Poison (22 page)

The comtesse’s personality, too, was as changeable as the shifting pigment of those tiny lizards that creep from leaf to petal, going green to pink to green again. With the prince de Conti, Olympe was brazen and loud and adored playing cards. With his consumptive, bookish cousin, the duc Charles, she became an intellectual, volumes of philosophy slipping from between
the folds of her skirts. Her skills at self-alchemy made Olympe de Soissons a great social success.

As for her clothes, the money spent on them might have dressed all of Quintanapalla, spring, summer, fall and winter. Her skirts were the widest in the land. At a masked ball in Paris everyone joked about what might transpire beneath such dresses, for the comtesse de Soissons favored hoops so extreme that her skirts were like tents. After Olympe had sacked her the previous season, the maid who used to dress her at Versailles told that the comtesse’s skirts were wide enough that they required three extra lengths of silk, and that her mistress easily hid one lover beneath them while answering the door for another.

And, what was more, her clothes did not always stay on, the maid said. She had once removed all her garments, even her pantaloons, at the premiere of an opera by Quinault and Lully. This was before King Louis had thrown her over, and when he had taken up with the star of
Proserpine
, who was singing on that evening of the comtesse’s disrobing. Before the arrival of a gendarme, Olympe was assured that every opera glass in the house was trained on her, and that talk was so loud no one heard the sweet soprano of Juliette Mérival.

When the fascinating Olympe de Soissons arrived in Madrid, the situation she found there was hardly more congenial than that in the Paris court, which had just expelled her.

“Why, what on earth has happened!” she said when she greeted her old playmate Marie. For the queen was in a very nervous condition, one that she said she could not explain until later, when they might be assured of privacy, and when no one would frown at their speaking in French.

Clearly everyone was out of humor. Maids burst into tears at any provocation, and meals were so strained as to cause dyspepsia. When at last they appeared at the same dinner, Carlos and María sat at opposite ends of the long dining table; and the queen mother, forever dressed in her black habit, sat at Carlos’s end. The king and queen and queen mother and their guests were outnumbered two to one by the corps of tasters. When dinner was served, plates were passed and traded until the food grew cold.

Carlos, María Luisa, Marianna, the comtesse Olympe, the French minister Rébenac, along with Vasco da Melo, a Portuguese alchemist visiting from Lisbon, and the Austrian minister, Von Richsberger, watched as eight men and seven women gingerly lifted their spoons to their lips and swallowed. They waited until grease congealed on their plates and until the sauces separated into their components. When no one gagged or grew faint, then Carlos began, and Marianna undid her corset and she, too, began to eat.

Fear destroyed the queen’s appetite. Each day she awaited some word from Carlos or from his mother, each day she awaited a summons to the audience chamber and there a formal response to her scandalous attempt to dupe an entire empire. But there was nothing. For a week she kept herself buoyed by the hope that she would be returned, in disgrace, to France. She wrote letter after letter to her uncle, King Louis, to her mother, to her brother, to anyone who might be able to help her. She entrusted these to Rébenac, but he returned them to her, saying that it would be best for her to wait.

“
Assez! Ça suffit!
” he observed. “You have done quite enough. Now let us see how much I can undo.”

But Rébenac had had nothing to report for over a week, and so nervous was the queen that she found herself unable to eat in the company of Carlos and his mother. She pushed her eggs around on her plate. Carlos sipped milk from his cup, milk that after it was collected from the wet nurses had been taken to the kitchen and boiled on the stove for twenty-four minutes precisely, twelve rotations of the sandglass and no more, no less. Cooled to room temperature, strained with a cheesecloth, served in a goblet.

The king, to whom common folk ascribe magical powers, to whom lepers pray and whose carriage is mobbed and touched that some power might rub off it, the king has no magic in him, not even the workaday alchemy of a healthy body. He is afraid of illness, of illness and poverty, of woods and horses, of choking and of being poisoned. But, after all, everyone in every court is afraid of being poisoned. Why, the office of taster is the one profession whose ranks swell and whose salary increases.

Long before the palace’s staircase was baptized with pig’s blood, King Carlos had been afraid of stairs, and of dwarfs. He had dreaded any celestial manifestation. Now, afraid of his wife, as well, the untimely appearance of a comet in the week after Eduardo was apprehended caused him to shut himself in his apartments and hide under the cloak of Saint John of Ortega. He wrapped his belly in the hair shirt of Saint Inés and piled manuscripts—copies made by monks of Saint Teresa’s reflections—around his bed, the same in which his father and his father’s father died, their bedclothes turned to winding-sheets before they breathed their last. The comet passed on, it singed the sky with its angry tail, and Carlos lay upon his grandfather’s bed and asked that God please spare him. That even if María had so displeased the heavens that an angry bullet had shot out of the sky, God must know that Carlos had had no part in his wife’s offense.

“What shall I do?” he prayed over and over. And when God forbore to suggest any discipline for a treacherous queen, Carlos decided to leave the whole mess in his mother’s capable hands.

Marianna looked across the dinner table at the various guests. Since Olympe’s arrival in Spain, the wanton comtesse and María had spent many afternoons together. If Olympe did not actually accompany her daughter-in-law on her walk, then María would return from the royal park and go directly into the comtesse’s sitting room on the third story. They drank chocolate together, and maids reported that the comtesse would send all servants away so the two of them could speak French without anyone frowning. She was a fast piece of baggage, that Olympe.

