by Perrat, Liza
‘Whatever is wrong with me?’
I looked up, but Léon was not gasping, or recoiling from me and whatever terrible sickness had struck me.
‘Welcome to womanhood, Mademoiselle aux yeux de la rivière.’ He threw me my clothes and turned around while I got dressed. ‘I know about the bleeding. I have five sisters, remember?’
Bleeding? Then it came to me — the curse of which Maman had spoken.
‘The church allows girls to wed at your age … at twelve,’ Léon was saying, his head still turned. ‘But my father says they’re mostly too young to know all about wifely dutie — ’
‘What? Why do you talk of marriage?’ I pressed a clutch of grass between my thighs. Flushed with embarrassment, I wanted to slide back into the river and disappear under the water forever.
‘Not now,’ Léon said, ‘but one day, you know, we could …’
‘You want to marry me?’
My cheeks burned again. Like every village girl, I dreamed of wedding and having my own family to care for. I could hardly believe my good fortune — the strapping and handsome Léon Bruyère, whose father owned land and animals, wanted my hand. In that moment of exhilaration, I ignored what Grégoire had said about my scanty dowry.
***
‘The bleeding came today,’ I told Maman that evening, when the weary harvest workers had headed off to the tavern to drink ale, listen to village gossip and tell jokes my mother said were vulgar.
‘Quite normal. You are twelve years old. It will come every moon until you are an old woman,’ Maman said. ‘Unless you are with child. Because now the curse has come, you are able to have babies.’
My own child.
Maman was always telling me about the dangers of childbirth; how women often died — the infant too — while she was birthing them, but it was still such an exciting, incredible thing that was happening to me.
‘To be born a woman is not favourable to long life, Victoire,’ Maman said. ‘Especially a peasant woman.’ She waggled a finger at me. ‘And you must be careful not to let a man have his way with you. In a flash he will charm you and lift your skirt and pull his breeches off, and do to you what you’ve surely seen those dogs doing, up on Monsieur Bruyère’s farm.’
I did recall my surprise, my curious shock, when I’d first seen one dog mount another. I had known, instinctively, that it had to do with having young, even though I’d wished the dogs were simply playing.
‘Because if you do,’ Maman went on, ‘your maidenhood will be torn and you will never be able to hide it from your husband the night of your wedding. He would disown you immediately.’
‘I will never let any man do that to me, Maman. Besides, I know who my future husband will be.’
She glanced at me sharply. ‘Léon Bruyère? Surely you cannot imagine your dowry is decent enough to wed a well-off landowner’s son?’
‘But … but I thought you could help me gather a dow — ’
‘I am rightly sorry, Victoire, but you will never be good enough to marry that boy.’
‘I will! I will find a way to marry the man I love.’
‘Marry for love? You must be joking. Here,’ she said, handing me a beaker of warm liquid. ‘Lime-blossom and sorrel,’ she said, obviously dismissing any further talk of my marriage. ‘For the pain in your belly.’
I wished Maman wouldn’t act as if my curse wasn’t the unbelievable thing it was to me. She seemed not the least moved, though she did give me scraps of cloth and tell me what to do with them.
When the pain eased a little, Maman told me how I would now accompany her when she birthed the babies. ‘You are old enough to be my apprentice midwife, to learn the skills.’
‘Will you teach me how to make angels too?’ I said.
‘Haven’t I told you never to mention that word, Victoire? It will only lead to trouble for many people.’
‘But it is true, Maman? You do kill unborn babies?’
My mother sat beside me. ‘You must understand it is difficult for country midwives. In the cities, a midwife takes in a pregnant girl and lodges her in secrecy until the baby is born. No one is the wiser, but here, that’s impossible. Girls do not have the money to pay for such things, and a pregnancy out of wedlock only causes a scandal — a curse on the girl, the child and her family, forever.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I understand.’
But as my mother snuffed out the candle, threw her cloak about her shoulders and curled up on our straw bedding, I was still confused. Père Joffroy always said it was a sin to take a life, even an unborn one.
