The Poisoning Angel (13 page)

Revault-Crespin wiped his fingers on a cloth, and said, ‘What if I were to order an autopsy anyway?’

On hearing that, Thunderflower soon vanished. Going down Rue des Innocents towards the banks of the Vilaine, she groaned, ‘I was wrong. That wasn’t the end of the world.’

‘What? What’s that, Rose Tessier? You’re telling me there’s a former judge who’s now a law professor at the University of Rennes, an expert in criminal cases, and he’s looking for a cook? That’s who I want to work for! A specialist in crime. Of course!’

In Thunderflower’s enigmatic green eyes, it was difficult to know how much was unbelievable defiance, and how much the desperate desire now really to throw herself into the jaws of the wolf. Sitting on the terrace of a modest bar where the neighbourhood servants liked to get together early on a Sunday morning – their day off – Thunderflower enquired slyly of the woman next to her, ‘And where does he live, your …’

‘Théophile Bidard de la Noë, tipped to become Mayor of Rennes one day, lives on the riverfront near Pont Saint-Georges.
I’ve worked for him for fourteen years, first as a daily servant and as housemaid for the last three.’

Glass of brandy in hand even at this early hour, the cook from Plouhinec gazed upon the shimmering waters of the river flowing through Rennes. Reflections bouncing off the Vilaine spattered green, red and mauve light on to the mist-shrouded clothes of the workers who, even on a Sunday, were beginning to unload pottery from Quimper and slates from Redon on to the quayside. Other men crouched down to lift sacks of chestnuts, which they would take by mule to Brest. As they straightened up, their legs cast shadows like bars on to the tall houses on the opposite bank. Thunderflower stood up.

‘Right, let’s go. Lead the way, Rose. Life is dragging on under this green tree, which, without appearing to do so, is holding on to its leaves!’

The glass of brandy slipped through her fingers to break against the corner of the table and she burst out laughing. Amid the fragments of glass, Rose Tessier drank the rest of her cup of coffee. Round her neck she had a glassware necklace. Ageless and very thin, she looked like a horse the slaughterman has rejected. A bandaged ankle gave her a limp.

‘That’s from another fall I had at the beginning of October,’ she explained. ‘I’ll fall and kill myself one day.’

Beside her, the servant from Plouhinec was not walking too straight either, which worried Rose.

‘Are you sure this’ll be all right, Hélène? Monsieur Bidard is very demanding where a cook’s concerned. He’s already dismissed three since …’

‘Oh, when he sees my references …’

‘Hmm! Hmm!’

The law professor from the University of Rennes cleared his throat as he reread the single letter of recommendation of the woman who had come to see whether she might suit.

‘“Hélène Jégado is an excellent cook. My one regret is that I am unable to keep her until I die …” That’s what I call a glowing recommendation! This missive from the abbé … Lorho has no date. So, since then?’

‘Nothing. I stayed quietly at his presbytery for fourteen years, and have just come from there.’

‘Ah, that’s what I like to hear. Just like Rose! I’m always wary of cooks who keep changing jobs. They never fail to cause problems.’

‘How right you are, Monsieur Bidard de la Noë.’

That’s it, Thunderflower! Use the best of your wiles in the pretty art of deceiving a former deputy state prosecutor who takes you at your word.

‘Hélène, I have not yet decided whether or not to employ you, but the salary would be forty écus paid at half-yearly intervals.’

Framed by the floral chintz of an armchair from the previous century, the specialist in criminal cases, born in 1804, a year after Thunderflower, looked hard at her standing there before him, her shining eyes glued to his drawing room wall. He could also smell alcohol on her breath.

‘Hmm! Hmm!’

He stood up on legs so bowed they looked like the feet of his Louis XV chair, and went to whisper something in Rose Tessier’s ear as she was lighting a fire in the grate.

‘Do you know this person well? I find her lacking in honesty, and what’s more, doesn’t she drink?’

The housemaid turned on her bandaged ankle with a grimace of pain.

‘That’s because on Sunday mornings, Monsieur Théophile, domestic servants let their hair down a little in the bars. It’s usual.’

‘Hmm, hmm. Today is 19 October. I’ll keep her on past All Saints’ if she proves suitable.’

‘Keep her, Professor. What will people say if you let this cook go as well? Just think, that would be the fourth since Midsummer Day,’ remarked Rose.

‘Rose! Rose! Rose!’

