Pure

1

They dig — dig and fill like men who lack the invention to do anything else. Pit fourteen gets its sixteen metres of earth and lime. In the next pit, the very centre of the cemetery, the bones are piled so thickly they can be handed up like bundles of brushwood. The dead are no longer surprised to see us, thinks the engineer, standing at the edge of the pit in spring drizzle. Where once even the barest bones seemed affronted, cowed, like some man or woman pushed naked into the street, now they lie passive as brides waiting for the hands of the miners to lift them into the Paris light. The Last Trump! The gone-ahead, the passed-over, reassembled by bearded angels smoking clay pipes. It is enough — nearly enough — to make him grin. Poor, credulous skulls imagining their wait in the dark is over!

By the end of the month they have nineteen pits — almost half those Jeanne identified the previous autumn. Pit twenty is begun in the first week of May, and it is while they are at work on this, eight metres down on a warm morning (a pair of blackbirds picking worms from the soil beside the pit), that Jeanne comes out of the house, her first outing since the assault. She has an arm looped through one of Lisa Saget’s. She looks half blinded by the sunshine. A few steps behind them is Héloïse, apron on, meat cleaver in one hand, the other raised to shade her eyes. The men on the surface stop work. Jan Block at his post by the bone wall looks moonstruck, and for the first time it occurs to Jean-Baptiste that the miner is in love, truly in love. And would he, given all that has passed, be the worst match Jeanne could make? He would need no explanations, knows all he needs to know. Does she like him? Or is the thought of any man touching her again repellent, impossible? The engineer lifts a hand to salute her. She waves back, wearily.

On the streets, in the little squares, among the stalls in the market packed tight as the combs in a bee skep, rumours about what happened that night in March are still plentiful and freely traded. Some of the miners, despite express orders to the contrary, must have been talking to their whores, for within a week of Lecoeur’s death everyone knew of it, knew he had been shot, knew beyond a shadow of doubt that the grey-eyed engineer — an example of whose rages some of them had witnessed that evening on the rue Saint-Denis — must have been the one who pulled the trigger. It stood to reason; they were not fools. Why he had done it, that was less certain. The miners, it seems, had kept their lips more tightly pressed when it came to mentioning Jeanne’s name. As a result, the favoured explanation was that the engineer shot the overseer in an argument about the engineer’s woman, the Austrian. The overseer had perhaps called her what she was and paid for it with his life. It was monstrous, of course, savage, and yet the women of the quarter — whose judgement would be the final one — were not entirely opposed to one man killing another in such an affair. Everywhere women were insulted with impunity, insulted by men. If a few of them suffered for their insolence as the overseer had, it might be no more than they deserved.

As for the Monnards, though they were not immune to rumour and would have observed the unusual comings and goings at the cemetery, their imaginations were, perhaps, less excitable, less succulent, than those of their neighbours, and they were distracted still by the memory of a different, earlier night, a disaster much closer to their hearts. Thus, they had not demanded to know why they were woken that night by one of the cemetery labourers beating at the door, or what was the meaning of the noise just before daylight, a noise like a tree snapping in a gale. The only moment of awkwardness was the dinner the week after Easter Sunday, when Madame Monnard — apparently in all innocence and sincerity — enquired if that charming Monsieur Lecoeur would care to visit the house again. Jean-Baptiste had been unable to do anything but stare dumbly at the dregs in his soup plate. It was left to Héloïse to say that Monsieur Lecoeur had been called home. Home? Yes, madame, quite unexpectedly. On family business? Urgent family business, madame.

Throughout the first weeks of May, with the new leaves unfurling, the first butterflies out of winter hibernation, small flowers pressing stubbornly through cracks in smoke-blackened walls, Jean-Baptiste is aware of himself waiting. He does not know what he is waiting for. The arrival of Lecoeur’s sister, perhaps, angry, frightened, confused. Or the sudden appearance of some implacable state official, someone not even the minister could shield him from. He has to remind himself, surprisingly often, that he did not kill Lecoeur, that Lecoeur killed himself. This is the truth. Should it not feel more convincing, more reassuring?

On the 22nd, 23rd and 24th of the month, he suffers a violent headache, the worst he has had since his head was cut. He lies in Ziguette’s old room, Ziguette’s old bed, a cloth folded over his eyes, clenching and unclenching his fists. On his chest, sixteen metres of earth and lime are crushing him. Then the pain resolves in the usual fit of vomiting. He rinses his mouth, drinks a little, finds his hat, reels from the room.

The city is hot now. Its stones give off a steady pulse of heat for an hour or more after sunset. In the cemetery, the men want more water with their brandy, need it. They work in their shirts. By the middle of the morning the cloth is stuck to the skin of their backs. Work slows down. Swifts and martins play in the blue above the charnels. All winter it seems they held on to something, some resolution the heat now leaches out of them. The engineer feels it as much as anyone, more so. A longing to let go, to have done with it all. To mask it, he goads the men on, restlessly paces the edge of the pits, talks more, shouts more. When the man on the pulley struggles with a cradleful of bones, the engineer lends his own weight to the rope. When they need to fit a box-crib, he clambers to the bottom of the pit to direct the operation. At night, he watches over the loading of each cart, shuttles between the street and the cemetery, speaks to the carters, even to the young priests who still look nervously at the door waiting for Colbert to appear, though Colbert has not been seen by anyone in weeks.

