Pure (37 page)

It’s probably true. They will fall; someone will fall. Fall or be thrown. Is that what he intends? He pauses, looks back. Sagnac is making his way, clumsily, along the deep gutter between the roof and the parapet. The mason holds out his hands, palms up, that posture – placatory, defensive – one adopts when dealing with a person whose behaviour is entirely unpredictable. ‘Just an accident,’ he says. ‘No one meant to do any harm. But I’ll see they’re punished for it. Their carelessness. You have my word on it. They’ll learn their lesson.’ He watches the engineer, watches him intently, then lowers his voice. ‘For pity’s sake, Baratte. One of them is my son-in-law.’

Now that things are stiller, Jean-Baptiste is aware of the heat of the sun. It’s fierce up here, a heat redoubled by being reflected off the unstripped tiles. He cannot quite see down into the church where the others are, where Slabbart is. The son-in-law and his friend are pressed together like terrified children. He has no more interest in them. On the ground, the distant, shining ground, Héloïse and Jeanne stand, two slight figures, on the grass by the preaching cross. He nods to them, makes a little movement with his arm, a kind of wave, then steps into the gutter.

She is waiting for him near the bottom of the scaffolding and the first thing she does is hit him, a curious female punch with the underside of her fist against his shoulder. She does not say anything. She walks away from him, arms crossed tightly over her breasts. He goes back into the church. Guillotin has arrived. Slabbart has been turned onto his back. The wound – an oozing gash as long as a man’s ring finger – is almost exactly where, on Jean-Baptiste’s head, Ziguette cut him with the ruler, but the wood has gone deeper than the brass, has touched not just the bone but the tenderness below it, pierced it. Guillotin is careful to keep the toes of his shoes out of the blood. He looks at Jean-Baptiste, makes an almost imperceptible movement with his shoulders.

‘Get a blanket,’ says Jean-Baptiste to the miner beside him. ‘Wrap his body. Carry it to the far chapel.’ He gestures to the northwest corner, beyond the organ, then moves forward as if to crouch or kneel again next to the dead man, but hands are stopping him, turning him away, pressing him, ushering him out of the circle. Guillotin comes next, the same respectful strength. After him, Armand. The circle closes.

For a few seconds the expelled men, masters until a moment ago, stand awkwardly, silently, behind the miners’ backs; then together they quit the church, step out into the harsh morning light.

‘They have a faith?’ asks Guillotin.

Jean-Baptiste shakes his head. His mouth is bone-dry, his heart still thudding from his climb. ‘There was a church at the mines, but none of them went near it. Among the managers it was thought they believed in nothing.’

‘There isn’t a man in the world who does not believe in something,’ says Guillotin.

‘I need a drink,’ says Armand.

‘I will join you gladly,’ says Guillotin. ‘And you, my dear engineer, should certainly take a glass. Two or three might be best.’

‘If I tell Lafosse of this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘he’ll order me to bury him here.’

‘Like our old friend,’ says Armand softly.

‘Ah, you refer to Monsieur Lecoeur?’ asks Guillotin, peering at them over the hook of his nose. ‘I had wondered if he was here. Does Jeanne know of it?’

The engineer shakes his head, looks up at the church roof. What are they doing up there? Sitting? Talking? Waiting?

‘The dead man could go to the cemetery at Clamart,’ says Guillotin. ‘It is where most of those who would have come to les Innocents are now sent. A perfectly decent place. Or there’s the Protestant yard at Charenton. If that is more suitable.’

‘I shall ask them,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I will do as they wish.’

‘I wept for my organ,’ says Armand, ‘but my eyes are dry now. I cannot think what sort of man that makes me.’

‘There is no grief in the abstract,’ says the doctor. ‘What was he to you? To any of us? Ah, here come the women.’ He rubs his hands, smiles at the approaching forms of Jeanne, Héloïse and Lisa Saget. ‘They will know what to do,’ he says. ‘They will have
insights
.’

The women’s insight – Lisa Saget’s at least – is to prepare the food. Stewed oxtails. Twenty loaves of bread stale enough to soak up the gravy. Wine cooled in the charnels.

