Pure (13 page)

‘I will leave you money. Use what you need. And you may use the minister’s name where it is necessary. But everything must be done without delay. If we drag our feet, I am assured that none of us will be needed. They have been most particular on that point.’

‘
Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur
,’ says Lecoeur, grinning and rubbing his palms together. ‘Now, will you take a mouthful of food? A few slices of the head perhaps?’ He reaches it down from the meat safe on the wall, holds it like a darling. The poor, hacked-about head.

13

There is snow in Paris too. Snow churned with ash, soot, mud, dung. On the better streets, outside the better houses, it has been swept into grey pyramids. Elsewhere, cartwheels, hooves, sabots have cleared their own paths. In the cemetery, the snow lies along the arms of the preaching cross, sits discreetly on the stone heads of the
lanternes des morts
, lines the tops of the walls, the sloping roofs of the charnels.

With a spade borrowed from the sexton’s house, Jean-Baptiste prods at the ground, feels its resistance, hears it, the dull ringing, as if he had struck iron. At least the stink of the place is much reduced. He feels no nausea. No active disgust.

Armand appears from the church, ducking under the low door, then crossing the cemetery, his hair like the one thing of vivid colour left in the world.

‘I see,’ he says, nodding to the spade, ‘you are staying true to your name, Monsieur Bêche.’

‘On ground like this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I would do better with an axe.’

‘You know it could stay frozen for months,’ says Armand, cheerfully.

‘It will not.’

‘Because the minister won’t permit it? Very well. But I do not think you will be digging up any bones this side of Christmas. You should go home. Remind yourself of who you are.’

Jean-Baptiste nods, taps around his toes with the edge of the spade. Home. He would like nothing better. He aches for it.

‘And you?’ he asks.

‘Christmas? I shall stay drunk for three days. Lisa will berate me for the dog I am. Then I will grow sober, make love to her for hours, go with her and the children to Saint-Eustache for mass. Have ungodly thoughts about the young wife in the pew ahead of me. Perhaps find a way to press against her at the communion rail.’

‘And your friends? Renard? Fleur, de Bergerac?’

‘Ah, you did not like them much, did you? In fact, there is not much to like about them. By the way, that paint on your cheek will wash off eventually. In the meantime, you can pretend they are beauty spots. Now, talking of beauty . . .’

The girl Jeanne, a heavy shawl over her shoulders, is walking towards them from the sexton’s house. She raises a pink hand in greeting.

‘You are back,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘I wondered where you had gone.’

‘I had some business,’ he says, ‘in another place. I travelled.’

‘That’s nice,’ she says. ‘Was it nice?’

‘It served its purpose,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘And does she know,’ asks Armand, ‘what its purpose was? Does she know what you have in mind for us?’

Jeanne looks at Armand, then at Jean-Baptiste. ‘You have something in mind for us?’ she asks.

‘Others do,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Important people.’

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘Oh, indeed,’ says Armand.

‘You must have wondered, Jeanne, what I was doing here. When you were helping me, you must have wondered.’

‘I enjoyed helping you,’ she says. ‘I will help you today if you wish.’

‘I will not need it today,’ he says.

‘The cemetery,’ says Armand, ‘for I shall tell her if you won’t. The cemetery is to be got rid of, Jeanne. The cemetery and the church.’

‘The matter was settled long ago,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The place is to be made new. Pure. It is what the king himself wishes.’

‘The king?’

‘You have nothing to fear. The remains, the bones, will all be taken to a place, a consecrated place, where they may be kept safely.’

‘All of them?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘And you can do this?’ She looks at the spade.

‘I will have others to help me,’ he says.

She nods several times. ‘If it is what you want,’ she says quietly.

‘You and your grandfather, you will be provided for. You have my word on it.’

‘You want to be careful what you promise,’ says Armand.

‘The cemetery,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ignoring him, ‘cannot just be forgotten about, can it?’

‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘it cannot.’

‘And you know how the people complain of it.’

She frowns. ‘Grandfather says they used to be proud to live by such a famous place. They boasted of it.’

‘People’s noses,’ says Armand, ‘have grown more delicate.’

She nods again, more emphatically, as if the matter was entirely proved.

‘And the house?’ she asks.

‘You will have a new one. Perhaps even here when the land has been cleared.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Grandfather will be well if I am with him,’ she says.

‘Of course. You must be with him.’

For a quarter-minute they stand without speaking. They look about themselves. They can see nothing to suggest that anything will ever be other than the way it is now.

An hour later, warming themselves with brandy and hot water in a mirrored booth at the Café de Foy, Armand says, ‘She agrees only because it is you. You have used some Norman enchantment on her. But have you not misled her? Once your miners get to work, they will fling the bones around like firewood. And this house you have promised her. Did you not invent it on the spot? You have no more power to give her a house than you have to give me the organ at Saint-Eustache.’

‘I will do what I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘You will do what you are told,’ says Armand. ‘Isn’t that more like it?’

‘The minister . . .’

‘Your great friend the minister.’

‘I do not believe he is . . . unfeeling.’

‘And you think he will feel something for Jeanne? Or is it you who feels something for her? I can see that it might be nice to curl up with a girl like that on a cold night.’

‘She is barely more than a child.’

‘Barely will do. Our beloved queen was wed at fourteen. And she’d go with you. You could smuggle her up to your room at the Monnards’. Though no doubt it would put Ziguette’s nose out of joint.’

