Free Chocolat by Joanne Harris

they say.”
           “So have I.” I poured myself a cup of chocolate from the silver pot. Small and black, like espresso, with a chocolate spoon to stir it. My voice was gentle. “But I don’t have to listen.” A pause while I sipped. “And neither do you.”
           Josephine laughed.
           The silence revolved between us. Five seconds. Ten.
           “They say you’re a witch.”
           That word again. She lifted her head defiantly. “Are you?”
           I shrugged, drank. “Who says?”
           “Joline Drou. Caroline Clairmont. Cure Reynaud’s bible groupies. I heard them talking outside St Jerome ‘s. Your daughter was telling the other children. Something about spirits.”
           There was curiosity in her voice and an underlying, reluctant hostility I did not understand. “Spirits!” she hooted.
           I traced the dim outline of a spiral against the yellow mouth of my cup. “I thought you didn’t care what those people had to say.”
           “I’m curious:” That defiance again, like a fear of being liked. “And you were talking to Armande the other day. No-one talks to Armande. Except me.”
           Armande Voizin. The old lady from Les Marauds.
           “I like her,” I said simply. “Why shouldn’t I talk to her?”
           Josephine clenched her fists against the counter. She seemed agitated, her voice cracking like frostbitten glass.
           “Because she’s mad, that’s why!” She waved her fingers at her temple in a vague indicative gesture. “Mad, mad, mad.”
           She lowered her voice for a moment. “I’ll tell you something,” she said. “There’s a line across Lansquenet”— demonstrating on the counter with a callused finger — “and if you cross it, if you don’t go to confession, if you don’t respect your husband, if you don’t cook three meals a day and sit by the fire thinking decent thoughts and waiting for him to come home, if you don’t have children — and you don’t bring flowers to your friends’ funerals or vacuum the parlour or — dig -the — flowerbeds!” She was red-faced with the effort of speaking. Her rage was intense, enormous. “Then you’re crazy!” she spat. “You’re crazy, you’re abnormal and people — talk- about — you behind your back and — and — and—” She broke off, the agonized expression slipping from her face.
           I could see her looking beyond me through i1e window, but the reflection against the glass was enough to obscure what she might be seeing. It was as if a shutter had descended over her features; blank and sly and hopeless.
           “Sorry. I got a bit carried away for a moment.” She swallowed a last mouthful of chocolate. “I shouldn’t talk to you. You shouldn’t talk to me. It’s going to be bad enough already.”
           “Is that what Armande says?” I asked gently.
           “I have to go.” Her clenched fists dug into her breastbone again in the recriminatory gesture which seemed so characteristic of her. “I have to go.”
           The look of dismay was back on her face, her mouth turning downwards in a panicked rictus so that she looked almost dull witted. And yet the angry, tormented woman who had spoken to me a moment ago was far from that. What whom — had she seen to make her react in that way? As she left La Praline, head pushed down into an imaginary blizzard, I moved to the window to watch her. No-one approached her. No-one seemed to be looking, in her direction. It was then that I noticed Reynaud standing by the arch of the church door. Reynaud and a balding man I did not recognize. Both were staring fixedly at the window of La Praline.
           Reynaud? Could he be the source of her fear? I felt a prick of annoyance at the thought that he might be the one who had warned Josephine against me. And yet she had seemed scornful, not afraid,