The Poisoning Angel (9 page)

Lorient

‘Euark! Euark!’

‘Monsieur Matthieu Verron, do you think your wife’s cough sounds like a cock crowing? Because if it is like a cock’s crow – all the medical books say this – then it’s a croup cough, and then, well … But
does
it sound like one? I can’t quite make up my mind.’

‘Euark, euark!’

In the well-lit dining room, expensively furnished in pear and cherry wood, a woman was lying flat on her back on the rosewood table, arms by her sides. She was dressed in an apron with a large silk embroidered bib, and a neck trimmed with swansdown, and lay with her head resting on a pillow, pale and ill, suffering from acute pains in her chest.

‘Euark, euark!’

‘It’s not exactly “cock-a-doodle-do”,’ said Matthieu hopefully, as he stood next to his wife.

On the other side of the table, the doctor did not know. Monsieur and Madame Verron’s cook, motionless at the dying woman’s feet, ventured no opinion. She was content to admire the husband, seeming to find him as handsome as a pale god with ivory eyes. He, his long light brown hair in a ponytail, registered absent-mindedly that a button had come loose from his blue Glazik waistcoat, two more had fallen off and were lost, and there was a tear in his shirt cuff.

‘These accidents to my wardrobe happened when my wife suddenly clutched me, and cried out, “Matthieu, I love you.”’

At the mention of this cry, the cook bit her lower lip and shook her head, while the doctor wondered aloud as he sounded the sick woman’s chest. ‘What we need to understand before we have any hope of curing her is this: is your wife really coughing or is she trying to vomit? Is the complaint coming from the respiratory system or the digestive system?’

‘Just now, after afternoon tea, she suddenly brought up a small cake.’

‘It would seem to be a stomach problem then. Was the cake bought in town? Perhaps it was bad.’

‘No, carefully prepared by Hélène.’

Hélène. Matthieu Verron had spoken the servant’s name. How sweet it sounded to her ears. She wanted to hear him say it again.

‘Who are you speaking about, Monsieur?’

‘Why, you, Hélène.’

The cook lowered her eyelids with a sigh of pleasure. Meanwhile, Madame Verron was not in a good way at all.

‘Euark!’

‘Oh, now her nose is bleeding,’ said the doctor in concern. ‘It must be the lungs then.’

‘Maybe not,’ her husband cautioned. ‘My wife sometimes has nose bleeds because the scent of flowers is too strong for her. We didn’t have a single one on our wedding day. She’s particularly sensitive to wild flowers, like the ones that grow on the moors round the menhirs. She attributes malign powers to certain flowers, as if they’d made a pact with evil.’

The doctor glanced around to check. ‘I don’t see any flowers in this room.’

‘Quite. We’ve never had a vase in the house.’

Thunderflower turned her head towards a rain-streaked window, and saw a butterfly waiting patiently on a branch. Her heart was heavy. The branch dipped, and the husband said, ‘Strangely, my wife’s nose bleeds began again a few days ago, without her smelling the slightest scent of flowers. It coincided with Hélène’s arrival in our house.’

‘Whose, Monsieur?’ asked the servant.

‘Yours, of course.’

The cook pulled a face, disappointed that her ruse did not work every time.

‘Eu-eu-eu-euark!’

The air was still, and everything seemed to hesitate. Could this cough be compared to the song of a gallinacean or not?

‘Eu-eu-eu … Eueuark!’

‘Co-co-co … Cock-a-doodle-do!’ echoed the doctor. ‘It’s the cock crow,’ he cried, suddenly panicking. ‘The poor lady won’t recover.’

The husband took hold of his wife’s hand and squeezed it.
‘Oh, no, don’t die, my darling. With your last sigh the sun will go out, and the stars will be thrown from their paths. Never could I forget or replace you.’

