Andrew Miller - Pure

‘And something else,’ he says, feeling for the appropriate register, a voice that might combine paternal indulgence with something bluff and worldly. ‘Tomorrow, the cemetery doors will be open and you will be free to go out until sunset, when the doors will be locked again. As for tonight, the doors may find themselves open for an hour in case any of our friends should wish to visit us.’

Lecoeur claps. He intends, perhaps, the men should join him in a show of appreciation, but there is nothing but some muttered talk, some shifting from boot to boot. Have they understood him? He looks at Lecoeur, but before he can ask his advice, ask him perhaps to put the whole thing into a growl of Flemish, Lisa Saget is beating the saucepan and the men file off to their tents to fetch knives and tins.

‘It is very good to let them out,’ says Lecoeur, once they have descended the steps. ‘Their hearts lifted.’

‘You think so?’

‘I saw it plainly.’

Jean-Baptiste nods. What he has seen plainly is himself on Monday morning without a single miner, or with a ragged half-dozen blind from drinking and fleeced of everything but their shirts. They may be tough as janissaries, these men, but they will be no match for the patter, the quick hands of the locals. Yet if he tries to confine them any longer, he will have a revolt, and one that will not be remedied with clay pipes and tobacco. At Valenciennes — though he did not see it in person — there were stories of the men running amuck, smashing machinery, torching company buildings, even laying siege to the managers’ compound until the militia arrived. Most of them are northerners, like himself. Slow to rouse, but when the spirit takes them. .

An hour after the men have eaten, the women arrive, cautious at first, the face of the boldest peeping round the half-open door from the rue aux Fers; then the door is thrown wide and in they march, calling as they come, cooing, waving their arms.

Lecoeur, Armand, Jeanne, Lisa Saget and Jean-Baptiste watch them from a moat of night-shadow at the foot of the church’s western wall. It is not easy to count them. Lecoeur makes it twelve. Armand tells him he has missed one, then names a few — Simone, Marie-Anne, and that skinny one at the back who is called La Pouce. The youngest looks no older than Jeanne, while the oldest — a big, brassy creature with a voice like a colour-sergeant — is almost grandmotherly, and moves over the rough ground with a grim and purposeful hobbling.

The miners wait like the crew of an enchanted vessel. The women wash over them, through them. A party starts in the light of the fire. The men pass round their bottles, their tin mugs primed with brandy. The women drink, grow professionally wild, choose their mates, price themselves. The first couples steer into the darkness, arm in arm, like lovers anywhere. The watchers by the church, who have been standing quietly (and something in the manner of explorers observing the ceremonies of primitives on a beach beneath the Southern Cross), now retreat to the sexton’s house. Block and Manetti are sitting either side of the kitchen fire, the sexton asleep, his head against the wing of his chair, Jan Block drowsily awake, flinching a little at the others’ arrival and returning the engineer’s nod with some awkward deferential movement of his own head.

They sit at the kitchen table. There’s brandy here too. (Brandy everywhere, thinks Jean-Baptiste. I shall end up floating the bones to the Porte d’Enfer on a tide of the stuff.) They talk, but their conversation is pierced by the whoops and laughter of the revelry outside. Thoughts are diverted. A carnal magnetism creeps around the edges of the house like wisps of blue fog.

‘We must have music,’ says Lisa Saget, and immediately she starts to sing in a plain but pleasant voice, light, girlish, quite different to her speaking voice. Armand joins her. Lecoeur enthusiastically mistaps the beat on the tabletop. The sexton wakes, looks, in his own house, briefly lost. Jeanne settles him, rubs the wrinkled brown backs of his hands.

Armand reaches for his coat. ‘We shall have music after all,’ he says. ‘We shall raid old Colbert’s candle store. You two —’ he points to Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur — ‘will man the bellows. The ladies will prettily sit, and I, the director of music, will play for your delight.’

While Jean-Baptiste is searching for some objection to this ridiculous plan (go into the church now? Play music?), the others are buttoning their coats. They look at him: it is hard to resist such looks. He shrugs, stands. If he cannot stop them, he can at least ensure there is no excessive behaviour, though the sudden prospect of it — excess! — wakes in him a kind of lively thirst, and he follows them out of the house willingly enough, eagerly perhaps.

They take the door into the south transept. Armand is at the front, holding high a lantern that throws a feathery light across walls dense with Latin couplets, dates, good works, blazonry. They shuffle, one behind the other. Their whispers fly about their heads. Things lean towards them from the dark, briefly loom. The gilt-flecked wing of an archangel ripples as they pass. A Virgin, her yellow face full of secret amusement, importunes them from a pillar. .

In one of the chapels, Armand loots candles from an iron box, passes them back. They huddle to light them from each other’s flames. As the light grows, Jean-Baptiste sees, lined up on the other side of the chapel, a half-dozen large containers, jars of thick greenish glass in snug wicker baskets, some clear liquor inside them. Around the glass necks, labels hang from twists of wire. He leans with his candle to read one.

Ethanol.

He steps back so rapidly his candle goes out.

‘You put these here?’ he hisses to Armand.

‘These? They came last week. Something for our friends the doctors.’

‘It is ethanol! Pure spirit. Put a flame near it and the whole church could burn down.’

‘Peace,’ says Armand. ‘The tops are in tight, see? Sealed with wax. There’s nothing to fear. And would it matter if the church burnt down? Would it not save us all a great deal of trouble?’

The engineer ushers them out of the chapel, is easier only once they have crossed the nave and gathered around the organ. On either side of the instrument’s keyboards are brass rings in the form of delicate wreaths, and into these go four of the candles. Armand settles himself. Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur go round to the pump, a metre of priapic oakwood, thick as an oar.

‘I shall be glad of the exercise,’ whispers Lecoeur, his breath emerging in a silvery gas. ‘This place is cold as the moon.’

‘Colder,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

The women sit thigh to thigh on the nearest pew, holding their candles in front of them like penitents.

‘Begin!’ calls Armand.

They begin. Down, up. Down, up. Down, up. In its depths on the far side of the panelling, the instrument starts to click and wheeze. For Jean-Baptiste, it feels as if they are having to crank the whole machine into the air, to physically raise it. Or else it is as though they are resuscitating some collapsed leviathan, something like the elephant the minister said so frightened the dogs at Versailles. Then, from the thing’s attic, comes a long sigh, the last breath of the world, and upon it, delicate as drops of rain, the music begins. Voix céleste, voix humaine, trompette, cromorne, tierce — the sounds building in layers, breaking in waves. Lecoeur is shouting something to him. Jean-Baptiste grimaces in reply, but he cannot understand him, cannot hear his words. The low notes are feeling out all the architecture of his chest; the high notes are doing something similar to his soul. Sweet Christ! They may as well be inside it. And this pumping! Up, down. Up, down. Beauty, it seems, has hard work at its root, and he begins to imagine a device, an automatic bellows, steam-driven, perfectly doable, and almost has it, the whole mechanism laid out in oiled parts in his head, when the music breaks off, mid-scale.