By one o’clock, when Lisa beats the saucepan, Sagnac has taken his men away, spirited them out quietly by the door to the rue de la Ferronnerie. The miners file from the church tamely enough. Nothing in their demeanours, the voices they use to each other, suggests anything is much amiss. They collect their tins, their utensils, queue up by the kitchen annexe, carry their food to the preaching cross, sit and eat.

‘I am sorry, Jean,’ says Héloïse to Jean-Baptiste, the pair of them standing privately in the shade of the sexton’s house. ‘But you frightened me so. I do not even think Ragoût would run along a wall like that.’

‘Then I am sorry too,’ he says. ‘But to lose a man in such a manner . . .’

‘It was an accident?’

‘We shall never prove otherwise.’

‘And what will you do with him?’

‘Slabbart? He can stay in the church tonight, but we must do something tomorrow. In this heat . . .’

‘He had family? A wife, perhaps? Children?’

‘I don’t know. I shall find out.’

‘They could be given some money.’

‘Money!’

‘Money would help them, Jean. You have nothing else to give them.’

The long summer’s afternoon. A great stillness over the cemetery, over the whole quarter. The sky high and pale, a few puffs of cloud, then the sun slipping towards the rue de la Lingerie, and as soon as it has dipped behind the ridges of the roofs, a stealthy, rousing coolness. A moon rises, fat and orange. The carts come from the quarry. The men, who have spent the greater part of the afternoon beside the openings of their tents, set to with no resentment, no undercurrent of complaints, though Jean-Baptiste halts the work as soon as he judges there are bones enough for the overseer at the Porte d’Enfer not to make sour remarks about idlers at the cemetery. The priests begin to march; the hems of their soutanes are white with dust. The singing is ragged, unenthused. Left to their own devices, they might tip every bone into the Seine. August in Paris is not a pious month.

It is close on eleven before Héloïse, Armand, Lisa and Jean-Baptiste leave the cemetery. Guillotin is long since gone, and Jeanne and her grandfather have not been invited to join them: it is late, and there can, of course, be no concert now, no jollity. Armand suggests they go to the Palais Royal, find some corner they can settle into, drink like soldiers. Héloïse protests. The Palais, its unrelenting gaiety, will embarrass them. They can drink in the house. The Monnards, in all likelihood, will have retired for the night, and there is brandy in the kitchen, a bottle of eau de vie upstairs. And wine, of course, Monsieur Monnard’s wine. Should that not be enough?

They go to the house. In the hallway, the air is thick as felt, the whole house dark and quiet. The Monnards have indeed retired. Marie too, though she seems to have taken the brandy to bed with her, perhaps for her cold. Héloïse fetches the eau de vie. In the drawing room, Armand pours four glasses half-full of wine, then tops them up with the spirit. ‘It might taste like wine now,’ he says. ‘Here’s to Slabbart.’ They raise their glasses, sip.

‘What was his first name?’ asks Héloïse.

‘Joos,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Joos,’ repeats Héloïse softly.

‘Play for us, Armand,’ says Lisa.

Armand shakes his head. ‘Music will add new emotions. We should stay with those we have.’

‘But play anyway,’ she says, touching his hand, stroking the ginger hairs on his fingers.

He shrugs, sits on the stool, shuffles through the music on the stand – those pieces Signor Bancolari tried to teach to Ziguette Monnard – then drops the music onto the floor and begins something slow from memory.

‘It’s out of tune already,’ he says. ‘Everything’s at least a semi-tone flat.’

‘It’s perfect,’ says Héloïse. ‘Please don’t stop.’

Jean-Baptiste has crossed to the window. He stands there, arms folded, looking out. As they only have a pair of candles in the room, both of them on the piano, he can see out without much difficulty. The moon is high now, almost directly overhead, smaller, no longer orange. Armand plays for several minutes, a piece more beautiful than sad but only just.

When it’s over, Jean-Baptiste says, ‘They’ve gone into the church.’

‘The miners?’ asks Héloïse.

