The Poisoning Angel (8 page)

Pontivy

‘Goodness, it’s raining!’

‘Oh yesh, I felt a shpot too.’

The two Norman wigmakers rested the ends of their cart shafts on the stones and looked up at the clouds from which a sudden downpour was falling.

‘It’s pouring! Let’s hope it doesn’t damage the bales of hair,’ fretted the bald man.

‘It’sh only a shquall,’ said the short, crooked one with the dislocated jaw, hopefully.

‘Only a squall?’ said the tall one-eyed man, doubtfully, continuing to examine the overcast sky.

‘It’sh 3 March, so it’sh an April shower.’

‘While we’re in Rue du Fil, with all the trades related to cloth, we should buy some to make a new cover to stretch over the charred hoops of the cart.’

‘With what? If we shpend the little money we shtill have, how will we pay for the next lot of hair? Don’t worry. The rain will go over.’

‘Go over, go over.’

Under the awning of a nearby bar, Thunderflower was sheltering from the torrential rain, which threatened to ruin the ribbons of her headdress. She was paying no attention to the two Normans, who slid under their vehicle, promising each other between its wheels, ‘I’m not pulling the cart any further while it’s raining like this.’

‘Neither am I.’

The cook was looking across the road to where an ivy-covered house stood surrounded by a wall. Thunderflower rushed through the puddles to reach the covered entrance gate. Mesmerised by a statue mounted in the wall beside it, she pulled the bell chain then, impatient, pulled it again as it was raining so hard. Soon she heard a door slam, the sound of footsteps hurrying across gravel and a key turning in the lock of the gate, which opened.

‘Who’s that?’ demanded Thunderflower immediately, pointing to the statue.

‘Saint Thuriau,’ a man’s voice replied. Its owner was holding a streaming wet coat over his head for protection. ‘We owe him numerous miracles, including the resurrection of a young girl.’

‘What’s resurrection?’

‘Bringing a dead person back to life.’

‘You wouldn’t catch me doing that,’ smiled Thunderflower, stepping into the courtyard.

‘And who are you?’ asked the man who had opened the gate, as they climbed the steps to the house.

The woman from Plouhinec replied in Breton, ‘They call me Hélène. Otherwise, who I am you’ll find out soon … to your cost.’

Hanging his soaking wet coat on a hook in the kitchen, on whose glass roof the millions of torrential drops were beating, the gentleman instructed her, ‘Speak to me in French, Madame.’

‘I was saying, Monsieur Jouanno, that the future Mayor of Auray thinks that I’m a cook who might suit you as the current Mayor of Pontivy.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of the good Dr Doré. How is he?’

‘He’s well. His mother-in-law, on the other hand, could really do with Saint Thuriau.’

‘Really?’

There was a noise of galloping on the staircase, mixed with animal shrieks and the cries, shrill and very deep by turns, of an adolescent boy whose voice was breaking.

‘I’ve got one, Papa! I caught another one in the gutter.’

The other door of the glass kitchen, the one leading into the house, was suddenly flung wide to reveal an overexcited acne-ridden youth gripping a struggling cat in his outstretched fists. The feline bared its teeth and spat. Its paws were rigid, claws out. Trapped by the neck and lower back, despite desperate squirming it found itself plunged into a sink filled with boiling washing-up water. Greasy, iridescent spatters flew in all directions, hitting the panes of the glasshouse. They ran down the windows in
parallel to the squally rain on the other side of the glass. When the drowned cat had stopped moving, the youth flung it on the floor like a steaming washcloth, before grabbing a saucepan.

‘I’m off to tie this to a dog’s tail in the street. It’ll send it mad. Give me one of your ribbons so I can tie a knot.’

He ripped a piece from the servant’s soaking, loose headdress. A stoic Thunderflower smiled as her eyes fell on a fly-paper, while the father interposed, ‘Émile, you might at least say good day to our new cook.’

‘I don’t talk to maids,’ retorted Émile Jouanno, slamming the door on to the gravel courtyard behind him.

