Poison (6 page)

The next day seventeen witches were found in the royal residence and brought directly here for questioning. The cause of the queen’s failure to bear a child would be discovered. The records of all persons in palace employ from the year of Carlos’s birth until the present were reviewed, my mother’s included among them. And I was moved from my original lodgings to this corridor of cells reserved for witches who have threatened the royal family: a consideration conferred by heredity; for in conjunction with my own not inconsiderable mistakes, my mother’s connection to the palace was of such intimacy and power that it mandates my being treated as a special case. I now occupy a cell between the queen’s translator and her secretary: one more woman in a row of malign maids-in-waiting, of deviously conspiring dwarfs, laundresses whose soaps bore curses, of chambermaids whose bosoms heaved with diabolic desire, wet nurses whose tits leaked liquid spells. Oh, every trade that serves the king and queen has its representative in these exclusive quarters.

Maybe the carriage with its mutilated, silent horse did pause in the street that last night. Maybe it brought its rag-wrapped wheels to a slow and very nearly silent stop on the one cobbled street of Quintanapalla, the same that ran past his lodgings. Perhaps on that night when I returned to him against all caution, and when we let a candle burn a moment too long—But what of
it? There is no law against light. He often studied all the night. Still, perhaps someone saw, or merely listened to my unorthodox catechisms. Stood silent under his windowsill, just as I had once stood there waiting to hear the sounds of his quill, the whisper of pages turning.

Was he afraid of discovery when we were together? I was, but fear only inflamed me further.

Returned to my cell from questioning, I awake to a stir between two departing guards. I hear the queen’s name, followed by an ugly laugh. Something is happening in the world above, but what? I crouch by the grille. Someone will have heard something. Someone is waiting to share what she knows.

We are not allowed to talk in here. We wear tongue locks, some of us, iron rods extending from jaw to collarbone that prevent a lady so adorned from opening her mouth. In this way the inquisitors think they can stop us from spreading heresies, one to another, like disease. It is difficult to drink water while wearing a tongue lock—you have to plunge your head into the bucket and suck the water up through your teeth. As for the crusts of bread they give us to eat, we poke them into our cheeks with our fingers, and when they are sufficiently moist they, too, can be sucked slowly through whatever teeth we have left. The tongues of false witnesses and incorrigible blasphemers have been cut out, of course, which makes sucking and all sounds but moaning impossible for them. But still, rumors multiply.

Messages traced by a finger onto the clean slate of an open palm. Those of us who know our letters—and, being witches, the prisoners in this lowest catacomb constitute an uncommonly literate collection—have the solace of silent communication, fingers conversing through the grilles. Or just the grasping of a feverish hand, that is enough for certain messages, a greeting or a taking of leave.

When the guards depart, taking their one lamp with them, the cautious hush of those prisoners who are awake and conscious slowly gives way to a rustle of gossip, conjecture. It cannot be that María Luisa has dared to pretend another miscarriage. For it is common knowledge—in this corridor, anyway—that until
her accomplice was caught, the queen had feigned several doomed pregnancies over the last two years. How better to appear to satisfy the one obligation of her position? The one un-doable duty of the wife to a king whose impotence must never even be hinted at? A miscarrying queen is, after all, in less danger than a barren one.

A false miscarriage. It could not have been any business for the fainthearted, not the way I imagine it. In the early dawn hours, before the undercook’s apprentice had roused himself to set water to boil, before he woke the little scullery maid (boxing her ears when she did not stand quickly enough and frightening her so that she was out of the door and collecting eggs from the hens before she even stopped to rub her smarting flesh and think, Ouch! the bastard!); yes, before anyone had stirred, someone, some secret ally of the queen had smuggled pig’s blood from the kitchen up to the royal bedchamber. This loyal if trembling accomplice—the same who in preceding months had discreetly removed evidences of the queen’s monthly flow, hiding some bloodstains in preparation for others—had already on several occasions helped the queen to pour pig’s blood over her nightdress and bedclothes, on her secret parts and in the chamber pot and all over the floor by the bed. Then the friend stole away, and María called for her maids. Screamed so that the doctor was summoned immediately and an examination made. And as the queen wept and moaned, the sad tidings were delivered; bells tolled to announce another lost heir to the empire.

I lick my lips and let my head rest against the wall, cold against my scalp; I reach to feel what hair is there. I was shorn a week ago, not more. Not a good job: two cuts on my neck and another at my temple for this assurance to my captors that no diabolical writings emerge on skin hidden by a growth of hair. Still, there are compensations. Though my captors surely do not intend it, their routine wielding of the razor provides some little comfort: I can gauge the passage of time by the length of my stubble. And vermin find me less attractive—my head, anyway. Of course, I am in a position to be grateful for anything. I am happy to be small, for I need that much less to eat, and when I sit up straight, there is room enough in here to stretch my legs.

As for the dark, the impenetrable and unremitting dark: that is the best place for dreams. For the dark is not empty forever, no. Try it sometime. Close your eyes, or better, cloister yourself away from the sun, away from all light.

The dark is quickly peopled.

HE QUEEN IS THE SAME AGE AS I, EXACTLY THE
same, María Luisa,
Marie Louise de Bourbon
, the princess from Paris, the queen of Spain. When I saw her for the first time, she was like a vision from the days when we believed in the future wealth and happiness of the Luarca family. As if arrayed in my dreams, she wore a gown of the finest watered silk—lengths of silk, and layers of silk: silk petticoats, silk pantaloons, silk hose, silk slippers, all beneath a silk skirt that swelled out as vast as a tent, from a bodice narrow as a sapling. She was tall, too, she rose a full head above King Carlos.

