Poison (9 page)

She eats too much upon rising. Hot chocolate before she even creeps from between the covers and then pastries downstairs at table. Pride tarts, so called because their crusts are filled with air; and Saint Agatha buns, two small round loaves, each with a currant in its center and served glued together with honey or treacle, the sweet bread thus calling to mind the martyr’s amputated breasts presented on their platter. María’s dowry is long spent, and the kingdom is poor, shockingly so. No longer are
viandes
served at every meal, or even at any meal. No pheasant or fish steaming on silver-lidded chafing dishes. No eels, no venison, no lamb. No dates or any other imported delicacy. Only eggs and whatever can be fashioned from eggs and flour. When currants run out, the Agatha buns are served without nipples.

María leaves Carlos at table. He eats so slowly, she cannot sit forever waiting for him to finish—although she ought to wait with him through his breakfast even were it to last until dinner, or so the courtiers whisper behind her back. From the day they were wed, she ought to have sat and been glad to sit there beside him, his slack lips on the rim of his bowl, his fingers trembling as they held it to his mouth.

He lives on a child’s diet of bread sopped in milk, this exalted
monarch, on an invalid’s meal that does not require him to chew anything with teeth so misaligned they do not allow his lips to meet. Not ordinary bread, though, but bread of the Eucharist, which Carlos himself watches as it is taken from the tabernacle, blessed and re-blessed. And not milk from a cow, but human milk, which—thank goodness—he takes from a cup. His sole smiles are wide and gummy, like an idiot’s leer. His kisses unspeakable.

The first time she saw him undressed, she gasped, she could not help herself. Gasped and then pretended the noise she made was due to some other cause, a phantom cramp.

“Are you all right?” Carlos asked, in his terrible French. He moved toward her, naked, and she nodded, mute, speechless, her hand still covering her mouth. The ceremony was hours behind them, they were in Burgos, at an inn. Without clothes or cape to disguise it, his shambling walk looked worse, as if he thrust his head forward and the rest of him followed. Were he fat, he would look like a pigeon, but he was not, he was terribly thin, and white-skinned. The king was remarkable in his pallor, María had never seen any to equal it. His lips, even, were without color; and except for his knees and elbows, inflamed with a patchy red rash, he looked as if he had no blood in him at all. His testicles were small, and they hung low, like an old man’s. Engorged, his organ was sickle-shaped and veered decidedly to the left.

The new queen had never before seen a man unclothed, but surely, she thought, surely, they did not all look like this.

The king undressed his bride shyly and slowly. He pulled at her corset strings as gingerly as if they were fuses, as if he were afraid she might go off like a firework. When he was finished, he took up a candle and held it so close to her breasts that she could feel the flame’s heat. He said nothing. Then at last he said, “You look better with your clothes off.” María did not answer.

He frowned, searching for the words he wanted. He shook his head, looked away, looked back, spoke. “I know that is not true of me,” he said. María sat on their marriage bed and began to weep. If only he had not acknowledged his ugliness, then perhaps she might not have had to, not immediately anyway.

From the time of the marriage of Carlos and María, the king’s potency was questioned by all of Europe. His amorousness, however, was unaffected by whatever physical incapacity he suffered, and his appetite for María did not diminish with the passage of time or the spreading of her flesh from that of lissome princess to fat queen. María did not return his desire, she never did, not from that first night when Carlos disrobed before her. In fact, in the first months of matrimony, even though she was well aware that she was to get with child, and quickly, the new queen tried to spend as many evenings as she could at card games.

Hoping to delay as long as possible the hour of wifely obligation, she remained cheerful under a barrage of criticisms from her new mother-in-law. Marianna was impatient with María’s slowness to learn the rules of trocero and piquet. Or perhaps the queen mother was impatient with María Luisa in general, and with her failure to conceive, and her impatience found its expression in card games. Each evening as she shuffled the cards, Marianna interviewed her daughter-in-law minutely as to her health and diet. “Perhaps fewer fruit ices in the evenings,” she would say. “They are chilling to the womb.” She suggested clove tea, cinnamon, pepper creams and poultices: anything to heat the flesh. She dealt the cards with her wrists flicking furiously, sending them scattering over the game table. Her explanations of the games’ various rules—in Spanish, translated to French by Esperte—were so fast that the younger woman could not follow them. And though Marianna wanted María to teach her fashionable French games like lansquenet, their rules, which María had mastered a season ago, jumbled senselessly in the young queen’s head. It seemed not only that María could learn nothing new, but that she had forgotten all she had previously known.