‘Émile, it’s raining!’ his father called after him. ‘Take your coat, you’ll make yourself ill.’

‘I don’t care a jot.’

His father gave a sigh. ‘Ah, children. Especially when one’s looking after them on one’s own. Do you have any yourself?’

‘No. If I fell pregnant one day, I’d get rid of it.’

‘Despite being a good administrator and a mayor justly respected by his fellow citizens, I can’t control my only son, for whom every nasty trick is a badge of honour. He’s very rowdy, beating up his schoolmates and burning his stomach violently by refusing to eat anything but mustard or drink anything but vinegar. You’ll have to keep those substances hidden at all times, as they’re so harmful to his health. That’s the only instruction I will not compromise on.’

‘So your son’s partial to things that set fire to the innards, then?’

‘I’d like you to make him lovely sweet things, creams and milky dishes, which he’ll get a taste for if they’re delicious. Maybe that will calm him down.’

Some days later in the glass kitchen, Thunderflower was wiping the steam from a pane with her finger so she could watch the gusts of wind and rain ruining the mimosas in the courtyard, when Émile Jouanno, aged fourteen, came in, yelling, ‘I’m famished. Where’s the mustard? Get me some to eat, you bitch!’

The cook, who was now scraping the bottom of a saucepan, turned round, spoon in hand, and very offended: ‘What a badly brought-up child! Never in any household, my man, has anyone shown me such a lack of respect! On your father’s instructions, I’m making you a delicate vanilla compote.’

‘Then you know where you can stick it.’

Émile Jouanno was making a mistake in speaking to Thunderflower like that while she was cooking him something to eat, but youth is often imprudent. After the servant had eyed the steam from her compote and murmured in Breton, ‘You strange little creature. I aim to do you harm; allow me a hope of succeeding,’ the uncouth boy reminded her, ‘You’ve already been told we speak only French here, you bumpkin from standing-stone land. Where’s the vinegar? I’m thirsty.’

‘So is death,’ declared Hélène Jégado, wheeling round abruptly on her heels. ‘Drink this milk I’ve prepared for you. You’ll see, it prickles too.’

As soon as the glass was empty, the cook instructed the boy, ‘Now go and lie down, my lad, since you’ve got stomach ache.’

‘No I haven’t. Even vinegar doesn’t … Aaaaargh! Help!’

‘See, what did I tell you? But you never listen.’

The spotty youth collapsed in a heap on the floor. Beside a
dresser with plates on its shelves, the servant knelt down by the still conscious Émile and confessed, ‘I’m the Ankou who travels through Brittany. I have stuck my scythe in your heart and will turn your blood as cold as iron.’

She wiped the sweat from the boy’s forehead with her hand, adding, ‘It’s not because you’re wicked that I’m doing this. Even if you were kind it would be just the same. This way, to be honest, it’s a pleasure, though. You’re someone I shan’t miss. Be assured of my utter contempt.’

Shaking her victim a little to make sure he was dead, the cook took a deep dish for the compote and got to her feet. As she straightened up she noticed her shadow, still slender-waisted, growing longer on the wall of the house. She removed her headdress and unpinned her chignon, letting her hair fall over her shoulders. Its outline now resembled the Ankou’s hood. Next the woman from Plouhinec put her right arm straight up in the air, holding the dish by its edge. The shadow of her raised limb looked like the long handle of an agricultural tool and, as Thunderflower tilted it this way or that, the dish described the curved blade of a scythe.

The door on to the courtyard opened, allowing in a burst of rain and the father, who asked the servant, ‘What are you doing holding that plate in the air?’

‘Daydreaming …’

‘Poor Hélène, you’d do better to— Oh, Émile! What’s happened to him?’

The next morning, the Mayor of Pontivy was standing in the kitchen, wearing the blue outfit of full mourning. He unfolded a letter near his servant, who was sitting on a chair, lethargically calm. The din of the rain splashing against the panes of the glass room could be heard, and then the father’s voice as he read the words on the sheet of paper aloud.

