The Poisoning Angel (12 page)

Vannes

The following day, Ash Wednesday, on a road leading to Vannes, a large woman made of straw covered in rags was being paraded through a village to be burnt in the marketplace. Four thin workmen plus a stocky one with a bare chest, side by side like the five fingers on the hand of a giant, were, together, turning the wheel of fortune on the front of the church, to see what the future had in store.

A priest came out, objecting angrily, ‘Consulting the wheel of fortune is now forbidden by the clergy.’

‘Kant brô, kant illiz, kant parriz, kant kiz …’
(‘A hundred regions, a hundred churches, a hundred parishes, a hundred customs …’), said the giant’s hand by way of justification,
spinning the wheel of fortune again, with its twelve little bells, each of which made a different sound.

Next to them, two shopkeepers were discussing the forthcoming municipal elections. ‘So, who will you vote for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? That means you’re voting for our rival.’

‘Maybe.’

‘But the man’s a liar.’

‘Oh?’

‘Didn’t he tell you he was Breton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s not true – he comes from Lorient.’

‘And is Lorient not in Brittany?’

‘Oh, there’s no having a sensible conversation with you.’

One of the pair noticed Thunderflower in a black cape with the hood down over her eyes and her bag on her shoulder. She was at a herbalist’s stall, buying a few medicinal plants and looking at the mouldy pancakes on display, which the saleswoman was recommending to her.

‘It’s a remedy for wounds. Look, I scrape off the whitish film that’s grown on the pancake, and slide it into this little jar. You then apply the ointment to a wound. Will you take some of this as well?’

Next the orphan from Plouhinec bought a piece of dried eel, which the fishmonger offered to cut into three. ‘It’ll be easier to chew.’

The straw woman went up in flames. By the time Thunderflower, looking suspiciously innocent, left the village by the coastal route, the fire was not quite out in the pile of ashes.

After passing through the rugged, windswept countryside the gallivanting cook rounded a bend in the rutted track and saw the coastal dunes, and the wigmakers at the edge of a piece of land. Rye, oats or buckwheat would be sown there no doubt, but for the moment it was still bare earth. The Normans were on their knees, breaking up clods with the sides of their hands, and planting the Breton hair from the bale. First they folded each long strand in two. Making a hole in the ground with the tip of a finger, they placed the capillary fibre upright in it. The clay was pressed back around the base, and the long hair, duly planted, would begin to wave, reclining and standing up again with the wind. It was beautiful. The watercolour sky was shot through with the shrill cry of the gulls. A butterfly fluttered by, a stemless flower. In the distance a donkey brayed. So much of Nature was in this vignette. The vivid blue sea and yellow sand shifted. Thunderflower admired the order of things and she understood what the Normans were doing. She knelt down beside them at the edge of the field and began pulling hairs out of the bale and planting them in the ground. Silently, the wigmakers turned their soulful eyes on her. Thunderflower spotted the deep nasal wound that the weakly Norman had incurred at the time of the accident with the cart on the Pont du bon Dieu. She opened a pot and, taking the white foam on her finger, applied it to the scarred wigmaker.

‘Crampöes mouzee?’
(‘Mould from a pancake?’), he checked.

The one-eyed wigmaker offered the unexpected nurse a bottle of brandy.
‘Gwin-ardant?’

She took a long drink straight from the bottle, then gave each of them a slice of her portion of dried eel.

‘Sili mor?’

In a row from left to right, the Jégado woman, the short wigmaker, and the tall one, chewing the dried eel for a long time, spent the whole afternoon on their knees planting hair without exchanging another word. Before them the ocean was rolling in a bed of golden seaweed. Islets lay on the water like baskets of flowers. A sacred unease was fermenting in the brains of the three hair farmers, longing for the infinite. A smile came over the world, and some graceful sailing boats danced on the horizon. The wind got up. It began to stir the scents of leaves and resin. As evening drew near, at the time the first star rises and work is at a close, countless rocks sprouted among the waves into which the red disc of the sun was sinking. Weary now, the wigmakers put an end to their day’s work and stopped lining up their rows of planted hair. Back by the roadside, they lay down on their fronts in the field, without worrying about dirtying their ruined clothes. Thunderflower went over and did the same. Chins on folded arms, they surveyed their handiwork. Against the backdrop of the setting sun, the wind combed, ruffled and smoothed the field’s hair. With a tall band of sparkling foam behind it, the meadow found its hair parted first on one side, then on the other. It tidied and untidied its hair to the sound of the waves. Thunderflower and the Normans kept the silence. Faced with the hallucinatory scene, the dreams consuming them must have come from a dark place. Wild geese, cormorants, gulls and herons flew swiftly overhead, making for the fields.

