Poison (43 page)

By the end of the ceremony each lady-in-waiting was carrying all of her mistress’s jewels and anything else that might decently be removed: wigs and ribbons and corsets and chokers, camisoles, farthingales, sashes and fans and fichus, everything collected into hampers and carried behind the lady, in case a breeze stirred and she felt sufficiently cool to be refurbished. But the air was so still that not one leaf moved, and each maid trailed uselessly after her stripped mistress, who looked as odd as a plucked peahen.

The next day, a great wind had blown over Paris. It chased the breathless heat away and blew so extravagantly that it tore the roof tiles off the château and sent them spinning over the parks and fountains, decapitating flowers and chipping the noses of marble nymphs. Henrietta stood with Marie and watched the windstorm from the gallery above the croquet lawns. She put her hand under her daughter’s hair to touch the sweet, moist nape of her neck.

Somehow, though she knows it is foolish, Henrietta continued
over the years to think of her daughter making her home not with a man but with a little picture in a jeweled frame. She saw Marie sitting at table with it, conversing with it and retiring of an evening with her head resting on a pillow next to a little painting whose frame glinted as the light was snuffed. Silly. But then, it was no more ridiculous, and a good deal more reassuring, than much of what was rumored about Carlos.

“Marie!” Henrietta calls suddenly, and she opens her eyes.

Marie Louise: her favorite child, her pet, her prize. With Marie, Henrietta had lying-in fever. She was very ill, her belly as great after the birth as before. Her fever climbed, and with it her mood. She was taken by that wild elation that some mothers get with milk fever. And the intoxication of it never wore off, it had made her love Marie all the more.

Henrietta stands and moves toward her letter case on her desk. She sits down.
Chère Marie
, she writes,
I think of you every minute. I am deeply worried, and in truth—

Marie draws close behind her mother’s chair and reads the letter as it is written, a letter she will never receive. Henrietta writes her daughter passionately, several times each month. Her letters are all tied in a ribbon; they are hidden in a chest in the queen mother’s dressing room. When Marianna dies, someone will find them, perhaps.

We are all thinking of you and praying for your recovery
, Henrietta writes.
Your uncle, the king, asked at dinner last evening what flowers were in your wedding bouquet. Our separation—can it be ten years? It is still difficult to walk in the garden, to enjoy the allées and the little bridge and footpath without missing you. It seems—

Marie falls upon her mother’s neck, and Henrietta drops her quill, caught up in an impossible embrace. When the daughter releases the mother, Henrietta slumps over her desk.

Tomorrow the doctor will call her swoon an indisposition provoked by overly larded meats, and Henrietta will be put on a restricted diet. She will argue with her doctor, a famous man from the famous medical school at Montpellier, saying that she does not know why a rich sauce should make her neck feel broken, her head pound and her throat constrict. “This kind of
crise
,” she will sputter and weep, “it was not like any attack of indigestion I have ever suffered! It was not!”

But for now, Marie leaves her mother with a burning kiss on her temple, another on her forehead, nape and shoulder. One last kiss on her palm, upturned and empty, her quill on the floor.

F ONLY I HAD HAD SOME SENSE, SOME PLAN
, some reason. If only I had made my way to Madrid—for what was there to keep me in Quintanapalla?—or to Paris. Yes, if only I had left Spain and disappeared into a northern city.

Sometimes, now, I imagine myself leaving everything behind me: my
sanbenito
, that shameful smock, empty and folded on the bench before our hearth. I leave the small chest containing my mother’s things, Mateo’s cup and spoon, and the little gold curl I cut from his head and laid in the ancestor box. I leave Papa and Dolores and travel north, find my way through the Cantabrian Mountains and then the Pyrenees.

In my mind I take the journey that I had once imagined for a strand of silk seeking a needle in Paris, a needle to lash it to a button made by Alvaro. Like his brother Tomás, I lose myself in Paris, where my wantonness might earn me a living.

As it was, I did not go. At the time when I might have escaped, I lacked the power to make any plan, large or small. My minutes, hours and days were all without purpose, my weeks and months as well.

I had no monthly flow, no blood to spare perhaps, and I never got with child again. But not because I was chaste. It was as if I wore a different sign upon my robe than the warning I knew to be stitched there. An invitation. Suddenly it seemed that every swain and his father knew I was there for the taking, that they need not even ask: I would join in carnal embrace with anyone.

They knew where to find me, in the old silk house that Papa had abandoned. No one bought my father’s little toys anymore, his hair ornaments, his cups and rattles. He spent his days checking his squirrel traps and tending our meager garden, leaving
the silk house to me. I built a fire on one of the four hearths, and I huddled near to its light and warmth.

I expected that the mute touch of flesh to flesh would be some sort of solace. But the men would not be silent. They talked and talked. They told me that the price of wool was falling, that their sons had consumption or their sisters were too ugly to find husbands. I put my hands on their lips or covered my own ears to keep out their sick sheep and sick mothers, their crops of beans and the price of lard, and how it was that they worried over lying with me and telling lies to their wives. For they told me their sins, too. They made me into the confessor Alvaro had been.

Above our heads, louder than they, I would hear my grandfather’s voice. “In this world there are the givers and the takers,” he said once. “Which are you?”

“I don’t know, Grandfather,” I answered.

They talked to me, I talked to him.

I did other things that frightened the men. Not purposely. Nothing sinister or magical. It takes so little to frighten people. Do you know what they were afraid of? The dark. I had only to snuff a light and they would scramble for their clothes, they would stammer and gasp and hiccough with fear.

The seasons revolved. It was spring. It was summer. It was fall again. Stones under my shoes, a vast scattering of yellow leaves that stirred with any slight wind. The ground beneath my feet looked alive, swarming. The sun was so bright I had trouble opening my eyes. Wind hissed through what leaves remained on the trees, hissed so that I heard whispering all around me.

