Poison (35 page)

And chandeliers filled with candles, also reflected over and over until it seems to the hot dancers that the room itself is blazing with stars. Yes! The whole château is on fire, as if comets shoot through the ballroom, making it burn with every incandescence: with velvet and gold, with light and with sound, with improvident whispers and lips made feverish by wine. All this heat growing ever more hot, it set the orange trees on fire. An enchanted fire, which does not consume them, no, but forces them to exude perfume so sweet that it makes everyone drunk—all the princes of the blood and all the princesses, too, they inhale the impossible sweet smell of orange trees that bloom in the dead of winter.

And so each night, every night, even this last night that María is to spend in the somber, guilty kingdom of Spain, where people never dance but only go to everlasting Masses and confessions and penances, where supposed lovers read the most boring
passages from the most boring book, each night she counts the orange trees.

Perhaps the princess is vain, or selfish. But as soon as she came here, to Spain and to Carlos, she knew that she had lost what she wanted, that the life that she had as a girl was the one she desired always, that she had no need of a prince, but only her dreams of a prince. She wanted each day to be filled with the pleasures of a girl, the sweetness of expectation—not fulfillment, because fulfillment brought disappointment, like taking home the bright little bird from the shop in Paris and having it die as it beat its bright wings against a mirror and the illusion of escape.

The body of the queen of Spain shudders. She is breathing slowly, shallowly, and her eyelids shine with unguent. A dozen dozen candles burn, and after the maids leave with their empty basin, Carlos orders that the relics be brought in.

Gold-lidded ossuaries filled with saints’ knuckles. A splinter of the true Cross kept safe in twelve nesting ivory boxes. The blood of Saint Pantaleon, which remains a dry crust inside a vial until each Good Friday, when it miraculously runs red and livid against the glass. The hair of Saint Clare. The hair of Saint Agnes. The hair of Bernadine, Dymphna, Flora and Gertrude. María turns her head to watch as the trunk is unlocked and opened to reveal shining hair of all colors. Hair curling, straight, combed, tangled. Hair plaited, hair held in a ribbon, hair bound with twine, hair however it was—dressed, undressed—when the saint lost her life.

Who is it that shears off the hair of dead saints? the queen wonders. Who comes with scissor, razor, sword? Who pulls it out? Her own hair is more beautiful than any of the holy hair before her, but no one will keep it, for she is no one’s savior. The sacrifice of her life will have meaning for few. In France, her mother will weep.

Persons were poisoned routinely in the Sun King’s court. A godmother, an aunt, two livery boys. María’s own first cousin, Berthe. She remembers how angry Maman was when Berthe was dying. Her mother came into the drawing room at Versailles.
They had been waiting there, she and her brother Henry, for hours. No one had remembered the children, everyone was at Berthe’s side, where children were not allowed. Henry was lying on the carpet before the fire. He writhed and screamed. He tore his hair and made gagging gestures, clutching his throat.

What are you doing!
their mother had said, and she grabbed him and shook him so hard that when she let go, Henry could not stand but dropped to his knees.

I was playing at being poisoned
. Henry was only five, he did not understand that Berthe was dying.

The poisoners of Versailles were without rival for imagination and bold enterprise. They murdered the beautiful princess from Albania. She broke out in sores like chancres all over her face, and at first the court was shocked that a princess of the blood could contract something so vile as the Italian disease. The poor girl died raving in a convent, uselessly protesting her innocence, feeling disgrace more keenly than death. Too late to comfort her, it was discovered that the lining of her ball gloves had been dusted with arsenic. Kid gloves the color of pistachio ice, they were turned inside out and passed on a silver tray, so that all could see where the pink silk linings bore the deadly sparkle of poison. At the funeral, the gloves were set beneath the princess’s catafalque.

After that, slippers or gloves or hats were never left lying about. Ladies-in-waiting were instructed to lock everything up. María remembers watching as maids attended her mother, each with the keys to Henrietta’s wardrobe kept safe in a little reticule worn under her own clothing. When they undressed Maman, María sat in the chair by the window, a little girl of ten, not more. She watched as layers and layers came off. Where, under there, was her mother?

Four maids to lift the dress, like the shell of a sea creature, up over Henrietta’s head. Underneath foamed undergarments, white like her snowy wig. The wig came off last, revealing hair that was curled like little snails against her mother’s scalp, still pink where the comb had drawn and parted. Yes, finally, under all those layers, all the false mothers of silk and of wool and horsehair, the scaffolding of hoops, farthingales, corsets, ruffs,
bustles and busk, there she was: Maman, quite small and pale and soft. The substance of the woman was much less than that of her garments, she was like an oyster stripped of its shell, soft and gray and swimmy, almost transparent. She was never just naked, Marie’s mother, but changing from one incarnation (hostess, dance partner, singer of romantic ballads) to another (overseer, nurse, chatelaine). Under her farthingale, hung from the metal hoops encircling her hips, were little glass vials, like some eccentric decoration, and in the bottom of each was a drop of honey or treacle, something sweet to tempt fleas away from her flesh. They jumped down into the little vials and drowned in the treacle. That was what had made Maman smell so sweet.

HAT ARE YOU THINKING?” I ASKED
.

“Nothing,” Alvaro said. We were lying together.

“But you must be thinking something.”

“No, nothing.”

“No one thinks nothing.”

“I do.”

“So you are empty, then? Just a vessel to be filled with other people’s stories? With mine and everyone else’s? Little sins, big sins? Love, lust, fear, woe. Anger. Proud follies, greedy, wicked—”

“Why do you torment me so!” he said, and he pushed me off.

I sat up, naked. “I want you!” I said. “Why do you not ask me what I am thinking! My thoughts are unremarkable, it’s true. I think of what I ate for supper, or that I need to mend my shift. Things that have nothing to do with God or with heaven or hell or anything else. But I think them nonetheless. They are
my
thoughts,
me
. Do you not want them?

