Poison (8 page)

“They must be burning a witch in there!” came the cry, as smoke began seeping out not just from the hidalgo’s chimney but from all the windows as well. For it is not just the royal family who fears sorcery.

“Ten witches!”

“Fifty!”

Having decided on so dramatic a ceremony as that required for the punishment of fifty witches, the appearance of the shrunken king and his stiff-necked bride was a disappointment to their incidental audience. At least it was disappointing to those like my sister, Dolores, for whom the smell of a burned witch is the most exalted of perfumes.

The afternoon sky was bright. Clouds moved before the sun and then floated off, so that shadows of the wedding party appeared against a wall or a hedge and then just as quickly disappeared, giving the impression of some ghostly chorus of witnesses: playful spirits, one minute revealing their presence, then suddenly diffident and vanishing from where they had stood.

And among the onlookers, Francisca de Luarca, dressed in felt, dressed in linen, dressed in wool, shod in wood—not a thread of silk on my person—watched the wedding of my king to the princess from France.

I stood alone, without companions murmuring beside me, a woman of just eighteen, already accused of witchery, interrogated and warned by the Holy Office (though not yet were my crimes seen as connected to my mother, my mother was not yet viewed with suspicion). I was young to have arrived already at notoriety. I wore a
sanbenito
, a smock that hung down as far as my knees and covered my dress. On its yellow front was the double cross stitched in scarlet and accompanied by a quill and scroll, indicating an appetite for letters that had taken an unacceptable turn. It was joined by one other image: a breasted serpent, symbolical for lust. On the back of the smock, which I was not allowed to remove, even as I slept, a Devil fed a little woman to a flame with his pitchfork, lest those who could not read miss the point the Holy Office wished to convey: here is Francisca, suspected of heresies and under holy quarantine. Still, I was free then, I felt the air on my face. If I did not count myself among the happy, then I did not yet know how unhappy it was possible to be.

As for María Luisa, for her wedding day she was dressed,
decked, ribboned, corseted, sashed, shod, veiled, and plumed in unhappiness, just as surely as she was covered, every inch of her, in silk and gold and jewels. And her gown of misery was every ounce as heavy as her wedding dress.

His Majesty, King Carlos, stood beside María Luisa, holding her lace-gloved hand in his own. Behind them, on the hillside, grew fourteen rows of twenty mulberry trees, their yellow leaves burning bright, reflecting the autumn sun. As promised, over the years the trees my papa planted had thrived on nothing, had grown ever taller and more lovely in their natural symmetry. Uneaten by any worm, the useless leaves dropped onto the black earth like so many coins spilled there, the only riches we had. The queen of Spain was wearing silk, but not our silk.

She was young, she was my age. Though I well remembered my mother’s letters, every word of every one of them, at that moment in the ceremony when the date of María’s birth—the fourth day of February in the year 1662—was read from a scroll, I started. On that very day, eighteen years previous, two female infants were delivered of their mothers: one in France, at a castle just outside the great city of Paris, and one in Spain, in the modest dwelling of a silk farmer in Quintanapalla. We each survived our births and the subsequent ills that take most children. We each budded in our time, surviving the so-called greensickness that claims its tithe of virgins. And now here we both stood.

It was said that María was the most beautiful of all the princesses in Europe. Melancholy brown eyes, a long nose, a mouth whose Cupid’s bow was well defined. White skin, a bit sallow, or perhaps just pale with fright; for every second that she breathed, every second from the moment she was betrothed and given by decree to Spain, Marie Louise, María Luisa, began to lose her life.

The princess had spent the morning before her wedding on her knees, saying over and over the one word she had promised herself to forget.
Maman
, she prayed again and again, forsaking God for a creature she loved better.
Maman, Maman. Je t’en prie
. I beseech you.

“Come,” a maid-in-waiting said, and she held out her hand to
María. She spoke and the translator translated. “Your mother cannot hear you,” the maid said. “Your mother is far away, and the ministers are calling. Come, you must get up now.”

