Poison (37 page)

The midwife swaddled him tightly and laid him in my arms. I heard her say to Dolores that she would accept her payment now. She was well pleased with the birth cord, for it was of extraordinary length and would be useful in treating dropsy and heart pains and lameness. She was careful to say that it was a cure for this or that disease, of course, because the ears of the Church were everywhere and none bigger than my sister’s, which, like an ass’s, turned to catch every indiscretion. But everyone knows that birth cords are prized for spells, and no doubt Azima had agreed to attend me because of the profane sort of passion that had got me with child. Mateo’s birth cord would have strong magic in it.

The rope that had bound me to my child lay in a dish on the floor. Bled white and glistening in the early morning light, it looked to me like the holiest thing. I remembered the prayer that Alvaro had been taught to say as he tied the cincture over his alb:
Praecinge me, Domine cingulo puritatis
, Gird me, O Lord, with the cincture of purity,
et extingue in lumbis meis humorem libidinis
, and quench in my loins the fire of concupiscence. He recited it for me once, that I might appreciate its ironical value. Either that, or the cost to him of our love.

I asked to touch the cord before Azima wrapped it up, and she brought me the bowl and left it on the bed. As she got her cloak I picked one end of it up, slick and smooth and strangely heavy.
My mama used to say that every soul had a silver rope binding it to heaven. After Dolores and I were born, Papa buried our birth cords and planted a cork tree over each, and the trees were growing still. I felt a little afraid of selling my own child’s, but what else had I of value to trade for the help of the midwife?

When Azima was dressed, she came back to my side to collect the cord, and she put a colored candle in my hand. “When you are up,” she said, “light this to the Virgin.” And she gave me three little pieces of paper, each with some indecipherable writing on them. I looked and looked, but for all my reading I could not make out the letters. She said one was to burn over the candle, one to chew and swallow, and the last to put around Mateo’s neck. She had a little string with a kidskin pouch for this.

I never did go to the Virgin’s shrine. I would have, if given another chance. I would have done any nonsense, stroked any talisman, muttered any prayer to keep him safe.

I dream of nurseries some nights. Of letting my lips rest on a baby’s brow, inhaling its soft sweetness. The babies stir but never wake. I touch the amulets on their beds, little beads their mothers have left with them to ward off evil. Spirits are always waiting to snatch a body, and a baby’s weak soul, it might be scared off easily. So mothers hide little charms around their children, in their cradles, anywhere they can. They sew them into the hem of swaddling cloths, they make sure to leave a little yarrow under the sheet. Inquisitors might miss these precautions, but evil spirits would know not to draw close.

ROUND THE BEDSIDE OF THE QUEEN A SMALL
crowd has gathered. María’s little dog has been removed to a basket in the corner, and the only movement from her body is that of her hand as it feebly touches here, then there, feeling among her bedclothes for her companion. Her lips move, but no sound issues from them.

Her face, the face that will be her death mask—set in plaster, then in silver, and at last in whatever Incan gold remains—grows ever more beautiful as she dies. Her eyes become larger, and her mouth smiles now, as if she knows a secret she might tell. Those around her are quiet, Carlos weeping silently and Marianna standing next to him with her arms folded. Everyone waits for the queen’s final confession; everyone—almost everyone—wants to hear an accusation against her poisoner. A little wizened man sits on a stool by her pillow. He holds a quill and ink, his hand is poised above his parchment; he is ready to record whatever María says.

Not asleep, not awake. The queen’s eyes are open, but she does not see what others see. From time to time, an unnatural tension grips her body, a vigilance, as if she feels the approach of death and resists being taken off just yet.

In consultation with Marianna and Carlos, Dr. Severo has called in another surgeon, Tarragona, famous for thick drinks of cream and egg yolk laced with iron filings. He calls himself a doctor of the science of magnetics and studied in Rome with Baldini and Ferrar. His whole career has been in preparation for such a moment as this, when he passes his little metal wands over the body of a queen. He says he is energizing her organs and calling her back to life.

She cannot last through another day of their cures. All their voices merge into one buzz over her head. The light from the
candles has painted her eyelids gold, beginning already her transformation from corpse to relic. When Severo bleeds her again, the blood meanders, each drop hanging languorously from her vein before dropping into the basin held beneath.

Her confessor leans over her, he prods her for a word, just one: that is all an accusation requires. One name: that of her secret, mortal enemy.

There are other theories, of course. The court does not want to believe a poisoner lurks in its midst. Someone says that the queen undermined her constitution long ago with the decadent French foods that she ate. Or what about that fall she took from her horse? It must have injured her in some grave, slow-acting manner.

“Her Highness’s habit of sleeping so late and always facedown caused an inflammation of her spleen,” says a minister. Hearing this, Obdulia has a sudden fit of hysterical laughter, her amusement quickly taking on that protracted, breathless quality that always accompanies a deathwatch.

Someone always chokes on water, someone always has a laughing fit, someone is always seized with diarrhea. Someone plays cards, someone has a nosebleed, someone pares his nails, and the rest have headaches.

The queen mother looks sharply at Obdulia, who collects herself with some effort. “Bad habits can, certainly, bring on feverish inflammations,” the maid says, looking at her feet.

The words
feverish inflammations
penetrate the queen’s secret dreams. In France the princess Marie had a friend, Nicolette. They loved each other the way girls do, and they played at matchmaking and at weddings together, each taking turns at being the bride or the groom. They practiced kissing each other, so that they would know what to do when the time came for a prince to take one of them in his arms. They kissed a good deal, and so they shared the usual ills of childhood.

