Spirit of Lost Angels (4 page)

‘How strange,’ she said, pressing her nose into my hair. ‘It smells like the river.’

I stole a glance at Grégoire, sitting on her other side. Even in the dim light, I could see my brother’s face had darkened. He sniffed and looked away, as if studying the candlelight shadows.

‘And what’s this?’ Maman plucked a scarlet petal from my braid. ‘A poppy petal? I haven’t seen poppies anywhere besides the riverbank slope.’

The
tap-tap
on our door saved me. ‘Madame Charpentier?’

‘Who’s there?’ Maman asked.

‘Françoise, the clog-maker’s daughter. Maman told me to come for you. The chest sickness has got my father again.’

Maman gathered garlic, dandelion, thyme and some other things from her stocks, which had taken us all those five years to replenish. She was thankful for the few shelves Grégoire had built, though they were nothing like the light and airy place in the cottage she’d stored her herbs and flowers, her special mortar, pestle and bowls. She kissed us and disappeared into the darkness with Françoise.

‘I hope they’ve got doves,’ Grégoire said.

‘What for?’

‘Because, silly, don’t you know how Maman heals the chest sickness?’

I shook my head.

‘You slice a white dove down the middle — a live one.’ Grégoire grinned. ‘Then you put the two shuddering halves on the man’s chest.’

‘That cannot be true! Maman would never kill a lovely bird. Our mother could never kill anything.’

‘She kills babies,’ Grégoire said.

‘Maman does not kill babies, she births them! I could slap you, Grégoire, for saying such a terrible thing.’

‘What do you think an angel-maker does then?’

‘Well … makes angels, of course.’

I knew Maman needed three different herbs and flowers to make her special angel tea, but after that, I really had no idea how the angel came to be.

‘No stupid,’ Grégoire said. ‘An angel-maker gets rid of a baby from its mother’s belly. She kills it.’

My hand flew to my heart and I thought I would pass out with the shock that our kind and gentle mother killed babies in the womb.

‘He’s dead, the old King is dead!’ As the voice skittered over the sun-warmed cobbles, I hurried out onto the square.

‘Gather, gather, let me tell you the story of the old King’s death,’ the journeyman said, the familiar traveller’s rags hanging from his ragged body.

As word passed around that a pedlar had arrived with a tale to tell, the people of Lucie scuttled from their homes. After all it was a Friday so we were not busy doing anything — the baker’s oven was cold, the silk-weavers’ looms still, the clog-maker and the blacksmith’s hammer quiet. It brought bad luck to do business on Fridays, dig a grave, give birth, bake food or change your clothes. Nobody began the harvest, sowed seed or slaughtered a pig, and the worst thing you could do on a Friday was wash clothes — garments washed on a Friday would become shrouds.

‘How is the old King dead?’ a silk-weaver woman asked, as the villagers crowded around the mountebank, who stepped onto an upturned crate.

Once the man had everyone’s attention, he held up a dark-coloured bottle.

‘My elixir to heal aching joints,’ he said. ‘It works like magic.’

‘Tell us about the King first,’ one of the quarry men said.

‘The old King is dead from
la petite vérole
,’ the traveller said. ‘The speckled monster got him!’

‘
Oh là là
,’ the clog-maker’s wife said. ‘The speckled monster chooses from all classes.’

‘The aristocrats may believe us commoners ignorant,’ the pedlar said, ‘but we are all, sadly, too familiar with this smallpox, which fills our graveyards and turns our babies into changelings their own mothers shudder at.’

‘Well I have a remedy for the smallpox,’ Maman said.

‘Your mixture of viper flesh and sweating paste no longer heals us,’ the blacksmith said.

‘Madame Charpentier’s remedies no longer seem to heal much at all,’ another silk-weaving woman said, clicking her tongue.

‘No, this is an entirely different treatment,’ Maman went on, ignoring the taunts. ‘Something far more efficient — the variolation — a procedure the royal government wishes all doctors and midwives to learn, to treat the smallpox.’

‘Hmm, this
variolation
sounds suspicious,’ Monsieur Bruyère’s wife said, cradling another new baby.

‘Not at all suspicious,’ my mother said. ‘Why as far back as half a century ago, an English lady living in Constantinople said the smallpox there was harmless, with the use of ingrafting. It was an operation performed after the great summer heat abated,’ she explained. ‘An old woman came with a nutshell full of the matter of the best smallpox. She ripped open a few veins, injecting as much matter as could lie upon her needle head. The fever began and they took to their beds, but after eight days they were quite well again.’

