Pure

~ ~ ~

Stone steps, a long flight of them, leading steeply down. The cellar. The knowledge of what is below, what must be.

At first it is too dark to see or understand anything of his surroundings. There is only the descent, the feel of the steps beneath his feet. Then a soft pinkish light, a narrow hall, a table with a tin on it, a little bell. There is a woman sitting behind the table. She keeps her face averted but knows he is there. She rings the bell and though it makes no discernible sound the curtain at the end of the hall is immediately drawn back. A man smiles at him, beckons him with a little gesture of his head. .

They are in a corridor. On either side of it, swagged drapes conceal what are, presumably, the entrances to rooms. One of these — where the drape has been imperfectly closed — he stops to look into, though perhaps it is not really a room at all. The walls seem to be made of packed black earth. The dimensions are uncertain, so too the number of people in there, the men and women and children sitting, crouching, lying. They look back at him. There is something ardent in their gazes. Ardent, wide-eyed, blank. He turns away. He is afraid that one of them will start to speak, will address him, will know his name. .

The guide is waiting at the end of the corridor. Another set of curtains. Pretty gestures of invitation. He goes in, the guide close behind him. Whatever is going to happen it is going to happen now and here. They are, it seems, in his room at the Monnards’ or something like his room, for there is no window and the walls are bare. Light comes from a single large candle on the table. On the bed is a man. He wears only a shirt, the tails reaching to his knees. His eyes are open, but his lips have been clumsily stitched with black thread.

The guide lifts the candle from the table and steps to the bed. It only takes a moment, he says. We must release the phlogiston. It is the agent of transformation. The destroyer of impurities.

He leans, and as though pouring something precious into the ear of the man on the bed, he touches the candle’s wick to his hair. It takes instantly, burns like dried grass. Then flames slide over the man’s face, wrap his throat, race over the skin of his chest, his belly. How can a body burn like this? A man should not burn like rolled paper! What has been done? What method is this?

In its wrap of flames the body begins to move. An arm, a leg. The torso lifts — floats! — from the burning sheets. The thread between the lips is sundered. The mouth springs open. Roars, roars. .

1

‘Keep him still,’ says Guillotin. He is leaning over the bed. A line of black thread lies over the patient’s face like a fine crack. Marie presses down on the kicking legs. She’s a good strong girl for the holding-down business. The doctor gets to work.

For the first forty-eight hours there is danger, a very grave danger. If the brain is bleeding, well, something might be done — there’s a surgeon on the rue Saint-Honoré with an elegant drill, but could he be fetched in time? The patient is watched continuously. Marie, Jeanne, Lisa Saget, Armand, Lecoeur. Guillotin calls every morning and again in the early evening. He stands over his patient, weighs the odds, then looks out at the church of les Innocents, thinks large thoughts about men, their heads, their hearts, the way of the world. The old world and the world that is, perhaps, coming.

In spite of the succession of watchers, when the engineer finally opens his eyes he would swear that the room is empty. On the bolster, his head is a dead weight, a fist of living gristle sown onto the stump of his neck. The pain is not on the surface but buried in the white depths of his brain. Its rhythm is the rhythm of his blood. At each heartbeat he winces. The door moves. Madame Monnard peeps in. When she sees that his eyes are open, that he is, apparently, looking at her, she flees.

‘Who am I?’

‘You? You are the doctor.’

‘And my name?’

‘Guillotin.’

‘Good. And you?’

‘Baratte.’

‘And the name of our king?’

‘Louis.’

‘You remember what happened to you?’

‘Some of it.’

‘Some?’

‘Enough.’

‘Monsieur Lafosse has visited us,’ says Lecoeur. (How many hours have passed? How many days?) ‘I believe Dr Guillotin informed him of your. . misfortune. He has instructed me to press on with the work. Says it would not do to keep the men idle. That time is money.’

‘Ziguette?’ murmurs Jean-Baptiste, but too quietly.

‘And look,’ says Lecoeur, ‘Jeanne has sent you a remedy. Herbs of some kind, I think.’ He holds out the bottle for inspection. On his hands, there is a stubborn speckling of black stains, black paint.

‘Probably a love potion,’ says Armand, who is also in the room, though out of the engineer’s field of vision.

‘What day is it?’ asks the patient.

‘Day?’ says Lecoeur. ‘It is Wednesday. Wednesday morning.’

Marie is on a chair by the bed doing something to the fire. He does not wish to move his head to see. Any quick movement of his head sends the world jittering and juddering. ‘Ziguette?’ he asks.

‘Why?’ she says. ‘Afraid she’s going to visit you again?’ Then, when he does not answer her, she says, ‘It was me what saved you.’

Light is a white sheet at his window, a dull white sheet that is folded each evening and hung out again the next dawn. They no longer watch him all the time. Unwatched, he steals out of bed, sits ten minutes on the chair, clinging to the seat. The following day, he sits for half an hour. Sitting becomes his practice. Sometimes, when swept by squalls of pity — for himself, his bullying father, the haunted lives of strangers, the cold bones in the cemetery — he makes odd shapes with his mouth, a type of dry weeping. Other times he is blank, calm and perfectly blank, until the world’s rawness, his own breath, the edges of the air, rouse him again. He studies his hands, looks at the fire, peers quizzically at the picture of the bridge. He lifts his eyes to the window: the clouds are coloured like the sea at Dieppe. Who are you? asked the doctor. He is Adam alone in the garden. He is Lazarus rousted out of his tomb, one life separated from another by a slack of darkness.

Guillotin comes to bleed him; phlebotomy a standard precaution in such cases. First, he carries out his usual examination of the wound. ‘You Normans have nice thick skulls,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t care to leave me your head, would you?’

‘What makes you think you will outlive me?’

‘Your taste in women,’ says the doctor, turning his attention to the engineer’s right arm and cutting him close to the elbow. The blood slopes into a tin bowl. ‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I won’t take much.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Your assailant?’

‘No one will tell me where she is.’

‘She was here until two days ago, in the house. Now she is sent away. Elderly relatives in Dauphiné. People of strict religion. I hope you will not object, but I gave the scheme my approval. There can be no more effective cure for a young woman’s ardency than a year or two muttering novenas in a cold house in a remote province. I assumed you would have no wish to prosecute her. A man would only make himself ridiculous prosecuting a woman in such circumstances. Had you succumbed, of course, then the matter would have been beyond any purely private solution. You were lovers?’

‘No.’

‘I shall believe you,’ says the doctor, balling a scrap of lint, pressing it over the cut and carefully folding his patient’s arm. ‘But if it was not love or jealousy or desire, what do you imagine made her walk into your room and try to split your head in two?’

‘Les Innocents.’

‘The cemetery? To keep you from destroying it? She may be madder than I thought. Let us hope she does not butcher her relatives in Dauphiné. One would feel a certain responsibility.’

‘How long has it been?’

‘Since the attack? Two weeks. A little over.’

‘I must return to the work.’

‘A month in the good air of Normandy would be a better prescription.’

‘I am well enough.’

‘You were struck a very considerable blow to the head. The effects of any such blow are both unpredictable and of long duration. You have noticed anything unusual? Hallucinations? Lapses in memory?’

‘Nothing,’ says Jean-Baptiste, lying.

The doctor wipes the blade of his lancet. ‘In that case,’ he says, ‘how would it be if we endeavour to get you down to the drawing room tomorrow? The Monnards will no doubt be anxious to afford you every comfort.’ He grins. ‘In the meantime, you have the Comte de Buffon to keep you company.’ He takes the book from the table, drops it onto the bedcovers. ‘You are aware, I suppose, that there are another thirty volumes of this?’

When the doctor has gone, Jean-Baptiste looks at the book and, after a moment, opens it. It is not the first time since the assault that he has tried it. He shuts his eyes, opens them, summons himself, the engine of his concentration, which has, in the past, served him so well. He puts a finger on the top left-hand side of the left-hand page. The first four words present no difficulty: ‘Now let us consider. .’ The next word he cannot read. The next is, he thinks, ‘instance’. The next nothing but a shape, meaningless as an ink blot. So too the one after it and the one after that. And it is not just words in books, it is the words in his head that have gone. Names of things, quite ordinary things, objects a child could name. Like and .

And if this, this blindness, should become common knowledge? If Lafosse and then the minister discover it, what then? Who in the world would employ such a man even to destroy a cemetery?

He shuts the book, pushes it onto the floor, rolls out of bed, stands experimentally, waits for his blood to arrange itself, then shuffles to the mirror. He has a nightcap on his head, a dressing of some sort beneath it. He looks — what? — foolish and saintly and slightly frightening. He fingers the hair on his chin, touches his skull as though it was a shelled egg and any sharp movement might pierce it, make a hole for the yolk of his brains to run through. .

He is twenty minutes easing off the nightcap, then the bandage with its damp, pink underside. His hair has been chopped, clumsily tonsured, but however he angles his head, he can see almost nothing of the wound itself except an ugly patch of discoloured skin and, poking from it like a single gross hair, a strand of black thread.

He looks for his clothes, the working suit he was wearing the day before the night Ziguette Monnard came in to murder him. He cannot see it. It has been tidied away or taken away. Spoiled? Splashed with his blood, with blood from the weapon, the thing, the metal thing, the name of which (a spark of panic in his chest) he has also lost? How can a man think at all if he does not have the words to think with? What can guide him if not the words?

He goes to his trunk, lifts the lid. The shock of colour, of light off colour, makes him flinch, but he is relieved to hear ‘green’ in his head, and ‘silk’, and even ‘pistachio’. He carries the suit to the bed, lays it there, regards it a while, then climbs wearily inside it. Let this be the answer, then. He will simply follow the world. The world, the things of the world, will prompt him. He will do what they suggest. It will not matter if he can name them or not. He will be like a child running after a ball bouncing down steps. Perhaps that is what he always did. He cannot quite remember.

When he is dressed, he looks for the banyan, the tarboosh, the rented wig, the paper they were all wrapped in, wraps them again, a large, clumsy parcel. He puts on his shoes, his riding coat. With teeth clenched he settles his hat on his head as if the wound might be oppressed simply by a shadow. He goes downstairs. No one sees him. The kitchen door is open but the room is empty. He glances at the cellar door, resists the urge to try it, opens the street door, narrows his eyes against the light, stands a full minute with his back against the wall of the house, gathering energy, courage, whatever he will need to go on. He dreads being recognised, stopped, spoken to. He assumes some version of the story is already in circulation, that he is not just the engineer now but the man the Monnard girl attacked, the man who must, in some way, have provoked her. He watches two boys come up the street whipping a toy, a hollow circle of wood. He lets them pass, then shoves off from the wall, launches himself.

At Gaudet’s he gets a shave. He is the only customer. When he comes in the barber is sitting in his chair reading the Mercure de France and nibbling a fingernail. The shave is simple sensual pleasure. The wound, of course, is not mentioned, though Gaudet has ample time to study it. Instead, the barber speaks of the town, the quarter, the price of things, the recent strikes. None of it requires any comment from Jean-Baptiste. He lets the man chatter, lets him work, is grateful to him.

‘I have been ill a while,’ he says at last.

‘But you are well again now,’ says Gaudet, brushing the brown hairs, the little grey ones, from the engineer’s shoulders. ‘You will be quite your old self again soon.’

‘You think?’

The barber grins at him through the medium of the mirror, shrugs elegantly, then folds the sharp thing, the bright thing, into its curved handle.

With the parcel in his arms, the cold air keen over chin and cheeks, he walks up past the Company of the Indies and the rue des Bons-Enfants to the place des Victoires. After being bedridden for two weeks the walk should have done him in; instead it seems to recover him a little. He has no difficulty remembering the address he wants. He shoulders the door. A bell rings. Charvet in his velvet pumps is crossing the polished floor of the shop. He stops, raises his little eyebrows, then tilts from the waist, stiffly.

‘Monsieur l’Ingénieur, is it not?’

There is a chair by the door. Jean-Baptiste drops his parcel onto its seat. The parcel starts to unwrap itself as though it contained something living. ‘I should like to have my old suit again,’ he says. ‘The one I wore when I came to you with Saint-Méard.’

