Poison (21 page)

ou be my book, my prayer book
.

He said this, and he pushed away what we were studying. Not the Bible or
Lives of the Saints
, but a book of magic stories by a man called Ovid. A book of women turning into trees, of a god become a bull who rapes the daughter of the king, of a lover going down to hell for his bride. Of many nights of passion written in the language of the Church. It was the sun in his chariot, and the son of the sun dying in that burning heavenly conveyance. It was the head and lyre of a poet, Orpheus, floating down a river, still singing, the tongue and the strings together.

You be my book
.

That is what he said as he opened my legs. His tongue was silver. Clever, yes, and when it touched me I changed. Like alchemy, like those verses written by the poet Ovid, but I was not turned into a tree, no, I was nothing earthbound. If Daphne became wood, I was that wood thrown on the fire. I was the spirit that rises heavenward: invisible, escaping.

I was the tremble in the air that you can see above a bonfire.

He would embrace me and put himself between my legs, touching the inside of my thigh up high near my sex.
This is what silk is, Francisca. This is the silk that no worm can make
.

When he came from behind me, when he put his hands around my waist and pulled me to him, I felt how small I was. I felt his thumbs almost meet over my spine. I felt his fingers on my hipbones as if he were holding two handles of a bowl. Sometimes he would drink from me. And sometimes I was a cup he would take and dash to pieces on the floor. I felt myself break up and fly apart. It felt good to be freed.

I rose until I was above the cares of all the people I knew, until each person was so small I could not make out the color of a
dress, the features of a face. Sometimes I might recognize a body by its walk.

Up high, the sun shone with a fierceness. There was no wind. The birds that seemed to dart so quickly when viewed from underneath revolved slowly below me. There was no loud noise: no voices, no tears, no speeches or clamor of any sort. Only a thin hum of collective sighs and curses, prayers and imprecations. No individual cry rose to where I found myself.

In heaven there are no errands, no duties, no obligations. Even a great city like Madrid is rendered small and incidental. Far, far below: a tangled weave of activity, as if in the great mortal loom the heddles had snapped and threads took directions of their own. Some formed a lovely tapestry, others a dirty trodden carpet.

Sometimes I began to weep, for there is grief in altitude. Sometimes I would wonder, how do the angels stand it?

HEY WERE CAUGHT, OF COURSE. HOW COULD
such a ruse continue? They were as cautious as they could be, but palace guards kept vigil on all the stairs, and Carlos was a fitful sleeper. The king was known to walk in his sleep, in which event he was never woken, he was followed by his confessor, the two men silently slipping through the dark halls. Once the sleeping king had ventured as far as the map room. And it was not only nighttime exposure that threatened their subterfuge. The cook complained that the butcher was cheating the royal kitchens by delivering thin blood, and Severo’s continued examinations of María Luisa’s breasts left him puzzled. Why, he mused to the queen mother, did the queen’s milk flesh not swell if she was pregnant? Why did her nipples remain that palest pink?

To get away once with the deceit of a staged miscarriage was possible. Twice, unlikely. Three times, remarkable.

Almost five months into the queen’s fourth feigned pregnancy, the dwarf Eduardo was apprehended on the west stair, just before dawn. In his arms was a chamber pot containing blood. A guard stepped out of the shadows, and the sound of his boots echoed through the cold stone corridors, echoed and multiplied, sounding to the dwarf, crouched in the shadows, like the approach of an army of tall men. Eduardo, small hands slick with sweat, dropped the chamber pot, and it broke on the stairs.

By the time the queen mother herself saw the spilled evidence, the pig’s blood had dripped thickly, slowly and deliberately down to the landing below. Away from the queen’s bedchamber it dripped, as if trying to avoid the scene of the next intended crime, as if in loyalty to the co-conspirators.

As Marianna looked at the blood on the stairs, María and Esperte waited in the queen’s apartments. The sun was just beginning
to rise. “What can have happened!” cried the queen. Esperte was helplessly wringing her hands and walking from bed to window, from window to bed, when Eduardo—forcibly escorted only as far as the door by the guard—entered the room. The flame of the one candle burning on María’s nightstand trembled at the sudden draft of air and set all their shadows leaping. In the hall, the king, queen mother and guard stood silently, hidden from view.

“Why, you’ve spilled it!” María cried, seeing the stain on Eduardo’s sleeve.

The dwarf made no answer.

“Is there no more left?” she said. “Where is my chamber pot?”

Eduardo shook his head. He said nothing. From behind him, Marianna and Carlos entered the Queen’s bedchamber. Esperte covered her mouth with her hands.

“What are you doing here at this hour?” Marianna asked Esperte.

“I called her,” said María quickly. “I could not sleep. I wanted company.”

“Why not call your husband, in that case?” asked the queen mother.

“I wanted female company,” said María. She did not look at Eduardo or at his sleeve, its darkening, stiffening stain of evidence.

“Well, then,” said Marianna, “you could have asked for me,” and then she said, “Daughter.” At that word, spoken so venomously, María Luisa sat suddenly down on her bed.

No one said anything for a minute, two minutes, more. Esperte lost her nerves and fell to her knees weeping. Carlos, his face still pale and flat with sleep, began to cry as well. He made no noise, used as he was to disguising grief held inappropriate to majesty; but tears fell down his cheeks.

