Pure (34 page)

‘It looks,’ says Guillotin, pausing to regard it, the streaked black cliff of the church’s west face, ‘horribly solid.’

‘Buildings are mostly air,’ says the engineer, quoting the great Perronet. ‘Air and empty space. And there is nothing in the world that cannot be reduced to its parts. With enough men you could turn the Palace of Versailles into rubble inside of a week.’

The more he thinks of it, the more convinced he is he has been thinking of it for a long time. He tries the idea on Armand.

‘Oh, my beautiful church,’ wails Armand, grinning broadly.

‘It will mean the organ too,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Naturally.’

‘You don’t object?’

‘It is what I said to you before. The night we went painting. One does not resent the future or its agents.’

‘And the future is good whatever it brings?’

‘Yes,’ says Armand, without a moment’s hesitation.

‘I do not believe that,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Think of the light,’ says Armand.

‘The light?’

‘The church of les Innocents has been hoarding shadows for five hundred years. You will free them. You will let in light and air. You will let in the sky.
That
is the future!’

‘That,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘is a metaphor.’

‘A metaphor? Where did you go to school?’

‘Nogent-le-Rotrou.’

Dawn: he lies in bed frowning into the indeterminate space above him, trying to work out the best way to destroy a church. What exactly
did
Maître Perronet say on the subject? Did they cover demolition while Jean-Baptiste was at home in Bellême, helping to care for his father? If it stood out in a field somewhere, he would simply blow it up. God knows he could make enough black powder from all the potassium in the soil of the cemetery. But a church halfway up the rue Saint-Denis? In theory, of course, a building could be
imploded
: mined and brought down upon itself in a tidy cloud of dust and tumbling stone. In practice – well, he has never heard of a single successful instance. There was that case in Rome five, six years ago, some old basilica they wanted rid of in a hurry. Filled the crypts with barrels of gunpowder, laid the fuses, lit them, obliterated the basilica and most of the neighbouring tenement. Two hundred men, women and children blown to rags. Shook the windows of the Vatican. He cannot remember what became of the engineer. Does he work still? Did they hang him?

For les Innocents, he will need a more methodical, a more prosaic approach. Get the lead off, the tiles, cut rafters, purlins, drop them in. Make the church disappear like a slow forgetting. Are the pillars solid or cored with rubble? And the foundations? This close to the river, the whole thing could be floating on mud.

He will need to speak to Manetti. And Jeanne. If the church is coming down, so is the house. And if the house is coming down, then he must, as he once promised, find them something new. The lead and tiles, carefully traded, should raise more than enough to provide for an old man and his granddaughter, provide for years.

And how is she, this girl whose rapist he put into her house to live with her? Guillotin tells him she has lost some of the sight in her left eye but is otherwise healing well. For himself, though it is almost two months now, he has been careful not to be alone with her. He remembers how she shrank from his touch the night she lay on the kitchen table. And he wants to leave it long enough so that when they are alone, Lecoeur will not sit bloody and leering at the side of them. Leave it much longer, however, and there may be another subject, equally difficult to ignore. Lisa Saget says Jeanne is with child, has said as much to Héloïse. It is not yet certain. There are some technical proofs to be established, and Jeanne herself has offered no confidences. Hard to think, however, that a woman like Lisa Saget could be mistaken. Does a child have any sense of the circumstances of its conception? There are plenty who think so.

He tilts his head to look at Héloïse, her softly piled hair on the bolster. At some hour of the night, she made little noises, uttered a dozen half-words out of a dream, a hurt, reproachful tone to them, but now she is in that pure last sleep before waking, her breathing no louder than if someone brushed a fingertip, to and fro, slowly on the linen.

Are the pillars solid or cored with rubble? And the foundations? Does the whole thing float on mud?

With Armand he walks down the rue de la Verrerie, the evening sun between their shoulder blades, their shadows rippling over the stones in front of them. From Verrerie onto Roi de Sicile, then Saint-Antoine, then five minutes walking towards the Bastille, a royal flag on one of the turrets, hanging limp. Down the narrow rue de Fourcy, past the walls of the convent and right again into the rue de Jardin . . . This is the district of Saint-Paul. There are stonemasons here: a blind man would know it. Armand and the engineer stop outside the open door of a workshop. Stone dust simmers in the warm air by the door. After the light of the streets, the inside of the workshop is ink-dark. Armand enters first, stumbles over a pallet, curses loudly. The sound of hammering stops. A heavyset man in an apron and white cap walks out of the ink to look at them. Every crease and bearing surface of his face has its dusting of stone.

‘You are?’ he asks.

‘Baratte,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Engineer at les Innocents. I am here for Master Sagnac. I sent word.’

‘And I am the organist,’ says Armand, making a little bow.

‘From the cemetery, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am Sagnac. Your letter said you were demolishing the church. That you needed masons.’

‘A master. Four or five senior apprentices.’

‘And labour?’

‘I have labour.’

‘Used to heights?’

‘They are miners. Or were.’

Sagnac laughs. ‘Then I’ll bring some of my own,’ he says. ‘At least until yours find their wings.’

‘As you wish.’

‘I’ve heard the king himself is behind the project.’

‘My orders come from the minister,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

Sagnac nods. ‘We all work for them one way or another, eh? You want me to get the green wood for the scaffolding? My contacts will be better than yours.’

‘But everything at a good price,’ says Armand, quickly. ‘My friend here may have a country accent, but I am Paris and learnt my tricks at the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés.’

‘You’ll find me true enough,’ says Sagnac. ‘I will not cheat any poor foundlings.’