I saw her in Santiago’s courtyard, and I took a mirror, a small round looking glass that I was in the habit of carrying in my hand, and I shined a circle of light, sent it bouncing over to her: her face, her eyes. What did she see? Nothing, perhaps. Nothing more than a little flash of light playing over her veil. She turned her head toward me, briefly, but still, she overcame her supposed paralysis. I shuddered. Her veil put me in mind of my mother’s winding-sheets.

“They shall kill you, too,” I whispered, and then I put my hand to my lips. I did not want to curse her. “Well, perhaps not,” I lied.

Beneath that veil, before the consecration of the kiss, María had her brief spell of privacy, one of the few her new life offered. Naturally, she thought of her home. If she tried, María could recall the smell of the gardens in Paris. At her wedding, her hands were empty.
Is there not one flower in all of Spain? Not one for a bride?
she wondered.

She missed flowers—for ten years she would miss flowers, because Castile has few—just as she missed the ornamental lakes, gondolas so full of minstrels that they routinely sank, players wading through the chest-high water bearing viols and flutes and lutes and zithers, oboes and ophicleides, clarinets and pianettes, all overhead and well above the splashing water. Midnight suppers of oysters and ices and cakes. Childish games of romance played by all, even widowed comtes and comtesses—especially they!—crouching in their corsets until their faces were red and breathless, adding up the dots on dominoes to determine the recipient of a kiss. Dancing, of course: dancing on blisters and on blisters’ blisters. And gazettes smuggled in by the maids and read under the counterpane, so that they caught the draperies on fire routinely. María missed everything, but she missed her mother and the flowers most of all.

Every year that he did not wage war on the Netherlands, Louis XIV imported four million tulip bulbs. Dutch tulips, and night-scented stock, daffodils, narcissus. Pear trees by the thousands
dropping their white blossoms in a carpet over the lawns, a carpet so thick that it gummed up shoes and disrupted croquet as petals withered and stuck to the rolling balls and made a slippery paste on the ends of the mallets.

By the time the pears were ripe, summer had arrived on a wave of honeysuckle that broke cloyingly sweet over the château and her grounds. Even the industrious bees sank in the air. They flew in from the fields and gorged themselves on the king’s flowers until their hind legs were lost under packed yellow plunder, until their flight degenerated into drunken, sinking spirals.

Was it possible that just last season María had been Marie, laughing with the other girls? Running through the long allées of maple trees, slipping beneath the canopy of leaves and into that mysterious, deep shade of summer afternoons. Tumbling on the grass and ruining silk dresses, staining them forever. The laundress sulked and scolded, the dressmaker came with his sleeves full of pins. There were always more dresses to be had, more summer days to squander on giggling. María began to weep behind her veil. Her plight was suddenly as clear to her as the action of a sandglass, future hope transformed directly to past regret. Unexpectedly, she found she knew what an old woman knows, that there is no present in which to take pleasure. That minutes are as two piles of coins: those spent, and those about to be spent. There is no other currency.

In Paris the perfume of the flowers had grown stronger and stronger until the kingdom reeled, and then, at the height of this orgy, ten ministers from Spain arrived. It was time to finalize a bargain struck years before. In exchange for certain diplomatic concessions amounting to an adjustment of borders, a loss of land, Spain would receive one marriageable, fertile, pure-blooded princess: an expensive girl, and a girl whose dowry of jewels and of silk was nothing against the hope of what treasure her body was expected to produce. The ministers from Spain brought with them a physician who examined those parts of the princess which most call secret, but which were to be secret no longer. When this doctor was satisfied that María could breed and could bear, then for one week the ministers met with King Louis in the morning. In the afternoons, they privately reviewed
the progress of their talks as they walked in their black breeches through the gardens, watched the ladies promenade around the ornamental ponds. Watched the carp rise through the water, their greedy mouths imposing a pattern of endless O’s upon its black surface. Watched an occasional bug skate across, each appendage dimpling the water’s bright mirror. The French ladies peered into the ponds as well, and the water cast back at them their perfectly rouged cheeks under a blue cloudless sky. The ladies, Marie’s mother among them, played cards under the trees, they ate tiny tartines, and when they could think of nothing other than lying down they returned to their chambers and slept away the afternoons so that they might be refreshed when it was fully dark and time to dance and gamble. The ministers from Spain, however, walked in the heat until they were exhausted, and then retired just as everyone else was getting up. They missed the midnight revels, the capsizing gondolas, the laughing and dancing and all the happy nonsense. But they would not have liked them, anyway. At the end of the week, meetings concluded to the satisfaction of interests both French and Spanish, the ministers took away a recent portrait of Marie Louise, along with a written promise that the princess herself would follow as soon as a proper trousseau could be collected.