Was she stupid? Was the new queen entirely, even willfully, naïve? Without betraying any worry, María began to misbehave. She did things for which she would not be forgiven. She made the wrong enemies. Some people do.

She cheated at the card games her mother-in-law took so seriously.
“Do hurry,” Marianna would say to her daughter-in-law. “We might as well not play if you are going to take so long.” The queen mother fidgeted, sighed and fanned herself with her cards.

María’s eyes were not weak but she squinted at whatever she had been dealt. She used to like cards, she had liked them in France. Liked the sound of her mother’s expert shuffling and the way Maman’s cool hands had restored order to the unruly pack. Cards with her mother had been fun, but here, whatever game they at last agreed to play lagged and dragged and lingered on, which was part of their purpose, she reminded herself, the strategy of delay. But even so, these games of chance could not protect the queen indefinitely.

As soon as Carlos began to fidget, Marianna urged María to go upstairs; and anticipating his new wife’s avoidance of the last contest of the day, Carlos would begin yawning pointedly—and unattractively, but he could hardly help that—soon after dinner. By ten o’clock he would stand from the inlaid card table.

“I am going up to my apartments,” he would say. “Would you like to accompany me, María?” Even if he spoke in Spanish, the queen did not have to look to Esperte for confirmation of what he said.

“Yes. I’ll just finish this game,” she would answer, avoiding his and the queen mother’s eyes. Her skirts lay heavily in her lap, where she had hidden a card, an ace of hearts.

“I am going up to my apartments,” Carlos said. “Will you accompany me?” Esperte translated his words in a whisper.

María murmured her acquiescence in French but did not look up from her hand. The jack was useless, she thought. Or was it? How could she possibly keep the rules of so many games straight? There were simply too many, and too many exceptions as well. No point in asking again. When Marianna got angry, her Spanish accelerated until it seemed to María that her mother-in-law’s jaws were snapping like castanets. María sucked an errant black lock of hair that had willfully escaped her coif. What should she do? She had to go upstairs. She had to get with child. If only it would happen tonight—then she would be safe. For a year, anyway. God help her. Why could she not
remember anything? It must be nerves. Was it only the king who was exempt from a trick, or the other face cards as well? She’d have to retrieve her ace now. But, no, she couldn’t pick it up when her mother-in-law was looking so fiercely at her. Perhaps she should just play the jack. After all, what was another scolding from Marianna? “I’ll just be another—” she began, but Carlos cut her off.

“I am going up now,” he said. “Will you accompany me?” María looked up. He was displeased, his eyes narrowed and watered, squeezing out tears of pique.

“Yes. Of course, Carlos,” she said. Now what was she to do? She couldn’t return the ace, she’d have to let it drop under the table as she stood. María lay her cards, face down, on the gaming surface, and rose carefully.

“You play my hand, Esperte,” she said. “Perhaps you will be lucky tonight.” The hidden ace slipped down her skirt, over the toe of her shoe and onto the floor. Before the translator even approached the gaming table, Carlos’s mother picked up the hand María had laid on the table and continued the game with her daughter-in-law’s cards in her left hand, her own in her right.

As María left the gaming room she could hear the energetic click of spoons being stacked and restacked—for lack of coins they played with flatware—and the rustling sigh of cards being laid down. “Ah! She’s won!” said Carlos’s mother. “Or she would have, if she’d had the sense to play her hand as I just did. Which I very much doubt.”

María paused in the hall, listening to her mother-in-law as Carlos ascended the stairs before her. When she tried, she could understand Spanish better than she let Marianna, or anyone besides the little translator, believe. “She would not have had the sense to play her jack,” Marianna was saying. “She isn’t her best with games of strategy.” There was the sound of cards being shuffled, like a series of impatient snorts, but no response was audible. “Ah, what would you know, coming from a convent?” Marianna said to Esperte. Carlos climbed, his valet at his heels, and María hung back in the stairwell, her heart beating too loudly in her ears to allow much more eavesdropping.

