Page 14 of Lady Macbeth

“I know,” Roscille whispers. Her fingers are trembling.

“He is here to perform cruentation.”

“I know.”

To perform cruentation, a priest must stand over a dead body and speak some sacred, secret rites. Then, in the presence of the murderer, the body’s death wound will begin to bleed anew, to bubble over in hot, dark gouts. In Wrybeard’s court, this is the stuff of primitive superstition, such that he would not tolerate. A fortnight ago she would not have feared it. But Roscille has been in Glammis long enough to know that the rules of nature are different here. Witches rattle chains in a prison under her feet. The world is so much wilder than she has known. Fléance’s wound stands out against his throat, as black as a burned tree.

Roscille feels as though she is choking on her own veil. She wants to tear it off, to gulp in the cold, unobstructed air. But she cannot, when Fléance is here. Instead she breathes in short, painful gasps.

“I did not know cruentation could be performed on the living,” Roscille says at last—only for something to say, because Fléance is looking at her with a furrow of concern between his brows.

“Yes,” he replies. His voice is tight. “And if the chancellor speaks the words in your presence, my wound will reveal us. So you must stay away. At any cost.”

Roscille nods. Her heartbeat is a feral thing, furious in its pounding. Her eyes trace the line of Fléance’s scar again.

“And your father,” she asks, through the thickness in her throat, “was he pleased?”

“He was,” Fléance replied. “He did not apologize for leaving me behind, but next time—he swears it—I will be on the battlefield beside him.”

The corner of Fléance’s mouth twitches, as if he wants to smile. He looks boyish to her again, almost more now because of the scar, how its gruesomeness contrasts so sharply with his unlined, plump-cheeked face. She wonders if this is the way she looked to her father, as she knelt before him and begged to be given a different fate. A sensation of disgust winds its way through her belly, like a lamprey in its pool.

It is easier than she expected, to stay away. When Banquho comes to her and explains what will happen—the chancellor’s mystic words, the ghastly spilling of blood—Roscille makes her face a mask of terror and feigns swooning. Oh, please, she says, I could not bear to witness it.

Banquho frowns as he catches her, his hard fingers holding tight to her slippery form. He is thinking: Here is a seventeen-year-old bride, new to these lands, doted upon by her father, raised in luxury; the most horror she has ever witnessed is the pricking of a needle. None of this is true, aside from her age and her greenness in Glammis, but she is a good liar, and Banquho is a willing audience. He does not want her there, either, his Lord’s unfirm foreign wife, exuding witchcraft.

So Roscille does not meet the chancellor, but she sees the train of villagers as they are brought into the hall. Broken-toothed farmers with black gums, shepherds with stooped shoulders leaning heavily on their crooks, millers old enough to be missing most of their hair. They are all accompanied by sons, grandsons, with smaller, younger versions of their faces. The faces are weather-burned, like ancient leather. Their eyes are squinted and damp and filled with fear.

Roscille sits with her back against the wall outside the chamber, the stone leaching the heat from her body. She can hear muffled, indistinct words from the other side. Angry words, from her husband’s mouth. And then the high-pitched, panicked pleading of the peasants. All of a sudden Roscille’s legs cannot support her weight. She slides down, crumpling to the floor, knees pulled up to her chest.

Her mind writhes with possibilities, like maggots in rotten meat. Perhaps, when the chancellor speaks his words before one of the peasants—say this hunched, decrepit shepherd—Fléance’s blood begins to run, not because of any divine power, but because Roscille’s stitches were sloppy, because Fléance used his muscles too much before they were healed enough, for no reason, for any reason. Macbeth has said that he will kill the man and his sons and his grandsons. He will end their bloodline, cut it brusquely and bitterly, like the bodice of a protesting woman.

Here is another story: In the ancient world there was a war between the Greeks and their exotic Eastern enemies. The exotic prince killed the lover of one Greek soldier. The Greek soldier took his vengeance upon the prince. Then another Easterner killed the Greek soldier. Then the son of the Greek solder killed this Easterner. But he did not only kill the man: He killed his six sons, too. He dashed the head of the infant child against the castle walls, cracking its skull and pulverizing the yet-unformed brain beneath. This was so the Easterner’s sons could never grow up and take revenge upon him.

Vengeance is not a wooden cup that empties. It is a jeweled chalice which endlessly spills over. Roscille puts her head between her knees. She fears she will be sick all over the floor. In her efforts to escape her husband’s violence, she has only diverted it, flooded it to fill another vessel.

Strangely, here in the empty hall, her father’s words return to her. You are whatever creature I make you. He sent her to Glammis as a bride, a limp body inside a white gown. But perhaps, disguised beneath the veil, he smuggled in an ermine after all. A clever creature—maybe. Or merely one with pitiless sharp teeth.

Hesitantly, Roscille lifts her veil and, with it, removes the real world. The gray stone of this windowless corridor shudders away. She slips into the memory easily, like a fish in a current.

It goes like this: Roscille is thirteen. The stories about her are only whispers, pale smoke at the edges of her vision. Other than that, she is beautiful; the Duke has high hopes that she will make a propitious match, forge a valuable alliance. She sometimes imagines herself being wed to a handsome Angevin prince, but such imaginings are distant, hazy. Now she thinks only of a certain stable hand, who has eyes like blue cut-glass and a furtive smile for her. She begins to linger around the stables, hoping to see his smile flash. The muscles of his back are strong, and where his sweat-damp tunic sticks to him, it shows every virile ridge.

Stable boys, of course, do not wed noble ladies, and noble ladies, unlike noblemen, cannot enjoy breezy couplings in haylofts with their servants. By then, Roscille has been taught not to make eye contact with a man, to keep her head down, just in case. The whispers have not yet solidified into truth. The rules are not rigid. There is no white veil to enforce them.

So one day, Roscille goes to the stables and takes the stable boy’s hand. She lifts her head. She meets his eyes.

It is said that some memories are too appalling for the human mind to bear and are thus pitted with black holes, so that the miserable parts do not cut over and over again, like bits of shattered pottery, sharp on all sides. Roscille wishes she could remember this only in bearable flashes. But she remembers it all. The stable boy’s eyes darkening. His grip on her hands tightening, pulling her body against his. Their lips, a whisper away from meeting.

And then a voice that comes from neither of them: the protest. The stable boy’s hands unlatching from hers. He is hauled backward, and struck across the face by the stable master, and she hears the crack as his fine-boned nose breaks, skewing sideways, spraying blood.

Roscille screams.

He is brought to Wrybeard in chains. The Duke listens to the story, rubbing his long, twisted beard with ring-adorned fingers. Roscille shrinks into the corner of the hall, staring at the floor. Her terrible eyes prick with tears.

Her father’s order is too low for Roscille to hear. There is only the choked gasp, and the splatter of something wet against the stone. By the time she looks up, all of it is cleared away: the boy’s body removed, the stable master returned to the stables, her father’s dagger back in its sheath.

The Duke approaches her. Maids are already scrubbing the red-dyed floor.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Too afraid, now, to meet his gaze.