Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat

any part of her, but the men kept pushing me back, and her face was a blur behind my tears.
    ‘Maman, Maman, no! They can’t do this!’
    My mother’s eyes sought mine, as the men dumped her onto the riverbank, not far from a place where ten years of growth had all but concealed a tumble of blackened wood and stones. I averted my eyes from our old hearth rising like some macabre tombstone. I could not look at that memorial to happy times as tragedy was set to strike me, again.
    Maman tore the angel pendant from her neck and pushed it into my hand.
    ‘Wear it always, Victoire. It will give you strength, and courage.’
    As the men shoved me away from her, I felt the heat of my mother’s hand for the last time. Or perhaps it was the warmth of the bone angel that took the chill from me.
    They held my mother still and stripped her naked. I was aware of Léon, beside me.
    He covered my eyes. ‘Don’t look, Victoire.’
    The sobs catching in my throat, strangling me, I prised Léon’s fingers apart, watching through the gap as they tied Maman’s right thumb to her left big toe and vice versa.
    The men secured her with ropes and threw her into the deepest part of the swirling current. Nothing happened for a moment, as she bobbed in the freezing water, and I saw the despair in her eyes, more grey than green as they emptied of all hope.
    ‘Maman!’ I tried to break free from Léon but he held me tight as the raw, chaotic grief clawed at my heart. My mind flashed back to the day I’d witnessed my first hanging, and the injustice of it — of this — speared me like the blade of a bayonet.
    The men were using long sticks to push Maman’s head under the water while others, holding the ropes, dragged her to the surface. They continued, up down, up down.
    ‘Maman, Maman!’ I shouted, on and on, until my voice cracked into a hoarse whisper and, finally, no more words came.
    Léon released his grip and I sank to the muddy riverbank in a limp curl, my fingers still gripping Maman’s angel pendant — my angel now.
    Through my tears, I saw Père Joffroy performing Extreme Unction and, amidst a blur of autumn browns, reds and yellows, I lay amongst the leaves that had fallen, thin and brittle, to the ground.
    I never saw my mother’s head dip below the ivy green water for the last time.
    ***
    We buried Maman with haste, in the cemetery of Saint Antoine’s, alongside Félicité, Félix and Papa.
    Both of us wrapped up in our own grief, Grégoire and I could barely speak, or comfort each other. I did not sleep that first night, and I refused the wheat bread, the gruel of grains and the dried peas Léon Bruyère and his mother offered us. Never could I have imagined a loneliness so utter, so complete.
    The following day, the clog-maker’s wife — Françoise’s mother — came with more soup.
    ‘Your parents are gone, Victoire,’ she said. ‘Grégoire promised your mother he would care for you, but he is only eighteen, earning but a pittance from working the wood.’
    ‘We’ll manage somehow,’ I said.
    ‘But you have no dowry,’ she went on. ‘You understand you cannot marry Léon Bruyère? If you stay here in Lucie, you’ll never have any means of getting a husband to set up your own household. You’re sixteen, you must go to the city — to Lyon or Paris — and find work in the domestic services.’
    I did not answer her, and kept my eyes on the earthen floor, clasping the bone carving between my thumb and forefinger, desperate for the courage my mother said the little angel would give me.
    When Françoise’s mother left, I shuffled outside into the autumn dusk, climbed the church steps, and looked out across the valley.
    The view over Lucie and back to the Monts du Lyonnais had always comforted me but I felt only emptiness, trapped as I was in this place of no light, no happiness, no hope and no love. Especially not the love of Léon Bruyère who, it seemed, was lost to me forever.
    I understood that everything