Page 53 of Lady Macbeth

Not so happy, yet much happier. No red smile on Banquho’s face, or on his throat. His mouth is an open cavity, pooling with blood-flecked foam.

Thou shalt beget kings, yet be none. He is nothing now. A cold body. And there will be no cairn to mark his grave.

Act V

Lady?

Thirteen

“What is your purpose here, Lady?”

This is what the man who guards the dungeon door asks her. Roscille did not expect to be confronted at the top of the stairs, did not expect her motives to be questioned. It draws up an uncertainty deep inside of her, one she was content to let seethe and linger without challenge. She is silent. Every time she tries to speak, her tongue feels too slippery in her mouth.

At last, she lifts her head. She meets the guard’s gaze—through the veil—and says, “I wish to see the prisoner.”

“The Lord forbids it.”

“The Lord will not know,” says Roscille. “Or would you rather I tell him how you put your hands on me in the hall when no one was there to witness it?”

The guard blanches. It is crude, to manipulate him this way. There is no pleasure or victory in it. If she were a warrior, she would have just struck him the clumsiest, most deathless blow.

In the space between her threat and his answer, the sound of the ocean is strong and insistent under their feet.

At last, with a grimace, the guard says, “Do not be long.”

“It will hardly be more than a moment.” The guard steps aside, and Roscille descends the stairs.

The dungeon is a place that fills her mind with fire. She is only halfway down the stairs when a blinding light cuts across her vision, obscuring everything, and in that empty space, memories flower up: her face pressed roughly against the table, the lace of her veil chafing her lips and cheeks. The coldness of the air against her bare thighs. And the pain, always the pain, the coiled viper under the sun-warmed stone, which strikes when it is prodded.

Her legs burn at this reminder. She must keep this fire hidden in her skin; she must feel her pain in silence, or else the men will snarl madness and she will be pinned down and a trephine driven through her skull.

But she rights herself and reaches the bottom of the steps. Her cloak drags through the grimy puddles. She keeps her gaze straight ahead, so she does not see the rusted tools on the wall, and especially the whip, still stained with her blood. So that she does not see the mangled iron bars of the cell that once held Lisander inside of it.

She stops before the second cell. Fléance sits flush against the left wall, nearest to the torchlight; he does not hide himself in darkness. When he sees her, he rises to his feet, and his hand sweeps about his hips, as if searching for a weapon. A sword would do him no good, anyway. There is a collar around his throat, and a chain connecting that collar to the wall. Manacled like a dog indeed.

Straining the collar, Fléance turns to look at her. “Why are you here?”

The same question, just as impossible to answer as before. “Did you think you could beat me as you did, and face no recompense?”

His gaze flickers. “Was it worth it, your vengeance?”

If she were a man, he would not ask her this. For men there is no debt of blood which goes unpaid. If the world tips in another’s favor, it must be made to tip back again. But the world is never in a woman’s favor. She cannot tip the scale. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you have always lived, or tear apart the world itself.

“I feel no satisfaction while you still draw breath,” Roscille says, and this is honest, in a way.

A long silence. Fléance’s gray eyes burn.

“Did ever a true word come from your mouth?” he rasps. “When you said your husband erred in overlooking me, that my father had done me a great injustice—did you believe it? Or were you merely stitching me into some great tapestry of deception?”

Her fingers curl into her hands. And then the words flow out, before she can stop them.

“I believe my husband errs in many ways,” she says. “And your father—he treated you cruelly, without regard. Perhaps I desired your aid, but I never turned you over on your back and made you show your belly. We could have been allies. Friends, even. You name me witch, evil temptress, a thousand spitting insults, but it is you who first forsook me.”

There is another long moment of silence. The gray hue of his eyes, once gleaming in the torchlight, now turns matte and churns like the ocean.

“Do not speak of my father.” Fléance’s voice is near to a whisper. “He was a good man. A just, loyal man. He was not like your father, that false weasel of Breizh, who sold you to Macbeth like a broodmare. Who loved no part of you but the flesh of your pretty face.”

A tempest rises in her. Twisting, snarling fury, all of which spirals outward from the hidden eye of the storm. This old pain, in moments forgotten but never truly vanished, rises to life again now.