On what he calls to himself an impulse but which is perhaps a desire to confess something, he tells Héloïse about his word blindness. It is a Sunday afternoon, the pair of them kneeling on the bed, a little raw about the loins, the gleam of his seed on her belly, their bodies in shadow from the two-thirds-shut shutters. It is, anyway, hard to keep hiding it from her, from everybody, hard and wearying, so he explains to her how he cannot get through a page of print without stumbling, that he still finds himself suddenly dumb in the face of the most ordinary objects. He tells her about his notebook with its list of recaptured words.

She kisses his brow, drops her shift over her head, adjusts the shutters and fetches a book. It is a book by an English writer with a French name. The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner. Holding the book in front of them both, she reads a page aloud, slowly. The next page is his, the third hers again. After an hour, he asks, ‘Is this true?’

She laughs. ‘You like it?’

He nods. He does. The castaway. His loneliness and ingenuity. It speaks to him.

‘As payment,’ he says, ‘I shall build you a bookshelf. It could go by the wall there.’

She thanks him, then adds, ‘Not so big we cannot get it out of the door.’

‘The door?’

‘We will not be here always,’ she says. ‘Will we?’

An extra grog ration, a few extra coins in the men’s hands. (He has what he would have given Lecoeur to spread around.) It will not do. It cannot. It is not enough. And Guillotin warns him that digging in the heat is unhealthy, decidedly so. Vapours, contagion. The place’s sour breath excited by the sun’s heat. Already four of the men — occupants of the same tent — have been struck by some low fever that has left them listless, weak, drooping like cut flowers. The doctor recommends the work be carried on entirely at night, or better still, suspended until the cooler weather in the autumn.

‘Suspended!’

‘Might it not be the wisest course?’

‘And come the autumn,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘I would be working here on my own.’

‘You think they would not return?’

‘Are you not amazed they have stayed at all?’

They are walking together in the late afternoon while the men are being fed. Having reached the cemetery’s western limit, they turn and start back, walking by the shadow-line of the wall.

‘What about the church?’ asks the engineer.

‘Mmm?’

‘We can work in there. It will be cool.’

‘Begin the destruction of the church?’

‘I would need more men. Specialists. Not many.’

‘It looks,’ says Guillotin, pausing to regard it, the streaked black cliff of the church’s west face, ‘horribly solid.’

‘Buildings are mostly air,’ says the engineer, quoting the great Perronet. ‘Air and empty space. And there is nothing in the world that cannot be reduced to its parts. With enough men you could turn the Palace of Versailles into rubble inside of a week.’

The more he thinks of it, the more convinced he is he has been thinking of it for a long time. He tries the idea on Armand.

‘Oh, my beautiful church,’ wails Armand, grinning broadly.

‘It will mean the organ too,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Naturally.’

‘You don’t object?’

‘It is what I said to you before. The night we went painting. One does not resent the future or its agents.’

‘And the future is good whatever it brings?’

‘Yes,’ says Armand, without a moment’s hesitation.

‘I do not believe that,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Think of the light,’ says Armand.

‘The light?’

‘The church of les Innocents has been hoarding shadows for five hundred years. You will free them. You will let in light and air. You will let in the sky. That is the future!’

‘That,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘is a metaphor.’

‘A metaphor? Where did you go to school?’

‘Nogent-le-Rotrou.’

Dawn: he lies in bed frowning into the indeterminate space above him, trying to work out the best way to destroy a church. What exactly did Maître Perronet say on the subject? Did they cover demolition while Jean-Baptiste was at home in Bellême, helping to care for his father? If it stood out in a field somewhere, he would simply blow it up. God knows he could make enough black powder from all the potassium in the soil of the cemetery. But a church halfway up the rue Saint-Denis? In theory, of course, a building could be imploded: mined and brought down upon itself in a tidy cloud of dust and tumbling stone. In practice — well, he has never heard of a single successful instance. There was that case in Rome five, six years ago, some old basilica they wanted rid of in a hurry. Filled the crypts with barrels of gunpowder, laid the fuses, lit them, obliterated the basilica and most of the neighbouring tenement. Two hundred men, women and children blown to rags. Shook the windows of the Vatican. He cannot remember what became of the engineer. Does he work still? Did they hang him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You are?’ he asks.

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

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

‘From the cemetery, eh?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘A master. Four or five senior apprentices.’

‘And labour?’

‘I have labour.’

‘Used to heights?’

‘They are miners. Or were.’

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

‘As you wish.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you.’

‘And you have heard the latest about Jeanne?’

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

‘Well?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

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

‘The doctors’ workshop.’

‘The what?’

‘It can go.’

‘Right.’

‘When does the wood arrive?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Very well.’

‘You want to keep the tiles?’

‘As many as possible.’

‘You’ll need hoists, then.

‘We have rope, chain, wheels.’

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

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

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

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

‘This should wake up Colbert,’ says Armand.

‘If he’s here,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Oh, he’s here, all right.’

‘What does he live on?’

‘Wax. Liturgy. His own thumbs.’

A miner steps back, brushing something from his face. ‘Dust coming down,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Stand away a little.’

The thumping is less muffled now. There’s a pause; then it begins again, a double beat, harder to place. ‘Are they right over us?’ asks Armand.

‘No, no. By that edge there. They’ll try to come in between the rafters near the bottom of the gully.’

Something hits the flagstones. Not dust any more. More of it comes down, comes down with each strike of the hammers. Flakes of stone plaster, of rubble. Then something big, crashing down seven, eight metres ahead of them, smashing into fragments. The double beat shifts to a triple. Ba-ba-bang, ba-ba-bang, ba-ba-bang. Then half a minute of silence; then two strikes, very aimed and deliberate, as if they had discovered some unguarded place on the dragon’s head, something yielding. Another large piece comes down. The party below retreat. In the black, the stared-at black above, something winks. A small white eye, small and almost too bright to gaze at.

