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Macbeth raised his arm and the boy cowered. ‘Go and prick your face and cover your paleness with blood, you coward!’ he yelled. ‘What soldiers, clown? Damn you! Those white cheeks of yours are hideous.’ The youth trembled. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak.

‘What soldiers, whey-face?’

‘The English force, Sir.’

Macbeth took him by the scruff of the neck and marched him to the door. ‘Get your face out of here!’ He opened the door and threw the boy out. ‘Seyton!’ he called. ‘I get fed up when I see… Seyton, where are you?’

The doctor, who had been sitting among the attendants, rushed across to Macbeth, who pushed him away.
This was a crisis and it would be solved one way or another. It made no difference how it ended: he had lived too long. His career had turned into a dry, withered scrap like a leaf about to fall. All the things that one should enjoy in old age – honour, love, respect, friends -he wouldn’t have now. Instead he’d have curses – perhaps not spoken aloud, but heartfelt – lip-service – mere air -which he would rather do without.

‘Seyton!’

His ensign appeared. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘What’s the latest?’

‘They’re close.’

‘I’ll fight until my flesh has been hacked off my bones. Give me my armour.’

‘You don’t need it yet,’ said Seyton.

‘I want to put it on. Go and get it. Send more horses out. Search the countryside: hang anyone who talks of defeat. And get my armour.’

Seyton left and Macbeth turned to the doctor. ‘How’s your patient, doctor?’

‘Not sick as much as troubled with incessant fantasies that stop her from sleeping.’

‘Well cure her of that, then.’

The doctor shook his head.

‘Can’t you treat a sick mind? Remove a terrible experience from the memory? Rub out the troubles printed on the mind and cover over the terror of a guilty heart with some pain-killing drug?’