One of the mason’s apprentices, a gangling boy dusted like his master, puts three stools outside the door and the three men sit and drink white wine and barter.

‘I almost trust him,’ says Armand as he and the engineer walk back to the cemetery together.

‘He will know his work,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And we will not pay him for what he does not do.’

‘You’re shaping up nicely,’ says Armand.

‘Thank you.’

‘And you have heard the latest about Jeanne?’

On Monday morning, half past six, 10 June, Sagnac arrives with four senior apprentices: Poulet, Jullien, Boilly and Barass. There are also a dozen labouring men in jackets and little hats, some with tools in their belts. The engineer walks Sagnac around the site. They tap the walls, prod the earth, confer, prod and tap some more. They meet the sexton and Jeanne. One of the apprentices makes careful sketches of the church. The others look at the charnels, the bone walls, shake their heads. Look at the miners too – that ragged band of saints – with no attempt to hide their distaste.

‘Well?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘We’ll put the scaffolding up this south wall to start with,’ says Sagnac. ‘What’s that there?’

‘The doctors’ workshop.’

‘The what?’

‘It can go.’

‘Right.’

‘When does the wood arrive?’

‘You can have the first of it tomorrow. And if your men know how to hammer in a nail, I can use them.’

Spars of green wood. A simple, repetitive geometry of squares and triangles spreading up the side of the church. It climbs fast. Each day the engineer climbs with it, soon climbs above the charnels, looks over the rue de la Ferronnerie, sees into the rue des Lombards, sees into first, second, then third-storey windows.

The miners are not as agile as the mason’s men; they do not skip from beam to beam or lean back insouciantly into the summer air, one hand casually gripping a strut, but they betray no fear of heights. They lift, tie, hammer, outdo the others in strength of limb, in sheer doggedness, in the calm efficiency of their labouring. At eating times, the two groups keep themselves apart. The mason’s men eat on the scaffolding, carry their food up there, look past their dangling boots at the miners, who, gathered below in their accustomed place, make a point of never looking up.

A week of shouting and the rattle of hammers and they reach the roof of the church. Jean-Baptiste climbs to join Sagnac.

‘The air’s a little better up here, eh?’ says Sagnac, his broad backside perched on the parapet at the edge of the roof.

‘If you say so,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He can see the river. The roof of the Louvre. The flour mills on Montmartre.

‘I suggest we break through in that gully,’ says the mason, indicating. ‘See what we’ve got.’

‘Very well.’

‘You want to keep the tiles?’

‘As many as possible.’

‘You’ll need hoists, then.

‘We have rope, chain, wheels.’

Sagnac nods. ‘Your men work well enough for foreigners.’

‘They’re not all foreigners,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘But yes, they’re good workers.’

‘A hell of a job all the same,’ says Sagnac, eyeing the young engineer, studying him as though, in the rareness of the air, he is seeing him for the first time.

In the church, the air is like standing water. Chill, stagnant. Having descended the scaffolding, the engineer goes inside with Armand and four of the miners. The mason is somewhere above the south transept. From the floor of the church nothing of the roof can be seen at all; everything must be imagined. They crane their necks, wait, rub their necks and look up again. A muffled thump brings a sudden creaking of invisible wings. The first blow is followed by a long series of them, two-second intervals.

‘This should wake up Colbert,’ says Armand.

‘If he’s here,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Oh, he’s here, all right.’

‘What does he live on?’

‘Wax. Liturgy. His own thumbs.’

A miner steps back, brushing something from his face. ‘Dust coming down,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Stand away a little.’

The thumping is less muffled now. There’s a pause; then it begins again, a double beat, harder to place. ‘Are they right over us?’ asks Armand.

‘No, no. By that edge there. They’ll try to come in between the rafters near the bottom of the gully.’

Something hits the flagstones. Not dust any more. More of it comes down, comes down with each strike of the hammers. Flakes of stone plaster, of rubble. Then something big, crashing down seven, eight metres ahead of them, smashing into fragments. The double beat shifts to a triple. Ba-ba-bang, ba-ba-bang, ba-ba-bang. Then half a minute of silence; then two strikes, very aimed and deliberate, as if they had discovered some unguarded place on the dragon’s head, something yielding. Another large piece comes down. The party below retreat. In the black, the stared-at black above, something winks. A small white eye, small and almost too bright to gaze at.

‘They’re through!’ says Armand. A flurry of strikes and the eye widens. A beam of swirling light cuts at a slant from roof to floor and breaks not on some gilded angel or plaster saint, but on the boot of a miner, who hops backwards as if it had burnt him.

Shyly they reach for it, the light, turn their hands in it. Another dozen blows from above and they can bathe their chests, then their whole bodies. Héloïse must see this, thinks the engineer. Héloïse, Jeanne . . . they must all see it.

‘Below there!’ shouts a voice. Sagnac. His head small as a coin.

The engineer steps into the light, peers up. ‘We are here,’ he calls. It is an odd sort of conversation. It is perhaps how Adam spoke to Jehovah. ‘Any trouble?’

‘Like breaking snail shells,’ says Sagnac. (‘Snail shells . . .’ sings the echo.) ‘Beams are rotten to the heart. Another twenty years it would have come down on its own!’ The head disappears.

‘I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘ A pair of these lads can pump for me.’

‘Is this a time for
playing
?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.’

A half-hour later, while Armand improvises on the organ, the engineer conducts a tour of the light. Héloïse squeezes his elbow. The sexton looks up, blinks his eyes like a prisoner trapped fifty years in some oubliette, some dank
cachot
like those said to exist in the fortress of the Bastille. Lisa wets her lips, opens her face like a flower.