Pure (20 page)

‘A mutiny,’ he says, hopping through the archway, not troubling himself with any pleasantries. ‘The men have mutinied!’ He looks at them, appears hugely satisfied to see their startled faces, then says, ‘It may not be correct to say they have mutinied, not yet. But they are unhappy. Most unhappy. They will not work.’

‘And the reason?’

‘They wish for pipes.’

‘Pipes?’

‘Tobacco pipes. They will not work without them. They have convinced themselves that tobacco is a specific against infection.’

‘Infection from what?’

‘The pits, of course.’

‘They wish to smoke?’

‘They insist on it. All of them. And you need not trouble yourself seeking the origin of such an idea. They wake up with them in their heads one morning. Such notions may even be autogenous.’

Armand chuckles. ‘This is more good than bad. It is a demand very cheaply satisfied. And they will think well of you for doing so. They will be comforted.’

While speaking, the three of them have stepped out of the charnel. The miners are bunched by the big fire, watching.

‘There is a shop on the rue aux Ours,’ continues Armand, ‘opposite the coaching office. Several hundred pipes in stock. Enough tobacco to supply the navy. I recommend it.’

‘Then,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘then perhaps you would fetch what is necessary?’

‘Should I open an account?’ asks Armand, reverting with no obvious effort to his role as Scaramouche, Harlequin, Puck. ‘Preferential rates? Monthly billing?’

‘And if Monsieur Saint-Méard has no objection,’ says Lecoeur quickly, ‘I could accompany him.’

Armand makes a bow of invitation. Lecoeur replies with a bow of his own.

‘How is the sick man this morning?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Block? Ah, a ministering angel attends him,’ says Lecoeur.

‘He is dead?’ asks Jean-Baptiste, his concentration still on the men, the wildness of their thinking.

‘I mean Jeanne,’ says Lecoeur. ‘She looks after him. We should not worry about Block. Block will outlive us all.’

It is, by the bells of Saint-Eustache and the restless hands of Jean-Baptiste’s own watch, almost two hours before Armand and Lecoeur return to the cemetery. He has already cursed himself for his folly in allowing them to go together, though whether he could have stopped them, whether he has the authority, the right, the necessary force of character, he does not quite know.

That they are both drunk is obvious at a distance of many metres, but they seem to be able to walk without staggering and the parcel in Lecoeur’s arms suggests they did not forget the original purpose of their errand.

‘You have seen the wall?’ hisses Lecoeur, his mouth swaying so close to the engineer’s cheek it is almost a kiss. ‘Saint-Méard says he knows him. This Bêche. Apparently a man you would never suspect of radicalism. Quite unassuming to meet, yet beneath it, beneath it, cold as ice. Kill without a blink. Saint-Méard calls him the people’s avenger. Does that not have a type of beauty to it?’

‘Those are the pipes?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I bought every pipe in the shop. Quite cleaned him out. There are several spare. Perhaps you would like one for yourself ? Shall I choose one for you?’ He laughs, starts to rummage in the parcel and looks happy, simply happy, for the first time in days.

When at last the men are gathered and they start back in the pit, there is not a single miner without a clay stem between his teeth. It does not seem to inhibit their ability to dig, collect, stack. Lecoeur stands dangerously near the edge of the pit. He seems to be drifting in and out of sleep. The doctors arrive. Guillotin stations himself beside Jean-Baptiste and, after watching the work for a while, says, ‘You have seen what is written on the wall?’

Jean-Baptiste nods.

‘There are forces at work,’ says Guillotin, ‘that our masters ignore at their peril.’

Jean-Baptiste glances round at him, the mild, brown eyes in that large, florid face. Was Guillotin of the party of the future? Did he, along with Renard and Fleur, de Bergerac and Armand, know the conclusions to be drawn? They hold each other’s gaze a moment until the noise of a spade striking wood, splitting it, draws both men’s attention back into the pit.

The engineer crouches. ‘A coffin?’ he calls. The miner looks up and, by way of answer, of assent, takes the pipe from his mouth.

