Poison (31 page)

From his bag Severo retrieves a piece of lambskin, cut long and narrow like a sash, and, turning the soft fleece side to the queen’s skin, he binds it tightly around her leg, just below the knee. He taps her foot when he is done with the tourniquet. “Your Highness, if you would, please move your foot,” he says. María wriggles her toes a little, and slowly the vein fills and rises. When the physician takes the foot in his hand again, she flinches.

The prick of the lancet is expert, relatively painless, and on this, the fourth try, her blood spurts out. Each beat of her heart sends a feeble jet that runs down her foot and drips warm as bathwater from her big toe and its neighbor. But blood does not feel like water, and her skin senses blood’s heaviness, its almost oily, slippery quality.

Dr. Severo and his assistant step back at the sight of the queen’s blood. They bow their heads. It is as if a new presence, some exotic dignitary requiring homage, has suddenly entered the room. And, in truth, the smell of María’s blood—like Estrellita’s, or anyone else’s—carries its own peculiar intimacy.

Nearing death, and brimming with longing for those she has loved and lost, an unexpected, almost embarrassing smell of revelation flows from María’s opened vein. Freed from the constraints of flesh, memories and desires carried in her blood crowd about the room. Her heart empties itself silently, but Dr. Severo cringes as if at a sudden clamor, and his boy shrinks back against the draperies.

Who are all these spirits! Mischievous Mademoiselle de Toquetoque, the marquise and her naughty cigarros, María’s nana and her cousin Berthe, her dance master, Lucie, Rocinante and a dozen little lovebirds—they are all there in her blood and they fly out for an instant; they mill about, they gossip together. Laughing, and flowing under the bed, splashing the tiles. Horse’s hooves clatter on the floor, the lovebirds sing their homesick song, they fly at Severo’s assistant’s head, and he starts. Over goes the nightstand and its water glasses, almond oil, unraveling bandages.

“You oaf!” the doctor yells at his boy, who scrambles to right the stand. He nervously mops up the barley water with his own doublet.

María opens her eyes, she stares at the canopy of her bed. The very air in her chamber trembles and expands. Above the noise and chatter of the spirits, the piercing birdsong, she hears her own pulse in her ears, she is aware of each breath she draws. Loss of blood makes her fingers cramp, her neck and shoulders suddenly ache sharply. She has the unpleasant sense that her teeth are loosening in their sockets. The thought of her foot,
open and dripping her life into a bowl, makes her think of Estrellita. She wonders how the child lives with her terrible gift from God.

When the blood begins to coagulate, Dr. Severo kneels and makes another opening just above the first. María hardly feels this prick. The room has grown brighter to her eyes, as if it has come unmoored and floats heavenward from the palace. Her ears pop, as if she has suddenly ascended a great height. She feels wonderfully cool, the fever is all draining away through her foot, and a strange taste fills her mouth, a sweet taste, as of hope. She is so light.
As if my veins had been filled with lead
, she thinks.
I am unburdened
.

Now she feels she understands Estrellita. Now she opens her arms and prays in the same words her husband uses:
Touch me. Find me
. She too would bleed and bleed, if she could only feel this ecstatic rising forever.

But it cannot last, too soon it will be over. Pleasant memories will forsake her. Dr. Severo cauterizes the wound with a knife blade heated until it glows white. As cool as she is now, in a few hours she will be miserably hot. Her tongue will feel thick and sticky again. It will cleave to the roof of her mouth and render her incessant requests for water incomprehensible. Yes, for the moment, she is improved, she can smile as Severo leaves, and for an hour or more she feels happy to remain in her body, she stops thinking of her mother, stops dreaming of somehow returning to France.

The hour passes quickly. The lovebirds turn to bats, friends to tormentors.

When Eduardo comes to sit by her side, she grasps his hand, she draws him toward her. “I want it over with,” she says. “Bring the laudanum. Every bit that you have, all that you’ve saved.”

When he refuses, she begins to weep.

Before the queen had Eduardo’s laudanum, her life had been a struggle between two poles: panic and the only means she had to smother it, a willed blankness. Without any rescue, when she first arrived in Madrid, the queen’s cheeks tingled with fear, her fingers trembled and she shook so at supper that she was forced
to hold her cup with two hands, she could not cut her meat. Such a pitch of feeling could not be sustained, of course, not even for a season, and so she settled into long periods of dullness interrupted by periodic fits of frantic weeping.

