Free Poison by Kathryn Harrison Page B

summer days to squander on giggling. María began to weep behind her veil. Her plight was suddenly as clear to her as the action of a sandglass, future hope transformed directly to past regret. Unexpectedly, she found she knew what an old woman knows, that there is no present in which to take pleasure. That minutes are as two piles of coins: those spent, and those about to be spent. There is no other currency.
    In Paris the perfume of the flowers had grown stronger and stronger until the kingdom reeled, and then, at the height of this orgy, ten ministers from Spain arrived. It was time to finalize a bargain struck years before. In exchange for certain diplomatic concessions amounting to an adjustment of borders, a loss of land, Spain would receive one marriageable, fertile, pure-blooded princess: an expensive girl, and a girl whose dowry of jewels and of silk was nothing against the hope of what treasure her body was expected to produce. The ministers from Spain brought with them a physician who examined those parts of the princess which most call secret, but which were to be secret no longer. When this doctor was satisfied that María could breed and could bear, then for one week the ministers met with King Louis in the morning. In the afternoons, they privately reviewedthe progress of their talks as they walked in their black breeches through the gardens, watched the ladies promenade around the ornamental ponds. Watched the carp rise through the water, their greedy mouths imposing a pattern of endless O’s upon its black surface. Watched an occasional bug skate across, each appendage dimpling the water’s bright mirror. The French ladies peered into the ponds as well, and the water cast back at them their perfectly rouged cheeks under a blue cloudless sky. The ladies, Marie’s mother among them, played cards under the trees, they ate tiny tartines, and when they could think of nothing other than lying down they returned to their chambers and slept away the afternoons so that they might be refreshed when it was fully dark and time to dance and gamble. The ministers from Spain, however, walked in the heat until they were exhausted, and then retired just as everyone else was getting up. They missed the midnight revels, the capsizing gondolas, the laughing and dancing and all the happy nonsense. But they would not have liked them, anyway. At the end of the week, meetings concluded to the satisfaction of interests both French and Spanish, the ministers took away a recent portrait of Marie Louise, along with a written promise that the princess herself would follow as soon as a proper trousseau could be collected.
    What in María’s old life could have prepared her for her new one? Everyone from Madrid wore enormous jeweled spectacles, an enhancement to dignity rather than eyesight, as the princess learned when she peered through a pair of
oculares
left behind at a banquet table and found that the lenses were of plain glass. Spanish ladies wore earrings that hung down as far as their shoulders, tiny clocks bobbing on the ends of gold chains where they could not even see them to read the time. And, while last season in Paris heels had been high, the Spanish nobility’s desire for loftiness was so intense and so literal that aristocratic women balanced on stilts—the higher her rank, the greater the elevation from which she gazed. When María’s lady-in-waiting brought her the bridal shoes in their mounts, the princess fell back on her bed, her hands to her mouth. “But what on earth are those!” she said.
    Beneath her wedding gown (which weighed a stone at least),beneath her thirteen petticoats and the hooped armature of wood and wire that held up the tower of fabric (another two stone), María rose above the bishop, who got a crick in his neck when he looked up to see the face of this newest and most reluctant lady of Spanish rank.
    Had not such elaborate scaffolding forced her to remain upright, the princess felt she