by Perrat, Liza
Madeleine jumped up and down, her curls bouncing around her face like hundreds of black coils. ‘I want to stay here,’ she said. ‘Will Uncle Grégoire tell me a story?’ It seemed my daughter loved her uncle’s tales as much as my father’s had enchanted me.
‘We won’t be long,’ I said to Grégoire. ‘I must gather bugle flowers for the infusion. Armand’s poor children are sick again.’
I left with Blandine and Gustave, gripping their hands as I helped them cross the river at its lowest point, where the Vionne was so sluggish my petticoat barely got wet.
‘Hold my hand tight,’ I said, leading them through the willow trees until we reached the bend in the river, and the place where the water rushed into the deeper pool in which I’d so loved to swim as a girl.
I’d not returned to my special place since that stormy afternoon with Léon, but the heat rushed through me as I remembered it, the guilt and shame shrouding me as I felt the same stab of desire for Léon Bruyère.
I barely thought of him these days though, because Léon was busy, and happy with his new wife, who awaited the birth of their first child. When I saw them in the evenings, we exchanged only the minimum of conventions.
I gripped the children’s hands as we crossed a clearing where, on rising ground, a woman and her three sons were building a simple hut, the boys cutting and driving stakes in.
I recognised her as the woman who’d come to the farm the previous day, Noëmie, whose husband was travelling the country in search of odd jobs. They could ill-afford to rent a house, and had to build a hut in the woods. They’d been sheltering in the old witch’s hut, but it was draughty and leaked when it rained. She asked for the loan of an axe and a mallet.
I thought of my journeyman papa and I warmed to the woman and her boys. After all, what could a destitute peasant child become? Only poorer than his absent father and his mother, already halfway to the grave. Was there coarser, cheaper cloth than they wore? Was there anything worse for the feet than rope? What was more tasteless than boiling up nettles and bark for meals?
I handed Noëmie the tools, and a basket, and when she saw the bread, wine, cheese and eggs, her hand flew to her toothless mouth. ‘You are too kind, good Madame Victoire.’
‘Bonne chance, Noëmie,’ I said, because good luck was about the only thing a beggar woman could count on.
I led Blandine and Gustave up the opposite bank towards another wooded area that bordered the Monts du Lyonnais, to a place where, as a child, I’d gathered bugle flowers with my mother.
Bent over around the shaded trunks of trees, I filled my basket with the cobalt blue petals with which I would make an infusion for three of Armand’s children.
As I plucked the flowers my thoughts drifted back to Léon and his pregnant wife, and I forgot, for an instant, the twins playing nearby.
A fly settled on my forehead, jolting me from my thoughts of Léon. I swiped at it and realised I could no longer see the twins. I was not yet anxious, but my pulse quickened and my head whipped around, left and right.
‘Blandine, Gustave!’ However could they run off so quickly? True, they had begun walking at scarcely ten months old, but they were slow and ungainly.
I dashed about, calling their names, my heart lurching. The river flashed through my mind; how they loved playing at the edge, as if the moving water bewitched them. The river was running low but there were still ditches and holes into which they might stumble out of their depth; twists and bends that caught the currents and transformed them into whirlpools.
La Vionne violente.
I had always scorned those words of the villagers, but now I raced back towards the river my breathing faster and more ragged with every step.
I stopped to catch my breath, at the spot where the people were building their hut. Noëmie was bent over, collecting twigs from the brushwood. I saw she had already assembled a pile of moss from the roots of trees and rush from a pond margin.
‘Have you seen my children?’ I said. ‘A boy and a girl, only one year old.’
‘Sorry, Madame Victoire.’ She shook her head and threw her handful of twigs onto the pile. ‘But I will help you search.’
‘Blandine, Gustave!’ I kept calling. No sign of them. I tripped on my skirt hem and stumbled. Noëmie took my hand and helped me to my feet.
‘Don’t be afraid, we will find them, Madame Victoire.’
Gripped with a heavy dread, my breathing laboured, we reached the ridge of the slope that led down to the river.
‘There they are!’ Noëmie cried.