The royal marriage would have to be dissolved, somehow. Von Richsberger, who had arrived just last week in the midst of the disgraceful scandal ensuing from the capture on the stairs, had brought with him several miniatures of the princess Anastasia, who, ill-favored as she was, was the only unwed princess in all Europe.
Marriageable
seemed like flattery, but she would have to suffice. The subsequent alliance of Spain and Marianna’s homeland, even if not the long-wished-for reforging of the Hapsburgs, might make a dynasty strong enough that
Austria and Spain together could someday rout King Louis, shove the Sun King’s prepossessing light under a barrel.

A dangerous person like that Portuguese alchemist Vasco da Melo, who claimed he could revive dead birds with silver salts, might be useful. In Lisbon, da Melo had built up a thriving business in harmonizing incompatible marriages by transfusion. He sucked the blood out of the quarrelsome husband and piped it into the testy wife, and vice versa. In this way, if they did not die, they stopped arguing. Da Melo’s Spanish was not understandable. He seemed to think Portuguese should be good enough, and he hollered all his comments as if amplification could correct for whatever differences there were between his native tongue and Spanish. Then he waited, blinking, for a response. He did not seem even to realize he was eating at a king’s table, so bumptious was he. But if he did not do them all in accidentally, if he did not blow up the palace, he might be useful.

Despite the diversion of the visit from her old friend, the queen did look miserable, almost as miserable as she should look, thought Marianna. Maids reported that she was suffering nightmares and slept almost as little as she ate.

In truth, fear had seeped into María’s bones like a chill. She complained all the time that she was cold and talked of her hair, which used to lie over her like a warm cloak in the days before she was forced to wear it up on top of her aching head. How her head ached, how it ached all the time, she said, and she stared out the windows and talked of the fires in France.

Of smoke spiraling, twisting, dancing heavenward from all the château’s chimneys, a fire burning in every hearth. Each long, long evening after dinner, María Luisa sat in her cold apartments with Olympe and the dwarf. Eduardo listened as aloud the queen remembered happier times. Imagine: almost seventy fires constantly burning in the French palace. And enough servants to tend them, making sure that they never burned low.

HAT WERE THE NINE DREAMS THAT MY MAMA
dreamed on the last night of her life? I try to think of what they might have been. A mother’s waking dreams are not hard to guess. She wants at least nine good things for her children, she wants nine hundred. But what does she dream while she is sleeping?

Nine is not an unlucky number; it isn’t nineteen. Or thirty-nine. Once I made a study of such matters. After Mama died, and then Natalia, I became fearful as I had never been before. I made the sign of the cross on myself often, and I turned around twice to the left and once to the right before walking over the threshold and entering our house. To go out, the reverse: once to the left, twice to the right. Even though she was not without superstition herself, Dolores slapped me whenever she caught me in these actions; she did whatever she could to make my life more miserable.

My sister was always bossy, but she became more so after Mama died. She took advantage of my unhappiness, which was so great that I could not even begin to defend myself, and she was always telling me what to do and treating me for ailments she said I had. For melancholy she had me drink only rainwater. She fed me capers against worms and celery for headaches. I could have no rabbit or chestnuts or cheese, and the quantity of fennel that I swallowed for my eyes delayed my monthly flow so that I believed I should never get it. I ate quince and sycamore and pomegranate until I suffered continually from colic and the flux, and until I stayed abroad at all hours, preferring not to eat at all to being fed by my sister.

Dolores would tie me to Papa’s big bed, she would tie my hands to the post. I could have gotten away if I had wanted to, but I was too proud, so I would close my eyes and dream,
whether or not I was asleep. Especially on rainy days; it seemed Dolores was forever tying me up when it rained, maybe because she did not want to have to go looking for me in the wet. The streets of Quintanapalla were not paved, most of them, and when the rain came, it came all at once and made holes where you could not see them. You would be walking along the wet road and your leg would suddenly disappear up to the knee in what looked like a regular, shallow puddle.

From where I was tied to the bed I could see the rain at the door, see how it made all the world a slippery, undulating sea, and hear it come down on the roof. It was peaceful and solemn, and it smelled like trees, instead of the old smells of fire and of food we had eaten the night before. It sounded, of course, like the silkworms eating, and that sound made it easier for me to dream, to believe that Mama had never gone away and that my grandfather was still among us—and that I was yet a child imagining illustrious fates for the work of our worms.

When people sleep and dream, their spirits wander afield while their bodies rest, and the trick of dreaming while awake is not so different. With my eyes closed, breathing in the rain, I dreamed that our house had six windows made of glass like the house Natalia had lived in. I dreamed we were both angels now and that we were in a glass box together all wrapped up in white cloths like those they had put around Natalia’s wrists. Our mamas and papas took us to the shrine, and there were many people there, as at a big feast day, and all we could see was the backs of people’s heads. And then bells began to ring and the glass casket burst open and all the little cloths like magic began unwinding from our arms and legs and stomachs. When we were unwrapped we were naked, but our skin was gold like the angels in the great cathedral, gold like El Dorado’s, and we flew up above everyone else, not with wings, but like Saint Teresa made buoyant by prayer. I looked down at Mama’s mouth open in astonishment. But then I could not see her anymore, for we were over great smoking clouds of incense and all we heard was people’s voices, Mama’s among them, saying,
Angelitas!

When I opened my eyes, Dolores would be shaking me. Sometimes my sister said she had shaken me for an hour, and then she
was angry and slapped me, but I didn’t care. I could always escape her in my dreams. I did not dislike her any less than when Mama was alive and I felt she stole some love that would otherwise have been mine. No, now that death had proved Mama’s love to be finite, I begrudged even more whatever Dolores had gotten of it. When we spoke we spoke of nothing but chores, of a dirty plate left on the table, of how much I should give the baker for a loaf. “And no more!” she’d say, pushing me out of the house. We never talked of what was in our hearts.