Page 22 of Lady Macbeth

She remembers how the king’s hands shook as he struggled to lift his goblet to his mouth, how the wine spilled from the open corners of his lips, droplets that stained his jerkin. King Duncane (a righteous man) would not suffer a witch to live. That he tolerates the presence of Roscille (hagseed) is a miracle. Now Macbeth is asking her to steal the merciful breath from his lungs.

She will not do this. She cannot. She may be witch-marked, she may be cleverer than her sex allows, but she is not a murderer. Her single enchantment was a mistake, a folly of youth, one that colored her father’s hands, not hers. But perhaps even this is absolution she does not deserve. Not once did she raise her voice to stop her father’s dagger. Not once did she consider how she might have damned him, this inconsequential stable boy, by inviting his peasant lips to soil her noble face.

Perhaps it is not cleverness that seeps through the generations but cruelty. One cold creature weaning another.

Roscille’s staggering footsteps take her to the parapet, where she breathes in dense, frigid night air. She can smell the salt that dries in white blisters on the black rock. She can hear the roiling tide. The wind on her cheeks is surprisingly painful; they have been turned raw with tears and, for the first time since arriving in Glammis, her face is bare, unprotected, unleashed. She presses her hands to her burning cheeks. Her palms are like two stones.

She looks down the sheer face of the cliff. She imagines Hawise’s body tripping down it, and then she replaces Hawise with herself, her torn veil floating like a jellyfish, her hair spreading like seafoam. The water swallows this imagined Roscille in half the length of a heartbeat. It is fast and bleak and final.

It is difficult to hoist herself onto the balustrade, because the stone is cool and slippery and her hands are cool and slippery and her arms are river weeds, trembling. Her ripped veil blows around her face, snatched by the wind.

Now she imagines her body joining Hawise’s on the seafloor, their bones curling together like mollusks. Her deathful eyes will be eaten out of her skull by the fish, her flesh sucked by the eels. Her heart rocks as though on a pendulum, swaying between comfort and terror.

A voice, behind her, as sudden as a clap of thunder. “Lady Roscille?”

Brezhoneg. Hearing her native tongue turns her blood to wine, florid and sweet. The shock of it unbalances her, feet slipping against the stone. Her fingers grasp for purchase and find only air. The black water surges up at her. But before she can fall forward, down the cliff and into the sea, a pair of strong arms lock around her waist.

“Close your eyes,” comes that same low voice.

She does. Lisander lifts her gently down from the parapet, as if she is weightless, gripping her under her knees and her shoulders—it is what in Breizh they call the bridal carry, which would seem befitting to an outsider, with her tattered veil now draped loosely over them both, if they did not know she was not only not a bride, but another man’s wife.

Lisander sets her on her feet again. Her knees are still weak beneath her.

“Whatever he has done,” Lisander says, “it is not worth this.”

Her eyes are still shut, but of course he can see her, the torn veil, the tears on her cheeks. In that moment she is any woman whose husband has handled her too roughly. Lisander need not know what words passed between them. He has no reason to think they spoke of magic, of murder. Of treason against his father. Perhaps she should make showier tears. Let him believe her no more than a misused wife.

“Please,” she whispers. “Don’t tell my husband.”

“I won’t.” A pause. “Yet it would please my father to know he treats his second wife as brutishly as his first.”

Roscille thinks of King Duncane’s treatise on witches. 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. Perhaps she has misjudged the degree of his mercy. Perhaps he gladdens to see a witch-marked woman wed to a man who might as well be her jailer; perhaps this is the severe punishment of which he wrote.

Second wife. When Roscille speaks, her voice is far more tremulous than she wants it to be. “And was his first wife a hagseed, too?”

Silence. Roscille wishes she could see his face. His serpent-green eyes, and the tired bruises under them.

“Some men like to see all women treated brutishly, no matter their nearness to witchcraft,” he says at last. “But your husband does make a habit of choosing wives with their own…mythologies. It vexes my father, yes.”

King Duncane, who robes his Druides in gold.

“Does it vex you?” she asks.

He exhales, sounding almost amused. “My father is heartier than he looks. You need not worry about what I think.”

“I only meant the opinion of today’s prince,” she says. “Not tomorrow’s king. Today’s barely-prince,” she adds.

Her angling is not subtle at all, and she does not really expect Lisander to give her the answer she seeks.

“You wonder whose head will wear the crown,” he says. “The younger son, who has the nobility of a lion and the golden graces of a storybook knight, whose only defect was being born second, or the elder, whose grim presence makes men shrink from him, whose only asset is the order of his birth.”

Roscille draws a breath. She had not thought he would state it so baldly.

“I know what it is,” she says, “to see men shrink from you.”

She feels the air shift, the coldness evaporating. Warmth seeps between their bodies, but it is a strange warmth, less like the blaze of an open flame and more like living flesh, heated by the blood pulsing below.

“I imagine so,” he says softly. “Just as I imagine you are well aware—Glammis is not a safe place for women like you.”