Her crying became a source of gossip and conjecture. As María could have told anyone, there was much to be unhappy about, and yet none of what came to pass in a day was the actual cause for tears. It was more that she had become like some vessel left under a steady drip of loneliness that would not dry but steadily accumulated until she overflowed. Weeping became a part of her routine, as regular as her morning toilette. Each morning as the angelus rang she began to cry as if the bell itself broke her heart, the way certain sounds of high pitch can shatter a wineglass or some overly fragile bauble.

“You must try to stop,” Esperte said to her. But María would weep until she was summoned to the midday repast and come to table with eyes swollen and face blotched. Her hair, of course, was smooth, but no servant could unruffle her spirit and erase the marks of woe.

Whatever concern Carlos’s mother first expressed yielded quickly to displeasure, and María knew her grief was dangerous. Still, she could not stop the feeling, and it was years after her arrival that the queen learned about the dwarfs and their laudanum and asked Eduardo about the drug. “You do not use it!” she said.

“No,” he answered, and he told María that she should be suspicious of unfelt pain. Did she like the way the other dwarfs smiled those smiles without mirth?

“Just let me try it,” she said, and she wheedled and cajoled and petted and begged until he finally acquiesced.

She knew how to charm him. How could he resist the lovely, lonely queen? In a month’s time María was taking the drug each day after breakfast, and again before dinner: one, two, three drops, just enough so that she was cast by the opiate into a deeper part of herself, each day’s brief drowning. Six drops spent during the day, the larger dose of four drops she saved for bedtime, for Carlos. With laudanum, the idea that she could perish lonely and exiled from all that she loved seemed somehow
less shocking. It was no longer an unthinkable punishment against which she railed.

In fact, at twenty-two, and in those hours of narcotic embrace, she began to long for death. “Kill me,” she would say to Eduardo, who invariably doled out no more than the seventy-drop bottle. “Kill me, please. I know you have more. You did not dispose of all those little vials, all those years’ worth. I know you saved some.” But he would not give it.

“I do not want to feel pain,” the queen said. “Not any kind. Not in my body, not in my heart. Nowhere.” María never believed her anguish to be some trial that might enlarge her character. Suffering would never raise her up but only cast her deeper into animal misery. Keening like some hound, or mute and wet like a mollusk: nothing exalted. It was laudanum that exalted her.

Mother, Mother, Mother
, she thinks now. How can it be that she is dying so far from home? How can she have been exiled forever?

“I am thirsty,” she tells Eduardo. He gets a cup and holds it to her lips. The water flows, just a trickle, cool and tasting of the metal of the cup. She has trouble swallowing, it runs down her chin.

She squeezes Eduardo’s short, thick fingers. “Where is the blue bottle?” she whispers. “Could I not have just a bit? A little, little, little bit?”

He shakes his head. “No,” he says softly. “You are too weak. It might harm you.”

She squeezes his hand again. “I don’t care,” she says. “A drop. Just a drop?”

He shakes his head.

“Talk to me, then. Say something. Tell me something nice.” She turns her head from side to side.

Eduardo looks at her, at her hair. So much of it. “Do you remember what I told you?” he asks. “What they say of freaks?” He strokes her hand, her forehead. “They excuse such deformities as my own by saying that our mothers must have had bad thoughts, bestial and monstrous, while they carried life inside them. That they let their eyes linger too long on some
terrible picture, that they let their thoughts stray to abominations.

“But your mother, María, each night that she carried you she dreamed of gardens. Of lilies and pear blossoms. She gazed upon roses and candles and pearls. She watched the Seine as it flowed beneath a moon so full that it spilled its silver light upon the river’s waves, and inside her your hair grew black and lustrous. She—”

“I want water,” says María fretfully. “More water, please. I am so thirsty.”

“Wait a little,” he says, and she knows he is right. Its taste is no longer delightful; it brings a sudden rush of saliva that wells up from behind her tongue. The taste of metal overpowers, and the retching begins again.

“Obdulia!” the dwarf calls. He keeps her head rolled to the side, preventing her from choking, as the maid holds the basin. Obdulia looks away. If she does not, she will be sick herself.