‘They’re through!’ says Armand. A flurry of strikes and the eye widens. A beam of swirling light cuts at a slant from roof to floor and breaks not on some gilded angel or plaster saint, but on the boot of a miner, who hops backwards as if it had burnt him.

Shyly they reach for it, the light, turn their hands in it. Another dozen blows from above and they can bathe their chests, then their whole bodies. Héloïse must see this, thinks the engineer. Héloïse, Jeanne. . they must all see it.

‘Below there!’ shouts a voice. Sagnac. His head small as a coin.

The engineer steps into the light, peers up. ‘We are here,’ he calls. It is an odd sort of conversation. It is perhaps how Adam spoke to Jehovah. ‘Any trouble?’

‘Like breaking snail shells,’ says Sagnac. (‘Snail shells. .’ sings the echo.) ‘Beams are rotten to the heart. Another twenty years it would have come down on its own!’ The head disappears.

‘I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘ A pair of these lads can pump for me.’

‘Is this a time for playing?’ asks Jean-Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.’

A half-hour later, while Armand improvises on the organ, the engineer conducts a tour of the light. Héloïse squeezes his elbow. The sexton looks up, blinks his eyes like a prisoner trapped fifty years in some oubliette, some dank cachot like those said to exist in the fortress of the Bastille. Lisa wets her lips, opens her face like a flower.

Guillotin says softly, ‘But this is philosophy.’

Jeanne begins to cry silently. She will not at first touch the light. Jean-Baptiste — it is the moment’s permission — takes her hand. She does not flinch. He lifts it, and when the light strikes it, her skin — the skin of both their hands — seems surrounded with a fragile blue fire.

Over the following days a score of holes are punched in a line along the south wall. The air thickens with dust, but at night the dust settles or escapes. Beams of light spread out until separate shafts become a jagged fringe moving slowly north towards the rue aux Fers. By the end of the month light laps at the edge of the nave, streaks the choir, pools by the foot of the altar. How filthy everything below now appears! How much the place depended on its darkness! The pews — most so beetle-ridden they would be dangerous to sit upon — are heaped together in a great pile under the crossing. Now that the light is here, it’s obvious that anything of value — monetary value — has been taken out already, officially or otherwise. With Armand, the engineer spends an hour searching for les Innocents’ most celebrated relic, the stylite’s toe bone in its box of iron, but there is no sign of it and something, some pantomime quality in his friend’s searching, prompts Jean-Baptiste to ask him if he has, in fact, stolen it.

Armand agrees that he has. ‘It was to raise funds for the hospital,’ he says.

‘Is that true?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

Armand shrugs.

A shout from above means something big is coming down — a sprocket, a wind-brace, an oaken hammer-beam spearing into the debris below. Or stone, something dislodged, then shattering on the flags like ordinance.

Half the miners work inside the church, wrecking. They have sledgehammers and picks and iron bars and bring, it seems, a certain sectarian relish to the business. The others work on the roof or man the hoists that lower parcels of salvaged tiles and folded lead. Jean-Baptiste starts to feel like an engineer again. Stone and dust and rotten wood are more than bearable after black earth and bones. And isn’t there something addictive about destruction? Does it not satisfy some shadowy appetite, some boyish urge to swing a blunt tool at what is silently, stupidly there?

He writes to his mother: ‘I am destroying a church!’ He encloses the usual money, suggests — only half playfully — she might want to use it to visit Paris to see him, her son, sleeves rolled, face caked with dust, bringing a stone elephant to its knees. And perhaps the pastor would care to accompany her?

He scores out that last thought. Scores it out carefully.

Working in one of the side chapels, one of those made plain and secular by lightfall, he finishes the bookshelf. A free-standing structure of five shelves built with wood from the church, the backs and seats of pews mostly (those few the beetles had not visited), though at the top he fits a carved panel cut from the reredos behind the altar, little figures, apostles perhaps, or just examples of those bystanders who must always be standing at the fringes of miraculous or terrible events. Guests at the wedding in Canna, villagers watching the arrival of Herod’s soldiers. Héloïse fills three of the shelves with books she already owns. An afternoon with Ysbeau down by the river — the pair of them genteel, forgetful — fills most of the fourth, the new books all good editions, not those for fifteen sous that fall apart in your hands.

About the city, these days of high summer, black paint and fresh graffiti.

Next to the church of Sainte-Marie on the rue Saint-Antoine: ‘beche will eat a bishop and spit out his bones. a cardinal for dessert.’

On the quai de l’Horloge, below the Conciergerie. Painted from a boat? ‘m. beche will drown the rich in the sweat of the poor!’

On a wall opposite the Company of the Indies: ‘beche has seen your crimes! the bill is on its way.’

On the parapet — left side going south — of the Pont au Change: ‘blood-sucking lords! m. beche will orphan your children!’

Spying graffiti, spying it before the authorities do, authorities now much keener to efface such sentiments, becomes a type of sport. People exchange new sightings with each other, casually, good-humouredly, though also with a certain questioning seriousness. For what if he exists, this Bêche? What if one day he does what is promised?

