Thunderflower hurried from one bedroom to the next. On the poorly lit staircase of the narrow house, she muttered, ‘I’m sure I’m going to fall and kill myself.’ She went from the one sick woman in bed on the first floor to the other on the second. ‘First Jeanne-Marie Leboucher, now for her daughter, Perrine.’
On sturdy, untiring legs she climbed back up the stairs. Both the mother and her twenty-year-old child were critically ill. How sad!
‘It’s such a pity to go to so much trouble for nothing,’ lamented Thunderflower, ‘since they’re both going to die.’
‘How can you know that?’ asked the doctor, bag in hand, on the first-floor landing. He was wearing a wide-skirted coat and a beaver-skin hat.
‘Well, Dr Toursaint, all your remedies do have the opposite effect from the one you expect,’ the servant replied helpfully. ‘With both the dying women, the cures are behaving counter to their known properties.’
‘That’s true, but …’ Toursaint said defensively. ‘I’m only a doctor in a Bas-Breton village, not a bigwig in Rennes! What’s that white powder you’re mixing in that glass, Hélène?’
‘It’s from the bottle you told me to get from the pharmacy.’
‘Oh, yes, the quinine sulphate to treat fevers.’
In the leather gaiters that went out by night, even in winter and along the worst roads, trying to bring help with the little knowledge he had, Dr Toursaint went into the first-floor bedroom.
‘How are you feeling, Madame Leboucher?’
‘Since even the water from Melusine’s spring, which you prescribed, hasn’t cured me – I’ve drunk from it three times at midnight – I’m giving up remedies.’
‘Now now, Jeanne-Marie, what’s all this? I think you simply have an attack of acrodynia, an illness that is causing the intense pins and needles in your limbs and the violent burning in your stomach. But, I say, what about your cook, her devotion and how involved she is in what happens to you?’
‘Thank goodness Hélène’s here. I don’t know what would have become of us without her. For more than sixty hours now she’s been looking after Perrine and me, without eating any of the food she’s brought us, and with no sleep. She lavishes us with continual attentions.’
Speaking of attentions, Hélène was just then administering them to the Leboucher daughter in bed on the floor above.
‘Look, here’s a glass of stuff you have to drink on the orders of the doctor I passed on the stairs. I think he called it quinine sulphate.’
Perrine struggled to swallow even a mouthful but none the less ordered, ‘Give me the rest to drink.’
‘Yes, certainly.’
No sooner had the brew been consumed than a sudden pallor came over her and her lips shrank back. There was an abrupt increase in the size of her pupils, and her eyes grew wider. Her eyelids began to twitch wildly. Seated at the bedside, Thunderflower could see her own outline in the foamy bubbles appearing at the edge of the invalid’s mouth. Then she walked back and forth in front of the window, the daylight casting her pretty shadow on to the bedroom floor at each turn, and all the while she told the patient a legend: a knight returning from a journey came upon a woman shivering with fever at the roadside. He lifted her up on to his horse and carried her into the town. It was the plague. Thunderflower came over to Perrine again and, leaning in close to her, predicted the future: ‘You’re going to die, my girl.’
In the room below, Dr Toursaint was absentmindedly reading the letter of recommendation the servant had brought, which was on the mantelshelf. There he read: ‘Hélène Jégado is an excellent cook and my one regret is that I cannot keep her until I die.’ Just then he heard a cry, piercing as a horn, through the ceiling. He rushed for the stairs and pushed open the door of the second bedroom to find Perrine dead in her bed, with the cover pulled up over her face.
‘I’m more doubtful about medicine than I’ve ever been,’ he moaned, while Thunderflower went downstairs to the mother.
On the staircase she half opened her lips, revealing small, bright white teeth, like those of a proverbial she-wolf.
‘What was that cry that sent the doctor running, Hélène?’ asked Jeanne-Marie Leboucher, struggling to sit up in bed.
‘It was your daughter who …’
‘Who?’
‘Who.’
For the mother in her current state, the shock was too great. There was nothing to stop her sinking into the abyss. Her maternal love stumbled through the burning of this hell and as her head fell back onto the pillow she grew radiant.
‘Well then, let’s sleep the last sleep. God will take care of our awakening …’
‘That’s it,’ said Thunderflower, encouragingly. ‘That’s what you have to say.’
Next there was a long rattling noise in Jeanne-Marie Leboucher’s chest, before she turned her face to the wall and became motionless by the time the doctor arrived – too late.
‘The lettuce water she was given, and the gomme syrup won’t have helped at all, then. Perhaps it was typhoid fever.’
The cook got hold of a pitcher, blew out the candles and covered a bowl with a cloth, to Pierre-Charles Toursaint’s astonishment.
‘What are you doing, Hélène?’
‘When someone has breathed their last, you have to put out the candles while the soul passes, and also be careful that it doesn’t turn the milk or drown in the jug of water. Right, that’s done. I’m worn out. What I really need now is to go out for a pick-me-up.’
