The Poisoning Angel (2 page)

At a loss for an answer, Anatole Le Braz shook his head and demanded,
‘Gwin-ardant!’
of his plump wife, who passed him a bottle of brandy, from which he poured a generous helping into an earthenware bowl for Jean Jégado as well.

‘The Ankou wears a cloak and a broad hat,’ said Anne Jégado, sitting down again. ‘He always carries a scythe with a sharpened blade. He’s often depicted as a skeleton whose head swivels constantly at the top of his spine like a sunflower on its stem so that with one glance he can take in the whole of the region his mission covers.’

‘Have you seen him yourself, Maman?’

Once he had wiped his lips and filled his own and his host’s bowl for a second time, Le Braz entered a world that was visible only to him: ‘I saw a fairy the other day, or it might have been a
Mary Morgan. At any rate, it was a siren in a pond. She had come out on to a rock to bind her green hair while she sang. A soldier from Port-Louis was passing by and, attracted by her beauty and her voice, went up to her but the Mary Morgan put her arms round him and dragged him to the bottom of the pond.’

‘Ah, fairies …’ said Madeleine. ‘There are some very helpful ones, but others cause no end of harm.’

Jean, descendant of Jehan, his eyes glinting with the third
gwin-ardant
, downed in one, ventured to interrupt: ‘Melusine, she’s one thing, but Viviane le Fay, whoa, she leaves something to be desired.’

‘No, of course I haven’t seen the Ankou,’ exclaimed Anne, raising her pale eyes to the ceiling. ‘No one who sees the Ankou lives to tell the tale. But they say there’s a statue of him in the cursed chapel belonging to the Caqueux – you know, those outcasts who live in the far-off moorlands. There’s a standing stone over there as well, actually.’

‘Why does the Ankou kill people?’

‘Why? He doesn’t need a reason, that Ankou, with his cart with the axle that’s always squeaking. Squeak, squeak. He comes across people or finds a way into their homes, but never gets angry with anyone. He cuts them down, that’s all. From house to house, that’s his job, Death’s worker.’

The child fell silent. In the evening, when people sat round together, the resin candle provided little illumination and the light would play tricks. The whistling of the wind outside was like the voice of a drowned man calling for a tomb. ‘The sea has been making widows.’ They had heard it too in the sound of the leaves. After brandy and a few bottles of bad cider, the
imagination would get to dreaming here. Once the night grew very dark they would tell more than one tale that sent shivers down the spine. In the stifling, airless cottage, the swirls of fumes from the fireplace muddled the thoughts. ‘I’ve seen a falling star. A priest’s going to hang himself.’

From the outside, the wisps of smoke could be seen escaping in pale grey streamers beneath the door, from the edges of the little window, between the dry stones in the walls, and among the stalks of the thatch, then spiralling up towards the starry sky. Just as straw rotted in the pond, inside the hovel, minds were fermenting.

‘I can hear a noise on the road!’

‘Eh?’

‘Didn’t you hear a cart axle squeaking?’ Anne asked the company.

‘To be honest, no,’ answered her husband.

‘The noise! Horses panting so heavily you’d think it was a storm wind. The squeaking axle’s going right through my head, yet you can’t hear anything?’

‘No,’ said Anatole Le Braz.

‘At one stage the carthorse began stamping on the spot as if it was stuck. How its hoofs beat the ground. It was like hammers on an anvil.’

Immediately everyone inside the cottage fell into a deep silence to listen properly. Jean’s hair was standing on end so stiffly it looked to be made of needles. In the end Anatole got up to observe the road through the small window made of horn.

‘Oh, it’s the cart that overturned this morning! The two owners have come back with some men from the town and a
second horse to get it upright again. They’re holding lights around the covered cart.’

‘They dare to come near our houses at night?’ Jean was astounded.

‘Particularly as they hardly got a friendly welcome in the daytime, especially the tall one in the goatskin waistcoat,’ Madeleine Le Braz felt obliged to point out. ‘I’d really love to know the name of whoever put his eye out.’

‘How I didn’t go mad, I don’t know,’ murmured Anne, still pale and trembling.

‘Mad enough, to be sure,’ her husband retorted in annoyance. ‘Fancy getting into such a state over a cart being righted.’

‘What
I
heard was no ordinary cart.’

