by Jean Teulé
He climbed on his convex legs through the darkness to go to knock on the door of the housemaid’s garret.
‘Rose!’
Taking his shoulder to the door, he forced the bolt and found her lying there.
‘Rose!’
He covered his face with his hands.
‘Rose!’
He went into the cook’s room to tell her that ‘Rose …’ but Thunderflower was in bed and feigning sleep. Once the former deputy to the prosecutor had softly closed the door again, she scraped her nails on the coarse fabric of her bolster, beside one ear: Squeak! Squeak! And she could hear the squeaking axle of a cart disappearing into the distance, weighed down by yet another set of mortal remains.
‘My dear and esteemed colleague Baudouin, I have asked you to come to Monsieur Bidard de la Noë’s house so as to hear your opinion about his housemaid, whose sudden death leaves me in a state of indecision.’
‘Let’s have a look, Pinault.’
The elderly doctor, called in to help by his young colleague who was hesitant to issue a burial licence, was wearing a grey cloth bonnet tight over his skull, beneath which longish white curls fell down the back of his neck. Thick moustaches, similarly snowy, bordered his austere face. He entered the drawing room and approached the dead woman, who was lying on a door supported by two trestles, with a sheet covering everything.
‘That’s the door between the drawing room and the kitchen, which we took off its hinges,’ explained the law professor. ‘I thought it preferable that Rose’s family should see her here just now, rather than in the attic where she … Hmm, hmm.’
Jean-Marie Pinault, a thin and clean-shaven doctor aged twenty-five, explained things to his moustached colleague. ‘I came to examine her yesterday afternoon because of the onset of digestive problems she suffered immediately after lunch. I found her racked by stomach pains and vomiting, but I wasn’t worried. First I advised a strong garlic infusion, because I suspected the presence of worms in the intestines, then I prescribed the application of leeches and five centigrammes of morphine acetate. I went off satisfied, and then this! I don’t understand what happened to her in the night. Have I made a mistake, Dr Baudouin?’
‘I don’t think so, young Pinault.’
‘What happened to her,’ an exasperated Thunderflower began explaining from her doorless kitchen, while she looked in her cupboards for the ingredients of a béchamel sauce, ‘what happened to her was she fell. You only have to see the lump on her head. That, in the state she was in yesterday … In any case, she was always saying, “I’m going to fall and kill myself someday.” Well, there you are, it’s happened!’
‘It is true that she had frequent falls and worried about that,’ the expert in crime confirmed to the two doctors. ‘Just last month she damaged her ankle, and still had it bandaged.’
‘That doesn’t explain the grotesquely swollen legs, nor the puffed-up throat,’ grumbled the old doctor, suspiciously. ‘There’s still some mystery to this.’
‘What have I done with my nutmeg? Ah, certainly there’s a mystery,’ the cook continued, with her back to them, getting a deep frying pan and heating it on the fire. ‘During the night I thought I heard a mournful voice calling Rose, and something scratching at her door. “It’s as if the Ankou were coming for her with his karriguel,” I thought to myself, and then I went back to sleep.’
‘So it’s the Ankou’s fault then?’ said the young Pinault with a surprised smile, sceptical as to this diagnosis, which he found rather unlikely.
‘My cook is more Breton than French,’ apologised the law professor at the University of Rennes. ‘Her nights are disturbed by tales from the countryside of Basse-Bretagne.’
‘You may mock as much as you like!’ scolded Thunderflower as she browned two soup spoons of butter and added almost the same amount of flour. ‘I happen to know that last night, at midnight, in the cemetery of the Caqueux, on the moor where I was a child, all the tombs must have opened. Their cursed chapel was certainly lit up, and more than a hundred skeletons came on their knees to hear Death preaching on the altar.’
She stirred the words of her mad tale vigorously, and the flour and butter in the frying pan with a wooden spatula, while milk rose in the bottom of a saucepan.
Thunderflower boiled with anger when she heard her employer order, ‘That’s enough, Hélène. And shut the kitchen door. Oh, there’s not one any more, confound it! Hmm, hmm. We’ve heard enough of your nonsense about legends concerning death.’
‘Nonsense? But, Monsieur Théophile, I live surrounded by shadows, korrigans and fairies. I see them more clearly than I see you. By day, by night, in my sleep, down in ditches, up in the air and the clouds, and I’m certain I’m in the right.’
