Poison (40 page)

Later, as we walked back through the elder trees with our baskets filled, as I walked dreaming of what my work might earn for me—a toy, a handful of sweets, a velvet ribbon—one of the pretty beetles lit on Dolores’s skirt. It folded its trembling glassy wings under its shell. She brushed it off. “Oh!” she said. Her fingertip burned where she had touched it, burned and burned until a blister appeared, its fragile skin lifting over a clear fluid. Dolores held the finger out stiffly as we walked. When we came home, Mama looked at the finger and put a salve on Dolores’s hand and bound it up with a bit of cloth.

“Do not handle blister beetles,” she said. “Never touch them.” She gave Dolores a tea of thistle and horehound and put her to bed, her hand wrapped and stinging. A few days later the skin on my sister’s finger peeled off and left it raw.

It is said that in the heat of the day, blister beetles will fly at your eyes and blind you. They are gathered only at first sunrise, when there is enough light to see them but they will not fly from the branches. The women who collect the beetles shake them loose without touching them. When they have enough of them in the winding-sheets they carry, they roll the fabric tight and carry it rolled back to their homes. They leave the insects bound up in the sheet for a week, and when they undo it, the beetles are dead. They dry them in an oven, still without handling them and crush their dried bodies to powder. They use pestles to do it, the beetle harvesters: they grind the legs and shells and heads and wings together until all that is left is a black, acrid dust.

Cantharidian powder. Sticky, stinging, darkly iridescent, it is sold at the apothecary market. Buyers pay a good deal for it—as much as a ducado for an ounce—and they dissolve it in spirits of wine. The resulting tincture is bottled in vials so small they hold no more than a spoonful. People in Madrid call it passion fly. In Paris they ask for Spanish fly. When Papa took us to market we saw the little bottles lined up at the perfumer’s, between aloes and clove oil at the spice trader’s and at the barber’s counter, among the soaps and salves.

A gentleman comes in, he buys one—nine times out of ten it is a man who makes the purchase. Later, at his lodgings, he makes up a wash: a toilet water for his lady love’s nether parts. So diluted, one drop dispersed through the contents of a hundred-dram bottle, it causes no blister, no burning, just a pleasant warming of the flesh, a little inflammation easily confused with that of desire.

One drop, one drop diluted in a wash and dribbled over a woman’s secret parts: an aphrodisiac. Two drops taken by mouth, in a glass of wine or in any medium that would mask its bite—a dose of laudanum would do—a deadly poison.

The queen mother stands so near María’s bed that the queen can smell the glycerin Marianna uses as she sews, the pungent, slippery jelly into which she dips her middle finger and anoints her thread. The smell, at once sweet and acrid, is familiar to the queen—she smelled it for the first time just recently, but it takes her a moment to remember when.

Eduardo’s hands had smelled of glycerin. They smelled of it the night the queen went to the theater with Olympe, the night she was taken ill. The queen and her dwarf met as María was getting into her carriage.

“I hear it is a remarkably tedious production,” Eduardo said, and discreetly he showed her a new vial of laudanum in his palm. Accepting it, María gave his hand a quick kiss.

“Is that a new pomade?” she said, making a face at the scent: sharp, sweet. “You need a better perfumer,” she teased. But Eduardo did not respond, and she thought no more about it until now.

For Eduardo’s hand to bear the smell of glycerin, it would have had to touch Marianna’s. Not merely touched but grasped and wrung it. Taken something from her pungent fingers.

The queen’s heart, weak as it is, beats faster. She manages to turn her head and look at Marianna.

You made me kill myself!
she thinks.
Made me administer the dose. Made my friend your envoy. I would never hesitate to empty the little blue vial directly onto my tongue. I would think
little of it, were it more bitter than usual. You knew that, and you knew I would sooner blame any illness on what I had eaten at dinner than blame it on a kind gesture from a friend
.

It was easy. It required no finesse. Of course you allowed Olympe to visit. The comtesse’s reputation was all the security you needed. And now Olympe is in a coach, traveling quickly north from Madrid. The road will give out, she will be forced to switch to a litter, she will be bounced and jounced over rocks. But, God willing, she will be over the border and into France before she can be arrested
.

Marianna hands her needlework to her little page. She replaces the lid on the little tin of glycerin. It works so well, it makes sewing effortless. How is it she had never heard of it before? How lucky that she found it at the druggist’s. She looks at the queen for one long moment, meets her open-eyed gaze, and then she leaves.

María closes her eyes.
One thousand orange trees
, she says inside her head, and she pictures them in circles, one inside another, her mother in the center of all the white blossoms.

Should she tell someone it was Marianna? Who would believe her? She has no proof, and the surmises of a woman addicted to laudanum are likely to be dismissed.

What María does not think, what she cannot bear to think, is this: The dwarf himself conspired against her. Her friend went to the queen mother after his apprehension on the stair. He confessed to her, apologized, kissed the hem of her gown and the soles of her shoes.

Eduardo offered to kill María. He said he wanted revenge as well. He wanted it as much as she. “The queen set a spell on me,” he told Marianna. He claimed she had bewitched him and had made him love her. When the pig’s blood dripped down the stairs and accused him, the dwarf recovered from the enchantment.

Eduardo did not lie to the queen mother. He had loved María, loved her enough to lose his head for a time. But, ultimately, he loved his life more, and he knew the workings of the palace. From the time the French queen arrived, he had guessed her fate.
When María remained childless, he warned her of what would come to pass. He knew she would be sacrificed, and he told her so. He confessed the murder years before committing it.

