Pure (38 page)

‘Once the church is on fire, it will be beyond anyone’s control . . .’

‘We know about fire,’ says the other. ‘It is a thing we understand well.’

‘And what of Jeanne, and her grandfather?’

‘I will fetch them out,’ says another voice, a voice the engineer immediately recognises. Jan Block.

‘Listen to me,’ says Jean-Baptiste, wildly seeking a new tone, something better than mere incredulity. ‘Your brother who died today. I am sorry for it. Truly sorry. The mason has promised that those whose carelessness caused the accident will be punished. He has given me his word. There may even be . . . some compensation.’

‘What the mason does,’ says the miner, ‘is for the mason to decide. It does not concern us.’

‘By why this? Why risk everything?’

‘You too take risks. You took a risk the night you went into the charnel after Monsieur Lecoeur, did you not? Coming here tonight, you have taken another.’

‘Let them do it,’ whispers Armand excitedly. ‘You have no authority here now. They will not listen to you. All that’s over.’

The miner has turned away from them. He is issuing orders. He is in his own tongue now. He does not raise his voice. More of the ethanol is brought from the chapel where the jars were stored. They break the seals, splash the liquid over the wood. For the final act, two of the miners scale the wood and spill the last half-jar over the wrapped body. When they come down, the miner in white gestures to them all to move further back. He speaks – a prayer or some ceremonial farewell – then takes a taper from the man at his side, steps towards the pews, stops, glances to the engineer, takes hold of a second taper and walks to him.

‘Together,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Together.’

‘Burn the church? Be party to this?’

‘Take the damn taper,’ says Armand, body poised as though ready – eager – to take it himself. ‘Take it before he puts us up there along with poor Slabbart.’

It is not, in the end, so hard to do. He looks into the miner’s eyes, the cool violet depths of them, sees no threat, no menace. Sees what, then? Reason? Philosophy? Madness? Or just himself, his own eyes, his own gaze reflected? He reaches for the taper. The moment he has it, the moment he closes it in his fist, everything assumes the character of a ritual, something rehearsed, something with its own irresistible progress. They walk together to the pyre, stand there with the wood rising over them to the height of six or seven men. The miner swings his taper first, lands it two-thirds of the way up the pile. Jean-Baptiste, after a brief and final hesitation, casts his to fall a little below it. For a while the tapers burn quietly, look almost as if they will gutter out, then a swirl of night air descending through the roof rouses them and blue flames spring from their tips, race up to gather round Slabbart’s blanket, race down again, following the trails of ethanol, down to the stone floor, to the jars themselves, which fill on the instant with roiling blue flames.

What have I done? thinks Jean-Baptiste.
What have I done!
Yet he feels like laughing, feels he has set alight not just this hateful church but everything that ever oppressed him, grossly or subtly. Lafosse, the minister, the sneering Comte de S—. His own father. His own weakness and confusion . . .

They stand; they watch. The wood, baked for weeks in the summer sun, begins to snap and to flare. At moments, the air itself seems to burn. Then a small explosion – one of the jars? – and the miners are leaving, getting out quickly, quietly. No hullabaloo yet. The fire must be kept a secret until its hold is unbreakable. It will not be long.

Armand grips Jean-Baptiste’s arm, jolts him out of his dreaming. ‘Colbert,’ he says.

‘Colbert? We don’t even know if he’s here!’

‘There are rooms,’ says Armand. ‘Behind the altar.’

They circle the burning pews, jump little streams of flickering ethanol, pass through the choir, pass the altar. On the right, two doors. The first opens into darkness: a small room quickly searched. The second door is locked. They beat at it, call the priest’s name. They try shouldering it, kicking it.

‘Use this!’ shouts Armand, starting to topple a wooden statue, one of those pieces no one would trouble to steal, a clumsily shaped Joan of Arc, the saint in wooden armour, a cross held in front of her like a posy. At the second swing, she cracks the door. At the third, the door flies open.

‘He’s in here all right,’ says Armand, recoiling. ‘Stinks like a fox hole.’

