The Poisoning Angel (6 page)

A crowd formed around Thunderflower. ‘Why didn’t
you
snuff it?’

‘God saved her. She’s a saint,’ yelled someone.

The fair lady of Plouhinec was considered an extraordinary being. Her fame was broadcast noisily through the streets. Worried, emotional farmers went down on their knees. It was pitiable! Crowds of other folk came running. Like a flock of scavenging birds, they fell upon the servant, a new figure on whom to focus their attention and curiosity.

Since there was no longer a Saint Yves in the church, she was the one people touched, and of whom they made demands: ‘Sainte Yvette, do something to help me!’

‘Keep the weevils away from my wheat!’

‘I’m having amorous relations with my neighbour but I don’t want to find myself pregnant. I’m counting on you, eh; you were saved by a miracle.’

‘You’ve been saved by a miracle, so you can work miracles, can’t you?’

Cripples made their way on their crutches, filled with hope. Thunderflower recognised two Norman accents. ‘Can’t you shtraighten my arm and fix my jaw?’ ‘Make my eye grow back!’ they begged. The wigmakers were in the shafts of their covered cart, pulling it themselves.

From the roof of a house across the road, a tightrope-walking angel of cast iron descended on a cable, carrying a flaming wand. It was a contraption designed to light the pile of straw at the heart of a bonfire hastily got up in honour of Sainte Yvette. Alas, the angel teetered during its journey, and fell on to the wigmakers’ cover, which went up in flames. The lettering of ‘À la bouclette normande’ burnt away while Thunderflower pressed through the crowd, dispensing copious greetings left and right, but complaining: ‘The annoying thing now is that I have to find another situation …’

Meanwhile the Normans came rushing past with buckets of water, yelling, ‘Sodding Bretons!’

Bubry

‘Then I accept your request for employment … Hélène. That is your name, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Monsieur l’abbé Lorho,’ answered Thunderflower, who recognised the door in the kitchen, which still had fixed to it the piece of mirror in front of which her blond hair had first been covered by a headdress.

The young chasubled priest who was speaking to her had a slight stoop. He unfolded his gold spectacles and put them on his nose before turning towards the other, glass door opening on to the courtyard.

‘Over there, cutting flowers in front of the presbytery gate, the thin woman you can see with the dry, pockmarked face, that
is my sister, Jeanne-Marie Lorho, a very devout maiden lady. She doesn’t miss a single Mass. Beside her is my eighteen-year-old niece, Jeanne-Marie Kerfontain, who’s also very pious. You’ll be our only servant.’

The girl from Plouhinec ran her finger over a very common piece of varnished pottery on the table, fired using poor rushes. ‘That wasn’t there before, in the abbé Riallan’s day.’

‘Indeed.’

The priest took off his spectacles and shook hands with Thunderflower to seal the agreement.

‘Since there’s no one left alive at the presbytery at Guern where you’ve come from, and your older sister, Anna, who worked here died there too, I’m giving you her place in this clerical household where you will feel at home.’

‘Thank you, Monsieur l’abbé Lorho. I’ll do my best to serve you well, all three of you if I can manage it.’

Seated demurely in the church at Bubry, Thunderflower was saying the rosary during the early afternoon Mass.

‘Maman … Monsieur Michelet who drove me to my first place … Godmother …’

It was the rosary she had brought from Guern. Hélène Jégado’s fingers weren’t the ones that had worn down the boxwood beads that followed one another: ‘Tante Marie-Jeanne, Yann Viltansoù …’

She gazed at the light of the candles, and listened to the indistinct voice of the gold-spectacled preacher behind the altar. It was the first time she had seen him exercising his ministry. The
people he was addressing dissolved into Jesus. The hubbub of their prayers made the church walls sweat, while Thunderflower continued to herself: ‘The abbé Le Drogo’s father, then his mother …’

To the right of the porch, a harvester made so bold – during the service too! – as to sharpen his scythe on the edge of the holy water stoup carved out of a menhir, because that would bring good luck for the next crop. The sounds it made mingled with the words of the priest, who was no longer put out by them.

‘Tsiing! Tsiing!’

The sound of the blade grating reminded the girl from Plouhinec of the Ankou’s scythe.

‘Marie-Louise Lindevat …’

Thunderflower was gazing several rows in front of her, at the back of abbé Lorho’s sister, who was kneeling on a prie-dieu, and recognisable from the smallpox scars on the back of her neck. She was wearing a long brown skirt, which had been baked in the oven to fix the folds, and a cap with small turned-up wings. Suddenly, however, the little wings fell down on to her neck and the spinster’s back started to move of its own accord, in a fit of shaking.