Blandine and Gustave were on the riverbank, wobbling about on their stumpy legs and throwing handfuls of shore gravel. ‘Luck is with you today, Madame Victoire.’
‘Dieu merci, Dieu merci.’ I held a palm against my sprinting heart, my fingers groping for my angel pendant. The empty place felt warm, as if it was still resting against my breastbone; as if the little sculpture was still protecting me.
16
Exhausted from his journey to the produce market eight leagues far, Armand slumped into a chair before the fireplace.
I handed him a beaker of wine. ‘Drink and rest, my merchant husband.’ It made me smile, how he insisted we call him a merchant innkeeper now, instead of a lowly farmer or winegrower.
A plume of smoke leaned into the room as Armand drank the wine. He took my hand. ‘A small profit was made. Minimal, but every bit counts, n’est-ce pas, my dear? All in our effort to overcome this impoverishment gripping Lucie and every other rural place around.’
I thought back to Noëmie and her beggar family and, once more, I blessed my good fortune to have such a man — a man who, despite lacking youth, rose in the four-o’clock cold to ride off and bargain good prices at the surrounding markets for our eggs, vegetables and poultry. What luck to have a husband also clever enough to understand a smattering of every dialect — the language of the river people, the butchers, the silk-workers and fishwives.
I left my hand in his. ‘I fear your children are worse, Armand. Their brows are feverish and they barely eat because of the coughing. This morning they began spitting blood. I keep giving them the bugle infusion and I have moved them from the others. I had to use one of the inn rooms.’
‘You separate them from the family?’ Armand looked up from the crackling fire, his eyes red-rimmed and bleary from the long ride home into the brunt of a south wind.
‘Maman always said a child with the speckled monster sickness smells like horse manure, one with scarlet fever smells like old apples, but the tuberculosis child has the odour of onions.’
‘And my children smell like onions?’
‘I’m sorry. Maman also told me la tuberculose is contagious. I must keep the other children safe. We cannot have more of them fall ill, and Madeleine, Blandine and Gustave are young … so vulnerable to sickness.’
Armand gave my hand a faint squeeze. ‘I know you’ll take care of my children — our children — and make them well again.’
I left my husband by the fire and, as Maman had shown me, I boiled up linseed and mustard for a poultice. I returned to the sick children and placed it on their hot little backs.
I held the beaker to their pale lips. ‘Come now, just a little more,’ I said, coaxing them to sip the minty-smelling bugle tea — my only hope to stop the bleeding inside.
I had been with the children only a few minutes when I heard voices. I listened closer. It was Léon’s voice, hushed and urgent. I put the beaker on the bedside table and hurried out to them.
Léon was sitting at the table, his hat in his hand, fiddling with the brim.
‘What’s wrong? What is it, Léon?’
For someone I thought I knew so well, I had no idea what to read on that grim face. I looked from him to Armand, the panic rising in my chest. ‘What is it?’
‘They are dead, Victoire,’ Armand said. ‘Léon’s wife and child. Dead birthing the first son.’
My first instinct was to run to Léon’s side to hold
him, to smother him with kisses and rock his pain away.
I felt my husband’s eyes on me and I did not move, only lowered my head to hide my blush. ‘I’m sorry, Léon. So very sorry for you.’
***
‘Water drips down the windows again,’ Armand said, as I prepared the morning coffee. ‘How peculiar, for a summer day. Quite as odd as this smoky haze that persists across the countryside.’
He nodded beyond the window. ‘Mon Dieu! Look, Victoire, frost covers the ground! Whoever heard of thick frost in a month of June?’
‘And the sun is the colour of blood again,’ I said, watching it rise, as it had done these past weeks, into that strange, smoky fog. A flock of birds heeled sideways, catching the first sun’s rays. They wheeled and dipped like crazed things, as if trying to dodge the fog, seeking fresh air in that great bowl of singed, scarlet light.
‘Whatever is happening, Armand?’
‘I have never seen such a thing,’ he said as he washed down a hunk of bread with coffee. ‘God must be enraged, my dear.’