7
‘The stone-cutter’s baby has been born with the elephant head!’ a woman squealed, scuttling past me on the square.
My mother had been called away to birth the stone-cutter’s baby not a few hours ago, so when people began murmuring to each other, I put my copper cistern aside, leaned against the fountain wall and listened.
‘The cretinous child may bring good luck to the family,’ the blacksmith’s wife was saying. ‘And it will never have to work or leave home and earn money to pay the tax-collector, but who has the time to care for an idiot child?’
‘The midwife is a witch,’ one of the silk-weaving women said.
Another woman nodded. ‘A charlatan. Remember the baby of the quarry man’s wife last month? Born dead and already cold.’
‘And what of the infant born with a gap in its top lip and a hole in its mouth?’ the silk-weaver said. ‘The child couldn’t suckle properly … the milk came back out through its nose. ‘Mathilde Charpentier has cursed the village of Lucie with the black magic only a sage-femme is capable of,’ she went on.
My dismay rose as I caught their murmurings of burnings and funeral pyres. My heart beat against my breast like the wings of a trapped dove.
‘How can they say such things, Grégoire?’
‘Come on, don’t give them the satisfaction of listening to their vicious lies,’ Grégoire said, tugging me back towards the church room.
‘They speak of burning witches. Surely they would never burn our mother?’
‘But it’s really not surprising,’ Grégoire said. ‘You know how they have been gossiping about her. For eight years, since Papa died, our mother has claimed God exists no more, and she has never returned to Mass. The people’s suspicions have swelled so much over time that they fester now, like some great pus-filled sore.’
‘Maman is a smart woman, Grégoire. She taught me to read and write, and instructs me on the birthing and healing skills. The bailiff would never have her burned.’
‘Well let’s hope her blasphemy only costs her a simple fine.’
***
I was right; they did not burn our mother at the stake.
‘Mathilde Charpentier will be swum in the Vionne River,’ the bailiff said.
I felt giddy, recalling one of my earliest memories, even before The Day of the Storm — the swimming of the previous village midwife, also accused of black magic. We had all lined the banks of the Vionne to see if, as a servant of the devil, the water rejected her and she floated, or she was guilty, and sank.
I gripped my brother’s arm. ‘No, they cannot, Grégoire. They cannot do this. It is so unjust. She’s only a poor peasant woman!’
My brother’s eyes clouded. ‘We must not go there, Victoire. We’ll stay home until it’s over.’
‘I am not staying in this awful parish room a minute longer!’ I said. ‘The Church has failed my mother, and God has failed us all.’
‘Don’t say such things, or the same thing may happen to you. There is nothing we can do, it will only be torture to watch,’ he said.
‘I must try and stop them.’
‘You cannot, Victoire. They’ll never waver from their decision.’
‘At least I have to try.’ I tore myself from my brother’s clutch and rushed outside, through the chill mist, up to Monsieur Armand Bruyère’s farm and down to the river.
A crowd had gathered around several men who w
ere carrying my mother, screaming and thrashing, towards the water.
I rushed to Maman, trying to hold her; to touch any part of her, but the men kept pushing me back, and her face was a blur behind my tears.
‘Maman, Maman, no! They can’t do this!’
My mother’s eyes sought mine, as the men dumped her onto the riverbank, not far from a place where ten years of growth had all but concealed a tumble of blackened wood and stones. I averted my eyes from our old hearth rising like some macabre tombstone. I could not look at that memorial to happy times as tragedy was set to strike me, again.
Maman tore the angel pendant from her neck and pushed it into my hand.
‘Wear it always, Victoire. It will give you strength, and courage.’
As the men shoved me away from her, I felt the heat of my mother’s hand for the last time. Or perhaps it was the warmth of the bone angel that took the chill from me.
They held my mother still and stripped her naked. I was aware of Léon, beside me.
He covered my eyes. ‘Don’t look, Victoire.’
The sobs catching in my throat, strangling me, I prised Léon’s fingers apart, watching through the gap as they tied Maman’s right thumb to her left big toe and vice versa.
