Work Text:
(She takes a sword and runs
at him behind;) kills him.
- King Lear, 3.7, between lines 98 and 99
She kills him.
Regan likes the feeling of a sword in her hand. In later years, there will be debate over whether she should know how to use such a tool (Surely not—A woman in that time—Only what is that time?) but Regan does not know or care about such debates. She knows only that she learned, that she tagged along after the knights in her father’s command. Even when Goneril sniffed and turned up her nose, Regan had no such qualms.
“What use have you for such things?” Goneril asked when she saw the sword left by the door of Regan’s house. She knew it wasn’t Cornwall’s, she knew without asking. “For you are the lady of the house, are you not?” Regan heard a tinny undercurrent to her words: Not the lord; you are not the lord?
Regan smiled, for even Goneril was not allowed to see everything she felt. “Of course, dear sister,” she said. “Yet even a lady must have her past-times, must she not?”
Goneril ran a finger along the hilt of the sword as if she was looking for dust. Regan knew she would find none. She had been practicing swordplay just a few hours before her sister arrived, and she smiled a secret smile to herself.
“Perhaps,” Goneril said absentmindedly. “But there are better past-times for a damsel to have.” She threw off her cloak with an impatient motion. “You have been attending to your lord, and to the house? You have not been idle, I hope.”
Regan swallowed a callous rejoinder and reminded herself, as she was wont to do, that it was not strange for Goneril to be so peevish and demanding. Cordelia could find it as grating as she pleased; Regan understood how much of a mother Goneril was.
For indeed, though she remained barren, Goneril was more a mother than Regan would ever be. Even if she should have ten children, Regan would come by motherhood late, and honestly. She would never be the kind of freckle-nosed, flat-chested mother that Goneril had been to her when they were both children: Hardly older than Regan and already telling her what was good and what was not. Well, what was she meant to do? There was no one else to do it.
Regan will never be a mother, and she does not think of this fact as her sword shudders through the man. She thinks of hardly anything, only the thrust of the sword, the arch of his back facing her, the light pressure on her skirt as it is spattered with blood. She has only a dim idea that she is sending shockwaves out from her, that she is entirely wrong from the idea of a woman. She does not know that women have never been murderers and will never be murderers, at least not in the public opinion. She does not know that a sword is the wrong way to do it. She does not think that she ought to have planned it out, to have used poison and needles and a good strong pillow.
No, Regan thinks of nothing but the sword and the crown. Let Goneril have her motherhood, her poisons and her remedies. Let her too have her politics, her governments and armies. Regan has her sword, Gloucester lies bleeding, and Regan intends to see through what she has started.
♕♕♕
Soon, Regan will be laying with her cheek pressed to the ground, waves of nausea crashing through her. She will taste poison lingering bittersweet in her throat, and bittersweetly she will remember that Goneril was kind enough to tell her that there are better ways for a damsel to kill than with the rude sword. Binnorie, she will think. O, Binnorie.
♕♕♕
Regan was married on a June morning; her father gave her away. The church pianist played something soft and floaty. Regan felt sweat sticking on her back as she walked. She wrinkled her nose in a small smile just for Cornwall. He looked out of place in his stiff black suit, like it was a paper-doll suit clumsily stuck on a paper-doll man.
Her father gave her away, like a pig at market. Regan smiled out at the congregation from the auction block at the front of the small white church. Regan: A beautiful piece of meat.
It was a nice enough ceremony, probably. Regan was too distracted by the sweat working its way down the skin between her shoulder blades to pay much attention. Goneril looked politely disinterested in the crowd; Cordelia looked bored. Regan did not look at her father. He had given her away. He had no more use for her now.
The kiss came as a surprise mandate from the priest, and Regan smiled blandly as she leaned forward to kiss her new husband. Regan was made again, a wife this time, a treaty. She was of use to her father—to the kingdom—in her passivity. Of use to her husband as a cover story. She was a beautiful icon in the state’s church. Quiet, sweet, the peaceful rolling hills of farmland bathed green and gold in the sun.