Jean-Baptiste, informed by Armand (who continues to deny all involvement), or Dr Guillotin, or Héloïse (who has not entirely given up her old free habit of threading the city’s thoroughfares), or on one occasion by Marie, of the existence of these scrawlings, nods and shrugs. What are they to him? And yet he cannot deny a creeping interest in this Bêche, even sometimes falls into the fantasy that there is indeed, in some fetid bâtiment in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, a man with thoughts like knife blades, a philosopher assassin, the people’s murderer. Would he oppose such a man? Betray him? Or would he follow him? Become, like him, implacable. Bloody and implacable. . Then he wakes from the fantasy and turns back to his business. Stones and sweat and calling orders across the mazed air. What the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later. History must wait a little on les Innocents.

A vantage point, a good one, from which to view the progress at the church, is his old room at the back of the Monnards’ house. He goes in there most days when he can, stands between the bed and the table looking out of the window. The air in the room is stifling. Heaven knows what it is like in Marie’s room above. Across the bed, Ziguette’s dresses lie slack as weed raked out of a river. Little golden moths, the type that crushed between thumb and finger, leave a smudge of gold on the skin, skip and flutter among the fabrics. Ragoût, remembering perhaps their old intimacy in the room, those winter nights he lay by the man’s feet, sometimes joins the engineer, makes himself comfortable on the dresses, has the habit of climbing half inside them — a cat becoming a girl, a girl a cat.

One Sunday evening at the end of July, the two of them are there in the room, Ragoût nuzzling a muslin frill, Jean-Baptiste propped drowsily against the table, gazing out to the church. It has a pleasingly stricken look. A quarter of the roof is still to come down — they will need scaffolding on the rue aux Fers next week — and they have still not dug a trench deep enough to examine the foundations, but the progress is acceptable, more than acceptable, so much so that even Monsieur Lafosse on his last visit could not entirely conceal his approval, and stood a full minute at the drawing-room window before turning to say (a voice oiled with suspicion) that the minister would not be displeased to learn that his project at last went ahead as it should.

If the miners can be kept at it just a little longer! The miners, Sagnac. And himself, of course, himself particularly. He has at least managed to find somewhere for Jeanne and her grandfather. Four decent, well-lit rooms on the ground floor of a house on the rue Aubri Boucher, opposite the church of Saint-Josse, a few minutes’ walk from the market. Convenient for a mother-to-be — convenient for a mother — for there is no longer any question but that Jeanne is with child. She has visibly thickened about the waist; her breasts are swelling. She looks younger. Young, shy, dreamy. Not unhappy. She smiles at them, speaks little, looks both ruined and saved, as perhaps Christ’s mother once did. And always nearby, always contriving somehow to stand at the end of her shadow, that booted, bearded, carved peg of a man, Jan Block. .

His face breaks in a yawn. He rubs the heels of his palms over his eyes, feels the body’s steady, monotonous instruction, his heartbeat’s heartbeat: this, this, this, this. . When he opens his eyes, he finds himself looking not at the church but at the picture on the wall, the etching of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, its single high arch high enough to let shipping through whatever the tide, its twenty-four narrow houses with their lead roofs. The picture dangles from its nail just as it has since the night he first came to this house, but it is months since he last considered it, months since he considered those old ambitions it once stood as emblem for. Bridges and roads? Yes. Bridges and roads crossing France, leaping her rivers, stringing towns and villages like pearls along a thread, and then the whole enterprise, dependable, sweetly cambered, laid like a gift at the walls of some shining city. Himself on a horse, gangs of men behind. Men, horses, carts, stone. Clouds of dust. And he could do it now. It is perfectly credible. He does not doubt himself, does not feel any more he must, through some anxious exercise of the will, hold all the pieces of himself together or cease to exist. But are his ambitions what they were? Are they, for example, less ambitious? And if so, what has replaced them? Nothing heroic, it seems. Nothing to brag of. A desire to start again, more honestly. To test each idea in the light of experience. To stand as firmly as he can in the world’s fabulous dirt; live among uncertainty, mess, beauty. Live bravely if possible. Bravery will be necessary, he has no doubt of that. The courage to act. The courage to refuse.

On the bed, the cat is watching him, placidly, out of the depths of its own mystery. He grins at it. ‘You think, old friend, they’d have me back on the farm?’ And then his gaze is drawn to the window again, to the church, where a black smoke is spiralling up through the broken roof. It rises, dips, swirls round the scaffolding, dips as low as the cemetery walls, then climbs again, circles in the clear air, circles, circles, circles, then swoops away towards the east. He shouts for Héloïse. She runs across the landing.

‘They’re going!’ he cries. ‘The flying. . Damn! Like flying mice.’

‘What? Bats?’

‘Yes, yes. Hundreds of them! Thousands!’

She looks to where he is pointing, squints, but there is nothing now above the church but night itself.

2

Mid-August; sunrise is twenty past six. Already the days are noticeably shorter. He folds back the shutters, studies the shadowed houses opposite, wonders if he is looked back at, cannot tell. In the bed behind him, Héloïse stirs. He asks if she wants a candle, if he should light one. There is no need, she says. She can see enough. Is there some water? He finds some for her, puts the glass into her hands, listens to her drink.

He is dressed only in the shirt he has slept in. He pulls on his breeches, tucks the shirt around his thighs, finds his stockings, sits on the end of the bed to draw them on. Héloïse is fetching down her peignoir from where it hangs overnight from an edge of the screen.

‘A clear sky,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘No rain for weeks.’

‘No.’

‘I should welcome a storm,’ she says. ‘Something to wash the streets.’

Their speaking is barely above a whisper. He is buttoning his breeches; she is about her business behind the screen. Across the street, the tops of the chimneypots show a thin, gold line of sunlight. Pink gold, orange gold.

‘What if we went away?’ he says.

‘Away?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘You could do that?’

