The Poisoning Angel

by Jean Teulé

  Guern

  In the church, death flitted among hideous grotesques and bizarre, mocking faces, and paintings depicting tears and agonies, thorns and nails hung all around. Cries could also be heard.

  ‘If you don’t take my child’s fever away, I’ll whip you like a mule!’

  ‘Heal me, or watch out for a beating!’

  ‘Here, take that!’

  In a wall niche stood the polychrome plaster figure of a Breton saint who, when he failed to answer prayers, was roundly whipped.

  ‘Saint-Yves-de-Vérité, during your lifetime you were just. Show that you still are, by God!’

  ‘The profits of my shop are almost nil. It’s in your interests to sort out my business.’

  ‘I’d warned you I didn’t want the Le Rouzic lad to get me pregnant, but it’s been two months now and I still haven’t had the decorators in! Do you want a slap?’

  It was a strange form of devotion, where the adulterous wife threatened to slap the coloured statue of the sturdy saint. Others proceeded to action. Fragments of plaster broke away and paint chipped off under the leather straps. Oh, the cries coming from Breton heads and chests harder than iron! Their voices howled like the wind. Beneath the lofty vault with its calm swirls of muted light, a superstitious din resounded: a mixture of Catholic faith and heathen practices. The people were transposing on to Saint Yves miracles worked by idols of times past, demanding them with whip strokes, to the great displeasure of a priest who appeared just then.

  ‘Will you stop that! It’s madness.’

  The rector came running, clutching his liturgical cross and threatening to beat them with it as if it were a club.

  ‘Watch out. My temper is fraying, my stomach’s rumbling and my patience is wearing very thin.’

  Fat and pink as could be, he hitched up his cassock, and berated his flock. ‘Get out of here, you itinerant beggars. Saint Yves doesn’t need trouble from you.’

  A voice argued, ‘That saint is so often absent-minded, lazy or difficult that he doesn’t do anything unless he’s threatened with violence.’

  ‘Be quiet!’ ordered the priest. ‘And get rid of that Bas-Breton gullibility. Everything that doesn’t belong strictly, exclusively and abundantly to the Roman Catholic Church must be thrown down the pan.’

  Someone else protested, ‘But, abbé Le Drogo, your little outburst is both laudable and reprehensible at the same time. It’s fine for a priest, but coming from a Breton it’s bad. In trying to suppress this belief you’re diminishing the soul of the Celts. You’re throwing our custom to the winds along with the dust of Saint Yves.’

  Abbé Le Drogo, with cheeks plump as a pig’s bottom, and who lived by Jesus alone, insisted: ‘Hitting Saint Yves’s statue is just a nonsense! We should breathe nothing but God, in the same way we breathe the fresh air through an open door.’

  He lifted high his avenging cross amid the odours of incense. The parishioners scuttled off like deer towards the door of the church.

  Back in the dining room at his presbytery, which was done up like a cuckoo clock, the abbé Le Drogo declared, ‘Oh, those Bretons who resist the cross and hit Saint Yves – I’ve given them a reception they won’t forget in a hurry. Just let other pilgrims of that sort turn up to whip the saint and I’ll be greeting them with a blow in the teeth from a censer.’

  ‘Calm down, dear boy,’ advised a mild, elderly man, seated alone at the end of a table almost completely set for the coming lunch. ‘Let these people shake off their wretchedness a little. Understand them. They must be really desperate and not know where else to turn before they resort to this idolatry. We may find it stupid, certainly, but when one is completely at a loss, one is ready to clutch at anything, isn’t that so?’

  ‘No! We pray to God, and that’s it. We leave Saint Yves in peace. Maman’s not ready to dine, then?’

  ‘Louise is with your new cook and the two daily women.’

  Still muttering – ‘After the spring we’ve had – there’s never been deeper poverty caused by inclement weather – the raving minds of the ruined peasants will form a huge midden. That will make for a strange summer for Saint Yves!’ – the starving priest pushed open the kitchen door to demand, ‘Are we finally going to be able to eat?’

  It was the priest’s mother, Louise Le Drogo, who turned to her son and replied, ‘But, Marcel, we’ve been waiting for you while you were at the church.’