‘Oh, poor Anne, you’re
briz-zod
.’

‘No, I’m
not
stupid. You can shrug your shoulders all you like but I’m telling you, the Ankou’s cart is going about in these parts. It won’t be long before we know who he’s coming for.’

Thunderflower’s eyelids were fluttering like petals. ‘It’s time for you to say goodnight,’ her mother pointed out.

While the child knelt up on the chest seat to open the panels of the box-bed, Jean Jégado asked offhand, just as if resuming a normal conversation, ‘Le Braz, did you know that Cambry has turned into a black dog?’

‘Jacques Cambry, who died last year? How do you know that?’

‘He told me so himself. I met a black dog that said, “I am Cambry.”’

The religion of the Druids, mother of tales and lies, left behind a phantom in Thunderflower’s imagination as she slid on to a bale of oats big enough for three. She shooed away a hen so that she could pull up the coverlet made from scraps of material joined
together, and laid her head on a sack of crushed gorse. Behind the doors she could hear other
nozve-ziou
, grown-ups’ tales. The brandy stirred them into strange stories and confessions.

‘Water sprites snatch away pregnant women!’

‘The
bag-noz
is a siren-boat made of crystal, which takes its passengers to the isle from which no one returns.’

‘Of course I joined the Chouans to fight for Louis XVI and the nobles! I was against the Great Revolution, that enemy of miracles.’

‘Do you really not hear anything?’

Inside the box-bed, the child had caught a little golden scarab beetle crawling along against a board. Holding it close to one ear and tapping lightly with her nails again and again, Thunderflower listened to the cracking of the carapace, which sounded like the axle of the
karriguel an Ankou
squeaking as it started off:
squeak, squeak
.

Nyaaa, nyaaa …

In the distance, the drone of the biniou bagpipes, inflated by the player’s breath, sounded a continuous note:
nyaaa
. Over this bass note, a reedy bombard gave the accompanying signal for the branle. The sounds of the instruments tore through the air. Men, women and children were dressed in their
fest-noz
costumes and, arm in arm, formed a Breton round dance. Clogs stamped in the mud and a voice began to sing:
‘Canomp amouroustet Janet, Canomp amouroustet Jan!’
(‘Sing we of the loves of Jeanne, sing we of the loves of Jean!’) Thunderflower could see them all over there. The little bagpipe sounded an octave higher than the bombard. The notes had the tone of a man with a cold, and the
dohs
were
lahs
, but what did that matter? Hearing it brought a tear to the eye. ‘Jean loved Jeanne, Jeanne loved Jean.’

In the middle of the circle of dancers, a large fire of branches, stuffed with firecrackers, had been lit. Explosions were shooting off in all directions, sending out stars sparkling into the darkness.

From Thunderflower’s vantage point, the whirling pool of light looked like a small pancake on top of the moor, the more so since, when the sabots beating time came up, their soles took with them a yellow mud, which rose and stretched like a paste mixed with grit, the remains of the schist from the megaliths that used to be here but had recently been taken down and cut up to make lintels for church doors. Very soon, as if to return the compliment, the dancers would burn a crude wooden statue of the Virgin Mary on the pyre, and the crowd would fight over its charred remains.

‘But since Jean has been Jeanne’s husband, Jean no longer loves Jeanne nor Jeanne Jean!’

The song was at an end. The Mayor of Plouhinec stood up to speak, something that happened too often. Most of the company straggled off to the refreshment stall. Pancakes were piled up on the tables. The supply of
far
cake was replenished. The evening poured fire into the glasses at the feast and lads lit lanterns. A woman struck up a merry song, and the pipes and bombard joined in. Again, the thudding of heels was like heavy rain on the stone and the mud underfoot. The men’s round hats bobbed up and down, with their two strips of black fabric fluttering at the back. The ribbons would part in the wind, one minute making the turning sails of a windmill, the next the rippling waves of the sea. Now, that was dancing!

A shepherdess, around ten years old, all dressed up, but whose
finery could not disguise her plain, flat face, snub nose and bulging eyes, left the ring of torches to say to Thunderflower, ‘Aren’t you coming to the feast, Hélène? You seem to be in a dream.’

Hélène Jégado, the last descendant of her noble Breton family, was leaning against an enormous standing stone, which carried her thoughts up to the sky. On the moor drenched in moonlight, she felt the supernatural surrounding her. She took on the energy of the menhir and wallowed in the light and dark of the Breton legends. ‘I hear again a distant, dying song.’

