Free The Poisoning Angel by Jean Teulé

bowl of milk then, at least – boiled with some chervil for its aniseed flavour. I’ll bring it to you in the drawing room right away.’
    ‘No, really. So that you easily find another situation, I’ve written this letter of recommendation praising you most highly.In it you’re described as particularly clean and an excellent cook.’
    ‘Could you add that I’m renowned for my
soupe aux herbes
, and then put that I’ve invented a very good cake as well? As for the kidneys with herbs, let’s not make a thing of it, they’re not to everyone’s taste.’

Locminé
    Thunderflower hurried from one bedroom to the next. On the poorly lit staircase of the narrow house, she muttered, ‘I’m sure I’m going to fall and kill myself.’ She went from the one sick woman in bed on the first floor to the other on the second. ‘First Jeanne-Marie Leboucher, now for her daughter, Perrine.’
    On sturdy, untiring legs she climbed back up the stairs. Both the mother and her twenty-year-old child were critically ill. How sad!
    â€˜It’s such a pity to go to so much trouble for nothing,’ lamented Thunderflower, ‘since they’re both going to die.’
    â€˜How can you know that?’ asked the doctor, bag in hand, on the first-floor landing. He was wearing a wide-skirted coat and a beaver-skin hat.
    â€˜Well, Dr Toursaint, all your remedies
do
have the opposite effect from the one you expect,’ the servant replied helpfully. ‘With both the dying women, the cures are behaving counter to their known properties.’
    â€˜That’s true, but …’ Toursaint said defensively. ‘I’m only a doctor in a Bas-Breton village, not a bigwig in Rennes! What’s that white powder you’re mixing in that glass, Hélène?’
    â€˜It’s from the bottle you told me to get from the pharmacy.’
    â€˜Oh, yes, the quinine sulphate to treat fevers.’
    In the leather gaiters that went out by night, even in winter and along the worst roads, trying to bring help with the little knowledge he had, Dr Toursaint went into the first-floor bedroom.
    â€˜How are you feeling, Madame Leboucher?’
    â€˜Since even the water from Melusine’s spring, which you prescribed, hasn’t cured me – I’ve drunk from it three times at midnight – I’m giving up remedies.’
    â€˜Now now, Jeanne-Marie, what’s all this? I think you simply have an attack of acrodynia, an illness that is causing the intense pins and needles in your limbs and the violent burning in your stomach. But, I say, what about your cook, her devotion and how involved she is in what happens to you?’
    â€˜Thank goodness Hélène’s here. I don’t know what would have become of us without her. For more than sixty hours now she’s been looking after Perrine and me, without eating any of the food she’s brought us, and with no sleep. She lavishes us with continual attentions.’
    Speaking of attentions, Hélène was just then administering them to the Leboucher daughter in bed on the floor above.
    â€˜Look, here’s a glass of stuff you have to drink on the orders of the doctor I passed on the stairs. I think he called it quinine sulphate.’
    Perrine struggled to swallow even a mouthful but none the less ordered, ‘Give me the rest to drink.’
    â€˜Yes, certainly.’
    No sooner had the brew been consumed than a sudden pallor came over her and her lips shrank back. There was an abrupt increase in the size of her pupils, and her eyes grew wider. Her eyelids began to twitch wildly. Seated at the bedside, Thunderflower could see her own outline in the foamy bubbles appearing at the edge of the invalid’s mouth. Then she walked back and forth in front of the window, the daylight casting her pretty shadow on to the bedroom floor at each turn, and all the while she told the patient a legend: a knight returning from a