Poison by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online Page A

confessed to everything. I have confessed to too many things, so we keep starting over.
    Or, as they say, we “continue.”
    My unfortunate tendency to laugh under duress also results in continuations. No one can be tortured twice, not for the same accusation—that is the law—but tortures may be continued, as mine has been, for months.
    My priest is dead, and my mother, too. Yet they gather evidence against each of them. After all, it is never too late for sentencing, never too late to decide the fortunes of an immortal soul. I am the one in whom truth is hiding: the Purple Hood must suspect this. He asks me questions. About the priest: Had he ever betrayed any disbelief in the sacraments? What was he looking for in those texts? Whom else had he tutored? About my mother: How many times had she been with child? What happened to the bodies of the babies who were stillborn? What sex were those dead children?
    Though I was arrested three years ago, it was only last summer that they began to question me. A clerical delay, possibly, for this prison is full enough that most of us die before our records of arrest are reviewed, before even a plan of interview is decided upon. But in my own case, I think it more likely that the Purple Hood’s questions reflect a palace preoccupation.
    The court is in a paroxysm over witches. Witches are found everywhere. When the
Bellavente
sank last season off the coast of Málaga, twenty women were burned in that port town, burned without trial. Rumor has it that their hearts were gouged out and cooked separately in a big pot, the same in which theiraccusers said they had stirred up the storm that sank the unfortunate ship. And those twenty women died a hundred leagues away from the palace, a full three weeks’ journey from Madrid, where last August King Carlos made his official statement. Stood quavering on the royal balcony in the Plaza Major and read his words from an unrolled parchment. “The failure of Queen María Luisa to get with child,” he said, “is due to sorcery.” His voice was weak, his words had to be repeated by an official crier. The crowds, faces tipped up toward their king, were strangely silent. After the proclamation they dispersed without the usual rioting and commotion, without the ordinary noise of assembly that is carried down through the cobbles until the prison’s locks and hinges whine.
    The next day seventeen witches were found in the royal residence and brought directly here for questioning. The cause of the queen’s failure to bear a child would be discovered. The records of all persons in palace employ from the year of Carlos’s birth until the present were reviewed, my mother’s included among them. And I was moved from my original lodgings to this corridor of cells reserved for witches who have threatened the royal family: a consideration conferred by heredity; for in conjunction with my own not inconsiderable mistakes, my mother’s connection to the palace was of such intimacy and power that it mandates my being treated as a special case. I now occupy a cell between the queen’s translator and her secretary: one more woman in a row of malign maids-in-waiting, of deviously conspiring dwarfs, laundresses whose soaps bore curses, of chambermaids whose bosoms heaved with diabolic desire, wet nurses whose tits leaked liquid spells. Oh, every trade that serves the king and queen has its representative in these exclusive quarters.
    Maybe the carriage with its mutilated, silent horse did pause in the street that last night. Maybe it brought its rag-wrapped wheels to a slow and very nearly silent stop on the one cobbled street of Quintanapalla, the same that ran past his lodgings. Perhaps on that night when I returned to him against all caution, and when we let a candle burn a moment too long—But what ofit? There is no law against light. He often studied all the night. Still, perhaps someone saw, or merely listened to my unorthodox catechisms. Stood silent