One summer they fell sick with a glandular fever that kept them to their beds for months. They were so weak, they could not stand or even sit. Something in the fever increased their propensity to weep, and they would cry over anything: a dead sparrow on the sill, the cook’s failure to provide gooseberry fool for
dessert. They cried over their little mares in the stable, whose lonely, wet noses must have been thrust forth in anticipation of the never-arriving princesses.

Marie and Nicolette crept into the same bed together. They lay in each other’s arms and wept weakly, tangled in each other’s hair. Their skin was dry and parched with fever, and how thin they grew. Hours went by without words or thoughts, just a swamp of wet feeling. As if time had slowed to nothing. They turned their heads on the pillows and watched branches toss in the breeze, watched shadows of leaves dapple the bedclothes and play over their pale cheeks. Sometimes they tried to read a novel together, each holding one side of the book, but then neither was strong enough to cut the pages. And they did not like their ladies-in-waiting to do it, they cried if their maids tried to help them.

When they were convalescing, the girls were carried in their chairs to the park, where they might sit at one end of the grand allée of birch trees. So beautiful those trees were, their paper bark unwinding white in the wind, unwinding and then blowing past their feet. Like love letters torn by some coldhearted recipient, and then cast on the wind. And that idea, too, made them weep. They recovered, of course. The next season they were laughing together at the marquise’s salon, shrieking heartlessly with the others as the little birds sang.

As Nicolette’s mother had died when she was small, Nicolette was raised by an old nurse, Agnès de Brabant, whom the girls called Bonbon, and who told them the sort of things that frighten girls, though later the two would laugh about them. “Test the man you will marry,” said Bonbon. “Tease him, but do not let him put his seed in your secret place.” She said women were trees, only upside down, their legs two boughs between which God had set a nest.

“Men want a nice, warm place for their little birds,” she said. “But do not let them. Not before you have the gentleman place his seed in a cup. Set the cup aside from one Sabbath to the next, and then look at it. If it has become a tangle of worms crawling, then you know you have been with a man who is evil and you must have nothing more to do with him. But if it is just dry in
the cup, a little silver wafer, then you know he is safe for you.”

How María missed Nicolette when she came to Spain. And when she weeps now at the memory of her friend, the maids think it is Carlos for whom she pines, and they summon the king to stand close by her bedside, where he fidgets and peels his cuticles. The king is afraid. If only the crowds outside would stop calling his wife’s name. Chanting it. Chanting that horrible rhyme.

Ma-ría! Lu-isa! Ma-ría! Lu-isa!
The throngs that surround the palace—can it be that they are calling for her death? Perhaps she is taking too long and they are growing impatient. How strange, María thinks under her closed lids, to have come from a place where everyone loved her to one where they hate her. Just the previous month, after Eduardo was caught, after Rébenac admitted that he could do nothing for her, María had sent letters to her uncle. She wrote that she believed she would be killed, and that the illness she had suffered the previous spring had likely been caused by poison. If someone wanted to murder her, not all the tasters in the world could prevent it, she wrote, and she needed his help.
Please
, she wrote,
Let me come home. Send antidotes, send more ministers. Send the army. Send Maman. Anything. Please
.

Perhaps the envelopes arrived without the letters inside, mysteriously opened and emptied in the same way she receives packets mysteriously without content, seals unbroken, paper not torn. She knows that her family thinks of her often enough that they write regularly, but she doesn’t know what they think, for every fortnight when María is handed an envelope bearing her mother’s looping, lilting script, slanting optimistically up toward the corner, not one has a letter inside. One day she went to Rébenac, sure somehow that Marianna stole the messages. “What can be proved?” he asked.
Rien
. Nothing.

“
C’est atroce!
” exclaims Rébenac now from the corridor. In his indignation, the French minister forgets his Spanish. Something must be done, he says to Carlos, about the disgraceful disturbance outside the palace grounds. The mob has stoned two of a party of
gabachos
—the local epithet for French citizens living in Madrid—in retaliation for their chanting a discourteous
rhyme about Carlos’s teeth. The Spaniards tore the
gabachos’
clothes off and threw them in the bonfires. The two naked corpses now hang from the gatepost. French and Spanish alike keep calling out the queen’s name,
Ma–ría! Lu–isa!
And their howls do not subside but grow louder as the crowds increase.

The Spanish troops are having no success in quieting the mob. Fires rage; fed by trash, papers and whatever can be snatched and thrown, they burn high around the walls. Rioters have broken into unguarded homes along the Calle de Arenal, they have dragged out tables and chairs, rugs and draperies. They throw everything into the fires, sometimes before the very eyes of the owners of the pillaged homes—for all of Madrid, it seems, is waiting outside the palace grounds, screaming the queen’s name.

Ma-ría! Lu-isa!

“
Cabrónes!
Bastards!” cries a man as he sees his bed, linens and all, fly through the air and onto the top of the biggest fire. The stench of feathers from the pillows reaches him just as he himself is picked up and hurled after his furnishings. “Burn in your blankets then,
Gillipolas! Coño! Hijo de puta!
” the rioters call after him. “You asshole! You idiot pig! You son of a whoring bitch!” The man’s screams are lost in the chanting.

The queen’s name has become an invocation, a taunt, a spell. Its syllables both express and excite the anger of the masses. At times the shouting grows so loud that down here, in our prison, the walls shake until it seems they will fall, crushing us. Releasing us.

“
Si votre seigneur ne
—” sputters Rébenac, and then corrects himself. He speaks in Spanish, uttering each syllable with enraged precision. “Unless Your Highness summons the armed forces to squelch this rabble, I shall have no choice but to send an envoy to France! Then Louis himself will take care of the situation.”