‘Aaargh!’

While the beautiful blonde cook continued her list, with her rosary between her fingers, ‘Marguerite André, Françoise Jauffret …’ her employer’s sister shot to her feet. She appeared to be feeling a burning inside, so violent that even a dozen cans of milk wouldn’t relieve it. She threw herself from side to side, straightened up, bent over again. It was terrible to see. She turned round. Her mouth was gaping, her eyes full of fever.
It was as if all the combined forces of a very dirty trick were producing unbelievable effects on her stomach. She shat herself. Her ankles were drenched in diarrhoea, which ran down into her shoes. It was fortunate that her skirt was brown already, because if not … Tachycardia, dilated pupils, hyperthermia, hallucinations, delirium, agitation, and death caused by paralysis of the respiratory passages.

Beside her, it was her eighteen-year-old niece’s turn to stand up. ‘Snakes are gnawing at my heart, and tearing my nerves! I’m in boiling oil!’

Jeanne-Marie’s nostrils were going like a blacksmith’s bellows. Saint Vitus dance set in and she was foaming at the mouth. Meanwhile, Thunderflower was trying not to miss anyone out: ‘Abbé Le Drogo, my older sister, Anna …’ The priest of Bubry was at a loss at the altar and shouted: ‘Euphorbia poultices!’ Bluish purple blotches were already appearing on his niece’s face. She was seized with terrible vomiting, which erupted in her throat like rolls of thunder.

Clapping her hand over her mouth, she ran down the central aisle towards the porch. But she could not wait and it was in the water stoup that she vomited the remains of kidneys with herbs. Her face was like a drowning woman’s as she slumped on to the harvester’s scythe.

‘No, no! It wasn’t me that cut her down,’ he protested. ‘Look at my blade. There’s nothing there. Apart from some bits of kidney, there’s not a drop of blood.’

While many in the church clustered frantically round the two dead women, Thunderflower ended with, ‘Jeanne-Marie Lorho, Jeanne-Marie Kerfontain,’ and stood up.

Crowds can be so fickle. Immediately the pretty cook crossed the porch of the sanctuary, everyone rushed at her with accusations.

‘What’s happened here is your fault, you’ve the evil eye! Once before here, when you were thirteen, your godmother …’

‘You’re a coward.’

‘You’re the woman who was saved by a miracle yet you bring misfortune with your wickedness!’

‘Wickedness in doing what? There’s not a scrap of wickedness in me, go on with you,’ replied Thunderflower.

The same people who had made her into a saint at Guern (or if not them, then similar ones, idiots at any rate) abhorred Sainte Yvette, now Lily Liver.

‘At night you dream of fire, and fire breaks out!’

‘You put spells on the animals and blight the corn in the ear.’

‘Don’t breathe her breath, anyone. It kills!’

Bored and disgusted at the sight of these people – some of whom none the less asked, ‘Are you sure about what you’re saying?’ to which others replied, ‘If you can’t see the most obvious thing in the world when it’s absolutely staring you in the face’ – Thunderflower made her way towards the presbytery gate. So what if there were nasty insinuations from countless people to whom she had become a bogeyman? Surrounded by
kornek
headdresses and
capots ribot
, the servant could hear the barking of the spinners and toothless old women trying to grab her by the hair.

‘Evil Breton woman.’

‘Ki klanv, ke gant da hent!’
(‘Sick bitch, be on your way!’)

‘When you arrive in a place, death follows. Then when you go away, the evil stops.’

‘Ankou! Ankou!’

‘Get out of here, you dirty bitch, and don’t let us see you in Bubry a third time!’

That same evening, in the priest’s mournful drawing room, faced with Lorho’s tear-misted gold spectacles, and in the presence of the servant who was busying herself around them, Dr Martel had to admit: ‘You can understand the locals’ protests, because it’s true that there is a link between the deaths at Guern and those at Bubry in the person of Hélène. It may be because there are people who are healthy carriers. It happens that someone carrying the disease transmits it without falling ill themselves. But that’s assuredly not the case here, and it’s just the result of chance. Cholera morbus is such a strange disease. It begins its ravages then disappears again and no one knows why. It moves to another village, strikes here, spares there, and destroys several members of a family while missing out others and all with no reason. For instance, why are you alive, Father, while your sister and niece …?’

