Page 62 of Lady Macbeth

Gruoch: Silence, both of you. Were we not all this girl, once? A Lady Macbeth? Look at us now, nameless. Trapped. We have sat rotting in the dark for too long. Finally there is a chance—we can redeem ourselves in this.

Left Witch: There is no redeeming this. I do not remember my own name.

Right Witch: I can only see in the dark. My hands are made for washing and nothing more.

Gruoch: Perhaps we are lost, fine. But she is not. There is still a chance. If she claims this name, Lady Macbeth, she claims it for us all. Our visions will be her visions. Our powers her powers. Our burdens her burdens. It is not a thing to claim lightly. Do you understand?

Right Witch: Why does she deserve this chance? I have been here a quarter of a century. And you half as long, and you twice as long.

A beat.

Roscille: I do not deserve it. I should stay here, after all.

Gruoch: This is what we were all made to believe. Keep your mortal eyes open. Remember. Think.

Roscille squeezes her eyes shut, not that it makes any difference, in the dark. Yet when she does, her vision explodes in a riot of color. Memories she assumed jettisoned, abandoned like ballast, to maintain the soundness of the ship. It all roars back to her now: the mornings she spent embroidering with Hawise, reading bawdy poetry and smothering their whispers; the evenings turning wide and blue, when they were allowed to wander out of the castle on horseback, Hawise pointing out each animal they saw. The yellow-beaked starlings that blended so well with the bark, the busy red squirrels with their tufted ears, the cormorant perched in the canopy, curiously far from the sea. Hawise knew their names in Norse and Roscille knew their names in Brezhoneg, Angevin, and Saxon. They smeared berry juice on their fingers to coax rabbits from their warrens.

All of these things which have felt so far from her are here now. There was the time one of the Duke’s men struck Hawise across the face, for no reason, for any reason, and then grabbed at her breasts, and Roscille was filled with an uncorrectable rage, but she waited. She watched as the man came and went from the castle and always returned with small parcels of goat’s milk, such that cannot be made in Naoned for the Duke does not keep goats. Roscille pointed this out to her father and it was discovered this man had dalliances with a bastardess from the House of Capet. Well, there is no place in Wrybeard’s court for men who may be swayed to the enemy’s side due to matters of the heart. He was gone the next day. To where, Roscille never found out. To hell, she hoped.

Even here, in Glammis: early days, when she sat at her husband’s council table and spoke, when she sent him running to Cawder to stain his hands with blood, when she ensnared Fléance in her lie, reading his boyish longings like a cipher. When she came to Lisander’s room with a knife and left with a swollen, sweet-kissed mouth. When she threw herself between his cell and Banquho’s whip. When she took in Senga, taught her Latin, let her braid womanly wisdoms into her hair. All of these things she did as a girl, as a lady, as a flinching foreign bride, as a witch with death-touched eyes, as Roscille of Breizh. She has believed herself an animal, simple, sharp-toothed, slippery like an eel. But she is both guilty and innocent, both girlish and wise, both witch and woman. Even the dullest creatures in cages dream of freedom. Their desires stretch and flourish, like a tree growing clever branches around the bars of a fence.

She stands in the dark, furious, fearful, thinking, blooming.

Roscille says, “I will take it. I will carry it all.”

Gruoch says, “That’s a good girl.”

She will take everything but this. Roscille reaches up and removes the cloak, letting it slide off her shoulders and puddle in the water. The small waves suck at the furs, drowning it. Then she unclasps the necklace. It makes a small splash as it drops into the water, but then the waves drag it under, too. At last, the veil. She tears it off. Shreds the lace between her fingernails. It is lost to the damp air and darkness. Her cheeks burn with the cold, but she is free.

The witches advance. Gently, they guide Roscille toward the steps, until she can find her own way. She climbs upward, water pouring from her clothes. She touches the door’s handle, jiggles the lock. The strength of one woman is not enough to break it. Nor two, nor three. But the strength of four is enough.

The witches wait in their own seething silence. Silver dreams unfold from their milky eyes and lipless mouths.

Roscille cracks the rusted metal under her hand. The door swings open. Light pours in. She looks back once at les Lavandières, to at last see their faces without the veil between them, and then she steps into the torch-warmed corridor, into the glowing, waking world.

She hears it right away, the clanging of blades. Arrows sliding into their notches. Muscles twanging as bowstrings are pulled taut and then released. She hears it with four sets of ears now, as perceptive as a hare. When the arrows hit their marks, there is the fleshy sound, like fruit being cut, the sound of men’s lives being stolen from them. Roscille breaks into a run.

By the time she reaches the parapet she is breathing hard, but her legs do not ache—she has the strength of four, now. The archers who are stationed along the battlements do not pay her any mind, even though it is dangerous for a woman to be here, dangerous for anyone to be here. She finds an empty arrow loop and crouches behind it.

There, she watches Æthelstan’s army advance up the hill. They are more ragged than she expected them to be: their clothes hanging off them, mud up to their knees. The rain has made the climb even more treacherous, each step risking a death-slide down the face of the cliff. They are so different from the Scottish warriors Roscille has known—no faces painted half blue, no tartans to show the intricate threading of clan loyalties, but the leather of their boots seems tougher and none of their sword-hilts are rusted.

Behind them, the trees of the copse are trees. The bushes are bushes. The animals can smell the blood and fire and are hiding in their warrens and holes. Roscille feels a helplessness overtake her, one that makes her knees tremble. The wood cannot ascend the hill. The soldiers can barely ascend the hill. Most of the arrows land with useless thuds in the grass, but when one does strike, it strikes true. Through the heart, the man falling like a slain deer, twitching and then going still.

No man of woman born. It seems no man at all will even reach the castle. The panic goes through Roscille, sluggish, each beat passing like blood behind a bruise. Where will she go, what will she do, if Glammis does not fall? Forced back into the dark, or back into her husband’s bed? The same fate as all women, which she has become an animal to escape—

No. She carries the weight of four now, all their stanched dreams and suppressed desires, and she must not fail.

Five women. Senga. Fear laces up her spine. Roscille will not allow her to have Hawise’s fate; she will tear apart the stone walls of the castle with her bare hands. This is what propels her back through the parapet, running, her hair coming loose from its braids and streaming out behind her. Her damp gown tangles around her legs but she does not stumble. The sea presses up from beneath the castle, straining toward the surface, and she seems to roll forward, as if carried by the invisible, underground tide.

Her new strong legs take her to Senga’s room. Roscille turns the knob but it rattles and will not budge. Something is blocking the door from the other side. She presses her face to the wood and says her handmaiden’s name.

A beat. Then there is a scraping, wood against stone, and the door opens just a crack. Senga’s face peers through. The lines on her forehead are deep and her eyes are wet and her voice is thick when she says, “Lady—I thought you were dead and gone.”

“No,” says Roscille. “I am here.” And then Senga opens the door wide enough for her to step inside.

When she enters, she sees that Senga has barred the door by jamming the chair beneath the doorknob, clever, as if she has done such a thing before. She has also taken the poker from the fire and holds it in her white-knuckled hand.

She sees Roscille looking, and says, “The soldiers will come. But I will not make it easy for them.”