Thunderflower, lids lowered and breathing fast, drank in the words, apparently imagining they were addressed to her. Her heart was beating like a drum while the wife’s stopped beating altogether. The dead woman’s hand slipped from the widower’s fingers. Matthieu Verron took the band from his ponytail, letting his wonderful hair hang over his shoulders as a sign of mourning. Outside, in the rain, two crooked fingers knocked at the window on to Rue du Lait. They belonged to the two Norman wigmakers. Enquiringly, the tall one-eyed man made scissors movements with two fingers, while the short misshapen one rubbed his thumb against two fingertips on the same hand to signify that they would pay for the lovely head of hair. The doctor’s palm slid over the dead woman’s face, to close her eyes.

‘It was an attack of croup, the most acute I’ve ever seen!’

The widower buried his face in his hands, alone in who knew what depth of sadness.

‘For her funeral I shall have to stipulate “No flowers or wreaths.”’

Thunderflower’s dreaming gaze was lost in the distance.

A few nights later Matthieu Verron was unable to sleep, alone in his marital bed. Face to the wall, curled up like a foetus in his inconsolable widowhood, he had left the candle burning on his bedside table. He thought he could hear the staircase creaking as if someone were coming down it towards his room – then
the door opened. Matthieu turned his shoulders and eyes to see a long white wisp, like a woman’s ghost. An apron with a large silk embroidered bib, a neckline trimmed with swansdown … Transfixed by what he saw, Monsieur Verron thought he was dreaming. The creature approaching him was like a fairy descended from the mountains, and would soon take on mythical status. She had hips broader than his wife’s and her heavy breasts emerged, bright as eyes, when she let her clothing slip to the floor. She had blond pubic hair and her nakedness was infectious. Matthieu took off his nightshirt. The newcomer joined him in bed, immersing herself in his shadow. Between the slipping sheets, their feet felt for one another and their hands trembled, knowing each other near. Beneath the stars, it was a curious journey the apparition took to the widower. Was it not also shameful and distressing? The burning candle was like a silent reproach. He tried to put it out but it always came alight again. Joys and mysteries, alternately dim and brilliant waves on their bodies – the night was a confusion of illusion. The pair of them were like two beautiful pink gods dancing naked. Blooming with sensuality and alive (her!), endlessly alive, there she was gliding the tips of her breasts, her parted lips over Matthieu’s chest, down his stomach and further, begging, ‘Please … Give me something to put in my mouth.’ Then there came very great happiness, true intoxication. She knew how to imitate the whirling tongues of the angels. He cried out loudly in gratitude.

At breakfast time, the servant brought him a cup of chocolate and asked, ‘Did you sleep well, Monsieur?’

‘I had a dream, Hélène.’

‘Oh, that’s nice.’

With a simple lace cap on the back of her head, the blonde girl served the widower at table and stood behind him. While waiting for his bath time, she rubbed his hands and feet with a herb that grows at the bottom of springs. ‘That’s what we used to do at Plouhinec to banish heartaches.’ It neither helped nor harmed him. He could feel Thunderflower’s fingers and the satin-soft skin of her palms, and breathed in her vanilla scent, sweet as a secret. All day long she was modesty, calm, respect, silence, attentiveness, quietly doing her humble duty as maid of all work, but come the night …

The door of Monsieur Verron’s bedroom opened. Here was happiness again. Lying on his back, Matthieu turned joyfully towards the naked fairy who was drawing nearer. She straddled him, seating herself on his hips, upright in the saddle. In the handsome widower’s night she opened an escape route towards the ideal. She moved up, and down, and up … His eyes and fingers took their fill to the sound of celestial harmonies. Hearts chimed! Full in the golden glow of the candle, she laughed and bent towards Matthieu’s mouth. Between her lips he could see the pearly tips of her white teeth coming nearer, and drank in her breath; oh, the sweetness, oh, the poison. Even as he filled her with tenderness, so many steamy kisses, suddenly, joining their delirious hands, the pale lovers cried out as one. She flung into his throat dizzying words, risen from the depths of the earth, which turned everything upside down: ‘I love you, Matthieu!’ and in response he called out the name of his dead wife. Raah!
Ashamed of his error, he pulled the sheet and coverlet over them both, throwing the fairy, so expert in the wonders of the universe and matters of love, in shadow. You may imagine what pleasant secrets were harboured by the cloth and wool as they moved together like waves. They shared a perfect orgy whose vices would have outraged savages, before a gentle hammering resumed.