  ‘I see the écuelles are missing from the table,’ the priest yelled at his two daily servants. ‘Marguerite André, Françoise Jauffret, do I have to do everything myself – set the table and save Saint Yves?’

  ‘Ah, it’s still that matter of the statue that has put you in a foul mood,’ realised the rector’s mother. ‘As for our écuelles, as you call our plates, rather than bringing in the big serving dish for everyone to put their fingers into, Hélène is suggesting she serves up in the kitchen. In these times of infection, when there’s talk of the cholera returning, I do believe it’s more hygienic.’

  Near the window, Thunderflower pulled the curtain back and watched birds flying in the sky. ‘Especially since crows circling over a village mean disease.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  The grumpy cleric’s mood softened at his mother’s touch as she accompanied him to the table, caressing his tonsure, saying, ‘I know how highly you thought of Anna Jégado, who’s gone to the new rector at Bubry to replace the aunt who died so suddenly, but her younger sister, whom you’ve taken in, seems very good as well. I do believe she’s a pearl.’

  The pearl being spoken about in the dining room had two of them hooked to her ears – river mussel pearls, which she had had set in cheap steel pendants.

  Surrounded by griddles for making pancakes, pots, milk cans, saucepans, skimmers, ladles, a rag … Thunderflower began to fill pewter plates with a light gruel with honey, each topped with a piece of delicately grilled black pudding. It was then that she noticed another plate, made of blue porcelain, hanging on a wall. The cook grabbed it and placed it in front of her. From behind, Thunderflower could be seen spending a little longer stirring the gruel in that one.

  ‘Right, who’ll have this blue plate with the picture of a little Breton girl dancing on the bottom? First I’ll give it to Joseph Le Drogo, then to Louise Le Drogo. Next it’ll go to …’

  The priest of Guern was at his wits’ end.

  ‘Dear Christ, what a shower of shit.’

  From a priest’s mouth, this was disconcerting.

  ‘What else am I going to have to bear?’

  The man, who had been stretching sleepily at daybreak to yawn out his prayers, was now, at the end of the morning, ready to knock down anything that got in his way.

  ‘Saint Yves, how could you allow this to happen?’

  Beneath the vault of the church, opposite the statue in its niche, Le Drogo was bathed in tears.

  ‘First of all my father. He fell ill on 20 June and died on the 28th. He was very old, admittedly, but I didn’t expect this to happen. He was in fine fettle for his age. Next my mother, who succumbed on 5 July. Yet she wasn’t one to go without putting up a fight. I’ve a good mind to rip your tongue and your eyes out, Saint Yves, and impale you on a spike!’

  Inside the Catholic edifice, the parishioners present were stupefied to see their rector tearing strips off the polychrome statue of the Breton saint as he whipped it. ‘Bastard! Swine! Here, take that in the face! You’ve certainly earned it.’

  His despair had burst its banks. In the emptiness of the stained-glass windows, heavy with silence, the priest, with his bare fingers, was looking for answers in the reflections.

  ‘But why, Saint Yves? Why?’

  The darkness seemed to bark round about him. ‘I was so wretched that my sister sent me her seven-year-old daughter to brighten my days a little. And then Marie-Louise Lindevat too, on 17 July? You must be mad, Saint Yves!’

  Sorrow rushed into the priest’s soul, howling like wind in deserted castles. ‘M
y niece, taken just now as suddenly as if she’d been struck with an axe. Her death was something diabolical. The way that child looked on the infinite … And somewhere there’ll be one more little grave.’

  The abbé Le Drogo – Breton through and through – took hold of the saint by the shoulders and shook him violently. ‘You knew how much I loved them! When each of these three fell seriously ill, I came in secret to order you to save them. Take this in your stupid face, you idle saint. What good are you, you useless creature?’

  Other insults rotted in his mouth. ‘What a fate. It’s enough to make a man hang himself.’

  He swung his liturgical cross against the coloured statue until it came adrift and flew into a thousand pieces on the slabs.

  ‘Saint Yves is dead! He’s been unseated. The priest has destroyed him with his stick!’

  While the flock ran out of the church shouting to alert the whole village, the abbé Le Drogo went back to the presbytery kitchen where Thunderflower was singing to herself: ‘Which day servant shall I give the blue plate to? Ah, Marguerite André.’

