Andrew Miller - Pure

He looks back, counts off the archways. He will soon be up by the door onto the rue de la Ferronnerie, the door through which they load the carts. Is that why Lecoeur came in here? To make his way more secretly to the door? There would have been a key in the sexton’s house. He might have pocketed it before attacking Jeanne, the escape planned before the crime was committed.

Gripping the spade in one hand, he feels for the wall with the other, his fingers trailing over lettering, then rough stone, then, unmistakably, the shaped edge of a hinge. He fumbles for the iron ring of the doorhandle, turns it, pulls, pulls again more sharply. The door is locked. Either Lecoeur had the coolness, the presence of mind, to lock it after him, or he is still here, in the cemetery, in the charnel.

He is poised to call out again — his nerves have had quite enough of this game of hide and seek — when he is aware of movement in the gallery behind him. Someone, something, is coming towards him, coming fast, sure-footed, recklessly fast. His first thought is not of Lecoeur at all but of the thing the minister spoke of, the dog-wolf. Would this not be its moment? A man alone at night, deep in its secret lair? Whatever it is, he has no hope of avoiding it. The thing’s energy, its intention, is already upon him. He swings the spade, arcs it blindly through the black air while in the same instant a voice roars at him, ‘ Violator! ’

The force of the contact comes near to throwing him off his feet. He skitters backwards until his shoulders collide with the wall; then, bracing himself against the stones, he jabs three or four times, furiously, at the dark, but there is no second assault. He waits, heart thundering behind his ribs, then creeps forwards, spade held out like a pike. Beneath his left shoe the snap of breaking glass. He stretches down, touches a curl of wire, a shard of smooth glass. Spectacles! He takes another step, sees beside one of the pillars of the nearest archway, the shape of a man’s head. He goes closer, lowers the edge of the spade against the man’s chest, feels it swell and fall.

‘Who was it?’

The engineer spins about, spade at the ready.

‘Who have you struck?’

‘ Lecoeur? Where are you? I cannot see you.’

‘Do not worry about that. I can see you well enough. My eyes have grown quite used to the dark.’

‘It was the priest.’

‘Colbert?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he killed?’

‘No.’

‘And what did you strike him with? What is that you have in your hands?’

‘A spade.’

‘Ha! He mistook you for me, perhaps? Or there again, perhaps not.’

From his voice it is evident that Lecoeur is no more than four or five metres away, yet somehow he seems to be speaking from within the wall.

‘You have hurt Jeanne, Lecoeur.’

‘I have?’

‘You know it.’

‘And you?’

‘What of me?’

‘Have you not also hurt her? Abused her willing nature? Made her your creature. Forced her to assist in the destruction of her little paradise?’

He has it now. Lecoeur must be sitting or crouching on one of the flights of steps leading up to the bone attics. A good place to choose. Easy to defend. Dark even in the middle of the day. ‘I have not raped her,’ he says.

‘So I am a little worse than you. Bravo. It is all a matter of degree, Baratte. And I can assure you she was no saint. I lived in the house with her. I knew her.’

‘If the men catch hold of you. .’

‘The men? What do you know about the men? You know nothing of them.’

‘I do not think they will hurt you if I am with you.’

‘You will be my protector? And then what? A trial? Or shall I be sent to join that mad girl who broke your head? Where was it she went?’

‘Dauphiné.’

‘Why did you bring me here, Baratte? Could you not have left me to rot in Valenciennes? Do you imagine you have helped me?’

‘Then let me help you now.’

‘Idiot! You cannot even help yourself. Look at you, standing in a stinking cemetery with your spade, wondering if you can get close enough to batter me with it. When you came to the mines, you were gentle. Shy as a girl. When I first saw you, I thought. . I thought, here at last is a man I can open my heart to.’

‘There is no time for this, Lecoeur.’

‘We were friends.’

‘I have not forgotten it.’

‘Was there nothing to value in such a friendship?’

‘The light is coming up. This cannot last much longer.’

‘The light! Ah, yes. The light. Tell me, then. She will live?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘I had some good in me once,’ says Lecoeur decisively. ‘Do not let them say otherwise.’

There is a pause — a dense, seashell hush, several seconds long — then the clear, mechanical articulation of a pistol being cocked. The engineer does not move. He waits, outlined against the growing light. The shot, when it comes, is both loud and muffled, a noise as though, in one of the crypts, a great stone-headed hammer had been launched against the slabs above. Echo, reverberation, silence.

He steps forward. ‘Lecoeur?’ he calls. ‘Lecoeur?’ He does not expect an answer.

Between eight and nine in the morning, a relentless downpour reduces the preaching-cross fire to a heap of smouldering black beams like the doused wreck of a small cottage. The men keep to their tents. There is bread to eat but nothing more, nothing hot until, in the late morning, Jean-Baptiste and Armand brew two large cans of coffee, lace them heavily with brandy and carry them over the wet grass.

A strange somnolence has settled over the cemetery. No one imagines any work can be done. Not today, not tomorrow either perhaps. And the day after? The day after that?

Guillotin (who, to the high amusement of his colleagues, has dubbed himself ‘physician to the cemetery of les Innocents’) examines Jeanne in the upstairs room where she has been made as comfortable as possible in her grandfather’s bed. When he comes down — his feet heavy and unhurried on the bare wood of the steps — he tells them that the only immediate danger comes from the operating of her own mind, from the morbidity that is the inevitable consequence of such an ordeal. Grief, terror. The loss of maidenhood in such doleful circumstances. And so on. The wounds to her flesh are survivable. A probable fracture of her left cheekbone, some lacerating of the soft tissues of her mouth — lips, tongue, gums, etc. Bruising — extensive — on both arms and much of the torso. .

‘She is young; she is hardy. You, my dear engineer, might convincingly empathise with her, though, I think, not yet. It may be a while before she finds the company of men agreeable again. Madame Saget can remain with her?’

‘She will wish to,’ says Armand.

‘Good. As to whether there will be any issue, any. . Well, let us hope it is not so.’ He smiles in kindly fashion at the sexton, who sits by the unlit grate and who may or may not have taken in much of what he has said. ‘A little time, monsieur. Time will put things right. You have not lost your Jeanne.’

The engineer accompanies Guillotin to the doctors’ workshop. Lecoeur is on the trestle table nearest to the entrance.

‘He was not unlikeable,’ says Guillotin, bending his knees a little to squint into Lecoeur’s head. ‘And at least he had the decency to put out his own light.’

‘I mistook him,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Mistook? Perhaps. Yet a man may be one thing and then another. He was not some drooling degenerate from the Salpêtrière. He was diligent, well read. Courteous.’

‘If I had been less distracted. Or had been with him more. Outside of here, I mean.’