Charvet looks at his assistant, then back to the engineer. ‘Your old suit? But that was sold, monsieur. To a gentleman in trade, I believe. Is that not so, Cédric?’

The assistant confirms it.

Jean-Baptiste nods, lets his gaze travel slowly round the shop. On one of the wooden mannequins (an adjustable torso on a wooden pillar) is a suit of neatly cut black wool. He goes up to it, handles the cloth, takes in the size. ‘This, then. This will do.’

‘In that,’ says Charvet, speaking now as if explaining something to a child, not a good child but a foolish one, ‘you will appear like a Geneva parson. It is here only because it is necessary to show a range of styles. A wide range, you understand. But for you, monsieur, it will not. .’

‘And this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, unbuttoning his coat to show a line of green silk, ‘I have no use for any more.’

Charvet makes a curious bridling movement, lengthens his neck, blinks extravagantly. ‘Yet I remember, monsieur, how well you liked it when you first had it.’

‘You do?’ It is a genuine question.

‘You wished to be more à la mode.’

‘More modern?’

‘Exactly. You. . cannot recollect?’

‘I remember being drunk. I remember being flattered.’

‘It is still an excellent suit.’

‘It is a suit I no longer want. And I have brought the banyan back,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The rest too. There. On the chair.’

Charvet and the assistant look at the chair, at the parcel, the tongue of red damask lolling from the paper.

They fit him with the black. With a few tucks the fit is surprisingly snug, the colour immediately restful, though it is true that he does indeed look something like a Geneva parson. Charvet leaves the alterations to his assistant. He stands to one side, arms folded. Now and then he glances, with some disgust, at the engineer’s battered head.

‘This suit,’ he says at last, ‘may be simple, but it is not inexpensive. And the other has been much worn, has, I see, some stains on the sleeve. Grease stains if I am not mistaken. Grease or something worse. I will be forced to sell it at a discount. A considerable—’

‘That old one of mine you had,’ says Jean-Baptiste, carefully shrugging himself into his riding coat again and starting to button it, ‘the one you sold to a man in trade. It was worth more than the whole of your shop. That I recollect perfectly.’ He looks at Charvet until Charvet turns away. He goes to the door. The assistant hurries to open it for him. Sheer force of habit.

In the pocket of his coat he has the key to the cemetery, to the door from the rue aux Fers. With his hands in his pockets, he holds the key in a fist and crosses the market. He wonders if he is hungry — he has eaten nothing but some soup for breakfast, a medicinal broth when the day was still half dark. He pauses by the entrance to one of the fish sheds. The market is different to him in some way, strikes him differently, though he cannot say exactly how. It looks the same — same stalls, same red-faced, raw-fingered stall-holders, same hoarse shouts, same muck. He goes inside the fish shed, stands in the dripping shadows among pools of water bright with fish scales, breathes deeply. On the lining of his nose there is a sensation of coolness, of dampness, but nothing that could be called a smell, a stink. So that too has gone! It is at least a symptom he can, without risk of repercussion, confess to Dr Guillotin. .

And then he is there, the rue aux Fers, where brown smoke coils above the cemetery wall and the black letters — still fresh-looking — are waiting for him: ‘FAT KING SLUT QUEEN BEWARE! BECHE IS DIGGING A HOLE BIG ENOUGH TO BURY ALL VERSAILLES!’

Is he reading or remembering? He is not sure. What he does know, does not need to question, is that when he first saw it, she was here, almost exactly where he is now, standing with her loaf of bread, a piece of which she offered to him and which he snatched from her like some big, awkward bird, a big, yellow-eyed gull. And then afterwards, in the charnel with Armand, whom he meant to upbraid, to accuse of frivolity, of undermining him, he was himself accused, told he was concerned solely with his professional character, that his politics were the politics of ‘undrawn conclusions’.

Had he understood what Armand meant by such a phrase? There had not been much opportunity to think on it. First that business with the men’s pipes, then Lecoeur and Armand coming back drunk. That and a hundred other worries. But yes, he had understood well enough. Had felt the justice of it. Had resented it. .

The door of the cemetery opens. A man — a wiry man with a flow of yellow beard that looks more youthful, more vigorous than the face it hangs from — steps into the street. When he sees the engineer he stops, tenses, stares.

‘Block?’ says Jean-Baptiste, stepping closer. ‘Block?’

Block nods. Under his arm he has two rolled sacks, bread sacks from the dust of flour on them.

‘You are sent on an errand?’

Block nods again.

‘Jeanne has sent you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have your strength back.’

‘Yes.’

They look at each other a moment, on their faces some fleeting recognition of shared experience, of dissolution and uncertain reassembly. Then, with a brushing of shoulders, they pass each other by.

Inside the cemetery, the men are gathered about a pit close to the north wall. Pit eight? Nine? A man lifting a clogged, mushroom-brown pelvis onto the bone wall sees him first. He stops, straightens (as far as a miner can). Lecoeur follows the man’s gaze, lets out a yelp of delight and hurries over, speaking so rapidly, so confusedly, his words seem to overlie each other. Are those tears in his eyes? From the smoke perhaps. Just the smoke.

The men working the surface gawp. One speaks a word, drops it like a pebble to his fellows below. The engineer greets them. He has no trouble bringing their names to mind. Agast, Everbout, Cloët, Pondt, Jan Biloo, Jacques Hooft, Louis Cent, Elay Wyntère. . He is glad of them, surprised at how unaffectedly glad he is to see them again. He asks them to go on with their work. They go on.

‘We have not,’ says Lecoeur, confidentially, ‘made all the progress I would have wished for. We finished two this last week —’ he gestures to where they have dug — ‘and would have finished this had one of the sides not collapsed. It was fortunate the men were on their break. I even feared for the cemetery wall.’

‘You were using the. . the wooden. . the shapes. . the shapes that hold the sides?’

‘The box-crib? I had hoped it would not be necessary. The weather has been tolerably dry. It was an error, of course. I am sorry for it.’

‘It is no great matter. We can shore the wall with the earth. A ramp of earth. Then put the crib in place.’

‘Yes,’ says Lecoeur. ‘That will be best.’

‘The men have eaten their midday meal?’

‘Some hours ago. It is, I think, past three o’clock.’

‘I had not realised.’

‘Tempus fugit,’ says Lecoeur, gleefully. There are little white crusts at the corners of his mouth. His lips, chapped by the wind, look sore. ‘You are perfectly recovered?’ he asks.

‘I am told I have a thick skull,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And you?’

‘Recovered?’

‘You are well?’

‘Oh, have no unease on my account. We Lecoeurs are a leathery breed.’ He laughs. ‘I dare say I could wrestle a bear. Were there some need to.’

‘Or an elephant?’

‘An elephant?’

‘I have just thought of it. An elephant. I do not know why. Have we spoken of elephants before?’

‘I cannot. .’

‘It is not important.’

For almost an hour Jean-Baptiste commands the work from a quarterdeck of winter grass; then, his limbs beginning to finely tremble, he excuses himself and crosses towards the sexton’s house.

Jeanne is standing at the table slicing dried sausage, leaning her whole weight over the knife. Armand is in Manetti’s chair, a book of music on his lap, big creamy pages, black staves, thousands of dancing notes. He is frowning with concentration, his fingers playing the bones of his knees. He looks up at Jean-Baptiste, grins. ‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘You must sit,’ says Jeanne, putting down her knife and pulling a stool from under the table. Jean-Baptiste sits, heavily, shuts his eyes a moment, then slowly removes his hat.

‘You are very pale still,’ she says.

‘He was always pale,’ says Armand.

‘You should be at home,’ says Jeanne, going quickly to the hearth, where a coffee pot sits on a tile by the fire.

‘Home,’ says Armand, ‘is where they cracked his head open. No doubt he feels safer in a cemetery.’

The coffee is only lukewarm and without its aroma it has no taste, but Jean-Baptiste gulps it and holds out the bowl for more. ‘Your grandfather?’ he asks.

‘He is resting,’ says Jeanne, brown eyes flickering shyly over the engineer’s grey. He wonders what she is thinking. The last he can remember of her, of any of them, is going into the church for Armand to play the organ. Was that the night he was attacked? The night before? The week before?

‘All that work stewing our exhumed friends,’ says Armand, ‘has quite exhausted the old fellow. It exhausts me just thinking about it.’

‘Is this sausage edible?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. He takes a piece, puts it in his mouth. Pork and pork fat hard as money.

Armand shuts his book of music. He turns in the chair and watches the engineer, watches him chew and eventually swallow.

‘You find me so interesting?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘Interesting? You know very well I have found you so from the moment you walked into my church. I confess I am intrigued to see what your surgeon has achieved.’

‘You mean Guillotin?’

‘I mean Ziguette Monnard. I fancy she has finished you off.’

Along the length of Jean-Baptiste’s wound the stitches briefly tighten. ‘It is what she intended,’ he says.

‘Ah, but you were in need of something, my friend. You were not quite hatched. . And is that not a new suit you have? Have you seen it, Jeanne? Black as midnight! Bravo! He has at last revealed himself as the good Calvinist I have always suspected him of being. You know his mother is of that persuasion?’

‘My mother. .’ begins Jean-Baptiste, speaking to the stone floor between his feet, ‘my mother. .’ He falls silent. He is in no mood for Armand’s games, in no condition to play them. He finishes the second bowl of coffee, rouses himself and goes upstairs to look in on Manetti, sits a while beside the sleeping man, then, coming down the stairs, suffers an instant of giddiness and only saves himself from tumbling by snatching at the rail.

‘You have done enough for now,’ says Armand, taking him firmly by the arm and walking him outside. ‘The cemetery is yours still. Poor Lecoeur was in a panic without you.’

‘I should speak to him. .’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Tomorrow will be soon enough.’

‘I shall come in the morning.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Armand.

‘And in my working suit, if I can find it.’

‘We shall be ready for you. I will even attempt not to tease you for a day or two.’ He smiles.

‘When it happened,’ says Jean-Baptiste, speaking quickly and quietly and looking over Armand’s shoulder at the arches of the south charnel, ‘when she struck me. . afterwards, I mean, there were some moments before I became insensible. Very few, I think, but enough. I wished to. . hold something. Some idea. I believed I was dying, you see. I wished for something to make the moment possible.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

On the rue aux Fers, grey light, grey stone; the black forms of birds on the steep roofs. To his left, the corner of the rue de la Lingerie, to his right, the rue Saint-Denis. By the fountain, a dog, skinny, pared down, is lapping at a puddle. Sensing itself observed, it looks up, water dripping from its muzzle, then turns, limps into the rue Saint-Denis, pauses a moment as if to see which half of the world beckoned it, and goes north towards the faubourg.

The engineer trails after it, enters the street’s stream, stands there clumsily, immediately in everybody’s way. He cannot see the animal any more but does not need to. He knows what he will do now, though for a man who has prided himself on possessing a trained and shadowless mind it feels uncomfortably like a descent into ritual magic. He will walk up the rue Saint-Denis. He will circle round to the church of Saint-Eustache. He will follow, as best he is able, the route he took the night he went painting with Armand and his fellow waifs, the night he found himself alone in the mist with Héloïse. He will follow the route and so discover her again and deliver his message — whatever the message is. He has not yet dressed it in words but surely, once she is standing in front of him, it will pour out of his mouth like the Holy Ghost.

He sets off through a cloud of seamstresses, noisy, red-cheeked girls heading towards the river after twelve hours on their benches squinting at needles. On the rue Saint-Denis, it is the fat hour when work is briefly suspended and there is a chance to look up and wring a little pleasure from a scrap of winter’s evening. Djeco’s wine shop is already full. A pair of porters lounge against the wall outside like Spanish gallants in the Age of Gold. Foundry men, flower-girls, shoe-blacks, stick-sellers, beggars, fiddlers, writers-for-hire — if any among them notice the engineer, the wounded white intensity of his face, and are, for a stride or two, amused or unsettled, they are soon swept past to new distractions. He, certainly, is mostly oblivious to them, would be entirely so were it not for the occasional shoulder-check from some man or woman hurrying in the counterflow. He is looking ahead, as far ahead as he can, looking and trying not to give in to the growing suspicion that all this — what he is doing here — is no more than one of those effects, unpredictable and of long duration, Dr Guillotin warned him of. And then, having walked no more than three hundred metres from the fountain, a movement of red — purple almost in this light — stops him dead, then starts him again at a quicker pace.