‘I could ask Sagnac to take care of things here. The work is mostly his anyway.’

‘And where would we go?’

‘To Normandy. Bellême. It will be fresher there. Much fresher. And is it not time you met my mother?’

‘Your mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘But what if something happened here?’ asks Héloïse, coming out from behind the screen, dabbing her face with the orange water. ‘What if your men would not work for Sagnac?’

‘Why would they not work for him?’

‘Perhaps they do not like him.’

‘They do not need to like him. I do not know if they like me. And it would only be for a fortnight. Less, if you wished. Do you not want to meet my mother?’

‘I do,’ says Héloïse. ‘But it scares me a little, that is all. We live. . irregularly.’

He goes closer to her. He loves to see her face in the morning. ‘She is kind,’ he says, taking hold of her water-cold fingers.

‘Kind?’

‘Yes.’

She starts to laugh. He joins her, a soft, hissing sort of laughter stopped short by an improbably loud sneeze from the room below, the first eruption followed by a rapid series of others.

‘Monsieur Monnard,’ says Héloïse, ‘has caught Marie’s cold.’

‘I had wondered,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘if Monnard. . If he and Marie. . Is that possible?’

‘Last Saturday afternoon,’ says Héloïse, ‘I swear I heard the oddest noises coming from the attic.’

‘Noises?’

‘Like someone birching a child.’

‘And now they have caught colds together,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Poor Madame,’ says Héloïse.

‘She should go to Dauphiné,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I do not know why she does not.’

‘Or she could come back here.’

‘What? Ziguette? You could sleep soundly with a murderer in the house?’

‘She is not a murderer, Jean. But no, I could not be in the house with her. We would need to find somewhere else. For example, Lisa says there is a nice apartment near to her own on the rue des Ecouffes. A notary and his wife have been renting it, but they are to move in September.’

‘That for example, eh?’

‘A place of our own,’ she says.

‘We would have Armand for a neighbour.’

‘We could survive that,’ she says. ‘Will you think on it, Jean?’

‘I will,’ he says.

‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’

They separate, go on with their dressing. He buttons his waistcoat by the window, looks down on the swaying canvas roof of a cart going by, one he knows well enough, M. Hulot et Fils, Déménageurs à la Noblesse.

And what was it prompted his sudden talk of going away? Light on a chimneypot? Was that it? Half the time, it seems, one does not know what one is thinking, what one wants. Yet the idea is not so impossible. Sagnac would likely be agreeable, at a price. As for the miners, why should they object so long as they receive what is due to them? He tries to imagine it, he and Héloïse carefree in the verdant country, walking in the woods, pillowing their backs against hayricks, spotting trout in the stream, his mother’s blessing on their heads. . It is not as easy to imagine as he would wish. Easier to see himself fretting the whole while about the cemetery, then finding some excuse to hurry back.

‘I will buy oxtails today,’ she says. ‘Butcher Sanson has promised them to me. The men will like it. I will cook them with onions and garlic and tomatoes and thyme and a great deal of red wine, and perhaps some pig’s trotters. A trotter is an excellent thing in such a stew. The sauce is much the richer for it. Did your mother cook trotters for you, Jean? Is it not a common food in Normandy? Jean. . what are you doing?’

He has moved from the window to the dressing table, is sitting there gazing into the blue sheen of the mirror.

‘Are you getting one of your headaches?’ she asks, going to him and laying her hands gently either side of his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not at all.’

‘I should not have mentioned Ziguette.’

‘It does not matter.’

‘But you are frowning.’

‘I have just noticed,’ he says, ‘that I am starting to resemble old Dudo.’

‘Dudo? Who is Dudo?’

He finds her eyes in the mirror, grins at her. ‘One of our Baratte peasants,’ he says. ‘The purest.’

There is already a deal of heat in the sun. It pours down the rue aux Fers, pours into the bones of his head. At the far end of the street, he sees the dark forms of the laundry women beside the Italian fountain, the water flickering about them like bees. He opens the door of the cemetery: it is not locked and has not been so since the night with Lecoeur. A locked door did not serve him then, serve any of them. Certainly it did not serve Jeanne. As for those who might steal a little wood, let them have it. They are, anyway, he suspects, the type of people who disdain the use of doors.

On the roof of the church the masons and labour are already in place, though from the noise they are making it seems there is more banter than actual work going on up there. He scans the scaffolding, the parapets, but cannot see Sagnac. Perhaps he is not come yet and his apprentices are making the most of their freedom.

A dozen of the miners are seated in a circle on the ledge round the base of the preaching cross, boots in the long grass. Some are smoking their pipes, some chewing still on bread from their breakfasts. The engineer bids them a good morning, goes past them to the sexton’s house. The kitchen in the house is bare now, stripped of all but what is necessary for feeding the men. In Lecoeur’s old room, the cemetery’s mouldering records have been crated, though what should be done with them, where they should be sent, who would want them, is far from clear. The big bed upstairs will be dismantled tomorrow or the next day, its parts carried to the rue Aubri Boucher. All cooking will be done in a new shelter at the western end of the cemetery. It will be too dangerous soon for anyone to be in the house. A toppled stone from the church would pierce the roof like a cannonball.

At the far end of the kitchen table, a shadow moves, becomes substantial. The sexton is there, his silver hair brushed and neatly tied but no coat or waistcoat, just an old, greyish shirt of unbleached lined unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. He has a hen’s egg in his fingers and is carefully shelling it.

‘You are nearly done here,’ says the engineer.

Manetti nods, does not look up from his peeling.

‘I suppose you will miss it? Something of it?’