Raising her eyes in exasperation, as she walked between the two men, Thunderflower leapt to the cholera’s defence, speaking of it as if it were female. ‘Come on now, cholera can’t do everything all at once. She’s not a machine, you know. You’ve also got to realise that …’

She carried on towards the kitchen, muttering under her breath, ‘For example, I didn’t know the priest didn’t like kidneys and wouldn’t eat them … Otherwise you may be sure I’d have cooked something else for all three of them.’

As she began to peel the vegetables she heard the doctor offer his sincere condolences and leave.

Lorho came to his servant with a handwritten sheet of paper. ‘What are you doing, Hélène?’

‘Doing? Making your dinner, of course.’

‘You mustn’t. You have to leave.’

Thunderflower laid the knife on the table. ‘You’re sending me away, Monsieur l’abbé? So you’re just like the rest of the villagers, then.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘A priest is not permitted to live alone with a female servant under the age of forty. The bishop forbids it. I have to say goodbye to you this evening.’

‘This evening? Don’t you want me to prepare one last meal for you?’

‘Thank you, no.’

Thunderflower had a sense of unfinished business.

‘Come now, I’ll just whip you up a snack before I go, and you can eat it on your own presently.’

‘Don’t insist, Hélène.’

‘I had in mind something you really love,
poulouds
– those flour balls cooked with …’

‘No, please don’t.’

‘A bowl of milk then, at least – boiled with some chervil for its aniseed flavour. I’ll bring it to you in the drawing room right away.’

‘No, really. So that you easily find another situation, I’ve written this letter of recommendation praising you most highly.
In it you’re described as particularly clean and an excellent cook.’

‘Could you add that I’m renowned for my
soupe aux herbes
, and then put that I’ve invented a very good cake as well? As for the kidneys with herbs, let’s not make a thing of it, they’re not to everyone’s taste.’

Locminé

Thunderflower hurried from one bedroom to the next. On the poorly lit staircase of the narrow house, she muttered, ‘I'm sure I'm going to fall and kill myself.' She went from the one sick woman in bed on the first floor to the other on the second. ‘First Jeanne-Marie Leboucher, now for her daughter, Perrine.'

On sturdy, untiring legs she climbed back up the stairs. Both the mother and her twenty-year-old child were critically ill. How sad!

‘It's such a pity to go to so much trouble for nothing,' lamented Thunderflower, ‘since they're both going to die.'

‘How can you know that?' asked the doctor, bag in hand, on the first-floor landing. He was wearing a wide-skirted coat and a beaver-skin hat.

‘Well, Dr Toursaint, all your remedies
do
have the opposite effect from the one you expect,' the servant replied helpfully. ‘With both the dying women, the cures are behaving counter to their known properties.'

‘That's true, but …' Toursaint said defensively. ‘I'm only a doctor in a Bas-Breton village, not a bigwig in Rennes! What's that white powder you're mixing in that glass, Hélène?'

‘It's from the bottle you told me to get from the pharmacy.'

‘Oh, yes, the quinine sulphate to treat fevers.'

In the leather gaiters that went out by night, even in winter and along the worst roads, trying to bring help with the little knowledge he had, Dr Toursaint went into the first-floor bedroom.

‘How are you feeling, Madame Leboucher?'

‘Since even the water from Melusine's spring, which you prescribed, hasn't cured me – I've drunk from it three times at midnight – I'm giving up remedies.'

‘Now now, Jeanne-Marie, what's all this? I think you simply have an attack of acrodynia, an illness that is causing the intense pins and needles in your limbs and the violent burning in your stomach. But, I say, what about your cook, her devotion and how involved she is in what happens to you?'

‘Thank goodness Hélène's here. I don't know what would have become of us without her. For more than sixty hours now she's been looking after Perrine and me, without eating any of the food she's brought us, and with no sleep. She lavishes us with continual attentions.'

Speaking of attentions, Hélène was just then administering them to the Leboucher daughter in bed on the floor above.

‘Look, here's a glass of stuff you have to drink on the orders of the doctor I passed on the stairs. I think he called it quinine sulphate.'

Perrine struggled to swallow even a mouthful but none the less ordered, ‘Give me the rest to drink.'

‘Yes, certainly.'