Continuing her energetic mixing with the spatula to avoid lumps, she came into the drawing room and let rip.
‘Nonsense? It’s the doctors who talk nonsense. They don’t know anything about anything, and believe in nothing. For example, I know that there’s a sacred spring near Plouhinec where new mothers come and drink so they produce more milk. When a man drank its waters out of mockery, his breasts got larger. He could have acted as a wet nurse. But just try convincing a doctor of that!’ she exploded angrily, looking daggers at young Pinault, who had disbelieved her story of the Ankou coming for Rose. ‘Upsy-daisy, there goes my milk. Oh, there’s hardly any left. Too bad, I’ll put some water in.’
‘Hmm, hmm. I did warn you, she’s a Bas-Breton …’ joked Bidard de la Noë between the two doctors, ‘so not quite human. At all events, I’m going to have to find a new housemaid because I can’t manage without one.’
‘I’ve found you one who seems perfect, on the terrace of the bar by the river,’ exclaimed Thunderflower from the kitchen where she was pouring the milk and water in a steady stream on to her mixture in the frying pan.
‘Already, Hélène? Gracious, you’ve not been dragging your feet, have you?’
‘Her name is Françoise Huriaux. I’ll introduce her to you tomorrow.’
When she had poured in all the milky liquid, the cook replaced the mixture on a low heat and went back to stirring it constantly to achieve the even consistency she desired.
‘I have to wait until the sauce coats both sides of the spatula at once,’ she chanted to herself. ‘Where Rose is concerned,’ the woman from Morbihan continued, with her back to the drawing room and eyes fixed on the wall in front of her, ‘you might also think of poisoning.’
She herself said that! She was becoming overconfident, but she enjoyed playing with fire.
Elderly Dr Baudoin followed her lead. ‘I thought of that as well.’
‘I would have let you taste her last soup, so you could check,’ went on the servant from Plouhinec, ‘but I gave what was left to blind beggars who could donate their useless eyes to the Vilaine fish.’
‘Hmm, hmm?’ Bidard de la Noë almost choked. ‘The villain’s dish, you say?’
‘The Vilaine fish!’
‘Oh, I thought you said …’
Young Dr Pinault was preoccupied, holding a finger to his temple as he gazed at a piece of furniture that the dead woman had polished and that now reflected her corpse, while Thunderflower put on a show of regret.
‘That poor Rose Tessier. I used to call her Rouanen ar foin (Queen of the Meadows). I did love her, just as I loved that poor unfortunate who died at the Hôtel du Bout du Monde where I was unable to stay. Perrotte suddenly fell into her plate there.’
‘Ruptured diaphragm,’ Jean-Marie Pinault pronounced automatically, while the cook added salt and pepper to the sauce, muttering to herself. ‘Not forgetting a few pinches of nutmeg to give its distinctive taste. Well, this béchamel is more like a roux but it’s not life or death. Will your doctors be staying to dinner, Monsieur Théophile?’
The two doctors scratched their heads and thought of other things, while the crime specialist gave a cough: ‘Hmm, hmm.’
‘You clear your throat a lot, Professor,’
observed old Dr Baudoin. ‘The start of autumn catarrh, perhaps?’
‘No, it’s this business that …’
‘Madame? Madame! Hmm, hmm!’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Do please excuse me, Monsieur Bidard de la Noë. As I rang your doorbell, I was watching two old Normans on the river bank. We’ve not seen their like here for a long time. They’re asking passers-by for a lock of hair, then sticking them to their bodies with mud …’
‘Madame, have you disturbed me in order to describe picturesque scenes from local life?’
‘I am Françoise Huriaux’s mother; you engaged her as a maid on 1 December 1850.’
‘Ah? Then do come in. How is my pretty little housemaid?’
‘Better. In Dr Baudoin’s care at the Hôtel-Dieu, finally, after receiving the last rites, Françoise is recovering. Now she’s out of the coma, the girl we took for dead is coming back to life.’
‘For ever?’ This worried Thunderflower, who was sitting on a chair in the drawing room, slipping Rose Tellier’s glass necklace through the buttonhole on a cuff from one of Perrotte Macé’s blouses.
