Free Poison by Kathryn Harrison Page A

all the princesses in Europe. Melancholy brown eyes, a long nose, a mouth whose Cupid’s bow was well defined. White skin, a bit sallow, or perhaps just pale with fright; for every second that she breathed, every second from the moment she was betrothed and given by decree to Spain, Marie Louise, María Luisa, began to lose her life.
    The princess had spent the morning before her wedding on her knees, saying over and over the one word she had promised herself to forget.
Maman
, she prayed again and again, forsaking God for a creature she loved better.
Maman, Maman. Je t’en prie
. I beseech you.
    “Come,” a maid-in-waiting said, and she held out her hand toMaría. She spoke and the translator translated. “Your mother cannot hear you,” the maid said. “Your mother is far away, and the ministers are calling. Come, you must get up now.”
    I saw her in Santiago’s courtyard, and I took a mirror, a small round looking glass that I was in the habit of carrying in my hand, and I shined a circle of light, sent it bouncing over to her: her face, her eyes. What did she see? Nothing, perhaps. Nothing more than a little flash of light playing over her veil. She turned her head toward me, briefly, but still, she overcame her supposed paralysis. I shuddered. Her veil put me in mind of my mother’s winding-sheets.
    “They shall kill you, too,” I whispered, and then I put my hand to my lips. I did not want to curse her. “Well, perhaps not,” I lied.
    Beneath that veil, before the consecration of the kiss, María had her brief spell of privacy, one of the few her new life offered. Naturally, she thought of her home. If she tried, María could recall the smell of the gardens in Paris. At her wedding, her hands were empty.
Is there not one flower in all of Spain? Not one for a bride?
she wondered.
    She missed flowers—for ten years she would miss flowers, because Castile has few—just as she missed the ornamental lakes, gondolas so full of minstrels that they routinely sank, players wading through the chest-high water bearing viols and flutes and lutes and zithers, oboes and ophicleides, clarinets and pianettes, all overhead and well above the splashing water. Midnight suppers of oysters and ices and cakes. Childish games of romance played by all, even widowed comtes and comtesses—especially they!—crouching in their corsets until their faces were red and breathless, adding up the dots on dominoes to determine the recipient of a kiss. Dancing, of course: dancing on blisters and on blisters’ blisters. And gazettes smuggled in by the maids and read under the counterpane, so that they caught the draperies on fire routinely. María missed everything, but she missed her mother and the flowers most of all.
    Every year that he did not wage war on the Netherlands, Louis XIV imported four million tulip bulbs. Dutch tulips, and night-scented stock, daffodils, narcissus. Pear trees by the thousandsdropping their white blossoms in a carpet over the lawns, a carpet so thick that it gummed up shoes and disrupted croquet as petals withered and stuck to the rolling balls and made a slippery paste on the ends of the mallets.
    By the time the pears were ripe, summer had arrived on a wave of honeysuckle that broke cloyingly sweet over the château and her grounds. Even the industrious bees sank in the air. They flew in from the fields and gorged themselves on the king’s flowers until their hind legs were lost under packed yellow plunder, until their flight degenerated into drunken, sinking spirals.
    Was it possible that just last season María had been Marie, laughing with the other girls? Running through the long allées of maple trees, slipping beneath the canopy of leaves and into that mysterious, deep shade of summer afternoons. Tumbling on the grass and ruining silk dresses, staining them forever. The laundress sulked and scolded, the dressmaker came with his sleeves full of pins. There were always more dresses to be had, more