Poison (7 page)

Eighteen years old, María had dreamed of Spain, had been dreaming of this country for years, even as I had been dreaming of France and of her. María was betrothed to King Carlos when she was five, when I was five, and when our worms were still alive, still chewing, still spinning. Still making clothes for princesses.
Dresses so immense and so many-layered, of silk so thickly brocaded and decorated with jewels, that once she was dressed it took all a woman’s strength to stand upright.

After dozens of parties, Marie left her mother and brother and father in Paris, and set off for her new life with her maids and six ministers. It took almost an entire season to journey from the middle of France to Castile, it took so long because Marie was in no hurry. She traveled on horseback for as long as the weather permitted, cantering around and behind the three carriages full of ministers and maids. On horseback, describing circles and serpentines, exploring creeks and ponds in the flat farmland around Paris; meandering south, where the land buckled into rolling, hilly vineyards, where the wind shook the grape leaves and made all of France into a vast green sea, rocking, rocking. Marie Louise rode until rain turned to sleet, until, two months after leaving Paris, the three carriages reached the boundary between France and Spain, a border marked by the little river Bidassoa.

In the tiny river-port town of Orhy, a ferry waited for the princess’s transport, a flat blue boat with a new canopy of snapping red and white, flags of France and of Spain bristling from each of its four corners. One of the thirty-seven onlookers assembled pointed at Marie Louise and said to the child sitting on his shoulders, “Look! Now you can tell your grandchildren that you saw the queen of Spain!”

The ferry was dragged over the water from the French to the Spanish shore by means of pulleys bearing ropes wound onto two giant spools turned by oxen, one spool on each riverbank. Marie Louise and her maids and ministers boarded the boat; and with a great squeal it began moving across the foaming water. The tide was fast, the wind sharp, and the boat pulled against the ropes. Midway across the river, one ox kicked another, there was much bellowing from animal and master, and in the ensuing struggle to separate the beasts the ropes snarled. The ferryboat stopped, and the journey was delayed an hour, the whole party paused in the neutral territory of flowing water. The relief of the princess occasioned by the reprieve of one hour was so great that, for the first time since leaving home, Marie
was forced to admit her fear. What did she know, really, about Spain, about Carlos? About being a queen? It was cold on the water, but a rivulet of frightened sweat ran from her neck down her spine.

Too soon the ropes were untangled and the misbehaving beast replaced by another, more congenial one. The boat continued, pulleys squealing so loudly that conversation was impossible. The one maid-in-waiting who had complained in days previous that the motion of the carriage made her head ache discovered that the motion of the ferry had even more objectionable effects. She vomited over the side rail until nothing more came up, only strings of mucus that shone silver as they stretched and broke in the breeze, then dropped into the water. When finally the ferry reached the Bidassoa’s Spanish bank, she disembarked before María. She ran from the boat in flagrant violation of the rules of etiquette, and of state, for it had been determined and contracted that the French retinue might accompany their princess only so far as the border: they were not to step on Spanish soil.

“Back on board immediately!” cried the ministers, almost in unison, and the poor girl was pulled, weeping, from the shore back onto the ferry, where she fell to her knees and began immediately to retch again. “Maman! Maman!” she begged, and María, standing now on the shore of her new home, found herself beginning to cry as well, not so much for the maid’s misery as for the girl’s helplessly calling for an absent mother.

“In all likelihood,” Marie’s own mother had said to her in Paris, tears washing the powder from her cheeks, “we will not embrace again in this life.” And they had held each other tightly, so tightly, until there was the small snap of one whalebone stay breaking, and then they had begun to laugh. “Yours or mine?” Marie had said, wiping her eyes, laughing and crying at once. “Mine, I believe,” said her mother. “Ouch, yes!” She held her side where the broken stay had poked her.

On the Spanish shore, Rébenac, the French minister who had come from Madrid, kissed one and then the other of the princess’s gloved hands as the other French ministers watched from the ferry. Water slapped over the deck, ruining shoe leather and
spraying the still-sobbing, retching maid. The pulleys began to squeal, the boat withdrew, the sobs grew faint.

In the midst of the corps of Spanish ministers was Marianna, King Carlos’s mother. She came forward. “Here is your translator,” she said in Spanish. “She is a good, chaste girl, and well versed in your tongue.”

