Poison (46 page)

In the end, Carlos retired to the palace with Estrellita and his mother’s corpse, and María continued on her bier before her mourners. She was bound for her white marble tomb in the hills, a tomb for a childless bride, a child bride.

Ever a child and ever a bride, María Luisa is blanketed in the white reserved for barren queens, the blinding white of innocence restored. Having died without issue, it is as if María has died a virgin, some little recompense for cruelty, this posthumous reinstatement to virtue. From being the most generally and vociferously reviled of women, she is made a saint. It happens this way:

People begin by praying for the dead queen’s soul. They petition the saints that María not have to remain in limbo too long. She suffered enough on earth, they say, the very people who had marched from the theater to the palace, who had called her a whore and demanded she be whipped. They spend their money on Masses to shorten the queen’s stay in purgatory.

For that is where she is now, in purgatory. With my mama and my papa, with Alvaro. But not Mateo. Children do not tarry in the netherworld. The old men, the messengers of souls, promise that there are no children under the age of seven in purgatory. Dying so young, they say, you go straight to your rest, you need not tarry in a place that is gray and cold and sorrowful.

I try to comfort myself thinking of this. I repeat this promise over and over to myself.

What do I believe? In nothing, and in everything. When Mateo died, whatever faith I had in life’s goodness evaporated. Like the faint moisture of the last breath that clouds the mirror, when my child died that thin mist of my faith evaporated.

Still, I pray. We all do. We cannot help ourselves.

There is another city under Madrid, another country under Spain. And its citizens know all of what comes to pass in the streets above. They know the world which is revealed by a sun they never see.

The citizens of Spain, below and above, who began by praying
for María, soon find themselves praying to her. It is because of the dead queen’s name, perhaps. Because her mother called her Marie, because we call her María, popular memory, so short and undiscerning, soon confuses her with the Virgin.

People mumbling their Ave Marias unwittingly repeat their prayers with the extra name added. They exchange the immortal Queen of Heaven with the late queen of Spain.
Ave María Luisa
, they pray.

And someone, some visitor to Queranna, where my papa poured out a libation of good oil to ensure his worms’ success, to Queranna, where Natalia was buried and where I carried my dying child, some pilgrim has painted a new face upon the effigy of the Virgin there. Like the faces of the Virgins in one and then another shrine all over Spain, its features are those of Queen María Luisa’s.

Left at the Virgin’s ivory feet are tuberoses, jasmine and those sweet little white flowers that grow nowhere but in the woods outside Versailles. Impossible, but there they are. María has her flowers, the pilgrims keep bringing them to her.

The Virgin at Queranna wears a dress of silk—as do all the Virgins from here to San Sebastián—she wears a white silk underskirt and a blue silk overdress that is faded now from the strong sun that slants into the chapel each morning. The silk has begun to rot and fray, it splits where the bodice joins the skirt. Stitches unravel, but its luster is not lost. Silk will shine until it falls into dust.

The robe on the Virgin at Queranna is old. It was made years ago, a lifetime ago, when my papa was a silk farmer. When Francisca de Luarca imagined that her father’s worms made in one extraordinary season a hundred thousand dresses for the queen of Spain, or for the Queen of Heaven. If I had looked then at the Virgin’s dress—if I had seen that dress as a child—I would have proclaimed it the work of Luarca worms.

Of worms who lived and spun and died so long ago. Spun silk, and dreams, as well.

The author wishes to thank Jack Hitt, Professor Karl Krober, Christine Pevitt, Diane Sabbarese and Thomas Spaccarelli, PhD, as well as the following institutions for guidance in the research for this novel: the Brooklyn Public Library, the Columbia University Libraries, The Hispanic Society of America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Health Museum, the Prado Museum and the Textile Museum Library, in Washington, D.C.

I am grateful to Janet Gibbs and to Joan Gould, for their support of me and of my writing in general. And I consider myself fortunate to have Elauriana Hunter care for our young children while I work.

I am both indebted and devoted to my agent, Amanda Urban, and to my editor, Kate Medina.

And, of course, I thank Colin, always the first champion of my work.

Much of what inspired
Poison
is borrowed from history, but I took enough license with whatever truths remain after three centuries that it seems to me if I were to cite individually the works I consulted, my doing so would implicate rather than honor the scholarship that yielded them.

For the record, Marie Louise de Bourbon was the niece of Louis XIV. Her father was the king’s brother, the famously dissipated Monsieur, the duke of Orléans; and her mother was Henrietta of England. Henrietta died in Paris in 1670, poisoned, some say, by two of Monsieur’s more dashing diversions, the Chevalier de Lorraine and the Marquis d’Effiat. As history is more sordid than the general audience of the novel would permit, and as tragedy becomes burlesque in heaping doses, I allowed Henrietta to live years longer than she did in actuality; I let her live beyond the death of her unfortunate daughter. This
was the first intentional distortion of what I had painstakingly taught myself, and it was that first lie which encouraged many more untruths.

Like Francisca, I had a grandfather given to aphorisms. “Lies have no legs” was a favorite of his, which I understand to mean that one fib will not carry itself and always has to be pushed along by another, and so forth. “Oh what a tangled web …” he would go on, and I confess that at this point I cannot untangle fact from fancy, at least not in the seventeenth century of Spain.

Historians, however, concur that Marie Louise de Bourbon married Carlos II, the last of the Spanish Hapsburgs, in Quintanapalla in 1679. Bride and groom were both eighteen, and both were descended from Juana la Loca, the brilliant, mad daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. María Luisa, as she was called in Spain, remained childless from the time of her marriage to that of her death in 1689, at the age of twenty-eight.

The circumstances surrounding the death of the queen of Spain remain mysterious. The fullest account I have found appears in John Nada’s
Carlos the Bewitched
, which is also the source of the unkind rhyme appearing on
this page
. On Tuesday afternoon, February 8, María had a riding accident and chose to have dinner in bed that evening: “puff paste,” Chinese oranges and cold milk. On Wednesday, February 9, she ate a dish of broth, as well as oysters with lemon, cold milk, French olives and Chinese oranges. At five o’clock on the morning of February 10, she awoke feeling suffocated and suffering a severe gastrointestinal upset. Her condition deteriorated rapidly throughout that day and the next, and she died on the morning of February 12. While it was never proved that the queen was poisoned, most historians assume that she was. Their theories usually implicate the notorious Olympe de Soissons (ever seeking revenge against Louis XIV for spurning her, Olympe is suspected of trying to undo the alliance of Spain and France) and suggest that the fatal drug was administered in a cup of hot chocolate. None point to the culpability of María’s mother-in-law, Marianna of Austria. No one has ventured that cantharides might have killed María Luisa, as it did some of the victims of a
dangerous gentleman who lived a century after her, in Paris. That poisoner was the marquis de Sade.

María Luisa de Borbón was succeeded by the Austrian princess Maria Ana of Neuburg, who also never bore a child by the king of Spain.

Carlos II died on All Souls’ Day, 1700, without any blood heirs. His will, made one month before his death, gave all the Spanish dominions to Philip, the duke of Anjou, and grandson of Louis XIV. Of his possible successors, Carlos chose the duke of Anjou because he believed he would prove a strong ruler who would keep the empire intact, and because Philip had assured the dying king that he would make his home in Spain.