Lady Macbeth's Daughter (30 page)
“You are Grelach. My . . . my mother.” I intended the words to be an accusation, but they slip harmlessly from my lips.
“Daughter, I pray you, forgive me.”
With these words, tears begin to course down her cheeks. She wipes them with her fingertips, then gazes at her wet hands in surprise.
Rhuven gasps. “My lady, you are weeping!”
Grelach nods and looks up again. She seems to be smiling.
“All that I did,” she says, letting the tears roll down her cheeks unstopped, “was born from my despair—at losing you, Albia.”
Her voice breaks, and her hands flutter to her sides, like birds unable to fly. But she swallows and tries again.
“Now that I have found you, I may hope . . .” She leaves the sentence unfinished.
Rhuven picks up one of her hands. “For peace, my lady?” she prompts.
Grelach nods. “Now that he is dead.” Her voice sounds stronger now. She looks at me. “The time is free.” She takes her hand from Rhuven and slowly extends it toward me.
I glance at at the long fingers, the palms red and blotched from self-torment. I am afraid to touch her hand. But why?
The time is free.
I feel it, too. All that was bound can be released. With Macbeth’s death, nature is reclaiming Scotland, stone by stone, tree by loch by glen. Slowly the land is freed from tyranny. Only my mother is still bound.
Unless I forgive her.
I step outside myself and observe this Lady Macbeth, late queen of Scotland, granddaughter of a king. She stands before me like a once-proud tree, struck by a storm and now broken-limbed. She has nothing and no one. Her infants are all dead. Luoch has renounced her. Only Rhuven loves her. But only I, her daughter, can ease her suffering.
I long to unleash the questions that crowd onto my tongue.
Why did you consent to his evil? Was it from weakness
or the strength of your own ambition? Were you my father’s victim or
his tempter?
But I say nothing. I am not sure the answers even matter anymore.
I begin to reach out my hand, then fold it quickly over my chest, grasping my upper arms. I cannot put aside sixteen years in a single moment. I hear a fresh sob from Grelach and close my eyes against her.
Through my sleeve I feel the jeweled band, like Geillis’s hand holding my arm. She had no reason to love me, a crying baby dropped in her lap. But she did. I have no reason to love Grelach and every reason to hate her. We stand close enough so that a breath of wind brings me the scent of her hair and clothes: woodsmoke, and lavender, and peaty earth. Yet the gap between us seems as wide as a chasm in the mountains, as profound as the deepest loch in Scotland.
I force myself to glance at Grelach. Her shoulders are slumped and she is weeping. I realize that I am taller than she is. Just then she draws herself up, as if sensing my gaze. We stand eye to eye. Hers are blue pools of tears.
I remember how I used to be afraid of the loch, of the monsters that lurked in its watery depths. But none of them had ever harmed me. One, Nocklavey, I even tamed and made my servant. As I slew the boar. As I faced my father with a firm arm. What do I have left to fear? This woman can no longer harm me. But I can hurt her terribly. With a word, I can cut every thread of her hope.
I lean forward and touch Grelach’s hand. I do not speak.
Her fingers close around mine with such force that her knuckles turn white. I feel her strain toward me as if she would clasp me in her arms, but like a queen she stands erect, holding herself back.
I see myself taking both her wounded hands in my own. The creases around her eyes and mouth, like so many rivers inked on Scotland’s map, seem to relax, softening her expression. I glimpse my mother when she was my age. With my fingertips, I stroke the skin of her hands until the bloody spots begin to fade, then disappear.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Lady Macbeth’s Daughter
is a work of fiction inspired by Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, which is based on what passed for history in Shakespeare’s time: Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles
. Holinshed in turn got his material from fourteenth-and fifteenth-century chroniclers. By the time Shakespeare wrote
Macbeth
(sometime after King James came to the throne in 1603), it contained more fiction than fact. He telescoped the action into a very short time span, combined two different royal murders from Holinshed, and made Macbeth inexcusably evil. Shakespeare kept the Weird sisters he found in Holinshed, for they would please not only playgoers but King James, who was an avid witch-hunter. With their predictions about Banquo fathering a line of kings, Shakespeare (following Holinshed) created a mythical ancestry to flatter his sovereign and patron.
When you read Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
, also look at the excerpts from Holinshed (reprinted in the Signet Classics and Norton Critical editions, to name but two). It is fun to study how he changed his sources and to ask why. Nick Aitchison’s fascinating
Macbeth: Man and Myth
(London: Stroud and Sutton, 1999) asks these questions in a much larger context. As his title suggests, he sorts out the history from the later fictions. With this kind of foundation, you’ll be able to see how I, too, altered my sources. I restored some of the history Shakespeare changed, but I also went out on a big limb by creating an entirely new character and putting her at the very center of the story.