She looked at her sisters as she passed them. Cordelia sat with one leg folded up on the chair next to her. She wore her anger on her face. She did not meet Regan’s eyes, still fixated on the altar before her.
Goneril looked at her, smiling serenely. She looked…proud of Regan. A few streaks of grey, far before their time. Her understated dress and soft eyes. Loving her. Goneril looked like nothing so much as a mother.
♕♕♕
Once, near midnight on New Year’s Eve, the three of them were sitting on the back porch of Dad’s house (Albany had gone to bed just past nine—He was never any fun) and the idea of children came up again. It was innocent enough—
Regan said, “The kids’ choir was sweet at the Christmas service.”
Goneril and Cornwall made noises of agreement, and Goneril said—
“Weren’t they? I was just thinking—” And she cleared her throat and looked up, Regan saw her blush a little in the porch light. Her fingers twisted at her coat sleeve, trying to rip it apart. Cornwall shifted uncomfortably, but Regan stayed very still. A moment came and went.
“Well, I suppose it’s not any good supposing!” Goneril said suddenly, brightly. She turned a gleaming smile on Regan. “What about you? When are y’all planning on?”
Others might describe her face as hungry. Regan would describe it as ravenous. “Planning on what?” Regan asked, smiling though she already knew the answer.
Goneril laughed quickly and brittlely. “On having a few of your own,” she said as though it was obvious. And Regan supposed that, in a way, it was.
She took a quick drink and shot a look at Cornwall. He gracefully evaded eye contact. She tried to keep smiling. “Well,” she said. “We’re just not sure.”
Goneril blinked. “Not sure? Of what?”
Regan chewed at the inside of her cheek. She drank again. “We just don’t know when we’re going to have kids.” When, she said, and they both heard the loud If behind the words.
It was strange to see Goneril’s face change as it did. It was like paper crumpling in a fire. Ice emerged, a stoic and shining smile that buried itself in Regan’s gut. “Oh, really,” she said. “Well, I hope you take all the time you need.”
Her smile widened till Regan felt she was falling into it: The soaring void of the sun.
“What the hell was that?” Cornwall asked on the drive home.
Regan shifted, bumped her knees against the passenger side door. She sat curled up in her seat, like a snail in its shell or a little girl. Her father would never let her ride in his car like this. Neither would Goneril. Neither of them could abide footprints on their upholstery. “She’s just sensitive,” she said. “About that kind of thing.” She could feel Cornwall’s skepticism. “Well, it’s important, isn’t it now?” she said, a little peevishly. “Some folks care quite a lot about kids.”
“You?”
“No.” Regan turned to look out into the dark, fields of corn rolling away into the January night. “Not me.” He’d heard it before, but she said it again: “I never want kids. I’ve never once wanted to.”
His hand found hers over the center console and squeezed. She squeezed back. It was a simple reassurance that their strange fairy tale could continue: The two of them chaste between themselves, closer to college roommates than lovers, but still…Regan and Cornwall stood together in a way she had never known before. Perhaps it was the mutual destruction that they assured each other of: Cornwall needed someone respectable and discreet, someone who wouldn’t betray his late night trysts with strange men, someone who wouldn’t mind, wouldn’t ask for more.
And perhaps she would have liked more, but Regan needed things too. Regan needed somewhere out of her father’s house, somewhere she could feel the recoil of her rifle at the range without the fear of her father and even Goneril’s disapproving eyes on her. Somewhere where she could put her feet up on the furniture and no one would mind, somewhere where she was not daughter or princess or land or property. At home, Regan was only Regan, often alone and unobserved.
It was strange, but Regan was happy with her arrangement. It was not her father’s house, and that was all she needed.
Goneril and Albany stood always with distance between them. Each stony-faced, each barely speaking to the other. And there was no one else for Regan to look to, no one else she would want to look to. It had always been Goneril, her big sister, who she had seen as the standard: Wife and mother and daughter and sister all bound together in a knotted skein. Eventually, Regan would have to make a choice as to whether she measured up or not.
