Poison (14 page)

And, too, there was the embarrassment of the queen’s occasional falls, induced by laudanum. Encouraged by the contents of the little blue vial, María had perfected the trick of sleeping
with eyes open through most ceremonies; she nodded and gestured automatically at appropriate points. But the cost was that on occasion she had tripped, stumbled, fallen.

On this day, just as she was beginning to laugh—she felt that happy—just a few lengths past the middle of the meadow where the sun had seemed to blaze so brightly, María lost control of Rocinante. Afterward it seemed to her that the saddle had slipped; perhaps its girth had been left too loose—perhaps, as Eduardo had warned, someone did intend her harm. Or perhaps, as the dwarf had also observed, the laudanum made her a less attentive horsewoman than a spirited mount required.

Rocinante tossed his head and skittered sideways. The queen lost one rein, pulled hard on the other, but the horse did not recognize the clumsy gesture as his mistress’s attempt to slow him down. He began to gallop. Young and—though castrated before he grew mean—excitable, Rocinante’s whinny issued from deep inside his lovely, glossy throat and made a sort of laughter. Once out of the stable and off the palace grounds, this horse danced on his hooves; around obstacles and over logs, his shoes made music on the stones. He was inclined to jump, it is true, but he rarely took a step that was not conscious of his rider. His only failing was a fear of snakes, at whose sight he would lose his head, skitter and bolt.

María jerked the rein again, she tugged it as hard as she could. Confused at having his mouth pulled in such a rude manner, Rocinante reared. Or perhaps he lost his footing. Or he saw a twisted stick, something that looked like a serpent. Whatever the cause, and no one could ask him, he reared and then stumbled, going all the way up and then all the way down—down on his knees, as if in sudden bestial prayer. María fell forward, an undignified slide off the sidesaddle and down his neck onto the ground. She was not able to rise. Her stays were laced so tightly she could hardly breathe, let alone move, and she remained on the ground until her maids and footman caught up with her and helped her to stand.

Rocinante, having cantered off toward a hillock, came back, ears pricked good-naturedly forward, and María took his reins. At her direction, one of the maids checked the girth, which was
a bit loose, but not enough, really, to indicate any intended harm to the rider.

The queen stood with her cheek resting against the surcingle, breathing as deeply as her corset and tight habit allowed. The sky refused to move back to its rightful position; to her eyes, it tilted and threatened to push the trees into the lake. Her side hurt so that she was afraid she could not remount, and she asked that her footman excuse her and her maids, so that they might get her out of her habit. As they unlaced her, María leaned panting against her horse’s wet hide, and his smell filled her head. The intimate perfume of the horse, so familiar and evocative of her childhood, of a past of no worries and only bright expectation made her cry with sudden and unexpected vehemence.

The footman cantered off to the stable on horseback and returned with a carriage to collect María and her maids from the fields. The vehicle’s wheels jolted back to the palace over grass and clods of dirt. With each bump the queen’s side pained her sharply.

Severo examined Maria in her apartments and diagnosed a fractured rib. To Carlos, he recommended that the queen have bed rest and, he regretted to say, a period of abstinence from marital intimacies of not less than eight weeks.

“If God had intended woman to go about on four legs, He would have given her as many,” Marianna remarked at dinner, an observation that was unoriginal, even for her.

“Severo says that some fresh air is necessary for health and, uh, fertility,” Carlos said.

“Then let her walk, when she is able,” his mother replied.

In the stable, the groom, Ignacio, finished bandaging Rocinante’s legs. He stroked the horse’s nose, and the pretty beast nickered and thrust his velvet-soft lips with their surprising prickle of whiskers into Ignacio’s neck. “Stop!” the groom said, laughing at the feeling, but his tone grew somber. “You are in trouble, my friend,” he said, his hand on the horse’s warm neck. Rocinante turned to him. His long eyelashes trembled as if he understood the groom’s words.

The next morning, after Mass and an hour in private with his
confessor, Carlos proclaimed, by royal decree, that the accident was all the fault of the horse. By then, Ignacio was removing the bandages and fetching his boot grease. He began to erase the white blaze and stockings from the horse’s coat, working the dark stain of walnut oil into the hairs, rubbing and rubbing. There were fifty-three horses in the royal stable, only four of which had white stockings. Soon, thought Ignacio, only three would be so distinctively marked. But he was interrupted in his work by the arrival of the king’s page.

