must keep it empty so she does not think of what awaits her tonight, and the next night, and the next. Macbeth sweeps her hair back from her neck.

Before she can speak, or even think, Macbeth knots the white fabric over her eyes. Blinding her entirely. When she blinks her crumpled lashes, she sees only a fuzzy blackness.

Panic overtakes her, curdling the words in her throat. When she can still her racing heart, quiet the pounding of blood in her ears, Roscille only manages one word: “Why?”

“I should have done it sooner,” Macbeth says, though there is no cruelty in his tone, only the flatness of reason. “My men will not cringe from you so much, or question whether my dominion over my wife is total. And you do not need to see. When you are to leave this room, I will guide you.”

And then, true to his word, Roscille is maneuvered through the door, even as Senga makes some inarticulate noise of protest, and into the corridor, all in the rough grip of her husband’s hands.

The floor is cold through the soles of her slippers, and there is the ocean underneath it, surging up as it always does, against the stone barrier which seems thinner with every passing moment. She can sense how far they have gone based on how much their footsteps echo. This is a long corridor, empty. The sound of Macbeth’s limping gait fills the silent hallway.

Roscille knows, Now we are turning a corner, now another one, seven paces and then one more, and then down the longest, narrowest hallway. See, she thinks with some relief, my mind has not been lost entirely. The salt air, as they approach, lifts the skin on the back of her neck. The key slides into the lock. She inhales sharply.

It is the first time she has been here without seeing. Well—perhaps it is merely the blindest she has ever been. In the beginning, she came only with her paltry mortal vision. She begins to suspect, as Macbeth guides her through the door, that he has not blindfolded her for the sake of his men. She thinks he has some preternatural sense of his own, that he can sniff out the affinity that grows between his wife and the witches. Perhaps he merely thinks she visited them in his absence. Perhaps that is enough to make him take such precautions, to ensure that she is always bound to him first, that she can never look into the milky eyes of les Lavandières and see herself reflected back.

Any light Roscille could glimpse from behind the cloth has now vanished. The blackness is solid and cold. She feels as if she could put a hand to it and leave the impression of her palm.

Macbeth splashes into the water. She hears a low grunt of pain as he does—that wound on his leg. Has he even allowed a doctor or a Druide to see it? He trusts nothing and no one, now. An herbal poultice might be poison. Roscille has stolen this from him, she realizes. Safety. Or perhaps it could be said she has transformed him. A slow metamorphosis, unfolding in stages, like a night-blooming flower. Macbeth, the righteous man. Now he is Macbeth, King of Alba, but bereft of his right hand and unsteady on his left leg.