‘So why was the King not variolated?’ the clog-maker’s wife asked.

‘Ah, the King wrongly thought he’d already had the smallpox, so was immune,’ the mountebank said, retrieving his story from my mother. ‘Besides, despite some advocating variolation, our country is much opposed. Our great thinker, Voltaire, had seen it practised while exiled in England and begged his fellow Frenchmen to variolate “for the sake of staying alive and keeping our women beautiful”.’

‘How did the King catch the smallpox?’ Léon said.

‘It is said he caught the speckled monster from a girl child delivered to Versailles for his pleasure,’ the man said.

‘Ha, serves him right,’ cried a quarry man. ‘
Qu’il aille au diable
!’

‘Why did we hate the old King, monsieur?’ Léon said as the people cheered the defunct king gone to Hell.

‘Because he was a bad king,’ the man said. ‘We peasants suffer the most taxes — roads, salt, cloth, bread, wine …’

‘Not to mention those lazy nobles who charge us
banalités
to use their flour mills, their granaries, their oil and wine presses, even the community ovens!’ a stone-mason shouted, his eyes blazing. He pulled a morsel of rough grain bread from his pocket. ‘The price of a loaf of this wretched stuff has risen to eleven sous — half the daily earnings of some. I heard it will be up to fourteen by next spring, but do our wages rise? No!’

‘I don’t know how we are to keep paying the lord’s rent, or buy candles and fat to cook with,’ the clog-maker’s wife said.

Everybody nodded.

‘And what goes on at Versailles?’ the pedlar continued. ‘Court society passing its days devising intrigues to catch the King’s favour and feasting on banquets of meat, fish and candied fruit.’

‘Tell us about the old King’s death,’ the baker said.

‘Well,’ he began. ‘The King spent a pleasant evening dining with his mistress, Madame du Barry, at Trianon. The next day he woke with the fever.’ Nobody spoke as the man paused.

‘The King got worse so his six physicians, five surgeons and three apothecaries decided to bleed him, but that didn’t help. On the fourth day, the face rash broke out. He became delirious and received the last sacrament. The court assembled in the Œil de Bœuf antechamber and waited. His face became swollen, and the hue of copper. A single black scab covered the face of our once-handsome ruler, as if he’d been burned or severely scalded. They say the smell was foul.’

We all wrinkled our noses.

‘One month ago, at three o’clock on the morning of 10 May, 1774, his candle was snuffed out. The old King was dead.’ He paused, running his tongue over his lips.

‘And since his death, people all over are welcoming the new rulers — the fair-haired, blue-eyed King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette,’ he said, ‘in streets decorated with flowers and triumphal arches.’

‘Long live the new king and queen!’ chimed several people.

‘But,’ the traveller said, holding up a hand. ‘Many say we must be wary of a young simpleton king who tinkers with locks, and a foreigner queen with expensive tastes.’

***

The sun dropped westward, behind the Monts du Lyonnais, throwing its amber light across Lucie.

As the sky turned a darker blue and the villagers gathered in the meadow, Père Joffroy held back his cassock with one hand and, with the other, touched his blazing torch to the stack of dried sticks and wood. The flames lapped at the kindling, quickly building to a noisy crackle that vied with our cheers.

‘Gather all, for this celebration of the solstice,’ the priest said, beckoning us closer. ‘Let us rejoice in our Midsummer bonfire we have built together, to protect us. For, as the sun turns southward yet again and the veil between this world and the next thins, evil spirits roam free.’

Wearing the wreaths we had made from the yellow, star-shaped Saint John’s flowers that covered the meadows like thousands of tiny suns, everyone began to circle the fire, leading their animals in the sunwise direction.

‘On this Midsummer night — Holy day of Saint John the Baptist — we embrace fire and water, symbols of purification,’ Père Joffroy chanted as he blessed the horses, cows, sheep, goats and pigs, so they would bear more young and have longer lives.

Grégoire and I each took one of our mother’s hands.

‘Come and dance,’ I said, trying to coax her to join in the celebrations. Even though she held our hands and feigned happiness, I sensed, as I often did since that day she’d claimed God no longer existed, Maman had stopped believing in everything — especially things that were meant to ward off evil and misfortune.

