The Poisoning Angel by Jean Teulé Page B

fortress tower that’s been turned upside down.’
    ‘Oh, which of you has carried out this vestimentary attack in the convent?’ thundered the woman in charge of the Sisters of Charity of Saint-Louis.
    ‘Perhaps it wasn’t a sister,’ murmured a nun.
    ‘Then, who?’
    ‘The maid’s been acting rather strangely in recent days.’
    All the nuns, each with missal in hand, crowded around the Mother Superior, almost stifling her as they gossiped in low voices. ‘How many times have we come upon her speaking to someone invisible, stretching out her arms to them?’ said one, whose buttocks were exposed. Another, bare breasted, backed her up. ‘It’s true that there’s some imaginary being she gives a very strange name to and whose presence she seems to be checking on.’ The one with the al fresco bush recalled, ‘Yesterday I heard her telling it she wanted to model herself on it at all costs.’ Another, all in strips of cloth, explained, ‘It seems she’s the only one who can hear this great mysterious voice and her mission is to act as a channel for it.’ The Sisters of Charity of Saint-Louis, who spoke to God personally on a daily basis, were shocked rigid by the servant’s madness.
    A great silence reigned in the common room when suddenly a nun who went to say a prayer aloud let out a cry: ‘Look, my missal! Oh! On every page with engravings, the faces of Christ and of the Virgin have been torn out.’
    ‘Mine too!’
    ‘And mine!’
    ‘Same here.’
    All the nuns were aghast at the books in which the heads of their Christian idols had been cut off.
    ‘It’s witchcraft.’
    ‘Be quiet! Don’t say that word, not ever!’ interrupted the Mother Superior in her dress with battlements – a fortress impregnable by devilish superstitions. ‘I don’t want to hear another word about this. Each of you, take a bowl of milk and go and have breakfast modestly in your rooms while I think things over in my study.’
    Cleared of exhibitionist nuns, the common room at last fell silent again. Through the door at the far end, Thunderflower entered with her broom and a full pail. She paused beneath the Christ hanging on the wall when through another, half-open door a yell was heard. Sister Athanase came running at top speed, the jagged edge of her habit flapping at her ankles, and moaned, ‘What next? There’s been nothing but uproar here since dawn. Lucky it’s a place for contemplation, isn’t it?’
    ‘She … she … she,’ stammered a nun, pointing at the maid at the end of the room. ‘She’s em … em … emptied in the instru—’
    ‘What then? Out with it!’
    ‘She’s emptied the slops pail into the harmonium.’
    Behind the musical instrument whose lid was still up, Thunderflower put the iron container down on the tiles, and did not deny it.
    The Mother Superior was one of those people who continually get upset over a trifle but stay terribly calm when the situation is very serious. She walked towards the servant. ‘You dare to empty a slops pail into the harmonium of the Eternal Father? Who or what are you? You’re certainly not human.’
    ‘Humans hold no sway over me, none at all,’ replied the accused, brazenly. ‘No humiliation will lay me low, no reef will sink me, and no hammer flatten me. I cannot be destroyed.’
    ‘Get out of this convent, Hélène. News of you will spread round all the religious places of Morbihan and you’ll never find another situation. However, I shall say nothing in town about the extraordinary events that have occurred here, because you’re quite capable of denying all involvement and then the peasants would sit round the fire of an evening, saying that it was korrigans, fairies, sirens, or hairy Poulpiquets who did it – or goodness knows what other legendary creature of this Celtic land.’
    The closing words of this speech did not exactly please Thunderflower, who had been nourished on precisely this enchanted but terrifying milk of evening