What in María’s old life could have prepared her for her new one? Everyone from Madrid wore enormous jeweled spectacles, an enhancement to dignity rather than eyesight, as the princess learned when she peered through a pair of
oculares
left behind at a banquet table and found that the lenses were of plain glass. Spanish ladies wore earrings that hung down as far as their shoulders, tiny clocks bobbing on the ends of gold chains where they could not even see them to read the time. And, while last season in Paris heels had been high, the Spanish nobility’s desire for loftiness was so intense and so literal that aristocratic women balanced on stilts—the higher her rank, the greater the elevation from which she gazed. When María’s lady-in-waiting brought her the bridal shoes in their mounts, the princess fell back on her bed, her hands to her mouth. “But what on earth are those!” she said.

Beneath her wedding gown (which weighed a stone at least),
beneath her thirteen petticoats and the hooped armature of wood and wire that held up the tower of fabric (another two stone), María rose above the bishop, who got a crick in his neck when he looked up to see the face of this newest and most reluctant lady of Spanish rank.

Had not such elaborate scaffolding forced her to remain upright, the princess felt she would have fallen down dead. But once she had her stilts firmly placed next to Carlos (who in his own elevated boots rose as far as her shoulders), María discovered she could relax a little, planted as she was in the sod like a fantastic jeweled umbrella. Perhaps this was the key to surviving the public functions of her new position: she would always seek out spongy ground.

On the banquet table, set under a canopy of royal purple, were twelve roasted peacocks, their feathered necks stretched prettily from their cooked breasts, their glorious tails reattached to their naked hindquarters, still smoking from the oven. They looked like a row of gargantuan ladies’ fans shivering in the breeze. The food, carried from the hacienda, must have grown cold quickly, and the smell of burned, wet draperies—the fire having been extinguished with water saved in casks from the late storms—rose up the hill to the peasants watching there, dampening appetites aroused by the sight of so many delicacies.

After the servants had packed up the remains of the surprising feast (the vision of which, together with the wedding, was so unexpected that each witness must have questioned his sanity); after the last noble’s carriage rolled out of view, the townsfolk of Quintanapalla ran down to the courtyard and searched the ground for any forgotten scrap. They took home stray peacock feathers as souvenirs, proof of the astonishing visitation, a wonder of which they would tell their children and grandchildren. Those feathers, having graced such an august occasion, would undoubtedly prove powerful amulets with which to ward off evil eyes. Indeed, such tail feathers looked like eyes themselves, each one like the oily eye of a courtesan.

I did not get one. It was understood that a woman in my position—a woman marked as a heretic by the Holy Office—had forfeited her right to press forward to claim any windfalls; and I
had no desire to feel a stone in my face. Still, in the waning light of that strange day, after the crowd had dispersed, I walked the packed ground where the new queen’s tables had been set. Like Thomas, that apostle of doubt, I pushed my finger into a hole, a puncture in the earth left by one of the queen’s tall stilts. Yes, there was the proof, it had all really happened.

The wind picked up, tore at the trees on the hill, and the yellow mulberry leaves came down. They rained all around me like gold scattered in the wake of royal carriages, and I caught one from the air, I held it tightly in my hand.

The queen of Spain sees yellow. She presses the heels of her hands into her closed eyes, and she sees yellow circles falling like leaves. The sun has filled her room. She cannot delay consciousness any longer.
Where is the page on which the fate of every soul is written?
she thinks. And then she thinks,
Oh God, it is too early in the day for thoughts like that
.