He kissed me and strode outside to begin the farm chores. Through the rusty haze, I watched him — a bleak figure looking across his frosted fields, and shaking his head as his gaze lifted to the sky.
Busy with the twins and preparing the inn for the evening guests, I pushed the worry of the queer weather aside, until Armand came stomping back inside.
‘The new oats are brown and all withered. The wheat looks mouldy and the water has turned a strange, light blue.’ He shook his head. ‘How are we to make the bread, Victoire? We, and our inn guests, surely have the right to decent bread?’
Léon appeared in the doorway. ‘That’s not all, Papa. The snouts and feet of the livestock are raw and have turned a bright yellow. The fruit trees have all shrivelled up, as if a fire had burned beside them.’
As always when Léon spoke, I busied myself at the stove or the fire. Still we avoided each other’s eyes, as if afraid of what we might see. Nor did we mention the loss of his wife and child, especially after the joyous birth of Gregoiré and Françoise’s healthy baby boy — Emile Félix Charpentier.
‘What poison does God send us from the heavens?’ Armand said, flinging his arms skyward.
‘Witches’ revenge!’ Pauline said.
Adélaïde shook her head. ‘We have enraged the angels.’
Over that whole summer, the people of Lucie tilted their heads towards the sky. They looked with suspicion and fear, but nobody could explain the frequent, violent thunderstorms which affrighted and distressed us, and which struck down cattle and men across the country. We had no idea why people had trouble catching their breath, some choking to death on the bizarre, ever-present fog, which covered the sun and stopped it warming the earth.
***
‘It is because of a volcano,’ our inn guest — a silk trader from south of Lyon — explained one morning the following autumn.
‘A volcano?’ Armand said.
We rarely heard of such things, and we all fell silent, still mourning our lost harvest.
The man nodded. ‘Eh, oui. So the scholars say. From a far-off land. Apparently this volcano, Laki they call it, began erupting in early June, and spews out great clouds of volcanic ash and lava, covering our sun with its poison.’
All eyes stayed riveted on the man. ‘This cloud has killed thousands and made the living even poorer, and more destitute.’
Before their afternoon sleep, I took a moment in my busy day to read to Madeleine and the twins from Les Fables de Jean de la Fontaine. I would teach them to read and write when they grew older, as I had promised Grégoire I would teach little Emile, but for now, the children were content to listen to the tales and gaze at the pictures.
The door flew open. ‘Come quickly, Victoire, Papa’s had an accident with the plough!’ Léon cried. ‘ … gone through his leg, the blood gushes out. Grégoire is with him.’
I hustled the children from my lap. ‘Stay here with Adélaïde and Pauline,’ I said, grabbing strips of cloth.
Léon and I hurried across the half-ploughed field to where Armand lay, the wound on his leg bloody and gaping.
‘Mon Dieu, poor Armand. Let me look.’ As Maman had instructed me, I pressed on the wound until the bleeding ceased, then bandaged it with the cloth. Between Léon and Grégoire, Armand hobbled back to the farm.
By the time my husband had crossed the courtyard and laboured up the steps, his face was grey as a storm cloud, and sweat dusted his pleated brow.
‘Go quickly,’ I said to Pauline. ‘Fetch la guérisseuse.’
Lucie had no residing physician or barber-surgeon, and apart from the blacksmith who set bones and helped women prepare for less painful childbirth, the healing woman was the only one who could help the sick.
La guérisseuse probed and cleaned Armand’s injured leg and applied a poultice. ‘Yarrow flowers leaves, to staunch the bleeding and close the wound,’ she said, applying a binder fashioned from thick leather strips.
‘Give him this for the pain, madame … willow-bark tea. Then make him rest. I will return tomorrow.’
‘Rest now, Armand,’ I said, helping him to our bed. ‘Tomorrow you’ll feel better.’ As he closed his eyes, I tried to quell the foreboding swelling inside me.
‘Armand must get well,’ I said, accompanying Grégoire outside. ‘He has to recover.’
My brother kissed my cheek. ‘I know you’re a good wife, you’ll take great care of your husband.’
