Poison (24 page)

“Why, what is the matter!” says Olympe.

“It is nothing,” says María. “Nerves. Only nerves.” She sits down carefully in her chair, but she cannot take her eyes away from Juana.

Juana, the mad queen. Daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Great-great-great-great-grandmother to María Luisa, and to Carlos, as well. Juana was mad from birth and then further undone, some say, by more education than the female brain can withstand. Ten languages, and mathematics, too. She could converse in Greek and Latin. Long before her own passing, she made herself an expert in every dead thing. Others say the lessons never hurt her, that her husband, called Philip the Fair, made her crazy with his philandering.

When Philip died in the north in the year of our Lord 1506 and had to be transported home, Juana walked behind his coffin for forty nights. She walked with him because she did not trust her handsome husband. At every stop she had the casket opened so that she could kiss him, that she could see he was still inside, faithful in death if not in life. When the mourning party stopped to rest at a convent, she would not suffer his casket’s being carried inside that cloistered, female place, but sat beyond the walls of the nuns’ dormitory with her hand under the coffin lid.

Everyone has heard the tale that Juana once took a pair of scissors to the cheeks of one of Philip’s mistresses. She roamed the castle naked, covered only by her long hair, always holding tight to a pair of golden embroidery scissors. When her ghost
comes to her box in the theater, she comes naked, she brings her scissors.

“You must not allow your nerves to get the better of you,” Olympe scolds María. “And, for the love of the saints, do stop fanning before you blow all our hair off.” The comtesse smooths the high curls of her wig.

María Luisa drops her fan in her lap, she wrings her empty hands. “I am sure they are deciding what to do with me,” she says. For Carlos and Marianna have remained at home, they refused to go to the theater with the two women.

In the weeks since the dismissal of the translator, there still had been no action taken against either the queen or her dwarf. “I do not understand it!” María cried to Eduardo that morning. “What can it mean!” The dwarf shook his head, his eyes watering.

“Something will happen to us,” he said at last. “Something will.”

Olympe smiles at the queen now, she takes her hand. “I hope they do decide,” she says. “Then it will be over with. And how wonderful it would be if they decided to turn you out! You could come to Majorca with me.” The comtesse draws the queen’s hand to her lips, kisses its palm and lays it against her cheek. “We could enjoy the sun while everyone else in Paris and Madrid sulks in their cold, dreary castles,” she says.

“Yes, perhaps I shall be exiled,” says María. She tries to concentrate on the stage, holding up her fan to block the sight of naked Juana and her tangled hair.

The court playwright, a mediocre talent, was busy all fall concocting this farce about a lady and her maids, a highly unlikely tale of intrigue and poison, in which nobody dies, nothing much happens, and no one is punished, excepting the audience.

During the intermission between the second and third acts, María, sitting between her maid Obdulia and Olympe, her back to Juana, feels a sharp pain in her side. “Oh!” she says to Olympe, holding her side where it hurts. “I feel so unwell, suddenly.”

“Indigestion, perhaps,” says the comtesse, yawning. “It certainly cannot be that you were laughing too hard.”

In fact, the comedy is so tedious, and the queen so nervous, that in the privacy of the royal box (and behind her fan) María has only just resorted to a drop or two of laudanum, which she has lately taken to keeping with her at all times. As she swallowed it she said a little prayer to the drops, asking them to dispel the ghost and her glinting scissors.

Olympe offers María Luisa a digestive mint from a little tin she keeps in her reticule. But the mint does not help, and the queen feels ill enough that the three women decide to return to the royal residence. They go downstairs to wait for their carriage.

But just inside the doors of the great theater, María suffers a spasm of pain so intense that she turns to her friend with tears in her eyes. “Something is wrong!” she says. She complains of a burning sensation in her mouth, her throat. She says she is afraid she will be sick.

“Tell the footmen to hurry!” she begs Obdulia.

Olympe pulls a small silver case from her reticule. Under her thumb the jeweled catch springs open. Inside: two tiny vials. “Triaca,” the comtesse says, identifying the antidote that was so popular in the French court that all Parisian ladies carried it with them. “Take it quickly.”

“I haven’t been poisoned!” says María, and then she vomits on the marble floor of the theater’s grand vestibule. She begins to cough, and to sob.