‘It is you, I think, who is interested in Ziguette.’

‘If you mean would I
do
it with her if the opportunity presented itself, the answer is yes. So, I assume, would you. Which makes me think we should go and ogle our Persian princess. What do you say?’

‘Not today.’

‘No? You are being very dull, Monsieur Bêche. You want to beware of dullness. It is not modern. But it shall be as you wish. When you’ve paid for the brandy, I will do you the honour of escorting you to your lodgings.’

At the edge of the market, as they are crossing the top of the rue des Prêcheurs, they encounter the Austrian. She is carrying a small parcel of books, wrapped and neatly tied with black twine. She gives the impression of being only a very little disturbed by the cold, the slush on the cobbles, the eddying wind others scowl into. Armand salutes her, then catches something of the glance, the second’s worth of to-and-fro between the whore and the engineer.

‘Oh, no. Not her as well?’ he asks. And starts to laugh.

SECOND

One day I shall mourn for those who are dear to me, or I shall be mourned by them . . . At the thought of death, the oppressed soul longs to open itself completely and envelop the objects of its affection.

J. Girard,
Des Tombeaux, ou de l’Influence des Institutions Funèbres sur les Moeurs

1

The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping. How much has changed in two hundred years? Did the people not live much like this in the days of Henri IV? They may have lived better, with fewer of them and the land less tired and the lords, with their just glimpsable chateaux, less numerous.

He is going home! Home for the first time in eleven weeks, though in his heart it might as easily be eleven years, himself a grizzled Ulysses straining his eyes for the blue shadow of Ithaca.

The roads, thank God, are passable. Last week’s snow has thawed and the new weather – a low, icy sun, the air cracking at night – has turned the mud to stone.

He has changed coach twice. The driver of this one is worryingly drunk, but the horses know their way. He looks out at the wall of a forest, frets when they are held up by a flock of geese being herded on the road ahead by some dreaming girl with a stick. Then a final hill, a church tower purple in the afternoon light and the coachman’s voice bellowing, ‘Bellême! Bellême!’

He climbs down in the market square. His bag is unlashed, dropped into his arms. As ever, a small group of townsfolk are stood nearby, arms folded, watching. In Bellême, curiosity will never go out of fashion. One of these watchers, a widow who deals in cures for the toothache, for palsy, wet ulcers, recognises him and he speaks to her and hears of the deaths of two or three whose names he knows, of the wedding of a local girl to a cloth-shearer in Mamers, of a man caught poaching on the cardinal’s estate and sent for trial at Nogent. Nobody, it seems, is making any money. The soil grows only stones. And yet somehow everyone is managing and the church clock is being repaired and God will grant them a better year next year, for they are not bad people and their sins are only small ones.

‘And what of you?’ she asks, finally drawing breath. ‘You have been somewhere?’

He has some distance still to go. He shoulders his bag, marches down the hill, crosses the stream on the stepping stones, walks warily through the corner of a field where once he was pursued by a white bull. From the woods at the side of him, he smells the smoke of the charcoal-burners’ fires, those mysterious people who belong only to themselves; then he passes the holly tree – thick this year with berries – crosses Farfield, hears the dogs begin their clamour, and there is the house, the yard, the patched outbuildings, all the stone and mud of home exactly where it should be, must be, and yet, at the same time, all of it somehow surprising. He quickens his pace; a figure appears in the doorway. He raises an arm; she raises hers. For the last minutes of the walk he is watched by her. It is as if her gaze was the path he was walking up, as if at the end of it he might walk clean into her grey eyes.

When they have greeted, he sits by the fire, holds his hands to the heat. There is a moment, a little span of seconds, in which he is simply and passionately happy and nothing in the world is any more complicated than a picture in a child’s book. He is home! Home at last! And then the moment passes.

His mother is making things for him, bringing things to him, asking him questions, thanking him for the money he has sent. She looks, he thinks, a little pinched about the eyes and mouth. And is there not more grey to be seen under the linen scallops of her cap? He would like to ask if she has been quite well, but she would only smile and say she has been well enough. Suffering is a gift from God. It is not a matter to complain of.

His sister comes in, Henriette, cold hands tucked under her arms. She has been in the dairy and smells like a wet-nurse. She wants, she says, to know everything. Her interest flatters him and he listens to himself with some astonishment, his fluent refashioning of the recent past. To hear him, anyone might imagine he and the minister spent their mornings together strolling between the fountains in the gardens of Versailles. The Monnards become a simple bourgeois family, amiable, irreproachable, while Armand is exactly the sort of companion his mother – who has always fretted that he will be lonely – would wish for him, and one who could never be suspected of living conjugally with his landlady or having a taste for preserved princesses. About his work at les Innocents he repeats only what he has already said in his letters, that he is charged with improving the health of a populous quarter, and with some structural alterations to an ancient church there. There is no good reason not to tell them everything, nothing forbids it, the work is not
indecent
, yet when it comes to it, he is afraid he will see something in their faces, will glimpse some imperfectly concealed reflex of disgust.

His sister wants to know if he has seen the queen. ‘Yes,’ he says, the bluntest of his lies so far. Naturally, he is required to describe her, in detail.

‘She was at some distance from me,’ he says, ‘and surrounded by her ladies.’

‘But you must have seen something?’

He describes Héloïse. Mother and sister are delighted, his sister especially.

‘She cannot have been so far away,’ she says, ‘for you have made a perfect portrait of her.’