Spirit of Lost Angels (3 page)

‘And there, in the middle of the square, that bronze king crowned in smoke looked down upon them all with a scoffing, careless air,’ Papa went on. ‘Most of the dead, naturally, belonged to the humblest classes.’

We all looked at each other and, behind me, my mother squeezed my shoulder. I knew we belonged to the humblest class, even Monsieur Armand Bruyère who owned his land, his crops and all those animals.

‘As always, it is unjust that only the strongest and richest survive,’ Monsieur Bruyère said.

‘Hear, hear!’ a silk-weaver woman cried, raising her beaker.

Everybody else raised their beakers and cried, ‘hear, hear.’

‘When I awoke the next day,’ Papa said, ‘a grim mist, like some shapeless bloodstain, covered Paris, and when news of the disaster reached Versailles, it cast a terrible shadow over the wedding of the young Dauphin and Dauphine.’

‘A bad omen surely,’ the blacksmith said.

Everybody nodded, and outside, the wind howled around the farmhouse like something in pain, and desperate to get inside.

It was early in the autumn of 1772 when Léon Bruyère tapped on the church room door. I was practising my letters, and supposed he’d come to tell us another journeyman was passing through Lucie with more tragic tales of the thousands dead from the famine.

Destroyed by hail, the crop had been disastrous and Père Joffroy seemed in a constant state of fatigue as he hurried about the village performing the Last Rites, then burying those who had succumbed to the starvation. Of course, our bellies grumbled too, but Maman’s edible plants and flowers did stop us from starving.

But Léon had not come to tell us about a traveller.

‘It’s your father,’ he said, panting hard and looking from me to Grégoire. ‘I came across him out along the road.’ He waved an arm northward. ‘On his way home but he is feverish, so I left him resting in a hay shed along the roadside.’

A rush of heat, then ice cold, struck me. ‘Is he all right?’

‘It must be the hunger got to him,’ Léon said. ‘I’m going to get the cart, my father and I will carry your papa home. Where’s your mother?’

‘Out birthing a baby,’ I said, my voice tight.

‘We’re coming to help,’ Grégoire said.

***

‘We’re almost there.’ Léon waved towards the old stone shelter up ahead.

‘I hope Papa is all right,’ I said. ‘Nothing can happen to him.’

‘We’ll take care of your father,’ Monsieur Bruyère said. ‘Don’t fret, child.’

‘Look, there he is!’ I cried, pointing to a bent figure shuffling along the roadside on the crest of a small slope.

‘Your father is a proud man,’ Monsieur Bruyère said. ‘I’m not surprised he is trying to get home unaided.’

Puffs of dust, thrown up by the hooves of horses that came galloping over the hill, clouded our view. The coach appeared, and as it careened along the road towards us; towards my father, I could see its gilded decoration.

‘Get out of the way, Papa!’ Grégoire yelled, over and over.

‘No, Papa, no!’ I screamed.

‘
Mon Dieu, mon Dieu
. Move, run!’
Monsieur Bruyère shouted.

Papa must have been so weak and sick that he didn’t hear the hammering hooves behind him, or our frantic shouts before him. I don’t even think he realised we were there, so close to him.

My eyes widened in horror as the coach drew closer to my father. We kept waving our arms and shouting. Surely there must be some way to stop it?

My breath caught in my throat, strangling me so I could no longer breathe, as the horses ran down my father without even slowing.

Monsieur Bruyère swerved the cart sideways to avoid the coach thundering past us. I gripped my brother’s arm as I caught the unmoving gaze of the noble, from inside.

The cart came to a stop beside Papa’s bloodied, broken body. I was numb with shock, and the pain slicing through my breast — a thousand swords at once — was so great I was certain it would kill me. My quivering legs could no longer hold me, and I sank to the ground.

‘No! No!’ I clutched at my brother’s legs, dug my nails into his flesh, and beat my fists against his calves.

***

Even before any of us spoke, I think Maman sensed something was very wrong.

She said nothing though, as Monsieur Bruyère told her of the accident. Her face a milk-white mask, her green eyes wide and staring somewhere beyond, her fingers groped about her neck for her angel pendant. She rubbed the old bone between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Death came instantly, Madame Charpentier,’ Monsieur Bruyère said. ‘Emile did not suffer.’

Still Maman did not flinch; the only movement was the angel pendant rising and falling with her shallow breaths. My mother’s tears came only when Grégoire told her the noble didn’t even stop; he hadn’t descended from his decorated carriage to check on the commoner he’d run down.

