Poison Read Online Free PDF Page B

angry.
    “Don Pascual!” she would say, but not loudly. No, she would only mouth the name of the Inquisitor General. “Come with your cart, Don Pascual, and take this naughty girl away!” And then I would put my head in her skirts and hide.
    After my mother died, I wondered whether she was taken to a place with any view, and whether she saw when it came to pass that one day I was collected by an officer of the Inquisition and thrown into a cart like those we joked about. I hope she did not. Yet some say that the reward of heaven is precisely this: the chance to observe from above the torment of the damned. Thatthe righteous enjoy the punishment of sinners, even those who were their children, and in life their beloved.
    Could my mother have guessed, when I was a child, what a sinner I would turn out to be? At home with my family I was obedient enough, especially with the incentive of a reward. No matter the quarreling or the unappealing nature of the jobs our father gave us, Dolores and I both pursued money zealously; we were sorry when Papa told us we had gathered enough kermes bugs. He took the last basket from me and bent down until our eyes were level.
    “Your papa is a very clever man,” he said, and I nodded, but I saw the ghost of my grandfather standing at his side and shaking his head. I heard him, too.
No te rejis
, he said in disgust. Don’t blow your horn.
    Papa and Señor Encimada’s experiment—their intention was to raise red silk—was not a success.
    The cocoons that the worms threw off were of a color that must have been a pale pink mockery of their dreams. Still, they did sell them at market, not for much, but a Dutchman, thinking them a local curiosity, bought the lot of them. If only Papa had taken this modest failure as some sort of caution, then our lives might have turned out quite differently, but it seemed an evil spirit had attached itself to him.
    My father was a true son of Castile, of our homeland in the bleakest and most fearsome of all the regions of Spain. In his rock-gray eyes I saw the windswept, wind-whipped plains which drop suddenly from the Pyrenees, which fall tumbling down from the Cantabrian Mountains, which plummet, crack and crumble and then work their peculiar bewitchment. A magic of altitude, of precipice, a magic of gulch, gully and chasm. A magic of something high brought suddenly low. A dizziness, a loss of balance. Blood’s memory of soaring, and a tendency to dream of that which is far, far above your head. Remember Quixote, fever-addled, finding giants in windmills and princesses in peasant girls? My father could not read that romance, but in Quintanapalla, not far from the birthplace of the Knight of Sad Countenance, he fell under the sway of visionsas potent as Quixote’s. My father was a true Castilian, a man who would risk everything for the sake of his dreams, even what he loved best. And I am my father’s daughter. I am a daughter of Castile.
    In the spring of the year of our Lord 1667, my papa, Félix de Luarca, bought eggs from the old man in Soria who bred the silk moths. There were others who raised eggs closer to our home in Quintanapalla, but it is best to buy eggs from a tested, trusted source. Healthy silk eggs are a luminous blue-gray color, like slate. Dead eggs are yellow. It is not unknown for unscrupulous vendors to wash dead eggs in wine so that they take on the slate color; then they sell them. If there was one way in which Papa would not cross my grandfather, even in death, it would be to go to a new egg vendor.
    So he made the trip to the old family vendor in Soria; he was gone for three nights. He returned on the fourth, carrying the tiny wood caskets of eggs packed in straw. On the way home, he told us, he had stopped at the shrine in Queranna and there he had poured out an offering of oil—the finest he could buy, from the first press of the pick of last year’s olives—over the feet of the miraculous Virgin there. He was sure, he said,