♕♕♕
When the rumors of their father’s plans began to spread, Goneril got to her first. “It’s quite simple, really,” she said as she poured tea. “I know what I want, and I know what he wants. All we have to do is give it to him.”
Regan noticed how quickly I turned into We: The simple folding-in of Regan as though she was Goneril’s arm. Regan leaned back, wanting to maintain as much space as she could manage. “And what is it you want?” she asked. “What is it he wants?”
Goneril smiled, though her eyes remained absent. “I want to be king,” she said. “And he wants the same thing.”
“King?” Regan poured herself another cup of tea. “Do you not mean queen?”
Goneril snorted, and Regan did love that horsey sound. She knew it was one that would never be shared with Albany or Cordelia or any of their father’s courtiers. It was too undignified, too genuine, too ugly. “Not queen,” Goneril said. “Never. This place does not have a queen, and never will. We’re far too wild. Too cruel.”
Regan settled for a shrug. She didn’t want to concede to her, not today and not about this. But Goneril was right. There were no queens in her father’s kingdom. And even if there were, Goneril shouldn’t be one. She was too strong, too wise. She was too bitter and angry and fierce, too. Regan was not learnéd in what a good woman was (How could she be? There were none for her to look to) but she knew that Goneril would make a good king, and conversely, was likely not a good candidate for queen.
“What do you suggest?” Regan asked.
Goneril smiled, cold and calculating. She looked so much like her father. “I suggest we play the dutiful daughters. Not forever, you understand. Only until we are granted what is rightfully ours. Once our father has gone on his way, we shall rule together.” She took a sip of tea, triumphal. “And Cordelia,” she added as an afterthought.
She made it sound so easy. As if the idea of daughter was one they could slip on and off like a coat. And perhaps, for her, it was. Goneril was the strongest of them, that Regan knew well. She had always been everything to everyone—Wife, mother, land, riches, daughter, dowry, sister, and now, it seemed, king.
Regan suspected that she herself was not made of such stern stuff. Regan did not have the subtlety or control that Goneril had, nor the boldness and self-righteousness of Cordelia.
No, Regan was merely Regan, and there was little more she could say about it. Regan would never be king; she did not have the constitution for it, as she insisted in her head. She had never been that kind of violent. She far preferred the quick and malleable masculinity of a sword, something that could be picked up and put down. The crown—the king’s crown—did not call to her as it did to Goneril.
She did not speak these words aloud, though, for Goneril was looking at her expectantly, and Regan could never bring herself to disappoint her.
“Very well, sister,” she said as she tried to smile. “I accept your counsel and will comport myself accordingly.”
Goneril smiled. It was genuine, yet still cold as a January morning. “I am glad to hear it, sister,” she said.
Regan took a drink of tea, hiding her face in the steam. For Regan knew she would never be king. She was no politician, no ruler, no general. No father, no husband, no son. Regan was not a good woman, but neither would she make a good king.
But Goneril would. Goneril would, and under her rule, Regan could pretend to be a valued councillor, the hand of the king. She would know the truth, and she suspected Goneril would too: Goneril had never needed her. She was the second-born, the spare. Regan was only Regan, while Goneril was everything that anyone needed. Whatever they might think, Regan and her sister were not a mirror. Regan was what she was: A faulty, motherless girl of her own making. Try as she might, she would never be king.
But under Goneril’s rule, perhaps she had a chance. Perhaps a sliver of that power that her father wielded would be granted her when Goneril ruled. After all, she might not be king, but Regan was no fool. If she could not have sovereignty, at least she could have a preferable sovereign.
Regan lowered her glass and smiled at her sister.
♕♕♕
Soon, Regan will be lying on the cold ground in a tent in her sister’s camp. Or—Regan will be lying on the cold, corporate floors of a government building. The carpeted floor of a mansion at the turn of the century. She is in pre-Christianity Britain, the second World War, a southern belle’s house, an empty black room.