Unsettling to have found her so easily! To not have the time to walk off the last of his giddiness, to gather himself. Unsettling to think that magic might work. .

She is too far ahead to call to, and moving in the same northward direction as himself. For a whole minute he loses sight of her, his view obscured by a pair of ambling packhorses; then he spies her again, standing by the window of a shop, her face close to the glass. He knows the place, has passed it a score of times. They sell those things, those — love of Christ, he has one on his own head! — but the ones for women, for women and girls. Ribbons and so on, scoops, coloured feathers. .

‘Héloïse!’

He has called too soon; his voice does not quite carry, though the woman behind him, one of those prematurely aged market crones with a figure like a herring barrel, has heard him clearly enough and mimics him surprisingly well, the plaintive, husky tone: ‘Oh HELO-ISE!’

He looks round at her, more confused than angry. Who is she? Does he know her?

‘Eh, Queenie!’ shouts another woman, sister-creature of the first. ‘Can’t you see the gentleman wants you?’

But still she has not heard them, still she stares in at the shop window, oblivious of the scene moving up the street towards her.

‘She don’t want to make her basket-weaver jealous,’ says a third. ‘Or the old bookseller. Or your old man!’

‘My old man so much as looked at her, I’d serve him his balls for dinner.’

Now she turns, watches them, holds her ground as they approach. Whatever she is feeling — anger, fear, astonishment — she is careful to keep all sign of it out of her face. The engineer stops a metre and a half, perhaps two metres from her.

‘He’s lost his tongue,’ says the first woman.

‘It’s not his tongue he’ll want,’ says the second, laughing at her own wit.

‘It’s him,’ says a man’s voice, a shaggy head leaning from the window of an unlit room in the house next to the shop. ‘The one digging up les Innocents.’

‘You sure?’

‘ ’Course I’m bloody sure. Look at him.’

‘Expect he wants a bit of what his workers are getting,’ says another voice, female, younger than the others.

‘I was looking for you,’ says Jean-Baptiste to Héloïse. ‘I wished. . to speak with you.’ At the mention of speaking, the audience bursts into delighted laughter.

‘You got to show her the colour of your money, dear. Bless him. He must be new to it all.’

‘And what about the Monnard girl?’ asks the younger voice. ‘Gone off her, have you?’

Héloïse, who has not once allowed her gaze to be drawn towards anyone other than the engineer, grants him now four or five seconds in which to make everything right. He breathes; he frowns; he opens his mouth. ‘Hats,’ he says. ‘How could I have forgotten hats?’

She makes the slightest of nods; then, very calmly, as if none of it had anything to do with her, as if it was just some nonsense she had happened upon and which now she had lost all interest in, she turns away and continues her progress up the street.

The man in the window leans further out. ‘Hats!’ he screams. ‘Did you hear him? He said, “Hats”! Hats!’

It is only a step or two to the window from where Jean-Baptiste is standing. He goes to it, goes quickly before the man has any chance to react. He takes a fistful of the man’s hair, pulls his head down hard against the narrow sill. In his other hand he has the key to the cemetery. He presses the tip against the man’s throat, a soft place just below the jaw.

‘Who do I look like to you?’ he asks, his voice quiet, almost conversational. ‘Who do I look like to you?’

In the time to come — when there will be cause to speak of such things — the man will say he saw bloody murder in those grey eyes, will insist on it and be listened to. Whatever he sees, it is enough to silence him. Even the women are discomfited. The show is over. They melt away, each to her own small circumstance. Within a minute the engineer stands quite by himself.

2

At his next meeting with Monsieur Lafosse — three days after the events on the rue Saint-Denis — Jean-Baptiste offers his resignation. He is quite clear about it. He no longer wishes to be the director of works at the cemetery of les Innocents. He wants nothing to do with les Innocents. He wishes to go somewhere else, do something different. He is, after all, an engineer: he knows that much. He should attempt to employ himself more appropriately.

Lafosse, who never sits during these encounters in the Monnards’ drawing room, waits for the younger man to finish what he has to say, then tells him that resigning is a recourse open to people of some importance in the world and that he, the engineer, is not such a person. He, the engineer, is in fact a type of servant and not even a particularly senior type of servant. A servant who was taken on at the minister’s pleasure. A servant who will be released when the minister has no further use for him. Those are the terms. To abuse them would be to destroy utterly any hope of future advancement. It is, perhaps, more pathetic than amusing that the engineer had not understood all this.

‘So I must remain here? I have no choice but to remain?’

‘Bravo, monsieur. You have grasped the essential fact. And now, if you would permit me to continue with what I have taken the trouble to come here and discuss with you?’

What Lafosse has come to discuss — though between them there is never anything that might be mistaken for a discussion — is the news that the quarry at the Porte d’Enfer is finally ready for its first consignment from the cemetery. His Grace the Bishop has scattered holy water in the vaults and passages where the bones will be stored. The carts will travel at night, accompanied by priests from the seminary at Saint-Louis. Throughout the journey the priests will pray aloud in strong voices. There will be incense, pitch torches, black velvet. Everything is to reflect the concern, the Catholic decency of the minister. .

‘And may I inform the minister,’ says Lafosse, ‘that your health is now quite recovered? That there will be no repetition of such adventures?’

He makes no comment on the engineer’s new black coat, a coat somehow a shade or two blacker than his own.

3

Dinner with the Monnards. A cabbage stuffed with capers. Veal kidneys cooked in wine. Pumpkin tart.

Monsieur and Madame eat in a state of exquisite discomfort. The engineer, for whom all food has now become simply a matter of volume, mass, elasticity, surface texture, degrees of aridity, just eats. Marie is blooming.

4

The night of 9 March, just after eleven by the engineer’s watch, a convoy of carts — solid, capacious vehicles built to haul stone — is ready to leave for the Pont Neuf and the quarry. It took more than three hours to load them, though in the cemetery the bone walls look much as they did before. As for the crypts and the attics of bones above the galleries, these they have not even touched.

The horses wait patiently in their traces. Now and then one scrapes a hoof over the cobbles. The priests are pale, rehearsed, young, competitively pious. They grip their flambeaux, glance at their neighbours, glance at the carts with their velvet-draped loads.

‘Let us hope these fellows have good boots,’ says Armand. ‘By the time this is over they will have walked to the moon and back.’

Twenty, thirty onlookers have gathered on the far side of the rue de la Ferronnerie. There has not been much, until now, for people to look at. The smoke of the fires, the weekly appearance of the miners, like sailors on furlough in a foreign port, eyes full of uneasy knowledge. But now there is this, a procession with carts and fire, and priests in their long, brass-buttoned coats. The first undeniable evidence of the end of les Innocents! The first removal. There is — there has been — no protest, no lament. Whatever loyalty people still feel for this patch of foul ground, no one, with the exception of Ziguette Monnard, has bothered to raise a hand to save it.

At the last moment, when everything is ready and the performance is about to commence, Père Colbert appears. He blunders through the cemetery door, shoves his bulk between Armand and Jean-Baptiste, glares at them from behind his tinted glasses, glares at the young priests. From the hands of one of them he snatches a torch, then stamps to the front of the procession and plants himself at its head.

The engineer gives the signal to the carter. The carter whistles to the horses. There is a jangling of tack, the crushing sound of iron rims turning on stone and, from the backs of the carts, a muffled tapping and grating as the bones settle beneath their covers.

The priests begin to chant a psalm — Miserere Mei, Deus — but the rhythm of their step, of their singing is confused by the tread of Colbert’s boots marching to a rhythm of their own. He leads them towards the river, red face thrust grimly forwards as though on his way to harrow Hell.

5

The pit by the cemetery wall is emptied, filled. Two more are opened. The engineer is refining his methods. He pushes the men harder, adds time to the working day as night slowly retreats before the season. A second miner absconds, returns three days later, silent and hungry. As for the others, who knows? To look at, they seem reconciled to the work, the character of the work, hardened to it. He would like very much to know what they speak of when they are alone. He admires them, their courage, that air of independence they have. Do they not seem less owned than he does? Do they not seem more free? There is one in particular who catches his eye, his imagination. The miner with the clipped finger, the violet eyes, who comes and goes like an apparition. The others, it seems, discreetly defer to him, move about him in some shifting constellation of respect. Lecoeur — a sure source of information on the rest — has little to say about him, only that he attached himself to the party shortly before they left Valenciennes, a replacement for a miner who declared himself unfit to travel. Name of Hoornweder. Probably Hoornweder. Hoornweder or Tant, or perhaps Moemus. They often simply invent names for themselves. Does the engineer have any cause to be dissatisfied with him? No, no, says Jean-Baptiste. There is no cause. It was nothing but his own curiosity.

By the middle of the month they are sending five processions a week to the Porte d’Enfer and for a while these processions — the droning priests, the tapers, the carts with their mournful cargo — are added to the list of the city’s entertainments. The Mercure de France prints a little guide giving the times of the processions and where they may be seen to best advantage (crossing the river is highly recommended). Young couples, particularly those from the idle classes, allow themselves to be roused by the sight. Moralists, grimly amused, look on with folded arms. Foreign visitors write letters home, strain for metaphor, to see all France in this winding caravan of bones. Then the city offers a collective shrug. It looks around for other ways to amuse itself. The cafés. Politics. Another riot, perhaps.

6

Armand invites himself to the Monnards’ house to play Ziguette’s pianoforte. He employs, at the Monnards’ expense, a man immaculately blind with tools like a tooth-puller, who tut-tuts and grimaces and climbs half inside the instrument, and at last renders it tuneful.

When Armand sits to play, he seems to throw sounds into the keys from the ends of his fingers. At the first big crash of chords, Ragoût cowers under the settle, then comes out and digs his claws frenziedly into the weave of the rug.

‘You are killing my organ,’ shouts Armand over the sound of himself, ‘but you have given me this and so I forgive you.’

‘I have not given it to you,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Ownership,’ says Armand, ‘will soon be a much more flexible concept.’

Jean-Baptiste suffers with headaches. He will suffer with them for the rest of his life. During the worst of them, the world is covered with a livid purple membrane, as if he looked out of the crack in his own head. He has to sit, perfectly still. The pain builds until it is released through copious vomiting. Other attacks are less severe and can be controlled — it was Guillotin’s suggestion — by drinking three or four cups of strong coffee.

Of the lost words some, like pigeons back to their loft, return to him. He writes them down, pen and black ink in the back of his journal:

Razor

Hoop

Ruler

Box-crib

Hat

. .

He still cannot read through a page of Buffon, cannot remember when or why he bought it. He wonders how much of a man’s life is the story he tells himself about himself. He wonders how much of his story he has lost. Wonders if it matters.

In the credit column, he is no longer troubled by dreams. He sleeps soundly. The bottle of medicine, the glutinous lachryma papaveris, is on the mantelpiece in his room, but he has not touched it since the attack, not even on those nights he lies down thinking of the hundred things he might have said to her, the Austrian, that dusk on the rue Saint-Denis.

At the bottom of the tenth pit, the remains of some thirty or forty children. There really isn’t time to arrive at a more exact figure. Guillotin and Thouret age the children at between four and ten years of age at the time of their demise. Manetti, consulted, nods. An epidemic in the orphanage at Plessy — 1740? Perhaps 1741. He couldn’t swear. In the pit the children have been laid head to toe, much as they might have slept together in the orphanage. The men are affected; they puff on their pipes, finger their charms. The doctors collect some of the skulls, pile them like cabbages or turnips into one of Jeanne’s wicker baskets and take them to the workshop.

The last days of March, there is snowfall. It sticks like melted wax to the black walls of the church, lies crisp and glittering over the piled bones. Then it freezes. Digging is more like scraping. Their tools ring on the earth. To open the eleventh pit, they have to keep a fire burning above it all night. It is winter’s last throw.