‘The garden,’ says the sexton. ‘We will not have a garden any more.’

‘A garden? No.’ From the kitchen window Jean-Baptiste can see the thin crescent of poppies down by the Flaselle tomb. And there are spikes of willow herb by the western charnel, and sorrel, whose leaves the men like to chew on. ‘Is it true,’ he asks, ‘they once cut the grass for hay here? That they grazed animals?’

‘It is true.’

‘Jeanne told me that. When I first came. She had learnt all your old stories, monsieur.’

‘There are some stories,’ says the sexton, fixing Jean-Baptiste with a steady and not entirely friendly regard, ‘you cannot tell to a child.’

The silence between them is broken by the doctor leaning in at the door. ‘Glorious morning,’ he says. ‘A very good day to you both.’ He beams at them. To Jean-Baptiste he says, ‘You are coming to the church? And where is that beautiful woman you have unaccountably persuaded to live with you?’

‘She will be here by and by,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

Outside, walking together, the doctor says quietly, ‘I fear that his mind is beginning to wander.’

‘Manetti? He seemed clear enough to me.’

‘Really?’

‘And what of Jeanne?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘My professional opinion?’

‘Yes.’

‘For her,’ says the doctor, ‘the only reality is the child. That above everything. When her time comes, I have offered myself as her accoucheur. No fee. I have designated myself a type of uncle.’

‘You have a niece in Lyon, do you not?’

‘My darling Charlotte. Yes.’

‘And the other?’

‘What?’

‘The other Charlotte. What did you do with her?’

‘Ah. She we had to burn, poor girl. She would not keep.’

They have walked round to the west door. It is not safe any more to enter into the south transept. Jean-Baptiste asks the doctor if there is something he wants from the church.

‘Now that you mention it,’ says Guillotin, ‘there are a pair of small paintings in one of the chapels. You know the sort of thing. Hazy landscapes with something inoffensively religious in the distance. Cleaned up, I think they would look well on the wall of my consulting room. You don’t object, do you?’

‘You are very welcome to them. They would only end up on a fire.’

‘A fire! My dear engineer, you have something of the Hun in you. Incinerating art indeed!’

Once inside the church, they go in single file. The sun has risen above the roof line and where the roof is gone, the light breaks in a shallow angle on the facing wall, picks out, with a kind of unnecessary perfection, the fluting of a pillar, the bevelled edge of an arch, a stone face staring goggle-eyed at some wonder in the middle air. Sagnac’s labourers and apprentices continue to twitter like birds. Something falls, flickers through light into shadow and hits the piled pews with a noise of thunder.

The north aisle is vaulted still, sheltered, dark as the edge of a wood. When they come close, they can see Armand is there, Armand and two of the miners, Slabbart and Block, all three bent beside the organ, working at it with tools. When Armand stands and looks at Jean-Baptiste, there are tears on his cheeks.

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

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

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

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

‘You want the stops too?’

‘You can get them?’

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

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

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

‘A little concert?’ asks Armand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shouts back to her, ‘Wait!’

‘Jean-Baptiste!’

‘Wait!’

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

‘Slabbart,’ says the miner.

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

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

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

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

Now that things are stiller, Jean-Baptiste is aware of the heat of the sun. It’s fierce up here, a heat redoubled by being reflected off the unstripped tiles. He cannot quite see down into the church where the others are, where Slabbart is. The son-in-law and his friend are pressed together like terrified children. He has no more interest in them. On the ground, the distant, shining ground, Héloïse and Jeanne stand, two slight figures, on the grass by the preaching cross. He nods to them, makes a little movement with his arm, a kind of wave, then steps into the gutter.

She is waiting for him near the bottom of the scaffolding and the first thing she does is hit him, a curious female punch with the underside of her fist against his shoulder. She does not say anything. She walks away from him, arms crossed tightly over her breasts. He goes back into the church. Guillotin has arrived. Slabbart has been turned onto his back. The wound — an oozing gash as long as a man’s ring finger — is almost exactly where, on Jean-Baptiste’s head, Ziguette cut him with the ruler, but the wood has gone deeper than the brass, has touched not just the bone but the tenderness below it, pierced it. Guillotin is careful to keep the toes of his shoes out of the blood. He looks at Jean-Baptiste, makes an almost imperceptible movement with his shoulders.

‘Get a blanket,’ says Jean-Baptiste to the miner beside him. ‘Wrap his body. Carry it to the far chapel.’ He gestures to the northwest corner, beyond the organ, then moves forward as if to crouch or kneel again next to the dead man, but hands are stopping him, turning him away, pressing him, ushering him out of the circle. Guillotin comes next, the same respectful strength. After him, Armand. The circle closes.

For a few seconds the expelled men, masters until a moment ago, stand awkwardly, silently, behind the miners’ backs; then together they quit the church, step out into the harsh morning light.

‘They have a faith?’ asks Guillotin.

Jean-Baptiste shakes his head. His mouth is bone-dry, his heart still thudding from his climb. ‘There was a church at the mines, but none of them went near it. Among the managers it was thought they believed in nothing.’

‘There isn’t a man in the world who does not believe in something,’ says Guillotin.

‘I need a drink,’ says Armand.

‘I will join you gladly,’ says Guillotin. ‘And you, my dear engineer, should certainly take a glass. Two or three might be best.’

‘If I tell Lafosse of this,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ‘he’ll order me to bury him here.’

‘Like our old friend,’ says Armand softly.

‘Ah, you refer to Monsieur Lecoeur?’ asks Guillotin, peering at them over the hook of his nose. ‘I had wondered if he was here. Does Jeanne know of it?’