On the second day after her fall the queen was still in a great deal of pain, enough that Severo had prescribed a tincture of opium much stronger than that of the laudanum the dwarfs received. María felt herself floating pleasantly above her bed. Her side hurt her fiercely, but this struck her as unimportant. Even the fact that she could not get with child—the great vortex of worry and sorrow and shame that swallowed up more and more of her life—seemed less dire than usual. She wondered if she could claim some chronic distress that would merit infinite opium treatments.

She got a double dose after the groom came with Rocinante’s tail. And then she got another half dose on top of that—for only then did they manage to unwind her horse’s tail from her hand, unwind it in spite of fingers that clung so tightly that the coarse hair cut into her soft white flesh. The opium did nothing, however, to stop the queen from screaming. She screamed until every last soul in the royal residence made his or her way as far from her apartments as possible, until pious Marianna began to blaspheme and Carlos to cry; until the chickens stopped laying; until cats scratched their skins and dogs chewed their paws; until the desperate cook plugged his ears with gobs of cold lard that melted down his collar; until one wet nurse lost her milk and was dismissed and another quit outright, saying not all the gold in Spain could make her stay.

María screamed until nightfall, until she had no voice, until Severo was ordered to overdose her into silence.

“Why?” she begged her maid the next morning, her voice ragged, almost unrecognizable. “Oh, please, why would anyone do such a thing? Do they want to kill me?”

“It was His Highness,” said Obdulia, wringing her hands and straightening the bedclothes in one confused gesture. She bit her lip. “He decreed that the horse that had thrown the queen be destroyed. It was his order on the day after you fell. He suggested that Ignacio bring the tail to you, Your Highness, that you might know your accident was avenged.” The little maid tried to grasp María’s hand to stroke it, but her mistress pulled away.

Now there is one less reason to try, the queen thought, now there was one less pleasure to make her lonely life bearable.

She said this to her maid—she said it standing in her bed, her legs tangled in the counterpane. She said it with her face swollen with weeping, and with one hand holding her broken rib, the other bandaged where Rocinante’s tail had cut it. She said: “Between me and them, between this French queen and her Spanish persecutors, there is a war.” She said it in French,
la guerre
.

She stopped crying and began to laugh, a high, horrible, hysterical, gasping laugh. “I declare this war and I declare that I would rather be dead than capitulate to such monsters as would murder my horse,” she said. And then she fell back into her bedclothes, weeping and laughing at once.

It is true that my countrymen do not easily tolerate the vision of any woman astride a horse, and certainly not their queen, the princess who learned to sit a horse at seven. Riding through the woods of Versailles. Snowdrops and muguets just emerging from the earth like patches of spring snow yet to melt, the blossoms of a thousand cherry trees raining down, pink and fragrant like the tears of cherubs. Sometimes hail was falling; it bounced off the slate roofs of the château, and Marie could not go out but was trapped inside, a girl wandering the long halls. There were bowls of wooden fruit with skins of gold foil, and she liked to leave the mark of her teeth upon an inedible pear or peach. Chairs the color of pistachio ice, vast carpets of chartreuse silk, a red and purple counterpane, and endless galleries of mirrors, mullioned windows throwing light into their depths. The whole château ate light, drank light. Her uncle, the Sun King, beamed within.

There were seven galleries between the dancing master’s studio and her mother’s apartments, and she ran through them, stopping suddenly to slide on the kid soles of her slippers, sliding through the bars of light falling on the warm wood floors. The light was pink in France, or so it seems to her now. The green gardens were laid out under pink curtains of light. Why, the very sun had shone at the command of the French king. All planets revolved around the sun, the first lesson in her study of natural science, and all the world revolved around Louis XIV, also a lesson for a neophyte, for even his swans, gliding clockwise around the looking-glass lake, knew that Louis was the prime mover, the mainspring of the vast clock that was France in the new era of so-called Reason, the age that marched witches to the gallows, one a week or more.

