Pure (18 page)

‘It is Block,’ says Lecoeur, kneeling by the man’s side. ‘Jan Block.’

In the surface air, Block stirs, looks about himself and, ashen still, gets to his feet.

‘Let him go to his tent if he wishes,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He has already heard someone mutter the words ‘choke-damp’. All of them know it, and at Valenciennes, all will have seen or heard of a man drowning in some undetectable element. Absurd, of course, to imagine that it could exist in the pit, but he calls a break and lets them pass the bottle. They look at him. He sees in their gazes nothing he can put a name to. After fifteen minutes, he sends a new party down the ladders.

Among the items found in the pit today: a green coin from the reign of Charles IX; a rusted but recognisable gorget; a ring with a cross on it – not valuable; more buttons; the blade of a knife – why? For use in the next world? A curious small piece of coloured glass, heart-shaped, quite pretty.

This last the engineer rinses when he washes his hands in the evening, and on some whim, or simply not knowing what else to do with it, he presents it to Jeanne, who accepts it, a strange solemn smile on her face.

6

A man runs away, runs away with his pack in the middle of the night. No one saw him go; no one heard him. Even the men in his own tent look surprised, uneasy, as if he might have been spirited away, perhaps by something they have disturbed in the pit. Lecoeur offers to lead a party in pursuit of him. He cannot have got far and will surely find it hard to conceal himself in a city he knows nothing of.

‘They are not prisoners,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘They are not bonded labour.’

‘The men expect a firm hand,’ says Lecoeur, who has this morning cut his neck shaving. ‘After all, have we not rescued them from the mines?’

‘I do not know,’ says Jean-Baptiste, more to himself than Lecoeur, ‘who we have rescued.’

Of the others, all are accounted for, though the man who fell from the ladder, Jan Block, is not fit to work and Jean-Baptiste visits him in his tent, where he lies on his bed of straw like Holbein’s Christ. His eyes follow the engineer’s dark form as it crosses the entrance of the tent and stands above him in the tent’s light.

‘You have pain? You are suffering?’

Block wets his lips with the tip of a pale tongue, says something, says it twice more before Jean-Baptiste understands.

‘You are cold?’

‘Yes.’

‘We will bring you more blankets. We will bring something hot for you to drink.’

Block blinks. The engineer leaves. When he finds Jeanne, he asks her if she could visit the sick man, take him some coffee or broth. And is there a blanket somewhere? He complains of the cold.

In the pit, under Lecoeur’s direction, the men are already at work. Fire, pulley, ladders. The hollow sound of bones laid on bones. A simple call from the men below warns those above that the canvas cradle is filled and ready for hoisting. They are deep enough now to need lights even in the morning, four torches protruding from the walls and burning fitfully. Jean-Baptiste crouches, tries to see the condition of the walls. Does the earth fray? Is there risk of collapse? Could the men be got out quickly if a side of the pit did collapse?

He decides that he must go down and see for himself (it is time he went down), and with no announcement he swings himself onto the nearest ladder and begins to descend. He is aware that both below and above him all work has ceased, that they are watching him. His feet feel for the rungs. The sky recedes. The air thickens.

Stepping off the bottom of the ladder, he suffers a momentary loss of balance and has to grip the elbow of the man nearest him. Now that he is down here, he should tell them to continue with their work, but there is so little room. He looks at them, their long faces lit from above by fire and the feeble light of morning. He looks at the black walls, looks at what he is standing on, looks up to where Lecoeur’s head and shoulders are bent over the pit’s edge. He takes a spade from the hands of the man he stumbled against, presses its blade into the earth wall, twists the blade and watches a piece of the wall come away in a damp slab. He tests the opposite wall in the same manner and with the same result. He returns the tool, gets a boot on the bottom rung of the ladder, is swept by a wave of nausea that, thank God, he is able to control, to let pass. He climbs, reaches the top, steadies himself on the grass.

To Lecoeur, who has come up close beside him, he says huskily, ‘We will build frames. Box-cribs to secure the walls. Bring the men out.’