‘Hmm, hmm, Madame Huriaux, tell your daughter we are impatiently waiting for her to return here.’
‘Oh, yes,’ confirmed the cook. ‘Just let her come back …’
Outside, the spring light was slanting through the foliage of a bush, which was coming to life again, and in at the window where it hit Thunderflower’s sensitive eyes; she shaded them with her palm. Next she bent down to bundle the necklace joined to the blouse into her bag, which was bursting at the seams, and put it away in a cupboard. Then she pulled the curtains across the panes framing the show of the perpetual rebirth of plant life, which annoyed her.
‘I’ll bake Françoise a wonderful little cake to welcome her back. It won’t fail to make an impact.’
‘That’s kind of you, Hélène,’ said the law professor, approvingly.
‘Monsieur Bidard de la Noë,’ began the mother of the hospitalised maid, resolutely. ‘I’m here to inform you, this 18th day of May 1851, that I wish my daughter to give up her employment in your household. She is handing in her apron. Better that than give up her life.’
The future Mayor of Rennes was flabbergasted. His bowed legs took him to sit in his Louis XV armchair, making it appear to have six feet. He gestured his visitor to a chair.
‘Well now, I’m sure you’ll appreciate I’m surprised, Madame Huriaux. Your decision is unexpected, but, most importantly, is it Françoise’s own? She is of age, after all.’
‘Come now, Professor. You know my daughter. You must have realised that at the age of twenty-three she is humility and gentleness but also blissful ignorance. That slight, slender creature is devoid of her share of intelligence.’
‘She’s an imbecile …’ muttered Thunderflower, standing beside the reattached kitchen door, biting into the skin of a lime. ‘But she’ll be bloody lucky if she never comes back here,’ she concluded, swallowing the bitter juice that flowed into her mouth.
She put the citrus fruit down, only slightly injured, on a console table. ‘Don’t worry, Professor. I’ve already found you another maid. Her name is Rosalie Sarrazin.’
‘Ever more prompt to take action, Hélène!’ said her employer, admiringly. ‘Four cooks and two housemaids, one dead, inside a year – it’s not easy to find suitable domestics. Fortunately it’s working out with you. That’s something. But Madame Huriaux, you also spoke of “giving up her life”. When she’s with you, does Françoise consider me responsible for the sudden breakdown of her health, her dizziness, the difficulty she has in climbing stairs and even holding a needle? Is she of the opinion that I work her too hard? Does she complain about me?’
‘No, not about you.’
‘Then about whom?’
‘Could I speak to you in private, Monsieur Bidard de la Noë?’
Thunderflower took a deep breath. She was beginning to find the mother of the woman who had come back to life a bit too talkative. She would gladly have cooked her a little something to shut her up, but Bidard de la Noë ordered her, ‘Go into the kitchen and shut the door, Hélène.’
The servant obeyed. ‘Quit, quit, quit,’ she added in Bas-Breton, which might be translated as ‘OK, OK, I’m going.’ She got hold of a bottle of brandy hidden in one of the kitchen cupboards, and took a swig while, on the other side of the door, she could hear the blasted mother telling tales.
‘Lately Françoise would come home on a Sunday increasingly ill. She’d drink litres of water. Her hands and feet were swollen and she’d be tottering about.’
‘So the cook’s knocking back the brandy but it’s the maid who does the tottering.’ Thunderflower wiped her mouth with the back of her hand in amusement.
There was a lengthy silence on the part of the former deputy prosecutor, who responded only by saying, ‘Go on, Madame Huriaux.’
‘Often on her days off Françoise would tell me, “Oh, those herb bouillons of Hélène’s, I’ve had enough of them. Dear Mother, I can’t stomach any of what she serves up at meal times. When it’s time for lunch or dinner, rather than saying. ‘À table,’ she says, ‘À l’abattoir’. Once, when I complained about what she’d made for me, she retorted, ‘If you want to be fed like Monsieur, ask him to invite you into the dining room.’ When I prefer to go hungry, she goes into my garret and pours oil of vitriol on to my clothes, to burn them.” I fear that one day, Professor, you will be telling me my daughter has died in your household.’
Thunderflower was pacing up and down the kitchen, still holding the bottle, and stopped to look at her reflection in the distorting mirror of a hanging saucepan.
