Poison (42 page)

I slept and slept. I fell asleep at table, on the hearth, outside. I could sleep in any posture and under any circumstance. When it appeared to others that I was awake, when my eyes were open, even then I was asleep.

Then, one night, I awoke. My papa’s small house was awash with the sounds of sleep: his snoring and Dolores’s sighing breaths, as if even in dreams she regretted her life with us. I woke and dressed quickly and slipped out the door. The moon was not full, but the night was sufficiently clear that I had enough light to find my way, a way I knew so well: the road to Alvaro’s old lodgings. My feet could have gone to that place without eyes to guide them.

When I arrived I stood for a moment beneath his window, in the very place where I had stood so many nights, waiting to hear the sounds of his studying there alone. The night was filled with noises I had never heard when I was so intent on him: the great birds of night, the rustlings of weasels and badgers, of porcupines, all those creatures, who, like myself, pursued their desires while the rest of creation slumbered. The shutter was broken, and I easily climbed and wriggled through the window.

After Alvaro was taken away, his books and papers, his every quill and inkwell and blotter were gathered into sacks and crates and borne away in a black carriage to Madrid, where the officers of God began their lengthy deliberations. As for the people of Quintanapalla, they knew it would be many months, even years, before the satisfaction of a sentence. And as there would never be any burning they would witness, they had undertaken their own haphazard exorcism. They had desecrated the little rooms where Alvaro once read and made his notes. Boys had thrown rocks in the windows and had torn down whatever they could reach. After they were done, little animals came to make their homes inside.

I stood in the room where once we had studied, and where we had taken our pleasure together, its walls barely delineated by the night’s faint light. I ran my hands over the table where we had sat, I lay on the floor where we had lain, I reached out into the shadows, but so thoroughly was he banished that not even a ghost remained.

Alvaro was nowhere. I tried, alone and curled on my side in his study, to remember those three days we had spent in the silk house, the storm of ice, my face between his warm flesh and the fur of his cape. But I could no more conjure his arms around me than I could my mother’s or my son’s. Why am I not crying? I wondered.

Awake, having slept enough, I was entering a new and more dangerous chapter of my life, the one that brought me to my final home.

HESE,” SAID A PROFESSOR AT LEYDEN, DISCUSSING
the work of the great Fallopio and holding forth on his white palm what looked like two little burst and tattered blossoms, “these are the source of your life, every one of you.”

Severo had leaned forward in his seat around the stage of Leyden’s famous anatomical theater. He could hardly see what his teacher held out, but in his lap was an expensive medical text, whose lavish illustrations included a series of drawings of female parts. The ovaries grew inside a woman, two little flowers borne on stems named for the great physician. Severo made a note in his text.
Source of life
, he wrote, and he drew an arrow to the spot.

The queen’s body is not yet cool when the medical inquest begins. The king, queen mother, confessor, dwarf and minister, all take their leave of María; they kiss her one last time. Then, following Dr. Severo, chirurgeons file in from the crowded corridor where, for the last hours of the queen’s life, they have been waiting with their saws and their basins, their glass-stoppered demijohns, their linens and bright knives.

The queen’s maids undress her corpse, and the doctors cut her open. From her breastbone down to the hair covering her shameful parts, they make one long, deep incision. They retrieve her heart and her liver. Onto a spool they wind the long loops of her bowels. Her spongy lungs, sighs still bubbling through the blood of severed windpipes, are dropped into a dish. Her gallbladder, swollen green and distended with bile—that little purse where María safeguarded her hatreds and her disappointments—is stolen, drawstrings intact, and taken away in a bottle. Her kidneys, wizened and hanging on their stalks, are picked and laid in a bowl.

All her viscera are borne down the stone stairs to Dr. Severo’s laboratory, and there this physician, trained by the century’s greatest minds, cuts into each part of the queen. He lays open the secret chambers of her heart; he examines under his microscope sections of her intestines. In the six basins of María’s cooling and coagulating innards, Severo looks for little flowers the same as those that his teacher had long ago harvested from the cadaver on the stage. He searches for some time without finding the queen’s ovaries, but the doctor is not deterred by their minuteness, and the little flowers give themselves up at last, clinging to her bladder.

