Poison (45 page)

For whatever reason, Louis did remember his prettiest niece, and he summoned the gardener—the same who gladly provided nosegays for hangings—to his chamber. Monsieur Clément arrived and stepped delicately over the current favorite’s camisole, which the previous evening, after an embrace disruptive to undergarments, had slipped to the floor from the chaise longue.

“Your Highness?” Clément asked.

“You remember Marie?” said the king.

“I do, of course,” said Clément.

“And those flowers that particularly pleased her?”

“Yes.”

“What were they?” asked Louis.

“Lavender. Lilac. Stock. Narcissus. Peony—”

“Yes, you need not list them all.” Louis looked out the frost-blurred windows to his hothouses, which perspired pinkly on the snow-covered lawns. “Gather together a good lot of them,” he said to Clément. “And a few of the orange trees, as well.”

“As you wish,” said Clément. He stepped backward as if to leave the room, entirely avoiding the corset strings.

“And ready yourself for travel,” said the king, and then dismissed him.

Tuberoses. Jasmine. Jonquils and violets. Asphodel. Tulips. Narcissus. Lavender, lilac and stock. Twelve miniature orange
trees in constant bloom, bearing never fruit but only white blossoms. Flowers of all different climates, yet blooming simultaneously in the delicious seasonless limbo of the royal hothouses.

In the glass-paned buildings, Clément’s staff gathered the flowers together, still potted, and they packed them into nine huge glass caskets. Thus protected from winter snows and bitter winds, they were carried by livery boys to the great cobbled courtyard enclosed behind Versailles’s east gate, and there they were loaded into three black coaches, whose side panels bore golden suns and whose seats had been torn out so that three long boxes might fit in a stack inside each, a deerskin spread between one’s glass lid and the glass bottom of another.

As they were loaded, a page holding the end of the ninth casket lost his footing and slipped from the running board to the cobbles. Everyone in attendance, the whole staff and every occupant of Versailles—an audience of nearly four hundred—held his or her breath as the glass box filled with living flowers slid to the ground. Marie’s mother, leaning heavily on the arm of her maid, closed her eyes.

The angry cry of Monsieur Clément obscured the sound of glass hitting stones. It must have. Or maybe there was no noise, for the casket did not shatter, or even chip. Perhaps this was the first evidence of the miraculous luck, the seemingly holy protection, that the romantic undertaking was to enjoy. For the journey of the flowers, through winter snows whose bitterness stilled commerce and stopped battles, proceeded as if enchanted.

Nothing could stop the three enormous black coaches. Though roads were either dangerous or impassable, though the stars were invisible and the moon on the wane, though all the rest of the world was stopped and sleeping, the flowers made their way.

The roads were indeed so deep in frozen mud that the flowers went by river wherever possible. After the initial day’s journey to Bonneval—the three teams of black horses whipped white into lather and lamed beyond recovery, Clément standing the whole way in the box of the first coach and yelling at the driver to go faster, “
Plus vite! Cochon!
You lout!” into his red ear—the
carriages were taken off their axles and set on barques on the Loire. Inside the first lowered coach, on a makeshift seat, an armless ballroom chair nailed to the floor, sat Clément, looking over his charges in their glass boxes and drinking brandy from a flask as he wrapped and rewrapped his knees in a fur-lined lap robe. Outside, unprotected by anything other than stable blankets and straw, and miserably sick from the pitching currents that knocked the boats about like sticks, the drivers, footmen and all the rest of the flowers’ retinue shivered and huddled together for warmth.

When ice floes made passage impossible rather than merely foolhardy, the barques docked, the carriages were set back upon their wheels, and teams of horses were procured instantly with bags of louis d’or. When the stable masters saw the gold glint under the lantern’s flame, grooms were roused and doors opened despite the late hour, and the little image of the king on each coin seemed actually to wink in conspiracy. Stable boys wondered the next day what could have happened when horses found their way home with legs bloodied and shaking, tails wet, tongues swollen, their hooves scorched and their bits turned to gold.