In the middle of the night, on the dark second-floor landing at Monsieur Bidard de la Noë’s house, a sepulchral voice was heard. It was Thunderflower disguising her own as she scratched her nails on her fellow servant’s bedroom door. ‘Rose … Rose … Rose …’ she whispered.

Several times she tried turning the ceramic door knob, but the door was bolted on the inside where a terrified Rose Tessier was sitting huddled in bed, sheets pulled up to her shoulders and a lighted candle beside her.

‘Who is it?’ she asked, her voice filled with panic.

‘It’s me, of course, Rose. Don’t you know this is what the Ankou does? Before he loads a victim’s body on to his cart he always calls them three times. So for you I’m whispering, “Rose! Rose! Rose!”’

‘Go away!’

‘I can’t do that, Rose. It’s my mission to carry you off. No more café terraces for you on a Sunday …’

‘Hélène, is that you?’

‘There
is
no Hélène. There’s only the Ankou. That happened a long time ago …’

‘But I haven’t done you any harm, Hélène!’

‘You don’t need to have harmed the Ankou for him to wreak havoc. Open the door, Rose, if you dare. Come out of the pond of your sheets, the swamp of your woollen coverlet, the mire of your sweat where you must be making bubbles.’

Naked under a shawl fastened with an iron button, Thunderflower bent to have a look through the keyhole.

‘Oh, you’ve got much fatter since that
soupe aux herbes
at yesterday’s lunch, Rose. It suits you. Your legs are a bit swollen, of course, and your throat, too. Oh, you can’t breathe properly any more. You’d like to cry out, wouldn’t you, but you can’t. You want to knock over some furniture to raise the alarm but there’s none in your room, and in any case you no longer have the strength.’

‘I’m ill …’ came a tiny thread of a voice, barely audible, from the poor maid overcome by a nervous complaint, eaten up by raging fire.

‘Where’s the wound, though, Rose? Late this afternoon, Dr Pinault prescribed leeches and poultices but your condition’s worsening. That doctor’s a fool. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He says there’s no danger. Well, I’d say you’re very ill – I even think you won’t ever recover.’

A ray of light through the keyhole picked out a green eye floating in the darkness of the landing.

‘This night, 7 November 1850, your hour will come.’

The poisoner made this prophecy while she went on scratching at the wooden door with her nails. ‘Rose! Rose! Rose!’

With a perversity that was perhaps innate, Thunderflower continued going to ridiculous lengths to disguise her voice while Rose Tessier – teeth chattering with fever and glassware tinkling as her necklace shook – struggled to stand on her still bandaged ankle and attempt an escape through the window. When she grasped the curtains, the metal rail slipped and fell, taking with it a dusty bronze crucifix – useless – which came adrift from the wall and fell with a huge din of metal mixed with the dull thud as Rose Tessier’s dead body collapsed, its skull slamming against the floor.

‘Hmm! Hmm!’

On the floor below, Théophile came out of his room in his nightshirt to ask, ‘What’s going on up there? Rose, is that you? Are you all right?’

He climbed on his convex legs through the darkness to go to knock on the door of the housemaid’s garret.

‘Rose!’

Taking his shoulder to the door, he forced the bolt and found her lying there.

‘Rose!’

He covered his face with his hands.

‘Rose!’

He went into the cook’s room to tell her that ‘Rose …’ but Thunderflower was in bed and feigning sleep. Once the former deputy to the prosecutor had softly closed the door again, she scraped her nails on the coarse fabric of her bolster, beside one
ear:
Squeak! Squeak!
And she could hear the squeaking axle of a cart disappearing into the distance, weighed down by yet another set of mortal remains.

‘My dear and esteemed colleague Baudouin, I have asked you to come to Monsieur Bidard de la Noë’s house so as to hear your opinion about his housemaid, whose sudden death leaves me in a state of indecision.’

‘Let’s have a look, Pinault.’

The elderly doctor, called in to help by his young colleague who was hesitant to issue a burial licence, was wearing a grey cloth bonnet tight over his skull, beneath which longish white curls fell down the back of his neck. Thick moustaches, similarly snowy, bordered his austere face. He entered the drawing room and approached the dead woman, who was lying on a door supported by two trestles, with a sheet covering everything.

‘That’s the door between the drawing room and the kitchen, which we took off its hinges,’ explained the law professor. ‘I thought it preferable that Rose’s family should see her here just now, rather than in the attic where she … Hmm, hmm.’