Eduardo stays with María until the vomiting stops. Her face, turned on its left cheek, is absolutely motionless. “María?” he whispers, “María?” Her eyes are open, but when he passes his hand before them, she does not blink. She appears peaceful, though, asleep, and the dwarf gently closes her eyelids. With her hair falling down the pillows and all around her, she does look as if she were resting on the surface of vast black waters. Her little dog, so old his mustaches are gray, his eyes clouded blue and blind, sleeps next to her. His legs twitch and paddle in his dreams, as if he seeks to outrun some pressing enemy. And then he sighs and lies quietly beside his mistress, his head under her hand. Even in her sleep, she strokes him.

The queen is never alone. When Eduardo leaves, the maids sit near her. For them the time passes with exquisite slowness. The bells ring terce, and Obdulia rises to straighten the bedclothes and to pull a robe over the dog, hiding him from view. The queen mother is expected for a visit.

Marianna is not fond of pets. All the birds that María had sent from Paris that first year her mother-in-law set free, and they died in the cold. For a time the queen could not walk the palace grounds without seeing a bright clot of feathers here and
there, where a bird had dropped frozen from a bough. The kittens were drowned, her rabbit disappeared. The monkey that Olympe sent last spring didn’t last a fortnight. Only the little dog, in whose behalf Carlos interceded, has lasted. But it is best to keep him out of sight.

When Marianna bustles in, she is followed by her secretary, dripping ink. The queen mother will attend to her correspondence in María’s bedchamber. That way she can visit the sick and dispense with her letters at the same time. She hates to waste even a moment, and there is a pressing legal matter which she must resolve.

Last month, after the shock of the discovery of the queen’s conspiracy to deceive them with a false pregnancy, Marianna had asked the duque of Valdemoro to advance her the funds required for the transportation of an identical pair of female dwarfs, twins born six years ago, from Segovia. The daughters of a chandler in that city, when they were orphaned their uncle was unable to afford their keep, and he wrote to Carlos, asking if the court might not find so rare a phenomenon amusing.

The king’s secretary had passed the missive along to Marianna, who at first threw the letter aside. No more dwarfs, enough is enough, she thought. But then her desire for a grandchild—thwarted as it was by María—found momentary satisfaction in the idea of the two tiny matched girls. Not even the girls so much as all the things they would require. She began to see herself dressing them in identical gowns of pink silk. Of two matching muffs. Two pairs of minuscule kid gloves. Yes, four tiny gloves! And four little pointed, pink velvet slippers, with seed pearls sewn on and a little tassel on the toe of each.

At the first opportunity, at a dinner welcoming the Portuguese alchemist, Marianna mentioned the twins to the duque. She promised him a seat at the next public trial, one in the balcony just below the king’s, a seat from which he could bend down and touch the very hair on the heads of the damned. If only the duque would pay the passage to Madrid for these tiny girls, and loan moneys sufficient to dress and keep them, then he would go to heaven, he could rest assured.

She got the money, it came by horse courier. Now the standard
contract for palace dwarfs must be revised to address the needs of the little twins. The clause concerning laudanum must be replaced by one providing for an educational allowance. The royal governess would earn her keep again.

As Marianna dictates, her secretary, whose penmanship is un-equaled but whose mind is feeble, follows behind her and writes down all that she says, making use of whatever surface she comes upon, vanity tables, mantelpieces, even the floor, if need be. “How are we feeling?” Marianna says to María, and the secretary appends this greeting to the paragraph she was writing, one concerning yearly visits.

“Oh dear,” the secretary says softly, realizing her mistake, and she looks up, ink on her lip.

“Not again!” exclaims Marianna. “We shall never conclude this business!” The little secretary curtsies from nerves.

“I’ll copy it over. It shan’t take but a few minutes.” She collapses in a heap of quills and ink bottles and parchments.

As the queen mother approaches María’s bed, Obdulia brushes the damp black curls from the queen’s forehead, where they are sticking in the sweat.

“She does not look any better,” says Marianna, and the maid shakes her head. “Well,” the queen mother says, and she sits in the chair near the queen’s pillow. She leans forward and, as if María were deaf rather than dying, “What now, then?” she shouts.