The Poisoning Angel

Plouhinec

‘Oh, no, don’t pick that, Hélène, it’s a thunderflower. Goodness, that’s what I should call you from now on: “Thunderflower”. And don’t pull on that stem either; it belongs to a viper flower. Don’t you know that a woman picked a bunch of those and her tongue split in two? You’re seven years old – when will you ever learn?

‘Don’t go near that field with your bare legs, poppy petals suck your blood; and don’t step in that, you’ll get your sabots dirty, little dung flower. Oh, don’t put those shiny little black balls near your mouth: belladonna berries are a deadly poison. Who would have a daughter like you? Who’s that in the distance, coming over the moor? We’ve not seen him before. And behind him,
there, beside the small man, with its wheels in the air, I only hope that’s not the Ankou’s cart. Quick, Thunderflower, run and get me two needles!’

The mother spoke in a Celtic dialect and when she had finished, Thunderflower, little Hélène, so pretty with her blond hair spreading out like a dandelion, and scrawny feet beneath her violet skirt, galloped off, sabots and all, through a pool with rotting gorse and straw, towards a miserable farm with a roof of thatch, and dry-stone walls.

Stones! There was no shortage of those in this landscape. Everywhere the granite poked up through the holly and thistles. There were so many stones, with scant grass and such poor soil that the farming women spread wrack snatched from the sea on their land as fertiliser.

Two rows of menhirs, standing stones made of schist, sawed at the overcast sky. As the intruder drew closer, the moor seemed to bare its teeth showing gums of heather. Some river women came up from the wash place and joined the women working on the land to go up to Thunderflower’s mother and ask, ‘Who can that man be, coming towards us, Anne Jégado?’

‘War ma fé, heman zo eun Anko drouk.’
(‘I would warrant that’s an evil Ankou.’) The gentleman was still approaching. He had a cane in his hand, a pipe in his mouth, new boots and a goatskin waistcoat. A gust of wind ruffled the few hairs on his forehead, which was creased in a frown.

‘Hello there, ladies,’ he called in French.

Visitors never came this way and the women and children watched him in astonishment, as he drew near, observing, ‘The road that goes past your place is the worst imaginable. It crosses
more than a hundred ponds and it’s not wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other.’ Smiling, he came closer still. As they waited for him, several of the women took out the pins that were holding the folds of their bodices together between their breasts.

‘He won’t be able to bring misfortune on any of us who can shed a drop of his blood.’

Close at hand now, the man introduced himself. ‘My colleague over there and I are Norman wigmakers. We’ve come to buy hair in your region because even the men wear it long here.’

Facing him, the old women in their black dresses and the younger ones in reddish-brown skirts listened to him, stupefied, as if he were a traveller from exotic lands.

‘Can you understand me?’ the Norman said, worried by their disconcerted faces. ‘Do you speak French, Mesdames?’

At that point, many of the women reached up to take out the needles securing the wings of their headdresses shaped like a horizontal figure of eight, which stuck out on either side of the head. The ends of the wide strips of white fabric tumbled on to their shoulders, and delightful Thunderflower, returning with little mud stockings, held out a needle to her mother, who had a plain flat headdress in everyday cloth. Meanwhile the wigmaker explained his presence.

‘We landed on your shores this morning, and before we’d even gone three leagues our covered cart, which you can see behind me, slipped into a rut. Might there be some men in this village who could help us to get it—’

‘Ann diaoulou!’
yelled a female voice, whereupon all the washerwomen and farm women hurled themselves upon the Norman, brandishing their metal points. It was like a wasps’ nest
emptying on to his almost bald head. Suddenly surrounded, he was stuck with darts all over. The needles and pins went far into his thighs, back, legs, face and stomach.

‘The Caqueux bleed from their navels!’ ‘The moon will swallow you up!’ The savage Celtic cries surrounded the wigmaker, who shielded himself with his arms as his legs flailed wildly. People came swarming up from the banks and moors.