Beside a thatched outhouse used for storing the plough and farming implements, a house door slammed shut as if a storm were approaching. The field’s hairpiece was all dishevelled. The two wigmakers were snoring away on the hair bale, near to the chain of their now extinguished lantern. The darkening horizon was echoed in the shape of their folded arms. A sigh deflated Thunderflower’s cheek. A death’s-head moth flew by.

Fww! Fww!

Thunderflower continued along the coast by night, holding in her outstretched hand the end of the chain of the lantern stolen from the wigmakers, which she was turning around above her head. The big glass lantern, like a coastal beacon, cast large regular circles of light. At each revolution the dazzling flame could be heard hissing –
Fww!
– mixed with the sizzling of the rain that followed, as it changed into streams of white steam.
Fww, fww!
The rusty links of the chain rubbing together creaked like the squeaky axle of a heavenly cart.
Squeak! Squeak!

Soon Hélène Jégado heard a huge cracking behind her, like a nut splitting open, and then the yells of a ship’s crew as they drowned beside a reef. It reminded her of her youth. She did not turn round, but continued on her inexorable way as if hanging on the thread of a star. While the endlessly whirling lamplight washed back and forth over her face, the woman who caused shipwrecks was brushed by the shades of the dead in her mental chaos. Encircled by puffs of smoke rising from her censer in the darkness, pale and tight-lipped, she glanced into the future and
saw only despair. Nearby farm-dwellers broke from telling ghost stories to come running out carrying baskets and knives. They passed Thunderflower as they rushed towards a ship that had gone aground.

Late in the afternoon of the next day, still in the rain and seventeen kilometres from Vannes, Thunderflower, who had taken a detour through Auray, pushed open the gate of the cemetery. At twilight, treading between pots of budding geraniums, she was looking for the tomb of Madame Hétel whose last moments she had been forced to miss. Ostensibly seen off by some treacherous soup, the elderly lady with little mirrors on her headdress, the mother-in-law of Dr Doré who had ambitions for the mayorship, had to be there somewhere, but how could she find out where if she could not read?

‘Excuse me, Monsieur, could you show me the way to the family vault of Dr Doré, the mayor?’

‘Doré? But he was never elected. Something to do with an unfortunate dinner party around ten years ago, I think.’

‘Ah? It’s actually his elderly mother-in-law’s grave I’m looking for.’

‘Oh, work it out for yourself,’ said the rich man, who was dressed in fine blue linen and carrying an umbrella, as he went off in the direction of some horses with violet accoutrements pulling a funeral carriage. Beside it were some women wearing mourning hoods with trains. Someone else joined them, weeping copiously. Pensive, Thunderflower sat down with her bag on a soaking wet bench off to one side. The rain was sending streams
of mud down her cape and dress, which were dirty from when she had lain down in the field beside the two Normans. She was covered in earth like an idol.

‘Can I help you?’ a man asked. ‘I heard you asking the way to an old lady’s grave. What’s her name?’

‘It’s not important really. Her mirrors stopped twinkling a long time ago.’

‘Have you ever noticed, Madame, that some old ladies’ coffins are nearly as small as children’s? I know what I’m talking about. My wife and I are monumental masons in Vannes – which is where I’m off to now if you have no need of me.’

‘Vannes. That’s where I’m going as well, and I hope to get there before dark,’ sighed Thunderflower, getting up from the bench.

‘On foot, Madame? Would you rather climb up into my cart? The cover would protect you from the bad weather. You’ll catch your death in this rain.’

‘But I’m all muddy. I’ll dirty your seat if—’

‘Pah,’ said the monumental mason, ‘what does that matter? You can dry off and change at our house. If needs be, my wife will make you a gift of some clothes. Here, these are for you,’ he added, handing her three roses taken from a wreath.