There is no shortage of suitable lumber: Monsieur Dejour must have hoarded half the saleable wood in Paris. They shape posts and struts, improvise puncheons and cleats. It is nice to work with the wood, and when the men go down after the midday meal, they go, it seems, in slightly better heart. By mid-afternoon the plumb line measures a depth of nearly seventeen metres. The cradle carries more earth than bone now. By dark they will have done it! Emptied one of the pits of les Innocents!

The last shift of diggers surfaces at half past six. A winter moon shines in their faces, shines on the bone wall that looks now less what it is, the macabre and pitiful residue of countless lives, and more like a good harvest, hard won. Jean-Baptiste takes off his hat, rubs at his hair, his own hair, which he’s grown to an almost respectable length, just as Charvet suggested. The miners file away from him, some with their spades over their shoulders like muskets. A good day. A little victory for stubborn hard work, for keeping one’s nerve. Quietly, by the side of the pit, he and Lecoeur congratulate each other. They reach out and touch hands.

He is less pleased with the world the next morning. He has slept badly again, waking in some useless quarter of the night, heart racing, and then lying for hours mentally digging pit after pit until he sickened of it and climbed from his bed and dressed in the dark.

At the cemetery, examined by lamplight, Jan Block is obviously worse. There is a sheen on his skin like that on rotten cheese. His breathing is laboured, unprofitable. He may be dying, may conceivably, all too conceivably, be dying of some infection the others could contract, the whole place shut down within the week, the last man living rolling the last man dead into the emptied pit . . .

An hour later, he finds one of the doctors, Dr Guillotin, inspecting the bone wall. He sees him prise out some fragment from the wall and slip it into his coat pocket.

‘You don’t object, I hope?’ asks the doctor, seeing the engineer approach. ‘An intriguingly deformed vertebra. Thought I should have it before Thouret beat me to it.’

Jean-Baptiste speaks to him of the sick man, describes the accident and asks if the doctor would be kind enough to examine him. ‘If there is an infection . . . something that might . . .’

The doctor is agreeable. The man is nearby? He is. They walk together to the tent, duck inside it. There is someone else in there. The miner with the damaged hand. For a moment the newcomers are kept at bay by the miner’s calm regard of them. Then he leaves, silent and unhurried.

‘A curious-looking character,’ says the doctor. ‘Violet eyes. Did you notice? Most unusual.’ He turns to the man on the straw. ‘What is his name?’ he asks.

‘This is Block,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Block? Good morning to you, Block. You have had a fall? You are unwell?’

Jan Block looks startled.

The doctor smiles. ‘You need not be afraid of me.’ To Jean-Baptiste he says, ‘If you would turn him? It is easier to examine a man’s back when he is not lying on it.’

Jean-Baptiste takes hold of the miner’s shoulders, starts to shift him. The sick man makes no protest, though his flesh trembles. It is not easy to turn him. When it is done, the doctor says, ‘Lift up his shirt.’

The skin of Jan Block’s upper back has been pierced either side of his spine, and though the puncture marks are small, they are surrounded by angry haloes of inflammation.

Guillotin steps closer. He looks, but like most of his profession is reluctant to touch. He nods. ‘You may pull down his shirt. Thank you, Monsieur Block. We will find something to help you, yes?’

When they have walked a few steps from the tent, the doctor says, ‘He is poisoned by whatever matter entered him in the fall. The wounds must be cleaned immediately with a solution of brimstone. As for the fever, he should take a dust of Peruvian bark, dispersed in a little brandy. I am not, however, in favour of suppressing fever entirely. Fever is not the enemy. It is the fire in which disease is combusted.’ He stops, then looks closely at Jean-Baptiste. ‘Even in perfect health,’ he says, ‘we are remade continuously in a heat of our own generation. You are familiar with the theory of phlogiston?’

‘I know something of it.’

‘Phlogiston, from the Greek, to set on fire. The combustible element within all things. The latent fire. The potential fire. Passive until roused.’

‘Roused by a spark?’

‘Or by some shock or friction. Or simply the gradual accretion of heat.’

