The Poisoning Angel

by Jean Teulé

  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.

  ‘I’ve lost my whole family. Their house has completely emptied in little more than a week …’

  He was lamenting to the President of the society of good works, who had come to offer support in his cruel trial. She said in surprise, ‘Pierre-Charles, I don’t see your cook, who was also absent from the burial, I think.’

  ‘Yes, Hélène vanished at first light without even asking for her wages, but you can see her point of view. Given all the superstitions being heaped on her, and people’s fear of her, that beautiful woman chose to keep out of sight. If she’d come to the cemetery for this latest burial, just imagine what the villagers would have done to her. In Basse-Bretagne there’s such a strong belief that evil characters from legend really exist.’

  Squeak … squeak … As she walked along the road leading to Auray, with her bag over one shoulder, the road stretching ahead of her, but her thoughts elsewhere, Thunderflower suddenly heard a sound like a squeaking axle behind her.

  Squeak, squeak.

  ‘That’s not the noise of a carriage drawing nearer and about to overtake me. I’d have heard it in the distance.’

  Squeak, squeak.

  The shrill creaking was growing ever louder, ever closer. It was deafening, echoing even close up.

  Squeak, squeak!

  ‘Is it the Ankou’s cart?’

  The girl from Plouhinec turned round. There was nothing behind her. The servant continued on her way.

  ‘Oh, it’s me then.’

  Auray

  Squeak, squeak!

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Hélène, that you keep making that noise like a squeaking axle with your teeth while clutching your forehead? Headache?’

  ‘It’s because, Mother Superior, I so much want to cook for all the Sisters of Charity of Saint-Louis at the Convent of the Eternal Father.’

  ‘Oh, no, don’t start that again, Hélène. For more than a year now I’ve been telling you, we already have a cook.’

  ‘Sister Athanase, let me take her place just for one meal. It’s really important to me.’

  The Mother Superior, a tall commanding presence in the middle of the convent common room, stretched wide the sleeves of her severe dark brown habit and raised her voice to Thunderflower, who sat hunched up on a spartan bench.

  ‘Hélène, when you came to offer your services at the Eternal Father, just as we were looking for a maid, you accepted this job inside the convent because you wished to flee the outside world for a time, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Alas, I had an unfair reputation for making too much work for pharmacists by destroying human bodies … Well, I shall just have to nourish you in my own way. Without my recipes I’m fading away, withering like a flower deprived of water.’

  ‘I’m not going to give in to your whim, Hélène.’

  ‘You call it a whim when what I’m talking about is a mission.’

  ‘Oh, yes, the great mission of boiling three boxes of carrots and putting a dozen rabbits on a spit for a convent,’ guffawed the Mother Superior, her chest bouncing and, with it, the wooden cross hanging from a string around her neck.

  ‘I’d make baby Jesuses out of sugar for you to swallow as communion wafers.’

  ‘Don’t argue, Hélène. Get your broom and pail and go and clean the sisters’ rooms. You will also cut a new altar cloth from the fabric that abbé Olliveau brought yesterday. And don’t forget to dust the musical instrument in the common room. That’s something you too often forget. Quick now!’

  The servant went off, trailing her broom. From a window she noticed pine trees communing with the stars. It also seemed as if the wind were whispering messages.

  *

  ‘Sister Athanase, Sister Athanase! Look at my nun’s habit!’

  ‘What are you doing, Sister Sophie, with your breasts bare for all to see?’

  ‘I found my robe like this when I woke up, with two holes cut out of the chest.’

  ‘Sister Athanase, Sister Athanase! Look at me with my back to you.’

  ‘Have you taken leave of your senses, Sister Marie-Thérèse, coming to show me your bare backside in the common room? Turn round to face me! No, don’t turn round. Behind you, Christ hanging on the wall above the harmonium might see your buttocks.’

  ‘Someone’s cut a big round piece out of the lower back.’

  ‘Sister Athanase, a triangle’s been taken out of the front of my habit, right in the middle.’

  ‘And here’s Sister Augustine come to show me her bush and we’ve not even had breakfast yet. Will you turn round, Sister Marie-Thé— No, not you! Sister Augustine. Oh, my goodness gracious!’

  Once she had seen, among other things, a nun’s habit cut very short like a chemise and asserted, ‘You’ve got good legs, Sister Agnes,’ and heard Sister Madeleine claiming, ‘Don’t you think I look like an African savage with my habit all cut into strips?’ the Mother Superior could take no more of the crazy fashion parade, and exploded, ‘Go and get changed, all of you.’

