Spirit of Lost Angels by Liza Perrat

vegetables, cheese and eggs to sell, as well as grain and cloth. As there is no fair close enough to conduct business, we thus request five annual fair days in the village of Lucie-sur-Vionne.
    ***
    The heat hit me like a blast from Claudine’s oven as I left the blacksmith’s that summer afternoon.
    In a bid to remove heat — that humoral excess ascribed to pregnancy — I’d lain on the blacksmith’s vibrating anvil as he swung his hammer and sparks flew about. People had advised me this would make the birth of my child less painful.
    A hot breeze gusted and the beginnings of dark cloud scudded across from the Massif Central. Something — an untouchable magnetism, or simply the promise of coolness — lured me away from the direction of the farm and down the slope to the Vionne River.
    I’d not been back since they drowned Maman, but the clear water, the gushing cascade, beckoned me as if the river had missed me as much as I had longed for it.
    I wove through the willow trees lining the riverbank like languid courtesans, and beyond the beggars’ hut. I no longer feared the woman as a mad witch, but was simply sorry for her wretchedness — too poor even to dwell in the village with the others.
    I sat on a boulder and removed my shoes — the Marquise’s cast-offs that cut into my hot, swollen feet.
    As the fat grey clouds gathered over the foothills, I felt a prickle, like a cluster of spiders scrambling down my backbone. I jumped and twisted around.
    ‘Are you going to take off all your clothes again, Mademoiselle aux yeux de la rivière ? I suppose it should be Mrs River Eyes, now?’
    ‘Léon! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your new wife?’
    ‘My new wife.’ I reeled from the arc of his spittle; from the anger that ploughed his lovely face.
    ‘You should have been my wife. How could you marry my father, then face me again? Why?’
    ‘Don’t make it harder than it already is, please.’
    ‘Why did you have to come back to Lucie and torture me with your presence?’
    ‘I had no choice, Léon.’
    He took a step forward, standing over me and I felt I would choke on his familiar heavenly scent of horses, hay and sun-baked soil. ‘What do you mean, Victoire, no choice?’
    I moved aside and stepped into the shallows, and as the sharp coolness of the water jolted each nerve in me, I told Léon about the Marquis, and Rubie. ‘You would not have wanted me, a woman with a bastard child. You deserved a fresh young girl of your own.’
    Léon edged into the water beside me, and bent his face close to mine, though not a hair of his touched me. ‘I wouldn’t have cared,’ he hissed. ‘I loved — love — you!’
    ‘I had no dowry, nothing to offer you, and when your father proposed, I had to accept, and put you out of my mind.’
    ‘Put me out of your mind? How could you?’
    ‘Please try and understand. I must devote myself to your fath — ’
    ‘No, Victoire, I will never understand. Surely there must be some way … divorce, I don’t know.’
    ‘You know divorce isn’t allowed. There is nothing, Léon, nothing to be done.’
    He clamped his lips over mine, so tightly I could not budge, his warm breath rushing into me, stealing my air. I saw the red sunburst behind my closed eyelids, then the shadow as the clouds covered the sun.
    His tongue darted in and out of my mouth, licking, caressing my own, and the heat rushed to the top of my thighs until the place between them burned.
    Léon pulled me from the shallows and down onto the sun-bleached riverbank. Blades of dried grass dug into my back and I felt the first smattering of raindrops.
    I did not move, and as the clouds opened, emptying their load on my bared legs, Léon eased himself on top of me, gently, so as not to hurt the tiny person inside me — the life I had begun with his father.
    Thunder blasted, louder, closer, but I didn’t care that we were getting drenched. I knew I should scream at Léon to stop; push him off me