Andrew Miller - Pure

They stand; they watch. The wood, baked for weeks in the summer sun, begins to snap and to flare. At moments, the air itself seems to burn. Then a small explosion — one of the jars? — and the miners are leaving, getting out quickly, quietly. No hullabaloo yet. The fire must be kept a secret until its hold is unbreakable. It will not be long.

Armand grips Jean-Baptiste’s arm, jolts him out of his dreaming. ‘Colbert,’ he says.

‘Colbert? We don’t even know if he’s here!’

‘There are rooms,’ says Armand. ‘Behind the altar.’

They circle the burning pews, jump little streams of flickering ethanol, pass through the choir, pass the altar. On the right, two doors. The first opens into darkness: a small room quickly searched. The second door is locked. They beat at it, call the priest’s name. They try shouldering it, kicking it.

‘Use this!’ shouts Armand, starting to topple a wooden statue, one of those pieces no one would trouble to steal, a clumsily shaped Joan of Arc, the saint in wooden armour, a cross held in front of her like a posy. At the second swing, she cracks the door. At the third, the door flies open.

‘He’s in here all right,’ says Armand, recoiling. ‘Stinks like a fox hole.’

The glow from the fire guides them, that and their groping hands. At the rear of the room is another door, also locked, leading out to the street. It’s Jean-Baptiste who finds the priest, discerns a blur of curled white on a bed at the side of the room. The skin is clammy — some dew of fever or starvation on it — but it is not the skin of a dead man. They pick him up between them, carry him like a sack of oats. Out of the room, they can see he is entirely naked. His eyelids flutter, spring open. His expression is that of a man who has woken to find himself in the grip of devils hurrying him into a furnace.

Another explosion. The pews and beams of Slabbart’s pyre are beginning to squirm in the heat. Slabbart himself is hidden behind walls of flame whose tops fling themselves closer and closer to the open sky. And parts of the choir have caught, the flames threading themselves through the narrow wooden arches. Twice, with the priest swinging between them, Armand and Jean-Baptiste jump broad lines of snaking fire. Heaven help them if the miners have barred the doors! But the doors are not barred, the way is free. Outside, they stagger as far as the tents. There is no one there. They drop Colbert in the grass, wipe their hands on the grass, rake the smoke out of their throats. Has the alarm been raised? The flames are clearly visible through the west window and must by now be equally so through the windows on the rue Saint-Denis.

Jean-Baptiste looks for the miner in white, but it’s Block he sees first, Jan Block hurrying Jeanne and Manetti away from the house. He runs to them, pulling the house key from his pocket, thrusts the key into Block’s hand. ‘Take them to the rue de la Lingerie. Tell the others there to wait. You wait there too. If the fire comes close, lead them down to the river. You understand?’

Block nods.

Jeanne says, ‘You must come too!’

‘I will come soon,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Go now.’

She holds out her fingers to him. For a second he clutches them. ‘Forgive me,’ he mutters, though he is not certain she has heard him. He watches them leave, the miner, the old man, the pregnant girl, watches their departing backs, the fragility of their diminishing forms. It is, he thinks, like the beginning and end of every story ever told.

How long since they threw the tapers? Ten minutes? Half an hour? Already the fire gives off an unearthly noise, groaning and thrumming and hissing. What fuels has it discovered in that place? What incendiary atmospheres were pooled in the crypts, waiting for a spark? Phlogiston! Each object’s secret fire woken and released! In the west window, the diamond panes begin to shatter. Single shots at first, then a fusillade.

And at last a bell! The urgent, irregular tolling of a bell. From Saint-Josse? Saint-Merri? He runs to the door onto the rue aux Fers, out onto the street. Plenty of people here who needed no bell to warn them. They churn about in their bedclothes, some of them shouting, some grimacing in silence at the church, some apparently happy, as if at a carnival. He jostles in the crowd, rocks in it. Useful now to be a little taller than he is, but he can see the miner in white, see him standing on the rim of the Italian fountain, one hand on the head of a stone triton, the other gesturing, directing his fellows, his brothers. They look to him occasionally — musicians to the capellmeister — but seem to know already what they must do. They press back the crowd, ease them away from the walls, establish a cordon. Some of them carry tools, home-fashioned billhooks ready to haul down burning debris. Nothing haphazard about these preparations. Nothing slack in their discipline. We know about fire , the miner had said. It is a thing we understand well . Is this the first, the second, the third church they have burned? And what besides? A factory? A chateau?

Lit from below, the smoke pours in a dirty orange torrent through the church roof. He follows it upwards, sees how, as it rises, it bows towards the west. . An east wind! Not strong but strong enough perhaps. A wind from the west and the flames would skip the rue Saint-Denis with ease. Like this — if the wind stays true — the fire has only the cemetery in front of it. The cemetery, the charnels. The rue de la Lingerie too, of course, though surely it will not reach as far as that. And if it does? Can he trust Block to do what is necessary? He has greater faith in Héloïse and Lisa, cannot imagine what emergency would be beyond such women.

He looks round for Armand, but the man beside him in the crowd is not Armand. He is pointing into the sky, where sparks sized like doves are soaring past the tiles. Sparks that are doves — doves or pigeons or whatever blind things had clung to their roosts and now, frantic and ablaze, make pitiful attempts to escape. ‘Human souls!’ shouts the man. ‘Human souls!’ and he grips Jean-Baptiste’s arm in a kind of ecstasy. The engineer scuffles free of him, elbows his way to the front, forces a passage between two of the miners (Rave and Rape, for whom he has, perhaps, not lost all authority, all prestige). He runs past the open cemetery door. He shouts for Armand, runs, shouts again more hoarsely, and at last receives an answer from somewhere near the sexton’s house. They must have set a fire there too. The tiles are already smoking and a flame-light shivers behind one of the upstairs windows. Armand is jogging away from the house. There is light in his red hair. In his hands he is holding out some trophy. A glittering green bottle.

‘I knew there was one left in there,’ he says, pausing to hack the smoke from his lungs. ‘Though if it had taken me much longer to find. .’

He tugs out the cork, takes a deep, amorous pull at the bottle. ‘The party of the future,’ he says. He wipes his lips, passes the bottle to Jean-Baptiste. The engineer takes it, drinks, then points over Armand’s shoulder with the neck of the bottle. ‘The grass is on fire,’ he says.

It’s true. Hundreds of burning tips of grass between the church and the preaching cross, each tip a delicate flower blooming only for a second or two. It is unexpectedly beautiful. Hard to look away from.

Behind them, in the fire’s shadow, the old priest, nude as a worm, begins to howl.

A man — a man neither young nor old — sits in an anteroom in a wing of the Palace of Versailles. Other than for his own black shape in the furred green of the mirrors, he is alone. There is no elegant stranger this time on the narrow armchair opposite him. But it is October again, and there is symmetry enough in that.