“I’ll just have a round of solitaire, then, if you’re not going to play.” A murmur from Esperte, only too glad to be excused, was obscured by the slap of cards on the table, as Marianna began to divide them into their suits.

“Why, there’s no ace of hearts!” came the inevitable exclamation, and then the sound of silk skirts rustling, of chairs screeching back over the marquetry. Two pages and Esperte were ordered to search the room, and Marianna’s heels made a cross, percussive sound on the boards beneath her shoes, as if she were punishing the floor for suspected complicity. María peeped around the corner to see Esperte’s hips wedged under the card table, Marianna rapping them with her fan.

“Here it is!” the translator said, her soft voice further muffled from its origin under the table.

“By the breath of the Sainted Virgin!” said Marianna, snatching the errant ace. “This is the second time since she’s come that we’ve found a card on the floor.” She looked at it, turned it over in her hand. She turned it upside down and then right side up. “I believe she’s cheating,” she said at last.

A murmured response, a sigh, a cough, and the sounds of cards resumed. María scrambled up the stairs at the sound of Carlos’s third call.

Eleven o’clock. Were she home in France, the night would just be starting. Aperitifs, then a midnight supper to which she had been looking forward, pheasant or duck or quail, so tender that the meat parted from the bones with a little sigh that was echoed in the contented sounds of diners. Instead, she had indigestion, the taste of eggs rising with each belch. Was it possible that in Spain they ate eggs every night? Lying on her back, she tried to remember the past week’s dinners. Monday: eggs with coriander. Tuesday: eggs dropped in boiling soup stock so that the white threaded through each mouthful and hung from the spoon like strings of mucus. Wednesday: eggs with pickled turnips, a bilious combination served with a spiced condiment that made even her eyelids perspire as she ate. Thursday: a hard-cooked egg hidden, shell and all, in yellow bread dough and baked into a small round loaf, one on each plate. Now, who could imagine something like that? Her Uncle Louis’s chef
would have fainted, and swallowing hard-cooked eggs always made María’s back hurt. She felt them descend slowly, like mouthfuls of clay. Friday: a soufflé in the shape of a fish. And then tonight’s disaster, eggs
à la française
, an omelette in which strange little brown lumps were disguised. Lumps of what? Sausage? After chewing one, María had chosen to swallow the rest whole.

Throughout each meal Carlos peered over his bowl of milk-soaked body of Christ. María avoided the sight of his plate, conjuring as it did for her the vision of a corpulent, melancholy team of wet nurses voiding their dugs into a basin, making what living they could before they were inevitably dismissed (and on two occasions even put to death) for causing one of Carlos’s myriad ailments.

In bed Carlos thrust at her, a motion accompanied by the sound of glass breaking.

“What is that!” Carlos said, but the queen only shrugged.

Upon learning that her husband had disallowed, by decree, the use of looking glasses in the palace, María had hidden all her hand mirrors between the mattresses. Carlos was afraid of his reflection, she guessed, of the revelation of his ugliness and frailty. Or he was worried about the possibility of a mirror breaking, about more bad luck and bewitchments, which—if one was superstitious, and she was—would follow from their having cracked one now.

His hands on her breasts, the king kneaded them like dough, first making as if to flatten them and then rubbing them around and around, as if trying to re-form them into balls. Such lovemaking might have made María laugh, in anyone but her husband. She could feel him hard against her leg, but he never made it up between her thighs before his excitement grew such that it came to its inevitable conclusion, wetting her legs and nothing else. He murmured, sighed and rolled over on his back. His avid attendance at so many bullfights, dog fights, cockfights, even bear fights did not inspire his own manly prowess. All his watching of cattle breeding and of his stallions taking their mares—his insatiable enjoyment of all manner of masculine display—taught
the king nothing. Even the little cocks, who attacked each other’s eyes with their painted, gilded spurs and who climbed flapping on the hens until they screamed, even a nine-ounce bird was more intelligently manly than the king of Spain.