Her surroundings change, her garb changes, the color of her hair skips from red to brown to blonde and back again. Motivation, presentation, the accentuating of this trait or that—All shift and change as years unspool and tangle together. Regan is shuddering between space and time, between tones and interpretations. She flickers like a candle’s flame, mutable and fragile, vulnerable to each passing breath of air.
And still, and still and still, Regan is someone’s daughter. Regan is someone’s sister. Regan is dying.
♕♕♕
Cordelia was close behind, but still too late. She came roaring up the lane, and Regan stood on the porch with her arms crossed.
“I want to talk,” Cordelia said before she was even all the way out of the car.
“I bet you do,” Regan said, more or less to herself.
It was late when Regan and Cordelia came back to her house. They had walked nearly the full perimeter of Regan’s land as they talked. Her sister was a convincing orator, almost as convincing as Goneril. But Regan was, at heart, a loyalist. At least, she was when it came to Goneril. At least, she was so in those days.
“I don’t suppose you’ll help me then?” Cordelia asked.
Regan shrugged, already bored. “You can do whatever you want. I just don’t want to upset him. Come on, Cordelia. There’s enough trouble as is—The sooner we can get him packed off in a retirement home somewhere, the better.”
Cordelia hugged her arms around herself like she was cold. “But it isn’t right,” she said quietly. “It isn’t. I don’t believe he should be allowed to trample all over whomever he likes.”
Regan tried to swallow a laugh and didn’t do a good job. Okay, maybe she didn’t try that hard to conceal it. But the affront on Cordelia’s face when the laugh bubbled out of her made her feel a little cruel. “Honey, if you can figure out a way to stop him from doing that, you’ll be—” She was somehow at a loss. A person who could stop him wasn’t something she had a word for. Even Goneril couldn’t do that. “You’ll be truly jaw-dropping,” she settled for.
Cordelia looked away, her face drooping in the way it had since she was a spoiled child who never got what she wanted.
“I mean, think about it.” Regan pushed the door open and nodded for Cordelia to enter. “All we have to do is wait till he passes the land off to us. It won’t be easy to play like we’re his nice little girls till then, but we’ve done it before.”
“I haven’t.” Cordelia stood, out of place in her wool sweater and long skirt, in Regan’s shiny kitchen. “I’ve never pretended to be something I wasn’t, and I don’t intend to start now.”
Regan felt the laughter again, but successfully tamped it down this time. She looked at Cordelia, taking in her serious eyes and firm posture. She turned away when she couldn’t stand to look anymore. “It must be nice,” she said, trying to keep the bitterness away. She turned, pulling crackers and cheese from cabinets.
“What?” Cordelia asked. Regan hummed noncommittally. “Regan, what are you talking about?”
Regan tried to brush past her sister, and the subject. “Cordelia, don’t—”
“Tell me.” Cordelia caught her arm. “What do you mean?” Her fingers dug into Regan’s arm, and she felt a strange flip of fear in her stomach. She thought Cordelia might leave a bruise. “What’s so nice about it?”
Tensed like a bowstring so as not to tremble, Regan met her gaze. “It must be nice to feel that you matter more to him than a prize cow, or an acre of land,” she said. “It must be real nice to feel like you’re a person in his eyes, capable of having thoughts or feelings that are worth any examination.”
Cordelia stared at her a moment longer. Then she shook her head, as though she had been in a reverie, or as though she was dismissing Regan, and let her go. She stepped away. “If you want to claim we’re land to him, fine,” she said. “But the land fights back. The land will kill you if you’re not good to it.”
She stood there for a second, glaring at Regan. Regan massaged the place where Cordelia had held her. Cordelia took a breath that seemed to siphon the air from the room, and then she turned and was gone. The door slammed behind her. Regan heard her truck rev to life out front.