“I think about dragonflies, about the worms in the floorboards, about grease in a pan. Clouds, sheep, door hinges, feather beds. I think of this child I am carrying. I think, Will it be a son or daughter? What will it look like? Should I go to market to buy it a charm? I think I ought to sew more clothes for it, and then I think how it is that I hate to sew and to mend, but sewing for a baby makes it a little better. Then I think perhaps I am going to be less selfish when I have a child, perhaps I will go to market and think only of what I want for my child, and nothing of what I would like for myself.

“I think of all the things at market, of the animals I like to see there. Of that great ox the oil merchant has and how his coat is a red color, redder than any other beast’s I have ever seen and how pretty the animal looks in the sunshine. I think of a cut on
my leg and of how many rows of onions Dolores and I planted last season—fourteen, it was—and perhaps we should plant twenty next year, for this year we hadn’t enough.

“I think of next year. Where shall I be? I think of this year, this month, this day. What is to become of us? I wonder.

“And I want to know the dull things you think, too. I don’t want to know only what it is you think of the books we read or whether or not you believe Ovid was a greater poet than Homer. I don’t care about that! Why do you keep me apart from you!”

He pulled his hand out of mine. “I am tired of words,” he said. “I am tired of words on the page and I am tired of talking. I want you to lie here next to me and be still.”

What is desire? What did I want to see in Alvaro? What did I think might be revealed?

I wanted us to
know
each other. I wanted every wish made plain, every memory given voice. I wanted one vein to empty into another, mine into his, his into mine. I wanted the gristle of our joints, his and mine, mine and his, pounded flat so that I could read what was said there.

What else was there for us? For anyone?

Two months before my confinement, Alvaro was arrested, and it was outside my papa’s door that the Inquisitors left his shoes. His shoes at the door, and his empty cassock hanging from one of our mulberry trees, hanging from a rope so that it blew a little in the wind, twisting like the blackened body of those criminals they string up in the plaza and leave for hawks and dogs.

The rumor was that I had been taken by some shepherd or laborer. I thought that was the rumor. That poor, peculiar Francisca who wandered about as she pleased, who so grieved for her mama that she took none of the precautions that a young woman ought to take, that Francisca had been raped on one of her strange and solitary pilgrimages. I assumed Dolores had done her part to conceal the truth. Not purposefully, not to protect my sins, no, of course not; but there was not one old garrulous widow to whom she had not gone with tales of how impossible I was, how stubborn, how wayward, how willful
and wild. If I was with child, it was no fault of hers, she made that clear.

My sister must have spied on Alvaro and me, and, once she knew what we were up to, gone to the wheelwright. Everyone knew the wheelwright was an informer for the Holy Office. Dolores got some money, then, she must have, enough for a dowry someday. Her treachery would serve her in another way as well, for in the eyes of the Inquisition she had now officially separated herself from me. Later, when suspicion of witchcraft fell on my mother, the Holy Office would judge that Concepción de Luarca had passed her sins along only to the younger of her two daughters.

So Dolores told the wheelwright, and the wheelwright told a Red Hood, and the Red Hood sent a White Hood, and on that last Thursday, when I stayed too late and then returned to Alvaro after nightfall—when we quarreled and then used our bodies to forget our quarrel—someone watched at the window that night. It must have been that night, for it could not have been longer than a day between witness and arrest: no one would allow someone as dangerous as an irreligious priest to go unpunished longer than one setting of the sun. Why, the Devil might come and take the whole town if someone like Alvaro was not punished quickly.

The night they came for him, I had already retired with my sister, my big belly making our bed that much more cramped. We still slept as we did when we were children, back to back, and I do not know that I heard Alvaro’s approach. But I
knew
it. My mind’s eye saw him coming to me, taking the same path through the wood that I had so often traveled to reach his side. The same branches tripping him, tangling in his cassock even as the night before they had snared my own skirts. Out of the wood, then, and stumbling over the furrows in the field that separated him from my papa’s house, the hops field, the last obstacle. The horse would have gained on him there, jumping the ditches where he had to scramble in and out. Perhaps, plunging through dead hops, the horse grew a little intoxicated.

My inner eye saw Alvaro’s approach, and I sat up in bed; and
Dolores sat up, too, and looked at me. She did not ask me, “Francisca, what is it?” for she knew. Of course she did. In her eyes I read my sister’s betrayal. Otherwise, wouldn’t Dolores have asked what troubled me? Was I ill? Was the baby coming? But she already knew what would come to pass that night.

Dolores and I sat together, both of us watching the door. Papa was asleep; he woke only as Alvaro entered. He sat up and looked as the village priest burst into our house and stood before the hearth with his eyes wild, his hair with leaves and sticks in it. Alvaro’s face, always red, was white that night. It made no difference now what he did, his fate was certain, and he came to our bed and he pushed my sister from it. She fell to the floor with a bump, dragging the bedclothes with her, and as he pulled me to my feet by my wrists, she gave such a shriek, as if she had seen the Devil, which I imagine she thought she had.

“Listen!” he said. “I have only a moment before they come. Say nothing to them. I will say I led you astray, I will say I raped you. Do you understand?” He shook me in his adamantness.

I reached out to embrace him, but he shook his head, eluded my hands. There was a crash then, and a horse—lathered and with rags falling from its hooves—came in the door with a White Hood on its back. The beast threw his great black head up, tossing it with his teeth apart; yet no sound came from his throat. So I knew it was true, what they say, the horse’s vocal cords had been slit, lest he give them away. It was terrible to see the great tongue dripping foam, and the beast plunging sideways so that he split the doorframe, and not a sound coming from his throat.