The itinerant servant was touched by this. ‘For so many springs, no one has given me flowers to wear on my bodice. Monsieur, you are extremely kind to welcome me in such terms. Since I’m a cook, I will make
soupe aux herbes
for you, if your wife will allow. That’s my speciality, my triumph. There’s not a soul alive with a bad word to say about it.’

‘Then with pleasure! Off we go. Let us leave this cemetery
where there is no future, and the people here are gathered round that fool who disdained to help you. That kind of mortal’s idea of happiness has always made me want to vomit.’

Leaving a half-timbered house in Vannes, under cover of darkness, Thunderflower, dressed in clothes not her own, hurried along a street with a runnel down the middle. Bag over her shoulder, she suddenly heard shouting behind her. People looked up towards a lighted window above a monumental mason’s business. There they saw the jerky silhouettes of a man with both hands at his throat, and a woman clutching her stomach, like a shadow play, as the clouds scudded by overhead.

Rennes

29 December 1849. Death of Albert Rabot. He was nine years old.

14 April 1850. Death of Joseph Ozanne. He was five years old.

When on 5 May 1850 Thunderflower arrived at the top of the Lices, in a little square that looked as if it dated from the Middle Ages, she was singing a Breton song from her childhood, and soaked by rain that looked set to go on for ever. The first thing she noticed was the two Normans in the middle, ripping open the mouldering canvas on their last bale of hair. Hurling themselves headlong on their stomachs, they rolled about in the rotting remains of their Celtic hair harvest. They flung grubby balls of lank hair in each other’s faces like dirty snow. Their cracked sabots slipped from under them in the mud and again they threw themselves into the long hair from Morbihan, which clung to their bare chests, arms, bagpipers’
bragou-braz
and to their round hats held on by ribbons tied under the chin. With a wondrous hairiness floating over their bodies, which were entirely coated in Breton soil, they were shouting like madmen.

The cook from Plouhinec walked through the square between them, making for the front of a hotel where she asked, ‘Is this the
Penn ar Bed
?’

‘The what?’

‘The End of the World. I want to go right to the end and am hoping the world ends here.’

The servant, descendant of Jean Jégado, seigneur of Kerhollain, who saved Quimper, looked a perfect fright and was doubtless a little drunk. The man she was speaking to put the visitor’s dishevelled appearance down to the squally wind and
rain, and answered, ‘Indeed, this is the hotel known as the End of the World, from the name of this square where in the Middle Ages the town gibbet stood, for executing criminals condemned to death. That was where their careers of destruction ended.’

‘Really?’

At the far end of the ground-floor room, whose walls were decorated with stuffed animal heads, a door opened and a voice could be heard asking, ‘What has that woman come to say to us, Louis? The one who doesn’t look like one of our guests.’

‘That she’s going to the very end, Mother.’

The voice, which was coming nearer, was the very quavering one of an elderly lady, so stooped she was like a caricature little old woman. Trembling continually, she was supported by a maid who helped her into an armchair.

‘There you are, Madame Roussel.’

‘Thank you, Perrotte. Hand me my shadowpoint needlework as well, please.’

‘Mother, with your illness the needle’s going to jab into you all over,’ Louis warned.

‘Perhaps it will be all right,’ said the Parkinson’s sufferer, hopefully. ‘I would so like to be still again.’

‘Give up hoping,’ advised Perrotte, the lady’s maid.

‘Who knows?’ objected Thunderflower.

‘Thank you,’ said the old lady, smiling at the stranger.

Rain was streaming down the windows. In the fading light, the sky gave off waxen gleams that made it look like a shroud. Madame Roussel, who was terribly frail, with her embroidery gesticulating in her hands, looked kindly in her
raie de Baud
headdress with its flounce hanging down over her bent back like a cod tail. Since her back was shaking, it looked as if the fish were wriggling.

‘You’ve fetched up here drenched, but are you hungry?’ asked the hotel owner. ‘Put down that big bag and at the table you can tell me about yourself as you cut into this round loaf with its golden crust.’

Thunderflower took only a little ball of bread and began working it between her fingers.

‘For me, earthly things scarcely exist, and my reality is only in a persistent childhood dream. I heard you were looking for a cook and am offering my services, principally because of the name of the hotel.’