♕♕♕
Regan will soon be laying on the ground, the poisoned ground or the ground of her father’s kingdom, and perhaps the two are synonymous. Regan will not think; she will think only of the cramps that wrack her body, only of Goneril standing over her. Goneril, trying half to smile as she holds the knife harsh and bright in her hand. Goneril: Doubly blessed for killing as a woman ought and as a tragedian ought.
Her sister, clean poison dissolving into nothing in the drink. Regan tasted something strange when she first drank of the cup, but still she did not suspect. How could she? She has only ever believed in Goneril.
Regan never believed in her father, not like Cordelia or Goneril did. Cordelia thought Lear was the sun, the doting father, the wise monarch. She could say anything she wanted to him, and he would forgive her. She believed.
And Goneril saw Lear as a storm: Natural, savage, unstoppable. All she had ever been able to do was to brace herself and pray to outlast. There was nothing that could be done to him, nothing that could hurt him. She believed in a vengeful god.
To Regan, Lear was only an old man. Frail from the beginning, selfish, greedy as old men are. He was a man, nothing more, swallowing up his daughters and spitting them out as old women. Swallowing up the land and spitting it out with poison running through it. Gold and paper money infecting the skin of everything he touched until the world was reduced to the profitable and the disposable.
But Goneril is not such a king, and Regan will think—as much as she is able to think with the poison welling up in her—of this fact as she watches her sister raise the dagger to her breast. Goneril is a tragedian, a hero in her way. The arc of her life will stretch out into the eternity that Regan sees as her life flickers away.
She will see her sister on a stage, lit by a bright beam. Noble and unavoidable. Brave as she raises the dagger, tender as she spares a glance for her dying sister. A tragic hero, dying on her own terms. Killing so quietly that no one will think to remark on it for a long time.
No, Goneril is not her father, though she plays the part as well as she plays any. Regan will feel an ache that she recognizes even through the haze of poison. The ache will be made up of the stubborn story that will form once the dagger pierces her. The ache will remember the fact that Goneril will never be remembered like her father, like the young prince of Denmark, like the one-time king of Scotland.
Regan will wish she had the time to tell her sister that she is the better of them. Goneril is all-encompassing: Mother and father, king and queen, sister and daughter, wife and warrior. Goneril is the storm. Goneril is her sister. In her last moments, as Goneril’s blood blooms red over her chest, Regan will find the strength to smile up at her.
♕♕♕
She scrubs. She scrubs and scrubs, until the soap burns; it strips her skin and curves her apart; she keeps scrubbing until it warms. Until she feels it lancing through her. Regan, if she could open her mouth, would speak.
Mother, she wants to say. Mother, the land is not empty and neither are our bodies. We are full of goodness and evil, of blades and poisons, rifles and pesticides. We are full of the children we lost and never had.
Mother, we have never been simple. Mother, we have always been murderers.
Even now, she can feel the weight of the sword in her hand. A wicked woman, especially in her unwomanliness. For women are not meant to kill, not like this. Women kill through poison, women kill for revenge or profit. Women kill themselves.
Women don’t kill in anger or savagery. Women don’t kill with a borrowed sword. Women don’t kill because it must be done. Regan meets her own gaze in the mirror. The servant lies dead on the floor. Her husband lies dying in his chamber. Men are dying all around her. Regan stands, alive and with a pounding heart, as she washes and washes and washes her hands.
Mother, she thinks. I have done what is unforgivable in a woman. I have become the lord of my own fate. I have acted with brutality. Blood stains my own hands—not my husband’s hands, or my children’s hands, or the hands of my father. My own hands before me have hefted the sword.
Mother, forgive me, for I have become what I never intended to. I have become the King.
Regan stands and looks at herself and speaks to the mother she never had. Mother, she says in her mind. It was never nothing. Our lives have never existed in dearth or in lack. I have always been something. Goneril has always been everything. We are both murderers. We are both Kings.
Regan gazes at herself. She realizes that she is smiling. She runs her bloodied, strong hands under the water once more, and then she turns. She feels the weight of the crown on her head.