Spirit of Lost Angels (12 page)

Breathless, I stumbled, tripping over an open grave in which a skeleton lay.

Rubie stood by the grave — a pretty girl in a red dress. She smiled and walked towards me. I spread my arms, reaching for my daughter. I was about to take her hand when I woke, startled, Léon’s hand in mine.

‘There’s somebody here to see you, Victoire.’

‘Who is this?’ I did not know this man, or why he stood before me.

‘He is the bailiff.’ Léon gripped my arm as if he was afraid I would fall over, or perhaps run off.

‘Child murder is one of the most heinous crimes known to man,’ the bailiff proclaimed. ‘You, widow Bruyère, are to be incarcerated for life in la Salpêtrière asylum of Paris.’

As they dragged me off, I had not the slightest idea what the man was talking about.

How odd it was to be still after what seemed like weeks of bumps and jolts. Or was it months, perhaps years, I’d been cramped inside that windowless carriage with so many people and their smells of sweat and sickness?

The coach door creaked open, the bright sky burning my eyes. Hot bits of fire danced in mid-air but I was cold, and shivered beneath my cloak. I reeled from the orange sparks. A man grabbed my arm, his fingers digging into my skin, pinching my flesh.

‘Must get away … get outside. Papa says get out, now! Fire’s burning. The twins … inside.’ I tried to pull away from him, from the flames.

The man sneered. ‘Scared of a few autumn leaves, my lovely?’

‘Leaves?’ Ah yes, I saw then, they were leaves — autumn leaves rocking in the breeze and fluttering to the ground, where they lay still amongst the browned, dead ones.

My hands were smarting. I looked down and saw my palms were grazed and bleeding. Perhaps it had been me, not the leaves, falling to the cobbles as I’d tried to flee the man restraining me.

He dragged me upright and pushed me ahead of him, towards a cluster of dark buildings. The closer we got, the stronger the stench of piss, shit and unwashed bodies flared my nostrils.

‘Where am I? Where are you taking me?’ My words came out in hoarse, sharp whispers. ‘Where’s Grégoire? Find Léon, he’ll know what to do.’

‘Welcome to paradise, my lovely.’ The man’s breath was foul on my cheek.

He pushed me down into a chair. Why was he binding my limbs to the chair legs? Something moved across my head. I glanced at the floor — at the spatter of cinnamon waves covering the grimy tiles. My head felt different. I shook it and found it light, unburdened.

I hadn’t the strength to struggle as the man removed my clothes and shoved me into a wooden tub, nor when he fastened something cold and heavy about my neck.

‘If you move a muscle, that iron ring will break your creamy neck,’ he said. I dared not move and I breathed so slightly I could barely inhale enough air. ‘Have a nice bath, my lovely.’

The shock of icy water hitting my face was so great I did not even cry out. It gushed into my eyes, my nose and my mouth. I tried to breathe, coughing and spluttering. The cold water came again, and again.

‘Stop, no! Please!’ Still the water hit me.

It stopped, the man unchained my neck and the next thing I knew, a woman was standing over me, holding a chemise and an ash-grey dress.

‘Put these on. Hurry, girl. Time to go and meet your fellow lunatics.’ She laughed, but I had no idea what was funny.

The man was back, and leading me across a deserted yard entombed in high walls. He hurried me down steps slick with moss, and nodded beyond the wall. ‘Shame your room got no river view. Nothing to remind you of home,
n’est-ce pas
, my lovely?’

I didn’t know what he meant but I flinched, as we’d reached a deep place where only the thinnest, grey rope of light penetrated. I quivered with the fear, the unknown. Where was the bright sky and those leaves the colour of fire? I was sure I would feel better; understand it all, if only I could get back to the sky and the leaves.

Cries began to beat against my eardrums — sounds so raw with despair I was certain I must be dead, and I had reached some vast hall of Hell.

I was still too terrified to struggle as the man thrust me into a damp room, and a smudgy blot of women with shaven heads. Some were clothed as I was, others stood naked, and thinner than scarecrows.

‘Where am I?’ I looked about wildly, trying to run from the swarming women towards the only light that came from a barred grid in the door.

‘No, no, I can’t stay here!’

There was nowhere to go; no way to get out. I backed into a corner, cowering behind my arms across my face.

