Wolfsangel by Liza Perrat Read Free Book Online Page B

pumping the soapy mix into her.
    While Dr. Etienne Laforge was Lucie-sur-Vionne’s legitimate medicine man, those who were suspicious of my mother’s herbal and floral remedies referred to Marinette Roussel as the village quack –– the charlatan. Others, ignoring her curt bedside manner, spoke of her as a healer-woman and swore by her omelette of oats and sawdust, which cured both snakebites and rabid dogs.
    My mother was also Lucie’s reputed faiseuse d’anges –– an angel-maker –– her methods far superior to those common abortionists whose dirty curtain rails, knitting needles and mustard baths caused feverish sicknesses; deaths even.
    ‘You can get up now,’ Maman said as she withdrew the tubing from inside the girl.
    I slunk away from the door, down the stairs and outside to the well. I drew water with the hand pump, inhaling the perfume from the knot of rose bushes beside the great brick well.
    When I returned with my full bucket, the girl was standing in the kitchen clutching her stomach. Her face was the colour of week-old snow.
    She looked away from me, at the wide stone hearth that housed the stove; at Maman’s gleaming pots, pans and utensils hanging from racks on the whitewashed walls. Her eyes roved across the ornaments on the mantelpiece as if a pottery dish containing a scattering of dried mugwort, a single cufflink and a broken ornamental comb were the most interesting things in the world.
    The girl had the same embarrassed, fearful look as all of them. Poor thing, I itched to say, to get yourself in that bind. But my mother had long ago forbidden me to speak to her customers.
    I took onions, carrots and potatoes from the cool room and started chopping them for supper. My knife chack-chacked against the chopping board in rhythm with the tock-tock of the grandfather clock –– the Rubie clock my grandmother had called it, because of its dark red fruitwood stain and because it came from an ancestor named Rubie, a celebrated midwife from the times of Emperor Napoléon.
    I could hear Maman fussing about in her herbal room –– her sanctuary that was forbidden to us. But my mother’s rules had never stopped me as a young girl, and when she was out, or busy in the orchard, I would sneak into the narrow room with its casement windows that let in so much light and poke about at the drying frames netted with gauze, and the hooks above the small fireplace for heat-drying. I loved its smell, like something in the woods hidden under rotting leaves. With tentative fingers I would touch each neatly-labelled bottle, basin and earthenware jar lining the floor-to-ceiling shelves, and feel that chilling, though not unpleasant, sensation amidst the spicy scents. I imagined I was standing in the shadows of all the healer-women who’d inhabited L’Auberge , with their own herbal medicines. The lair of ancient witches.
    ‘Mix this with warm water and drink it,’ Maman said, pressing a sachet of dried flowers into the girl’s palm. My mother had never taken me with her to gather medicinal stocks, or explained how she used them, but I had picked up a few things over the years, like how she used sage, mugwort or rue to brew angel-tea.
    ‘Go now,’ she said to the girl. ‘It will all happen in a few hours.’
    With another blush the girl glanced at me again. I gave her a brief nod as she scurried along the hallway, and from the window I watched her scuttle across the courtyard like a frightened rabbit.
    ‘You’re still doing that?’ I said, heating the pot of water on the stove. ‘Even after they guillotined the abortionist woman only last month?’
    Maman didn’t answer as she untied her apron and took a clean one from the hook behind the door.
    ‘And not that I care a flip what Marshal Pétain says,’ I went on. ‘About there being too few children; that the women of France have neglected their duty by not having enough babies, but you do realise Vichy have strengthened their abortion