The Poisoning Angel Read Free

like the voice of a drowned man calling for a tomb. ‘The sea has been making widows.’ They had heard it too in the sound of the leaves. After brandy and a few bottles of bad cider, theimagination would get to dreaming here. Once the night grew very dark they would tell more than one tale that sent shivers down the spine. In the stifling, airless cottage, the swirls of fumes from the fireplace muddled the thoughts. ‘I’ve seen a falling star. A priest’s going to hang himself.’
    From the outside, the wisps of smoke could be seen escaping in pale grey streamers beneath the door, from the edges of the little window, between the dry stones in the walls, and among the stalks of the thatch, then spiralling up towards the starry sky. Just as straw rotted in the pond, inside the hovel, minds were fermenting.
    ‘I can hear a noise on the road!’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Didn’t you hear a cart axle squeaking?’ Anne asked the company.
    ‘To be honest, no,’ answered her husband.
    ‘The noise! Horses panting so heavily you’d think it was a storm wind. The squeaking axle’s going right through my head, yet you can’t hear anything?’
    ‘No,’ said Anatole Le Braz.
    ‘At one stage the carthorse began stamping on the spot as if it was stuck. How its hoofs beat the ground. It was like hammers on an anvil.’
    Immediately everyone inside the cottage fell into a deep silence to listen properly. Jean’s hair was standing on end so stiffly it looked to be made of needles. In the end Anatole got up to observe the road through the small window made of horn.
    ‘Oh, it’s the cart that overturned this morning! The two owners have come back with some men from the town and asecond horse to get it upright again. They’re holding lights around the covered cart.’
    ‘They dare to come near our houses at night?’ Jean was astounded.
    ‘Particularly as they hardly got a friendly welcome in the daytime, especially the tall one in the goatskin waistcoat,’ Madeleine Le Braz felt obliged to point out. ‘I’d really love to know the name of whoever put his eye out.’
    ‘How I didn’t go mad, I don’t know,’ murmured Anne, still pale and trembling.
    ‘Mad enough, to be sure,’ her husband retorted in annoyance. ‘Fancy getting into such a state over a cart being righted.’
    ‘What
I
heard was no ordinary cart.’
    ‘Oh, poor Anne, you’re
briz-zod
.’
    ‘No, I’m
not
stupid. You can shrug your shoulders all you like but I’m telling you, the Ankou’s cart is going about in these parts. It won’t be long before we know who he’s coming for.’
    Thunderflower’s eyelids were fluttering like petals. ‘It’s time for you to say goodnight,’ her mother pointed out.
    While the child knelt up on the chest seat to open the panels of the box-bed, Jean Jégado asked offhand, just as if resuming a normal conversation, ‘Le Braz, did you know that Cambry has turned into a black dog?’
    ‘Jacques Cambry, who died last year? How do you know that?’
    ‘He told me so himself. I met a black dog that said, “I am Cambry.”’
    The religion of the Druids, mother of tales and lies, left behind a phantom in Thunderflower’s imagination as she slid on to a bale of oats big enough for three. She shooed away a hen so that she could pull up the coverlet made from scraps of material joinedtogether, and laid her head on a sack of crushed gorse. Behind the doors she could hear other
nozve-ziou
, grown-ups’ tales. The brandy stirred them into strange stories and confessions.
    ‘Water sprites snatch away pregnant women!’
    ‘The
bag-noz
is a siren-boat made of crystal, which takes its passengers to the isle from which no one returns.’
    ‘Of course I joined the Chouans to fight for Louis XVI and the nobles! I was against the Great Revolution, that enemy of miracles.’
    ‘Do you really not hear anything?’
    Inside the box-bed, the child had caught a little golden scarab beetle crawling along against a board. Holding it