‘Don’t take my Rubie … cold in her basket. Stealing Madeleine’s milk.’

I clutched at my breasts, but I held only withered knobs, and I felt again the fierce suckling of the rich, robust infants, sapping my energy and leaving me too exhausted to stand.

‘
Plus de pain
. No more bread.’

The women’s words mewed softly from some distant labyrinth of my mind I could not reach. I think I moaned.

The man was quickly upon me again, fastening chains about my wrists and ankles, and I could move from the wall only as far as the chains allowed. I caught snatches of his words that meant nothing.

‘… mad … incurable … drowned … river … Insane Quarter.’

‘What river?’ I gazed about me. There was no river running into this sea of filth.

‘No point clawing at the walls, imbecile,’ a woman said. ‘Nobody will help you in here.’

I stopped. I fought no more, so weak that I slumped to the ground and rested my head on ragged straw, which squeaked with the bustle of small creatures. I didn’t know what else to do, so I covered my ears to block out the dipping, mournful cries pulsing from the women’s lips — sounds like birds that had lost the nest.

I rubbed my blue clotted arms. My nails were ragged, my hands streaked with blood. What was this blood from? Armand’s wound? No, no, I’d stopped the bleeding — used Maman’s treatment to stop my husband’s blood flowing, and save his life. His leg could heal now and Armand would be well, and everything would be all right.

I will wake soon, I kept telling myself. I’ll wake and Armand will be lying beside me.

‘Only a bad dream,’ he’ll say, his gentle smile caressing me, and the day’s work done, we’ll sit together on the riverbank, the sun tickling our faces, the wind ruffling our hair. I rocked back and forth, waiting to wake up. I think I felt a little better, so I kept rocking back and forth, back and forth.

The man returned. He placed wooden bowls on the floor, threw chunks of black bread beside the bowls and unchained us.

‘What is that? Who is this man?’ I whispered to a pock-faced woman beside me.

‘A keeper. All cruel, evil creatures.’ She pointed to my bowl. ‘Eat, girl. It’s soup. Best keep your strength or your death will be like theirs.’ She nodded at two bodies that lay curled and still, their eyes wide as dead fish.

‘Slow, cold, agonising deaths,’ the pock-faced woman said.

I took the bowl onto my lap, bent my head over the liquid and inhaled a vague odour of something turned bad. I drank it, and chewed the bread.

Once supper — I supposed it was supper — was over, the keeper refastened our chains and stomped off, his heavy boots thudding in my ears long after he’d gone.

There was nothing left to do. ‘Armand? Where are you, Armand?’ In the glacial damp, I yearned to cling to my husband, to feel his warmth and comfort, but once again, the chains restrained me.

‘Do not fret, my dear wife, I’m here,’ he said. ‘Over here. Yes, right beside you. I’ll take care of you, Victoire.’

My eyes darted around the room. ‘Where? I do not see you. Armand come back.’

‘Shut up, whore!’ a woman shouted.

I coiled into the smallest possible ball on the moving straw once more. I shivered in the blue darkness, making odd shapes with my mouth — a strange kind of dry weeping. I recoiled from the creatures that nibbled at my legs, their thin tails sliding around my ankles. I did not think. I did not sleep, or dream.

***

The single cry of a bird woke me. Where is the tree from where it chirps, and the fields, the hills and orchards? There was no smell of damp earth, fresh cut hay or fruit blossom. Then I saw there were no birds at all. The cry into the cold dawn was a woman, who still shrieked as the men steered us all, still half-asleep, across a courtyard.

‘Where are they taking us?’ I asked the pock-faced woman.

‘I already told you,’ she said. ‘The keepers take us to the chapel for Mass. Mass, every morning. You’ll see.’

‘Mass? Perhaps Père Joffroy will be there. He’ll know what to do. He’ll get me home.’

The cold from the chapel flagstones crept through my clogs and the soles of my feet, winding itself around my ankles, and up my legs. It clutched me so tightly I thought I would die of it. I nestled into the women closest to me — a small part of that great, grey, shivering bulk gazing ahead at the altar.

There was a priest, but it wasn’t Père Joffroy. Enrobed in purple and gold, this other priest stood at his iron lectern like a great master of ceremony, shouting words I couldn’t understand.

I tried to concentrate on the Holy Scriptures. If I could focus on the scriptures, everything would be all right. Things would be back to normal. I recited the prayers, and I sang of the glory of God, though I could barely recall the words.