‘Gracious me, I’ve filled out a lot. That’s no good, I was always so dainty. What I’m turning into …’
At the age of forty-eight, she lamented, ‘We shouldn’t have to grow old. The people who cross paths with me are lucky. They escape this shipwreck – except that little trollop, of course.’
Taking another swig out of the bottle, she amused herself by imitating her employer’s speech tic.
‘So you’re drinking, hmm, hmm, Hélène?’
‘I worship pure water and its horrors from afar, Monsieur the specialist in crime. Doubtless I’ll pay for it some day, but all that is yet to come.’
Fat Thunderflower had to resign herself to the fact that her colleague was not leaving the household feet first. As she heard the law professor asking, ‘Madame Huriaux, are you sure of what you are telling me?’ she made herself a promise: ‘I shall have to get back on form with Rosalie Sarrazin.’
*
‘Rosalie! Rosalie! Rosalie!’
A door on the first-floor landing opened soundlessly, and a dressing-gowned Bidard de la Noë slipped into the darkness to listen to nails scratching and something murmuring on the second floor.
‘Rosalie I don’t know what there is in that garret. Rose died there, Françoise was very ill and you’re going to die in there. I wouldn’t like to sleep there. Rosalie this is the Ankou speaking to you, tonight Monday 30 June 1851. Rosalie …’
The specialist in crime slowly took a flannel belt out of the loops on his dressing gown, and rolled the two ends round his hands, as if ready to leap upstairs in the darkness to tie up the cook, and hand her over to the police. But he hesitated: ‘Perhaps it’s just some morbid Bas-Breton trick. One can’t take action on a mere suspicion.’
Tuesday 1 July 1851, 10 a.m. In the still hazy morning sun, young Dr Jean-Marie Pinault went inside to order something at the bar on Quai de la Vilaine, then joined his colleague Dr Baudoin, who was looking at the front page of Le Conciliateur on the terrace.
‘Thankfully it’s not Sunday, because with all the servants gathering here early on the Lord’s day, we’d never have got a seat under the tree. What’s in the paper? Is the news good?’
‘Er …’ Baudoin hesitated under his grey cloth bonnet, tight over his skull. ‘I’ve been reading the speech that Louis-Napoleon has just made at Châtellerault:
… I have placed myself resolutely at the head of the men of order. I am marching forward without a backward glance. To march in times such as ours, it is necessary to have both a motivation and a goal. My motivation is love for my country; my goal is to bring about the victory of religion over republican utopias, and to act in such a way that the good cause no longer trembles before error … Nothing good will come of this kind of language. Something is afoot, something that before the end of the year will cause great uproar and occupy our minds.’
As a waiter brought two cups of coffee to their table, Pinault replied, ‘And what do you think about the latest drama at Bidard de la Noë’s?’
‘In my opinion,’ sighed the chief doctor at the Hôtel-Dieu, stroking his moustache, ‘the suspicion voiced discreetly after the death of Rose Tessier has become a certainty. And since last night Rosalie Sarrazin also died from ingesting a toxin, there’s a poisoner hiding in that house. Events have moved on, and I’m coming back definitively to my initial idea not only in the case of Rose but also in those of Françoise Huriaux and of course Rosalie Sarrazin. The symptoms, their sudden progress, our vain attempts to halt them, the very nature of the sufferings to which the two unfortunate women succumbed, everything points to poisoning.’
‘So what do you conclude, colleague?’
‘After our cup of coffee, young Pinault, our business on this terrace will be at an end. Our place will be in the office of the state prosecutor, alerting the judicial authorities.’
In a large office with walls and doors dripping with friezes and silly gilded mouldings, above a huge black marble fireplace dating from the reign of the other madman of Saint Helena – how many was it he’d bumped off again? – the hands of the bronze clock showed eleven. Baudoin rushed in, having first taken off his cap.
‘Monsieur Malherbe, for a long time I have kept to myself not remorse but regret over the death of a servant in the house of your former deputy, Bidard de la Noë. Today, along with my young colleague Pinault, I have certified the death of another servant in this same house. Both these women were poisoned. My colleague and I are convinced of this. Even if no trace of poison were to be found in the entrails of the victims, we would still believe it was poisoning.’