The flowers sped over frozen, rutted roads to the nearest spot where water flowed freely and where again the coaches were plucked off their axles and set on fresh barques. White foam leaped from the rivers’ currents into the black sky and blended with the snow falling onto the carriage roofs. Icicles froze ever longer from their darkened side lamps; one carriage body had to be hacked off the deck of its barque.

But at least a river runs a decided course, for the skies were so overcast that sidereal navigation was impossible. During the days of that voyage, winds lashed the oceans into a vortex such that a hundred ships were lost, masts snapped, useless sextants sinking quickly under the waves. But a river runs a course that even a maelstrom cannot alter, and the barques shot on without guidance. From the Loire to the Vienne to the Vézère to the Dordogne, to the foaming Garonne, which flowed into the Baise, a river whose name spells kiss.

To storm the fortress of the Pyrenees, the carriages’ wheels
alone were stripped off, making handles of axles, and the flowers were thus transported through mountain passes in fantastically huge and unwieldy litters. The carriage bodies were so heavy that it required sixteen men to lift and carry each. Then on to the Spanish rivers Gallego and Jalón, and into the Duero looping around Soria, whose silk mills were silenced in the terrible freeze. And finally to the Henares, frozen solid into a road of ice so that carriages had to be set on runners and pulled by horses galloping on the banks: carriages became sledges.

Two days before Christmas, in the year of our Lord 1689, the gates of the city of Madrid swung wide to admit the gardener of the Sun King riding on the first of three black coaches, their panels emblazoned with golden-rayed suns. As custom demands that all vehicles pull to the side of the road to allow the passage of any royal conveyance, a path opened for the carriages of flowers from Paris.

Crowds greeted the procession. Despite the cold, people thronged the streets, and no guards could keep them back. They scrambled for a hold on the carriages’ sides, they tore off hardware as they tried to climb and peer inside and see the faces of the flowers, the dark-eyed violets and sweet-throated tuberoses nodding in their glass caskets. The horses reared in panic and Clément was forced to climb to the safety of the driver’s box.

In the days since the queen’s death those unruly subjects who had ceaselessly called María’s name, who had broken down royal gates and trampled royal spirits, had remained silent. They had not returned to their homes, though, and it seemed that every citizen of Madrid had forsaken his hearth to camp on the royal grounds, the palace besieged by its own subjects.

And what were they waiting for? Marianna wanted to know. It was to be hoped that the catharsis and pomp of a really grand funeral would satisfy them, would lay dissension to rest along with the dead queen.

Through the throngs, the flowers proceeded slowly to the royal residence, so slowly that it seemed to Clément that the last miles took longer than all the rest of the journey. The carriages creaked past the smoldering bonfires to the heavily guarded palace.
Inside the great audience chamber, María lay in state, her arms empty, awaiting her bouquet.

Spain may not trouble to grow flowers in the dead of winter, but her funerary arts are without peer. After they removed the last of the queen’s blood, Severo and a team of physicians filled her empty veins with a sweet philter—a recipe of civet and myrrh and other secret ingredients, all steeped in spirits of alcohol, which they poured into her neck. Now perfume rises from her every pore, a fragrance sweet and holy, her hollowed body transformed to some fantastic mortal incense vessel. The smell of her is such that even eyes that would refuse to weep do so. The sour courtiers who paced with impatience outside the queen’s chamber, so eager for her death were they, now weep helplessly over María’s body, they beat their breasts, they tear their hair. All those grandees and duques who manage to secure permission to view the dead queen press forward with their families, and they, too, lament loudly.

Clément and his staff arrange the flowers themselves, unpack and heap them all around, orange trees and peonies and a thousand tulips in bloom. They lay a huge bouquet in her arms, one with sprays and cascades of every white blossom: roses and narcissus and asphodel, muguet and chrysanthemum, white lilies and even whiter gladioli.

María’s body goes to its rest with hair unbound and washed with rose water, dressed with pearls. Pearls were made to adorn hair such as hers, its waves black like the waves of the dark and distant ocean that yielded them. The queen’s face is lovely in death, for what died was grief and bitterness and boredom. What was stripped away was the flesh of unhappy consolations. Her eyes look as though they might at any moment open, her lips are parted slightly, and their beauty remains intact through the long days of services, through vespers and vigils and prayers of absolution, through lauds sung by one hundred eunuchs and through high Masses chanted by a holy army of priests.