My eyes were drawn upwards, beyond the cold blue light that filtered through a high window, to another light. It was the shade of a lemon, and thin as the eye of a needle. I squinted, trying to see it more clearly, not even certain it was truly there. I shut my eyes for a second and when I opened them again, the slice of light was gone.

***

‘Health may only be restored through a harmony of blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile,’ the keepers said, as they strapped me to the stool. ‘This will balance your body fluids and restore your humour.’

They began to spin the stool. ‘We must rearrange your brain, put it all back right.’ Faster and faster, they turned me. The room flashed by. I was giddy, and bursting from the stool, about to hurtle off and slam into a wall.

‘No, stop, please!’

They kept spinning me. My gut lurched and heaved, and when they finally stopped, I clutched my aching head, leaned over and threw my bread up on the putrid floor.

The keepers hurled a bucket of water over me, and the vomit, their sneers as icy as the water.

‘
Pitié, pitié
!’ I cried, knowing what was coming next — what always came after the spinning stool. My pleas went unheard, and they cocked their lancet device, the trigger firing the spring-driven blade into my veins.

Once they finished taking my bad blood, the blows began.

‘Too much black bile,’ they said, hitting me over and over. ‘Have to beat it out of you.’

I didn’t fight; I no longer even flinched, for I was dead, again.

Hymn music clanged through the dawn gloom of the chapel, mauve threads of incense smoke twisting up into the cool air. I sang along with the others, my gaze, as always, pulled up to that distant slice of lemon light — an instant of peace through my daily Hell.

The needle-eye light had brightened these past days, and with its glow I’d become conscious of the passing of time, and the daily rhythm of Mass, prayers, blood-letting, enemas, spinning stool.

The fog cleared a little more each day. It swirled upwards, away from me, and from the great oval window of the chapel, that lemony scythe of light spread its warmth through my body.

This morning, the light shone so brightly its glare almost blinded me. I blinked into it, beginning to take hold of the tangled threads of my mind; to weave those unwieldy knots into neater, more purposeful tresses. My lips formed words, then sentences, and I no longer felt the terrible, sharp panic as when I’d arrived at la Salpêtrière; the crushing fright that had made me sweat and scream and tear at my shaven skull.

***

‘Why do they shave our heads?’ I asked the pock-faced woman, the only one who spoke to me, or made the slightest bit of sense.

‘For the vermin,
ma chère
,’ she said. ‘And they say the wet compresses they use to calm our madness work better on the naked skull.’

‘You don’t seem mad,’ I said.

‘I might be as mad as the next woman here, but there are plenty of reasons besides insanity to get you thrown in the dungeons.’

‘Dungeons?’

She nodded.
‘
Les cachots
of
la Salpêtrière.
Most feared dungeons of them all.’

La Salpêtrière.

From my days at the house in Saint-Germain, I’d heard gruesome stories of la Salpêtrière, and the peculiar warmth of the chapel light burned like a fireball now — a lightning bolt that struck me and left me breathless and dizzy. I finally understood I was imprisoned in the largest and most feared asylum of them all. For what reason though, I had no idea.

At once, my self-awareness became an appalling curse. I wanted to drop onto the dirty straw and scream out my frustration, but I could no longer cry, though the tears choked me as I shivered in that dismal tomb of madness.

‘Why do they put us in here?’ I asked.

‘Oh, for any reason,’ the pock-faced woman said. ‘Protestants refusing to convert, women reading horoscopes, taking lovers, practising divination, or throwing stones at royal coaches. And, naturally, general madness.’

‘How long have I been here, in the dungeons?’

‘A month, possibly. You’ve done well. Most who enter
les cachots
never come out alive.’

I was thankful I had little recollection of that month. ‘But why ever should I be sent here?’

‘They say you murdered your children … you went mad and drowned them in a river.’

‘Drowned my children!’ I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head like the lunatic they took me for.

The jade green ribbon of river curled between the willows. The shrill songs of birds drowned out the noise of the current and the sough of the breeze. Like new lambs on shaky legs, Blandine and Gustave wobbled towards the water’s edge.

‘Come back, come back!’ I shouted, running towards them, but as I reached them, it all faded to blackness, then nothing.

