Andrew Miller - Pure

But for Marie and her peeping, he would have bled to death. She had watched him blow out his candle, had got into her own bed, rattled off a Hail Mary, rubbed herself a little between her legs and dozed off for a minute, or for an hour or two, before opening her eyes and seeing a spot of light on the floor. Wide awake in an instant, she lowered herself to the boards, crawled over the cold floor and settled an eye over the hole. What was he doing lighting his candle again in the middle of the night? She was sure it had never happened before. And then — stranger still, thrillingly strange — she saw that he was asleep, quite obviously asleep, and the light came from a candle held by someone else, someone she could not yet see. For what felt like an age, though may in truth have been less than half a minute, nothing happened — nothing! — and she was almost beside herself with the frustration of it. What if whoever-it-was simply left and she never knew, never saw them at all? Never saw her , for she was convinced the secret watcher — the other secret watcher — was a woman. But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what could have prepared her for the shock of seeing Ziguette, dog-naked, step quietly into view! Had there been more than just a mouthful or two of stolen wine in her bladder, she might have puddled the floorboards. Ziguette, with her big, rosy bubs! The big, rosy curve of her arse! In one hand she held a candle, and with the other hand she took something off the lodger’s table, something that caught the light and made, knocking against something else on the table, a little chiming sound that he must have heard in his sleep for he started to stir. It was that thing of his, the metal thing for measuring. Was she going to measure him? Measure what? His neck, his feet, his cock-a-doodle-doo?

For the last scene, a very short one, he was, she would swear, awake and looking at Ziguette, though neither of them said even the smallest word. In her imagination, Marie seemed already to be watching what must follow — the covers thrown back, the lovers snugly wrapped in each other’s arms, the kissing and cuddling, the oohing and ahing, and she above it all, squirming on the boards. But it didn’t happen like that. The metal thing, the ruler, cut through the air and came down on his head and killed him. She must have made some noise herself, a little squeal, for Ziguette suddenly looked up, her face all dark, a dark mask, and at that , the sight of that, she had at last lost a few drops of Monnard’s wine.

Quiet as a cat, she stole away from the hole, crouched by her bed listening for feet on the stairs. Then, when none came, when there was no creak of the door, no naked mistress with a length of bloody metal in her hand, she wanted to crawl into bed and sleep, thinking that if she did so, she would wake in the morning and none of it would have happened. And this she might have done had she not heard him, his noise, a kind of snoring, a terrible sound, like someone in a nightmare they cannot wake from. She listened and listened. Her fear grew less. If silly Ziguette came in she would just crack her over the head with one of her sabots. That would settle her. Girls from the warrens of Saint-Antoine had no cause to tremble at lily-skinned girls from les Halles.

She pulled on her clothes. Everything was dark but she was perfectly used to dressing in the dark. She felt her way in stockinged feet down the narrow stairs and onto the landing. Under Ziguette’s door a light but no sound of her moving or weeping or whatever a girl does after trying to split a man’s head in two. On closer inspection she could see the door was not quite shut and needed only a very gentle push to open it wide enough for her to put her head round. There was her mistress, all tucked up in bed, innocent as a lamb, the ruler on the end of the bed, the candle on the bedside cabinet. She leant in, lifted the candle and crossed to the lodger’s room. When she opened the door, Ragoût bolted past her feet and plunged headlong down the stairs. The candle shook in her hand but she did not drop it, not quite. She found her breath again, went on, went in, went right up to the bed and stood over him, as Ziguette had done. And what a mess he was! It reminded her of something seen in childhood, an uncle of hers, a sort of uncle, who had put a lead ball through his temple one boiling Sunday afternoon. Blood, blood, blood. Puddles of it. The lodger, however, unlike her uncle, was still breathing, and not as he had before, noisily, but in shallow gasps, little dips of air like a child after a long cry. To stop a wound from bleeding, bind it with cobwebs. She had picked that up from somewhere. But where would she find cobwebs? Had she herself — good maid that she was — not swept them all away? She went to his trunk, opened it. At the top was the suit of green silk that when she first saw it seemed so funny and so beautiful. She reached below it, dragged out a handful of linen and went back to the bed. She held the candle over his head, touched the gash, its pulpy lips. He moaned, shuddered as if he might be starting a fit. ‘I only touched it,’ she whispered, then quickly, neatly, pressed a square of folded linen over the wound (some rag for drying himself after washing) and bound it in place with a neckcloth. Then, to be sure of it, she took off one of her own blood-warm stockings, wound it under his chin and knotted it over the already darkening pad of linen. She sat on the bed and looked at him. Now and then his eyes would flicker, but they did not open. She patted his hand, unwilling to give up ownership of this marvellous disaster, but then the thought of announcing to the half-asleep Monnards what their daughter had just done was too tempting, and taking the candle, she went down to their room (one leg bare, one dressed) and told them everything in the plainest speech imaginable, adding at the end — she really could not stop herself — ‘Why, madame, I suppose they might even hang her.’

In the cemetery of les Innocents, in the pearly light of eight in the morning, the miners have congregated near the door onto the rue aux Fers. Most, perhaps encouraged by their whores, have made some effort to smarten themselves, to look more like regular subjects of Louis XVI and less like men who pull bones, coffins, miraculously preserved girls out of the ground. Jackets have been brushed down, mud kicked off boots. There has even been some washing, some untangling of beards. Three of the younger men — they stand together nearest to the door — have plaited grasses into crowns to wear round the brims of their hats. Others, looked at closely, can be seen to wear items once used to decorate the dead, trinkets picked out of the sticky earth or traded for at night in the privacy of the tents. One fellow, clear-eyed, calm-eyed, his back straighter than the others, sports a pair of memorial rings, Respice finem on one hand, Mens videt astra on the other, its greenish metal wrapping the hilt of a finger lost at the middle joint.

They have long since eaten their bread and drunk their coffee. They have piled wood beside the preaching-cross bonfire, which in their absence will be fed by others. They are ready now. They are restless.

Outside the sexton’s house, Lecoeur studies his watch, makes faces, mutters under his breath. Of all the mornings Baratte should choose to oversleep, this one is peculiarly inconvenient. Of course, in the comfort of his lodgings, he must find it all too easy to forget them, those who live below . The men, however, will take it very amiss if they are kept dawdling. He will take it amiss himself for that matter. Fifty drops of the tincture last night! At least fifty, and heaven knows how much drink to wash it down, but far from procuring a night of restful slumber, it served only to make him an utter stranger to himself. It was — how to express it? — as if he, Lecoeur, was Lecoeur’s body only, the ticking flesh, and something, some invasive intelligence, was roosting in him, animating him, directing his actions. Had the true Lecoeur made a decision to go outside in the middle of the night? Had he? He did not believe so and yet he went, in nothing but his nightshirt, to the doctors’ workshop, and there lifted the lid of the coffin and looked at her, Charlotte, with the light of a glowing stick from the fire that seemed almost to be magically in his hand. A horrible excitement! A great strain on the heart. On the teeth too, for he must, by the pains in his jaws, have been grinding them furiously for hours. .