‘8 March 1838. Autopsy report. Émile Jouanno. Inflammation of the stomach. Corrosion of the intestines, which may be attributed to recent inordinate consumption of mustard and vinegar.’

The hand holding the letter dropped back along the thigh of the town’s chief magistrate, who spoke bitterly: ‘I’d told you, “Dangerous substances have to be kept hidden.”’

‘That’s what I do, Monsieur.’

‘My son’s death proves otherwise.’

‘But—’

‘Hélène, you will have to look for a new situation.’

Thunderflower stood up, put on her coat, threw her bag over her shoulder and set out again. As she closed the gate behind her, she hailed the statue of Saint Thuriau, ‘Give my regards to Madame the Virgin, not forgetting the Trinity.’

Suddenly the heavy rain clouds hanging in the sky above Rue du Fil burst into hail. The little balls of ice rattled on the roofs, ricocheting off the sheet metal. Very rapidly tons of them fell on the ground. The Rue du Fil, turned to silver, gleamed. The two Normans walked round their cart in utter disbelief: ‘It can’t be true. That’s not po-po-possible.’ They skidded on the words just as their shoes, worn down by years of pulling the cart, went
sliding on the loose hailstones. They fell over, got up again. They were like two shipwreck survivors from the sky. They held on to each other, arm in arm, as if about to do a Breton circle dance. Fragments of wood flew off the wobbly trellises of their vehicle’s sides, and the ruined cloth of the bales on the floor of the cart split open in any number of places. The tall one-eyed man, who would have torn his hair out, had he had any left, grabbed tufts of the hair escaping through the holes pierced by the celestial machine gun. He could have cried. ‘Our goods are going to be ruined.’

Everything was losing its shape and being spoilt. And what a racket the storm of ice marbles made! When one of the men shouted, ‘Lie on top of the bales, that’ll protect them,’ the other replied, ‘I can’t hear you.’ They laughed so much they fell over again.

For the cook who was leaving, the hail was like an onslaught of pins and needles thrown from a catapult, in order to drive her from the town. She felt herself the target of the succeeding gusts, but did not care a fig. Alone amid the shameful wreckage of her private catastrophe, Thunderflower walked on, arms outstretched before her. Her palms, turned upwards to the sky, and soon filled with pools of light, occasionally took flight like white birds, while behind her the wigmakers, submerged in an enormous nightmare, were struggling like swimmers, yelling, ‘What foul weather! You’d think we were fish, there’s so much water around us. We’ll be growing scales at this rate. Why did we ever come to this shit-hole of a Brittany?’

Hennebont

In a dim bedroom, which was also a study, the curtains were still closed and an old man so decrepit he was deformed was taking his time over getting up. To make the journey from his marquetry box-bed to an ancient armchair with carvings of people on it, fashioned in Solomon’s time no doubt, he first clutched on to a Cornish clock, then puffed his way along the stone mantel of the fireplace where a dying fire still glimmered. Standing in the doorway of his kitchen, Thunderflower – radiantly beautiful – was teasing him.

‘Monsieur Kerallic, if you go at that speed, you’ll be old by the time you reach your chair!’

‘But I am old, Hélène. I’m weary, no longer of an age for hiking. Like a chess piece, I move rarely.’

Wearing an ultramarine-blue dressing gown, he made his way past the stuffed animals, and insects preserved in spirits of wine, saying sadly, ‘The years have left snow on my temples but, when all’s said and done, having lived without much joy I shall die without great regret. How is it that you came to me at dawn, shaking me by the shoulder as I lay in bed and whispering in my ear, “The time has come, you stubborn old man. We’ll have to get going. My name is Hélène”? Had I left the door unlocked as if I were hoping you’d come?’

‘I was on my way to Lorient when, as I walked up one of the steep streets of Hennebont, a voice told me what to do: “Pay a visit to Kerallic, the old schoolteacher, first. He’s tired of living and will have a job for you.” So I said to myself, “Right, I’ll just look in and make his early morning coffee because I’ll have to prepare the midday meal somewhere else.”’

