The Poisoning Angel Read Online Free

family signet ring with the Jégado crest engraved on it that I gave her on our wedding day.’
    Madeleine Le Braz, ruled by Breton superstition, carried out the test of the ten candle ends, which she had cut to equal length. Five were placed on one side of the stricken woman, for death, five elsewhere, for life. The latter went out much sooner. ‘The patient’s had it,’ the farm labourer’s chubby wife predicted matter-of-factly.
    ‘Is there someone coming?’ asked Jean.
    Anatole looked out of the cottage’s one small window to check. ‘No, why?’
    ‘I thought I heard a cart jolting along.’
    Madeleine was already strewing mint, rosemary and other aromatic leaves on the soon-to-be corpse. ‘We also have to empty the water from the vases lest, at any moment, the dead woman’s soul should drown there.’
    Madame Le Braz executed this task while Jean, helpless and at a loss, not knowing how he could make himself useful, automatically reached for a broom handle.
    ‘No, no
scubican anaoun
(sweeping of the dead)!’ advised Madeleine. ‘You never sweep the house of someone who’s about to die because their soul is already walking around and the strokes from the broom might injure it.’
    The farm cottage filled with sighs, though everyone was admiring of Thunderflower’s zeal and devotion as, head bowed, she took such care of her sick mother, whose tongue was now green, flecks of foam hanging from her lips. Had they been able to see the small blonde girl’s expression from underneath, however, they would have discovered something infernal about it. She was standing beside someone who was about to die … It was like the birth of a vocation. As she put her little fingers to one of her genetrix’s burning cheeks, it was like the child Mozart touching the keys of a harpsichord for the first time. She murmured something the adults took for a sob,
‘Guin an ei …’
(‘The wheat is germinating …’) and her mother died, lowering only her right eyelid, which put Madame Le Braz in an instant panic: ‘When a dead woman’s left eye doesn’t close it means someone else you know is in for it before long!’
     
    ‘That’s true, Hélène. You’re right. The blade of the Ankou’s scythe is fixed to the handle the opposite way round. But how do you know that at your age? In any case, the scythe belonging to Death’s worker is different from those of other harvesters because its cutting edge faces outwards. The Ankou doesn’t bring it back towards him when he cuts humans down. He thrusts the blade forward, and he sharpens it on a human bone.’
    Her father demonstrated the gesture on the moorland, silver grey with lichens.
    ‘Like that, well out in front. D’you see? But why are you concerned with that? Just as your big sister, Anna, is in service with the parish priest at Guern, you’re about to go to join yourgodmother in the presbytery at Bubry, to work in abbé Riallan’s household. You’ll have to call him “Monsieur le recteur”. What do you think you’ll be scything over there?’
    ‘Papa, are there people in Bubry?’
    ‘Yes, it’s quite a large village.’
    ‘And is there belladonna there?’
    ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t there be?’
     
    Hélène was biting greedily into a slice of bread when the dainty carriage belonging to a haughty gentleman arrived. He got out, exclaiming, ‘Well now, Jégado the royalist, I expected to see you wearing blue. Aren’t you in mourning?’
    ‘In Lower Brittany, husbands never mark their widowhood, Monsieur Michelet. Only the animals on the farm observe mourning rituals. I put a black cloth over my hive and made my cow fast on the eve of my wife’s funeral. You may as well learn that now, because you never know, you old revolutionary – who are soon to be married,’ added Jean as he noticed the embroidery on the ribbons fluttering from the back of Michelet’s hat, a sign that he was engaged.
    The well-turned-out visitor – still young,