Tragedy had visited us twice. Félicité and Félix, and our home, had been gone six years. My father had been dead for two, and even as Maman said we must not think of those things; we must get on with the living, it seemed she, herself, could not forget them. It was as if those cursed accidents had broken something inside her — a thing nobody could fix. She continued to teach me to read and write; to explain the birthing skills and instruct me what plants and flowers to use for the different sicknesses, but she seemed to trudge through each day, eternally sad.

‘I hope you’re dreaming of me?’

Startled, I jumped. Léon adjusted my floral crown and took my hand. ‘Come and enjoy this night with me, Victoire, and forget our work, the hunger and sickness, for a moment.’

I gripped Léon’s hand and together we circled the flames, watching them leap closer towards the darkened sky, which would not go entirely black on this longest day of the year — only deepen to the inkiest blue before paling again.

‘The firelight makes your eyes the same dark green as the Vionne,’ Léon said. ‘That’s what I’ll call you from now on — Mademoiselle
aux yeux de la rivière
, eh, Grégoire?’ He looked across at my brother. ‘Your sister’s new name, Miss River Eyes?’

Grégoire, holding the hand of the clog-maker’s daughter, Françoise, threw Léon and me dark looks, but I couldn’t help feeling flattered. My cheeks burned and I was aware of the buds of my breasts tingling as they pressed against my chemise; of my hips brushing the coarse cloth of my skirt.

When Léon paid me attention, I forgot my mother’s sadness, my brother’s jealousy. All I felt was the warmth that started in my ankles and crept up my legs, the heat peaking at the top of my thighs. It was that same strange but pleasurable sensation as when I removed my cap at night and brushed my hair out, or when I lifted my chemise and ran my hand across the patch of light brown fuzz below my belly.

Firelight made macabre shapes of the wrinkled, toothless faces of the old people. The younger faces — scrubbed clean for the festival — glowed pink and smooth as ripe peaches. Flames threw shadows onto fat oak trunks, and I conjured up horned beasts with drooling jaws and ravens with hooked claws. I loved this time of year, when we all laughed, danced and made jokes together, giddy with the scent of flowers, the pulse of summer sweat and dirt.

People leapt higher and higher, Léon the highest of all.

Armand Bruyère beamed. ‘That is how high this year’s harvest will be then!’ he announced, and we all clapped and cheered.

The flames began to lose their force, and the fragrance of grilled sausages, mushroom and cheese-filled crepes,
pâté
and sweetbreads filled the night air. Baskets brimming with fruit appeared. The dancing slowed and people began to drop, exhausted, to the ground.

We washed our feast down with blessed water from the Vionne and wine from Monsieur Bruyère’s grapes, and I beckoned to Maman, standing alone, to come and sit beside me to listen to the stories people had saved up for this special night.

‘What of this
Bête de Gévaudan
the journeymen speak of?’ Grégoire asked.

‘Ah, the Gévaudan beast was an unusually fierce and daring wolf-like creature that roamed for two years, killing twenty people!’ Monsieur Bruyère said.

‘
Oh là là
,’ several people cried.

I felt something creeping up behind me. I shivered and spun around, staring into the woods, dark in the waning firelight. I imagined the Night Washerwoman hidden amongst the greatest oaks, washing the shrouds of all her children she’d killed; the woman you had to be careful not to come upon, or she’d ask for help and you too would be covered in the blood of her infants. The trees were still though, nothing moved.

The stories were over, and I had eaten more than I normally would in a week. I patted my swollen stomach and, with the other villagers, Maman, Grégoire and I curled up beside the glowing embers and closed our eyes.

I awoke some time later, rubbed my eyes and stood, tugging down my crumpled petticoat. Maman was gone, probably to the church room where she liked to sit, alone. Grégoire was gone too, back to his wood-working.

‘See, the sun also dances with joy,’ Léon said, as I bathed my bare feet in the sacred, early dew. I looked to where Léon pointed, beyond the village, at the stripes of pale sunlight throwing soft lavender shadows across the hillsides.

‘As if we have washed the world clean and it shines like our very own diamond,’ I said, as Père Joffroy sprinkled more holy water for the crops.

We scattered the bonfire ashes across the fields and, blessed, I went home feeling safe and protected.

At least until the next storm.