At a little push from the queen mother, a young woman came toward María. She curtsied, and translated Marianna’s words exactly: “Here is your translator—”

“But do you not have a name?” the princess asked.

“Esperte. I am Esperte.”

The party set off south into Spain. Northern Spanish roads would break up any carriage wheels, lame any horse, and so the future queen was carried with her translator in a litter, carried by the legs and arms of men. Strong legs, and noble, too. Each kneecap, each shin and sinew and toenail could follow its pedigree back to King Ferdinand: lesser legs would have been an affront.

If such transportation seemed to bear María backward into centuries past, as far away from Paris in years as in miles, at first she was glad of it. She was young and excited by the romance of inconvenience, when inconvenience was a novelty. Besides, she was more and more wary of reaching her destination. The Spanish king, it was rumored, was peculiar. María knew he had been an invalid, of course, but still she pictured him in good health, recovered from whatever had plagued him. Tall and if not handsome, exactly, then at least vivacious. He would play games as the young men in Paris had. Perhaps he would teach her new ones.

“Have you seen him?” she asked the translator.

“Only from a great distance.”

“Does he ride?”

“I think not.”

“Oh. Well, does he play croquet?”

“Croquet?”

“Yes, with the mallet and the … Is there no croquet here?”

The translator shook her head. “I have not heard of it.”

When the litter stopped to change bearers, Rébenac, the
French minister, cleared his throat outside the curtains. “I think perhaps you might occupy yourselves with a Spanish lesson,” he said, but as soon as he drew away from the litter, María pressed her translator for more gossip, more details.

“They say His Majesty sleeps upon a bed of relics,” Esperte whispered. “The bed’s posts are made of thigh bones, and the knobs are skulls. The canopy is the hide of Saint Epipodius, who was flayed when the lions would not devour him.

“They say he has no teeth and does not eat the usual things kings eat.

“They say he suffers bad dreams. He sleepwalks. He still takes milk from the breast.”

“Assez,”
María said. Enough. She motioned for Esperte to stop talking.
I am in a coffin
, the princess thought suddenly of her litter borne aloft by six footmen. The walls of its curtains swelled as if to crush her.

Perhaps she
was
dead. Perhaps she’d suffered an accident in France and now was dead and on her way to hell.

The impassive face of the Spanish minister of etiquette bore an expression that certainly could grace the observer of a never-ending funeral. Not an hour after their introduction to one another at the border, he had told Esperte to instruct María that she could not be seen riding, she could not be seen eating, she could not look out of the curtains of the litter. On the few occasions when she might be seen, she must be careful to let no unseemly passion derange her features.

Défense de manger. Défense de sourire
. So, she might as well have been dead already and lying in state. Visitors would see a cold, set smile, for it appeared that Spain would not tolerate any signs of life in its queen.

María Luisa, worn out by fits of panic, slept during much of the trip, and her translator did, as well. Each girl was so shocked to find herself in a new world, a new life, that unconsciousness alone provided relief. They found themselves yawning helplessly. They fell asleep midsentence, and their heads nodded in time with the pitching of the litter and sometimes came together with a smart crack that woke each girl from her dreams: Esperte’s of the library in the convent, her sleeping fingers drawn
together as if around a quill; and María’s of dances, endless dizzy balls, which kept her feet twitching beneath her skirts.

“Do look out of the curtain,” said the princess, holding the side of her head, where it had bumped Esperte’s. “And tell me what you see.”

Yellow grass, gray rocks, blue sky, gray sky. Twisted olive trees with foliage so dark that they looked black against the dry grass. Towns like dirty beads upon the coiling silver string of a distant river. Endless stone walls coming down and falling into rubble, sheep grazing among the boulders. Farmhouses disgorged a few puzzled peasants as the litter and its entourage passed. The common country folk had no notion of a king and queen. They knew not even that they were Spaniards. They paid homage to the weather and the Virgin and little else.

Occasionally, the litter’s curtains swung apart to reveal a flash of her bearers’ boots, and María saw the dust of the road come up under their heels. It blew into the litter and settled on its passengers. Grime crept under her fingernails and between her breasts. The princess blew her nose, another thing never done in public, so she made sure to blow it well behind her curtain each time before she was called to emerge. The mucus came out blackened with dust, like a tiny augur of death there on the white linen handkerchief, and she hid it under a cushion.