Jean-Marie Pinault, a thin and clean-shaven doctor aged twenty-five, explained things to his moustached colleague. ‘I came to examine her yesterday afternoon because of the onset of digestive problems she suffered immediately after lunch. I found her racked by stomach pains and vomiting, but I wasn’t worried. First I advised a strong garlic infusion, because I suspected the presence of worms in the intestines, then I prescribed the application of leeches and five centigrammes of morphine
acetate. I went off satisfied, and then this! I don’t understand what happened to her in the night. Have I made a mistake, Dr Baudouin?’

‘I don’t think so, young Pinault.’

‘What happened to her,’ an exasperated Thunderflower began explaining from her doorless kitchen, while she looked in her cupboards for the ingredients of a béchamel sauce, ‘what happened to her was she fell. You only have to see the lump on her head. That, in the state she was in yesterday … In any case, she was always saying, “I’m going to fall and kill myself someday.” Well, there you are, it’s happened!’

‘It is true that she had frequent falls and worried about that,’ the expert in crime confirmed to the two doctors. ‘Just last month she damaged her ankle, and still had it bandaged.’

‘That doesn’t explain the grotesquely swollen legs, nor the puffed-up throat,’ grumbled the old doctor, suspiciously. ‘There’s still some mystery to this.’

‘What have I done with my nutmeg? Ah, certainly there’s a mystery,’ the cook continued, with her back to them, getting a deep frying pan and heating it on the fire. ‘During the night I thought I heard a mournful voice calling Rose, and something scratching at her door. “It’s as if the Ankou were coming for her with his
karriguel
,” I thought to myself, and then I went back to sleep.’

‘So it’s the Ankou’s fault then?’ said the young Pinault with a surprised smile, sceptical as to this diagnosis, which he found rather unlikely.

‘My cook is more Breton than French,’ apologised the law professor at the University of Rennes. ‘Her nights are disturbed
by tales from the countryside of Basse-Bretagne.’

‘You may mock as much as you like!’ scolded Thunderflower as she browned two soup spoons of butter and added almost the same amount of flour. ‘I happen to know that last night, at midnight, in the cemetery of the Caqueux, on the moor where I was a child, all the tombs must have opened. Their cursed chapel was certainly lit up, and more than a hundred skeletons came on their knees to hear Death preaching on the altar.’

She stirred the words of her mad tale vigorously, and the flour and butter in the frying pan with a wooden spatula, while milk rose in the bottom of a saucepan.

Thunderflower boiled with anger when she heard her employer order, ‘That’s enough, Hélène. And shut the kitchen door. Oh, there’s not one any more, confound it! Hmm, hmm. We’ve heard enough of your nonsense about legends concerning death.’

‘Nonsense? But, Monsieur Théophile, I live surrounded by shadows, korrigans and fairies. I see them more clearly than I see you. By day, by night, in my sleep, down in ditches, up in the air and the clouds, and I’m certain I’m in the right.’

Continuing her energetic mixing with the spatula to avoid lumps, she came into the drawing room and let rip.

‘Nonsense? It’s the doctors who talk nonsense. They don’t know anything about anything, and believe in nothing. For example, I know that there’s a sacred spring near Plouhinec where new mothers come and drink so they produce more milk. When a man drank its waters out of mockery, his breasts got larger. He could have acted as a wet nurse. But just try convincing a doctor of that!’ she exploded angrily, looking daggers at young
Pinault, who had disbelieved her story of the Ankou coming for Rose. ‘Upsy-daisy, there goes my milk. Oh, there’s hardly any left. Too bad, I’ll put some water in.’

‘Hmm, hmm. I did warn you, she’s a Bas-Breton …’ joked Bidard de la Noë between the two doctors, ‘so not quite human. At all events, I’m going to have to find a new housemaid because I can’t manage without one.’

‘I’ve found you one who seems perfect, on the terrace of the bar by the river,’ exclaimed Thunderflower from the kitchen where she was pouring the milk and water in a steady stream on to her mixture in the frying pan.

‘Already, Hélène? Gracious, you’ve not been dragging your feet, have you?’

‘Her name is Françoise Huriaux. I’ll introduce her to you tomorrow.’

When she had poured in all the milky liquid, the cook replaced the mixture on a low heat and went back to stirring it constantly to achieve the even consistency she desired.