  ‘Marguerite André on 23 August, then Françoise Jauffret on 28 September. Both of my day servants.’ The priest of Guern was at the table in the dining room at the presbytery, alone. He unfolded his napkin from pure habit as he had lost his appetite (a new phenomenon in this glutton, and he had slimmed down a lot). Thunderflower came into the room carrying the blue plate. Even when the pretty servant walked it was as if she were dancing. She placed the steaming plate in front of her employer.

  ‘It’s one of those soupes aux herbes I’m so good at making. It will give your heart a good clean out.’

  Prematurely aged by his suffering, and holding his head in his hands, the rector wept into his soup. He was worn out by grief and felt profoundly downcast. ‘Isn’t it beyond comprehension, and simply heartbreaking? What do you think, Hélène?’

  ‘To be honest, what do you expect me to say? Life is short.’

  ‘I’m full to overflowing with horror. What day is it?’

  ‘It’s 2 October,’ the soubrette by his side informed him.

  The abbé Le Drogo dipped a spoon into his soup, and lifted it up, blowing on the steam. He opened his mouth and slipped the spoon in, like the host, amen.

  Anna Jégado, in a violet mantell ganu (Breton mourning cape) was three years older than her sister, Thunderflower. She had come from Bubry for the funeral and now stood in the kitchen, with the blue plate in her hands. ‘It was very kind of you, little sister, to have made that for me before we go to the cemetery. The abbé Le Drogo was very kind as well.’

  ‘Yes, he certainly was, no question about that.’

  ‘Aaargh!’ Breaking out in a sudden sweat, Anna began to sway, overcome by dizziness. The kitchen walls were spinning, and the blue plate went flying through the air. Thunderflower rushed to catch it while her older sister collapsed on the floor.

  ‘I’ll have to hang it up again. It was almost dropped yesterday.’

  The stunningly attractive cook in the presbytery at Guern was holding the blue plate up against the wall, feeling for the nail to hang it on, but she fluffed it and the plate slipped and fell, smashing on the floor. Watched in silence by Dr Martel and the Mayor of Guern, Thunderflower gathered up the remains.

  ‘That said, it would have been of no use to anyone now – I certainly shan’t be eating out of it.’

  Dr Martel could not get over the shock – not of the plate falling but the carnage.

  ‘What unbelievable cataclysm can have descended on this house in the space of one summer to wipe out almost all its inhabitants? The wind of death has passed through the presbytery. Perhaps it’s the return of the …’ The doctor hesitated to say the word aloud.

  ‘Do you think so?’ the mayor asked, understanding his meaning.

  While Thunderflower untied her apron, Dr Martel recalled: ‘Last autumn the cholera claimed more than a hundred lives in Rennes, before the epidemic came to an abrupt end with the frost – it spreads better in the heat. Do these initial deaths, in the summer at the presbytery, herald the curse’s passage through Morbihan?’

  Into one of the sides of her bag, on the kitchen table, the cook was tidying away two handkerchiefs embroidered with different initials, three napkins, a rosary, a child’s doll …

  ‘And if your fears turn out to be justified, Doctor?’ the mayor wanted to know.

  ‘Well then, Le Cam, we’ll have to get used to it the way we get used to bed bugs or scabies. And if we don’t manage to get used to it, then we’ll needs die of fear.’

  The girl from Plouhinec slipped her arms into the sleeves of a coat and buttoned it up. She was adjusting her collar when the mayor suggested, ‘I think it would be wise to refrain from mentioning it for fear of triggering a general panic.’

  Marcel shared his opinion. ‘It is indeed preferable not to terrify the populace.’

  ‘Right, that’s me ready,’ said Thunderflower, leather bag over her shoulder. ‘May I go?’

  ‘What? Yes, yes …’ the mayor said hurriedly.

  The cook left the presbytery. She walked under the dim vaults of the church, emerging into daylight through the porch. At the top of the steps she looked at Guern. It was market day with its wealth of honey, butter, leather, tallow and cloth. When people saw her, they called to others, ‘Look! It’s the one who didn’t croak at the priest’s house! She’s alive.’