‘Yet it’s not very enticing,’ opined the establishment’s trembling owner.

‘I see an empty future ahead of me while my past grows ever bigger, Madame Roussel. If you employ me, you, like many others, will taste the specialities for which one day I’ll have a truly amazing reputation –
soupe aux herbes
that’ll have you falling face first into your plate, cake so amazing you’ll be clutching your throat with both hands, and …’

When they heard that, the ghosts of the Druids in Plouhinec, that moor of legends, must have had a good laugh into their green and mauve lichen beards. While Thunderflower spoke about her cooking, she was filled with passion. She moulded the bread into a little menhir and placed it upright on the table.

‘Take me on, Madame Roussel. Even if it’s for the stupendous wage of five centimes a day, I shan’t let you down.’

‘That’s agreed, then,’ said the owner, intrigued, ‘but I
personally eat nothing but boiled eggs now, without fingers of bread for dipping. And I open the shells myself – I put the knife blade near them, and it trembles and they break. You take your pleasures where you can find them.’ The sick woman pulled a face, while Thunderflower shifted her chair and got abruptly to her feet.

‘Oh, no, not boiled eggs. Boiled eggs to be opened by Madame herself! Hélène Jégado serving boiled eggs, and not even spreading something special on the bread!’

She bent to pick up her bag, saying sadly, ‘It’s a pity because I had hopes about that tremor that bothers you.’

‘Tell me about it, Hélène.’

‘It’s …’

‘Spit it out, for heaven’s sake. You’re killing me with your shillyshallying.’

‘I had thought that, with a small dose in my pastry … but if Madame can take nothing but eggs served shell intact, we’ll forget it and you can go on pricking your fingers.’

‘I give in, you insistent thing, Hélène. Put your bag down again and go and bake me a cake. The kitchen’s on your right, you confounded Breton.’

‘Will I find raisins, yeast and most importantly rum?’

Once in front of the oven in the Hôtel du Bout du Monde, with the kitchen door shut behind her, Thunderflower took a long swig of rum straight from the bottle. A laugh kept the bottle at her lips. ‘Who cares what happens? Let’s just drink while the doctors’ backs are turned.’

‘Your mother’s not shaking any more.’

‘Well, no, Dr Aristide Revault-Crespin. That’s because she’s paralysed, with her hands stuck round her throat.’

‘How did it happen, Monsieur Louis Roussel?’

‘I have no idea. Just now, as the night fell, I came back from the hotel stables to find my mother in her armchair, paralysed. Our maid, Perrotte Macé, had already gone to fetch you.’

The doctor, who had arrived with Perrotte, had a white collarless shirt, a waistcoat with wooden buttons, and doubts. He was at a complete loss confronted with the old lady, frozen rigid.

‘I’m wondering what could restore her and must admit to a crushing sense of powerlessness. She appears to have fallen victim to a harmful substance mixed with her food. If she were dead, I would ask for an autopsy. Nowadays science is very powerful when it comes to asking questions of a corpse.’

‘But she’s not going to die. Oh, these doctors!’ exclaimed Thunderflower, standing in the open doorway of the hotel, which was very brightly lit thanks to numerous candlesticks.

With her back to the reception she seemed to be watching the square.

‘Who’s that, who thinks she knows everything better than anyone else?’

‘Our new cook. Mother took her on this morning.’

The son refreshed the open lips of his tetraplegic progenitor, with the green tongue and eyes so wide they looked to have been dug out. She remained absolutely still, with her hands at her throat, bent over her canvas, mute and mournful. The lace fishtail of her characteristic
raie de Baud
headdress trailed down her back, but the fish looked well and truly dead.

Beggars were rushing across Place du Bout du Monde, to ask Thunderflower, ‘We saw the doctor hurrying here with the maid, shouting “Madame Roussel!” Has the hotel owner died? If she has, you need to give us something to eat. When someone dies, food is given out to the hungry destitute, who come to the dead person’s house at night. It’s a tradition.’

‘Shush, not so much noise, but of course I’ll give you something to eat. In any case, I’ve been waiting for you with this big cake on a plate – it’s barely been started. It’s better the leftovers go to the poor than go to waste.’

