Andrew Miller - Pure

‘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.

‘What is it they will do in there?’ asks Lecoeur, shaking the water from his fingers and nodding towards the doctors’ new workshop, a little, windowless structure of draped canvas propped against the wall of the church.

‘God knows,’ says Jean-Baptiste, who earlier in the day witnessed a pair of trestle tables being carried inside, along with a heavy leather pouch that jangled as it was carried.

In the kitchen, there is only the old sexton, asleep in his chair, but after a few moments, Jeanne appears at the bottom of the stairs, her face softly radiant as though she had just bathed it in fresh cold water. ‘He is resting,’ she says, ‘and has taken all his medicines.’

‘Block?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

She nods. ‘The doctor says he will look at him again tomorrow, if he is able to.’

‘Good. Thank you, Jeanne. I am grateful to you.’

‘And your medicine is on the mantelpiece,’ she says. ‘There.’

‘Yours?’ asks Lecoeur.

‘Dr Guillotin seemed to think I might need some help with my sleep.’

‘Ah, sleep,’ says Lecoeur. ‘Yes. Morpheus has proved no friend to me recently. I am restless at night as a jackrabbit.’

‘Then you shall have half of this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, examining the thick, brown glass, corked, unlabelled. ‘There must be enough for both of us in here.’

He leaves Lecoeur with Jeanne and her grandfather, returns to the rue de la Lingerie, the half-decanted flask in his coat pocket. He should try to do some accounts before bed, and tomorrow he must draw some more money at the goldsmith’s on the rue Saint-Honoré. There are tradesmen to pay, and the men of course, and something handsome for Lecoeur, for Jeanne and her grandfather, for Armand and Lisa Saget. He owes a month’s rent to Monsieur Monnard. He does not like to be behind with it, to give Monsieur Monnard any further cause to find fault with him. On the stairs to the drawing room, he meets Marie coming down with a tray of plates. The plates are littered with small bones. She makes a face at him, a little grimace that might have some specific meaning in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. He asks, keeping his voice low, how Ziguette is today.

‘Oh, poor Ziggi!’ says Marie, in a very passable imitation of Madame Monnard. Then she brushes past him, shoulder and thigh against his own.

He goes up to his room, sits in candlelight, puts on the table his bottle of medicine, folds his arms, looks at it. How many drops is he supposed to take? Did Guillotin say? He remembers his father towards the end having such a remedy. What was it they spooned into his mouth? Ten drops? Twenty? He decides, simply, that he will take some . He will not trouble himself with counting; he is tired of counting. He will take some and see how he does, then make his adjustments accordingly.

It is late, late or early. Jeanne, woken by something she has heard in her sleep, leaves the room she shares with her grandfather and looks down at Jan Block, his face lit by the moonlight that slides through the narrow arched window at the end of the landing. It takes a few moments — she has been sleeping deeply — to realise that his eyes are open. She smiles at him, then kneels beside him so that he can see her more certainly. He lifts a hand to her and she catches it before it falls, holds it a moment, then lays it on the shallow panting of his chest. Slowly he shuts his eyes, and there is something so resigned, so final in that shutting she cannot believe he will ever open them again. His breathing suspends a moment, a long moment, a moment that will perhaps extend into eternity. Then, with a little spasm in his chest, a kind of hiccup, it starts again, somewhat easier.

On the stairs, the wood creaks. A head appears, rising out of the darkness of the stairwell into the silver light of the corridor. A shaved nude head, eyes that glitter.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ says the head, very softly. ‘It is only Lecoeur.’

‘He woke,’ she says, ‘but he is sleeping now.’

‘You are a good girl,’ says Lecoeur. ‘I believe I was dreaming of you.’

‘Is it morning?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says, uncertainly. ‘I do not think so.’

Héloïse Godard, reader, woman for sale, daughter of innkeepers on the Orléans — Paris road, a young person recently entered into her twenty-fifth year though not yet quite finished with her long project of debasement, rises with the six o’clock bell from Saint-Eustache, dresses by touch (from white stockings to the green ribbon round her throat), lights her candle for a final brief inspection of herself, blows it out and descends the winding wooden staircase into the public world of the rue du Jour.

Always that small shock of being outside again, that small hardening of whatever, as she lay alone in her bed through the hours of night, had softened, opened. . She pulls her cloak about herself, pulls up her hood, breathes the cold air.