Pure (24 page)

They have long since eaten their bread and drunk their coffee. They have piled wood beside the preaching-cross bonfire, which in their absence will be fed by others. They are ready now. They are restless.

Outside the sexton’s house, Lecoeur studies his watch, makes faces, mutters under his breath. Of all the mornings Baratte should choose to oversleep, this one is peculiarly inconvenient. Of course, in the comfort of his lodgings, he must find it all too easy to forget them, those who live
below
. The men, however, will take it very amiss if they are kept dawdling. He will take it amiss himself for that matter. Fifty drops of the tincture last night! At least fifty, and heaven knows how much drink to wash it down, but far from procuring a night of restful slumber, it served only to make him an utter stranger to himself. It was – how to express it? – as if he, Lecoeur, was Lecoeur’s body only, the ticking flesh, and something, some invasive intelligence, was roosting in him, animating him, directing his actions. Had the
true
Lecoeur made a decision to go outside in the middle of the night? Had he? He did not believe so and yet he went, in nothing but his nightshirt, to the doctors’ workshop, and there lifted the lid of the coffin and looked at her, Charlotte, with the light of a glowing stick from the fire that seemed almost to be magically in his hand. A horrible excitement! A great strain on the heart. On the teeth too, for he must, by the pains in his jaws, have been grinding them furiously for hours . . .

Behind him, soft footsteps. He turns, sees Jeanne, a shawl round her shoulders, coming from the house to join him. She smiles at him, prettily as ever, but does not today have quite her usual good colour, her usual
bounce
.

‘It is strange he has not come,’ she says.

‘It might be he took more than was good for him last night,’ says Lecoeur.

‘I do not think that is right,’ she says, smartly.

‘No, no,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Probably he is engaged upon some unexpected business matter. A meeting with that man Lafosse, perhaps. The minister’s man.’

She nods. ‘Will you go out today also?’

‘I believe I will,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Monsieur Saint-Méard has invited me to join him and a few of his friends on something of an excursion. He did not say exactly what he intended.’

‘It will be pleasant, I am sure,’ she says. ‘You have the key?’

He shows it to her, an old key in his hand.

‘I think Monsieur Baratte would wish you to let them go,’ she says.

‘You think?’

‘Do you not?’

‘You are probably right.’ He looks at the men, bares his teeth a moment, then looks down at the girl. ‘Shall we do it together?’ he asks.

THIRD

Soon the neighbours wake up and rush to the scene which is no longer of death but of romance.

Cadet de Vaux,
Mémoire Historique et Physique sur le Cimetière des Innocents

Stone steps, a long flight of them, leading steeply down. The cellar. The knowledge of what is below, what must be.

At first it is too dark to see or understand anything of his surroundings. There is only the descent, the feel of the steps beneath his feet. Then a soft pinkish light, a narrow hall, a table with a tin on it, a little bell. There is a woman sitting behind the table. She keeps her face averted but knows he is there. She rings the bell and though it makes no discernible sound the curtain at the end of the hall is immediately drawn back. A man smiles at him, beckons him with a little gesture of his head . . .

They are in a corridor. On either side of it, swagged drapes conceal what are, presumably, the entrances to rooms. One of these – where the drape has been imperfectly closed – he stops to look into, though perhaps it is not really a room at all. The walls seem to be made of packed black earth. The dimensions are uncertain, so too the number of people in there, the men and women and children sitting, crouching, lying. They look back at him. There is something ardent in their gazes. Ardent, wide-eyed, blank. He turns away. He is afraid that one of them will start to speak, will address him, will know his name . . .

The guide is waiting at the end of the corridor. Another set of curtains. Pretty gestures of invitation. He goes in, the guide close behind him. Whatever is going to happen it is going to happen now and here. They are, it seems, in his room at the Monnards’ or something like his room, for there is no window and the walls are bare. Light comes from a single large candle on the table. On the bed is a man. He wears only a shirt, the tails reaching to his knees. His eyes are open, but his lips have been clumsily stitched with black thread.

The guide lifts the candle from the table and steps to the bed. It only takes a moment, he says. We must release the phlogiston. It is the agent of transformation. The destroyer of impurities.

He leans, and as though pouring something precious into the ear of the man on the bed, he touches the candle’s wick to his hair. It takes instantly, burns like dried grass. Then flames slide over the man’s face, wrap his throat, race over the skin of his chest, his belly. How can a body burn like this? A man should not burn like rolled paper! What has been done? What method is this?

In its wrap of flames the body begins to move. An arm, a leg. The torso lifts – floats! – from the burning sheets. The thread between the lips is sundered. The mouth springs open. Roars, roars . . .

1

‘Keep him still,’ says Guillotin. He is leaning over the bed. A line of black thread lies over the patient’s face like a fine crack. Marie presses down on the kicking legs. She’s a good strong girl for the holding-down business. The doctor gets to work.

For the first forty-eight hours there is danger, a very grave danger. If the brain is bleeding, well, something might be done – there’s a surgeon on the rue Saint-Honoré with an elegant drill, but could he be fetched in time? The patient is watched continuously. Marie, Jeanne, Lisa Saget, Armand, Lecoeur. Guillotin calls every morning and again in the early evening. He stands over his patient, weighs the odds, then looks out at the church of les Innocents, thinks large thoughts about men, their heads, their hearts, the way of the world. The old world and the world that is, perhaps, coming.

In spite of the succession of watchers, when the engineer finally opens his eyes he would swear that the room is empty. On the bolster, his head is a dead weight, a fist of living gristle sown onto the stump of his neck. The pain is not on the surface but buried in the white depths of his brain. Its rhythm is the rhythm of his blood. At each heartbeat he winces. The door moves. Madame Monnard peeps in. When she sees that his eyes are open, that he is, apparently, looking at her, she flees.