Untended, the mulberry trees thrived, but still I struggled under the yoke and buckets, water spilling cold onto my skirts. I liked to care for them. It made them that much lovelier to me that they were unnecessary. Like jewels, like the silk they never became, they were wealth in and of themselves.

Grief was not what I expected. When I knew Mateo was gravely sick I contemplated my sorrow from a distance. I looked ahead to what I thought grief would hold, and I counted the leaves of anguish on each tree. But as it turned out, grief was not
a dark, tangled wood but a flat, brown wasteland. As if worms had consumed every last twig of feeling. As if my father had passed a flame over the trees with his torch and reduced them to ash. All dead, all brown, all dry, no single leaf of pain or of pleasure.

Two mirrors with nothing in between, a blank cold winter of feeling.

I had not sufficient shame, perhaps. I did not hide myself under a magic cloak of composure, as women ought to do. My unhappiness should have been veiled.

In the marketplace, a peddler sold perfume and bracelets and little mirrors with pictures of Saint Lucy on their backs. Saint Lucy without her eyes. Saint Lucy who saw not this world but another. This peddler had been coming through town for many years, and one day my mama had bought me a looking glass with some of the money she earned from the orphans’ asylum.

I kept that mirror in my skirt now. I looked at my face when no one could observe me, but not out of vanity. I was looking to see who was there. Who was this Francisca who had taken carnal pleasure with a priest, who had been given an angel and failed to protect him? In my mind’s eye I had grown to be a monster, and each time that I looked at my reflection I was surprised to see the pale, dark-eyed face of a girl shining back from the little mirror. A
moza
, as we call them, a girl just past her innocence.

It became a bad habit with me, looking in the little glass. It got so that I went nowhere without it in my palm. Sometimes I bounced a pretty little circle of light before me on the ground, or I let it play along the walls of houses. “She is casting spells with that,” I heard a boy whisper. “Do not let the shining circle touch you, it will burn you.” I flashed it on his thigh and he screamed.

Mad Francisca. Francisca the witch.

I heard Mateo’s cry everywhere, in the wind, in the yowling of hungry cats, in the babble of the marketplace. I would turn suddenly, having heard him. But there was no one, not even a cat or a crow, behind me. Walking through the marketplace, mirror in my palm, I did not lift up my head, I did not look before me, I
did not meet any eye. I saw the ground under my feet, and I avoided accidents with the aid of my mirror.

I saw lips move in the palm of my hand, the black holes of nostrils. Good day, Francisca. How goes it with you this morning? When they laughed, their mouths stretched wet and open, teeth in my palm. I could feel that even the people who spoke to me were afraid and testing their fear.

I walked and walked. Sometimes I would see the looks exchanged by people as I passed. They stared after me and shook their heads. They said my mother’s name to one another, I heard it almost like a sigh on the wind, following me,
Concepción, Concepción
. They wondered how the Luarcas had come to this. How sad Concepción would be to see her daughter now.

I revisited all the shrines, not traveling purposefully as I had then, but helplessly. I walked some days until I was faint, until I lost the feeling of the ground under my feet and came back to the grove, to the wind blowing spinning clouds of yellow leaves. Each so bright, circles of light falling, falling, spinning, sailing. Courageous, hopeful, burning bright with color. Spinning down, one last flight upon the wind, and then sunk in black November mud. I trod on them. With my toe I smeared the gold with mud.

I spoke to no one. All the words I had—the Latin and the Spanish ones—a vast sea of language now rose up to rebuke me. I had believed in their power; now I saw that they offered no salvation. Language mocked me, it made me that much more aware of my damnation, just a greater means of expressing my own wretchedness.

In Quintanapalla, thirteen houses were burned that autumn, not by churchmen, not by the civilized Church, but by suspicious neighbors. Some of the people who lived in those burning houses had no time to flee their masked persecutors. Manuel Xavier, the hop farmer, was caught at the gate. The next morning I saw his hat and boots there. In the mud, signs of a struggle gave way to a set of footprints and two long tracks that had unfurled from Manuel’s unshod, unconscious feet. Well, frostbite would not trouble him. His body was found at the end of
those tracks, at the mill, crushed between the stones. That must have forced all heretical thoughts from his head. llena Xavier’s tongue was cut out for bearing false witness when she named the man who she thought had killed her husband.

From the time of Alvaro’s arrest, I had been allowed to remain in Quintanapalla, free, as long as I always had upon me, even as I slept, my
sanbenito
proclaiming heresies and other wanton deeds. In this way, a person not familiar with my sins, a stranger to the town, perhaps, might know of the infection I represented and would keep apart from me.

Only an Inquisitor could afford a horse. A cold evening, light snow, the smell of wood smoke, a drip of pork fat sizzled on the hearth. A bird called out, a log fell into coals, trees creaked in the wind. Was that the noise of hooves over cobbles, muffled by rags? The wind picked up, a distant bough snapped. To me everything sounded like the approach of a horse.

White Hoods came through town on a regular basis, on their way to Burgos with its great cathedral, stronghold of the Church. One afternoon, as they passed through the plaza, one of them motioned to his deputy, and I was collected and thrown into the cart with two other condemned: Ilena Xavier, whose confiscated tongue only whetted the Holy Office’s appetite for the rest of her, I guess, and an old man known as Caballo, who had claimed certain visions of having been escorted by an angel to a bullring in the sky where he saw Jesus dressed as a matador.

Arrested on suspicion of witchcraft, I joined those hungry women who said they attended midnight banquets, those earthbound women who so longed to rise above their cares that they claimed they could fly, those lonely women who said they lay down with a dark horned man. I joined other women unfortunate enough to lose their babies.