Pure (16 page)

The soup and bread are consumed without ceremony. The miners lick their spoons, wipe clean their beards with the side of a hand, spit, scratch, yawn.

Seeing them done, Jean-Baptiste climbs the winding steps to the narrow, railed pulpit on the pediment of the preaching cross. He is followed by Lecoeur, then, entirely at his own invitation, by Armand. With three of them in the pulpit, they have to stand with their shoulders pressed hard against each other. With his free arm Jean-Baptiste gestures to the miners. They stand and slowly approach the cross. Something else he had forgotten about these men: years of stooping in the tunnels means that many are permanently hunched. They gather below him and tilt their heads awkwardly to look up. To Lecoeur he says, ‘I shall speak to them a little. Then you, if you will be so kind, can repeat the gist of it in Flemish.’

He clears his throat. He does not have a strong speaking voice, wants to be heard but does not wish to shout at them. ‘You are welcome here,’ he begins. ‘It may be that I knew some of you in Valenciennes. Our work here will be very different. All this ancient cemetery and the church behind you is to be destroyed. The whole surface of the cemetery will be dug out. All the bones, all those you can see in the charnels, all those underground and in the crypts, will be removed and taken to another place. You must handle the bones as you would those of your own ancestors. We will start tomorrow on the first of the big pits. We will, at all times, have fires burning to purify and circulate the air. The doctors are agreed that fire is the best defence against any vapours our digging may release. Your pay will be twenty-five sous for a day’s work. There will be one hot meal a day plus a litre of wine. You must not leave the cemetery without permission from myself or Monsieur Lecoeur. Your first task is to put up your shelters and dig the latrines. You must not foul the ground. We will work every day. You will each be responsible for the care and maintenance of your tools.’ Then, an afterthought, ‘I am Baratte. The engineer.’

‘Excellent,’ whispers Lecoeur.

‘Functional,’ says Armand.

Lecoeur begins his translation. He is evidently much more fluent than he has admitted. As he speaks, Jean-Baptiste scans the broken ranks of the miners. There is one who stands out; taller than most of the others, bare-headed, his gaze seems to move coolly across the faces of the triumvirate on the preaching cross. One might almost guess that he was amused, as if he had seen such sights, witnessed such moments too often not to find in them some hint of the absurd. For a few seconds he settles a hand on the shoulder of a much older miner in front of him, and though it is hard to see clearly across twenty metres of air, the hand is evidently not quite as it should be, is, in some way, deformed.

When Lecoeur has finished, the three of them, at some risk of tumbling over each other, descend the winding steps. Boyer-Duboisson’s poles and canvas are carried to the level ground in the middle of the cemetery. Once the first tent is erected, its construction understood, the others go up swiftly enough.

The wood merchant arrives with fresh timber. He peers in at the miners, sucks his gums, nods approvingly. Supplying les Innocents will be the best work of his life: once the fires are lit, they’ll stay that way for months. The new wood is stacked close beside the tents. It is both valuable and stealable. Already a sizeable quantity has found its way over the walls at night.

Jean-Baptiste inspects the work on the latrines, approves it. Inspects each tent, tugs at their ropes. Several times he is called away to the cemetery doors to deal with a tradesman, work he eventually gives to Armand, who seems to want it.

Even in digging the latrines and the fire pits they have unearthed some hundred or more large bones and countless fragments, some of them chalk-white, others grey or black, or yellow as a chanterelle. Jeanne collects one of the smaller skulls, dislodges with her thumb a gob of earth from its brow and settles it in the grass again as though returning a fledgling to its nest. There is in these actions of hers something faintly repellent, yet it is obvious to Jean-Baptiste that her example will impress the men far more than any words of his own.

As he passes them in the deepening gloom of early evening, he tries to fix their faces in memory. Not many will look him in the eyes. Those who do he stops and asks their names. Jacques Everbout, Joos Slabbart, Jan Biloo, Pieter Molendino, Jan Block. He does not find the man he noticed from the preaching cross, the one who looked up so coolly. Whoever he is, he seems to have the knack of making himself invisible when he chooses to.

When Jean-Baptiste built the bridge on the estate of the Comte de S—, he had some twelve men under him – servants from the house and gardens, together with a pair of journeymen masons and a master mason from Troyes. The master in particular made no effort to hide his impatience with the ‘boy’ who commanded the project. The journeymen were not much kinder, and even the house-servants would come and go as they pleased and missed no opportunity to humiliate him, in that way servants in great houses become adept at. It is not good to be humiliated. It is not good to be the master in word only. Here, at les Innocents, he must somehow impose his will, must do it even if in the privacy of his own heart he is as uncertain of himself as he was then. And yet he would like them to like him. Or at least, not to despise him.

Once it has become too dark for any useful activity, the men sit by the openings of their tents. They have been fed a second time, have been given drink. Jean-Baptiste – who has eaten only because Jeanne insisted on it, standing beside him with bread and bowl – makes a last round with Lecoeur, the pair of them bidding the men a good night and receiving in reply a few guttural responses. Impossible to know what they are thinking, whether half of them intend to run away in the night. Can they be trusted? There were, on occasions, incidents at the mines, violent incidents. Imagine the minister’s face when he is told that the men have absconded and are ravaging Paris!

Away from the tents, Lecoeur reassures him.

‘You are paying them considerably more than they received at Valenciennes. And they are decent sorts in their way. One might raise a very creditable company from them.’

‘With you as their captain,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘You, dear Baratte, are our captain. I think you should look quite dashing atop a white horse.’