The men secured her with ropes and threw her into the deepest part of the swirling current. Nothing happened for a moment, as she bobbed in the freezing water, and I saw the despair in her eyes, more grey than green as they emptied of all hope.
‘Maman!’ I tried to break free from Léon but he held me tight as the raw, chaotic grief clawed at my heart. My mind flashed back to the day I’d witnessed my first hanging, and the injustice of it — of this — speared me like the blade of a bayonet.
The men were using long sticks to push Maman’s head under the water while others, holding the ropes, dragged her to the surface. They continued, up down, up down.
‘Maman, Maman!’ I shouted, on and on, until my voice cracked into a hoarse whisper and, finally, no more words came.
Léon released his grip and I sank to the muddy riverbank in a limp curl, my fingers still gripping Maman’s angel pendant — my angel now.
Through my tears, I saw Père Joffroy performing Extreme Unction and, amidst a blur of autumn browns, reds and yellows, I lay amongst the leaves that had fallen, thin and brittle, to the ground.
I never saw my mother’s head dip below the ivy green water for the last time.
***
We buried Maman with haste, in the cemetery of Saint Antoine’s, alongside Félicité, Félix and Papa.
Both of us wrapped up in our own grief, Grégoire and I could barely speak, or comfort each other. I did not sleep that first night, and I refused the wheat bread, the gruel of grains and the dried peas Léon Bruyère and his mother offered us. Never could I have imagined a loneliness so utter, so complete.
The following day, the clog-maker’s wife — Françoise’s mother — came with more soup.
‘Your parents are gone, Victoire,’ she said. ‘Grégoire promised your mother he would care for you, but he is only eighteen, earning but a pittance from working the wood.’
‘We’ll manage somehow,’ I said.
‘But you have no dowry,’ she went on. ‘You understand you cannot marry Léon Bruyère? If you stay here in Lucie, you’ll never have any means of getting a husband to set up your own household. You’re sixteen, you must go to the city — to Lyon or Paris — and find work in the domestic services.’
I did not answer her, and kept my eyes on the earthen floor, clasping the bone carving between my thumb and forefinger, desperate for the courage my mother said the little angel would give me.
When Françoise’s mother left, I shuffled outside into the autumn dusk, climbed the church steps, and looked out across the valley.
The view over Lucie and back to the Monts du Lyonnais had always comforted me but I felt only emptiness, trapped as I was in this place of no light, no happiness, no hope and no love. Especially not the love of Léon Bruyère who, it seemed, was lost to me forever.
I understood that everything was different now. A snap of time had reshaped me, and nothing could ever be as it was before.
I shivered in my thready clothes and looked up at the moon. In its pale light, I glimpsed a tawny owl on a branch, starting his night hunt. He glided down in silence, dropping onto the bird, frog or insect, and extended his wings over the luckless victim.
***
A week later, Grégoire opened the door to Père Joffroy — to the church room in which, of course, I’d had no choice but to remain.
‘I’ve been meaning to speak with you, Victoire, since your mother’s death.’
‘The death you might have stopped?’ I said my voice tight. ‘The death that, had we been rich or noble or anything besides poor peasants, might not have happened?’
The priest shook his head. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Victoire, but I am only a lowly parish priest, with no influence on those types of decisions. I know the accusations against your mother were untrue. She was a healer-woman and a midwi — ’
‘My mother was no witch, Father.’
‘I also believe,’ he went on, ‘it was simply some temporary madness; an unfortunate melancholy of the blood, which turned her back on the Church and God. She never deserved to die for that, and you, Victoire, must guard against this same type of affliction. I have heard a mother can pass it to a daughter.’
He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘My brother is a priest in one of the parishes of Paris,’ he went on. ‘He tells me of a noble family in the suburb of Saint-Germain whose scullery maid is dead of the dropsy.’ He thrust a sealed letter at me. ‘I have written you a recommendation letter, Victoire. The family is expecting you.’