  ‘We can’t, Sister Athanase. Not one outfit’s been spared.’

  ‘It’s because you don’t take proper care of your things!’ yelled the Mother Superior, holding her arms up to heaven, while Sister Denise, bare armed, warned her, ‘The bottom of your habit’s been crenellated. You look like a fortress tower that’s been turned upside down.’

  ‘Oh, which of you has carried out this vestimentary attack in the convent?’ thundered the woman in charge of the Sisters of Charity of Saint-Louis.

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t a sister,’ murmured a nun.

  ‘Then, who?’

  ‘The maid’s been acting rather strangely in recent days.’

  All the nuns, each with missal in hand, crowded around the Mother Superior, almost stifling her as they gossiped in low voices. ‘How many times have we come upon her speaking to someone invisible, stretching out her arms to them?’ said one, whose buttocks were exposed. Another, bare breasted, backed her up. ‘It’s true that there’s some imaginary being she gives a very strange name to and whose presence she seems to be checking on.’ The one with the al fresco bush recalled, ‘Yesterday I heard her telling it she wanted to model herself on it at all costs.’ Another, all in strips of cloth, explained, ‘It seems she’s the only one who can hear this great mysterious voice and her missi
on is to act as a channel for it.’ The Sisters of Charity of Saint-Louis, who spoke to God personally on a daily basis, were shocked rigid by the servant’s madness.

  A great silence reigned in the common room when suddenly a nun who went to say a prayer aloud let out a cry: ‘Look, my missal! Oh! On every page with engravings, the faces of Christ and of the Virgin have been torn out.’

  ‘Mine too!’

  ‘And mine!’

  ‘Same here.’

  All the nuns were aghast at the books in which the heads of their Christian idols had been cut off.

  ‘It’s witchcraft.’

  ‘Be quiet! Don’t say that word, not ever!’ interrupted the Mother Superior in her dress with battlements – a fortress impregnable by devilish superstitions. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about this. Each of you, take a bowl of milk and go and have breakfast modestly in your rooms while I think things over in my study.’

  Cleared of exhibitionist nuns, the common room at last fell silent again. Through the door at the far end, Thunderflower entered with her broom and a full pail. She paused beneath the Christ hanging on the wall when through another, half-open door a yell was heard. Sister Athanase came running at top speed, the jagged edge of her habit flapping at her ankles, and moaned, ‘What next? There’s been nothing but uproar here since dawn. Lucky it’s a place for contemplation, isn’t it?’

  ‘She … she … she,’ stammered a nun, pointing at the maid at the end of the room. ‘She’s em … em … emptied in the instru—’

  ‘What then? Out with it!’

  ‘She’s emptied the slops pail into the harmonium.’

  Behind the musical instrument whose lid was still up, Thunderflower put the iron container down on the tiles, and did not deny it.

  The Mother Superior was one of those people who continually get upset over a trifle but stay terribly calm when the situation is very serious. She walked towards the servant. ‘You dare to empty a slops pail into the harmonium of the Eternal Father? Who or what are you? You’re certainly not human.’

  ‘Humans hold no sway over me, none at all,’ replied the accused, brazenly. ‘No humiliation will lay me low, no reef will sink me, and no hammer flatten me. I cannot be destroyed.’

  ‘Get out of this convent, Hélène. News of you will spread round all the religious places of Morbihan and you’ll never find another situation. However, I shall say nothing in town about the extraordinary events that have occurred here, because you’re quite capable of denying all involvement and then the peasants would sit round the fire of an evening, saying that it was korrigans, fairies, sirens, or hairy Poulpiquets who did it – or goodness knows what other legendary creature of this Celtic land.’

  The closing words of this speech did not exactly please Thunderflower, who had been nourished on precisely this enchanted but terrifying milk of evening storytelling, and on the energy of the menhirs against which she had leant as a child to feel the soul of the standing stones. Something like a rumble of pebbles rose, swirling up in the water, from deep in her throat. ‘Our legends, or even the comic routines of fairground Harlequins, make perfect sense compared to the sermons, and jokes of priests and Mother Superiors …’

  ‘Get out!’

  ‘What, that creature’s still in Auray? And, what’s worse, she’s with your parents-in-law, Dr Doré?’

  In a dining room belonging to a bourgeois family with private means, which contained a bird cage alive with the sounds of canaries and greenfinches, the table was splendidly set for dinner.

