Andrew Miller - Pure

Waking, coming to the surface of himself as though flung into a place more confusing even than the dream, he is already trying to explain, to excuse. He stares at his hands, at the sheets, but they are perfectly clean, freakishly normal. Héloïse is pressing his shoulders. He blinks up at her, still babbling, but she is not listening to him. She is trying to tell him something of her own, her own dream perhaps.

‘Hush,’ she says. ‘Hush and come now, Jean. Come. They are waiting for you.’

He sits up. Marie is in the doorway with a candle. She is, apparently, fully dressed. From behind her a draught of cold, sluggish air flows in from the landing.

Héloïse gives him his breeches. Obediently, he puts them on. Odd how he cannot properly wake up. Is he ill? Is that it? A tainted oyster at the theatre? The chicken? No. He does not feel ill.

Kneeling, she buttons the legs of his breeches. He buttons his waistcoat. His watch is on the floor by the bed. He leans for it, flicks up the lid.

‘It’s half past four in the morning,’ he says, a remark that should occasion some sort of explanation but doesn’t.

‘Very well.’ He stands, wipes a hand across his face, accepts his hat from Héloïse, then follows Marie onto the landing. He does not ask her any questions. He knows her well enough now to know she is quite likely simply to invent something.

On the floor below, Monsieur Monnard, nightcap askew, is standing outside his bedroom door. ‘Are we to have no peace?’ he asks huskily, tearfully perhaps. ‘My wife, monsieur, my wife is very—’

‘Go back to your bed,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

In the hallway, a tall, gaunt figure is restless in the dark. Jean-Baptiste takes the candle from Marie, holds it up.

‘He doesn’t speak any French,’ says Marie.

‘Of course he does,’ says Jean-Baptiste, but when Jan Block starts, at great speed, to try and explain what he is doing there at half past four in the morning, it is only with the greatest difficulty, and by drawing on his small though slowly growing reserves of Flemish, that the engineer is able to follow him. There has been an accident in the cemetery. Yes. An accident or an incident of some sort. Jeanne has been hurt. Monsieur Lecoeur is looking after her. . or no. Monsieur Lecoeur is not looking after her. Monsieur Lecoeur has in fact — what? Run away?

‘Enough,’ says Jean-Baptiste, putting the candle on the hall table and stepping towards the street door. ‘I will see it for myself.’

Outside, a milky pre-dawn vapour hangs in the street, something like the shed skin of a cloud, damp, miasmic, coating their faces with droplets of moisture. Block is already at the corner of the street. He looks back, silently urging the engineer on. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to run,’ says Jean-Baptiste, though more to himself than to Block. He is trying to imagine what manner of accident could possibly have befallen Jeanne in the middle of the night. As for Lecoeur, why the devil should he disappear? Or did Block mean he had gone to fetch help? Perhaps even to find Guillotin or Thouret. That would make some sense of the story, though even as he thinks it, he knows the truth’s something quite different.

The cemetery door, when they reach it, stands wide, but once they are inside the walls, everything looks normal enough. The fire by the preaching cross burns as it has for weeks. The church is the same mad shadow as always. Then he sees, over by the south charnel, the movement of torches, hears the rumbling of men’s voices.

Block runs towards them. Jean-Baptiste, cursing under his breath, jogs after him. The miners are gathered on the ground between the charnel and the sexton’s house. Block calls to them and they fall silent, look at him, look past him to the engineer; then the talking resumes, louder now, more urgent. Some of them point to the charnel, wave their hands at it, their fists. He has not known them like this before. Block he has lost sight of. He sees Jacques Everbout, asks him where Jeanne is.

‘The house,’ says Everbout.

The house. Naturally. Where else would she be? He nods to Everbout, issues a perfectly unnecessary order for the men to remain where they are, then sets off towards the house. He has only gone four or five strides when he is suddenly falling, arms flailing, onto the black grass. He gets up, looks to see what has tripped him, reaches to feel it with his hand. A lime sack some fool has left carelessly in the grass? Then he touches hair, the rough parchment of skin. He snatches back his hand. A corpse! Though not, thank God, a fresh one. One of the preserved girls? Guillotin’s Charlotte? Why here ?

Another ten strides and he is in the sexton’s house. There is a lamp in the kitchen and around it a little of the mist is glittering in a blue nimbus. Jeanne — though it is not at first obvious that it is Jeanne — is lying on the kitchen table. She has a blanket over her. Her eyes are shut. Her grandfather is beside her, stroking her brow. He is making a low but terrible noise, a keening such as one might hear in the throat of some beast whose progeny the farmer has just led away towards a reeking shed. At the sound of movement behind him, he blinks his muddied eyes, bares the stumps of his teeth.

‘It’s me,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The engineer.’

The sexton gesticulates. A mime, a dumb-show. He is far beyond words. Jean-Baptiste approaches the table. A quarter of the girl’s face is disappearing into the swelling above her left eye. Her mouth. . her mouth must have been struck repeatedly. Fist? Boot? Some implement? What other wounds she has — and he is certain they exist — are hidden under the blanket. He is glad of it.

He leans over her, whispers her name. The eye by the wound will not open, but the other does. It opens and stares at him, without expression. He touches her shoulder; her whole body flinches. He takes back his hand.

‘Lecoeur?’ he asks.

The eye tells him it was so.

‘He has. . attacked you?’

And the eye tells him it was so.

‘I will bring the doctor to you,’ he says. ‘I will bring some women to you. I will send for Lisa.’

The eye shuts. He walks outside. It seems noticeably lighter, but the mist is lingering, thick skeins of it tangled in the bars of the charnel arches. By the door of the house, a spade with a heart-shaped blade is leaning against the wall. He takes it — the haft worn smooth — and walks towards the men. The first he meets is the tall one, the one with the missing half-finger. He asks him if Monsieur Lecoeur is in the charnel.

‘He is,’ says the miner, quietly. Then, as Jean-Baptiste is stepping away from him, the miner touches his arm, stops him. ‘He has a pistol,’ he says.

‘I remember it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. For an instant he is tempted to ask the miner to come with him, is desirous of having the other’s calmness and strength beside him. Then he goes on his own, down past the doctors’ workshop to the charnel’s first open archway. He steps inside, into the frigid stillness of its air, stops, turns his head to listen. Outside, the men have ceased their noise. They too are listening.

He moves forward: impossible, with no light but what is offered by the thinning darkness, to move soundlessly over such a surface. Too much debris. Pieces of stone, pieces of bone. Who knows what else besides. There is no hope of surprising Lecoeur, of stealing up on him. He decides to announce himself.

‘ Lecoeur! ’

An echo but no reply.

‘Lecoeur! It is Baratte!’

Nothing.

He goes on, trusting as much to his memory of the place as to his eyes. To his right, the archways stand out a faintly luminous blue against the speckled blackness of the gallery. One way or another it is light that will bring this thing to an end. Light will make a target of him. Light will leave Lecoeur nowhere to hide. And then? When Lecoeur is able to see him? The only reason he can imagine Lecoeur will not shoot him is that he would not then have time to reload his pistol before the miners reached him.