‘Did you have a good night, Monsieur?’

‘Lovelier than I’ve ever dreamt of. What about you, Hélène? Did you sleep well?’

‘Monsieur is taking an interest in my dreams now? Might he be considering proposing marriage, thinking me a suitable match?’

‘Would I be making a mistake, Hélène?’

‘Yes, Monsieur.’

That evening, in the attic above Monsieur Verron’s room, Thunderflower was pacing up and down, holding her head in her hands and pleading, ‘No, not him, not Matthieu!’ But
squeak, squeak
, in spite of her fingers in her ears she could hear the squeaking of an axle, which brought her back into line: ‘Think of your duty! As for that old irony – love – I’d really like you to think no more about it. It’s an illusion.’ With her soul in torment, when night fell she listened to the voice speaking to her from the depths of a horrendous pit, plaguing her so much she was like a desperate woman in her attic room. ‘Not him …’

On the floor below, Monsieur Verron was in bed, eyeing the ceiling and hearing his cook’s buckled shoes trailing over the
floor. He tossed and turned, unable to sleep, his heart gripped by anguish, when, with the approach of dawn, his door finally opened. The apparition who brought a touch of the supernatural into the widower’s life had changed from day to night. Her eyes were eyes no longer, but two small white candles burning deep within two big black holes. She was like a shipwrecked woman in a nightmare with no shore, but who had been led to him by some alien force.

‘It’s over. We won’t see each other again.’

She was dressed, and carrying a bag over one shoulder. He got up, naked, to face her. ‘Sweet death, I would have surrendered myself to your arms …’

‘Don’t say anything.’

While she let him slip her camisole off over her shoulders and take down her petticoat, a sigh from the beauty’s lips punctured the silence: ‘You’ll forget me. I will have been only a passing shadow.’

Kneeling opposite him she took a bottle of white powder out of one side of her bag. She appeared to sprinkle it over something. ‘Quench me,’ she demanded, then put it into her mouth whole.

He could see her back view reflected in a mirror hanging on the opposite wall. The sweet thing’s shoulders, her neat waist, her backside, broader because it was resting on her heels, made the shape of a guitar. At the top of this instrument of pleasure, a blonde head was swaying back and forth and he caught hold of the hair to impose a rhythm on it. Handsome conqueror filled with light, pure as an angel; as dawn came a transparent farewell dripped into his mouth. Pale tears with iridescent reflections streamed from feminine orifices.

Thunderflower stumbled across the ill defined and badly paved Rue à l’Herbe, both arms wrapped around her stomach. She was pale, choking, vomiting against walls, blaming it all on the arsenic. She was like someone born goodness knows where, who would soon be found lying dead of despair on the ground. The respectable people who passed her felt ill at ease. The servant hoped that one of them would dare to call her names. And not for the first time … But we mustn’t think too highly of Thunderflower. Woe betide all those who would open their doors to her deadly career. In spite of her unsteady state, she walked resolutely towards crime, bag on shoulder, even as she bawled her love sickness. Between the wood and daub houses, which sagged and gaped in the lane where the façades would have merged into one another without the inclusion of horizontal beams, the two Norman wigmakers spotted a triangle of blue sky.

‘Look, it’sh shtopped raining!’

‘As it is, the shower will have lasted for five years. Look how our cart and its load are dripping.’

Tears were streaming from the forty-something cook’s eyes.

‘It’ll pash,’ promised the short wigmaker.

‘It’ll pass, it’ll pass …’ repeated the tall one, doubtfully.

Ploemeur

‘No, Monsieur de Dupuy de Lôme, I am not happy to stay here until the summer. It’s too far to walk to the town of Ploemeur for the provisions. Lorient was where I was taken on. If I had known I was going to end up hanging around a manor house in the depths of a forest I would have turned the job down. I have only one wish, to hand in my apron.’