Through all the next week the ground thaws, turns to mud, molasses. When a coffin is pulled out, a skull, the sound is amphibious, oddly sexual. Coats are unbuttoned, hats pushed back. Even at les Innocents — and even to one whose sense of smell is as withered as the engineer’s — the air is altered and has, at unpredictable intervals, an unnerving purity to it that makes them all, men and women, miners and their masters, imagine themselves somewhere else, setting out perhaps on a long walk into the country, a stroll to some river fringed with willows.

Jeanne one morning, just after the engineer has arrived at the cemetery, summons him, her face lit with excitement. She leads him to the northwest corner of the cemetery, close to where they emptied the first of the common pits.

‘You see?’ she says, pointing to a patch of little yellow flowers, the leaves shaped like mottled green spades, and close by, a clump of taller plants with crimson flowers.

‘The seeds were buried,’ she says. ‘Your digging has brought them to life again.’

He stares at them, the yellow, the crimson flowers. He says nothing. He is utterly disconcerted.

7

He does not see her, does not hear her until she is standing beside him. It is dusk and he is about to enter the Monnards’ house. A large wagon — M. Hulot et Fils, Déménageurs à la Noblesse — is rattling down the street towards the rue Saint-Honoré. Startled, he stares at her in a way he imagines must be quite comical.

‘You wanted to speak with me?’ she says.

‘That was weeks ago,’ he says.

‘So you no longer wish to speak with me?’

‘I do. Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘Very well.’ She waits, looks directly into his eyes. She is not wearing the red cloak today but has a shawl or scarf of some light stuff covering her hair. Her face is stiff, her lips pressed hard together.

‘I have thought of you,’ he says, opening his mouth and letting the words come as they will. It is too late for anything circumspect, for the careful measuring of effects. ‘I have thought of you. Often.’

She nods. The gesture does not help him.

‘We could go inside,’ he says. ‘Talk inside.’

‘In the Monnards’ house?’

‘They would not object. They are in no position to object to my wishes.’

‘On account of the daughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of what she did?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was your friend?’

‘Not as you mean it.’

‘And how do I mean it?’

‘You know how you mean it.’

‘It would not have mattered.’

‘No?’

‘Why should it have mattered?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t know.’

They pause, as though the mind of each was briefly dazzled by the sheer strangeness of such a conversation, of it happening at all. It is Héloïse who recovers first. ‘And that is what you wished to say? That you have thought of me?’

‘It is not everything.’

‘And the rest?’

‘I wondered if you might. . come here.’

‘Visit you?’

‘If you might stay here. Might care to.’

‘In the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let us be clear,’ she says.

‘I thought I was,’ he says.

‘You wish to take me as your mistress?’

‘I want you to stay with me.’

‘What is this stay? You mean to live with you?’

‘Yes.’

Now, he thinks, now she will throw back her head and laugh. She will accuse him, in a voice full of scorn, of not knowing what he is saying. And it is true. He does not. Was this his message? Live with me? Or has he simply said the most extravagant thing he can think of? He readies himself to say some harsh, dismissive thing to her, something to cover his humiliation, but when she speaks again, her voice is quiet, serious. Not unfriendly.

‘You have lived with a woman before?’ she asks.

‘No,’ he says. Then, ‘Is your question practical? Are you afraid I will not know how to behave?’

‘We do not know each other,’ she says.

‘We do not know each other well,’ he says.

‘On better acquaintance, you might find me disagreeable. I might find you so.’

‘You do not wish to live with me?’

‘I have not said that. Only I do not believe you have thought of. . all that you need to. Not properly.’

‘You are wrong,’ he says.

‘Or you are wrong.’

‘I am not wrong.’

‘Ha! You do not care to be contradicted.’

She makes a shape with her mouth, forms her lips as she might in the market when dealing with some canny, persistent stall-holder. Then she looks down and slowly grinds the toe of one of her shoes on the cobbles.

‘You like me,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Why?’

‘You must know,’ she says.

‘Of course,’ he says, though in fact it has never occurred to him that he needed a reason for liking her. ‘You looked at me,’ he says.

‘I noticed you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is true,’ she says. ‘I did notice you.’

‘You were buying cheese,’ he says.

She nods. ‘You looked lost.’

‘You also.’

‘Lost?’

‘Out of place.’

‘Were I to agree to this,’ she says, after another of those pauses in which she seemed carefully to weigh each of his words, ‘I must be free to come and go as I choose. I am too old to take orders from you or anyone else.’

‘You would be free.’

‘And if you ever struck me. .’

‘I would not.’

‘I heard you held a knife to a man’s throat. That night on Saint-Denis.’

‘It was a key, not a knife.’

‘A key?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because he insulted me?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will not be the last.’

‘Then I will fight them.’

‘With a key?’

‘You could come soon,’ he says. ‘Do you have many things?’

‘Some clothes,’ she says. ‘Some books.’

‘Books?’

‘You imagined I could not read?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I did not think that.’

‘I would like more books. The good editions. Not those for fifteen sous that come apart in your hands when you open them.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not those.’

‘And the theatre,’ she says. ‘It is a long while since I have been there.’

‘The theatre,’ he says. ‘I would like that too.’

For a while they are quiet together, peaceable. Even the street has entered one of its periods of occasional hush, barely a soul abroad. It is likely, thinks Jean-Baptiste, that from one of these windows they are being watched by someone who knows who they both are. He could not care less.

‘Is that you?’ she asks, turning to look diagonally across the street to where, on the shutters of the haberdasher’s, black paint proclaims another of Monsieur Bêche’s threats to the mighty. This one concerns the fate awaiting the governor of the Bastille. It went up a week ago and has still not been painted out.

‘You know my name,’ he says.

‘I know them both,’ she says, smiling at him openly for the first time.

8

She will not give him any assurance. She will consider the matter. It is a large matter. She will consider it and send word to him. He, she suggests, would do well in the meantime to consider it too. To wonder if in fact he meant to say what he said. Truly meant to.

For nearly a week he is left in a state of exquisite uncertainty. By the fifth day — the fifth night — he is suddenly sure it will not happen. That is his instinct, his flash of insight. It will not, cannot happen. Most probably she has each week half-a-dozen men asking her to live with them, men who confuse their lust with something more tender, something that has no part to play in the trade she practises. She is hard, she must be: reason insists on such a conclusion. She is hard and hollowed out. Or else she is kind, endlessly kind, and will not come to him for his own good. A man like him, an educated man, a professional man who must naturally seek to rise in the world — for such to ally himself to a woman like her would be to condemn himself to public ridicule, to ignominy. An aristocrat like the Comte de S— might do it, or else someone of small importance, someone who has risen as far as he ever will and can lose very little with the loss of his name. But for him — who is neither grand nor little — it is an impossibility. And she has seen that, has, at the expense of her own comfort, chosen to protect him from his folly.

He longs to speak to someone. He has never felt such a stranger to himself, as if his life was a room in which every familiar object had been replaced with something that merely imitated it. Speak to Armand? But Armand will be too vehement, too furiously for it or against it, too amused. Guillotin? Guillotin would listen, would, with the experience of his years, take a large view of the matter. A medical view? It is not unlikely. It may be the correct view. He is unwell! Unwell and not himself, not as he should be.

He discovers the doctor in the middle of a warm morning seated on a stool in the doctors’ workshop, polishing one of the orphans’ skulls. At the sight of it, that poor, brightening object on the doctor’s palm, all thought of confession instantly departs. Instead, they talk about the bones of the head. Frontal, parietal, occipital. How in infants and young children the various bones are not yet fused and how this is necessary at their birth when the skull is subject to immense pressure on its passage through the birth canal.

‘They are perfectly done,’ says the doctor, passing the skull to Jean-Baptiste. ‘They do not split like melons. They do not shatter like balls of glass.’

He stands to examine Jean-Baptiste’s wound, carefully parts the newly grown hair, pronounces himself quite satisfied with the appearance of the scar.

‘You still suffer no symptoms,’ he asks, ‘other than the headaches?’

‘I am. .’ begins Jean-Baptiste, then shrugs. ‘I am as you see. And I should be pleased if we settled at last on some fee. For what you did. Your kindness in waiting on me. I have never properly thanked you for it.’

The doctor waves the suggestion away. ‘Unless, my dear engineer, you have changed your mind about leaving me that famous head of yours?’

He is coming back from the cemetery in the late twilight when a boy, leaning his shadow against the shadow of the cemetery wall, steps out and stands in his path. It is the mute boy, the one who helped carry his trunk the night he moved to the Monnards’ house. He has his hand out and for a moment Jean-Baptiste thinks he is asking for something, that he has learnt to beg, but he is offering something, a square of folded paper. There is — by stepping into the middle of the street — just enough light to read the note the paper contains. It is very short. ‘I will come if you still wish it.’

He does not have anything to write with. To the boy, he says, ‘Can you sign? Can you make yourself understood with signs?’

The boy nods.

‘Then go back to the woman who gave you this. Tell her she should come tomorrow. At three in the afternoon. Now show me how you will do it.’

The boy shows him. To Jean-Baptiste it looks perfectly clear. He gives the boy a coin. ‘Go,’ he says. ‘Find her tonight.’

9

For the time it takes to walk back to the house and up the stairs to his room, he imagines himself the happiest man in Paris. He does not light a candle — he sits on the bed in the cool almost-dark as though wrapped in the purple heart of a flower. How simple it all is! And what idiots we are for making such a trial of our lives! As if we wished to be unhappy, or feared that the fulfilment of our desires would explode us! Briefly — the old reflex — he wants to examine what he feels, to name its parts, to know what kind of machine it is, this new joy; then he lies back on the bed, laughing softly, and like that comes close to sleep before sitting suddenly bolt upright, everything uncertain again. What exactly did she mean by her message? Was there some ambiguity? Could he have misread it, he for whom words have become such unreliable servants. And then to have sent a mute boy with his reply when, with a little sobriety, a little patience, he could have brought the boy into the house and written something plain and explicit!

He stands, paces the little room, stops by the door, looks into the room — where now all its objects offer only the faintest outlines of themselves — and realises that if she does come tomorrow (and why three o’clock?), they cannot possibly be in here, stay in here, live even a single night together in here.

He steals down the stairs, past the door of the dining room, gets a candle lit at the hall table, returns — two steps at a time — to the top of the house. He stands outside Ziguette’s room, catches himself listening at the door, rebukes himself in a whisper, opens the door and goes in.

He has not been in here since the night he visited her to see what a melting girl looked like, and found both girl and room in an advanced state of disarray. It is orderly enough now, its atmosphere a little damp from being left to stagnate, but that could quickly be put right. He lifts his candle, takes in the painted wardrobe, the fireplace, the dressing table with its oval mirror (in which his candle flame now sparkles). A bed big enough for two. Does the room still smell of her? He doesn’t know; he cannot tell. He crosses to the unshuttered window, gets it open, feels the evening air flow past his fingers. His fit of doubting has passed, but so too the dizziness, those lovely blind minutes of joy. He is hungry. Very hungry. He goes downstairs to join the Monnards at supper. They have almost finished the soup but the tureen is still on the table. It is the moment when he should tell them, Monsieur and Madame, what he intends, who, tomorrow — if a mute boy’s signing is understood — will be coming to live in their house. Spooning soup into his mouth, he tries to discover some elegant, decisive way of saying it all, but before he can begin, he starts to laugh. The soup, in a thin, brown stream, comes back past his lips into his bowl. He wipes his lips, clears his throat. Apologises.

First light. He dresses in the black suit, goes looking for Marie, finds her in the kitchen. She is bent double by the kitchen table, dangling a piece of cooked meat from her mouth for the cat to reach up and take.

‘It’s a game,’ she says.

He nods, then asks her if she will remove all of Ziguette’s clothes, all the china shepherdesses, amateur watercolours, seashells, painted thimbles, painted fans, all of it, out of her room and into his own, where, for now, it may be conveniently stored.

‘Why?’ she asks.

‘I wish to use it.’

‘Her room?’

‘Yes.’

‘For you?’