What
do
we know about the “real” Macbeth? He indeed killed King Duncan in a dynastic feud but went on to rule Scotland in relative peace for seventeen years (1040–1057). In 1054 Duncan’s son Malcolm defeated Macbeth in battle, but Macbeth’s kingship survived until Malcolm killed him in 1057. Macbeth had married Gruoch, the granddaughter of a king, after killing her first husband in battle (avenging the death of his own father). Gruoch had a son, Lulach, by her first husband, and he ruled Scotland briefly (1057–1058) until Malcolm killed him in 1058. It was a bloody time. Shakespeare got that right.
There is no record of children being born to Macbeth and Gruoch. But written records were pretty scarce then, so they could have had children. The birth of a daughter especially might have gone unrecorded. Regardless of what
might
have occurred, why did I create Albia?
The quick answer, among others, is that I wanted to give an entirely new perspective on the events of Shakespeare’s play, using a protagonist who is outside the main action but crucial to its unfolding. (Whom in the play would you have chosen for this purpose?) I considered having Lady Macbeth tell the story, but she is an accessory to the central crime of the play. Though she is a tragic figure, I didn’t think that my younger readers would identify with her. But it was Lady Macbeth who gave me a tip when she tells her husband: “I have given suck, and know / How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me . . .” (1.7.54–55). Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth admits that she has nursed a baby? Then why do they have no children in the play? When I looked at all the male characters in the play with sons, I asked myself how the lack of a son might make Macbeth so anxious about his legacy that he is driven to commit murder. How might the loss of a child affect Lady Macbeth? So I invented Albia and made her rejection by her father the single event that precipitates all the tragic action of
Macbeth.
To create a vivid physical setting for my protagonist, I studied a number of books, the best of which were Ann Mac-Sween and Mick Sharp’s
Prehistoric Scotland
(London: B. T. Batsford, 1990) with its magnificent photographs of tombs, ritual stones, forts, and henges. Also good is Iain Zaczek and David Lyons’s
Ancient Scotland
(London: Collins and Brown, 1998). For details of daily life, two useful resources are I. F. Grant’s
Highland Folk Ways
(Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd., 2007) and Regia Anglorum, a Web site that re-creates in fascinating detail English and Scottish life from 950–1066 (
www.regia.org
). To help me invent the stories and belief system of Albia and the Wyrd sisters, I dipped into Sir George Douglas’s
Scottish Folk
and Faery Tales
(London, 1892. Reprinted Bath, U.K.: Lomond Books, 2005) and Arthur Rowan’s
Lore of the Bard: A Guide to
the Celtic and Druid Mysteries
(Llewellyn, 2003). Another useful Web site with several links is
www.medievalscotland.org
, covering Scotland from 500–1603.
Actually going to the places you are writing about is a great way to do research, and “I need to research a book” is the best excuse ever for a trip overseas. In the summer of 2007 my son Adam and I visited Scotland, driving on the wrong side of the road from the prehistoric ruins of the Kilmartin Valley, to the stone henges at Callanais, to Cawdor Castle and Dunsinane Hill, eating haggis, neeps, and tatties along the way. Thank you, dear heart, for your company. (On my Web site,
www.authorlisaklein.com
, you can see photographs of some of the places that inspired the setting of this book.)
But the journey really began more than thirty years ago at a high school in Peoria, Illinois, when I first read
Macbeth
in an English class taught by Judith Burkey, and then with a nutty bunch of classmates wrote and performed a parody,
The
Tragedy of Rich Macwood
, surely the silliest homecoming skit in that (now defunct) school’s history. Thank you, Julie Bartley, Brian Green, Mike Humkey, Joe Kella, Liz Klise, Cyndi Lakin, Kevin McGowan, Tom Mueller, Beth Newsam, Jerry Novy, Paula Schweickert, Bob Simon, Patty Van Buskirk, Martin Willi, Louise Ziegler, and everyone in that Academy of Our Lady/Spalding Institute class of 1976 who made the Bard roll in his grave, laughing. Wasn’t that a blast?
Returning to the Now-world, my gratitude goes out to my extraordinary editor, Melanie Cecka, and the talented staff at Bloomsbury Children’s Books. Bless you, Carolyn French, for your encouragement and good sense. And thank you, Rob, for making it possible for me to have my cake and share it, too.
Names or descriptions in boldface denote characters also in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
MACBETH
, thane of Moray, later king of Scotland
GRELACH, his wife (
LADY MACBETH
)
ALBIA, their daughter
LUOCH, Grelach’s son by her first husband
| RHUVEN, Grelach’s servant HELWAIN, a soothsayer GEILLIS, known as Albia’s mother |  | THE WYRD SISTERS |
| MURDO, a farmer COLUM, his son, a shepherd CAORA, a shepherdess |  | Albia’s friends |
BANQUO
, Macbeth’s general, Albia’s foster father
BREDA, his wife
FLEANCE
, their son and Albia’s love
DUNCAN
, king of Scotland killed by Macbeth
MALCOLM
, his son
MACDUFF
, thane of Fife, leader of the rebels against Macbeth
FIONA, his wife (
LADY MACDUFF
)
WEE DUFF, their son, one of several children
| ROSS ANGUS | | Thanes and allies of Macduff |