The glow from the fire guides them, that and their groping hands. At the rear of the room is another door, also locked, leading out to the street. It’s Jean-Baptiste who finds the priest, discerns a blur of curled white on a bed at the side of the room. The skin is clammy – some dew of fever or starvation on it – but it is not the skin of a dead man. They pick him up between them, carry him like a sack of oats. Out of the room, they can see he is entirely naked. His eyelids flutter, spring open. His expression is that of a man who has woken to find himself in the grip of devils hurrying him into a furnace.

Another explosion. The pews and beams of Slabbart’s pyre are beginning to squirm in the heat. Slabbart himself is hidden behind walls of flame whose tops fling themselves closer and closer to the open sky. And parts of the choir have caught, the flames threading themselves through the narrow wooden arches. Twice, with the priest swinging between them, Armand and Jean-Baptiste jump broad lines of snaking fire. Heaven help them if the miners have barred the doors! But the doors are not barred, the way is free. Outside, they stagger as far as the tents. There is no one there. They drop Colbert in the grass, wipe their hands on the grass, rake the smoke out of their throats. Has the alarm been raised? The flames are clearly visible through the west window and must by now be equally so through the windows on the rue Saint-Denis.

Jean-Baptiste looks for the miner in white, but it’s Block he sees first, Jan Block hurrying Jeanne and Manetti away from the house. He runs to them, pulling the house key from his pocket, thrusts the key into Block’s hand. ‘Take them to the rue de la Lingerie. Tell the others there to wait. You wait there too. If the fire comes close, lead them down to the river. You understand?’

Block nods.

Jeanne says, ‘You must come too!’

‘I will come soon,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Go now.’

She holds out her fingers to him. For a second he clutches them. ‘Forgive me,’ he mutters, though he is not certain she has heard him. He watches them leave, the miner, the old man, the pregnant girl, watches their departing backs, the fragility of their diminishing forms. It is, he thinks, like the beginning and end of every story ever told.

How long since they threw the tapers? Ten minutes? Half an hour? Already the fire gives off an unearthly noise, groaning and thrumming and hissing. What fuels has it discovered in that place? What incendiary atmospheres were pooled in the crypts, waiting for a spark? Phlogiston! Each object’s secret fire woken and released! In the west window, the diamond panes begin to shatter. Single shots at first, then a fusillade.

And at last a bell! The urgent, irregular tolling of a bell. From Saint-Josse? Saint-Merri? He runs to the door onto the rue aux Fers, out onto the street. Plenty of people here who needed no bell to warn them. They churn about in their bedclothes, some of them shouting, some grimacing in silence at the church, some apparently happy, as if at a carnival. He jostles in the crowd, rocks in it. Useful now to be a little taller than he is, but he can see the miner in white, see him standing on the rim of the Italian fountain, one hand on the head of a stone triton, the other gesturing, directing his fellows, his brothers. They look to him occasionally – musicians to the capellmeister – but seem to know already what they must do. They press back the crowd, ease them away from the walls, establish a cordon. Some of them carry tools, home-fashioned billhooks ready to haul down burning debris. Nothing haphazard about these preparations. Nothing slack in their discipline.
We know about fire
, the miner had said.
It is a thing we understand well
. Is this the first, the second, the third church they have burned? And what besides? A factory? A chateau?

Lit from below, the smoke pours in a dirty orange torrent through the church roof. He follows it upwards, sees how, as it rises, it bows towards the west . . . An east wind! Not strong but strong enough perhaps. A wind from the west and the flames would skip the rue Saint-Denis with ease. Like this – if the wind stays true – the fire has only the cemetery in front of it. The cemetery, the charnels. The rue de la Lingerie too, of course, though surely it will not reach as far as that. And if it does? Can he trust Block to do what is necessary? He has greater faith in Héloïse and Lisa, cannot imagine what emergency would be beyond such women.

He looks round for Armand, but the man beside him in the crowd is not Armand. He is pointing into the sky, where sparks sized like doves are soaring past the tiles. Sparks that
are
doves – doves or pigeons or whatever blind things had clung to their roosts and now, frantic and ablaze, make pitiful attempts to escape. ‘Human souls!’ shouts the man. ‘Human souls!’ and he grips Jean-Baptiste’s arm in a kind of ecstasy. The engineer scuffles free of him, elbows his way to the front, forces a passage between two of the miners (Rave and Rape, for whom he has, perhaps, not lost all authority, all prestige). He runs past the open cemetery door. He shouts for Armand, runs, shouts again more hoarsely, and at last receives an answer from somewhere near the sexton’s house. They must have set a fire there too. The tiles are already smoking and a flame-light shivers behind one of the upstairs windows. Armand is jogging away from the house. There is light in his red hair. In his hands he is holding out some trophy. A glittering green bottle.