My tears came too, burning my cheeks, and I wept long and hard for my father; for the fascinating stories he conjured up to entertain me — tales of werewolves, of flying snakes with boils for eyes, and of green men who looked frightening but were harmless. I sobbed for his stories from the far-off coast — of mermen who broke fishermen’s nets and of horned men who stole young girls, because there were no horned women. I cried for the touch of his tender hand, which seasons of carpentry and knife-grinding had roughened and calloused.

***

‘
Dieu n’existe plus
!’ Maman cried, as we buried Papa beside Félicité and Félix.

The villagers gasped in horror. How could their healing woman, their midwife — whose skilled hands saved the lives of mothers and babies — no longer believe in God?

‘I will never again enter the church!’ Maman said.

‘Maman shouldn’t say such things,’ Grégoire hissed at me. ‘She only ignites the fires of rumour as if she herself were holding the blazing flambeau.’

‘She’s shocked and sad,’ I said. ‘Maman does not mean what she says.’

Grégoire and I too, were shocked and sad, and my anger at that murdering baron wouldn’t leave me, the pain like all of Maman’s sewing needles jabbing into me at once.

‘We’ll find the villain,’ Grégoire said, his dark eyes grim, his face pale with the rage. ‘And throw rocks at his head until he too leaks out all his blood.’

‘I’ll kill him myself,’ I said, feeling the first stirring inside me — a bitter hatred of every noble person.

The following year Maman decided I was old enough to attend my first hanging.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go; I cannot see such a terrible thing.’

‘Don’t be an idiot, hangings are fun.’ Grégoire said. ‘And there is always such a crowd.’

Maman snagged my arm. ‘You have eleven summers now, Victoire — quite old enough to see what happens to wicked people.’

I kept tugging against her grip as she hustled me across the village square, where the wooden frame of Lucie’s gallows stood opposite Saint Antoine’s, the looped rope hanging from a high beam.

It seemed all of Lucie gathered on the square
that sunny May afternoon to see the boy die: old people and babies, the women who wove silk from their homes, the families of the baker, the clog-maker, the stone-masons and the blacksmith. Even the day labourers had stopped their field work.

I’d seen this boy before. Grégoire told me his family had recently come to Lucie from a village two leagues distant. Nobody had any idea why they would leave their own village, and we didn’t know their names, so we simply called them The Foreigners.

‘But what has he done?’ I asked.

‘The boy is accused of celebrating black Masses on the naked body of his sister,’ Maman said.

‘Black Mass?’

‘The most evil blasphemy,’ Maman said. ‘The worst mockery of the Holy Mass.’

I frowned, still not understanding.

‘They bleed a baby to death over the body of a woman who lies naked on an altar,’ my brother said.

‘Grégoire! Your sister does not need to know every detail,’ Maman said. ‘And where did you learn of this?’

‘Shush, it’s about to start.’ The blacksmith’s wife tapped a finger to her lips. The crowd fell silent, all eyes on the boy whose tears rolled down his cheeks.

Surely he was too young to die. Then I remembered Félicité and Félix were only three when God called them.

Two big men were pushing the boy up the steps because he wouldn’t go on his own and kept screaming, ‘No, no! I am innocent.’

Père Joffroy stood beside the struggling boy. ‘Repent my son, before it is too late!’ he said in his loud priest’s voice, the great cassock opening in the breeze as if trying to swallow up the boy’s cries for mercy.

The executioner tightened the noose around his neck. A large stain appeared on the front of the boy’s breeches. A few people laughed.

‘Ha, he’s pissed himself!’ a man cried. ‘A sure sign of guilt.’

The boy seemed stiff with terror, his eyes opening so wide I thought they’d burst from his skull.

‘Why doesn’t Père Joffroy save the boy, Maman?’

My mother said nothing; she simply gripped my hand tighter, the fingers of her other hand folding around her bone pendant. She slid the angel back and forth, along its leather thread.

The boy’s screams had died down to moans. The villagers were quiet again. The birds stopped singing and I imagined even the flowers and trees stopped growing for this one moment — the end of the boy’s life.

The square was silent, as if everyone held their breath. The executioner pushed the boy from the platform. I wrapped my arms around myself and turned from the body writhing and flipping like the fish we caught in the river.

