Poison (13 page)

“Yes,” María said, eyes shining. “It would almost be a favor, would it not? Think how happy the beetle would be that the Queen of Heaven had time for the queen mother of Spain!”

A master of ventriloquism, the dwarf could project any voice at any pitch. Even a celestial-sounding one was not beyond his abilities. Later that day he hid himself under the bed, beneath the counterpane dragging on the tiles, and when Marianna asked the Virgin for her guidance that evening, he gave it. The Virgin’s voice sounded sweet and lilting as she suggested to Marianna that she cut off all her hair and eat nothing but raw white of egg for nine days, as a sign of devotion.

The next day, Carlos’s mother’s hair joined the piles of long plaits and the masses of curls at the cool marble feet of the Virgin in the national cathedral. When times were bad, devotion increased, and already that season the church caretaker had made three trips down to the little room below the nave where he deposited such tokens of affection: Crates of hair and sacks of hair. Silk wigs, too, barrels of them. Walking sticks and shoes, spectacles, jewels, capes lined in fur. All left for the Virgin, that she might, with such evidence of faith, shape a happier world.

At supper that night, María tried to avert her eyes as Marianna struggled with the clear, viscous matter in her bowl. It slithered once and then again from her spoon. For a moment María contained herself, but such control depended upon her not looking at any other face at table. When she saw Carlos’s puzzled countenance she began to laugh.

“What is that, Mother?” he said. María put bread in her mouth and choked on its crumbs. Once she began to laugh, her mirth so intoxicated her that her scalp prickled, her cheeks flushed red. She could not stop. Her buttons popped and her stays flew apart, she wept and wheezed with glee.

The queen’s behavior was diagnosed as hysterics. She was
sent back to her rooms, and Dr. Severo came and dosed her with cathartics until she was too weak to laugh anymore.

Eduardo came to visit her, clambering into the chair by her bed. He looked very grave. “We must be more careful,” he whispered. “In the future I shall not let such silliness carry me away. I apologize to you.”

“Oh, I don’t care!” the queen said aloud. “It was worth it!”

“Shhh,” he cautioned, and he pointed at the maid standing by the door, her ears sticking pink and eager from under her cap. María paid no heed.

He sat silently by her bed. “I shall be very lonely,” he said at last.

“Lonely? What do you mean?”

“Because you will be sent back to France, if you are not careful.”

“Oh!” she cried, sitting forward, the bedclothes falling immodestly about her. “Do you think I could do something so dreadful that I would be sent home?”

He looked at her. “No,” he said at last. “You would only be sent home if that is where the courts of both France and Spain agreed you were to be buried.” They were silent then, he looking out the window, she looking at him.

“María,” he said at last. “It is getting worse. The talk in the kitchen today was of nothing else.” He examined his fingernails, his overly large head lowered in concentration, his abbreviated arms bent in an uncomfortable-looking angle that called attention to his short-fingered hands. Eduardo’s bowed legs ended in small, delicate feet, which he kept expertly and extravagantly shod. He was vain about his pretty feet, and about his large expressive eyes with their brows arched high.

“What do they say?” María asked.

“That you are barren, and—”

“I am not barren! No woman in my family was barren, no—”

“No, of course not.” He smiled. His red lips were framed by a well-barbered beard. “But it is either your fault or the king’s that you have no heir. And given that choice, who do you think will be blamed?” María was silent. She folded her arms.

“You know that if Spain is not to succumb to France and lose
what little power remains to her, she must have a healthy male heir to her throne. And whether or not you find politics a bore, you cannot afford to ignore them.” Eduardo whispered, but his voice was adamant.

“Do you not see,” he said, “that if it is officially decided that you are responsible for the lack of issue—and we are almost at that point—then you will be eliminated?” He sat forward. “Do you not understand what that means, María? You will go mad, perhaps, and have to be locked up. You will be declared consumptive and sent off to the Alps. You will succumb at last to despair, and when days of weeping go uninterrupted by a smile, you will be examined by experts and exorcised, or worse.

“You will, perhaps, be poisoned.”