“Perhaps not,” says Olympe. “But take it anyway.”

But before she can, the queen collapses.

The carriage arrives just as Obdulia is unlacing María’s stays, and the three women depart, two guards carrying the unconscious queen from the theater. A small party of curious onlookers, who saw the queen leave her box and then followed her and her companions down the stairs, return to their seats. They talk to their neighbors, and their neighbors talk to their neighbors’ neighbors, and soon everyone in the theater is whispering excitedly, paying little attention to what transpires on the stage.

The queen’s driver whips her horses around the circle in front of the theater and pulls the carriage up so sharply that one of the horses stumbles and cuts his leg on another’s hoof. As the injured
animal screams shrilly, a corps of palace militia arrives and hurries into the theater, just after the palace livery boy. They barricade all the exits from the theater, even as the queen is loaded unconscious into her coach. Actors and actresses continue with their performance, but no one is in his or her seat.

“Where is the French queen?” someone calls out, pointing to her empty box. “Where is María Luisa!”

“Poisoned!” calls a voice from the third balcony, and instead of laughter there is a shocked silence in which opera glasses rove all over the audience, their lenses reflecting light from the chandeliers.

“
Parid, bella flor de lis!
” someone screams, and then, in this late autumn, when King Louis’s forces have routed the last of the Spanish armies, when everyone has attended more funerals than concerts, when the harvest is poor and when tales of the French queen’s shameful pretended pregnancies and staged bloody miscarriages have already spread from palace to streets, a riot begins.

“Where is the French harlot!” come the cries. “Give her to us! She shall be whipped in the plaza!”

“The whore María mocks King Carlos and all of Spain, all her citizens! She mocks every one of you!” yells a man standing on the wall of the loge. He brandishes a broken chair leg in his hand and then hurls it into the great chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. It sticks there and begins to burn. Candles drop into seats below, a fire quickly spreads.

When the audience discovers it is locked inside the theater, the women begin to scream, all of them, and the men to fight. People take up chairs and throw them from the balconies. Seventeen people are killed outright, countless others trampled.

By order of the command of His Majesty’s forces, the audience is held inside the theater in order that its members can be searched, questioned and released one by one. They would be there tomorrow, most of them, but for one lady’s maid who observes to her mistress that, as all the actors and actresses seem to have disappeared, perhaps the trapdoor used in the first act really works. In an instant the entire audience disappears down the secret stage stair, and drains like wine from a broken cask
out the back of the theater. They leave Juana alone in her box, naked and staring at the burning chairs below.

When the king’s guard looks inside, pokes his head inside the barricaded theater to call the next suspect, he finds that the great, smoking room is empty.

Some of the audience go home. Anticipating a siege of unrest, the few more cautious souls want to count their money, bar their doors and lay in some provisions. But how many are this provident? At least two hundred people run directly from the theater, down the Calle de Arenal and on to the palace, picking up rabble as they go.

A huge crowd gathers at the gates to the park surrounding the royal residence. From the gatehouse, the guards watch the people milling around. Fires are started. Small at first, over which hands are warmed on a cold night, by dawn they are bonfires into which the crowd throws whatever it can find: a walking stick snatched from an old man, broken chairs carried from the wrecked Teatro Real, papers from the gutter (including that seditious publication
El Hechizado
, which fills the squares, finds its way under every door, but whose authors and whose press are never found—mysterious, in that it cannot be easy to hide something so immense and loud as a printing press). Dry boughs from a dead chestnut tree on the Calle de Arenal, refuse from the dump at the marketplace, a tattered cloak, seven doublets reeking of wine and three pairs of boots left for the destitute on the steps of the Monasterio de la Encarnación. It all burns in the fires. One enterprising man has already set up a little brazier over which he heats a punch of oranges and cloves and some spirit so strong that it burns the nostrils. For two maravedis a cup, he ladles it out, and those who partake are sufficiently warmed and emboldened to climb the gate and call out over the strangely silent grounds. “María Luisa!” they shout, and others take up the cry “Ma-ría! Lu-isa!” until the queen’s name resounds throughout the city.

