My mind reeled. Try as! might, I couldn’t cope with the swirling images his suggestion had suddenly conjured up. Myself, at night, in Duncan’s castle, as his guest Duncan performing my role. What would he do with the murderers…?
“Perhaps he’s decided not to commit the crime?” my wife said that night in bed.
“Don’t you believe it!”
She sighed.
“Well…If you’re going to act, do it tonight. Something tells me tomorrow will be too late.”
And so the deed was done. On the stroke of two in the morning,in accordance with Duncan’s (and my) plan. The only difference was that at the last moment, when I saw his body covered with blood (who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?). I felt faint, and ordered one of my men to remove the corpse from the castle.
“Where to?” he asked.
I remembered a swift-flowing irrigation canal with peat-lined banks, a few miles away.
In the small hours it took some of the weight off my mind to think the body was out of the castle, with the blood being washed off it by the current.
Then something happened which gave rise to a lot of chat in the taverns, and which that fool of a Billy Hampston stuck in his play. In the morning, even though the corpse wasn’t there, the news of the murder spread like wildfire. (Strange that the lack of a body didn’t suggest to anyone that the king might still be alive, skulking in some corner.) Everyone hung round the bloodstained sheets, gaping in horror. It struck me that a missing body terrified people even more than a murdered corpse…
The finding of the body in the canal late that afternoon didn’t change anything. And there had Ï been, pinning such hopes to my disposal of the remains! Fifteen years have gone by since then, but I can still remember every hour, every minute of what happened: the arrival of the cart carrying the king’s body, dripping with water and mud; the shrieks of the guards under torture; the candies cast. ing shadows on the walls.
Î kept out of the way, gnawing my fingers with anxiety. I’d been right to send the body away, but! should have sent it further. Â hundred, a thousand, two thousand miles… But how? There wasn’t a desert in Scotland, curse it.
My lady and I still hoped the moving of the body by night would help to conceal the truth. But we didn’t breathe a word about it.
Later on, we often talked about what happened, she and I, on cold afternoons, sitting by a fire that warmed us less and less. And now she is no more I go over it all on my own, scarcely bothering whether or not the servants hear me.
Ever since my wife passed on my life has been very lonely, and this last year I have missed her worse than ever: my beautiful, intelligent lady, whom that ne’er-do-well Billy Hampston put in a play, depicting her as chief instigator of the murder. Is there no limit to the lies of these vile poetasters?
But now I wish I hadn’t, in my rage, torn the wretched play to pieces with my own hands. I’d have liked to read it again, especially for some of the strangest passages… And I oughtn’t to have had the author of it executed. If I’d been satisfied with putting him in prison I could have gone down one night to his cell and told him to re-write his horrible play.
Some parts of it really were strange, but I can’t remember them very clearly. Partly because it’s so many years since the manuscript was confiscated; partly because I read it at one go, without a pause, almost blind with fury,
I remember one scene in which the ghost of Banquo appeared to me. It’s true that at two or three official banquets I did suffer from hallucinations of that kind — but! never told anyone about them,not even my wife. How could that charlatan Billy Hampston have got to know about something which I virtually concealed from myself?
“You shouldn’t judge him so harshly,” my wife said sometimes. She was always noble and generous. She might easily have hated the man for defaming her so. “You shouldn’t speak ill of him — his play is quite sympathetic to you, throughout.”
“Do you think so?”
“I’m sure of it. That was my main reason for telling you not to tear up the manuscript much less have its author’s head cut off. But you were so furious when you’d read it you wouldn’t listen to reason,”
And so on through all those long autumn afternoons. More and more often we would find ourselves — she more than I — discussing passages from the no longer existent tragedy. One of the scenes that astonished us most was that which depicts the witches. Billy Hampston must have been out of his mind to entertain such visions. We had never seen anything so terrifying in any theatre. How could he have imagined such a nightmare, and what did it mean? I conjured them up in my memory oee by one, time after time, but could never decide whether their sinister predictions lessened the weight on my conscience or added to it.
One day we were talking about it when I suddenly struck myself on the forehead.
“Of course!” I cried. “There we were racking our brains, and all the time it’s quite plain, Those witches in rags and tatters…Didn’t John Tendier, my spy at Duncan’s court, send me a messenger disguised as a beggar woman two or three times?”
“Did he? You never told me…”
“It was of no importance…And the news he brought me was so worrying I paid no attention to anything else …”
As she listened, she looked at me with her piercing gaze as if she knew there was more to come.
“John Teedler’s messenger…” I went on. “Disguised as a beggar woman dressed in rags…I can even remember where we met…It was a deserted fields beyond the old priest’s house…That’s where I heard for the first time about the plot Duncan was hatching against me…All that’s as clear as day…What I don’t understand is how Billy Hampston got hold of it…I always kept it a secret…You can bear me out on that, can’t you?”
“Perhaps John Tendier or his agent confessed…”
“Do you think so?”
“They must have done. It can only have been one of them.”
“I suppose so. Admittedly, I didn’t follow what happened very closely after the fuss died down…But anyhow, it was Duncan who was chiefly implicated while he was still alive …Whereas now…If John Tendier were still alive today, I wouldn’t mind if
he did talk…It might even be to my advantage if he told what
he knew…But of course, he is no longer with us!”
“Perhaps his messenger is still alive?”
“The one he sent disguised as a beggar woman? Bet who can say who he was? John Tendier was the only one who knew…And that messenger was so horribly disguised I wouldn’t be able to recognize him myself…”
“I see…”
After that, I noticed that whenever the subject of the witches cropped up she looked very sad. One day she asked me gently,almost tenderly:
“Michael, are you sure the man you met on that heath really was John Tendler’s agent?”
“What do you mean?”
She stroked my hand before she went on.
“Did it really happen, or might it have been a vision?”
As she told me later, I suddenly went pale, I could hardly speak.
“It was as real as can be,” I managed to answer, through clenched teeth. “And if you don’t believe me, your Majesty, come with me and 111 show you the very field.”
“No, no — I believe you,”
“Let’s go at once!”
“Michael, please!”
“You’ve got to come, do you hear? You and ail the others who still have doubts. Let them all get ready — guards, courtiers, and priests!”
“Don’t shout so loud — the servants will hear.”