Poison (25 page)

Yes,
She was taken ill at the theater
is the news the courtiers instruct the ministers to convey, but after they are alone together, they eye one another suspiciously, and the word among themselves is
Poison!

“Someone has poisoned the queen!” It is as if the very walls of the palace whisper the words back and forth. Floorboards moan, staircases shudder under the lightest tread, and the heavy draperies hang more disconsolately than ever.

After she quits the clot of alarmed observers around the queen’s bed, Marianna keeps to her chamber until the next morning. In a panic, Carlos summons his confessor, the cloak of Saint Eulalia and the bell jar under whose glass is preserved the last gasp of Benedict, patron saint of poison sufferers, a breath exhaled between seizures caused by mercury and trapped under glass in the year of our Lord 543. So crazed with cracks is the glass bell that any soul less credulous than Carlos might suspect that holy Benedict’s last gasp has ascended to a more rarefied atmosphere than that of the royal reliquary. But Benedict’s last exhalation is one of the prizes of Carlos’s collection, even though today it does little to calm him.

The king vomits from fear, and then, further frightened that he too has been poisoned, commands that a special Mass be said while the basin of his half-digested breakfast is sent down to Dr. Severo in his laboratory. There it takes its place among basins of the queen’s, already undergoing examination for malign chemical agents.

María Luisa’s maids change her nightdress yet again. The almond oil does nothing for the retching. It has gone on all night. What can stop it? It is like the action of some terrible regret.
Regret not of one meal, one dose of poison, but of an entire life.

She retches and retches. She is ill enough that she is out of her head with her sickness. Her bedchamber, her curtains, her hairbrush and water glass and the rings upon her fingers, they are all less real to her than her dreams. When the spasms of nausea abate, her mind returns again and again to the woods.

Beyond the Sun King’s lake, beyond the ordered, barbered trees are woods, and in her bed, with its two mattresses of batting and one of feathers, María Luisa dreams of riding trails. Of willow trees in new pale leaf, stone cottages and daffodils, tulips, clematis, the wet branches of a peach tree, so dark they look black. Pink blossoms against a bank of dark clouds with the sun bright silver behind them. The smell of the earth in her nose as her horse’s hooves tore into the wet ground. What was the name of that first little horse? The one only twelve hands high? Lucie? Yes, Lucie. Lucie with the funny, bouncing gait. Her trot was like the rocking of a nursery’s toy horse.

The night her cousin Berthe died, all the fires in the château went out. Berthe had been poisoned, a certified case. When they opened her up, her liver was white.

Is my liver turning colors?
the queen wonders. But she cannot think about that. Think about something else, think about something pleasant. She’ll think about Lucie, her little mare of long ago. Not of riding sidesaddle as she had been forced to do in Spain, where she was not allowed to have her legs parted, open and astride an animal, but was trussed up in a heavy habit of velvet, complete with plumed hat and gloves to the elbow. No, she’ll dream of riding in boy’s breeches on a real saddle. Of France. Of lingering at the stable after her ride and watching as the livery boys lifted her saddle from the pretty chestnut back. Underneath, Lucie’s coat would be dark with sweat, a silhouette of the princess’s saddle drawn on the animal’s back.

EVERO IS NOT AN UNSOPHISTICATED MAN. HIS
degree—purchased from the University of Leyden after five weeks of study, the vellum scroll signed by the great scientist and physician Sylvius, and bearing engravings of Hippocrates, Bacon and Paracelsus—guaranteed that he had been tutored at great expense in various arts of medicine: mucus analysis, glandular function, ferments and gases, advanced underwater chirurgical techniques to prevent sepsis from the contact between organs and parasites borne on air currents. It said that he knew the use of the Huygens Calidometer, whose long tube of glass—its case as tall as Severo himself—bore a serpent of volatile mercury far more exact in its measurement of temperature than any human hand. That he had mastered atomism, mercury fumigations for skin ills (both venereal and allergic), Harvey’s findings on the movements of the heart, Fallopio’s circulation theories and his investigations into secret female parts, as well as all the many branches of iatrochemistry. That he was well versed in the art of cautery, and could use a heated knife blade to staunch hemorrhage and to cure hernias, migraines and gangrenous furuncles. That he was an alchemist, and though he had not yet turned lead into gold, he had had as much success in the endeavor as any other great thinker.

