Andrew Miller - Pure

‘This wretched provincial,’ he says to the doctor, jabbing a finger a coin’s breadth from Jean-Baptiste’s waistcoat, ‘is making me butcher my own instrument.’

‘Oh, monsieur,’ says Guillotin sweetly, ‘monsieur, monsieur! I have already accused him of being a Hun. And I am sure he will find some nice thing for you. Some recompense.’

‘What are you doing to it?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Getting the keyboards out. If I have the keyboards, I can still practise.’

‘You want the stops too?’

‘You can get them?’

‘Of course,’ says Jean-Baptiste, reaching to touch the shaped end of the closest. He has learnt their names now, some of them. Cromorne, trompette, voix céleste, voix humaine. ‘I would have kept it all if I could.’

‘And done what with it?’ asks Armand, whose fit of grief seems already to be passing. ‘The thing has had its day. Had thousands of them. It dies with the church.’

‘Then come and play at the house tonight,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Bring Lisa. And we may persuade Jeanne and her grandfather to come. You are welcome too, Doctor.’

‘A little concert?’ asks Armand.

‘If we like. I am sure the Monnards will have no objection.’

‘The Monnards?’ says Armand, giving the engineer his chisel. ‘No. I am sure they will not. The Monnards will never object, eh? By the way, isn’t it time you considered leaving them alone? They’ve had their punishment. Listen to Héloïse.’

For half an hour in the dusty cool of the north aisle, Jean-Baptiste works with Slabbart, loosening the keyboards, then starting on the panelling around the stops. The miner has a neat way with the tools and it’s pleasant to work with him, but once it is clear Slabbart can finish the job perfectly well on his own, Jean-Baptiste skirts the walls to the west door and steps outside again. Ahead of him, above the charnels, the sun is full on the backs of the houses of the rue de la Lingerie, every window blind with light. Was it really about punishing the Monnards? Punishing them for having a mad daughter? He had not, knowingly, thought of it like that. On the contrary, his behaviour towards them — treating them with the barest possible civility, keeping Ziguette in her exile, doing exactly as he wished in their house, living there with Héloïse — all this had seemed entirely reasonable. Just and reasonable. Now it strikes him he has behaved towards them much as Lafosse has behaved towards him, much, perhaps, as the minister behaves towards Lafosse. He has set them at nought. He has humiliated them.

From the roof, more whoops and skirls. He steps away from the church’s shadow, squints up at the scaffolding, decides he must go up there soon, talk to Sagnac. First, though, he will set the men to work shifting the bones for tonight’s convoy. After that, they can begin the business of forcing out the iron grilles from the fronts of the bone attics. He has already examined most of them, seen (perched on a ladder) how weathered the stone is about the bars, how rusted the bars themselves are. Remove the grilles and they can simply rake the bones from the attics, a task immeasurably less arduous than carrying them, armful by armful, down the narrow, black stairways to the charnel archways. Rake them onto big tarpaulins, bundle them up, drag them to the door. An ass might be useful. A pair of them even more so. Would Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson deal in such humble creatures? Hard to believe he would not.

He gathers the men to him. They come at their own steady pace, shirtsleeves rolled, collars open. Brown necks, brown arms. Looking more like farmers now than miners. He starts — in his usual gnarled mix of French and Flemish — to give them their orders, starts to explain his thinking about the attics and the grilles. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Héloïse arriving from the market, two big straw bags in her hands. One of the men, Elay Wyntère, hurries to help her.

‘Our dinner,’ says the engineer. He smiles at them, then looks round at the church. A flurry of shouting has been followed by a strange silence. No one is hammering or sawing now. The labourers on the roof, those who can be seen from the ground, seem simply to be standing there, staring down into the church. The day ticks. Light falls, admirably and unchangingly. It is the miners who understand it first. What have the works at Valenciennes failed to teach them of such things? Disaster felt as a gentle vibration through the boots, the hush that follows. They run past the engineer, brush past him, run towards the church. After a moment of confusion, he runs behind them.

‘What is it?’ calls Héloïse. Then, ‘Don’t go in, Jean!’

He shouts back to her, ‘Wait!’

‘Jean-Baptiste!’

‘ Wait! ’

Inside the church, the miners are already circling a spot midway between two pillars, south side of the nave. Jean-Baptiste has to pull hard at the arm of one, push the shoulder of another, raise his voice, bully his way through. And there on the ground in the midst of them is a sprawled man, a length of sawn beam on the stones nearby. Already there is a jagged halo of blood around his head, though the wound is not immediately obvious. Is it coming from his mouth? Is the wound on his face? One of the miners is crouching beside the stricken man. Jean-Baptiste kneels on the other side.

‘Slabbart,’ says the miner.

‘Find Guillotin,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Fetch him here.’ The miner stands; the others open a passage for him. There is an urgency to their movements still, though it is nothing but the moment’s vile excitement. Slabbart is quite obviously dead, must have died instantly, died mid-stride, perhaps starting to look up in answer to a warning, the wood striking him, spinning him.

‘Who is it?’ asks Armand, shoving through.

‘Slabbart,’ says Jean-Baptiste, then looks to the roof and the faces staring down from its edges. He gets to his feet. The cloth at the knees of his breeches, black with blood, sticks to his skin. He goes outside. He has gone slightly deaf. He sees Héloïse, but he does not clearly hear what she says to him. He starts to climb the scaffolding, uses ladders where he sees them, clambers the structure itself when he can find nothing else. Ascending, climbing with reckless haste, he receives oddly gimballed views of the streets beyond the cemetery walls — a big dray turning into the rue Troufoevache, a young woman in a straw hat strolling with an older woman, an open doorway on the rue des Lombards. . When he reaches the upper walkway, the sky rears. It is as if he had climbed out of les Innocents’ deepest pit, climbed panting to its surface. Ahead of him, shocked, scared-looking faces. Bodies braced. And over there, on the cat ladder above the nave, two faces stiff with the horror of what has happened, stiff with fear, stiff — to the engineer’s mind — with guilt. He pulls himself onto the parapet and runs for them. They have perhaps never seen a man run like that on the top of a narrow wall fifty metres above the ground. His deafness has passed now. He can hear them all shouting. A clamour, like seabirds. The two on the roof begin to look demented. They slither along the tiles, closer and closer to the edge, the drop. Then Sagnac’s voice rises above the others. ‘Baratte! Baratte! You’ll kill them! You’ll fucking kill them!’

It’s probably true. They will fall; someone will fall. Fall or be thrown. Is that what he intends? He pauses, looks back. Sagnac is making his way, clumsily, along the deep gutter between the roof and the parapet. The mason holds out his hands, palms up, that posture — placatory, defensive — one adopts when dealing with a person whose behaviour is entirely unpredictable. ‘Just an accident,’ he says. ‘No one meant to do any harm. But I’ll see they’re punished for it. Their carelessness. You have my word on it. They’ll learn their lesson.’ He watches the engineer, watches him intently, then lowers his voice. ‘For pity’s sake, Baratte. One of them is my son-in-law.’