‘You can’t do that to us, Hélène. Who would make our meals? The time to refuse was when we informed you we’d be coming here for part of the spring. How do you expect us to find another cook now? It’s true, we did say two weeks and now we’re staying longer but even if it is a long way for you to go for provisions –
and I’m very sorry about that – it’s a pretty place. Just listen to the different varieties of birdsong, the buzzing of the bees …’

‘It’s poisonous here, the water is polluted and the air is bad.’

‘What nonsense is this? I was born in this castle twenty-five years ago and I know perfectly well there are no health hazards here.’

‘What’s going on, Stanislas-Charles?’ asked a man coming into the kitchen, alerted by the sound of raised voices.

He had a white beard along his jaw, curly like a sheep’s fleece, spiky hair swept backwards and bushy eyebrows.

His son answered, ‘It’s Hélène making one of her scenes again. Pah, I think it will be easier for me to build the first steam-powered warships and pioneer dirigible airships than ever to exercise authority over that cook. Not content with complaining about how far it is to go shopping, here she is demanding we go back to Lorient because life here is “poisonous”.’

‘It is worth noting,’ the elderly man conceded, ‘that at the beginning of the year our horses did die because of the poor quality of the water.’

‘Ah, what was I saying?’ exclaimed Thunderflower, standing opposite a sulking Stanislas-Charles, while a two-and-a-half-year-old little girl tugged at the servant’s red skirt, asking, ‘Are you cross, Godmother?’

‘Marie, stop calling her Godmother,’ said the young naval engineer in irritation. ‘She’s not your godmother, she’s the cook.’

‘She is, Uncle, she’s my godmother. Waaaa.’ The child began to cry, while her mother ran towards the cook, wanting to know what had made her child – who was wearing a white pearl-embroidered
dress with a lace collar – cry.

‘Give her to me,’ she ordered her brother.

Stanislas-Charles Dupuy de Lôme got hold of his niece, who was hiding in Thunderflower’s skirts, and handed her, arms waving, to his sister, while the cook muttered, ‘A woman should never let anyone pass her child to her over a table.’

‘Why is that, Hélène?’ asked the mother.

‘It’s a sign that the child won’t last the week.’

The prediction cast a chill, which the grandfather with the fleecy chin tried to dispel. ‘Get along with you, Hélène. You moan but I’m sure that any minute now you’ll be off to get one of those plump hens you do so well, either in a fricassee or succulently spit-roasted with potatoes.’

‘If it’s not too heavy,’ the servant cautioned. ‘Otherwise I’ll get six artichokes between us and serve them with a herb vinaigrette, and that will do very nicely.’

‘Personally, I’d have liked trout,’ chimed in a bird-like grandmother, joining the others around the table. ‘Admittedly to find a fresh water one you have to go much further than Ploemeur, but—’

‘As for you, Hortense-Héloïse, don’t make things worse,’ interrupted her husband, knitting his bushy eyebrows.

‘But, Father, why shouldn’t Mother be allowed trout?’ said Stanislas-Charles angrily. ‘It’s unbelievable. Are we going to have to take orders from the cook, no longer the masters in our own home? Hélène, you will listen to me and there’s an end to it.’

‘As you wish,’ murmured the servant, only half liking her employer’s tone. ‘Fine, fine, I’ll do whatever I have to.’

‘That’s it, do whatever you have to. It will make a nice change. You can start by giving my niece her breakfast, and then off you go, shopping, double quick.’

‘Be careful, Monsieur Dupuy de Lôme. Go on playing against yourself and you’ll end up winning.’

‘And no threats either, thank you.’

Everyone left the kitchen, except for Marie, who went back to clutching Thunderflower’s skirt. ‘Will you tell me a story, Godmother?’

‘Of course, dear.’