“She did have them,” he reports to Marianna.

“Well, perhaps they were diseased,” says the queen mother.

The doctor nods. “Yes,” he says.

María is far from her body in Severo’s laboratory. Once she was up—once she gathered herself, sprang from the bed, shattered the window—it took but an instant for her to find her way home. The passage many years before from her mother’s side to Carlos’s may have taken long enough that the princess thought it would never end, but this backward journey is so fast that María does not so much arrive back at the château as find herself suddenly there among all that she so loved and missed. She sobs with relief, and the halls are filled with the sound. A maid bearing a coal scuttle starts and looks outside the window for an explanation. Perhaps a sudden wind is blowing.

María—no, call her Marie again, call her Marie now that she is home at last—Marie is in the east wing, where her mother’s apartments are. The floors shine under the light cast from the wall sconces, and the shadows of chairs and of pedestals, of vases and of flowers, leap and dance under the soft light of candles.

Her mother cannot be far. Henrietta’s scent, the smell Marie has never forgotten, is strong and definite. She must have been writing letters tonight, for along with the woman, along with
her
, Marie smells sealing wax, the little square red tablet Henrietta keeps locked in her writing desk.

Long ago her mother would sometimes allow her to play with the wax, and Marie dripped a red pool onto the blotter and
pressed in the seal. Or she used her finger, leaving its print on the surface of the soft, cooling wax, and then held it under the lamp to examine the tiny whorl, a downward draining spiral. Maman would sit next to Marie. Her voluminous skirts rose around them as she perched on the edge of her chair, a sudden rush of perfume gusting out through the seams. She took the wax from Marie’s hand. “
Regarde
,” she said. “Now, watch,” and she withdrew a sheet of writing paper and an envelope from the small drawer that held them. She wrote on the page,
Chère Marie, Maman t’aime
, and below she made a little drawing of a woman holding a flower stiffly out from her side. She folded the page and put it in the envelope, whose flap she held down as she melted the wax over the lamp’s wick.

Marie’s mother dripped sealing wax until a little pool of it held the envelope closed. She pulled out one hair from her temple, one brown hair just where it peeped out from under her powdered white wig. She put the hair into the hot wax and pressed her seal into it, drowning the hair. Marie looked at the two ends of her mother’s hair protruding from the wax. Henrietta waved the envelope for a moment to set the seal, and then she handed it to Marie.

“That is what you shall do one day when you find a gentleman to love,” Henrietta said. “You shall send him a note and put your hair into its seal.”

Marie had never done that, locked up a love letter with a hair from her head. She had saved the sentimental gesture for the man she would marry, but, as it turned out, she never felt so inclined. She kept the
billet doux
from her mother, though. She did not open it, nor did she disrupt the hair. It was in Spain, in her apartments, hidden among her belongings.

Searching among his dead wife’s things, opening chests, picking locks with a wire when he can find no key, Carlos has come across the old letter from her mother. He weighs it in his hand a moment, then breaks the long sealed seal and reads the note.
Dear Marie, Maman loves you
. He understands that much French, anyway. He places the letter on a pile of things to be burned, and then goes on sorting, his secretary making notes
and binding up packets for this person and that. But, after a moment, Carlos retrieves the page and its envelope with the cracked red wax, the broken hair. “Send that back to France,” he says. “Put it in the box with her braid and her prayer book and her hair combs.”

After retiring for the night—after hot milk, a few minutes with Estrellita, a prayer with his confessor—Carlos finds himself thinking of the letter and of the love sealed under the wax. He cannot sleep, he calls for a candle. With his valet he makes his way back to his dead bride’s apartments, where he retrieves the small box meant for Henrietta. He takes it back to his own chamber and tucks it under his bed where other relics lie. A small box of mementos of a departed princess, of vanished happiness: he will keep these with his other holy things.

