Poison by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

under his windowsill, just as I had once stood there waiting to hear the sounds of his quill, the whisper of pages turning.
    Was he afraid of discovery when we were together? I was, but fear only inflamed me further.
    Returned to my cell from questioning, I awake to a stir between two departing guards. I hear the queen’s name, followed by an ugly laugh. Something is happening in the world above, but what? I crouch by the grille. Someone will have heard something. Someone is waiting to share what she knows.
    We are not allowed to talk in here. We wear tongue locks, some of us, iron rods extending from jaw to collarbone that prevent a lady so adorned from opening her mouth. In this way the inquisitors think they can stop us from spreading heresies, one to another, like disease. It is difficult to drink water while wearing a tongue lock—you have to plunge your head into the bucket and suck the water up through your teeth. As for the crusts of bread they give us to eat, we poke them into our cheeks with our fingers, and when they are sufficiently moist they, too, can be sucked slowly through whatever teeth we have left. The tongues of false witnesses and incorrigible blasphemers have been cut out, of course, which makes sucking and all sounds but moaning impossible for them. But still, rumors multiply.
    Messages traced by a finger onto the clean slate of an open palm. Those of us who know our letters—and, being witches, the prisoners in this lowest catacomb constitute an uncommonly literate collection—have the solace of silent communication, fingers conversing through the grilles. Or just the grasping of a feverish hand, that is enough for certain messages, a greeting or a taking of leave.
    When the guards depart, taking their one lamp with them, the cautious hush of those prisoners who are awake and conscious slowly gives way to a rustle of gossip, conjecture. It cannot be that María Luisa has dared to pretend another miscarriage. For it is common knowledge—in this corridor, anyway—that untilher accomplice was caught, the queen had feigned several doomed pregnancies over the last two years. How better to appear to satisfy the one obligation of her position? The one un-doable duty of the wife to a king whose impotence must never even be hinted at? A miscarrying queen is, after all, in less danger than a barren one.
    A false miscarriage. It could not have been any business for the fainthearted, not the way I imagine it. In the early dawn hours, before the undercook’s apprentice had roused himself to set water to boil, before he woke the little scullery maid (boxing her ears when she did not stand quickly enough and frightening her so that she was out of the door and collecting eggs from the hens before she even stopped to rub her smarting flesh and think, Ouch! the bastard!); yes, before anyone had stirred, someone, some secret ally of the queen had smuggled pig’s blood from the kitchen up to the royal bedchamber. This loyal if trembling accomplice—the same who in preceding months had discreetly removed evidences of the queen’s monthly flow, hiding some bloodstains in preparation for others—had already on several occasions helped the queen to pour pig’s blood over her nightdress and bedclothes, on her secret parts and in the chamber pot and all over the floor by the bed. Then the friend stole away, and María called for her maids. Screamed so that the doctor was summoned immediately and an examination made. And as the queen wept and moaned, the sad tidings were delivered; bells tolled to announce another lost heir to the empire.
    I lick my lips and let my head rest against the wall, cold against my scalp; I reach to feel what hair is there. I was shorn a week ago, not more. Not a good job: two cuts on my neck and another at my temple for this assurance to my captors that no diabolical writings emerge on skin hidden by a growth of hair. Still, there are compensations. Though my captors surely do not intend