No sooner had the brew been consumed than a sudden pallor came over her and her lips shrank back. There was an abrupt increase in the size of her pupils, and her eyes grew wider. Her eyelids began to twitch wildly. Seated at the bedside, Thunderflower could see her own outline in the foamy bubbles appearing at the edge of the invalid's mouth. Then she walked back and forth in front of the window, the daylight casting her pretty shadow on to the bedroom floor at each turn, and all the while she told the patient a legend: a knight returning from a journey came upon a woman shivering with fever at the roadside. He lifted her up on to his horse and carried her into the town. It was the plague. Thunderflower came over to Perrine again and, leaning in close to her, predicted the future: ‘You're going to die, my girl.'

In the room below, Dr Toursaint was absentmindedly reading the letter of recommendation the servant had brought, which was on the mantelshelf. There he read: ‘Hélène Jégado is an excellent cook and my one regret is that I cannot keep her until I die.' Just then he heard a cry, piercing as a horn, through the ceiling. He rushed for the stairs and pushed open the door of the second bedroom to find Perrine dead in her bed, with the cover pulled up over her face.

‘I'm more doubtful about medicine than I've ever been,' he moaned, while Thunderflower went downstairs to the mother.

On the staircase she half opened her lips, revealing small, bright white teeth, like those of a proverbial she-wolf.

‘What was that cry that sent the doctor running, Hélène?' asked Jeanne-Marie Leboucher, struggling to sit up in bed.

‘It was your daughter who …'

‘Who?'

‘Who.'

For the mother in her current state, the shock was too great. There was nothing to stop her sinking into the abyss. Her maternal love stumbled through the burning of this hell and as her head fell back onto the pillow she grew radiant.

‘Well then, let's sleep the last sleep. God will take care of our awakening …'

‘That's it,' said Thunderflower, encouragingly. ‘That's what you have to say.'

Next there was a long rattling noise in Jeanne-Marie Leboucher's chest, before she turned her face to the wall and became motionless by the time the doctor arrived – too late.

‘The lettuce water she was given, and the gomme syrup won't have helped at all, then. Perhaps it was typhoid fever.'

The cook got hold of a pitcher, blew out the candles and covered a bowl with a cloth, to Pierre-Charles Toursaint's astonishment.

‘What are you doing, Hélène?'

‘When someone has breathed their last, you have to put out the candles while the soul passes, and also be careful that it doesn't turn the milk or drown in the jug of water. Right, that's done. I'm worn out. What I really need now is to go out for a pick-me-up.'

Outside, under her lace-trimmed headdress, Thunderflower was walking behind a cart that had lost its cover, and whose charred and twisted metal hoops had suffered a fire. In front of the vehicle, each pulling one shaft, two Normans were complaining about the state of the Breton road, their accent ringing out: ‘All the Locminé roadsh need to be redone.'

‘You can't take one step after dark without risking a broken leg.'

The cook looked at the rectangular bales wrapped in rough canvas, which lined the wagon she was following. Through the triangular tears at the corners of the pink fabric packages burst very unerotic-looking big black tufts of long, stinking Breton hair. Shaken about by the uneven road surface, in the light of a tavern from which laughter and singing could be heard they looked like rustic pubic hair dancing a
fest-noz
.

The wigmakers continued along the narrow road, where the littler one's shadow made a misshapen gnome on a wall, as, apropos of the lost cover, he had to concede, ‘Well, it'sh not raining, that'sh shomething.'

‘It keeps the hair in better condition,' the bald man agreed.

Thunderflower went into the bar. From the dim street, through the lighted windows made up of little squares of coloured glass, a beautiful girl was visible – green eyes, blond curls escaping from her headdress, skin with a scent of vanilla and sex, and which must taste of it as well. The landlady came towards her. ‘What do you want, Hélène?'

‘Some of your brandy, Widow Lorcy.'

Locminé was a picturesque village, with its elm trees, its openwork steeple, its narrow grey houses, and its graveyard, which Thunderflower had just left to return to the late Widow Lorcy's bar, where a grieving niece was waiting for her.

‘My aunt died the very next morning after the evening she took you on here. Why?'

‘How should I know? That's been the case so often. Death follows me everywhere I go. When I went to the presbytery at Guern there were seven people there. When I departed, I was the one closing the door behind me. At Bubry I saw the priest's sister and niece die. I arrived in Locminé, at Jeanne-Marie Leboucher's, and she died, and Perrine as well. And now your poor aunt. You couldn't exactly say I bring good luck. Would you like a piece of the cake I made? The widow Lorcy barely started it.'

‘No thank you, I'm not hungry,' the niece answered.

‘All right, too bad. Someone else can have it.'

