Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat Page B

hovering over my breasts. ‘What would a nice girl like you be wanting with those sang bleus ?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Ah ha, domestic service I bet?’
    ‘Please, m’sieur, which way?’
    He pointed vaguely, bending so close to me I thought his nose would touch my face. ‘You be careful, young thing, those aristocrats think they can do what they like with us commoners.’
    As I hastened through the fog, I realised the noise of the capital was even more shocking than the smell. I was used to Lucie’s church bell tolling when it was time to rise, at noon for the hour of break, and in the evening for vespers, but here, church bells from what sounded like a hundred different belfries, deafened me.
    As dawn gave way to day, the streets filled with more people, who looked like labourers, on their way to the workshops. I snatched whiffs of stale beer, roasting meat, and cheese from the fromageries .
    I found myself in a narrow street that went nowhere. I retraced my steps, gagging on the stench of piss and shit, rotting vegetables and animal fat, and holding my skirt up as I stepped over the slaughterhouse blood streaming into the sewers. I stumbled into a blind alleyway and reeled from the odour of congealed tannery blood and damp featherbeds.
    I shrank from a man defecating in a courtyard, and recoiled from ragged beggars squatting in roadside filth, pawing at my skirt and pleading with their mad city eyes.
    It came lighter. I crossed a bridge, the river below teeming with barges and so wide it made the Vionne look like a stream. The Seine River, I imagined. Ships smelling of coal, hay and damp ropes lined the gravelled riverbank, and, from the grisly spectacle unfolding before my eyes, I assumed I’d reached la place de Grève.
    Spectators were throwing mouldy vegetables at a poor wretch attached to a cartwheel on the square. A group of children played with balls and spinning tops, while others waved sticks about.
    To the crowd’s gleeful shouts, the executioner raised his iron club and brought it down onto the victim’s limbs, stretched along the spokes of the revolving wheel. I flinched as bones cracked, one after the other, his screams carrying far across the Seine.
    Over and over, the executioner bludgeoned until finally he dealt the fatal coup de grâce to the man’s chest, for which I was certain the victim was grateful. I gasped as blood spurted from his mouth and his head fell, limp, sideways.
    The executioner braided the man’s shattered limbs through the wheel spokes and hoisted it up a tall pole. As the birds swooped to peck at the remains, I clenched my eyes shut but I still saw the bloodied face, the mouth open in a soundless scream. The horror — the fury — of my parents’ senseless deaths tore through me again.
    I hurried away from the gruesome square, and came upon a vast market place. The stench of decaying fruit, vegetables and meat flared my nostrils, along with the odour of the excrement of hundreds of horses and mules. The vulgar cries of the fishwives — the poissardes who seemed loathe to part with the smallest scale or fin before it began to stink — filled my ears. Grains of all kinds overflowed from sacks and the pink carcasses of skinned hogs, speckled with black flies, hung from hooks. Never could I have imagined such an expanse of produce and wares in one place, not even at the village fairs.
    The smell only worsened as I trudged on, not the stink of rotting food, but a powerful stench rising from a shocking expanse of tombs and charnel houses.
    ‘Careful, lovely, you don’t want to end up in there.’ I spun around to a toothless man, his gaze travelling across my face and down to my breasts. ‘The Innocents Cemetery. They’ve been stacking the dead here, bone upon bone, for eight hundred years.’
    I quickened my steps, anxious to be away from both the man and the cemetery. Above the street noise, I didn’t hear the thundering coach until it was almost upon me, the