And the witches, they too became part of the movement of the terrible clock. Their legs swung like pendulums back and forth above crowds cheering their death. Marie went to hangings, everyone did. After the fêtes, after dinners and dances and the latest drama from Racine, a hanging was the best entertainment. Marie and the other princesses begged bouquets of mugwort and marigold and angelica from the gardener.

“Very fine against witches!” Monsieur Clément said. “And make sure to get some thistles!” he called after them. “And here is a bit of purslane for your carriage!” They threw their bouquets on the gallows. If it is true what they say, that yellow flowers trouble those who practice dark arts, then perhaps before they swung, the witches trembled.

María was not so amused by the public sentencings in Madrid. Even the last and grandest of them—the next and last celebration at which we were both in attendance, the queen and I—did not appear to please her. Of course the smell of a score of heretics burning is not so festive, I imagine, as the jaunty tick-tock of a pair of wicked ankles.

The grand auto-da-fé, now three years past, on the twenty-first day of what was the hottest June in memory, Saint Paul’s feast day, began at dawn and continued late into the night of that longest day of the year. Heretics were collected from the whole of Spain for sentencing and the humiliation of public
punishment. Jews, witches, bigamists. Harlots, adulterers, blasphemers. Simoniacs, panderers, falsifiers. The prisons of Madrid and nearby Toledo were packed with sinners, but not enough of the most flagrant and spectacular transgressors for this display, so more and more were dragged to the capital from every wretched corner of the country. From dank prisons in Seville, from the infamous floating asylum off the coast of Málaga, from salt mines in Badajoz and from the dungeons under the Alhambra. Miserable, ragged corps of the damned, made more miserable still by weeks of travel in tumbrels, packed in like sheep bound for the butchers’ stalls. Those who died en route were fortunate.

On the twenty-first day of June, the sun blazed with a febrile intensity that well represented the rabid, nay-saying apostle Paul. Lengths and lengths of crimson damask draped the outdoor theater and its piled balconies. A full eight sagged with ladies-in-waiting, another ten groaned under grandees, and the scores of hidalgos were packed so tightly into their observation galleries that they had to stand rather than sit. Everyone sweated in costumes made heavy with a holy brocade of religious symbols stitched one upon another. The Inquisitor General sat in his chair above them all.

Having been arrested a month prior to the grand auto, I was held until that date in a relatively spacious chamber of the same underground prison I inhabit today. There were sixteen of us witches in the one locked room, shackled ankle to ankle in the dark. Whispered introductions revealed that we were, in sum, six midwives, two wet nurses, five sluts and three crazy widows. So here you have an accounting of the dark arts: birthing babies, suckling babies, fornicating and going mad. Of course there were witnesses against us all, those who attested under oath that we had bewitched their cattle, that they had seen our faces burning in the fires on their hearths, that they had taken fits when they crossed our paths or that droughts had begun when we moved to town. They did not lie, no, they believed absolutely the words they spoke against us.

Upon arrest we were stripped by White Hoods and our bodies were then searched for Devil’s teats, which, not surprisingly, we
all were found to have. I stopped struggling against such profane inspection when I understood that the White Hoods would sooner break my arms and legs and neck than let me go without searching every fold of my skin, looking for that hidden nipple where every witch is said to give suck to her master, the prince of dark arts. My knees were forced apart by a special brace they have for that purpose. For that or for any other reason a man might have for keeping a woman’s legs spread.

“That is no tit!” I said, uselessly. The White Hood had pried open the flesh of my secret parts with the toe of his boot, he would not touch me with his hands. The scribe stepped forward with a lantern, he shined it on me, he wrote down what he saw.

For the auto, we witches were robed in our underground chamber while it was yet nighttime, and breakfasted in the night, too—lest we faint and spoil the procession. A piece of soft black bread smeared with goose grease, a big piece for each of us. We were led from our temporary cell before the bells rang lauds, ascending a wet stone staircase to reach a triple-gated door between two shops, a baker’s and a casket maker’s—two businesses whose services might have complemented the prison’s, had anyone, any average citizen, any common baker or funeral master, known what lay beyond and below the gates.