The scent of wax draws Marie along the second-floor gallery and into a small sitting room, where Henrietta is seated at her hearth. As she reads, a screen protects her face from the fire’s heat, her wig is off, and her hair is not yet brushed but still stuck against her scalp like so many little gray leaves.

Oh!
Marie thinks.
She is so old! Why, her hair is thin, and her hand is not steady as she holds her book! How can it be that my Maman has grown old?
And even as she thinks this, Marie is in her mother’s lap, she puts herself between the red leather-bound pages and the woman.

Henrietta shifts in her chair, she lays down her book, a novel by Scarron, his last, published posthumously. She slips her paper knife into its chamois case for safekeeping. If it were to fall on the floor, a child or one of her cats might tread on it and hurt themselves. The two fat felines look up at Marie and, hissing, slink under the chaise.

“Why, what is it, Minou?” Marie’s mother calls, “Félicité!” Silly creatures.

Indigestion, Henrietta thinks, such a strange heaviness on her chest. It must be from the pheasant, the rich sauce. She is too old to eat sauces, but she cannot resist them. Where are her charcoal pills? Oh, in the morning room, such a distance! But the heaviness is too intense to ignore, she will have to ring for the maid to
fetch them. Nothing the matter with her heart, she hopes, but, Mother of God, she can hardly breathe.

Henrietta hates to be old. She thought she would have been tamed by the passage of years, content with comfort and with the memory of passion. Like all women, Henrietta had expected that as she grew to be old, inside her would beat a heart as gray and thin and flattened as her hair. She feels betrayed by a life that leaves a girl’s heart clamoring inside a ruined body.

Perhaps she is not suffering from indigestion but grief. Marie’s mother received word today of the death of a man she once loved, someone who lived on in her mind as a boy, in the same way that she herself was years younger in her daughter’s memory. Why, the marquis de Brinvilliers
was
a boy, a boy with golden hair, strong legs and arms. The news had brought a quick wrench of grief, sudden and brutal, like wringing the neck of a kitten. It instantly killed the joy in her.

Henrietta rings a bell, and at the entrance of the servant, Marie startles and withdraws from her mother’s lap.

“My pills,” her mother says to the maid. “Please fetch them.”

Marie lingers at the transom, she watches her mother reach again for her knife case and take her book in her hand. Henrietta cuts the next page, but she does not read it. Instead she leans back in her chair, she leaves her book in her lap and closes her eyes. She cannot keep from worrying about Marie. Certainly there had been news of ill health before the previous day’s communication, but her daughter had always recovered. And this latest report sounded no more grave than earlier such tidings. The tone, as usual, was businesslike; the missive gave few details.
María Luisa, Regina, etc., was taken ill at the theater on the evening of the 17th day of the 12th month, at which time the court physician determined cholera morbus
.

The dispatch was read to the king, he betrayed no emotion, and other news was read as well. But then, at dinner, Louis quit the table before the last course was served. He stopped behind Henrietta’s chair. “Madame?” he asked. “There was a spray of asphodel in your daughter’s wedding bouquet, was there not?”

“Yes,” Henrietta answered.

“And jonquils and lilies?”

“Yes,” she said again. “Several varieties of lily.”

He nodded. “I thought there were,” he said, and then he left the room.

Marie Louise’s wedding day in Paris, the proxy, the first of the weddings between the princess from France and the king of Spain: her father gave her away to a foreign minister bearing a cushion on which was a miniature portrait of the king of Spain. It was a sweltering August day, impossible to breathe inside the château and out. The wedding guests assembled under a great tent in the garden. Feet blistered in open-toed slippers, wigs grew as heavy as helmets. Lilies dropped their petals. They rubbed their naked, sticky stamens into the folds of passing skirts, brown pollen staining the material forever. Perspiration gathered over women’s lips, and sour runnels of sweat disappeared into their bodices, bosoms rising and falling as they panted. Sweat rendered wig powder into a paste that trickled slowly down from ear to throat, dulling the stones of earrings.