She gave each shivering wretch a ready-cut slice, saying, ‘Here, take this but go and eat it further away. I don’t want to have to spend time clearing your remains from the pavements.’

She poisoned people indiscriminately and as absent-mindedly as if she were throwing seed for the pigeons. For the men and women returning to the middle of the square, death was on its way. With the light from the hotel behind her, Thunderflower’s enormous Herculean shadow filled Place du Bout du Monde.

Dr Revault-Crespin emerged from the half-timbered building, accompanied by Louis Roussel.

‘Give your mother a strong dose of magnesium morning and evening,’ he instructed him. ‘It’s an antidote. I don’t think it’ll be enough but maybe she’ll start shaking again.’

He was astonished, then, to see the starving vomiting in the square. One of them was pleading for a drop of water to cool his tongue, as if he were surrounded by flames. At the same time, another finished chewing and in the blink of an eye collapsed as if his bones had dissolved. Their unloved shadows were all writhing on the ground. Like an echo, in the middle of the square
bordered by tall houses, their death rattles all merged into one deep sound.

The worried doctor gave his diagnosis. ‘No doubt it’s the vile cholera returning to Rennes, promising us nothing but a dirty stinking death. There’ll be no more murmured complaints from shivering down-and-outs at the corners of the square. They’ll fall silent. Good evening, Monsieur Roussel.’

Thunderflower was puffing peacefully at her father’s pipe. Beside her, Louis asked, ‘Is that tobacco you’re smoking? Perrotte claims my mother was paralysed as soon as she’d had some of your cake.’

‘If she’s said that, it’s very wicked,’ the cook replied calmly, looking round at the maid, who had stayed in the hotel reception.

Her gaze slid over her. It was the gaze of a wild beast, a big cat, but her voice remained soft.

‘You wait, Perrotte, one of these days I shall make you
soupe aux herbes
.’

Splosh!

On 1 September 1850 (the date was written on the front page of the newspaper –
Le Conciliateur
– lying beside her where she sat) Perrotte Macé fell face first into a plate of
soupe aux herbes
. Her forehead hit the rim, and the piece of crockery tipped up. It flew into the air in the kitchen of the Hôtel du Bout du Monde, depositing its green contents on the maid’s brown hair then, hitting the neck of the servant stretched on the table with her arms out sideways, it rolled along the curve of her back, bouncing
off her vertebrae, and fell on to the floor where it exploded into a thousand pieces. It was like a circus turn. Thunderflower had to stop herself applauding.

Dr Revault-Crespin arrived in the wreckage. His soles crunched as he asked, ‘What’s happened now, Monsieur Louis Roussel?’

‘I haven’t the least idea. I was by my mother’s armchair, in despair at seeing her still just as inert, when the kitchen door opened and Thunderflower announced, “Perrotte Macé has snuffed it.”’

Shaking his head, the doctor walked round the kitchen table. ‘Was Perrotte having her dinner?’

‘Yes, a simple soup, I think, Doctor.’

‘A simple soup. Where’s the rest of it?’

‘I gave little bowls of it to the town’s shameful poor, who came running,’ said Thunderflower. ‘And, incidentally, they should be grateful to me for doing what I can to help them.’

‘And you, Monsieur Roussel? Any symptoms? Do you feel all right?’ asked the healer.

‘I’m fine, but Hélène didn’t give me soup. She cooked me stewed peas, and I must say they were excellent.’

Having been right round the table, Aristide Revault-Crespin slipped a hand into the green slime of the maid’s hair, before taking a long sniff at his dirty palm.

‘Hélène, does any of these kitchen cupboards contain rat killer that might have accidentally got into the food?’

‘Any …?’

‘Rat killer, poison, arsenic!’

‘I’m not familiar with
reusenic’h
!’ Thunderflower burst out angrily.

‘Arsenic,’ the doctor corrected her.

‘You see, I don’t even know how to say it properly! No one can say they’ve seen any in my possession.’

At the sink the doctor poured water from a jug to wash his hands carefully with soap, saying to Louis Roussel, ‘An autopsy would reveal the truth.’

‘Perrotte’s relatives would never agree to that, sharing the revulsion for opening a corpse that all peasants have.’