  A crowd formed around Thunderflower. ‘Why didn’t you snuff it?’

  ‘God saved her. She’s a saint,’ yelled someone.

  The fair lady of Plouhinec was considered an extraordinary being. Her fame was broadcast noisily through the streets. Worried, emotional farmers went down on their knees. It was pitiable! Crowds of other folk came running. Like a flock of scavenging birds, they fell upon the servant, a new figure on whom to focus their attention and curiosity.

  Since there was no longer a Saint Yves in the church, she was the one people touched, and of whom they made demands: ‘Sainte Yvette, do something to help me!’

  ‘Keep the weevils away from my wheat!’

  ‘I’m having amorous relations with my neighbour but I don’t want to find myself pregnant. I’m counting on you, eh; you were saved by a miracle.’

  ‘You’ve been saved by a miracle, so you can work miracles, can’t you?’

  Cripples made their way on their crutches, filled with hope. Thunderflower recognised two Norman accents. ‘Can’t you shtraighten my arm and fix my jaw?’ ‘Make my eye grow back!’ they begged. The wigmakers were in the shafts of their covered cart, pulling it themselves.

  From the roof of a house across the road, a tightrope-walking angel of cast iron descended on a cable, carrying a flaming wand. It was a contraption designed to light the pile of straw at the heart of a bonfire hastily got up in honour of Sainte Yvette. Alas, the angel teetered during its journey, and fell on to the wigmakers’ cover, which went up in flames. The lettering of ‘À la bouclette normande’ burnt away while Thunderflower pressed through the crowd, dispensing copious greetings left and right, but complaining: ‘The annoying thing now is that I have to find another situation …’

  Meanwhile the Normans came rushing past with buckets of water, yelling, ‘Sodding Bretons!’

  Bubry

  ‘Then I accept your request for employment … Hélène. That is your name, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur l’abbé Lorho,’ answered Thunderflower, who recognised the door in the kitchen, which still had fixed to it the piece of mirror in front of which her blond hair had first been covered by a headdress.

  The young chasubled priest who was speaking to her had a slight stoop. He unfolded his gold spectacles and put them on his nose before turning towards the other, glass door opening on to the courtyard.

  ‘Over there, cutting flowers in front of the presbytery gate, the thin woman you can see with the dry, pockmarked face, that is my sister, Jeanne-Marie Lorho, a very devout maiden lady. She doesn’t miss a si
ngle Mass. Beside her is my eighteen-year-old niece, Jeanne-Marie Kerfontain, who’s also very pious. You’ll be our only servant.’

  The girl from Plouhinec ran her finger over a very common piece of varnished pottery on the table, fired using poor rushes. ‘That wasn’t there before, in the abbé Riallan’s day.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The priest took off his spectacles and shook hands with Thunderflower to seal the agreement.

  ‘Since there’s no one left alive at the presbytery at Guern where you’ve come from, and your older sister, Anna, who worked here died there too, I’m giving you her place in this clerical household where you will feel at home.’

  ‘Thank you, Monsieur l’abbé Lorho. I’ll do my best to serve you well, all three of you if I can manage it.’

  Seated demurely in the church at Bubry, Thunderflower was saying the rosary during the early afternoon Mass.

  ‘Maman … Monsieur Michelet who drove me to my first place … Godmother …’

  It was the rosary she had brought from Guern. Hélène Jégado’s fingers weren’t the ones that had worn down the boxwood beads that followed one another: ‘Tante Marie-Jeanne, Yann Viltansoù …’

  She gazed at the light of the candles, and listened to the indistinct voice of the gold-spectacled preacher behind the altar. It was the first time she had seen him exercising his ministry. The people he was addressing dissolved into Jesus. The hubbub of their prayers made the church walls sweat, while Thunderflower continued to herself: ‘The abbé Le Drogo’s father, then his mother …’

  To the right of the porch, a harvester made so bold – during the service too! – as to sharpen his scythe on the edge of the holy water stoup carved out of a menhir, because that would bring good luck for the next crop. The sounds it made mingled with the words of the priest, who was no longer put out by them.

  ‘Tsiing! Tsiing!’

  The sound of the blade grating reminded the girl from Plouhinec of the Ankou’s scythe.