Stunned, I stared up at the priest. ‘I’m to go to a noble family? After what a noble did to my father? Besides, I don’t know a single person in Paris, and I am sure it is such a big city I would only get lost.’ I breathed fast, grappling for more excuses. ‘Maman told me they don’t even speak as we do in Lucie.’
‘Your mother taught you well,’ Père Joffroy said. ‘And gave you the taste for learning. You will accustom yourself to the French language of Paris, and the ways of the city. Besides, you must not generalise about the aristocracy, they are not all like that baron.’
I glanced at my brother. ‘Grégoire is all I have left, and I am all that he has. How can I leave him?’
‘Go, Victoire,’ Grégoire said. ‘You’ve always dreamed of rising above our peasant roots; of seeing the world beyond the gates of Lucie, n’est-ce pas? Go, little sister, and take this chance.’
Paris
1778–1779
8
Accustomed as I was to the smell of unwashed humans — mouths of rotting teeth, clothes stained with grease and sweat, the cheesy odour of the sick and dying — nothing in Lucie had prepared me for the stink of Paris.
Stiff from a week of bumps and jolts in the cramped public carriage and the squalor of roadside inns with their hard bread and bland gruel, I finally stepped out onto the streets of the capital on a thickly-misted November dawn of 1778.
Against the din of church bells chiming for morning Mass, roosters crowing and dogs barking their replies, I skirted a line of women waiting for a bakery to open: servants, working women, the wives of labourers, I supposed. Mingled with the delicious aroma of fresh bread in the bakers’ ovens, the scent of hot coffee from the carts of roadside vendors flared my nostrils.
Through mist rising from the cobbles, which swallowed ground-floor windows and shrouded shop signs, I had little idea where I was going. Clutching Père Joffroy’s letter, I tramped up and down streets with no names, the ache in my feet deepening as I searched for the noble house.
‘M’sieur, m’sieur, excusez-moi,’ I said, stopping a passing man. ‘Please, in what direction is the district of Saint-Germain?’
‘Saint-Germain, eh?’ the man said, baring dung-coloured teeth, his eyes hovering over my breast
s. ‘What would a nice girl like you be wanting with those sang bleus?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah ha, domestic service I bet?’
‘Please, m’sieur, which way?’
He pointed vaguely, bending so close to me I thought his nose would touch my face. ‘You be careful, young thing, those aristocrats think they can do what they like with us commoners.’
As I hastened through the fog, I realised the noise of the capital was even more shocking than the smell. I was used to Lucie’s church bell tolling when it was time to rise, at noon for the hour of break, and in the evening for vespers, but here, church bells from what sounded like a hundred different belfries, deafened me.
As dawn gave way to day, the streets filled with more people, who looked like labourers, on their way to the workshops. I snatched whiffs of stale beer, roasting meat, and cheese from the fromageries.
I found myself in a narrow street that went nowhere. I retraced my steps, gagging on the stench of piss and shit, rotting vegetables and animal fat, and holding my skirt up as I stepped over the slaughterhouse blood streaming into the sewers. I stumbled into a blind alleyway and reeled from the odour of congealed tannery blood and damp featherbeds.
I shrank from a man defecating in a courtyard, and recoiled from ragged beggars squatting in roadside filth, pawing at my skirt and pleading with their mad city eyes.
It came lighter. I crossed a bridge, the river below teeming with barges and so wide it made the Vionne look like a stream. The Seine River, I imagined. Ships smelling of coal, hay and damp ropes lined the gravelled riverbank, and, from the grisly spectacle unfolding before my eyes, I assumed I’d reached la place de Grève.
Spectators were throwing mouldy vegetables at a poor wretch attached to a cartwheel on the square. A group of children played with balls and spinning tops, while others waved sticks about.
To the crowd’s gleeful shouts, the executioner raised his iron club and brought it down onto the victim’s limbs, stretched along the spokes of the revolving wheel. I flinched as bones cracked, one after the other, his screams carrying far across the Seine.
Over and over, the executioner bludgeoned until finally he dealt the fatal coup de grâce to the man’s chest, for which I was certain the victim was grateful. I gasped as blood spurted from his mouth and his head fell, limp, sideways.