Lamenting his fate, the harvester of hair, understanding that he was suspected of bringing misfortune, uncovered his face to comment, ‘You’ve hardly been touched by civilisation. Only here could one witness such superstitions.’ A needle was thrust into one of his eyeballs. The wigmaker let out a yell. With his face in his hands he fled the circle of heathens, as a stout peasant woman chided, ‘Oh, not in the eye! Who’s put his eye out?’

The Norman ran off through pink heather and flowering buckwheat, that late summer’s snow. ‘’Sdeath,’ he shouted, and it was as if the women had thrown out Jesus Christ Himself. Once safely back with his horrified sidekick – a puny dark-haired man who moaned, ‘Oh, that such a thing should be seen in the Empire of Napoleon’ – the injured man turned round. With his good eye he could make out in the distance men at work breaking the moor, using picks to turn over the soil, which was so difficult and stony it would snap a ploughshare. These peasants would strive doggedly to get a few farthings out of the stones. But now, in their short waistcoats, wide breeches and round hats over long, flowing hair, their calloused hands on tools that looked straight out of the Middle Ages, they were doubled over with laughter.

At all the natives, both men and women, the maimed victim shouted, ‘Fossils! Cretins! Degenerates!’

This took place in the hamlet of Kerhordevin in Plouhinec (Morbihan). The wigmakers unhitched the horse from their overturned cart with its yellow canvas. Anyone tilting their head sideways would have been able to make out the words ‘À la bouclette normande: Normandy’s finest tresses’. Bareback on their mount, they crossed a pond (where the steed went for a swim) still bawling, ‘Idiots!’ after the people they were leaving behind on the moor.

‘Piou zo azé?’
(‘Who’s there?’)

The front door of a miserable cottage opened wide. Seated at her spinning wheel, Anne Jégado saw only the bright night and then the outline of her daughter appearing on the threshold.

‘Oh, it’s you, you naughty
groac’h
(sprite)! What a fright you gave me! Why did you knock three times before you came in?’

‘I only banged my sabots to get the mud off them, Maman.’

‘So you don’t know, Thunderflower, that a chance noise repeated three times means misfortune? Don’t you know that’s what the Ankou does? Before he puts the body of a victim into his cart, he calls them three times in an eerie voice. For instance, for me he would call “Anne! Anne! Anne!” Look, your father was frightened as well. He immediately unsheathed his sword, messenger of misfortune. Where have you been at this hour, at
Penn ar Bed
(World’s End)?’

‘Leaning against a menhir on the moor.’

‘Again? What can you be dreaming of, always leaning against those standing stones?’

Then, still in the
brezhoneg
tongue, of course, since people at Plouhinec spoke only Breton, the mother demanded her daughter’s sabots –
‘Boutoù-koat!’
– so she could go and fill them with hot ash to dry and warm her little girl’s feet.

In the hovel, filled with smoke from a fire fuelled with cowpats and dried turf, chestnuts were roasting under the ashes. A pot hanger and some pancake pans were suspended over a rusty trivet.

Thunderflower’s father, sitting on one of the low walls on either side of the hearth, got up to put his sword back in its sheath above the fireplace. Its shiny blade was decorated with a coat of arms (gules a lion argent langued sable). One of his neighbours, a farm labourer, ensconced on the other side, rhapsodised, ‘Oh, you’re a true nobleman, Jean …’

‘Noblans Plouhinec, noblans netra!’
(‘Nobility of Plouhinec, nobility of nothing!’) said Jean Jégado, deprecatingly. ‘Being descended from Jehan Jégado, the seigneur of Kerhollain, who saved Quimper when it was captured by the brigand La Fontenelle, doesn’t make it any the less difficult for me to plough the moor today. But that’s the fate of the younger sons of the aristocracy,’ he conceded fatalistically, as he resumed his seat and took a Morlaix clay pipe out of his waistcoat.