They dig it out, lay it in the cradle, hoist it, lay it on the ground.

‘I suppose we must open it,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly, as if to himself. He looks at the man nearest him. Guido Brun, or if not Brun, then the one who looks much like Brun. Someone Agast. Englebert Agast? The man drives the edge of his spade under the lid of the coffin, levers it, then levers it more forcefully until the wood, with a small detonation, gives itself up, and much of the coffin, on the instant, disintegrates. Inside is a skeleton, the residue of a man, his bones connected by patches of leathery sinew. Strands of coarse, black hair, like black grass, sprout from the sides of his skull. Several large, brown teeth are on show.

Lecoeur, awake now, very sober, crosses himself, as do several of the men.

‘To get the bones,’ says Dr Thouret, ‘to separate them and have them as you wish, you will need to boil them.’

‘Boil the corpse?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘It is a perfectly normal procedure,’ says Guillotin, soothingly. ‘There is nothing indecent. You should speak with the sexton. Those gentlemen have their arts.’

The next coffin raised to the surface has inside only a clean litter of bones, so that picked up and shaken it would rattle like a child’s toy. The next, but for a little dust, is empty.

‘At least,’ says Guillotin, looking round at the company, ‘one has escaped. There is hope for us all.’

The remark is presumably intended to lighten the atmosphere, but the men look at him stonily, and only Lecoeur, with a kind of courage of good manners, manages a smile in return.

A new system emerges, a new routine. Coffin wood is burnt on the fire, where it provokes brief displays of weirdly coloured flames. Those corpses still stubbornly strung together with ligament and tendon are left inside the charnel, where, from the middle of the afternoon onwards, Manetti, assisted by one of the miners, collects them on a handcart and wheels them away to where he has established his boiling vessel, a copper tub used for a hundred years to finish off what the earth of les Innocents had started, and that now has been dragged from its long retirement in a corner of the cemetery.

For the men in the pit, and the men above charged with the task of opening the coffins, there is at first a palpable tension, all of them seemingly braced for some horror, something abruptly unhidden that might, from its box,
regard
them. Along with the brandy bottle, the tobacco jar is circulated. It is, mercifully, enough to keep them at it. And by the end of the day, as the last coffin is lifted by firelight, it all seems queerly bearable, as if work, whatever its particulars, was in the end just work. Something you bent to for probable reward. Something you did because human restlessness must be harnessed to some purpose if it is not to feed on itself.

He has supper with the Monnards. He cannot avoid them for ever. He sits with them – with Madame and Monsieur – chewing mouthfuls of meat and brown beans. The little fire is livelier than usual: Jean-Baptiste has arranged a delivery from the cemetery of his plentiful wood. The flames ripple in the polished hip of the pianoforte. Ziguette’s absence is not commented upon, though now and then her mother glances at the unoccupied seat, the laid but unused utensils on the table.

They have, in fitful conversation, exhausted the weather, the merits of the meat, the rising price of beans, and have, each of them, fallen back upon their private thoughts, their relentless chewing, when Madame Monnard, clearing her throat, asks, ‘Is it true, monsieur, what Marie tells us about the scandalous thing written on the cemetery wall?’

‘Marie, madame? I did not know she could read.’

‘She could not read her own name, monsieur,’ says Monsieur Monnard, ‘but she has ears. She can hear better than an owl.’

Instantly – unbidden and perfect – an image of Marie with tufted ears, perched on a bough in moonlight, enters the engineer’s imagination.

‘It was said to her, monsieur,’ explains Madame. ‘She learnt it.’

‘And it is not the only such,’ says Monsieur Monnard. ‘I had Monsieur Gobel in the shop this afternoon, who informed me he had seen something of a very similar character on a wall opposite the Bourse.’

‘There may be hundreds of them,’ says Madame. ‘Could there be hundreds?’

‘That other,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, fork in the air, ‘the one by the Bourse. It made use of the same name?’