“There was no baby?” he said to his wife. “There never were any babies?”

The queen put her hands to her face. She shook her head.

Interrogated downstairs, Esperte admitted her part in the deception. She admitted that she had brought the queen herbs to
help her pretend childsickness. She admitted spiriting away the cloths bearing stains of María’s monthly flow. She admitted that she loved María and that she would have done any evil thing for her mistress.

She admitted she was a wanton, undeserving slattern, and she agreed to the queen mother’s suggestion that she had cast spells and made potions. When Marianna asked if she had fashioned little dolls of wax, Esperte laughed and laughed; she could not stop. She did not deny it, nor any other accusation. The translator, whose usefulness had long been outgrown, who had been retained as companion to a lonely foreign queen—for what harm could a convent girl cause?—suffered such hysterics that her teeth chattered. She heard herself calling Marianna a fat old spider, a snake, a cow, and possibly even worse things, which she subsequently forgot. Eduardo had no chance to say goodbye to Esperte, for the little translator was removed from the royal residence that very afternoon and thrown into the cell next to mine.

As for the dwarf, there was no disciplinary action taken against him. At least not immediately, not obviously. Carlos and his mother remained closeted in their respective apartments. For some days they even ate in solitude, away from the courtiers, and away from the queen, who breakfasted alone at the long, long table, who lunched alone, too, and went to bed before sunset, without any dinner.

María was afraid. No one spoke to her, not one person, but all the people who touched her in the course of a day, all those present only by the actions of their hands—dressers and hairdressers and maids and manicurists—grew kinder. Now that it was clear not only that María Luisa would not produce an heir, but that she had tried to deceive her husband the king and must therefore be doomed, those serving hands no longer pulled the queen’s hair and dressed it so tightly that her head began to ache within the hour. They did not pinch her as they fastened her stays. Indeed, no longer did they exact any cost at all for her high-and-mightiness. As if in recognition that now they had such power as she did not—the power of the living, of the safe, of the loved—they stroked her. Affectionately they tucked stray
locks behind her ears and caressed her neck. They kissed her almost, these sympathetic hands, fingertips lingering at her waist, her toes and aching temples, for they were not so cruel that they would deny small comforts. Not when the situation had grown so desperate.

The queen’s flesh recognized their pity, understood what it meant and tightened with fear.

The scent of her doom wafted down the long corridors after María. It was a strange odor, it was like that of a stale floral arrangement: the sweetness of withered petals overcome by the smell of stems rotting in a slime-slick vase. The smell entered a room before María Luisa, it announced her arrival. At meals the servants took note of it and set her plate before her with excellent silence. They arranged every morsel so artfully that each bite might have been presumed her last. Her breakfast chocolate—which in the old days had been served cold enough that María had had to lift a skin from its surface with her spoon—was served hot, and steam curled prettily from the cup. At last María did not have to take up her spoon to break that unsavory and yet implicitly hopeful milk skin, lifting it from the sweet surface and leaving it to congeal and adhere to her saucer.

Two weeks after the dwarf’s capture on the stairs, Carlos appeared at table across from Queen María. He greeted his wife for the first time in a fortnight and was seated. The familiar sight of Carlos’s sopped bread made the queen feel nauseated, as usual, but she ate her one bun and, on the morning I am picturing her, three Chinese oranges. A visitor had brought an entire crate of these as a gift.

María had company. A week after Esperte was taken away, the comtesse de Soissons had arrived in Madrid. She came from Versailles, to stay for a month, before going on to her winter residence in Majorca. She was a lively guest, she offered many diversions besides the hamper packed with fruit and chocolates and marzipan and candied ginger, all manner of delicacies carried over the border from France. The comtesse was as delicious as all of these, and she did her best to cheer up the queen. Despite having been forced to leave the French court early and at the height of the fall season (a little matter of a love spat with the
king and a subsequent paroxysm of jealousy by Madame de Maintenon), Olympe de Soissons’s spirits were irrepressibly high.

Of course, none of the Spanish livery would wait upon the comtesse, at least not after the second week of her visit, for rumors of arsenic caught up with the pretty visitor.

“She killed the king of France’s mistress!” the queen’s maid Obdulia had whispered to the dwarf, her dropsical eyes bulging even more than usual.

“Don’t be such a fool as to believe everything you hear!” Eduardo retorted.

But rumors about Olympe did include those that she had gradually eaten poison for years: arsenic distilled from apricot pits, which she had taken in higher and higher doses until her flesh was immune. In France it had been whispered that she had made her body into a vessel bearing death. That one kiss and her lover would die. At least, that was what was said late at night, after the confusion of too much wine, the dizziness of too many dances—the hour when people will say anything to keep their audience.

La Jolie Araignée
, the pretty spider, they called her.

Olympe was mysterious, she was beautiful. All her features were so sublime, and yet it was as if they were slightly blurred to her admirers’ dazzled eyes. Her pliant mouth, her nose, her mutable eyes, all encouraged the comtesse’s lovers to see in them whatever characteristic they favored. Her eyes: were they blue or gray, or were they violet? Monsieur de Vendôme said that her nose was sharp; his brother called it a button. To the comte, her lips were as full and sweet as dark cherries. Why, he married her on their account, he said. But the prince of Langlée said they were drawn as sharp as an arrow from Cupid’s quiver, he said they lacerated his heart.