‘For me. Yes. For me and. . for another. A woman.’

‘A woman?’

‘She will stay with me.’

‘A woman?’

‘Yes. A woman. Is it so remarkable?’

‘She is your wife?’

‘It is. . an arrangement. Between us. Are the men and women who live together in the faubourg Saint-Antoine always married?’

‘No.’

‘Then we shall be like them.’

‘You will want me to wait on you,’ she says. ‘And her.’

‘I will give you something extra for it. Half again what Monsieur Monnard gives you.’

‘When is she coming?’

‘Today, I think. Perhaps this afternoon.’

‘So you will pay me today?’

‘I will give you something when the room is made ready. You will have time to spare from your. . other duties?’

She nods, grins at him slyly, excitedly. All through their conversation the cat has kept its eyes fixed on the maid’s mouth.

At two o’clock, having told a series of lies to Lecoeur about having to draw funds at the goldsmith’s on the rue Saint-Honoré, Jean-Baptiste returns to the house. When he opens the door to Ziguette’s room, he looks with relief at the open and empty wardrobe, the dressing table where not a pin remains, the bare walls. Excellent Marie! He will see she has something handsome for this, enough for a new dress, a good one, something to show herself off in when she visits her home, if she has a home, somewhere one might recognise as a home.

Did she change the linen? He pulls back the bedcover, examines the bolster for blond hairs, then, on impulse, looks under the bed, finds there some small, fine thing, which he pulls out and turns in his hands. Purple satin. A thing of purple satin laced with a purple ribbon. A type of shoe, a soft sort of. . What does it matter what it’s called? There’s no time for that now. He folds it, puts it in a pocket, perches on a corner of the bed, then immediately gets up and goes to the window, leans out, scowls at the street, mutters to himself some weak witticism about women and punctuality, goes to the bed again, goes to the mirror, bares and examines his teeth, takes out his watch, sees there is another fifteen minutes before the hour, sits on the bed again, looks at the dirt on his shoes, cemetery dirt, the humus perhaps of dead men and dead women, then finds himself thinking of Guillotin’s Charlotte, the preserved girl with her long eyelashes sprouting from grey and sunken lids, lids like old coins. Why must he think of her now? Can he not be free of them, even for an hour or two? Other than for his father he used never to think of them at all. .

And who the devil is that old face looking at him from the window across the street? So you like to spy, eh? Very well. He stands and stares back, arms folded across his chest, staring, sneering, and is starting to suspect that it is not a face at all but something hanging, perhaps even the soft light of a small mirror, when he hears the sprightly trotting of horses, the rhythm of sprung wheels. Cabs have their own music and this is unmistakably a cab. He jumps to the window, looks down, sees it draw up outside the house, sees an old cabman slither off his box and come round to open the cab door. Sees, a moment later, the top of her head. The crown.

‘So this is it,’ he says, his voice in the room’s new hollowness like an actor’s, as false, as strange as an actor’s. He runs down the stairs, headlong, shoes clattering on the wood. Madame Monnard comes out of the drawing room, stands on the landing wringing her hands.

‘Is the house on fire?’ she cries as the engineer runs past her. ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’

10

Their first hours together are so painfully awkward that each is forced to the conclusion that a serious mistake has been made. He talks too much, then for almost half an hour says nothing at all. She sits on a chair by the dressing table, the light coming over her shoulders. He is tormented by the thought that she is suddenly, inexplicably, not as pretty as, on all their encounters in the street, she has seemed to be. She is wearing a white gown embroidered with red and pink flowers. Does it suit her? And high on her breastbone there is a mark, a little blemish, that she has tried to cover with powder. She is — in a way that suggests she pities him — talking about something or other. Polite enquiries about his work. His work! He is little better than a body-snatcher. And should he ask her about her work?

The light in the room fades to the colour of laundry water. He is suddenly very angry. He would like to make some sour, idiotic remark about women, about courtesans, prostitutes. Something unforgivable. Instead he says, ‘We should eat.’

‘Here?’

‘Where else?’

‘You eat with the Monnards?’

‘Of course.’

‘Perhaps tonight we might eat in the room?’

‘You must meet them sometime. It might as well be now.’

Downstairs in the drawing room, Madame Monnard is sitting alone beside the fire. In the weeks since Ziguette’s departure much of the life has gone out of her. There are little tearful episodes, snufflings into a balled handkerchief, sighs, damp looks into the distance, the occasional involuntary mewing sound. She receives no visible comfort from her husband, perhaps from no one at all. At times she gives the impression of being completely unaware of the world turning round her, but she is satisfyingly astonished to see Héloïse Godard walk into the room.

Marie could have warned her, of course; Marie chose not to. The visitor who knocked at the door in the afternoon was, as far as she knew, simply an acquaintance of Monsieur Baratte’s, someone from the cemetery, no doubt. Perhaps that rather frightening person, Monsieur Lafosse. And now this. This! The sudden, almost dreamlike appearance of a woman whose very name (supposing anybody knew it, her real name) cannot be uttered in polite company.

‘Madame Monnard, Mademoiselle Godard. Mademoiselle Godard will be staying in the house now,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘I hope, madame,’ says Héloïse, ‘that will not trouble you too greatly?’

‘I will settle with your husband,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘for the extra rent.’

Madame Monnard nods. She looks from one to the other, twists the ear of a little lavender-stuffed cushion on her lap.

‘What a nice room this is,’ says Héloïse. ‘Elegant and homely. Usually one finds it is one or the other.’

‘Oh?’ whispers Madame.

‘I am no expert,’ says Héloïse, spilling onto the older woman the light of a smile so generous, so of the heart, Jean-Baptiste has to look away for fear he will yelp with jealousy. He picks the decanter off the table, pours two glasses, gives one to Héloïse, who passes it to Madame Monnard, who takes it from her as if she had never held a glass before, never seen red wine.

‘You embroider, madame?’ asks Héloïse pointing to a sampler of indifferent workmanship hung on the wall beside the fireplace.

’embroider?’

‘The stitching, madame. I made one such as this as a girl, but it was not near as neat.’

‘My daughter did it. My daughter, Ziguette.’ It is the first time since the attack she has dared to mention her daughter’s name in the engineer’s hearing.

‘I can see she was well instructed,’ says Héloïse.

Madame smiles. Pure gratitude, pure relief. And something heroic gathers in her. Belly to heart to mouth. ‘Do you think, mademoiselle,’ she says, gripping the cushion more tightly, ‘do you think the air was a little warmer today? Warmer than yesterday?’

Héloïse nods. ‘I think, madame, perhaps it was.’

A half-hour later — a half-hour that flows past on a little stream of polite feminine chatter — they are joined in the room by Monsieur Monnard, who comes in, as he always does, smelling of some tart, acidic compound employed in the cutlery trade. It is his wife who, almost eagerly, introduces Héloïse — ‘A friend of Monsieur Baratte’s’ — but it is left to Jean-Baptiste to inform him that Mademoiselle Godard will be staying in the house. Living in it. With him.

‘Living, monsieur?’

‘Yes.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the house?’

‘Yes.’

It is the moment Monsieur Monnard might stage his revolt. The moment he might refuse point-blank and at the top of his lungs to have either of them in his house a minute longer, might, conceivably, unhinge himself and fly at the engineer, wrestle with him. . Then the moment is past, swallowed perhaps by the recollection of his daughter lying naked and lamb-innocent in her bed, a length of gored brass by her feet. He brushes something from his sleeve, looks to the window where the fires of les Innocents burn jaggedly in the spring night. ‘I see,’ he says. ‘Indeed.’

They sit at table. Marie, coming in with the tray, serves Héloïse first, already looks to have some crush on her. They start with a radish soup. For the main course, along with some boiled greens and boiled onions, there are tubular sections of a grey meat in a sauce of the same colour.

‘Is this eel, madame?’ asks Héloïse, and when Madame Monnard confirms that it is, Héloïse manages to say half-a-dozen clever, pertinent things about eels. ‘And they are mysterious, madame. I am told no one knows where they raise their young.’

‘When I was a child,’ says Madame, ‘I liked to look at them in their buckets at the market. I used to wonder what would happen if I put my hand in the water. Whether they would eat it.’

‘Damn them,’ growls Monsieur Monnard.

‘Monsieur?’ asks Héloïse.

‘I do not think I said anything, mademoiselle.’

‘My husband,’ begins Madame Monnard, ‘has a large establishment on the rue Trois Mores. Blades from plain to fancy. Père Poupart of Saint-Eustache cuts his meat with one of my husband’s knives.’

‘I have seen it, madame. The establishment. Everyone speaks of its excellence.’

‘You know Père Poupart?’ asks Madame, who seems to have performed in her head the trick of entirely forgetting who she is talking to.

‘We have passed in the street, madame.’

‘He has a lovely speaking voice. My daughter, I think, delighted in it.’

‘One needs a strong voice in so large a church.’

‘Oh, one does, mademoiselle. Yes, I think that is very true.’

‘Rogue!’ shouts Monsieur Monnard, springing from his seat. Ragoût, infected by the room’s atmosphere of feebly suppressed anarchy, has leapt onto the table and seized a gob of Monsieur Monnard’s eel. He escapes with it beneath the pianoforte. Monsieur Monnard, released at last to express himself, hurls his plate at the cat, but too wildly. The plate hits the side of the instrument and disintegrates in a rain of porcelain and grey sauce. In the silence that follows, Jean-Baptiste gets to his feet. A moment later, Héloïse stands too.

‘You must be fatigued after your journey, mademoiselle,’ says Madame Monnard, airily.

‘You are kind to think of it,’ says Héloïse, though she has travelled no more than a length of a half-dozen streets. ‘Good night to you, monsieur,’ she says.

Monsieur Monnard nods, grunts, but does not — cannot perhaps — lift his gaze from the floor where Ragoût, having bolted his morsel of eel, is carefully cleaning sauce from the larger fragments of plate.

They go up to the room — their room, if that’s what it is. The evening, the room, are not particularly cold (a few weeks back, they could have watched their breath leave their mouths), but Jean-Baptiste kneels on the hearth rug and busies himself building a fire. When it takes, he stands back to watch it and, still looking at the fire, tells Héloïse that he must return to the cemetery.

‘Now?’

‘They will be loading the carts.’

‘Will you be long?’

‘As long as is necessary.’

‘And there is no one else who could do it?’

‘That is not the point.’

He leaves, quickly. She looks at the back of the door, hears his feet on the stairs. Shortly, she hears the noise of the street door. For several minutes she stays as she is, her face expressionless. Then she raises a hand, clears her eyes of two tears she does not wish to let fall and goes to the dressing table. She loosens and reties the Madras ribbon in her hair, pushes off her shoes, rubs the outside of her right foot where the shoe pinches, then starts to unhook herself, unlace herself, fiddle with eyelets and bows and pins until she is down to her under-petticoat, shift and stockings. She opens a tapestry bag — one of three large bags in which she has brought all her things — and takes out a quilted bed-gown and a pair of leather mules, a bottle of orange water, a cloth. She cleans her face with the orange water, wipes her throat, wipes under arms and between her breasts. The commode is in the corner of the room. It has a little screen of pleated cotton on a wooden frame. She sits and, when she is done, uses the orange water to clean around the creases of her thighs. She is due to come on in a few days, can feel it building in her, the slight heaviness, slight bloating. She has known men who were disgusted by a woman’s bleeding, others who — more troublingly — were attracted to it. The engineer, she suspects, will be among that mass of men who take care not to think of it at all.

She buttons the gown, stirs the fire with the poker, starts to examine the room. It is, very obviously, not the room he is used to occupying, for there are none of his things here. The wardrobe is empty (she will not, just yet, put up her dresses). There is no manly clutter. She would like to have had a look at that suit she once spied him in, that thing the colour of wild lettuce, but there is nothing, not even a shirt. So whose room was it, if not his? She could guess — guess correctly in all likelihood — but tomorrow she will get that odd little maid to tell her things. The maid will know everything.