‘Is it possible,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, ‘that Block’s infection is caused by a disease that has continued in the bones? That the bones carry still a residue of the sicknesses that once afflicted them? I mean, afflicted those to whom they once belonged?’

‘How quaintly you put it,’ says Guillotin. ‘You speak as if our bones were mere possessions, like a horse or a watch. But to answer your question, I think it unlikely any disease could so long outlive its victim. I do not suggest, however, that you or your men allow the bones to touch any open sore or wound. I recommend vinegar as a general disinfectant. And purified alcohol. Ethanol. Very effective. Though be careful where you store it. A powerful intoxicant. Also highly inflammable. Even the vapour. Particularly the vapour.’

‘And where would I find it? Ethanol?’

‘Shall I procure you some?’

‘I would be indebted to you. And for the brimstone? The bark?’

‘I will write you a note for the apothecary,’ says Guillotin, patting the younger man’s shoulder. ‘Now, let us go into the house together and see if that nice girl will make us some coffee, eh?’

At the kitchen table, Jeanne, Lisa Saget and both of Lisa’s children are busy paring vegetables. A chair is brought for the doctor but he prefers to stand by the fire. He is vigorous and good-humoured. He says pleasant, admiring things to the women and children. Jean-Baptiste explains that they have been to see the sick miner. That he is certainly worse today but that the doctor has prescribed some remedies.

‘Natalie,’ says Lisa, tilting her head towards the girl, ‘will fetch them. Wipe your hands, Natalie, and put on your coat.’

‘We can make room for him in the house,’ says Jeanne. ‘I can make a bed on the landing upstairs. He will be better here.’

‘You have the cooking,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘and many other duties.’

‘Good nursing,’ says Guillotin, ‘is often the difference between a patient living or dying.’

‘Then we must do it,’ says Jeanne, turning wide-eyed to Jean-Baptiste.

‘Could he not go to a hospital?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

The doctor flares his nostrils. ‘Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.’

Natalie, her coat buttoned, is ready for her errand. There are writing materials in the office where Lecoeur sleeps. The doctor writes a little list, squints at it, signs it, folds it, gives it to the child.

‘I have added something for you,’ he says to Jean-Baptiste. ‘
Lachryma papaveris
. Tears of the poppy. It will help you with your rest. Have I judged the matter rightly?’

‘You go to Monsieur Boustanquoi,’ says Lisa to the girl. ‘Straight there and straight back.’

The girl nods, grins coquettishly at the doctor, takes her leave.

‘Children,’ purrs the doctor. He taps a finger on the lid of the coffee pot. ‘May we impose, mademoiselle?’

The emptied pit is filled, the black earth leavened with sacks of quicklime. The wind has got up, skirling and gusting between the cemetery walls. The men’s clothes, hands and faces are all finely dusted with the lime. Eyes sting, noses run, but filling a pit is better work than emptying one. Quicker work too. By early afternoon, pit one can have a neat line run through it in Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. The fire burns down. The pulley and cradle, the timber for the frames, the tools, the men themselves are all moved fifteen strides to the south. Lecoeur and Jean-Baptiste measure out the mouth of a new pit with the pegs and rope. Jeanne and the sexton are brought out to confirm the position. The sexton, after walking about somewhat in the manner of a dog looking for somewhere to sleep, eventually decides the rope square should begin another five strides in the direction of the south wall. The pegs are pulled and driven in again. The sexton nods. A new fire is built, lit. The gang who are to dig step across the rope; those who are to stack stand ready. It starts again, that dull music of blade on earth, then the noise of the bones, the way, when knocked together, they ring like clay pots.

A day’s difficulty can be measured by the amount of strong liquor necessary to endure it. Today is a three-bottle day. A bottle per metre dug. A tenth of a bottle per man per metre dug. Is that the equation? It is not one the engineer was taught at the Ecole des Ponts. When they have finished and the miners have dispersed to their tents or to the warmth of the big fire by the preaching cross, Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur wash their hands in the bucket outside the door of the sexton’s house.