‘Who am I?’

‘You? You are the doctor.’

‘And my name?’

‘Guillotin.’

‘Good. And you?’

‘Baratte.’

‘And the name of our king?’

‘Louis.’

‘You remember what happened to you?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Some?’

‘Enough.’

‘Monsieur Lafosse has visited us,’ says Lecoeur. (How many hours have passed? How many days?) ‘I believe Dr Guillotin informed him of your . . . misfortune. He has instructed me to press on with the work. Says it would not do to keep the men idle. That time is money.’

‘Ziguette?’ murmurs Jean-Baptiste, but too quietly.

‘And look,’ says Lecoeur, ‘Jeanne has sent you a remedy. Herbs of some kind, I think.’ He holds out the bottle for inspection. On his hands, there is a stubborn speckling of black stains, black paint.

‘Probably a love potion,’ says Armand, who is also in the room, though out of the engineer’s field of vision.

‘What day is it?’ asks the patient.

‘Day?’ says Lecoeur. ‘It is Wednesday. Wednesday morning.’

Marie is on a chair by the bed doing something to the fire. He does not wish to move his head to see. Any quick movement of his head sends the world jittering and juddering. ‘Ziguette?’ he asks.

‘Why?’ she says. ‘Afraid she’s going to visit you again?’ Then, when he does not answer her, she says, ‘It was me what saved you.’

Light is a white sheet at his window, a dull white sheet that is folded each evening and hung out again the next dawn. They no longer watch him all the time. Unwatched, he steals out of bed, sits ten minutes on the chair, clinging to the seat. The following day, he sits for half an hour. Sitting becomes his practice. Sometimes, when swept by squalls of pity – for himself, his bullying father, the haunted lives of strangers, the cold bones in the cemetery – he makes odd shapes with his mouth, a type of dry weeping. Other times he is blank, calm and perfectly blank, until the world’s rawness, his own breath, the edges of the air, rouse him again. He studies his hands, looks at the fire, peers quizzically at the picture of the bridge. He lifts his eyes to the window: the clouds are coloured like the sea at Dieppe. Who are you? asked the doctor. He is Adam alone in the garden. He is Lazarus rousted out of his tomb, one life separated from another by a slack of darkness.

Guillotin comes to bleed him; phlebotomy a standard precaution in such cases. First, he carries out his usual examination of the wound. ‘You Normans have nice thick skulls,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t care to leave me your head, would you?’

‘What makes you think you will outlive me?’

‘Your taste in women,’ says the doctor, turning his attention to the engineer’s right arm and cutting him close to the elbow. The blood slopes into a tin bowl. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I won’t take much.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Your assailant?’

‘No one will tell me where she is.’

‘She was here until two days ago, in the house. Now she is sent away. Elderly relatives in Dauphiné. People of strict religion. I hope you will not object, but I gave the scheme my approval. There can be no more effective cure for a young woman’s ardency than a year or two muttering novenas in a cold house in a remote province. I assumed you would have no wish to prosecute her. A man would only make himself ridiculous prosecuting a woman in such circumstances. Had you succumbed, of course, then the matter would have been beyond any purely private solution. You were lovers?’

‘No.’

‘I shall believe you,’ says the doctor, balling a scrap of lint, pressing it over the cut and carefully folding his patient’s arm. ‘But if it was not love or jealousy or desire, what do you imagine made her walk into your room and try to split your head in two?’

‘Les Innocents.’

‘The cemetery? To keep you from destroying it? She may be madder than I thought. Let us hope she does not butcher her relatives in Dauphiné. One would feel a certain responsibility.’

‘How long has it been?’

‘Since the attack? Two weeks. A little over.’

‘I must return to the work.’

‘A month in the good air of Normandy would be a better prescription.’

‘I am well enough.’

‘You were struck a very considerable blow to the head. The effects of any such blow are both unpredictable and of long duration. You have noticed anything unusual? Hallucinations? Lapses in memory?’

‘Nothing,’ says Jean-Baptiste, lying.

The doctor wipes the blade of his lancet. ‘In that case,’ he says, ‘how would it be if we endeavour to get you down to the drawing room tomorrow? The Monnards will no doubt be anxious to afford you every comfort.’ He grins. ‘In the meantime, you have the Comte de Buffon to keep you company.’ He takes the book from the table, drops it onto the bedcovers. ‘You are aware, I suppose, that there are another thirty volumes of this?’

When the doctor has gone, Jean-Baptiste looks at the book and, after a moment, opens it. It is not the first time since the assault that he has tried it. He shuts his eyes, opens them, summons himself, the engine of his concentration, which has, in the past, served him so well. He puts a finger on the top left-hand side of the left-hand page. The first four words present no difficulty: ‘Now let us consider . . .’ The next word he cannot read. The next is, he thinks, ‘instance’. The next nothing but a shape, meaningless as an ink blot. So too the one after it and the one after that. And it is not just words in books, it is the words in his head that have gone. Names of things, quite ordinary things, objects a child could name. Like    and    .

And if this, this blindness, should become common knowledge? If Lafosse and then the minister discover it, what then? Who in the world would employ such a man even to destroy a cemetery?

He shuts the book, pushes it onto the floor, rolls out of bed, stands experimentally, waits for his blood to arrange itself, then shuffles to the mirror. He has a nightcap on his head, a dressing of some sort beneath it. He looks – what? – foolish and saintly and slightly frightening. He fingers the hair on his chin, touches his skull as though it was a shelled egg and any sharp movement might pierce it, make a hole for the yolk of his brains to run through . . .