María looked out the window at the cheerless gardens, unrelieved geometries of box hedges, one plant pruned into a wall enclosing another and another, nature forced to express endless confinement. “Oh that,” she said, attempting ironical cheer, but the words came out too high. They both fell silent remembering a severe and unexplained illness she had suffered the previous season.

“You will be sorry, will you not?” she said to him after a moment. “A little inconsolable?”

The dwarf sighed, he looked at the ceiling. Sitting back in his chair, his legs stuck out absurdly. Only the dwarfs’ apartments had chairs and beds and tables scaled to their size. In the rest of the palace they had to adapt, and the queen’s furnishings seemed to mock Eduardo’s somber mood, making dignity impossible. But, in truth, grief does not suit dwarfs, they are hampered by always appearing comical.

“Eduardo,” María said, and she held out her arms to him, as if she were a child and he her shrunken father. “I know I am vexing. How tired you must be of trying to educate me.”

The dwarf sighed again. He got down from his chair and came to María’s side, he let his head rest on her bed.

Eduardo found his mistress mysterious. As a man whose sole genuine talent was for survival—all the double-jointed, voice-throwing stunts were mere parlor tricks in service to that higher artistry—he knew that he would always do what he had to do.
María, on the other hand, was she indifferent to survival? Would she not settle for anything less than those girlhood dreams she had shared with him?

The seasons passed, one after another, and largely without incident. Seven winters, seven springs. Seven summers, seven autumns. The trees my papa had planted years before were now so tall and so full that their leaves, each autumn, made a solid canopy of gold between the sky and the earth. By this time I was in my final home, in prison and exiled from all that I loved. No longer could I wander amid the mulberry as a wind blew, or lie on my back and look up as it shook the yellow leaves. With my head resting on the black earth, the trunks of the trees rose solemn and columnar, like legs—like my mama’s legs disappearing under a full yellow skirt—and sometimes I would turn onto my side and put my arms around one trunk. My heart quickened as the wind parted the finery of the leaves above and revealed a glimpse of heaven. When I put my hand before me in the dark, the rough stones of my cell seem like the bark of trees. Sometimes they do.

The riding accident occurred in the autumn of the seventh year of María’s reign.

The day of the accident began like any other. The queen returned to her chamber after breakfasting. Though it was almost the noon hour, her maid Obdulia knew she would return to bed, and, as always, she was slipping the warmer between the sheets, chasing away the cold that had crept from the stone walls under the heavy counterpane.

Queen María Luisa, back in her nightdress, her morning gown discarded and her hair unbound again, crawled beneath her heavy covers and slept, a plump fist to her mouth. She was sad, so she slept. But, sated with sleep, and not yet having had the day’s first dose of laudanum, she was fitful and kicked under the covers. She started awake with a cry as the bell rang terce, perspiring, with her hair sticking to her cheeks. She sat up in bed and called for Obdulia to dress her in her riding habit. She did this as a somnambulist, ringing the chime on her nightstand. When the maid appeared, she held out one pale arm so that she
might be pulled to her feet. Her toilet did not require her attention: she had sat patiently, passively under the hands of a maid so many times, so many thousands of times, her curling black hair pulled straight by the comb.

It was rare that María desired conversation from her maid—she saved confidences for Eduardo and Esperte—and Obdulia was quiet as she worked. After all, the maid knew her place: that was the first requirement of her position. Any lady who cares to wait on a queen must have a highly refined perceptivity. She must provide palace gossip when in her mistress’s gestures she reads an invitation to chatter. But if silence is demanded, that, too, is something she must understand from the subtleties of posture, the communication of a sigh. She should direct her attention only to the part and never to the whole woman. Manicurists must focus on the cuticle; hairdressers converse with the curl behind the ear; dressers attend an ankle, a button, a tie on the stay. Each day, few people actually looked at María, whose vantage, whose
highness
, allowed her to look at whomever she pleased and for as long as she cared to. She stared and searched their features, she let her gaze rest on their downcast eyes, and there she looked for clues as to what happened out in the halls, what the queen mother was up to and whether Carlos would come that night to her chamber. Dutiful, the king was yet human, and had grown tired of failure, as tired as was María. He was no longer aroused casually; now he required certain dresses, certain perfumes, even certain words. A sure sign of an impending visit was the arrival of her tightest corset, a request conveyed, humiliatingly, from valet to maid-in-waiting. King Carlos liked his bride to have the waist she showed off when still a princess, a waist he could span with his trembling-fingered hands.