‘I would need to improve my Flemish.’

‘Advance, attack. Ten sous for every enemy head. That would be enough, I think.’

They are crossing the corner of the cemetery towards the sexton’s house. Lecoeur has a burning torch, though they hardly need it. There is lamplight from the windows of the house and a broad, red light from the big fire.

‘My first view of this place,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘was from the window of my room, up there. I looked down at night and it was a region of the most impenetrable dark. Now it is almost festive.’

‘Festive? Forgive me, but I do not think such a place could ever be festive.’

‘How do you find the stink now?’

‘Tolerable, just. I have no large sense of stinks. Some effect of the mines. My skull is packed with coal dust.’

‘There is said to be an animal,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘part dog, part wolf, that has its lair in the charnels on this side.’ He gestures ahead of them to the south wall, the archways leading into the galleries.

‘I would not allow such a story to get among the men.’

‘No, you are right,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘But should it prove more than an old story, I have come prepared.’ Lecoeur stops and pulls a shape from the pocket of his coat. ‘You see?’

‘Is it loaded?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I have powder and balls among my things. And I have practised with it. I can hit a coal scuttle at thirty paces.’

‘Lecoeur’s wolf-destroyer,’ says Jean-Baptiste. They laugh, softly. Lecoeur extinguishes the torch with the side of his boot and they enter the sexton’s house.

The old man is asleep by the grate, the silver curls of his beard crushed against his chest. Armand is at the table with Jeanne. Jeanne stands as soon as the others enter. ‘We have been waiting for you,’ she says.

‘We have been making our rounds of the camp,’ says Lecoeur. He is looking at the brandy bottle on the table by Armand’s elbow.

‘How is your grandfather?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Weary,’ says Jeanne, smiling at the top of the old man’s head. ‘Yet glad, I think, that it has begun. And he sees that I am content.’ To Lecoeur she says, ‘Your men are very nice.’

Lecoeur makes a little bow. ‘You have become a favourite of theirs already, mademoiselle.’

‘Now,’ says Armand, yawning, ‘perhaps we will be permitted to have that drink. Jeanne, we will need two more glasses.’

The glasses are fetched, filled, raised. Even Jeanne takes a little; the heat of it makes her cheeks burn. Armand tops them up. Jean-Baptiste puts his glass aside.

‘We start to dig tomorrow,’ he says. ‘It would be best we do not sit up with the bottle. I shall be here very early, Jeanne. And I believe Madame Saget will be coming?’

‘Lisa will be here,’ says Armand. ‘It seems she is quite reconciled to you.’

‘I will go to the market for bread as soon as it is light,’ says Jeanne. ‘Grandfather will come, and perhaps Madame Saget.’

‘And I have arranged for fifteen nice old hens to join us for dinner,’ says Armand. ‘A sack of potatoes, a sack of carrots, a man’s weight in green lentils. Onions. And I took the liberty of ordering a hundred and twenty litres of Burgundy wine. Chateau Nothing-in-Particular. I suggest we keep the wine locked in one of the church offices. I doubt Père Colbert will drink it.’

‘Good,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Thank you.’

‘We are a machine!’ exults Lecoeur, whose glass, emptied twice, is somehow full again. ‘We have been wound and now we are running!’

‘Tick, tock, tick, tock,’ says Armand. Jeanne giggles.

‘Are you coming?’ Jean-Baptiste asks Armand.

‘I think perhaps I shall stay a while,’ says Armand.

A pause.

‘Very well. Then I wish you all a good night.’

He goes out, irritably tugging at the collar of his coat. Is Armand trying to make a fool of him? Is he up to something with Jeanne? He can only hope that Lisa Saget keeps him on a tight rein.

At the door to the rue aux Fers, he turns back to look at the strange, flickering stage he has created. From one of the tents comes the sound of singing, something muted and repetitive, a ballad, perhaps a lament. He listens a few moments, then goes out onto the empty street, shuts and locks the door. If Armand intends to leave at all, let him fumble his way out through the church.

At the house on the rue de la Lingerie, he avoids the Monnards, goes with his candle as quietly as he can past the drawing-room door. They, like everyone else, will have seen the fires – they could hardly have a better view of them – and given their inexplicable opposition to his work, the sight is unlikely to have occasioned any celebration. If he sits with them, they will rebuke him with silences, batter him with sighs. He has no idea any longer what to tell them.

In his room, he tugs off his boots. The brandy sits in a little stinging pool in his chest. He belches, then leans over the bed to look out of the window. A light rain has started to fall. There is nothing to see but the points of fire, the darkness close around them.

He closes the shutters and sits at the table, draws his notebook towards himself. He has had, this last week, some thoughts of starting a journal, a record of the destruction of the cemetery, something technical but also philosophical, witty even, that he could one day present to Maître Perronet at a small ceremony at the school. He toys with the pen, turning it round in his fingers. He should have stayed with the others, drunk more brandy, laughed a little. It would have done him good, would have been better than sitting up here on his own, oscillating.

He takes the cork from the ink bottle, dips his nib, writes at the top of a new page the date, writes below it, ‘They came today, thirty poor men led by one whose presence I may have cause to regret. Already the work disgusts me and we have not even begun it. I wish to God I had never heard of Les Innocents.’

He closes the book, pushes it away, sits there blankly like a man under sentence. Then he draws the book to him again, opens it, reads through what he has written, dips his nib and, working methodically across the page, scratches a glistening X over each letter until the lines are hidden, unreadable, buried.