‘Will you be leaving again so soon?’

‘I’ve a lot of people to visit, Monsieur Kerallic. If I tarry with all of them I’ll never get through my quota.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ll go and see to the coffee,’ answered the servant girl, turning back towards the kitchen.

The elderly man flopped into his chair between a volume of Celtic tales on one arm and a Hebrew grammar on the other, beside his table cluttered with papers, books and newspapers. His smoky lamp, lit by the visitor, cast a feeble light on him as he went on talking about how tired and weary he was: ‘It seems that what is wrong with me is a sort of fog in my head, which makes
it hard for me to distinguish between dreams and reality.’

Hélène’s voice sounded from the kitchen: ‘I’ve got that too, Monsieur Kerallic.’

‘Really, Hélène – at your age?’

‘Sometimes I don’t know any more …’

Coming back into the room with a wooden box-like object in her hand, she asked, ‘Is this for grinding coffee?’

‘Yes, it’s new. A present from a former pupil of mine who is now the doctor at Hennebont.’

‘What does the plaque on the drawer say?’

‘The name of the man who invented it: Peugeot.’

‘You’re a teacher – show me how to write “Ankou”.’

‘What a strange notion. I’ll try to make the letters for you on this sheet of paper, even though my writing has changed beyond recognition. The ample strokes I used to make when my pen ran as freely as water at the mill have been reduced to painful scribblings. There you are, Madame. ANKOU.’

‘Ah, so it’s like that.’

Thunderflower sat down on a high-backed bench. With the coffee grinder between her knees she poured a third of a packet in and slid the lid shut.
Clack!
As it closed, the servant’s mouth opened, and, turning the handle, she gave her judgement: ‘This is a better method than the old one, where I had to use a hammer to smash the beans wrapped in a cloth. Sometimes a few would escape and fall on the floor so you had to hunt for them if you wanted to grind them as well. It wasted time.’

She listened with relish to the merciless cracking sounds of the machine’s internal workings, which ensured that not a single bean was spared.

‘Monsieur Kerallic, I’ve spent so much time at the bedsides of so many people, taking care of what needed doing to them.’

‘Are you a nurse as well?’

‘No, I wouldn’t go that far, but even in the time between leaving Pontivy and arriving here, I had three years in farms, inns, and bourgeois households, everywhere wiping the brows of people so racked by convulsions that they ended up as dust.’

‘Death in every place? You have to agree, Hélène, that’s a real catalogue of disasters.’

‘You could say that, couldn’t you, Monsieur Kerallic? I go into a house and everybody starts to vomit.’

‘Maybe they’d swallowed something harmful. Did no one suspect anything?’

‘You can’t tell what’s in a soup just by looking at it.’

‘What do they die of?’

‘Chest digestion, I expect.’

‘Chest digestion?’

The servant’s Bretonisms and her Morbihan peasant accent amused the old teacher, who was looking closely at her in an enigmatic way, his eyes as gentle as two flowers on a heap of rubble.

‘You’ve seen a great deal of misfortune. No one could have such bad luck.’

‘I force myself to carry out my work.’

‘Yours is a sad profession.’

Thunderflower went on turning the handle of the coffee grinder as she talked.

‘At all events, it’s not for the money that I go to this trouble. Besides, I’ve very often left households without getting my wages.’

‘Why? Were your employers poor?’

‘It’s not so much that but … as I told you … often when … left … they … weren’t al …’

Words were missing from her mouth the way notes can be missing from a keyboard.

‘What can I do, Monsieur Kerallic? My weakness is growing too fond of people. But it’s true that I’ve seen the deaths of so many people caught up in my destiny. And it’s not over yet …’

With her mind in disarray, she poured more roasted beans into the grinder while the old man grasped her meaning.

‘It’s the same with me: I didn’t become a teacher to grow rich. But when you feel a particular calling … And speaking of yours, I read in yesterday’s issue of
Le Conciliateur
that the Emperor Napoleon’s ashes are being returned to France. We owe him two million deaths.’