In Leyden, Severo witnessed chirurgical procedures to correct such congenital misfortunes as a cleft palate, an eleven-toed foot and one unfortunate child’s arrival without an anus. He saw broken heads put back together and whole ones taken apart. The procedures were largely unsuccessful in that none of the patients survived more than a fortnight, but as the infirm were all volunteered from Dutch prisons and asylums (and either came to Leyden while still living or died in their cells and came as cadavers), it was no loss to society, and the sawmanship and
stitching techniques were unparalleled. Severo also learned of many new places from which to take blood, places that doctors in the low countries of Spain and Italy had never tried. Why, as it turned out, you could get a good deal of blood from almost any part of the body, and Severo came home from Leyden with a chart of forty-seven of those locations.

At the lecture halls, Severo attended a two-day congress on the values of bleeding from the side of the disorder versus bleeding from the healthy side, and a series of dinner talks by Francis Glisson himself comparing the benefits of emetic purges and cupping to those of fomentations and enemas. He stood until he grew faint in the great anatomical theater where the cream of Netherlands society came to picnic, drawing from their hampers cold joints and soft-crusted loaves of yellow bread, and drinking champagne as they watched the correction of a harelip or the transfer of blood from a sheep to a prisoner, whose own body had been nearly emptied of its sanguinary fluids that it might accommodate the beast’s. He saw the removal of a live baby from its dead mother’s belly; he saw a hundred kidneys preserved in vinegar. He watched a heart beat outside its body for whole minutes; and, on no less than seventeen volunteers, he improved his technique for repairing hernias until he could accomplish the procedure in under a quarter of an hour without sacrificing either testicle. Yes, Leyden had an undeniably reputable program, with peerless teachers and scientists. And, for a foreign collective of learning, it was very particular, excluding as it did unconverted Jews, the sons of hangmen and all bastards, even those of noble birth.

At the end of these varied and exciting colloquia, Severo went home to Spain, but not before he visited Leeuwenhoek’s workshop in Delft, where he purchased one of the great man’s microscopes, a tiered contraption of no fewer than ten lenses, which used a new screw method of focus—no more old-fashioned draw-tubes—to provide magnification of three hundred and seventy times the power of the naked eye. The microscope offered surprises: that minuscule worms wriggled in blood, that muscles were made of bundles of hair, that Severo’s own toenails provided generous accommodation for no less than thirteen
different organisms, five rooted like a tiny garden, and eight capable of independent locomotion. As far as the doctor could judge, these were all revelations that the eye, mind and imagination together would never have been able to forge. And for no extra charge—for the microscope had literally cost a king’s ransom—Leeuwenhoek gave Severo a marvelously ingenious spring-loaded knife that dived into gum boils and abscessed wounds before the patient ever had a chance to see it, much less cringe.

When he slept, Severo often dreamed of the Netherlands, where he had learned all he needed, bought all he wanted and had dined exceptionally well. He could still taste those beguiling little cheeses the Dutch served for breakfast; and, though it was well known that strong-brewed coffee thinned the blood, he still missed the Dutch blend he had sampled some twenty years ago.

Carlos’s father, King Philip, paid for Severo’s passage to Leyden in 1665, and for his degree, in hopes that the young doctor would learn something to arrest the gouty necrosis that had already crept from Philip’s toe, on up his ankle, and from there to his shin. And, too, Marianna, then queen, had hoped there were Dutch wisdoms that might safeguard the health of her son, at eight years of age still spindly in his wet nurse’s arms, still unable to stand. (About to be in
my mama
’s arms! About to take what was mine!)

