Andrew Miller - Pure

When it’s over, Jean-Baptiste says, ‘They’ve gone into the church.’

‘The miners?’ asks Héloïse.

‘Yes.’

‘A vigil,’ says Armand.

‘Forget about them a moment,’ says Lisa. ‘Let them be.’

Jean-Baptiste nods, joins the others by the piano.

Armand starts a new and livelier piece. ‘You remember the play we saw?’ he says. ‘The servants and masters thing? This is the opera.’

He plays the overture, two or three of the arias. As he warned them, new emotions are being added. The atmosphere is shifting, becoming — in a troubled, melancholy, drink-inspired way — almost merry. When he pauses, the women applaud. He bows to them.

‘They are still there,’ says Jean-Baptiste, who, during the playing of the last aria, was unable to keep himself from drifting back to the window. ‘They have light. Fire.’

Armand gets off the stool, joins him by the shutters. ‘You cannot expect them to stand around in the dark,’ he says.

‘What do you know about them?’ asks Jean-Baptiste quietly.

‘The miners?’

‘Yes.’

‘As much and as little as you. They are mysterious as eels.’

‘I want to see,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘See? See what?’

‘He wants to see what they are doing,’ says Héloïse. ‘Are you worried, Jean?’

‘But what harm can they be doing,’ asks Lisa, ‘in a ruined church in the middle of the night?’

‘I have no idea,’ says Jean-Baptiste, collecting his hat off the table. ‘I shall not stay long.’

‘Go with him,’ says Lisa to Armand.

‘As you wish, my dove,’ says Armand, rolling his eyes. He does not have a hat. He follows the engineer out of the room. The women look at each other.

‘What are we now?’ asks Armand as they stop in the shadow of the cemetery door. ‘Spies?’

‘Hush,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Hush.’

They move over the grass towards the church. A wash of light ripples on the panes of the window above the west door. Under the preaching cross, they pause again, watching and listening. Are those voices they can hear, voices rising past the beams of the roof?

‘If we are going in,’ whispers Armand, ‘then for God’s sake let’s go.’

The west door, open all day, is shut now. Jean-Baptiste raises the latch, pushes the studded wood. Four steps take them the length of the vestibule. Then a second door, flaps of tattered leather over its hinges. It opens quietly enough, but immediately there is the sense — the certainty — that whatever was happening inside the church has been suspended. A dozen points of light mark out where the miners are gathered around the pile of pews in the nave. The first man the engineer recognises is Jacques Everbout. Behind him — who’s that? — Rave? Then Dagua on his left, Jorix, Agast. None of them move. All of them are watching, intensely watching, the new arrivals.

‘Can you smell it?’ whispers Armand.

‘What?’

‘Liquor. The place reeks of it.’

‘It’s ethanol,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He nods to two of the big wicker-wrapped jars, their seals broken, that have been placed, side by side, next to the pews.

A movement. . A man steps forward, emerges in almost leisurely fashion from behind the others. A figure in white. White shirt, white trousers, white cloth at his neck. He walks to within parlaying distance. His shadow, thrown forward by the taper of the man behind him, spills over the stone floor to the engineer’s feet. It is the miner with the missing half-finger. The miner with the violet eyes. The only one Lecoeur did not know. Hoornweder? Lampsins? Whatever his name, there is no question but that he is the master here.

‘It was not our intention,’ begins Jean-Baptiste, finding his voice with difficulty, ‘to disturb you. We saw lights. I was—’

‘Is that Slabbart?’ asks Armand. He points to a bundled form laid on a pew at the top of the heap.

The miner in white nods. ‘Our brother was killed today,’ he says. ‘Tonight we will part with him.’

‘Part?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘Where will you take him?’

‘He is where he needs to be,’ says the miner. ‘We will part with him here.’ He looks at the engineer, waits patiently for him to understand, to piece together the elements — the night, the ethanol, the wrapped corpse. .

‘You mean to burn him? Here?’

‘This place killed him,’ says the miner. ‘Our brother. We have done with it.’

‘But if you burn him here, you will burn down the church!’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘You could burn down the whole quarter!’

‘It is the church that will burn,’ says the miner. ‘We will guard the rest.’

‘Once the church is on fire, it will be beyond anyone’s control. .’

‘We know about fire,’ says the other. ‘It is a thing we understand well.’

‘And what of Jeanne, and her grandfather?’

‘I will fetch them out,’ says another voice, a voice the engineer immediately recognises. Jan Block.

‘Listen to me,’ says Jean-Baptiste, wildly seeking a new tone, something better than mere incredulity. ‘Your brother who died today. I am sorry for it. Truly sorry. The mason has promised that those whose carelessness caused the accident will be punished. He has given me his word. There may even be. . some compensation.’

‘What the mason does,’ says the miner, ‘is for the mason to decide. It does not concern us.’

‘By why this? Why risk everything?’

‘You too take risks. You took a risk the night you went into the charnel after Monsieur Lecoeur, did you not? Coming here tonight, you have taken another.’

‘Let them do it,’ whispers Armand excitedly. ‘You have no authority here now. They will not listen to you. All that’s over.’

The miner has turned away from them. He is issuing orders. He is in his own tongue now. He does not raise his voice. More of the ethanol is brought from the chapel where the jars were stored. They break the seals, splash the liquid over the wood. For the final act, two of the miners scale the wood and spill the last half-jar over the wrapped body. When they come down, the miner in white gestures to them all to move further back. He speaks — a prayer or some ceremonial farewell — then takes a taper from the man at his side, steps towards the pews, stops, glances to the engineer, takes hold of a second taper and walks to him.

‘Together,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Together.’

‘Burn the church? Be party to this?’

‘Take the damn taper,’ says Armand, body poised as though ready — eager — to take it himself. ‘Take it before he puts us up there along with poor Slabbart.’

It is not, in the end, so hard to do. He looks into the miner’s eyes, the cool violet depths of them, sees no threat, no menace. Sees what, then? Reason? Philosophy? Madness? Or just himself, his own eyes, his own gaze reflected? He reaches for the taper. The moment he has it, the moment he closes it in his fist, everything assumes the character of a ritual, something rehearsed, something with its own irresistible progress. They walk together to the pyre, stand there with the wood rising over them to the height of six or seven men. The miner swings his taper first, lands it two-thirds of the way up the pile. Jean-Baptiste, after a brief and final hesitation, casts his to fall a little below it. For a while the tapers burn quietly, look almost as if they will gutter out, then a swirl of night air descending through the roof rouses them and blue flames spring from their tips, race up to gather round Slabbart’s blanket, race down again, following the trails of ethanol, down to the stone floor, to the jars themselves, which fill on the instant with roiling blue flames.

What have I done? thinks Jean-Baptiste. What have I done! Yet he feels like laughing, feels he has set alight not just this hateful church but everything that ever oppressed him, grossly or subtly. Lafosse, the minister, the sneering Comte de S—. His own father. His own weakness and confusion. .