Andrew Miller - Pure

For les Innocents, he will need a more methodical, a more prosaic approach. Get the lead off, the tiles, cut rafters, purlins, drop them in. Make the church disappear like a slow forgetting. Are the pillars solid or cored with rubble? And the foundations? This close to the river, the whole thing could be floating on mud.

He will need to speak to Manetti. And Jeanne. If the church is coming down, so is the house. And if the house is coming down, then he must, as he once promised, find them something new. The lead and tiles, carefully traded, should raise more than enough to provide for an old man and his granddaughter, provide for years.

And how is she, this girl whose rapist he put into her house to live with her? Guillotin tells him she has lost some of the sight in her left eye but is otherwise healing well. For himself, though it is almost two months now, he has been careful not to be alone with her. He remembers how she shrank from his touch the night she lay on the kitchen table. And he wants to leave it long enough so that when they are alone, Lecoeur will not sit bloody and leering at the side of them. Leave it much longer, however, and there may be another subject, equally difficult to ignore. Lisa Saget says Jeanne is with child, has said as much to Héloïse. It is not yet certain. There are some technical proofs to be established, and Jeanne herself has offered no confidences. Hard to think, however, that a woman like Lisa Saget could be mistaken. Does a child have any sense of the circumstances of its conception? There are plenty who think so.

He tilts his head to look at Héloïse, her softly piled hair on the bolster. At some hour of the night, she made little noises, uttered a dozen half-words out of a dream, a hurt, reproachful tone to them, but now she is in that pure last sleep before waking, her breathing no louder than if someone brushed a fingertip, to and fro, slowly on the linen.

Are the pillars solid or cored with rubble? And the foundations? Does the whole thing float on mud?

With Armand he walks down the rue de la Verrerie, the evening sun between their shoulder blades, their shadows rippling over the stones in front of them. From Verrerie onto Roi de Sicile, then Saint-Antoine, then five minutes walking towards the Bastille, a royal flag on one of the turrets, hanging limp. Down the narrow rue de Fourcy, past the walls of the convent and right again into the rue de Jardin. . This is the district of Saint-Paul. There are stonemasons here: a blind man would know it. Armand and the engineer stop outside the open door of a workshop. Stone dust simmers in the warm air by the door. After the light of the streets, the inside of the workshop is ink-dark. Armand enters first, stumbles over a pallet, curses loudly. The sound of hammering stops. A heavyset man in an apron and white cap walks out of the ink to look at them. Every crease and bearing surface of his face has its dusting of stone.

‘You are?’ he asks.

‘Baratte,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Engineer at les Innocents. I am here for Master Sagnac. I sent word.’

‘And I am the organist,’ says Armand, making a little bow.

‘From the cemetery, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am Sagnac. Your letter said you were demolishing the church. That you needed masons.’

‘A master. Four or five senior apprentices.’

‘And labour?’

‘I have labour.’

‘Used to heights?’

‘They are miners. Or were.’

Sagnac laughs. ‘Then I’ll bring some of my own,’ he says. ‘At least until yours find their wings.’

‘As you wish.’

‘I’ve heard the king himself is behind the project.’

‘My orders come from the minister,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

Sagnac nods. ‘We all work for them one way or another, eh? You want me to get the green wood for the scaffolding? My contacts will be better than yours.’

‘But everything at a good price,’ says Armand, quickly. ‘My friend here may have a country accent, but I am Paris and learnt my tricks at the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés.’

‘You’ll find me true enough,’ says Sagnac. ‘I will not cheat any poor foundlings.’

One of the mason’s apprentices, a gangling boy dusted like his master, puts three stools outside the door and the three men sit and drink white wine and barter.

‘I almost trust him,’ says Armand as he and the engineer walk back to the cemetery together.

‘He will know his work,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And we will not pay him for what he does not do.’

‘You’re shaping up nicely,’ says Armand.

‘Thank you.’

‘And you have heard the latest about Jeanne?’

On Monday morning, half past six, 10 June, Sagnac arrives with four senior apprentices: Poulet, Jullien, Boilly and Barass. There are also a dozen labouring men in jackets and little hats, some with tools in their belts. The engineer walks Sagnac around the site. They tap the walls, prod the earth, confer, prod and tap some more. They meet the sexton and Jeanne. One of the apprentices makes careful sketches of the church. The others look at the charnels, the bone walls, shake their heads. Look at the miners too — that ragged band of saints — with no attempt to hide their distaste.

‘Well?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘We’ll put the scaffolding up this south wall to start with,’ says Sagnac. ‘What’s that there?’

‘The doctors’ workshop.’

‘The what?’

‘It can go.’

‘Right.’

‘When does the wood arrive?’

‘You can have the first of it tomorrow. And if your men know how to hammer in a nail, I can use them.’

Spars of green wood. A simple, repetitive geometry of squares and triangles spreading up the side of the church. It climbs fast. Each day the engineer climbs with it, soon climbs above the charnels, looks over the rue de la Ferronnerie, sees into the rue des Lombards, sees into first, second, then third-storey windows.

The miners are not as agile as the mason’s men; they do not skip from beam to beam or lean back insouciantly into the summer air, one hand casually gripping a strut, but they betray no fear of heights. They lift, tie, hammer, outdo the others in strength of limb, in sheer doggedness, in the calm efficiency of their labouring. At eating times, the two groups keep themselves apart. The mason’s men eat on the scaffolding, carry their food up there, look past their dangling boots at the miners, who, gathered below in their accustomed place, make a point of never looking up.

A week of shouting and the rattle of hammers and they reach the roof of the church. Jean-Baptiste climbs to join Sagnac.

‘The air’s a little better up here, eh?’ says Sagnac, his broad backside perched on the parapet at the edge of the roof.

‘If you say so,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He can see the river. The roof of the Louvre. The flour mills on Montmartre.

‘I suggest we break through in that gully,’ says the mason, indicating. ‘See what we’ve got.’

‘Very well.’

‘You want to keep the tiles?’

‘As many as possible.’

‘You’ll need hoists, then.

‘We have rope, chain, wheels.’

Sagnac nods. ‘Your men work well enough for foreigners.’

‘They’re not all foreigners,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘But yes, they’re good workers.’

‘A hell of a job all the same,’ says Sagnac, eyeing the young engineer, studying him as though, in the rareness of the air, he is seeing him for the first time.

In the church, the air is like standing water. Chill, stagnant. Having descended the scaffolding, the engineer goes inside with Armand and four of the miners. The mason is somewhere above the south transept. From the floor of the church nothing of the roof can be seen at all; everything must be imagined. They crane their necks, wait, rub their necks and look up again. A muffled thump brings a sudden creaking of invisible wings. The first blow is followed by a long series of them, two-second intervals.