Free The Poisoning Angel by Jean Teulé Page B

do you want, Hélène?’
    â€˜Some of your brandy, Widow Lorcy.’
    *
    Locminé was a picturesque village, with its elm trees, its openwork steeple, its narrow grey houses, and its graveyard, which Thunderflower had just left to return to the late Widow Lorcy’s bar, where a grieving niece was waiting for her.
    â€˜My aunt died the very next morning after the evening she took you on here. Why?’
    â€˜How should I know? That’s been the case so often. Death follows me everywhere I go. When I went to the presbytery at Guern there were seven people there. When I departed, I was the one closing the door behind me. At Bubry I saw the priest’s sister and niece die. I arrived in Locminé, at Jeanne-Marie Leboucher’s, and she died, and Perrine as well. And now your poor aunt. You couldn’t exactly say I bring good luck. Would you like a piece of the cake I made? The widow Lorcy barely started it.’
    â€˜No thank you, I’m not hungry,’ the niece answered.
    â€˜All right, too bad. Someone else can have it.’
    The not over-talented Dr Pierre-Charles Toursaint arrived in great distress at the bar, where millers slaked their thirst – an establishment the niece, who had inherited, had no intention of keeping on.
    â€˜I don’t know what your aunt died of either,’ he said. ‘Something wrong with the pylorus, perhaps. At any rate, applying leeches and vesicatories proved useless. I also tried to get the fever to go into the bark of a tree, but in vain. The only good fortune she had was the constant and zealous care Hélène lavished on her, just as she did at the Lebouchers’. You poor servant,’ he added, turning to Thunderflower, ‘you must be very tired.’
    â€˜I’m all right. A little tired but, after all, I haven’t come to Locminé to enjoy myself.’
    â€˜And you’re without an employer yet again?’
    â€˜Well, yes, they’re rotting in the graveyard.’
    â€˜Hélène, my parents are looking for a cook. Their previous one didn’t suit. When she talked about her soup, my mother used to say, “If only it was dishwater we could have fed the pigs on it.”’
    â€˜She wouldn’t complain about my
soupe aux herbes
,’ Thunderflower said firmly.
    â€˜My father, mother and sister live in a town house along with their housemaid. Would you be prepared to join the four of them this very day, 9 May?’
    The girl from Plouhinec turned her head towards the coloured glass in a window so that the doctor could not see her expression, which was like a weasel’s when it spies a dovecote.
    Â 
    On 12 May, Pierre-Charles Toursaint was crunching along the gravel path in his leather gaiters. On the doctor’s right was his sister, on his left his parents. All four were making their way towards a poor peasant couple to whom they condescendingly offered the standard expressions of sympathy.
    â€˜Our sincere condolences, Madame and Monsieur Eveno. We shall miss your daughter, Anna. She was a most pleasant housemaid who, alas, died so suddenly under our roof.’ The grieving parents answered each member of the family in Breton: ‘
Trugaré
.’ (‘Thank you.’) They said the same to the new cook, who had likewise come to offer the fraternal sympathy she rarely had opportunity to use. The housemaid’s body, wrapped in a sewn-up white sheet, slid along a plank and plummeted into thecommon grave. As soon as the first spadefuls of earth had been thrown on to the sheet, Thunderflower took her leave: ‘Right, I’m off to do the cooking!’
    Â 
    15 May. ‘He is neither cold nor hot, he is not dead, he’s sleeping. The dawn comes in vain, he sleeps.’ An open fan in front of Thunderflower’s face did not hide her burst of laughter. Over the top of the fan, her lovely eyes were watching a dignitary speaking in the same cemetery, where the