‘Watch, Victoire.’ Maman’s firm hands pivoted my shoulders around. ‘Public punishment is an important lesson to deter people from committing crimes.’

‘But how can we be certain of his guilt? What if he is innocent, and dies for nothing?’

I kept trying to avert my eyes from the boy, who was still twisting about. How long did it take to die?

‘Hush.’ Maman frowned at me. The executioner took hold of the boy’s legs, and stretched them out backwards.

I flinched as his neck snapped like a summer twig. Maman pulled me close and held me tight, and from far-off, a woman’s keening cry echoed deep and mournful through the valley.

‘I know a boy’s passing is a terrible thing to see, but death is part of life, Victoire and, apart from unforeseen tragedies, you now know it comes early to those who do not obey the ways of the Lord.’

I nodded, thinking of the boy who had not repented in the end. I pictured him falling fast, deeper and deeper, until he reached Hell. The devil was waiting for him — a scarlet, horned creature surrounded by great flames. The devil’s fangs drooling spittle, it gobbled the boy up, and he disappeared into everlasting darkness.

A small girl with tangled hair appeared beside us, and startled me from my thoughts of the devil.

‘Madame Charpentier, the baby is coming.’ She was tugging my mother’s skirt. ‘Maman sent me to fetch you.’

‘Grégoire, Victoire, go straight home,’ Maman said. ‘No wandering off in the woods. Those beggar people are so wild and poor they will steal your clothes and clogs one day, and remember, no going near that dangerous river.’

We nodded. ‘Yes, Maman.’

‘Prepare the soup, Victoire, and Grégoire, light the fire under the pot please. This is her fifth babe, I shan’t be gone long.’

Our village had no physician, so my mother alone cared for the people. She looked serious with her hair pulled back like that, in a chignon sitting low under her cap, but I understood Maman had to look serious when she was birthing babies and healing the sick of Lucie.

Our mother was not always serious though. She often smiled when we were alone in the evenings, reading a funny tale together, except when something reminded her of The Day of the Storm. Then Maman would stop smiling, and shadows darkened her green eyes as if she was seeing right up to Heaven to check on Félicité and Félix.

***

‘Let’s go?’ Grégoire said.

I nodded, glad to get away from the boy’s body swaying in the breeze like someone’s forgotten scarecrow.

We hurried from la place de l’Eglise, out across the fields, through corn and wheat as tall as me, the green already speckled with gold. Cherry and pear blossoms floated from branches like snowflakes, as we flew past. Fat crows circled and squawked overhead, as if eyeing us as prey. We reached the woods and slowed down, breathing fast.

‘We’re safe,’ Grégoire said. ‘Nobody will see us here — no tale spinners to tell Maman we didn’t go straight home.’

‘There she is, the mad witch!’ I pointed through the trees to an old wooden hut, so well hidden between the large oaks that you could easily mistake it for some tangle of branches, leaves and ivy.

‘Not too close, Grégoire, she’ll see you and cast spells on us.’

But I was certain the witch-woman had already spotted us. A dark eye, rimmed in red, stared from around the open doorway.

‘No such thing as witches.’ Grégoire rolled his eyes. ‘That’s only another stupid peasant story. You’ll learn, Victoire, when you’re as old as me.’

Witch or no witch, I was glad we hurried on, breathing more easily when we left the woods, on the side near Monsieur Armand Bruyère’s grapevines.

Léon Bruyère, bent over the vines, was seventeen now, and when I’d watched him weed and plough the earth, this spring, I saw he was as strong as a man.

Léon smiled as we waved, the sun shining off his skin the same bronze colour as the King’s statue on la place de l’Eglise. Léon stuck his thumb up, which meant he could sneak away and meet us on the riverbank.

Grégoire and I continued on, past the Bruyère farm perched on the ridge like a king surveying his great domain. We somersaulted down the grassy slope, shrieking all the way to the riverbank. Fingers of sun tickled my cheeks, my nostrils flared with the scent of spring grass and damp earth, and the Vionne River twisted like a green serpent through the valley of the Monts du Lyonnais.

We walked the opposite way from where our cottage had stood. Since The Day of the Storm, Grégoire and I avoided the pyramid of stones and rotting beams that had been our home. Even if I caught a glimpse of the fireplace, the only thing left standing, my belly heaved and I felt sick.

‘A hearth without a home is worse than a home without a hearth,’ Maman had said.

We rounded a bend, to where a group of women were washing clothes and sheets in the river.