I saw her, and it was as if before me stood the work of a hundred thousand worms. I saw the leaves of all our trees shiver over her in the wind; I heard the jaws of our worms, chewing, chewing, like the noise of a great storm. It had not rained for all the months of summer, but in the weeks preceding the royal wedding it had poured, an autumn deluge that had washed the dust from our one glass window.

The first news that had come home to us from the palace was of María. “Francisca,” said a note at the bottom of a letter from my mother, who could now write as well as read, “the prince Carlos is betrothed to a little girl in France—a princess. She is the niece of King Louis the Fourteenth. Her name is Marie, and she is exactly the same age as you, my daughter, exactly. Same year, same month, same day.”

We could not read the letters Mama sent—it would be years before I found my teacher—so we had to rely on others to tell us what they said. The innkeeper, usually, who read so haltingly that I guessed most of the words before they found their way out of his mouth, or his wife, who was even slower.

“Do you remember what your grandfather used to say?”
began another letter. “ ‘Even a cat may look at a queen.’ Well, here I am, and I shall tell you everything I see in the palace.”

And so my mother filled my head with details of the court, of Prince Carlos and of his mother. Of dwarfs, dresses, of quarrels and betrothals. Mama described what I thought I should never see for myself. But time passed, fate worked its own bewitchments, and one day I found myself in the company of the very princess of whom my mother had written—a woman who, by then, had long been visiting me in my dreams.

Ten years ago I was eighteen; ten years ago she was eighteen; and ten years ago María was married in Quintanapalla, the town where I was born.

Marie Louise de Bourbon. The witch. The whore. The saint. The stranger. The same girl for whom that familiar taunt was invented, the rhyme the mobs were shouting when she first arrived in Madrid, and which they still scream at her, only more loudly. So loudly that the stones of this prison ring with their jeering. So loudly that lately the queen has taken to riding doubled over in her carriage, her hands covering her ears.

The new queen did not understand what the mobs were shouting as her coach rolled slowly through the palace gates the morning of her arrival. How could she, for she spoke no Spanish.

One fool slipped past the barricade and leaped upon the coach she shared with her translator, the coach immediately following Carlos’s; the king shared his with his confessor. The man clung to the vehicle’s side lamp and leered in the window.
“Parid! Bella flor!”
he hissed, and then a soldier shot him, and, instead of the next line of the rhyme, blood came out of his mouth.

María, holding tight to her translator’s hand, shook those perspiring, fear-clammy fingers, she wrung them.
“Comment!
Comment!”
she said. “What! What are they shouting!” The foreign queen held the young woman’s fingers so tightly that her rings cut into them.

Her translator hesitated, then explained.
Parir
was the verb meaning to give birth. Paris was not only the premier city of Europe, the city of the queen’s birth and of her happiness, but it was also
paris
, the second person singular of
parir. Parid
, the imperative:
You give birth
.

The translator bit her lips, and tears came to her eyes. Only a month before, she had been living in a convent, unaware of how luxurious was the calm of transcribing holy manuscripts. Above her forehead, her cropped brown hair was still flattened from having been long squashed under a black habit.

Parid
, pretty queen. Give birth!

A male heir, that is what the whole country wanted, that is what it wants now. A successor to the throne, a healthy male of sufficient intelligence and will to control the corps of manipulative ministers and hidalgos, grandees and bishops who were snatching every day more and more power from this greatly hoped-for scion’s father, King Carlos. By the time he was married, a boy no older than his bride, Carlos had already dried up the treasury, crippled the armies and was losing each month more territories to France, to the Netherlands, even to the savages in the colonies. To save Spain, Carlos’s heir would have to arrive in a hurry and come to power quickly—before the child was twenty, before he was ten. He would have to be an extraordinary child, a messiah.

So, from the beginning, Queen María Luisa knew what was expected of her.

On the morning of her wedding, I looked at María Luisa, and beyond her crown I saw our silent orchard of failed trees burn with bright insistence against the sky. I looked at her and remembered my mother’s back growing smaller as she walked down the path to the road where the black carriage waited, the carriage bearing the king’s coat of arms on the door.

Run!
I whispered. She was standing before the bishop with King Carlos. In a moment it would be too late, she would be married to him, to the man who took my mother’s life.
Run into
the woods, hide among the trees! I will come and find you
, I promised.
I will bring you a common cloak and hood of wool. I will take those clothes which would betray you. I will burn that silk gown which would give you away
. But of course, María Luisa could not hear me. And even had she wanted to run, a woman could barely walk in a dress like that.

The wedding of Don Carlos José, príncipe de las Españas—Carlos Segundo, or, as he is called in some attempt to explain his ill luck in all things,
El Hechizado
, the Bewitched—to Marie Louise de Bourbon demanded the princess’s translation from French to Spanish, from Marie Louise to María Luisa. And not just her name, but all of her was to be changed—a conversion marked first by the ascension of her dress collar some ten inches, from bosom to throat, those warm breasts so recently displayed like the dough of two rolls bursting sweet and fragrant from her bodice forced flat and apologetic like the unleavened bread of the penitent. Other changes, too, were forced upon her. There was the concurrent taming of her black curls.

“It is to a woman’s long hair that the Devil clings,” said Carlos’s mother, Marianna. And she made sure every ringlet, every handhold, was removed.

Never once in her entire life had the princess’s hair been straightened, but was rolled each bedtime in a hundred crackling curl papers such that each night became an ordeal endured for beauty. Yes, in France, Marie Louise had worn it as a veritable cataract of hair, like water flowing, like the tale sung by the poet Ovid of the nymph Arethusa changed into a fountain before Alpheus could rape her:
Dark drops rained from all her body
, the great poet said. Oh, María Luisa had hair like no other princess, and for her wedding it was dressed and bound with ribbons of gold, with gems and garlands and clips of tortoiseshell. For her wedding her hair was pulled back so tight that her eyes offered their own bright jewels.