The secret corridor of saints is opened for the final day of funeral Masses. Under heavy guard, its occupants leave the royal residence for the cathedral, where Sister Tomita hovers,
the weepers weep, the twins pay homage and Estrellita’s couch is carried through the nave and up to the chancel rail. When María and her flowers are at last ready for the procession from altar to tomb, she seems to smile a secret smile, as if at last she is satisfied. Indeed, something comes to pass that might have pleased her.

Is it some property of the flowers, perhaps, the intense perfume released as they are strewn before the catafalque and crushed under its wheels? Or is it the smell and sight of the queen, at last released to her public, her strangely blazing beauty, long anticipated, that works an enchantment? Does the look and smell of her make the mob, which had been calm, begin to rage once more? The long procession through the streets commences with shouts and howls and keening cries of what sounds like grief.

Can it be that they are
missing
her? thinks Marianna, as she walks beside Carlos. Why, just last week they were calling for her death, they were intoxicated by her torment.

Even Rébenac, who busies himself during the interminable services by mentally packing and repacking his trunks, thinking such thoughts as I must not forget that doublet I left with the seamstress, and calculating just how many weeks will pass before he is once again settled in his apartments in Paris; yes, even the bitter French minister takes note of the cries, and how bereft the people sound.

They have forgotten the rhyme and the taunts. They call her by her name only. “
María Luisa!
” they scream, and they do not stop, but call ever more loudly.

The nine virgins whose job it is to prepare the path for the catafalque, spreading the queen’s flowers before her, cringe at the noise. Hands occupied, they cannot cover their ears. And the horse, the one horse allowed by custom in a state funeral, the one pulling the queen, shies.

It is a peculiar accident. Afterward, no one can recall exactly how it happened. The horse drawing the catafalque suddenly rears and plunges to the side. He is a black horse, over twenty-two hands high. His head is dressed with black plumes, his back is draped in black silk, and when he goes up on his hindquarters,
only his rolling eyes and his teeth flash white. The rest is a thrashing darkness, a storm of black silk.

“But was not Marianna walking a good distance behind the body?” people ask the next day.

Crowds are thick, and few see clearly. The ash from braziers and burning cedar boughs, from bonfires and from torches, blows into bystanders’ eyes. The smoke overpowers.

“It was my belief that she was standing beside Carlos,” Rébenac will write to King Louis. To his wife’s funeral Carlos wore breeches of tight black velvet and a short doublet with long full sleeves lined with purple. Though one might have judged him too frail to bear the weight of stiletto and sword and walking stick, yet he carried these implements of murder and locomotion as he walked beside the dead queen’s body. His mourning collar was so high that he could not turn his head, and when the horse’s hooves came down on his mother, he did not see them.

“Oddly,” Eduardo will write to the comtesse de Soissons, safe at last in a castle in Antwerp, “the beast who killed Marianna was brother to the very one María used to ride, the one called Rocinante. The horse trod upon Marianna’s train, it was a heavy one of black brocade, and the train did not tear but pulled the queen mother under the animal’s hooves.”

Olympe will pause in her reading of the dwarf’s letter. Outside her window the sun will be sparkling on the river. “And here is the best of all possible postscripts,” Eduardo’s message will conclude. “The groom did not kill the animal, but this time disobeyed the king’s orders. He escaped from Madrid on its back.”

The comtesse will tear the letter into four pieces, she will burn it. Now what, my friend? she will think. What is to become of you now that your powerful protector is dead? Olympe will not honor Eduardo’s letter with any reply.

The funeral procession was, of course, delayed by the accident, delayed for whole hours. There was talk of holding the queen’s body in Madrid, and then taking the two of them, María and Marianna, together through the hills to the Escorial. But no one wanted to risk inciting the mob again, which, though it fell quiet after the queen mother’s death, continued to call for
María’s body, temporarily removed to the safety of the guardhouse at the city’s west gate.