Spirit of Lost Angels Read Online Free Page A

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 squarethat 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