‘I knew there was one left in there,’ he says, pausing to hack the smoke from his lungs. ‘Though if it had taken me much longer to find . . .’

He tugs out the cork, takes a deep, amorous pull at the bottle. ‘The party of the future,’ he says. He wipes his lips, passes the bottle to Jean-Baptiste. The engineer takes it, drinks, then points over Armand’s shoulder with the neck of the bottle. ‘The grass is on fire,’ he says.

It’s true. Hundreds of burning tips of grass between the church and the preaching cross, each tip a delicate flower blooming only for a second or two. It is unexpectedly beautiful. Hard to look away from.

Behind them, in the fire’s shadow, the old priest, nude as a worm, begins to howl.

3

A man – a man neither young nor old – sits in an anteroom in a wing of the Palace of Versailles. Other than for his own black shape in the furred green of the mirrors, he is alone. There is no elegant stranger this time on the narrow armchair opposite him. But it is October again, and there is symmetry enough in that.

At the end of the room the door to the minister’s office is shut (symmetry in that too). In a while, if no yellow-eyed servant comes out to admit him, he will go and knock on it or scratch on it and deliver his report, the thirty neat, ribbon-bound pages he has on his lap detailing – with many necessary omissions – the destruction of the church and cemetery of les Saints-Innocents.

He smooths the cover of the report with the edge of his hand, brushes from it some imagined imperfection, a dust of ashes perhaps. Instructive how much can be enclosed in a document as cool, as innocuous-seeming as a folded napkin! A year of bones, grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year unlike any other he has lived. Will ever live? A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love . . .

As for the fire that brought it to an end, that was matter for the report’s last five pages and not, when he came to it, as hard to write as he had feared. A scatter of lies about how and when he discovered the fire, some spurious suppositions as to how it might have started. After that, a brief description of the fire itself, how it burned until daylight the following day, how it destroyed the church in the most complete way imaginable, destroyed the sexton’s house, burnt down the charnels (with the exception of the west charnel), damaged two houses on the rue Saint-Denis and one on the rue de la Ferronnerie, though none of these beyond repair. There was – for what could it matter to the minister? – no need to recount how the grass the next day was like stems of black glass, shattering under their boots, how the preaching cross stretched like a blackened arm out of the wreckage, how the smoke hung over the quarter for two days before a great burst of rain dispersed it, or how the old priest was certified insane by Dr Guillotin and taken in a cab by the doctor himself to the Salpêtrière asylum.

About the miners, it was sufficient to record that their vigilance and courage had saved many properties from the flames, and that after the fire they worked admirably to clear the ground. Five weeks of knocking down what still stubbornly stood, of separating, where it was possible, bones from the tangle of burnt things that resembled them . . . Another nineteen convoys were sent to the quarry before he, the chief-of-works, declared that what was left could stay and become part of the hardcore under the new cobbles Mason Sagnac would be laying, the mason having been given formal charge of the site for its final transformation into the Marché des Innocents . . .

For that was what had been decided, decreed. A new market on the old man-eating earth of the cemetery! The hustle of small trade, the crying of wares where once there was only the priest’s bell, the thud of the sexton’s spade. And Jeanne will have a stall there. She has said she wishes to. Flowers, dried flowers and herbs, though first she must be delivered of what she carries in that big neat swelling that lifts her skirts from the ground. Guillotin still promises to be her accoucheur. He visits her often and recounts witty, fond stories of the domestic life at the apartment on the rue Aubri Boucher, the dreaming girl, the old gravedigger, the miner. In his last instalment he told them – Jean-Baptiste, Héloïse, Armand, Lisa – of the crib Jan Block had built, a little bed on half-moon rockers, the whole thing, according to the doctor, exquisitely done, a rose carved at the foot end, a little bird like a sparrow at the other.