Alas, Philip expired before Severo had even crossed the border into France, and though the doctor made inquiries of every teacher he met, there were no known cures for any of Prince Carlos’s ailments. Once home, Severo tried mercury fumigations, once each season, but each time he worried that the child would choke to death, and—to poor Mama’s dismay: “The pain is very bad,” said one of her letters—his wet nurse’s nipples broke out in blisters.

Now, years later, Carlos having survived countless ills and treatments, Severo is having little better success in treating the king’s bride. With his microscope the doctor searches in her vomit for one of two suspects: an invading organism, which, according to one text, looks like a bent, furred stick, and which would support his first diagnosis of cholera morbus, or some
toxic substance, which might not look like anything he could recognize.

By now, basins and basins of María’s vomit have been analyzed. From basin number one, Severo heated the fetid liquid and skimmed the fatty substance off the surface. Inspection of this, through the stacked Leeuwenhoeken lenses, revealed it to be the remains of the sweet almond oil he had himself prescribed to quell her retching.

Severo then distilled the contents of basins two through four, yielding a quantity of putrid-smelling water, but nothing he added to this distillate told him anything he needed to know. Sulpheride made it stink all the more. He sprinkled in copper oxides, and it turned a pretty blue. Jasper made it red. He went on to stain it all the colors of a cathedral’s windows, and made his laboratory look like an artisan’s workshop, all without learning a thing. Of the remaining basins (allowed to stand for four, six, eight and twelve hours) none had yielded any precipitate.

Even more confounding, María Luisa’s bodily acids have an unexpected effect on the medicaments he prescribes. Mithridatic administered in a base of clear, raw egg white comes up literally white, as if she has cooked it internally. What is more, her tongue is peeling as though blistered, and likewise her gums, thin ribbons of flesh hanging. Her pulse is so erratic that it eludes his fingers like leaves before a wind. And as soon as her breathing settles into a quiet, regular cadence, it devolves into rasping, gasping and choking. Clear fluid drips from her nose.

If only the University of Leyden had offered a curriculum in poisonings. But that would have been impossibly vulgar. Only an Italian college would present such scandal.

Dr. Severo dips two fingers into the contents of one of the standing basins. He rubs them together, noting the thick and almost oily quality, the tarry color. It reminds him, suddenly, of his dinner two nights ago. Of that dish the cook prepares but once each month. Of the queen mother’s favorite dish, and of the one Carlos does not like to even see on his table. The one meal which some look forward to and others dread. It reminds Severo of blood pudding. It reminds him of blood. The acidic
humors of the stomach could render blood dark and foul and viscous, could they not?

Dr. Severo sends his assistant to request a special evening audience with the king and queen mother. “Her Highness is vomiting blood,” he tells them.

“Blood!” says Marianna.

“Blood?” Carlos looks back and forth between the doctor and his mother. He is confused.

“Blood,” Severo responds with a conviction he does not feel. But he must provide some definite diagnosis of the queen’s ailment. If it progresses as it has, the queen will die. He must take some decisive action. He clears his throat. “Either Her Highness has a surfeit of the sanguinary humors, or some toxic agent has settled into her circulation.”

“Toxic?” asks Marianna. “There
is
a poison?”

“Perhaps. Analyses are in progress.”

“Then María does not suffer from germ agents inside her?” Carlos says.

“Your Highness,” Severo says, and to prevent further questions, he pauses to collect vocabulary that the king will not be able to understand. He clears his throat again. “Palpation has not yielded the discovery of any petrification that might indicate a septic inflammation of the viscera,” the doctor says.

Carlos nods, frowns. His features fall into the practiced expression of simulated concern that he uses each morning when he listens to various ministers’ reports. Marianna frowns as well, says nothing. When the silence grows uncomfortable, Severo continues.