  ‘Which creature, abbé Olliveau? Who are you speaking about?’

  Around twenty guests, glass in hand, exchanged toasts and walked around before they went into ecstasies over the dishes laid out on the long white tablecloth – trout, lovely eels, mallards, and side dishes in sauces of various colours.

  ‘Dr Doré, I’m talking about the girl I saw at the ovens when I passed the open door of the kitchen.’

  ‘Hélène?’

  ‘That’s it. What’s her surname?’

  ‘How should I know? No one asks a servant their last name. The first one’s enough. I believe she told me only that she was from Kerhordevin in Plouhinec.’

  The subtle odours of the game and the freshwater fish tickled the nostrils of gourmet dignitaries anxious to take their places at table, while the abbé Olliveau took the doctor’s arm and led him to the end of the room.

  ‘Doctor, like every priest in Morbihan I’ve made an oath to the Mother Superior of the Eternal Father, and so I’m not going to tell you what your Hélène did at the convent, but if you knew … I’ll say only that for years now, in every presbytery and village where that girl has been a cook, people have died in unexplained ways. She uses witchcraft to cut down humans.’

  ‘Witchcraft? Father, surely it’s a distressing anachronism for such an odious expression to come from the mouth of a cleric?’

  ‘There are so many bad rumours about her.’

  ‘Pah, they’re just made up. She gave us excellent references – from a priest, as it happens. And we have nothing but praise for her work. I’ve even asked her if she knows another cook of the same calibre for the Mayor of Pontivy, who despairs of ever finding one to suit.’

  ‘She has an infirmity, a sort of horrible goitre. People even claim she’s the Ankou.’

  ‘Monsieur le curé, you’re sunk in the prejudices of a bygone age.’

  A lady wearing the violet stockings of a married woman walked past the fire crackling in the grate. Apparently the mistress of the house, she had dotted her headdress with as many little mirrors as she had hundreds of livres of income. Reflecting the candle flames, the tiny looking-glasses shot rays of light all over the dining room. She shone like a lighthouse. In black velvet, a sign of wealth (she had a lot of velvet in her dress), and with her shoulders covered in a shawl with a brightly coloured foliage pattern, this ever so proper lady sat down at the head of the table and summoned Dr Doré.

  ‘Come and eat, Son-in-law. Just seeing the marvels Hélène has prepared for us is making my mouth water. When we envisaged this meal, which is so important for your ambition to be mayor, she promised us a banquet that would go down in the annals of Auray. I see now that was no lie. Now, let’s be seated.’

  ‘We’re coming, Mother-in-law.’

  But in his panic, the priest held him back with both hands, insisting, ‘Send your cook away right now! So many tombs have been opened and closed on her path already, and more will open this evening if you don’t act.’

  ‘The meal’s ready.’

  ‘Have it thrown away.’

  ‘You can’t mean that. The support of my guests is indispensable if I want to become the chief magistrate of Auray. How can I go and tell them, “Actually, I’ve changed my mind. You can all go home hungry”?’

  ‘I’m telling you, all hell’s going to be let loose by this girl. And tomorrow I’ll be saying the Office of the Dead for you all.’

  The son-in-law raised his eyebrows at the prediction.

  ‘But are you sure it’s her, this monster of yours? You don’t even know her surname, and Hélène’s—’

  ‘I saw her when I took fabric to the Eternal Father for their altar cloth,’ the priest said emphatically. ‘Prevent the massacre while there’s still time, and send the cook packing.’

  Dr Doré looked at his guests, already seated at table. They were unfolding their napkins in front of a pretty porcelain dish filled with a delicate green soup, which had been cooling for a moment or two. They were tapping on their spoons, to hasten the arrival of the priest and future mayor so they could start. At the head of the table, his mother-in-law could wait no longer. ‘Right, I’m going to begin, otherwise it’ll be cold.’

  She raised her spoon to her mouth and was repeating the gesture when her son-in-law cried out, ‘No! Don’t eat it, Mother-in-law!’

  ‘And why not? This soupe aux herbes is delicious.’

  They were all gathered round the mother-in
-law in bed in her room. She was foaming at the mouth, and jerking about as if being electrocuted.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  She gave a hiccup and died.

  ‘Where’s Hélène?’ the priest asked her son-in-law.

  ‘Well now, I don’t know. You told me to send her away. I did so on the spot, as I handed her her bag.’

  ‘We’ve got to find her!’

  ‘Oh, make up your mind, abbé Olliveau.’

  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.’