‘I don’t know.’ I tapped the side of my head. ‘It’s gone.’

My memories of the misery were not gone though. I recalled how it had crept low in the beginning, so stealthily I hadn’t seen it coming. Then it gained on me little by little and, when it was too late, possessed me.

I heard again the demon voices, whispers at first then screeches so loud I wanted to beat my head to get them out. I understood the madness had reduced me to little more than a flaccid, palpitating corpse, no longer commanding any power of thought or reason.

‘I suppose I must have been truly insane, for a time,’ I said, and while I felt my normal self, there still remained much of which I had no recollection. Something had gouged that terrible day on the riverbank with Blandine and Gustave from my mind.

‘Perhaps it would’ve been better to stay mad?’ I said to the pock-faced woman. ‘So mad I wouldn’t hear these poor wretches muttering nonsense and moaning.’

Surely it would be easier not to see their eyes too — as wide and soulless as felled deer, and to watch them clasping their palms in prayer to a deaf God.

***

As a lucid woman, the keepers’ “treatments” seemed more barbaric, and for their entertainment rather than our recovery.

I quickly understood the spring-driven lancet was only one of the horrifying devices they used to blood-let me, but I no longer cried out as the scarificator blades slashed my skin in a mosaic of shallow slits. I said nothing as they drained my blood into a cup. I did not retch on the stench-laden fug of their breath that could have extinguished a candle. I was silent, crumpling to the floor in foetal submission as they beat me, and enclosed me for a time in a solitary confinement box into which the waters of the Seine River rose.

I thought of writing to my friend, Claudine. She would know what to do, or perhaps Léon, or my brother, but in those dreaded
cachots
, we were barely able to get bread, soup and water to survive, let alone ink or paper.

***

Most of the rich Parisians who visited la Salpêtrière in their glamorous carriages with liveried footmen came purely for entertainment, but I sensed many of them also feared us “crazies” — that long-popular equation of mental illness and demonical possession.

Oh yes, those same wealthy people who’d once hired me as a wet-nurse, paid the keepers handsomely for the pleasure of ridiculing me — the freak.

‘Here they come again,’ the pock-faced woman said. ‘Their special Sunday afternoon outing, after feasts of … of what?’ She stared at me. ‘I cannot remember. It’s an age since I have eaten anything besides bread and soup.’

‘Oysters?’ I said. ‘Lamb and green peas, and maybe strawberries?’ My mouth was moist with memories of Claudine’s kitchen.

Through the barred grid, I watched the keepers lead their guests across the courtyard of the Insane Quarter of the asylum. Their pockets jangling with louis d’or coins, the keepers pointed out to the visitors where they could peer in at us, through the bars.

I recoiled as a man in a beaver fur hat waved his sword, lace frothing from his wrists and neck. Another in a powdered wig poked his cane at me and sneered. The swish of his cape washed cold air over me, and I felt like a monkey in some macabre circus act.

‘Come, Jean-Henri,’ a woman in a fur-trimmed cloak and fluffy handmuffs said to the sword-waver, her tight ringlets bobbing under her veil. In a dour cold that gripped me tighter than my shackles, I envied the woman her velvet cloak, her full skirt and the lingering smell of her perfume that vied for airspace with the shit and vomit of la Salpêtrière.

The handsome couple moved away, the man swinging his cape, the woman’s steps delicate in gem-encrusted slippers. I imagined them stepping into their decorated carriage, the horses clomping daintily off, leaving the asylum far behind.

Our visitors gone, I stared around me, at all those sent here for treatment — the beggars, prostitutes, epileptics, Jews, Protestants, criminals and the thieves; at the presumed witches, magicians, bohemians and idiots. Those women would never recover, but simply die slow, horrific deaths.

I gnawed on my hard bread, thinking of those visitors pausing at a café on their way home for brandy, sorbet or candied fruit, and I felt the surge of fury again; the injustice of it all.

I closed my eyes to the women’s vacuous stares, a murmur coming from some distant corner of my rearranged mind.

How dare they keep me trapped in their web of human misery? I did not deserve to be here. Like these women, I could succumb and die. Or I could fight it
.

As I finished the last of my soup and crumbs of bread, I pledged to myself I would not perish in the filth of this asylum. I would flee la Salpêtrière. Somehow I’d get back to Lucie, to my brother, my daughter, and to Léon.