The not over-talented Dr Pierre-Charles Toursaint arrived in great distress at the bar, where millers slaked their thirst – an establishment the niece, who had inherited, had no intention of keeping on.

‘I don't know what your aunt died of either,' he said. ‘Something wrong with the pylorus, perhaps. At any rate, applying leeches and vesicatories proved useless. I also tried to get the fever to go into the bark of a tree, but in vain. The only good fortune she had was the constant and zealous care Hélène lavished on her, just as she did at the Lebouchers'. You poor servant,' he added, turning to Thunderflower, ‘you must be very tired.'

‘I'm all right. A little tired but, after all, I haven't come to Locminé to enjoy myself.'

‘And you're without an employer yet again?'

‘Well, yes, they're rotting in the graveyard.'

‘Hélène, my parents are looking for a cook. Their previous one didn't suit. When she talked about her soup, my mother used to say, “If only it was dishwater we could have fed the pigs on it.”'

‘She wouldn't complain about my
soupe aux herbes
,' Thunderflower said firmly.

‘My father, mother and sister live in a town house along with their housemaid. Would you be prepared to join the four of them this very day, 9 May?'

The girl from Plouhinec turned her head towards the coloured glass in a window so that the doctor could not see her expression, which was like a weasel's when it spies a dovecote.

On 12 May, Pierre-Charles Toursaint was crunching along the gravel path in his leather gaiters. On the doctor's right was his sister, on his left his parents. All four were making their way towards a poor peasant couple to whom they condescendingly offered the standard expressions of sympathy.

‘Our sincere condolences, Madame and Monsieur Eveno. We shall miss your daughter, Anna. She was a most pleasant housemaid who, alas, died so suddenly under our roof.' The grieving parents answered each member of the family in Breton: ‘
Trugaré
.' (‘Thank you.') They said the same to the new cook, who had likewise come to offer the fraternal sympathy she rarely had opportunity to use. The housemaid's body, wrapped in a sewn-up white sheet, slid along a plank and plummeted into the
common grave. As soon as the first spadefuls of earth had been thrown on to the sheet, Thunderflower took her leave: ‘Right, I'm off to do the cooking!'

15 May. ‘He is neither cold nor hot, he is not dead, he's sleeping. The dawn comes in vain, he sleeps.' An open fan in front of Thunderflower's face did not hide her burst of laughter. Over the top of the fan, her lovely eyes were watching a dignitary speaking in the same cemetery, where the eye was now drawn to a dozen wreaths around a hole. ‘To our father', ‘To my husband'. Dr Toursaint and his sister were holding up their fainting mother, who was wearing a blue widow's cape. Some women in headdresses with fluttering or turned-up edges, and dressed in black, were there like carrion crows, watching what was happening around them. As the crowd began to disperse, Thunderflower announced, folding up her fan, ‘Ah me, that's another one then. And to think it won't be the last …' The prediction resounded in the ears of the Breton women walking in the tranquil cemetery where little white crosses bloomed in the shade of the gothic church.

On 18 May, the sky was overcast and the ground damp. Thunderflower found the people who had come for the burial ugly. Dr Toursaint had his arms round his mother, who could no longer stand unaided: ‘My daughter as well …' She answered her neighbours' greetings with ‘
Trugaré
' and the vague gesture of an old lady who is crying. As reddish light washed over the trees,
anger darkened the brows of the Bretons approaching that perfect beauty, the cook. ‘How many deaths is that now since you've been in our village? Even just at the Toursaints', how many?' Hélène brushed off the question, saying, ‘Let Death count the dead!' There was a grinding of teeth: ‘The cemetery won't be big enough if that girl stays in Locminé.' Among themselves they likened her to the innards of a hanged bitch. ‘Destruction is in you. You're possessed. You bring misfortune,' they told her.

While the sly Morbihan women went into the hydrangeas and began removing the needles and pins from their headdresses and bodices, Thunderflower, knowing what they had in mind, prudently beat a hasty retreat from the cemetery. In silence, taking the road where grass was growing up between the stones, she returned to her masters' house (well … just her elderly mistress's from now on) where a wisp of smoke could be seen rising from the chimney above the kitchen. Oh, the meat that was cooking, and the cake that followed!

20 May. ‘It is with great sorrow that Dr Toursaint announces the death of his mother …' Stuck to the outside wall of the town hall at Locminé, the death notice fluttered in the wind while on the façade of the Toursaint house, written in charcoal by an anonymous hand, were the words, ‘People are murdered here.' In the drawing room of his parents' house, the village doctor was utterly bewildered.