At least the window looks over the street rather than the cemetery. And she had no clients on the rue de la Lingerie, no one she need be embarrassed to walk into. Not that she intends to be embarrassed by anything. She has left her old life — old by a day or two — but will not lower herself to the indignity of pretending. She has lived publicly, has been a public woman almost four years, has lived out in the full light of public regard that career her parents, by their actions if not their words, apprenticed her to at the inn on the Paris — Orléans road. But four years is long enough. The point is made. Grief and rage have made their passage; she has pulled them like a thorn-bush through her own entrails, and they have scoured her, have left a thousand little scars, but have not killed her. And now this. A new life. A new life with an awkward, grey-eyed stranger who, nonetheless, she seems to know rather well. A stranger who wants her — she has no serious doubt of that — and not just on the first Tuesday of the month like old Ysbeau. .

At the thought of the bookseller, she goes back to her tapestry bag and takes out two books, carries them to the dressing table, sits and draws the candle close. What will it be? Cazotte’s Le Diable Amoureux? Or Algarotti’s Newtonism for Ladies? Tonight, perhaps, she should stay with Algarotti and Newton. Then, when he comes back, she can calm him by asking him to explain things to her. (He will like that; they all like it.) She settles herself, finds her page, and is about to begin a chapter on optics when she hears, low on the door, the sound of scratching.

He does not go to the cemetery, never intended to. He goes in the opposite direction, towards the Palais Royal. He needs to walk, to think, to stop thinking. Is he getting one of his headaches? Surprisingly, he is not.

How bitterly she must regret her arrival! That supper! Grotesque! And worst of all, his own behaviour — the dullness, the rudeness of it. As if he resented her! She who he has longed for all winter! Why can nothing ever be simply wanted, simply desired, with no contradiction, no inexplicable ‘no’ in some unexamined fold of the heart? And now he has run away when he should be doing what any proper man would be doing in the company of a woman like Héloïse Godard. Armand would be on the second go by now. The windows would be spilling out of their frames. A nasty thought, of course, Armand with Héloïse. If he ever lays a finger on her. .

At the Palais, the night air shimmers with superfluous light. Flambeaux, chandeliers, strings of Chinese lanterns. If he could illuminate the cemetery like this they could dig all night. Another thirty men, one gang sleeping, one digging, then a change of shift at dawn and dusk. At Valenciennes, there were seams worked like that, men and women, pumps and horses, working round the clock. God knows he will need to think of something, some innovation if they are not still to be digging up the dead when the new century arrives.

He fights his way forward, his black coat brushing against green and reds, silvers and golds. Faces swim out of the crush. A man, heavily powdered, pokes out the tip of his tongue at the engineer. Two women, who may or may not be courtesans with apartments on the first floor, glance up at him from their game of teasing a monkey, the creature tethered by a length of silver chain to a spike. .

Outside the Café Correzza, a young man with yellow hair stands precariously on a chair making a speech. What is it? The usual stuff. The hearts of men, the requirements of Nature, the promise of philosophy, the destiny of mankind, indomitable justice, virtue. . And did he mention Bêche? Bêche the Avenger? Impossible to hear over the din the others are making, the gossip, the laughter, the broken marching of harlots and gentry, the half-dozen little bands playing in the courtyard.

He goes into l’Italien, gets a seat near the porcelain stove, orders brandy. He is, he fancies, served more quickly these days. It is the black coat? A black severity that makes him appear half priest, half functionary, the wielder of ambiguous powers? Or is it something Ziguette Monnard unearthed? A newfound willingness to press a key to a man’s throat? Violence is respected; he has learnt that much about the world. It may even be one of those virtues the young man on the chair was preaching about. Gentlemen with blood up to their shoe buckles, bowing and making to each other un beau geste. Virtuous violence. The virtuous necessity of it. Violence as a duty. It is, very likely, the coming thing.

When he reaches into his pocket to pay for the brandy, he pulls out Ziguette’s satin shoe-thing. The waiter treats him to a waiter’s almost invisible grin. Outside, he steps through a family of female mandolin players, abandons the satin thing on the windowsill of Salon No. 7 and regains the dark, the sudden hush of the streets behind the Bourse. A little brandy has sobered him up. He knows what he’s about now. When he reaches the buttresses of Saint-Eustache, he starts to run.

Coming in, he is momentarily disappointed to find her looking less unhappy than he had imagined she would. In fact, she does not really look unhappy at all. She smiles at him, calmly, holds out her book above the head of Ragoût, who has curled his bulk tidily on her lap. She points to a word halfway down the page.

‘I cannot see it,’ he says.

‘You are not looking at it,’ she says.

‘You cannot read it?’ he asks.

‘ “Refraction”,’ she says.

‘Oh,’ he says, laughing. ‘Yes. I know it. Refraction. To use a lens to change the angle of the light.’

He carries the cat onto the passage (set down, it shivers with disgust), then comes back into the room, takes off his boots, coat, waistcoat. They sit side by side on the bed. She wets two fingertips, puts out the candle. There is light enough from the fire. They lie down. They kiss. Their mouths at first feel cool to each other, then warm. She is, unsurprisingly, good at buttons. He struggles out of his breeches, presses his face into her breasts, clings to her. Gently, she disentangles herself, works her shift up until it is rucked about her hips. When he dares to look, he sees flame-light on the skin of her thighs. Under his shirt, he’s hard as a bottle, too hard. Almost as soon as she touches him, he convulses, lets out the sort of strangled half-shout he might have made the night Ziguette Monnard brought the ruler down on his head.

It is another week before, in an unexpected mid-afternoon encounter, neither of them much undressed, he finally enters her. Once he is inside her, he lowers his brow, lets their skulls press lightly against each other. With her thumb she traces the line of his scar, the ridge of nerveless skin. From that moment on, in his own heart, he considers her to be his wife.

11

At les Innocents, there is a sharp increase in the number of rats. Rats visible. Guillotin is of the opinion they are leaving. The men acquire cats. Each tent has at least one, though not even Lecoeur seems to know where they have got them from. From their Saturday-night women perhaps, their moppets. Sometimes the engineer thinks he sees Ragoût among them, patrolling in the dusk, but at a distance one cat can seem much like another. At night, they fight epic battles. A cat is killed, but so too many of the rats, their bodies, whole or sundered, found in the lengthening grass or left as trophies on the steps of the charnels.

A new pit — pit fourteen — is opened in the vicinity of the south charnel. In addition to this, the engineer decides to broach the first of the private crypts. He gathers a small team — Slabbart, Biloo, Block, Everbout — and walks them to the west charnel under the windows of the rue de la Lingerie. They will start with the Flaselle family, the tomb sealed in 1610. With chisel and mallet they break the mortar, loosen the top-stone, then drive in their long, wedge-tipped steel bar and haul down until the stone shifts. They lower a ladder; it only just reaches. The crypt, it seems, has aristocratic dimensions. Jan Biloo is the first man down. As he descends, his light begins to flicker. Somewhere near the bottom of the ladder, it goes out. They call; he does not answer. Jean-Baptiste and Jan Block go down to get him. They hold their breath like scallop divers. They find him with their groping hands, drag his dead weight up the ladder until Everbout and Slabbart can take hold of him. He comes to almost immediately, but he and the engineer and Jan Block are some minutes together crouched on the grass outside the charnel, spitting, sucking in air.

Later, in the sexton’s kitchen, Jean-Baptiste sketches designs for breathing equipment, masks with filters of treated lamb’s wool or powdered charcoal. Or something more complete, a closed hood with an air-pipe and some manner of clapper valve to allow exhaled air to be expelled. He tries to interest Lecoeur in his ideas, but Lecoeur’s mind is elsewhere.

‘Monsieur Lecoeur is exhausted,’ says Jeanne, perhaps more sharply than she intended. ‘Everyone is exhausted.’

He nods. She knows about Héloïse Godard, of course; the whole quarter knows, though only Armand will speak to him about it. He folds the sketch, pockets it.

Lecoeur smiles at them both, dreamily. ‘We Lecoeurs,’ he begins, ‘we Lecoeurs. .’ Then he shrugs and turns away and gazes out of the window again.

12

Each morning, in the liquid half-light of spring dawns, he wakes from blank sleep beside Héloïse. Some mornings he wakes to find her watching him, wakes into her smile. And some mornings he is the first and lies very still, studying the lovely imperfections of her face, the privacy and mystery of her shut eyes. Then, when she opens them, her gaze, its roots deep in sleep and dreams, often has some taint of sadness to it, though it is a sadness she denies if he ever asks her about it. With dry mouths they lie a while talking of intimate, unimportant things. With dry lips they kiss a little. And this is medicine to him, this gift of mornings, the doggish warmth under the covers, the birdsong on the neighbours’ roofs, the new heartbeat in the bolster. He hardly notices how much he has ceased to notice, how much of the world beyond this room he has ceased to properly attend to.

When Marie remembers to bring them anything, they breakfast together in the room. On the mornings she forgets, Héloïse stays in bed and he eats at the cemetery with Jeanne and Manetti and Lecoeur. As to how she spends her days when he is gone, it is a source of continual fascination to him. No detail is too trivial. It is not enough that she informs him Madame Monnard cheats at backgammon; he wants to know exactly how she does it. The dice? The counters? And when the two women spend an afternoon sitting by the window embroidering, he wants to be told what, and what patterns they stitched. Rosebuds? Zigzags? Peacock tails?

‘What do you talk about?’

‘You, of course.’

‘Me?’

‘No. Never you.’

‘Ziguette?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And Monsieur Monnard?’

‘Sometimes of him too. And the price of bread, the probability of rain, whether senna or buckthorn is best for a constipation.’

‘You have made her happy again.’

‘No, Jean. I have not. You know I have not.’

A month after Héloïse arrived at the house on the rue de la Lingerie, she sits up in the bed drinking a little dish of coffee from a bowl painted with roses, and says that she wishes to visit the theatre. Did he not promise her? He nods. He goes to see Armand. Armand will know about theatres.

‘The Odéon,’ says Armand, as they stand together in a green lozenge of sunlight beside the preaching cross. ‘They are performing a play by Beaumarchais. Beaumarchais is of the party.’

‘The party of the future?’

‘Of course. And I shall come with you. Lisa too. You will not know how to behave otherwise.’

‘I don’t object to your company.’

‘Mademoiselle Godard is not well enough acquainted with you. She has not studied you as I have.’

‘Tell me this, Armand. You think Héloïse belongs to the party of the future?’

‘Héloïse? She and Lisa will be among its queens.’

‘And my own membership?’

‘Ah, you will be informed, dear savage.’

‘Informed? By whom?’

‘By circumstances. By what you will and will not do. We shall all be found out in time.’

‘When you speak like this you remind me of the pastor. My mother’s pastor.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘Desolation alone is left in the city and the gate is broken into pieces. If a man runs from the rattle of the snake he will fall into the pit. If he climbs out of the pit he will be caught in the trap. .’

Four days later, Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse dress for an evening at the theatre. He has nothing brighter than black. She teases him. Where is that coat of his the colour of pea soup? Pistachio, he says, peeled pistachio. And back where it came from. Good, she says. Green was not your colour.

They cross the river in a cab. Armand and Lisa have their backs to the horses; Jean-Baptiste and Héloïse are facing. The two women, having met for the first time in the hall of the Monnards’ house, having observed each other carefully among the woody shadows of that place, have, apparently, decided to like each other, a great relief to Jean-Baptiste, who has developed a powerful faith in the rightness of Lisa Saget’s judgements.

The cab’s two windows are hard down. The evening sun is on the river. On the Pont Neuf, the crowd flows through itself, slowly. Each time the cab is forced to stop, strangers peer in for a moment. A girl in a straw hat climbs onto the cab step and reaches in with posies. Armand insists Jean-Baptiste purchase the two largest, the two prettiest. The cemetery is a thousand miles away, its pits, its walls of bone, like things imagined, some old trouble they are finally getting free of. And could they not keep going like this? A bare week and they would be in Provence letting the sun’s heat scour them. Or cross the Alps to Venice! The four of them in a gondolier sliding under the Rialto Bridge. .

