Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat Page A

was different now. A snap of time had reshaped me, and nothing could ever be as it was before.
    I shivered in my thready clothes and looked up at the moon. In its pale light, I glimpsed a tawny owl on a branch, starting his night hunt. He glided down in silence, dropping onto the bird, frog or insect, and extended his wings over the luckless victim.
    ***
    A week later, Grégoire opened the door to Père Joffroy — to the church room in which, of course, I’d had no choice but to remain.
    ‘I’ve been meaning to speak with you, Victoire, since your mother’s death.’
    ‘The death you might have stopped?’ I said my voice tight. ‘The death that, had we been rich or noble or anything besides poor peasants, might not have happened?’
    The priest shook his head. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Victoire, but I am only a lowly parish priest, with no influence on those types of decisions. I know the accusations against your mother were untrue. She was a healer-woman and a midwi — ’
    ‘My mother was no witch, Father.’
    ‘I also believe,’ he went on, ‘it was simply some temporary madness; an unfortunate melancholy of the blood, which turned her back on the Church and God. She never deserved to die for that, and you, Victoire, must guard against this same type of affliction. I have heard a mother can pass it to a daughter.’
    He ran his tongue over his lips. ‘My brother is a priest in one of the parishes of Paris,’ he went on. ‘He tells me of a noble family in the suburb of Saint-Germain whose scullery maid is dead of the dropsy.’ He thrust a sealed letter at me. ‘I have written you a recommendation letter, Victoire. The family is expecting you.’
    Stunned, I stared up at the priest. ‘I’m to go to a noble family? After what a noble did to my father? Besides, I don’t know a single person in Paris, and I am sure it is such a big city I would only get lost.’ I breathed fast, grappling for more excuses. ‘Maman told me they don’t even speak as we do in Lucie.’
    ‘Your mother taught you well,’ Père Joffroy said. ‘And gave you the taste for learning. You will accustom yourself to the French language of Paris, and the ways of the city. Besides, you must not generalise about the aristocracy, they are not all like that baron.’
    I glanced at my brother. ‘Grégoire is all I have left, and I am all that he has. How can I leave him?’
    ‘Go, Victoire,’ Grégoire said. ‘You’ve always dreamed of rising above our peasant roots; of seeing the world beyond the gates of Lucie, n’est-ce pas? Go, little sister, and take this chance.’
     

Paris
1778–1779
     
     

8
     
    Accustomed as I was to the smell of unwashed humans — mouths of rotting teeth, clothes stained with grease and sweat, the cheesy odour of the sick and dying — nothing in Lucie had prepared me for the stink of Paris.
    Stiff from a week of bumps and jolts in the cramped public carriage and the squalor of roadside inns with their hard bread and bland gruel, I finally stepped out onto the streets of the capital on a thickly-misted November dawn of 1778.
    Against the din of church bells chiming for morning Mass, roosters crowing and dogs barking their replies, I skirted a line of women waiting for a bakery to open: servants, working women, the wives of labourers, I supposed. Mingled with the delicious aroma of fresh bread in the bakers’ ovens, the scent of hot coffee from the carts of roadside vendors flared my nostrils.
    Through mist rising from the cobbles, which swallowed ground-floor windows and shrouded shop signs, I had little idea where I was going. Clutching Père Joffroy’s letter, I tramped up and down streets with no names, the ache in my feet deepening as I searched for the noble house.
    ‘M’sieur, m’sieur , excusez-moi ,’ I said, stopping a passing man. ‘Please, in what direction is the district of Saint-Germain?’
    ‘Saint-Germain, eh?’ the man said, baring dung-coloured teeth, his eyes