‘Bêche,’ says Monsieur Monnard, stabbing at a last square of beef on his plate. ‘And all manner of threats to the king and his ministers. My wife has been very affected, monsieur.’

‘I fear,’ says Madame, who does, suddenly, look very affected, ‘we shall be murdered in our beds. We shall have our throats slit.’

‘I am sure it is all idle,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Nothing but . . . a type of game.’

‘A
game
? You may say so, monsieur. Yes, you wish to comfort me. You are a very considerate young man. But I shall dream tonight of this Bêche climbing in at our bedroom window. Would you come, monsieur, if we called you? Do you have a sword, monsieur?’

‘I do not, madame.’

‘I thought you would have a sword.’

‘I am an engineer, madame. I have a brass ruler.’

‘I dare say it might serve,’ says Madame, thoughtfully. ‘If it is a large one.’

Marie comes in to clear the plates. All conversation stops. The plates are gathered, piled. She has strong red hands like a man, a working man. And that black hair of hers! That slick female moustache that is, surely, no defect. To Jean-Baptiste she seems to possess a vigour no one else in the room can match, as if her roots were sunk into some richer, blacker soil they cannot reach.

When she goes, pulling the door shut with her trailing foot, Madame and Monsieur exchange glances, then turn their gaze on their lodger, as if some explanation – an explanation for every ill and unsettling thing that has occurred since his arrival on the rue de la Lingerie – was now required of him.

‘I wished to ask you,’ begins Jean-Baptiste, ‘to enquire that is, how your daughter does, madame.’

‘Ziggi? Oh, it is very trying to have children, monsieur. She seems quite to have melted. You should call on her, monsieur. My husband and myself are at our wits’ ends. Ever since – and I pray you excuse us – ever since your work began she will not be comforted. It is as if she felt the shovels on her own skin.’

‘I am sorry for it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Truly. But the work cannot be avoided. I am trying, madame . . .
we
are trying, to do what is good, what is . . .’

The fire snaps; a spark flies out. Jean-Baptiste, rising swiftly, extinguishes it with the toe of his boot.

‘The wood is green,’ growls Monsieur Monnard, and he frowns at the fire as though green wood was the green heart of all that vexed him.

Upstairs, shielding his candle from the dozen draughts that live in the air at the top of the house like so many secret, invisible streams, the engineer stops outside Ziguette’s room and looks down at the line of light at the bottom of her door. It is late, but he is curious to see her, this melting girl. And he would, if he is able, like to give her some reassurance. As a guest, a type of guest in this place, it surely behoves him to offer her his sympathy, and he is about to tap softly on the door when it is opened and Marie is there, the hint of a smile on her face. For a few seconds they stand, blatantly regarding each other; then she steps back to admit him.

Two candles (in addition to his own) illuminate the room: one on the dressing table, the other in a little holder of painted porcelain on the cabinet beside the bed. The room is spacious, at least three times the size of his own, and with a large shuttered window over the quiet street. Put into good order, it would be a pleasant room, the nicest in the house perhaps, but nothing here is in good order. The place appears to have been subject to a private storm, one that has whirled every dress and petticoat, every linen pocket, embroidered apron and set of stays, every mob cap and straw hat, every frill, stocking and furbelow that a cutler’s paternal love can bestow upon an only daughter, whirled it all into the air and then, suddenly ceasing, left everything to rain down in confusion. In the centre of it all, partly covered by it, is Ziguette herself, her body loosely sculpted by a linen sheet, her face flushed with a heat whose source is surely internal. (The room has only a modest fire.) She stares up at the engineer with swollen eyes, her hair – unpinned, uncovered, uncombed – spread over the bolster in a heavy blond tangle. Her mouth has a punched look, and in the stretched white of her neck he can clearly see the pulsing of her blood.

‘It is not too late, I hope, to pay a call?’

She does not answer him. He looks round at Marie, who is standing directly behind him, hands clasped at the front of her thighs, her expression now perfectly blank.