Marianna folded her arms. She nodded at the dwarf on his knees before her. “Get up,” she said. She would test him. She needed Eduardo: after all, a willing murderer is hard to come by. He could be discarded after he made himself useful. “We must wait for the arrival of the comtesse de Soissons,” she said to him. In the meantime, Marianna herself would obtain the poison. Something common, something she could get from any city shop.

Eduardo knew María was afraid of her mother-in-law, so afraid after the discovery of the false miscarriages that she would take no drug from Marianna’s stores—she was afraid that Marianna might try to do Eduardo some harm. So the dwarf told the queen that he had some laudanum put away, that he had saved some from those years before the queen began using it, enough to tide her over until he could discover another source.

When Marianna summoned Eduardo to her apartments, when she handed him the poison and said its name, the dwarf started. Cantharide! Had the queen mother chosen passion fly for its ironical value? Was this her message: that as María Luisa had aroused her son insufficiently to produce an heir, she would die by an overdose of aphrodisiac? He did not ask Marianna these questions, of course. He accepted the packet of black powder and returned to his apartments to mix the poison.

The final bleeding is not in the least successful. Severo gets no more than a thimbleful—María has no life left to give—and he sends a message to the king and queen mother as they sit down to dinner.

“Come!” Severo’s assistant says. “Come immediately!”

The queen of Spain is hot. She wants the window opened. She wants the cold air to pass over her body, for winter to breathe upon her and make her skin cool, to make it sparkle with frost as if new, to make it feel the way it did when she was riding: the ride when autumn is just ceding to winter, leaves blowing dry
upon the ground, blowing, scattering, rustling. When Lucie’s hooves stirred them, they seemed to whisper. Rocinante’s came down harder, drove them into the mud.

The trees are bare, the light comes through the boughs. The woods are so filled with light that the frost on the trees and bits of ice here and there catch the sun’s rays. Everything is turned to silver.

Open the window!
she calls.
Please, I beg of you, open it!
But no one pays her any heed. Even were her requests audible, the windows would not be opened, for they do not open.

Open the window!
There is an errand she must accomplish, there is a place she must get to.

You open it
, I tell her.
Concentrate yourself. Focus your will
.

The bedchamber is silent. The maids, Eduardo, Carlos, Marianna: no one says anything. The queen mother’s industrious fingers have abandoned their rosary beads. María is motionless, yet she seems poised as if for some action. What if she should speak? thinks Marianna. What if she should accuse her? The queen mother will not be safe until the queen is buried.

The wind blows outside, calling to María, lowing under the eaves, rattling the panes. The glass creaks and shivers.

Open it
, I say to her.
Do not be afraid. You can go now. You can go now to your mother
.

When I was a child, I told Dolores that the dead could feel the cold, and that they came to the hearth as we slept and blew on the embers until the fire burned bright. They took logs and threw them on the coals, but logs would not be consumed or even scorched by the fires made by the dead. When we woke to find new wood on the grate, I would say, “Look! Mama has been here trying to get warm.”

How she hated to hear that and to think of Mama cold and wandering and coming to warm her hands at our hearth. In those days my father walked in his sleep, and “
It was Papa, you idiot, Papa!
” Dolores told me. “He put the logs on!” she would yell.

I would answer calmly, saying, “No, Mama comes back here.” Dolores believed that I knew something she did not. She believed that Mama visited and spoke with me and not her.
“And, you know, they are busy, the dead,” I used to tell my sister.

“Doing what?” she would say.

“Oh, making pilgrimages.”

Everyone dies with some stain of sin left unrepented, some love left undeclared. There is always much to be done, even after death. Most people die young, so there are not so many old souls, and I told Dolores that in the next life the old people are so light that the breath of God or of the Devil blows them hither and yon, their feet never touch the ground. If you get to be old enough before you die, it does not matter whether you had sinned or were pure, since all that was left was a bit of skin buffeted by the winds of the afterlife. “We must pray,” I would say. “Pray and pray that Mama can rest and not scurry about purgatory forever.” When our mother was all finished and atoned, then she could come back in a new body.

But to myself I thought, What wrong could Mama have done? When Saint Michael came and stood at the head of her deathbed and read from the book of her deeds, he must have found it filled with far more good than evil. And any sin that she committed, would it not have been erased by her regrets?

The first cracks in the window opposite the queen’s bed are silent, but as Eduardo looks the glass turns to lace, and with a sudden burst the window gives way. At the sound of the explosion overhead, there is a gasp from the rioters standing below. Slivers of glass fall like rain on their heads.

The bells begin to toll, and the mob falls silent. They stop their terrible song.

The dead do make pilgrimages, but they are different from those I described to my sister. I no longer believe that people travel about to undo their sins. No, they go one last time to touch the people they love best.

TOOK MY CHILD TO ALL THE HOLY PLACES I
could get to, to any place I heard of, there was always a miracle of which I was told. In that time of pilgrimages, I became part of a company of miracle seekers.

It was not belief that bound us one to another, not faith but fear. We were desperate and deluded persons who kept moving, trying to outrun our fate. We recognized one another at various shrines, we spread word of cures and successes, of news like that of a certain Xavier’s son who had been crushed by a plow and regained the use of his legs after a visit to the weeping statue of Our Lady at Campo. She took pity on him, so they said, and we all rushed there so that she might feel sorry for us, too.

I stood in lines so long that I lay down and slept in line, waiting my turn to scrape a bit of earth from the ground where a saint had trod, to hold Mateo under a trickle of some holy stream, to add my own votive offering to the piles left at the feet of wooden and plaster holies.

Libera nos, Domine. Libera nos, libera nos
. Deliver us, O Lord. The eternal prayer of mankind, all of us so weary of our lives.