‘How many?’ asked the cook, stunned and suddenly humbled.

‘Two hundred thousand in Russia, forty thousand at Waterloo …’

Thunderflower was dumbfounded. ‘I don’t know what he was cooking, but he did a hell of a job of it! I myself find the best thing for cakes is
reusenic’h
. It has a sweetish taste. At one point I thought of anti- … -coin? … -note?’

‘Antimony?’ the teacher suggested.

‘That’s it. But people would have noticed the taste of tainted silver and said to themselves, “Oh, this cake tastes funny, I’m not going to finish it.” How many is one million dead?’

‘That’s as many dead as there are grains of coffee in the drawer of that grinder – you should open it, by the way, because it must be full by now.’

The servant took a pinch of brown powder between two fingertips, and let it trickle on to the sheet of paper with ANKOU written on it. Using her nail she pushed a good score of the grounds to one side, before comparing it with the heap remaining in the drawer.

‘No … you’re having me on, Monsieur Kerallic.’

‘It’s true, Hélène.’

‘How could that be possible?’

‘Ah, how it
was
possible …’

‘You’re getting muddled, my dear Monsieur. It’s time I gave you your mixture.’

She nipped into the kitchen; there was the sound of a singing kettle, then the dull ‘pop’ of a cork being removed from a bottle, soon followed by the clinking of a spoon stirring something. Thunderflower came back into the room carrying a steaming cup.

‘But then with your Léon Napo, there – the human coffee grinder – France became very, very great.’

‘He left it smaller than it was when he came to power.’

‘Is France far from here?’

‘We’re in France, Hélène.’

‘No, no, it’s Brittany here. Oh, my poor Monsieur, you’re not very well at all now.’

The old teacher raised the cup to his lips, blew on the steam then took a mouthful. The servant watched, asking, ‘Is it to your liking?’

‘A bit sweet but I was expecting that. Thank you for making it for me.’

‘It’s the least I can do. A small service is never refused.’

‘Delighted to have met you, Hélène.’

‘Likewise.’

‘You’re very good at your job.’

‘Thank you. I don’t often get compliments.’

A fog was spreading over the humble schoolteacher’s eyes; he had been a young man at the time of the French Revolution, with eyes as blue as a summer’s sky.

‘Monsieur Kerallic, may I cut a lock of your hair? I always like to take a keepsake with me when I leave, so I can add it to the previous ones. I’m making them into a garland and keeping it in one of the compartments of my bag.’

The elderly gentleman showed his assent by extending two fingers on the hand holding his cup, then taking another long draught of the coffee while the servant cut one of his white curls. Next she placed the sheet of paper with the name Ankou written on it upright against the old man’s chest. ‘So they’ll know who’s done this to you. Of course your doctor won’t believe it – he’ll think the coffee has burned your stomach. Doctors are asses, easily fooled.’

‘I’m grateful to you, Hélène, because finally I’d had enough of the circus of civilisations and of this life, a dirty business with never-ending cares …’

His breathing was growing laboured and his voice so weak that his words barely reached her ears. Facing Thunderflower, whose eyes showed a rare gentleness, he was smiling, having placed his empty cup on top of the volume of Celtic tales. He called her ‘Maman’ by mistake, and recounted a memory from his early childhood. ‘I was scared of the big shadows. I was scared of the
way the sun moved around in the evening. Farewell, you who brought my death into the world.’

‘
Kenavo
, Monsieur Kerallic.’

‘Well now, Madame Aupy, are we going to eat this soup or what?’

‘It’s sweet.’

‘That’s because it has carrots in it and carrots are a bit sweet. Are you afraid I might poison you? I’m not Léon Napo. Who’s that in the drawing on the wall opposite you?’

‘That’s my son François – he’s a priest in Orléans. I’m so proud of him but I don’t hear from him any more.’

‘He’s got an unusual face and a very big nose, hasn’t he? Eat up, Madame Aupy, another spoonful – for François!’