Breakfast at Glamis Castle, home of Lord and Lady (soon to
be King and Queen) Macbeth was never a particularly jolly affair. Apart from
the appalling draughts that blew down the length of the dining room through all
the ill-fitting windows, there was the recurring problem of the awkward
questions that flew across the breakfast table between the castle’s chief occupants.
These quite often referred to missing guests. It was a
common occurrence for a distinguished visitor to enjoy a hearty supper the evening
before but not put in an appearance at breakfast. His lordship would ask her
ladyship what had happened to Lord McX or Duke McY and be fobbed off with the news
that he was a particularly heavy sleeper. Macbeth always doubted this, knowing
just how uncomfortable all the beds were at Glamis Castle. His suspicion was that
the only way to lose consciousness for any length of time in a castle bed was
if one’s throat was attended to courtesy of a sharp knife, and his wife had
never said anything to allay that suspicion.
However, on the morning of 14th February the
questions were about a very different matter. Four envelopes were propped against
his lordship’s box of cornflakes but there was none within reach of Lady Macbeth
at the other end of the table.
“Where’s my Valentine’s card, then?” she snapped.
“Oh – is it Valentine’s Day today, my sweet?” Macbeth
replied.
“You know full well it is”, said her ladyship. “And you’ve
forgotten to buy me a card!”
“Oh dear”, said Macbeth. “Sorry.”
“What’s the matter with you?” asked his wife. “Don’t you
love me any more?”
This was a question to which a straight yes or no answer was
not easy to give. It was the “any more” that was the problem. Had Macbeth ever
loved his wife in the first place? This was the question he was forced to ask
himself, and he racked his brain trying to remember if this had ever been the
case.
The fact was that theirs would have been a shotgun wedding had
shotguns been around at the time. Determined to get herself an aristocratic husband
she had put the word around that Macbeth was the father of her unborn child and
gathered an impressive force of violent thugs to frog-march Macbeth down the aisle
of the local kirk to put a ring on her finger.
For his part, Macbeth could not recall ever having been to
bed with his bride, and this situation did not change after they were married.
The supposed pregnancy had all been a trick, thanks to some well-placed
cushions that disappeared immediately after the wedding.
“So how come you’ve got four Valentine’s cards today?” she
asked. “I know who one of them’s from, but what about the other three? How many
floozies have you been seeing behind my back?”
Macbeth knew that any answer he gave would only lead to
further trouble, so he stayed silent.
“Open them”, she said. “I want to know who sent them”.
“Valentine’s cards are always anonymous”, Macbeth said. “You
wouldn’t be able to tell.”
“Give them here”, she said. “I can always tell”.
So Macbeth flung the offending cards down the length of the
table. Lady Macbeth started to open the first of them, using a knife that
looked as though it might have used for other purposes in the past, judging by
the suspicious red stains on it.
“I know the perfume used by every woman within 20 miles of
this castle”, she said. “If you’ve been playing around with any of them I’ll
know after a single sniff”.
So saying, she gave put her nose to the open envelope and
nearly collapsed on the floor, grabbing her throat as she did so.
“My God!” she gasped. “That’s appalling! What female could possibly
smell like that?”
“Like what?” Macbeth asked.
“Like a ton of dog poo mixed with the pong from that corpse
I forgot to bury until it had been dead for a fortnight”.
“What corpse was that, my precious?”
“Never you mind. At all events, this pong smells worse.”
“And what does the card say?” he asked.
Lady Macbeth gingerly extracted the card and read the verse
on the front.
“Roses are red, Violets are blue, You will be mine, I’ve put
a spell on you”.
“I wonder who could possibly have sent that?” Macbeth
wondered, having a pretty good idea what the answer was.
“You can read the other two”, said Lady Macbeth, throwing
them back in his direction. “I don’t want them anywhere near me”.
“OK”, said her husband, holding his nose as he extracted the
cards from their envelopes.
“This one says: “Some roses are yellow, Others are white,
You’re a lucky fellow, Come to dinner tonight.”
“And the third one?”
Macbeth picked up the final mystery card with trepidation,
knowing full well where it had come from. Why those hags from Blasted Heath
Cottage thought of him on Valentine’s Day was anyone’s guess, but it was hard to
imagine that their intentions towards him could have been even remotely
friendly ones.
The third card read:
“Roses are red, Violets are blue, You never could guess,
What we’ve put in the stew.” On this point they were entirely wrong. He could.
Lady Macbeth was staring at him down the length of the
table. Although Macbeth did not have the slightest intention of accepting the
invitation to dinner, his wife did not appear to be so sure.
“I think you’d better look at my card”, she said. She was
holding her knife in a somewhat threatening manner, testing its sharpness with
her thumb.
Macbeth promptly did so. Its message was clear enough:
“Roses aren’t blue, Violets aren’t red, Start messing around, You'd be better off dead”.
© John Welford
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