Using his thumb, he filled it with poor-quality leaf tobacco, coarsely chopped. A brand at the end of a pair of tongs served as a match. Three puffs and a stream of saliva into the flames, then he lamented, ‘Being the younger son of a younger son, himself born of a younger son who … At each inheritance the land is divided up in favour of the elder sons, so at the end of the line you find yourself with a tiny plot on this stony moorland. The year hasn’t been great. If you have a bad harvest you can’t pay for anything, so you sell what you have to pay your debts and the
next thing you know, you’re on the road, begging.’

The former nobleman had had to assume the fears of the poor peasants but maintained the pride of his lineage when with his wife, who was currently unpicking the hem of a pleated garment.

‘Even though it seems that the stones of the Château de Kerhollain are soon to be sold off one by one, our arms are still at the top of the main window in the old church on the banks of the ria d’Étel. Alas, the window is so overgrown with moss that you can hardly see a thing any more. Some day I’ll have to take a ladder and go and clean it with vinegar.’

Jean Jégado puffed away on the shaft of his short pipe, but the unsmokable tobacco would really have needed the breath of an air pump to get it going. He was the same age as his wife, around thirty, thin, with a chestnut-brown face, and clean-shaven but with very long hair. Jean was wearing the traditional
bragou-braz
(wide, knee-length breeches) and woollen stockings. He half opened his waistcoat, which fastened on the right with metal buttons.

‘But enough of that. What have you got to tell us, Le Braz?’ he asked the labourer sitting on the other side of the flames.

‘Nothing,’ replied the other man, his mind elsewhere. ‘I was just thinking about your Hélène and her attraction to the standing stones.’

‘Aren’t you ever scared, all on your own on the moor at night?’ Anne asked her daughter in amazement. She was sitting beside her on the chest seat against a box-bed, busy working on the hem.

‘No, why?’

‘When I was a little lad,’ Le Braz recalled, ‘people used to tell me that every hundred years the stones from the moor came to drink from the river and that during that time they gave up the treasures they were hiding …’

‘Why, you silly girl? Because you might have run into the Ankou, for God’s sake,’ Thunderflower’s mother fretted. ‘You’d have asked him, “What are you doing here?” and he’d have replied, “I catch and I take.” “Are you a thief then?” you’d have enquired, and he’d have admitted, “I am the one who strikes without fear or favour.”’

‘They told
me
,’ put in Madeleine, Le Braz’s wife, a round peasant woman with a face like a cider apple, who was spinning by hand beside the ploughman, ‘that the standing stones were an army of motionless ghosts, a whole wedding party who’d been turned into stones for some mysterious misdeed.’

‘Stand up,’ Anne commanded her daughter, ‘so I can check whether this dress fits you. Not even eight yet, Thunderflower, but see how you’re growing!’

‘Maman, who’s this Ankou you’re always talking about?’

The warmth of the fire was gradually loosening both limbs and tongues in the cottage with its floor of trodden earth and its barn separated from the humans by a waist-height partition. On the animals’ side were a thin cow, three sheep, and a bald donkey, which shook its ears as Le Braz predicted, ‘We’ll be seeing fewer and fewer of the Druid stones here because when the clergy aren’t using them as a quarry for building chapels, they’re Catholicising them by carving Roman crosses at the top.’

Jean Jégado, resting the heels of his sabots on the sagging edge of a historic armchair spurned by his elders, was unsurprised.

‘When religions succeed one another they merge. The new one gains the upper hand by swallowing up the old, and in time digests it.’

‘The Ankou? He’s Death’s worker,’ explained the mother,
holding the pleated skirt against the hips of her child, whose blond mop was filled with dust and as wiry as horsehair.

‘Right, that’ll still do fine for this year. Shift, so I can fold it and put it away.’

As she lifted the lid of the chest seat the mother revealed, ‘There’s nothing more frightening than the Ankou! He makes his way around Brittany with his cart and loads it up with the bodies of all those he strikes down, indiscriminately, as if by an invisible force.’

‘What does he look like?’ Thunderflower asked, suddenly greedy for information.

‘But if one day there are no longer any menhirs, Anatole, what will the Poulpiquets go round … brr, those nasty, hairy dwarfs that take you by the hand and drag you into a mad dance until you die of exhaustion?’