‘Quick!’ Grégoire pulled me behind an oak tree. We leaned against the trunk, listening to the women chattering about what their husbands made them do in bed.

‘… bend over like a dog,’ one was saying.

‘Tie … rope around … neck,’ another said, giggling. ‘… lead him … like a pig!’

I nudged my brother and we cupped hands over our mouths to smother the sniggers.

As much fun as it was listening to their stories, we tramped on until we came to our secret place where the water flowed fast around a bend, sweeping across ferns, and boulders with mossy faces, emptying acorns, twigs and leaves into a deeper pool.

From the pebbled shore, we skimmed stones, breaking the smooth surface, waiting for Léon. Grégoire was showing off, boasting he could skim pebbles better than I could.

Léon soon sauntered towards us, and as he pulled off the boots he now wore instead of his old clogs, I saw Grégoire eye them, and I knew he would love to have such a pair.

Perhaps, if we found that golden treasure from the fables’ book, my brother would have a lovely pair of boots, and I might have a princess dress.

The boys rolled their breeches up and waded into the river.

Grégoire grimaced. ‘Ah, freezing!’

I knotted my chemise and petticoat on the side and followed them into the icy water.

I never understood why Maman worried so about the river. Grégoire and I had come to know every ditch and hole in which you might lose your footing; we were aware of every twist and bend where the current snagged and became a swirling whirlpool. We paid no attention to the villagers who called it
la Vionne violente
.

If Maman discovered we actually swam in the river, she’d have worried even more. The river was for scrubbing clothes, for cooking and drinking. Nobody wanted to swim, or even wash, in it.

Grégoire always said we must not tell people we came here; that they believe the river is bad for you, even deadly if you get your skin wet. He said they would treat us as if we had a curse.

Tiny fish darted like fireflies, moss glowed the brightest green, and the sun’s rays stretched right down to the smooth, rounded stones on the riverbed. I flicked water at the boys and laughed, longing for the hot summer days when we would swim and lounge beneath the waterfall.

‘This is the loveliest place in all the world,’ I said.

‘That’s because you’ve never been out of Lucie,’ Grégoire said.

‘Oh but I will, one day, Grégoire. I’ll journey across the country like Papa did, and see exciting places.’

‘I don’t see why you’d want to do that,’ Grégoire said with a snort.

Léon’s large hand wrapped around a trout, and as he held up the writhing fish, the poor hanged boy flashed through my mind.

‘Your supper,’ Léon said.

‘Keep your fish,’ Grégoire said. ‘Or our mother will know we’ve been at the river.’

Léon pushed the trout towards me. ‘Tell her I gave it to you, it is the truth.’

Grégoire shook his head. ‘Keep it, I told you. I’ll catch one for us.’

Léon lit a fire. We danced around the small blaze, and when our feet were warm, we fell into a heap on the grass, giggling. I never knew what we found so funny, but something always made us laugh until we were breathless, and clutched our sides.

Léon plucked a poppy, lifted my cap and wove it through my braid. The afternoon sun lay across my shoulders like a warm stole and my father’s words chimed in my head.

You have your mother’s tresses, Victoire, that gleam like a fox in the moonlight.

How I missed him, and how the rage bubbled in me each time I thought of that noble baron and how a peasant could do nothing to punish such a person.

‘Stop touching her hair,’ Grégoire said. ‘You’re not supposed to play with girls’ hair.’

‘Wherever did you hear such a thing?’ Léon said. ‘Anyway, your sister doesn’t seem to mind.’

‘She’s only eleven — not old enough to know what she minds.’ Grégoire grabbed my arm and pulled me upright.

‘Come on, we have to get home before Maman.’

I wondered why Grégoire didn’t talk to me all the way back, and why I had to run to keep up with him.

***

Maman lit a candle, which threw long shadows onto the walls. I shivered as I mopped up the last of the pea soup with rye bread. It was not really cold but after five years in the damp church room, I still shivered, remembering our cosy cottage hearth.

‘Be thankful for what we do have,’ Maman had said. ‘We are lucky to have a roof; blessed we don’t have to live like really poor beggars in open huts in the woods.’

Maman opened the copy of
Les Fables de Jean de la Fontaine
, which Père Joffroy had given us when we lost everything The Day of the Storm. I sat beside her, following each word with my finger.

‘
Maît-re Cor-beau, sur un ar-bre per-ché
…’

‘You are reading so well now, Victoire,’ she said, as I started on the next story.