The cab sways to a halt by the theatre steps. The two couples join the throng filtering between the white pillars. Jean-Baptiste has never been to the Odéon (it has only been completed four years). Nor has he been to the Comédie-Française or any other grand theatre. The last time he saw a play it was one of those rough affairs put on twice a year in Bellême by companies of travelling actors who arrive noisily (bellowing, blowing hunting horns) and leave quietly (with stolen chickens, scrumped apples, the honour of certain local girls).

This, well, it is more like Versailles, though of course less theatrical. They are shown to their box by a flunky in a tight lavender coat who, though graceless and offensively casual, will not leave without his tip. Their box is cramped and does not have a good view of the stage. The chamberpot at the back of the box has not been emptied. The candle wicks are untrimmed and one of the chairs looks as if, during a recent performance, it was briefly on fire. None of it matters; their mood is impregnable. The flunky is made happy with the size of his tip, then sent to fetch wine and. .

‘What do you have?’ asks Armand.

‘What do you wish for? Oranges? Roast chicken? Oysters?’

‘Yes,’ says Armand, ‘we’ll have those.’

The place is filling up. It starts to roar. People call across to each other, signal with their hats and fans. Some of the women shriek like peacocks. A scuffle breaks out by the spikes at the front of the stage. ‘Author’s friends,’ says Armand, knowledgeably. ‘Author’s enemies.’

The lavender coats move in. A man is carried out, arms and legs waving like a beetle on its back.

‘The minister is here,’ says Jean-Baptiste quietly. ‘Box opposite the stage.’

‘The one with a face like an axe?’ asks Armand.

‘That’s him,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘But do not stare. I do not wish to be sent for.’

‘You’ve as much right to be here as he does,’ says Héloïse.

‘Even so,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not want him in my head tonight.’

They sit back in their seats. Behind the curtain, the musicians are tuning their instruments. The engineer does not mention the other man in the minister’s box, the young man in the shimmering coat. The name of Louis Horatio Boyer-Duboisson would mean nothing to them.

First, there is a short, frantic mime, then a lengthy interval, then, finally, the play. The audience sits in the light of five hundred candles, charmed, restless, a little bored. The engineer, Armand, Héloïse and Lisa Saget suck oranges, chew on the bones of high-flavoured chicken, drop the bones under their seats. Jean-Baptiste finds the play elusive, sometimes baffling. Who exactly is Marceline? Why can Suzanne not marry Figaro? And who is hiding in that closet? Héloïse, her lips beside his ear, patiently explains. He nods. He watches the audience, watches them watching. Dead, stripped of their feathers and fans, their swords, canes, ribbons, jewels, stripped bare and piled like bacon, could he not fit them all into a single pit? He has the thought; feels the disturbance of it; lets it go.

Another chicken is delivered, and more wine, and almonds tasting like scented sawdust. The engineer is tipsy. He kneels to piss in the pot at the back of the box, pisses into another’s cold piss and returns to his chair to discover that Suzanne will, after all, marry Figaro.

‘So they will have what they wished for?’ he asks, though his question is lost in the noise of applause and renewed skirmishing. Cautiously, he leans forward to see how the minister has liked the play. The minister is standing. Next to him, Boyer-Duboisson is whispering in his ear. The minister laughs. Boyer-Duboisson steps away from him, also laughing. Below them, the theatre-goers are fighting their way through the doors like scummed water draining out of a sink. The minister, still laughing, rests a hand on his chest as if to settle himself, and glances over, casually, to the box where Jean-Baptiste is watching. Does he see the engineer? His engineer? Would he even remember his face? And still he cannot stop laughing. It is as if nothing short of death could bring such a flow of amusement to an end.

Impossible once they get outside to find a cab. They trail through the little streets, almost careless of where they are headed, find themselves (just as the women’s shoes are starting to pain them) on the Ile de la Cité, eat bowls of tripe from a night-stall beneath the walls of the Conciergerie, then hire a skiff and are rowed along the black scarf of the river to the steps under the Pont Neuf.

They stumble up the treacherous steps, and on the rue Saint-Honoré, with embraces and promises of doing it all again — soon! soon! — they finally part.

At the house, Jean-Baptiste lights a candle, and with Héloïse behind him, both of them yawning extravagantly, they start up the stairs to bed. As they pass the drawing room the door swings open. Marie comes out. ‘A girl called for you,’ she says.

‘A girl?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. ‘What girl?’

‘Well, it wasn’t Ziguette,’ says Marie. She lets out a squeak of laughter. In the candle-shadow her face looks like a mask she has put on in a hurry.

‘It might be best,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘not to let Monsieur Monnard know you’ve been at his wine. Though God knows how you managed to get drunk on it.’

‘You’re a fine one,’ she says. She turns to Héloïse. ‘Before you came, he used to talk to himself all night. Mutter, mutter, mutter. Drove poor Ziguette right out her brains.’ She sniffs.

Héloïse steps closer and takes one of the maid’s hands.

‘But who was the girl?’ she asks. ‘The one who called here?’

‘Oh, I sent her away,’ says Marie. ‘He’s got you now, hasn’t he.’

‘Yes,’ says Héloïse softly. ‘Yes.’

He had intended — had planned as much as they skimmed over the river — to spend the night, or a good part of it, diligently plundering his Héloïse, but within a few minutes of climbing into bed (he is lying on his side watching her disrobe and listening to her speculate about the identity of his mysterious caller) he has fallen asleep, and for the first time since the attack he starts to dream.

He is back in the theatre, walking on the frayed red carpeting in the corridor behind the boxes. He is looking for the minister’s box. He has a message for him, an important message, one that he must deliver in person, but the little polished doors to the boxes have no numbers on them and there is no one to ask. And then, in the sudden way of dreams, there is someone, a lanky figure lounging against the wall under a branch of candles. . Renard? Renard the foundling? There is no mistaking him. Scrawny neck wrapped in a collar of greasy fur, a tight little grin on his face. He bows to Jean-Baptiste, points to the door opposite him, turns and hurries away down the empty corridor. Quietly — no knocking or scratching — Jean-Baptiste opens the door and slips inside. The only light is a dull, red pulsing, as if from some conflagration in the stalls below, but it is enough to show him the minister and Boyer-Duboisson, their chairs side by side at the front of the box. Have they really not heard him? Are they so engrossed? From his pocket he takes out the message. A message with weight, a point, an edge. He steps behind the minister’s chair, puts a hand gently but firmly across the minister’s eyes, feels the fluttering of his eyelids. No nerves now. No more uneasiness. He is a boy from the country; he has seen this sort of thing often enough; has sat with his brother watching the pigman come over the winter fields with his ropes, his canvas roll of blades. As he sets to work, the minister’s feet kick like an excited child’s. .

Waking, coming to the surface of himself as though flung into a place more confusing even than the dream, he is already trying to explain, to excuse. He stares at his hands, at the sheets, but they are perfectly clean, freakishly normal. Héloïse is pressing his shoulders. He blinks up at her, still babbling, but she is not listening to him. She is trying to tell him something of her own, her own dream perhaps.

‘Hush,’ she says. ‘Hush and come now, Jean. Come. They are waiting for you.’

He sits up. Marie is in the doorway with a candle. She is, apparently, fully dressed. From behind her a draught of cold, sluggish air flows in from the landing.

Héloïse gives him his breeches. Obediently, he puts them on. Odd how he cannot properly wake up. Is he ill? Is that it? A tainted oyster at the theatre? The chicken? No. He does not feel ill.

Kneeling, she buttons the legs of his breeches. He buttons his waistcoat. His watch is on the floor by the bed. He leans for it, flicks up the lid.

‘It’s half past four in the morning,’ he says, a remark that should occasion some sort of explanation but doesn’t.

‘Very well.’ He stands, wipes a hand across his face, accepts his hat from Héloïse, then follows Marie onto the landing. He does not ask her any questions. He knows her well enough now to know she is quite likely simply to invent something.

On the floor below, Monsieur Monnard, nightcap askew, is standing outside his bedroom door. ‘Are we to have no peace?’ he asks huskily, tearfully perhaps. ‘My wife, monsieur, my wife is very—’

‘Go back to your bed,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

In the hallway, a tall, gaunt figure is restless in the dark. Jean-Baptiste takes the candle from Marie, holds it up.

‘He doesn’t speak any French,’ says Marie.

‘Of course he does,’ says Jean-Baptiste, but when Jan Block starts, at great speed, to try and explain what he is doing there at half past four in the morning, it is only with the greatest difficulty, and by drawing on his small though slowly growing reserves of Flemish, that the engineer is able to follow him. There has been an accident in the cemetery. Yes. An accident or an incident of some sort. Jeanne has been hurt. Monsieur Lecoeur is looking after her. . or no. Monsieur Lecoeur is not looking after her. Monsieur Lecoeur has in fact — what? Run away?

‘Enough,’ says Jean-Baptiste, putting the candle on the hall table and stepping towards the street door. ‘I will see it for myself.’

Outside, a milky pre-dawn vapour hangs in the street, something like the shed skin of a cloud, damp, miasmic, coating their faces with droplets of moisture. Block is already at the corner of the street. He looks back, silently urging the engineer on. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to run,’ says Jean-Baptiste, though more to himself than to Block. He is trying to imagine what manner of accident could possibly have befallen Jeanne in the middle of the night. As for Lecoeur, why the devil should he disappear? Or did Block mean he had gone to fetch help? Perhaps even to find Guillotin or Thouret. That would make some sense of the story, though even as he thinks it, he knows the truth’s something quite different.

The cemetery door, when they reach it, stands wide, but once they are inside the walls, everything looks normal enough. The fire by the preaching cross burns as it has for weeks. The church is the same mad shadow as always. Then he sees, over by the south charnel, the movement of torches, hears the rumbling of men’s voices.

Block runs towards them. Jean-Baptiste, cursing under his breath, jogs after him. The miners are gathered on the ground between the charnel and the sexton’s house. Block calls to them and they fall silent, look at him, look past him to the engineer; then the talking resumes, louder now, more urgent. Some of them point to the charnel, wave their hands at it, their fists. He has not known them like this before. Block he has lost sight of. He sees Jacques Everbout, asks him where Jeanne is.

‘The house,’ says Everbout.

The house. Naturally. Where else would she be? He nods to Everbout, issues a perfectly unnecessary order for the men to remain where they are, then sets off towards the house. He has only gone four or five strides when he is suddenly falling, arms flailing, onto the black grass. He gets up, looks to see what has tripped him, reaches to feel it with his hand. A lime sack some fool has left carelessly in the grass? Then he touches hair, the rough parchment of skin. He snatches back his hand. A corpse! Though not, thank God, a fresh one. One of the preserved girls? Guillotin’s Charlotte? Why here?

Another ten strides and he is in the sexton’s house. There is a lamp in the kitchen and around it a little of the mist is glittering in a blue nimbus. Jeanne — though it is not at first obvious that it is Jeanne — is lying on the kitchen table. She has a blanket over her. Her eyes are shut. Her grandfather is beside her, stroking her brow. He is making a low but terrible noise, a keening such as one might hear in the throat of some beast whose progeny the farmer has just led away towards a reeking shed. At the sound of movement behind him, he blinks his muddied eyes, bares the stumps of his teeth.

‘It’s me,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The engineer.’

The sexton gesticulates. A mime, a dumb-show. He is far beyond words. Jean-Baptiste approaches the table. A quarter of the girl’s face is disappearing into the swelling above her left eye. Her mouth. . her mouth must have been struck repeatedly. Fist? Boot? Some implement? What other wounds she has — and he is certain they exist — are hidden under the blanket. He is glad of it.

He leans over her, whispers her name. The eye by the wound will not open, but the other does. It opens and stares at him, without expression. He touches her shoulder; her whole body flinches. He takes back his hand.

‘Lecoeur?’ he asks.

The eye tells him it was so.

‘He has. . attacked you?’

And the eye tells him it was so.

‘I will bring the doctor to you,’ he says. ‘I will bring some women to you. I will send for Lisa.’

