Andrew Miller - Pure

‘Ah, so you think the cemetery is the culprit? That he was too much among lugubrious scenes?’

‘It is possible, is it not?’

‘Poisoned by them?’

‘Yes.’

‘And thus was uncovered some criminal weakness.’

‘Yes.’

‘He told me you once planned together an imaginary city. A utopia.’

‘When we worked at the mines.’

‘And what was it called? Your city?’

‘Valenciana.’

‘After Valenciennes?’

‘It was. . a game,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘You were idealists. Dreamers.’

‘We were young.’

‘Of course. And clever young men like to play such games. You are free of the vice now, I suppose?’ He looks up, grins, then goes to the other trestle table, lifts the lid of the casket. ‘Poor Charlotte,’ he says. ‘These post-mortem adventures have not improved her. You say you carried her back yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘One presumes he attacked Jeanne upon realising Charlotte could not serve his purpose.’ He settles the lid, taps it thoughtfully. ‘And the priest? There is any news of him?’

‘None.’

‘He has vanished?’

‘It was still dark and there was much confusion. My guess is that he is inside the church.’

‘Gone to ground, eh? And you do not much feel like looking for him? Not, at least, without a shovel to protect yourself with. You have had quite a morning. None of it could have been easy. But no doubt the minister saw that you were a man who might be trusted to manage in such a circumstance.’

For some seconds the pair of them gaze down at the corpse on the table. The eyes are part open and give to the shattered face the air of someone intent upon remembering. Then they look away from him, turn away, as if he had passed beyond all relevance.

Héloïse comes to the cemetery. Jean-Baptiste has not sent for her; she comes on the authority of her own misgivings. She raps on the door. One of the men — Joos Slabbart — opens the door to her. Though she has often looked down at the cemetery from the windows of the house it is the first time she has been inside the walls of les Innocents. She pauses a moment to take it in — the cross, the stone lanterns, the charnels, the bone walls, the tents — then Slabbart escorts her to the sexton’s house. When she hears what has passed she rests a hand on the sexton’s arm, then takes down Jeanne’s apron from its peg by the stairs. She reminds Jean-Baptiste that she grew up in an inn, and that whatever the failings of her parents (not seeming to care for her much being one), they knew their business and made sure she knew it too. She hikes her skirts, crouches by the empty grate. ‘This first,’ she says, long fingers picking quickly among the kindling.

The next to arrive is Monsieur Lafosse, to whose office in Saint-Germain the engineer sent a runner with a letter as soon as he was able to put his thoughts in order. The letter, written at the kitchen table, was intended to be a dry, almost technical relation of the night’s events, though when he read it through before sealing it, it struck him as more like one of those disturbing dramas full of blind mortals and intractable gods he sometimes flicked through in the library of the Comte de S—, those days when it was too wet to work on the ‘decoration’.

He takes Lafosse to see Lecoeur’s corpse, though not, of course, to see Jeanne, who could hardly be soothed by the sight of a man like Death’s steward at the end of her bed.

When they come out of the workshop, Lafosse dabs with a handkerchief at the bloodless tip of his nose. ‘And the girl will live?’ he asks.

‘Jeanne? It is what he asked. Lecoeur.’

‘And you answered?’

‘Yes. She will live.’

‘Then I do not see there is any difficulty.’

‘I should be pleased if you told me how to proceed.’

‘We are in a cemetery, are we not?’

‘We are.’

‘And how many have you taken out of the ground?’

‘I cannot say exactly. Many thousands, I think.’

‘Then putting one in should be a matter of no great consequence. The balance will still be in your favour.’

‘Bury him? In les Innocents?’

‘Bury him, bury his effects. Remove his name from all documents, all records. Never mention him again.’

‘Those are the minister’s instructions?’

‘Those are your instructions.’

They cross to the cemetery door together. The rain has moved through, replaced by a strange damp warmth, febrile.

‘One less mouth to feed,’ says Lafosse. ‘One less wage to pay. It should enable you to make a saving. The country is bankrupt, Baratte. The minister pays for all this from his own purse.’ He scans the cemetery, in his face a slow flowering of disgust. ‘How do you tolerate it here?’ he asks.

The engineer pulls open the door for him. ‘I did not think I had any choice.’

‘You do not. But even so. .’

‘You get used to it,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

At dusk — an early moon skitting between clouds — he walks Héloïse back to the rue de la Lingerie. She has cooked and cleaned. She has laboured all day. He thanks her.

‘Tomorrow I will do the same,’ she says. ‘I will do everything Jeanne did. I will go to the market.’

He wants to object — is this what he had in mind for her, a cemetery housewife? — but he knows he will find no one more competent, more to be counted on.

‘I will pay you,’ he says.

‘Yes, you will,’ she says. They smile into the gloom ahead of them. First smile of the day.

They reach their room without encountering either of the Monnards or Marie. She lights a candle; he lights the fire.

‘You are going back there,’ she says.

He nods. ‘Some matters. . outstanding.’

‘Of course.’ She looks at the candle, strokes the flame. ‘I am half afraid to let you go,’ she says.

‘And I,’ he answers, ‘am half afraid that if I do not go now I will never set foot in the place again.’

He has already settled on pit fourteen. Newly emptied, scraped, its earth at the side of it, and far enough from the tents for there to be some hope of secrecy, pit fourteen is the obvious place.

In the sexton’s house the kitchen is deserted. The old man must be upstairs with Jeanne. Lisa, presumably, will have gone home for the night to her own people. There is no one to be curious, to ask questions. He stands in the doorway of the records office, blocked for a moment from entering it, intimidated by some spectral afterglow of the life that so recently inhabited it; then he barges in, lifts Lecoeur’s bag onto the bed and starts quickly filling it with those few objects he troubled to unpack. A pair of square-toed shoes. A horsehair bob-wig. A shirt left draped across the desk. The knitted waistcoat. Two books: Rousseau’s Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire , and La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine . The empty bottle of tincture. An inexpensive watch. The ribbon-bound parcel of Valenciana papers.

He consults his own watch. It is too early for what he has in mind. He takes L’Homme Machine out of the bag and sits with it at the kitchen table. He has not read the book. La Mettrie is not remembered kindly. A provincial like himself, a clever rogue, a man who died from eating an excess of pâté. After a moment, he opens the book, survives almost half a page before he loses the first word. He looks away, looks back, sharpens his focus. Nothing gets any clearer. He flushes: that old schoolroom shame he has become reacquainted with these last months. Then shame is swept away by something more urgent. A spasm in the guts, deep in the lower-left quadrant, the soft coils. It fades, but only to return more sharply, sharp enough to make him groan. He stuffs the book into a pocket, stands up from the bench, gets outside and runs, an awkward, lopsided, wounded-animal run, round the back of the church to the slit canvas wall of the latrines. Unwise to come in here at night without a light! He grips one of the poles, feels with his toe for the hole, one of the holes. Here? Here will do: he cannot wait longer. He gets his breeches down (loses a button in his haste) and lets the muck fly out of him, hears it slap the surface of the muck already in the hole. A pause: the body seems to be listening to itself; then another burst, almost burning him as it passes. He clings to the pole, his forehead against the planed wood, panting, waiting for the next convulsion. They will name squares after us, said Lecoeur that morning in Valenciennes, the snow brushing the window. The men who purified Paris!