The engineer shakes his head, looks up at the church roof. What are they doing up there? Sitting? Talking? Waiting?

‘The dead man could go to the cemetery at Clamart,’ says Guillotin. ‘It is where most of those who would have come to les Innocents are now sent. A perfectly decent place. Or there’s the Protestant yard at Charenton. If that is more suitable.’

‘I shall ask them,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘I will do as they wish.’

‘I wept for my organ,’ says Armand, ‘but my eyes are dry now. I cannot think what sort of man that makes me.’

‘There is no grief in the abstract,’ says the doctor. ‘What was he to you? To any of us? Ah, here come the women.’ He rubs his hands, smiles at the approaching forms of Jeanne, Héloïse and Lisa Saget. ‘They will know what to do,’ he says. ‘They will have insights.’

The women’s insight — Lisa Saget’s at least — is to prepare the food. Stewed oxtails. Twenty loaves of bread stale enough to soak up the gravy. Wine cooled in the charnels.

By one o’clock, when Lisa beats the saucepan, Sagnac has taken his men away, spirited them out quietly by the door to the rue de la Ferronnerie. The miners file from the church tamely enough. Nothing in their demeanours, the voices they use to each other, suggests anything is much amiss. They collect their tins, their utensils, queue up by the kitchen annexe, carry their food to the preaching cross, sit and eat.

‘I am sorry, Jean,’ says Héloïse to Jean-Baptiste, the pair of them standing privately in the shade of the sexton’s house. ‘But you frightened me so. I do not even think Ragoût would run along a wall like that.’

‘Then I am sorry too,’ he says. ‘But to lose a man in such a manner. .’

‘It was an accident?’

‘We shall never prove otherwise.’

‘And what will you do with him?’

‘Slabbart? He can stay in the church tonight, but we must do something tomorrow. In this heat. .’

‘He had family? A wife, perhaps? Children?’

‘I don’t know. I shall find out.’

‘They could be given some money.’

‘Money!’

‘Money would help them, Jean. You have nothing else to give them.’

The long summer’s afternoon. A great stillness over the cemetery, over the whole quarter. The sky high and pale, a few puffs of cloud, then the sun slipping towards the rue de la Lingerie, and as soon as it has dipped behind the ridges of the roofs, a stealthy, rousing coolness. A moon rises, fat and orange. The carts come from the quarry. The men, who have spent the greater part of the afternoon beside the openings of their tents, set to with no resentment, no undercurrent of complaints, though Jean-Baptiste halts the work as soon as he judges there are bones enough for the overseer at the Porte d’Enfer not to make sour remarks about idlers at the cemetery. The priests begin to march; the hems of their soutanes are white with dust. The singing is ragged, unenthused. Left to their own devices, they might tip every bone into the Seine. August in Paris is not a pious month.

It is close on eleven before Héloïse, Armand, Lisa and Jean-Baptiste leave the cemetery. Guillotin is long since gone, and Jeanne and her grandfather have not been invited to join them: it is late, and there can, of course, be no concert now, no jollity. Armand suggests they go to the Palais Royal, find some corner they can settle into, drink like soldiers. Héloïse protests. The Palais, its unrelenting gaiety, will embarrass them. They can drink in the house. The Monnards, in all likelihood, will have retired for the night, and there is brandy in the kitchen, a bottle of eau de vie upstairs. And wine, of course, Monsieur Monnard’s wine. Should that not be enough?

They go to the house. In the hallway, the air is thick as felt, the whole house dark and quiet. The Monnards have indeed retired. Marie too, though she seems to have taken the brandy to bed with her, perhaps for her cold. Héloïse fetches the eau de vie. In the drawing room, Armand pours four glasses half-full of wine, then tops them up with the spirit. ‘It might taste like wine now,’ he says. ‘Here’s to Slabbart.’ They raise their glasses, sip.

‘What was his first name?’ asks Héloïse.

‘Joos,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘Joos,’ repeats Héloïse softly.

‘Play for us, Armand,’ says Lisa.

Armand shakes his head. ‘Music will add new emotions. We should stay with those we have.’

‘But play anyway,’ she says, touching his hand, stroking the ginger hairs on his fingers.

He shrugs, sits on the stool, shuffles through the music on the stand — those pieces Signor Bancolari tried to teach to Ziguette Monnard — then drops the music onto the floor and begins something slow from memory.

‘It’s out of tune already,’ he says. ‘Everything’s at least a semi-tone flat.’

‘It’s perfect,’ says Héloïse. ‘Please don’t stop.’

Jean-Baptiste has crossed to the window. He stands there, arms folded, looking out. As they only have a pair of candles in the room, both of them on the piano, he can see out without much difficulty. The moon is high now, almost directly overhead, smaller, no longer orange. Armand plays for several minutes, a piece more beautiful than sad but only just.

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

‘The miners?’ asks Héloïse.

‘Yes.’

‘A vigil,’ says Armand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The miners?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘I want to see,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

‘See? See what?’

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

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

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

‘Go with him,’ says Lisa to Armand.

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

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

‘Hush,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Hush.’

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

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

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

‘Can you smell it?’ whispers Armand.

‘What?’

‘Liquor. The place reeks of it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You mean to burn him? Here?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘And what of Jeanne, and her grandfather?’

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

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

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

‘By why this? Why risk everything?’

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

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

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

‘Together,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Together.’

‘Burn the church? Be party to this?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Block nods.