The eye shuts. He walks outside. It seems noticeably lighter, but the mist is lingering, thick skeins of it tangled in the bars of the charnel arches. By the door of the house, a spade with a heart-shaped blade is leaning against the wall. He takes it — the haft worn smooth — and walks towards the men. The first he meets is the tall one, the one with the missing half-finger. He asks him if Monsieur Lecoeur is in the charnel.

‘He is,’ says the miner, quietly. Then, as Jean-Baptiste is stepping away from him, the miner touches his arm, stops him. ‘He has a pistol,’ he says.

‘I remember it,’ says Jean-Baptiste. For an instant he is tempted to ask the miner to come with him, is desirous of having the other’s calmness and strength beside him. Then he goes on his own, down past the doctors’ workshop to the charnel’s first open archway. He steps inside, into the frigid stillness of its air, stops, turns his head to listen. Outside, the men have ceased their noise. They too are listening.

He moves forward: impossible, with no light but what is offered by the thinning darkness, to move soundlessly over such a surface. Too much debris. Pieces of stone, pieces of bone. Who knows what else besides. There is no hope of surprising Lecoeur, of stealing up on him. He decides to announce himself.

‘Lecoeur!’

An echo but no reply.

‘Lecoeur! It is Baratte!’

Nothing.

He goes on, trusting as much to his memory of the place as to his eyes. To his right, the archways stand out a faintly luminous blue against the speckled blackness of the gallery. One way or another it is light that will bring this thing to an end. Light will make a target of him. Light will leave Lecoeur nowhere to hide. And then? When Lecoeur is able to see him? The only reason he can imagine Lecoeur will not shoot him is that he would not then have time to reload his pistol before the miners reached him.

He looks back, counts off the archways. He will soon be up by the door onto the rue de la Ferronnerie, the door through which they load the carts. Is that why Lecoeur came in here? To make his way more secretly to the door? There would have been a key in the sexton’s house. He might have pocketed it before attacking Jeanne, the escape planned before the crime was committed.

Gripping the spade in one hand, he feels for the wall with the other, his fingers trailing over lettering, then rough stone, then, unmistakably, the shaped edge of a hinge. He fumbles for the iron ring of the doorhandle, turns it, pulls, pulls again more sharply. The door is locked. Either Lecoeur had the coolness, the presence of mind, to lock it after him, or he is still here, in the cemetery, in the charnel.

He is poised to call out again — his nerves have had quite enough of this game of hide and seek — when he is aware of movement in the gallery behind him. Someone, something, is coming towards him, coming fast, sure-footed, recklessly fast. His first thought is not of Lecoeur at all but of the thing the minister spoke of, the dog-wolf. Would this not be its moment? A man alone at night, deep in its secret lair? Whatever it is, he has no hope of avoiding it. The thing’s energy, its intention, is already upon him. He swings the spade, arcs it blindly through the black air while in the same instant a voice roars at him, ‘Violator!’

The force of the contact comes near to throwing him off his feet. He skitters backwards until his shoulders collide with the wall; then, bracing himself against the stones, he jabs three or four times, furiously, at the dark, but there is no second assault. He waits, heart thundering behind his ribs, then creeps forwards, spade held out like a pike. Beneath his left shoe the snap of breaking glass. He stretches down, touches a curl of wire, a shard of smooth glass. Spectacles! He takes another step, sees beside one of the pillars of the nearest archway, the shape of a man’s head. He goes closer, lowers the edge of the spade against the man’s chest, feels it swell and fall.

‘Who was it?’

The engineer spins about, spade at the ready.

‘Who have you struck?’

‘Lecoeur? Where are you? I cannot see you.’

‘Do not worry about that. I can see you well enough. My eyes have grown quite used to the dark.’

‘It was the priest.’

‘Colbert?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he killed?’

‘No.’

‘And what did you strike him with? What is that you have in your hands?’

‘A spade.’

‘Ha! He mistook you for me, perhaps? Or there again, perhaps not.’

From his voice it is evident that Lecoeur is no more than four or five metres away, yet somehow he seems to be speaking from within the wall.

‘You have hurt Jeanne, Lecoeur.’

‘I have?’

‘You know it.’

‘And you?’

‘What of me?’

‘Have you not also hurt her? Abused her willing nature? Made her your creature. Forced her to assist in the destruction of her little paradise?’

He has it now. Lecoeur must be sitting or crouching on one of the flights of steps leading up to the bone attics. A good place to choose. Easy to defend. Dark even in the middle of the day. ‘I have not raped her,’ he says.

‘So I am a little worse than you. Bravo. It is all a matter of degree, Baratte. And I can assure you she was no saint. I lived in the house with her. I knew her.’

‘If the men catch hold of you. .’

‘The men? What do you know about the men? You know nothing of them.’

‘I do not think they will hurt you if I am with you.’

‘You will be my protector? And then what? A trial? Or shall I be sent to join that mad girl who broke your head? Where was it she went?’

‘Dauphiné.’

‘Why did you bring me here, Baratte? Could you not have left me to rot in Valenciennes? Do you imagine you have helped me?’

‘Then let me help you now.’

‘Idiot! You cannot even help yourself. Look at you, standing in a stinking cemetery with your spade, wondering if you can get close enough to batter me with it. When you came to the mines, you were gentle. Shy as a girl. When I first saw you, I thought. . I thought, here at last is a man I can open my heart to.’

‘There is no time for this, Lecoeur.’

‘We were friends.’

‘I have not forgotten it.’

‘Was there nothing to value in such a friendship?’

‘The light is coming up. This cannot last much longer.’

‘The light! Ah, yes. The light. Tell me, then. She will live?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘I had some good in me once,’ says Lecoeur decisively. ‘Do not let them say otherwise.’

There is a pause — a dense, seashell hush, several seconds long — then the clear, mechanical articulation of a pistol being cocked. The engineer does not move. He waits, outlined against the growing light. The shot, when it comes, is both loud and muffled, a noise as though, in one of the crypts, a great stone-headed hammer had been launched against the slabs above. Echo, reverberation, silence.

He steps forward. ‘Lecoeur?’ he calls. ‘Lecoeur?’ He does not expect an answer.

13

Between eight and nine in the morning, a relentless downpour reduces the preaching-cross fire to a heap of smouldering black beams like the doused wreck of a small cottage. The men keep to their tents. There is bread to eat but nothing more, nothing hot until, in the late morning, Jean-Baptiste and Armand brew two large cans of coffee, lace them heavily with brandy and carry them over the wet grass.

A strange somnolence has settled over the cemetery. No one imagines any work can be done. Not today, not tomorrow either perhaps. And the day after? The day after that?

Guillotin (who, to the high amusement of his colleagues, has dubbed himself ‘physician to the cemetery of les Innocents’) examines Jeanne in the upstairs room where she has been made as comfortable as possible in her grandfather’s bed. When he comes down — his feet heavy and unhurried on the bare wood of the steps — he tells them that the only immediate danger comes from the operating of her own mind, from the morbidity that is the inevitable consequence of such an ordeal. Grief, terror. The loss of maidenhood in such doleful circumstances. And so on. The wounds to her flesh are survivable. A probable fracture of her left cheekbone, some lacerating of the soft tissues of her mouth — lips, tongue, gums, etc. Bruising — extensive — on both arms and much of the torso. .

‘She is young; she is hardy. You, my dear engineer, might convincingly empathise with her, though, I think, not yet. It may be a while before she finds the company of men agreeable again. Madame Saget can remain with her?’

‘She will wish to,’ says Armand.

‘Good. As to whether there will be any issue, any. . Well, let us hope it is not so.’ He smiles in kindly fashion at the sexton, who sits by the unlit grate and who may or may not have taken in much of what he has said. ‘A little time, monsieur. Time will put things right. You have not lost your Jeanne.’

The engineer accompanies Guillotin to the doctors’ workshop. Lecoeur is on the trestle table nearest to the entrance.

‘He was not unlikeable,’ says Guillotin, bending his knees a little to squint into Lecoeur’s head. ‘And at least he had the decency to put out his own light.’

‘I mistook him,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Mistook? Perhaps. Yet a man may be one thing and then another. He was not some drooling degenerate from the Salpêtrière. He was diligent, well read. Courteous.’

‘If I had been less distracted. Or had been with him more. Outside of here, I mean.’

‘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.

14

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.’

15

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!

One dead now with a ball in his head. One hanging from a pole above a pool of his own sewage.

When it is done, he tears pages out of L’Homme Machine, cleans himself as best he can, drops the pages and then the book into the hole, draws up his breeches.

In the sexton’s house, he scrubs his hands with vinegar. The fire is burning low. He prods it, lays on more wood. He looks for brandy but for once cannot find any. Overhead, the boards creak, but no one comes down. He goes outside again, peers towards the tents, then goes back into the kitchen, lights a lantern and carries it to the doctors’ workshop. He puts the lantern on Charlotte’s coffin, then takes hold of the lapels of Lecoeur’s coat, tries to raise him to a sitting posture, but Lecoeur, dead some eighteen hours, is stiff as a clay pipe. He stands back and tries to think it through as a problem, then goes to Lecoeur’s feet (where one stocking has unravelled to a cold white ankle), swings the feet out and lets the body cantilever against the edge of the table. It works, more or less. Lecoeur rises, though he seems not so much a clay pipe any more as a rolled carpet, a heavy rolled carpet, sodden. There is a thud onto the earth between them. The pistol? He will come back for it later. In three movements, he turns the body about, clasps it under the arms, adjusts his grip and is shuffling backwards to the workshop entrance when he hears the canvas flap being drawn.

‘You might have trusted me to help you,’ says Armand. ‘Or did you think I was squeamish?’

‘Get the lantern,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘And the pistol. It’s on the ground.’

‘There’s moon enough for us to see our way,’ says Armand, coming round to take hold of Lecoeur’s feet. ‘And he will not miss his pistol.’

They go without speaking, carry the body side-on to the edge of the pit, set it down beside the pulley. The engineer returns to the house for Lecoeur’s bag. Manetti is in the kitchen now, sitting in his chair.

‘I am taking some of his things,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

The sexton nods, solemnly. Who knows what he understands.

Out of the door, Jean-Baptiste reaches again for the convenient spade. At the pit, he drops the bag to the bottom. It lands discreetly enough. They lift Lecoeur into the sling, the cradle. Armand wraps a loop of chain round his waist, leans back his weight, takes up the slack, while Jean-Baptiste pushes both sling and body out over the pit. Then the pair of them play out the chain, the pulley wheel complaining like a mechanical goose.

‘How deep is this damned pit?’ hisses Armand.

‘Sixteen metres,’ says Jean-Baptiste. Then, ‘He’s there!’

‘You wish me to come down?’ asks Armand.

‘I would prefer to know there is somebody above. Someone I can trust.’

He drops the spade into the pit, goes to the ladder, swings himself onto it. Armand was right: now the clouds have scattered, there’s moon enough for what they need. Darkness enough too. He looks over to the rue de la Lingerie, the backs of the houses, the windows, sees in one high window — conceivably his own former room — a light move from left to right as though signalling. He climbs down to the ledge, goes cautiously to the second ladder and reaches the bottom of the pit. It takes a long minute to find the spade (a minute in which all manner of lunacy threatens to erupt in his head); then he goes to the sling, pulls Lecoeur free of it and hauls him towards a pool of moonlight in a corner of the pit. He starts to dig there, the spade’s edge sinking easily enough into the spring-softened earth. The men, perhaps, would find it instructive to see him labouring like this, the engineer, the chief-of-works, hatless and bent to his task, starting to sweat.

He digs long enough for the moon-pool to shift a little, then steps back. It’s hard to see what exactly he’s done — moonlight is not a true light — but suddenly he cannot bear to continue with it. He leans the spade, stoops, takes hold of Lecoeur, lies him beside the hole and rolls him in. The bag goes by his feet. Neither bag nor body is deeply laid, but neither needs to be. Tomorrow, he will have the whole pit filled with earth and lime. Sixteen metres of it: deep enough for anyone. He kneels a moment by the hole, catches his breath, and in a gesture secret almost from himself he reaches down to touch the dead man’s shoulder. Then he stands, takes up the spade again and begins quickly to cover him. The legs first, then the body. Finally the face.