Dawn. A time of quiet, usually, but the stones of the prison ring with the queen’s name, and with the rhyme. The terrible rhyme that the queen must hear, too, as she lies in her bedchamber.

Give birth, beautiful flower!

The queen of Spain sees a shower of sparks when she closes her eyes. The sight is pleasant, not alarming, and she keeps them closed, thereby ignoring the unusual assembly in her bedchamber: her maids Obdulia and Jeanette, the physician and his assistant, Marianna and Carlos, Olympe.

A few ministers mill about in the hallway. Their ornamental spurs jingle with merry discordance on the tiles.

Dr. Severo puts his broad thumb on the lid of María’s left eye and lifts it, her brown eye with its black pupil dilated so fully that it almost obscures the ring of brown. The white of the queen’s eye is unnaturally clear, a side effect of a poisoning agent, Dr. Severo posits privately. But in such a climate of panic and hysteria he dares not make a diagnosis of poison, not unless he is very, very sure. And for that he will have to make an analysis. To learn which it is—arsenic, alkaloid, antimony: these are just the A’s from an alphabet of poisons—he will have to make many tests. He peers more closely at María’s eye. Not the tiniest vessel is visible on its surface, and it rolls slowly in its socket, so slowly.

A healthy eye moves quickly, darting from one subject to another, but this royal organ of sight travels in a barely perceivable orbit. Since returning from the theater, María has drifted in and out of sleep, of consciousness. She has had brief periods of lucidity, and longer ones of confusion.

To the king and queen mother, Dr. Severo makes a tentative diagnosis of cholera morbus, and administers
agua de la vida
, a quack decoction of cloves in vinegar. It produces a warm sensation, stimulating to the digestion, and the queen retches and coughs, spraying the remedy, which went down clear and comes up pink, over the physician’s starched collar. He shakes his head. He’ll try sweet almond oil, perhaps it will help a little.

“What did she eat?” he asks again. “Tell me exactly what happened!”

“I do not know,” says Obdulia for the third time, and repeats all that she said before, all that she does know. “Her Highness complained of a bad pain in her side. We were in the box at the theater, we were accompanied by Madame Olympe. The comtesse,
thinking that Her Highness had been seized by an attack of biliousness, gave her a digestive remedy, but it did not help, and so we left the box and went to get our carriage.

“Then, as you know, Her Highness vomited, and she collapsed just inside the door of the theater.”

Severo nods. “Dinner?” he asks.

“The same as everyone else, sir. Omelette. Bread. Apple tart.”

“What besides a pain in her side?”

“A burning in her mouth. And more vomiting.” Obdulia points to a basin resting on the vanity table and covered discreetly with a cloth.

He lifts the cover. “Is that all of it?” he asks.

“The first time was in the theater, sir. There was no basin.”

“Did no one collect it? Did no one even look at it?”

“It looked like egg and apple only, sir.” Obdulia gestures nervously, cupping her empty hands as if they bore the vomited dinner.

“Is it not understood that all palace vomit is to be analyzed in my laboratory?”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“Obviously, you may consider that your position is in jeopardy.” His mustache quivers with importance. “There will be an inquest,” he continues. “You will have to speak.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dr. Severo nods, and Obdulia falls back into place beside the other maid, Jeanette, who looks at her own feet. Severo leaves the royal bedchamber followed by his assistant bearing the covered basin. The ministers scatter, spurred heels jingling.

The omelette, was it the omelette? And what about that digestive mint? The comtesse’s bag, including the mints and the remaining triaca, have been confiscated and taken to the laboratory. Downstairs, everyone reviews all the details. The queen was in her box at the theater, she felt a pain in her side, she left her box, she collapsed. She vomited in public.

It was an attack of biliousness, the courtiers are saying to the corps of foreign ministers, a crowd of them gathering in the king’s audience chamber, collecting this latest and most interesting of international developments for their own kings waiting
back home. This is the news that all Europe awaits:
The queen was taken ill at the theater. Spain’s French queen is dangerously ill
. The foreign ministers are dispatched to their various offices and apartments, where their secretaries scratch at parchment with goose quills and burn their fat fingers on hastily melted sealing wax. So seldom is there any real news to send home! Spain is teetering, toppling, and as soon as she finally tumbles, France and England, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands will carve her up among themselves.