Thunderflower was wearing a white headdress, which came down over her ears. Opposite her, the little shepherdess held up her glass lantern so she could look at the Jégado girl, her sky-blue eyes so characteristic of the Celts.

‘Hélène, why are you so near to the Caqueux’ chapel? There’s nothing here but evil spirits going about to trap the living. People say the chapel’s where the fairies hold their deadly orgies and round this very standing stone is where the bearded dwarfs hide, the ones that appear and force you to join the dance until you die of exhaustion. You know, the …’

‘The Poulpiquets, Émilie.’

‘I prefer dancing with the handsome lads at the
fest-noz
. Do you really not want to come?’

‘No, I’ve got a date with the Ankou in the chapel.’

‘What? First you venture into this cursed worship place, and now you say you’re meeting Death’s worker. Poor Hélène, you must be losing your mind.’

‘Maybe …’

Émilie stopped her ears so as not to hear any more. Lantern in hand, she ran back towards the feast while Thunderflower
slipped into the chapel. No sooner had she dipped her fingers not into holy water but into the sacred purificatory water of a pagan fountain than the child noticed the green wall paintings bulging out like the scales of some mythical creature. Their lacklustre colours were oppressive, and made the building’s Romanesque vault seem to bear down on her. In that debased church, lit by a ray of moonlight coming through a window, it seemed that God had been defeated.

In front of the main window, enthroned on the altar, which contained an ossuary displaying skulls, was the statue of the Ankou. It was a skeleton holding a scythe taller than himself. Had someone read it to her, Thunderflower would have understood the inscription running round the thick edge of the granite table beneath the figure.

‘I will spare no one. Neither pope nor cardinal will I spare. Not a king nor a queen. Nor their princes or princesses. I will spare neither priests, bourgeois, judges, doctors, shopkeepers nor, similarly, the beggars.’

There he is then, Death’s worker, carved in black wood, the child thought, lifting her head. In place of eyes and nose, the Ankou had empty holes, and the lower jaw hung down. To the farmer’s daughter, the curve of the blade the figure held seemed oddly positioned. The child felt an iciness penetrate the tranquillity of her body and her mind spun off in wild imaginings.

Outside, as Émilie the shepherdess ran across the moorland, her lantern cast a second, revolving beam of light through the window. It elongated the Ankou’s shadow, which moved until it exactly merged with Thunderflower. Now the shadow of Death’s worker appeared to be wearing a child’s Breton headdress. The
little girl’s brain was sent mad by such a marvel. Just like the Ankou, she raised her arm as if holding a scythe.

‘Why are there black balls in my
soupe aux herbes
and not in Hélène’s?’ Émilie wondered aloud as she took her place at the table next to Thunderflower, who was already seated. Anne Jégado, who was serving herself from the pot over the crackling logs, wheeled round in the cottage where the shepherdess had been invited to lunch at her daughter’s request. The mother made her way towards the offending plate in astonishment.

‘What black balls? Oh, those are belladonna berries. Don’t eat them, whatever you do. Thank heavens you noticed them, little Le Mauguen! As for you, Thunderflower, what sort of joke is that you’ve played on Émilie? Haven’t I told you these berries are poisonous? Thank goodness you didn’t crush them first. You might have put far more in. We wouldn’t have noticed a thing and then …’

Thunderflower wiped her mother’s dripping brow as she lay flat on her back on the table. Then she gripped her hands tightly for a long while. ‘You’ll be all right, Maman.’ The sick woman’s eyes were vague and her breathing quickened. Violet blotches were coming out on her skin.

Le Braz, the neighbour, had come running. ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

‘She went down like a cow with a hammer-blow to the head,’ Jean Jégado answered. ‘Hélène’s described the scene for me. At
supper, Anne put out two plates of wheat gruel, for her and our daughter, then, while the youngster was eating, she went outside and blew the horn to call me in for the meal as well. When my wife returned she ate her gruel too; she criticised it for a bitter aftertaste but swallowed it all anyway, wiped her plate with some bread and that was it. Where’s the ring she wore on her middle finger? It’s a family signet ring with the Jégado crest engraved on it that I gave her on our wedding day.’