Wearing a ruched cap, and an air of niceness for the child’s benefit, the cook had her back to her, stirring a little milk heating in a saucepan. ‘It’s the story of a king, the uncle of a princess,’ she told her. ‘He takes a handful of dust and throws it into the air; his castle falls down, with the princess in it.’

The servant left the manor house, built in the classical style, with her empty basket in her hand and curses on her lips. The early morning insects with diaphanous wings, fluttering butterflies and clear sky brought infinite variety to the delights of the landscape. The sunny day was the finest in a decade.

‘In the shentury, no doubt,’ gasped the shorter wigmaker, punching the air with his twisted arm, as they stood beside their cart stopped at the roadside.

‘Maybe we should unfasten the horses somewhere and let them dry off,’ suggested the taller, bald one. They had both aged considerably.

Mist was rising from the fields and the road leading to Ploemeur. The streams were in shade. Further on, Thunderflower passed a
farmer busy undervaluing a girl who was being offered to him in marriage, in order to get a more considerable dowry: ‘She’s really ugly.’ The parents handed their eldest daughter a spade and she demonstrated her strength by digging out huge clods of earth. The peasant hesitated.

On her way back to the château de Soye, basket of artichokes on her arm, the servant spotted a small cart being pulled by some men. It was carrying a husband who had let himself be beaten by his wife. She passed a bank with plumes of yellow broom and topped with blackberries, and as soon as she entered the drawing room of the manor house, Thunderflower saw people bending over a little body lying on the floor and rushed forward, shouting in Breton,
‘Quit a ha lessé divan va anaou!’
(‘Get off the corpse – she’s mine!’)

While the naval engineer was still asking, ‘What’s that mumbo jumbo she’s saying?’ the servant dropped her basket and knelt down beside Marie, lifting her into an embrace and whispering in her ear in Celtic. ‘A bad angel made our paths cross. Tell me, at least, I’ll have lived in your heart.’ The infant put her weak arms round the cook’s neck, replying in words no one could make out. It was like the soft sighing of the waving grass, and Stanislas-Charles, uncomprehending, said in astonishment, ‘Is Marie speaking Breton?’

Thunderflower’s hands closed the eyes of the child in the pearl-embroidered dress. Her mother was prostrate on a chair.

‘To what irresistible force has she succumbed?’ lamented the grandfather. ‘When my son-in-law hears the news he’ll be in utter despair over his daughter’s death.’

The grandmother could hardly breathe. The uncle looked inside the basket, then at the cook, who was already making for the door. He caught hold of her by the sleeve. ‘You should have brought six artichokes, one for each of us, and yet you got only five. Why? You don’t like artichokes, is that it?’

‘Yes I do, but I don’t like weighing myself down unnecessarily.’

Stanislas-Charles looked her straight in the eye. ‘Hélène. What did little Marie Bréger die of today, 30 May 1841, at the age of two-and-a-half?’

‘You’re asking
me
that, when I was away on an errand when my godchild collapsed?’

‘She was not your godchild. She was my good niece, when she was alive.’

‘That’s one person fewer. Blame can go to the saucepans, which have just been recoated with tin, or the poor quality of the water here at château de Soye. Monsieur Dupuy de Lôme, your suspicions will not make me lower my eyes in shame. I won’t blush either, do you hear?’

Half demented, the child’s mother got to her feet and began to sing. She was filled with the joy of the Church and lit household candles as if they were the tall candles of an altar.

‘I warned you we needed to go back to Lorient,’ Thunderflower reminded them. ‘The weakest has already died, and it will be the others’ turns next. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were an epidemic soon. The manor house will be left empty, just as has happened elsewhere. The cemetery at Ploemeur will be too small.’

The servant who could predict the future was standing
proudly in front of a chestnut cupboard with ornately carved foliage, while all those around her were agog, hanging on her every word.

‘Mark my words. I’m warning you, if we stay here you’re all going to die.’

Stanislas-Charles gave in. ‘We’re going back.’

‘Finally …’ breathed Thunderflower. ‘The lengths you have to go to in order to be heard!’