As my brother left to return to Françoise and little Emile, the hairs on my arms bristled in the late afternoon chill.
17
My dear Victoire,
Thank you for your wishes. Marie, Roux and I are well. The lecherous Marquis found new prey quickly — the young scullery maid who replaced you. The poor girl must have resisted him and Marie found her strangled in her attic bed. Quelle tragédie! Of course, the Marquis, ever the fawning toady to those who matter, claimed it was some intruder — a thief come to rob the silver and jewels.
I have an urge to upturn my vat over his powdered wig and watch the burning oil run down his frock coat and soil his satin breeches and white stockings.
So caught up he is, in his own high and mighty self at the Palais-Royal, he never notices me observing from the throngs of commoners at the Camp des Tartars; watching him strut around the expensive arcades, eyeing the fancy ladies in their paste jewellery and striped gowns. As he goes up to the gambling casinos and plush houses of pleasure, I am plunged into sorrow for that dead scullery girl, as I was for you, Victoire.
He will go unpunished no doubt. As you well know, justice is a dream! Those of the blue blood are above crimes and we commoners are powerless against them.
I was relieved to hear of Madeleine’s recovery. I hope the twins are also in good health. They must be eighteen months old now? Healthy children who survive infancy are true gifts from God.
I imagine you experienced this terrifying volcano down south? The foggy rust-coloured air over Paris killed many throughout summer, and the scholars predict thousands more will perish in the freezing winter this volcano is sure to bring. We must prepare ourselves, my child, for this unexplained punishment God sends us.
So as not to cloud this letter with bleakness, I have some news that will make you laugh. Did you hear of the brothers Montgolfier, who invented an enormous balloon filled with hot air? Well, they have flown this giant balloon before a huge crowd at Versailles. You could never imagine such a spectacle! A rooster, a duck and a sheep were inside to check its safety. This trio travelled a short distance and landed unharmed, except the sheep had kicked the rooster! The fat King watched it all through his telescope, and has made nobles of the Montgolfier family. Humans flying in the sky, whatever will men think of next, Victoire?
I close now, my child, the kitchen awaits me. I hope all is well with you and Armand at L’Auberge des Anges.
Affectionately yours,
Claudine
***
/> I immediately took up my quill.
My dear Claudine,
I beg a thousand pardons for not answering your letter earlier. Several reasons, the first being that some months back, three of Armand’s children succumbed to la tuberculose. Despite all I could remember of my mother’s remedies, theirs were terrible deaths, all within days of each other, and it seemed we were constantly calling Père Joffroy out for the Last Rites in the morning, then again in the afternoon to lay the children to rest.
I am desperate for my poor husband, and try to comfort him. He has now lost seven children. Dieu merci Madeleine and the twins were spared the sickness.
Alas, this is not the only bad news from our hearth. Two weeks previous, the plough pierced Armand’s leg. The healing woman comes daily with her marshmallow cataplasms, but the wound is surrounded by an angry halo of swelling, and causes him dire pain.
Since Armand is no longer able to work the farm, his children — Léon, Joseph, Adélaïde, Pauline and even the two youngest boys — and I are working harder than ever. Everyone is anxious. I am terrified.
As in Paris, and all over we are hearing, the weather has been unkind to us too, made even worse as the previous spring rains never came to Lucie. Along with the great drought, this volcano killed much of the vines, fruit trees, animals and crops. The price of hay, wine and wheat is elevated. With little stock, some days I wonder how I will feed my family, let alone the inn guests. Though travellers are far fewer these days. As if, since they witnessed its fury, people are afraid of Nature, constantly staring at the sky and fearing what poison it will rain on them next. Or perhaps it is simply that the burden of feeding and sheltering families has become too much for men to stray far from their own hearths?
Finances are desperate once more and I fear la mélancolie stalks me again. As when I left Rubie, the darkness crouches on my shoulder like a feral cat whose hunger has driven it from the forest, wild and searching for prey. I am less and less able to fight it. Some days I can no longer even find joy with my sweet children.