The entire trip María’s throat ached with loneliness. She felt the pressure of unexpressed grief behind each eyelid, eyelids swollen and stinging from the sand that penetrated the curtains of the litter. But María did not cry, because the first and only time she began to weep—unfortunately on the occasion of a ceremonial dinner—the minister of etiquette leaned forward, one eye made grotesquely large by the lens of his quizzing glass, and said, as Esperte translated, “Do not cry. Crying will bring you bad luck. If you cry for no reason, God will soon give you one.”

“Shhh!” said Carlos’s mother. “Why frighten the child any more than she is?” But the queen mother gave the princess a sharp look of disapproval even as she patted her hand. “Do not worry,” Marianna said. “You shall be with Carlos before long.” And Esperte translated this, along with the explanation
that the king was in Toledo, attending the traditional prenuptial bullfights.

María stopped herself before the welling tears could fall down her cheeks. But perhaps she didn’t catch herself soon enough, perhaps God had noticed. Perhaps it was He that made the wind blow so ceaselessly through the hills of Cantabria and over the plains of Castile, going from a sigh to a moan and then back to a sigh. Perhaps, once upon a time, the wind had cried for but a little reason, and then God had made him unhappy forever.

Beyond the litter’s curtains, the bearers huffed, chuffed, stumbled, and occasionally even fell with exhaustion. As they approached their destination, the meeting of the king and his queen at Burgos, ministers set to waxing their mustaches and duennas occupied themselves with looking glasses and tweezers. María took advantage of everyone’s distraction, once even daring to poke her head right out of the curtains, just as the litter wobbled past the lazy Arlanzón River. The water was green and choked by vegetation. On its oily surface, grasses rippled like the hair of a corpse caught in the rocks.

The nuptials were to take place in the cathedral at Burgos. Where else than in that greatest church in all the kingdom, and in whose shadow our town of Quintanapalla took refuge? But in the days preceding the ceremony the bishop of Burgos made as if to die; the court found itself without sufficient moneys to buy enough kindling to properly heat the cold interior of the great stone structure; the young king grew impatient for his bride; and María suffered a mysterious paralysis, a stricture which rendered her quite unable to move her neck and which confounded the court doctor traveling with them. At least, he said he was confounded, for it would have been too impolitic to voice his impression that the princess was stiff with fright.

A dying bishop, lack of money, an amorous king, a frozen princess. All of these and more were put forth as explanations for the very unlikely occurrence of the wedding of a king in Quintanapalla. For years, the townsfolk would talk of it, and these are the sorts of things they said. But none of these was the real reason.

Even then, so fearful were Carlos and his mother (and all the court) of a hex undoing the grand plan of the Hapsburgs, the wish that a prince be sired, and so determined were they that María get with child soon, that the royal family dared not allow the public spectacle of a state wedding. Crowds would offer too many hiding places for witches; and, as everyone knows, witches attend weddings for one purpose only: to cast spells on the secret parts of bride and groom. Obscured by a neighbor’s back, hidden beneath a shawl or plunged into a basket, their profane, red-knuckled fingers would be busily twisting up lace knots, those infamous lengths of catgut, of horsehair, of wool, of linen, or of shining silk. Knots that, when tied during wedding vows, would sew up the mouth of the womb, shut it up as tight as a drawstring closes a purse, and prevent the unhappy couple from ever getting with child.

Of course, the villagers were not supposed to know of this hurried sacrament, for that would have defeated the very point of it, would have issued an invitation to local witches. The ceremony was to occur secretly in the hacienda of that obsequious, flattering, foppish hidalgo, Santiago, an estate owner whose not inconsiderable vanity was further swelled by such an honor. A very commodious and well-appointed structure was Santiago’s home, and well built, better than most. But built of wood, not stone, it caught fire as the wedding party assembled. A spark dropped from a censer into a drapery, and instead of purifying that presumptuous building with the scent of the saints, it sanctified it utterly. There was a holy conflagration, a fire that was everywhere at once, licking at doublets and dresses, singeing feathered hats, tasting the possibilities of a silk cape even as it ate up the carpet and chairs. The wedding party ran outside and into the courtyard in full view of the townsfolk. We had gathered, of course, in clots of gossipers, fearful and conjecturing about the meaning of so many black carriages bearing the king’s coat of arms.