Outside, under her lace-trimmed headdress, Thunderflower was walking behind a cart that had lost its cover, and whose charred and twisted metal hoops had suffered a fire. In front of the vehicle, each pulling one shaft, two Normans were complaining about the state of the Breton road, their accent ringing out: ‘All the Locminé roadsh need to be redone.’
‘You can’t take one step after dark without risking a broken leg.’
The cook looked at the rectangular bales wrapped in rough canvas, which lined the wagon she was following. Through the triangular tears at the corners of the pink fabric packages burst very unerotic-looking big black tufts of long, stinking Breton hair. Shaken about by the uneven road surface, in the light of a tavern from which laughter and singing could be heard they looked like rustic pubic hair dancing a fest-noz.
The wigmakers continued along the narrow road, where the littler one’s shadow made a misshapen gnome on a wall, as, apropos of the lost cover, he had to concede, ‘Well, it’sh not raining, that’sh shomething.’
‘It keeps the hair in better condition,’ the bald man agreed.
Thunderflower went into the bar. From the dim street, through the lighted windows made up of little squares of coloured glass, a beautiful girl was visible – green eyes, blond curls escaping from her headdress, skin with a scent of vanilla and sex, and which must taste of it as well. The landlady came towards her. ‘What do you want, Hélène?’
‘Some of your brandy, Widow Lorcy.’
*
Locminé was a picturesque village, with its elm trees, its openwork steeple, its narrow grey houses, and its graveyard, which Thunderflower had just left to return to the late Widow Lorcy’s bar, where a grieving niece was waiting for her.
‘My aunt died the very next morning after the evening she took you on here. Why?’
‘How should I know? That’s been the case so often. Death follows me everywhere I go. When I went to the presbytery at Guern there were seven people there. When I departed, I was the one closing the door behind me. At Bubry I saw the priest’s sister and niece die. I arrived in Locminé, at Jeanne-Marie Leboucher’s, and she died, and Perrine as well. And now your poor aunt. You couldn’t exactly say I bring good luck. Would you like a piece of the cake I made? The widow Lorcy barely started it.’
‘No thank you, I’m not hungry,’ the niece answered.
‘All right, too bad. Someone else can have it.’
The not over-talented Dr Pierre-Charles Toursaint arrived in great distress at the bar, where millers slaked their thirst – an establishment the niece, who had inherited, had no intention of keeping on.
‘I don’t know what your aunt died of either,’ he said. ‘Something wrong with the pylorus, perhaps. At any rate, applying leeches and vesicatories proved useless. I also tried to get the fever to go into the bark of a tree, but in vain. The only good fortune she had was the constant and zealous care Hélène lavished on her, just as she did at the Lebouchers’. You poor servant,’ he added, turning to Thunderflower, ‘you must be very tired.’
‘I’m all right. A little tired but, after all, I haven’t come to Locminé to enjoy myself.’
‘And you’re without an employer yet again?’
‘Well, yes, they’re rotting in the graveyard.’
‘Hélène, my parents are looking for a cook. Their previous one didn’t suit. When she talked about her soup, my mother used to say, “If only it was dishwater we could have fed the pigs on it.”’
‘She wouldn’t complain about my soupe aux herbes,’ Thunderflower said firmly.
‘My father, mother and sister live in a town house along with their housemaid. Would you be prepared to join the four of them this very day, 9 May?’
The girl from Plouhinec turned her head towards the coloured glass in a window so that the doctor could not see her expression, which was like a weasel’s when it spies a dovecote.
On 12 May, Pierre-Charles Toursaint was crunching along the gravel path in his leather gaiters. On the doctor’s right was his sister, on his left his parents. All four were making their way towards a poor peasant couple to whom they condescendingly offered the standard expressions of sympathy.
‘Our sincere condolences, Madame and Monsieur Eveno. We shall miss your daughter, Anna. She was a most pleasant housemaid who, alas, died so suddenly under our roof.’ The grieving parents answered each member of the family in Breton: ‘Trugaré.’ (‘Thank you.’) They said the same to the new cook, who had likewise come to offer the fraternal sympathy she rarely had opportunity to use. The housemaid’s body, wrapped in a sewn-up white sheet, slid along a plank and plummeted into the common grave. As soon as the first spadefuls of earth had been thrown on to the sheet, Thunderflower took her leave: ‘Right, I’m off to do the cooking!’
15 May. ‘He is neither cold nor hot, he is not dead, he’s sleeping. The dawn comes in vain, he sleeps.’ An open fan in front of Thunderflower’s face did not hide her burst of laughter. Over the top of the fan, her lovely eyes were watching a dignitary speaking in the same cemetery, where the eye was now drawn to a dozen wreaths around a hole. ‘To our father’, ‘To my husband’. Dr Toursaint and his sister were holding up their fainting mother, who was wearing a blue widow’s cape. Some women in headdresses with fluttering or turned-up edges, and dressed in black, were there like carrion crows, watching what was happening around them. As the crowd began to disperse, Thunderflower announced, folding up her fan, ‘Ah me, that’s another one then. And to think it won’t be the last …’ The prediction resounded in the ears of the Breton women walking in the tranquil cemetery where little white crosses bloomed in the shade of the gothic church.
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.’