Free Poison by Kathryn Harrison

gathered, of course, in clots of gossipers, fearful and conjecturing about the meaning of so many black carriages bearing the king’s coat of arms.
    “They must be burning a witch in there!” came the cry, as smoke began seeping out not just from the hidalgo’s chimney but from all the windows as well. For it is not just the royal family who fears sorcery.
    “Ten witches!”
    “Fifty!”
    Having decided on so dramatic a ceremony as that required for the punishment of fifty witches, the appearance of the shrunken king and his stiff-necked bride was a disappointment to their incidental audience. At least it was disappointing to those like my sister, Dolores, for whom the smell of a burned witch is the most exalted of perfumes.
    The afternoon sky was bright. Clouds moved before the sun and then floated off, so that shadows of the wedding party appeared against a wall or a hedge and then just as quickly disappeared, giving the impression of some ghostly chorus of witnesses: playful spirits, one minute revealing their presence, then suddenly diffident and vanishing from where they had stood.
    And among the onlookers, Francisca de Luarca, dressed in felt, dressed in linen, dressed in wool, shod in wood—not a thread of silk on my person—watched the wedding of my king to the princess from France.
    I stood alone, without companions murmuring beside me, a woman of just eighteen, already accused of witchery, interrogated and warned by the Holy Office (though not yet were my crimes seen as connected to my mother, my mother was not yet viewed with suspicion). I was young to have arrived already at notoriety. I wore a
sanbenito
, a smock that hung down as far as my knees and covered my dress. On its yellow front was the double cross stitched in scarlet and accompanied by a quill and scroll, indicating an appetite for letters that had taken an unacceptable turn. It was joined by one other image: a breasted serpent, symbolical for lust. On the back of the smock, which I was not allowed to remove, even as I slept, a Devil fed a little woman to a flame with his pitchfork, lest those who could not read miss the point the Holy Office wished to convey: here is Francisca, suspected of heresies and under holy quarantine. Still, I was free then, I felt the air on my face. If I did not count myself among the happy, then I did not yet know how unhappy it was possible to be.
    As for María Luisa, for her wedding day she was dressed,decked, ribboned, corseted, sashed, shod, veiled, and plumed in unhappiness, just as surely as she was covered, every inch of her, in silk and gold and jewels. And her gown of misery was every ounce as heavy as her wedding dress.
    His Majesty, King Carlos, stood beside María Luisa, holding her lace-gloved hand in his own. Behind them, on the hillside, grew fourteen rows of twenty mulberry trees, their yellow leaves burning bright, reflecting the autumn sun. As promised, over the years the trees my papa planted had thrived on nothing, had grown ever taller and more lovely in their natural symmetry. Uneaten by any worm, the useless leaves dropped onto the black earth like so many coins spilled there, the only riches we had. The queen of Spain was wearing silk, but not our silk.
    She was young, she was my age. Though I well remembered my mother’s letters, every word of every one of them, at that moment in the ceremony when the date of María’s birth—the fourth day of February in the year 1662—was read from a scroll, I started. On that very day, eighteen years previous, two female infants were delivered of their mothers: one in France, at a castle just outside the great city of Paris, and one in Spain, in the modest dwelling of a silk farmer in Quintanapalla. We each survived our births and the subsequent ills that take most children. We each budded in our time, surviving the so-called greensickness that claims its tithe of virgins. And now here we both stood.
    It was said that María was the most beautiful of