‘Yes.’

‘A vigil,’ says Armand.

‘Forget about them a moment,’ says Lisa. ‘Let them be.’

Jean-Baptiste nods, joins the others by the piano.

Armand starts a new and livelier piece. ‘You remember the play we saw?’ he says. ‘The servants and masters thing? This is the opera.’

He plays the overture, two or three of the arias. As he warned them, new emotions are being added. The atmosphere is shifting, becoming – in a troubled, melancholy, drink-inspired way – almost merry. When he pauses, the women applaud. He bows to them.

‘They are still there,’ says Jean-Baptiste, who, during the playing of the last aria, was unable to keep himself from drifting back to the window. ‘They have light. Fire.’

Armand gets off the stool, joins him by the shutters. ‘You cannot expect them to stand around in the dark,’ he says.

‘What do you know about them?’ asks Jean-Baptiste quietly.

‘The miners?’

‘Yes.’

‘As much and as little as you. They are mysterious as eels.’

‘I want to see,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘See? See what?’

‘He wants to see what they are doing,’ says Héloïse. ‘Are you worried, Jean?’

‘But what harm
can
they be doing,’ asks Lisa, ‘in a ruined church in the middle of the night?’

‘I have no idea,’ says Jean-Baptiste, collecting his hat off the table. ‘I shall not stay long.’

‘Go with him,’ says Lisa to Armand.

‘As you wish, my dove,’ says Armand, rolling his eyes. He does not have a hat. He follows the engineer out of the room. The women look at each other.

‘What are we now?’ asks Armand as they stop in the shadow of the cemetery door. ‘Spies?’

‘Hush,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Hush.’

They move over the grass towards the church. A wash of light ripples on the panes of the window above the west door. Under the preaching cross, they pause again, watching and listening. Are those voices they can hear, voices rising past the beams of the roof ?

‘If we are going in,’ whispers Armand, ‘then for God’s sake let’s go.’

The west door, open all day, is shut now. Jean-Baptiste raises the latch, pushes the studded wood. Four steps take them the length of the vestibule. Then a second door, flaps of tattered leather over its hinges. It opens quietly enough, but immediately there is the sense – the certainty – that whatever was happening inside the church has been suspended. A dozen points of light mark out where the miners are gathered around the pile of pews in the nave. The first man the engineer recognises is Jacques Everbout. Behind him – who’s that? – Rave? Then Dagua on his left, Jorix, Agast. None of them move. All of them are watching, intensely watching, the new arrivals.

‘Can you smell it?’ whispers Armand.

‘What?’

‘Liquor. The place reeks of it.’

‘It’s ethanol,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He nods to two of the big wicker-wrapped jars, their seals broken, that have been placed, side by side, next to the pews.

A movement . . . A man steps forward, emerges in almost leisurely fashion from behind the others. A figure in white. White shirt, white trousers, white cloth at his neck. He walks to within parlaying distance. His shadow, thrown forward by the taper of the man behind him, spills over the stone floor to the engineer’s feet. It is the miner with the missing half-finger. The miner with the violet eyes. The only one Lecoeur did not know. Hoornweder? Lampsins? Whatever his name, there is no question but that he is the master here.

‘It was not our intention,’ begins Jean-Baptiste, finding his voice with difficulty, ‘to disturb you. We saw lights. I was—’

‘Is that Slabbart?’ asks Armand. He points to a bundled form laid on a pew at the top of the heap.

The miner in white nods. ‘Our brother was killed today,’ he says. ‘Tonight we will part with him.’

‘Part?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘Where will you take him?’

‘He is where he needs to be,’ says the miner. ‘We will part with him here.’ He looks at the engineer, waits patiently for him to understand, to piece together the elements – the night, the ethanol, the wrapped corpse . . .

‘You mean to burn him? Here?’

‘This place killed him,’ says the miner. ‘Our brother. We have done with it.’

‘But if you burn him here, you will burn down the church!’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘You could burn down the whole quarter!’

‘It is the church that will burn,’ says the miner. ‘We will guard the rest.’