When he had come to her the night before the accident, the favorite corset had not worked its magic, and, unable to feel manly, Carlos left after an hour, no more. He did not speak sharply, he never did, but he had taken the corset off María and tossed it aside roughly. It still lay on the floor under the stand bearing her washbasin, and María looked at it as the maid
combed out her long, long hair and dressed it before placing her riding hat on her head.

The undergarment looked so small and so constricting, how was it that she hadn’t suffocated the previous night? The movement of the hairbrush tugged her eyes away from the corset. Still in a state of sleepy fretfulness, when she was at last all buttoned and laced, combed and gloved and booted, the queen walked down the long staircase of the west wing, followed by a footman carrying her riding crop.

“Oh!” she said suddenly, and the footman stopped. “I must return to my apartments. I’ll be no longer than a minute. I will meet you at the garden’s south gate.” He frowned. “A call of nature,” she explained, and without waiting for a response, she left him and ascended the stair. At the landing she turned left (not right, which would have taken her to her apartments) and slipped into the map room just as the bells for nones sounded. Eduardo stepped out from behind a large rendering of the territory of Tejas, its boundaries filled with colored pushpins indicating the location of each incident in the rich history of slaughters of Spaniards by the Nasoni, the Apache and Comanche and Tonkawa. A duque merited a pin with a blue head, a grandee got a purple one, hidalgos blue, caballeros green, and so on down the ranks of intrepid explorers. There was no marker for a dead savage, but he would probably care little for the slight, his only real adversary being smallpox, which wages its wars without maps or pins.

The queen took the vial from the dwarf and they parted, but only after she had applied exactly two drops of the amber liquid to her out-thrust, eager tongue: not enough to induce any narcotic effect, just that required to offset her addict’s nausea.

María rejoined her footman at the appointed gate, and together they traversed a path through the box hedges, currently in metamorphosis as they were reshaped from pure geometric design into a clumsy representation of an armada of green ships incapable of motion. Already, six years before the event—but “Plants cannot be rushed, they cannot, they cannot,” said the head groundskeeper—gardeners were preparing for the bicentennial
celebration of Columbus’s discovery of New Spain, assuming that in 1692 Old Spain still had enough plundered Incan gold for any sort of festival. María and her footman walked silently along the perimeter of a topiary maze that the queen had never once essayed. “Why should I,” she once asked an insulted hedge trimmer, “when the palace itself affords more labyrinths than anyone could hope to penetrate in a lifetime?”

At the stable, Rocinante was waiting with his groom. Rocinante, amber-eyed, frisking at the noise of the queen’s boots on the cobbles. Rocinante, named after the steed of the Knight of Sad Countenance, the same as in that most popular novel by Cervantes. The footman helped the queen to mount and then collected his own horse and followed ten lengths behind María, two equestrian maids another few lengths behind him.

The queen was a better horsewoman than any of her servants, and she lost them after a few minutes. She gave her horse his head and went from a canter to a gallop. As usual, María Luisa was careful not to truly wake until she was in the saddle, until a mile had passed beneath Rocinante’s hooves. Only in flight did she fully regain her wits, the black earth flying up in clods from under her mount’s hooves, wet leaves sticking to her boots.

Exercise made her ache at first, or perhaps consciousness itself made her ache, but then it felt good, she felt good. As her hair tumbled down her back, as her hat blew off to be retrieved by the surly footman, she felt a sudden bursting joy, and the autumn sun seemed to grow so bright and so penetrating that it filled her uncovered head and poured down over her heart. The queen’s life, stripped as it was of almost every pleasure, her every indoor moment burdened by her failure to fill the royal nursery, her life yet offered her the pleasure of riding. The movement of her horse offered María some compensation for her own restriction. She had at last mastered the stilts she wore for public occasions—not only the highest in the land, they were the highest in history—but even the most gracefully athletic woman would find herself crippled by Spanish-court clothing.