Jeanne says, ‘You must come too!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

At the end of the room the door to the minister’s office is shut (symmetry in that too). In a while, if no yellow-eyed servant comes out to admit him, he will go and knock on it or scratch on it and deliver his report, the thirty neat, ribbon-bound pages he has on his lap detailing — with many necessary omissions — the destruction of the church and cemetery of les Saints-Innocents.

He smooths the cover of the report with the edge of his hand, brushes from it some imagined imperfection, a dust of ashes perhaps. Instructive how much can be enclosed in a document as cool, as innocuous-seeming as a folded napkin! A year of bones, grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests. A year unlike any other he has lived. Will ever live? A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love. .

As for the fire that brought it to an end, that was matter for the report’s last five pages and not, when he came to it, as hard to write as he had feared. A scatter of lies about how and when he discovered the fire, some spurious suppositions as to how it might have started. After that, a brief description of the fire itself, how it burned until daylight the following day, how it destroyed the church in the most complete way imaginable, destroyed the sexton’s house, burnt down the charnels (with the exception of the west charnel), damaged two houses on the rue Saint-Denis and one on the rue de la Ferronnerie, though none of these beyond repair. There was — for what could it matter to the minister? — no need to recount how the grass the next day was like stems of black glass, shattering under their boots, how the preaching cross stretched like a blackened arm out of the wreckage, how the smoke hung over the quarter for two days before a great burst of rain dispersed it, or how the old priest was certified insane by Dr Guillotin and taken in a cab by the doctor himself to the Salpêtrière asylum.

About the miners, it was sufficient to record that their vigilance and courage had saved many properties from the flames, and that after the fire they worked admirably to clear the ground. Five weeks of knocking down what still stubbornly stood, of separating, where it was possible, bones from the tangle of burnt things that resembled them. . Another nineteen convoys were sent to the quarry before he, the chief-of-works, declared that what was left could stay and become part of the hardcore under the new cobbles Mason Sagnac would be laying, the mason having been given formal charge of the site for its final transformation into the Marché des Innocents. .

For that was what had been decided, decreed. A new market on the old man-eating earth of the cemetery! The hustle of small trade, the crying of wares where once there was only the priest’s bell, the thud of the sexton’s spade. And Jeanne will have a stall there. She has said she wishes to. Flowers, dried flowers and herbs, though first she must be delivered of what she carries in that big neat swelling that lifts her skirts from the ground. Guillotin still promises to be her accoucheur. He visits her often and recounts witty, fond stories of the domestic life at the apartment on the rue Aubri Boucher, the dreaming girl, the old gravedigger, the miner. In his last instalment he told them — Jean-Baptiste, Héloïse, Armand, Lisa — of the crib Jan Block had built, a little bed on half-moon rockers, the whole thing, according to the doctor, exquisitely done, a rose carved at the foot end, a little bird like a sparrow at the other.

Of the rest of them — Block’s brethren — they have been gone some two weeks now, though where is uncertain. There was a last interview between Jean-Baptiste and the violet-eyed miner in the gardens behind Saint-Sepulcre, where the men had re-established their camp after the fire. It was dusk, a fine mist over the last of the summer flowers, the dahlias and geraniums. Jean-Baptiste had come with the men’s money. The money was accepted — the pouch briefly weighed in the palm of the miner’s hand — and then, with a slight softening of his habitual formality, the miner informed the engineer that they would be gone by the following morning.

To Valenciennes?

Not there.

But you will remain together?

We will.

Then I wish you. . I am grateful to you. To you all.

A nod.

You are Hoornweder?

Lampsins.

Lampsins, then.

Moemus.

Moemus?

Sack, Tant, Oste, Slabbart. .

The next morning, the gardens were empty. Nothing but some flattened grass to say anyone had been there at all. An odd, unsettling feeling not to have them there any more, there or anywhere. Héloïse accuses him of missing them, and though he laughs at her — how can one miss such people! — there is truth in what she says. He depended on them, depended heavily. Without their specific mix of steadiness and riot, would les Innocents not still be throwing its shadow over the rue Saint-Denis?

And who did he not depend upon? Who did he not burden in that way? The very report could not have been written without Héloïse sitting beside him, page by page, at the table in his old room. When a word he needed was a word still lost, she found it for him and, if necessary, wrote it out for him to copy (her hand taught to her by a lascivious cleric, his thrashed into him by the brothers of the Oratorian Order). Three days it took them, late September heat rolling through the open window, dry thunder over the city. Then, when it was done, they separated and packed their possessions. His own took a bare hour to put into his trunk. Héloïse, with her books and hats, her pins, slippers and ribbons, took an hour longer, though she might have done it more quickly if Marie had not been sitting on the bed in tears and needing every quarter-hour to be soothed with the prospect of Ziguette’s return.

He does not intend to see Ziguette Monnard, not if it can be avoided. Unlikely, of course, she will want to see him — what could they possibly say to each other? — but she is not expected at the house until the end of the month and by then he will be with Héloïse in Bellême, and after that at their new apartment on the rue des Ecouffes.

And after that? What? The cemetery has stolen something out of him, some vitality he will need to restore before he is ready to go on. He should imitate the dead a while; or better still those seeds that lay so long asleep and undisturbed in the earth of the cemetery. Then, when he is ready — and when those ministerial livres and golden louis he has tucked away run dry — he might visit his old teacher, Perronet, ask for something decent, something small, something that does not place him at the disposal of men he does not respect, who do not respect him. .

He looks at the door of the minister’s office. Odd thing how all shut doors are not alike, how in their way they are expressive as human backs. This one tells him that were he to sit there until the end of time, it will not be opened, not unless he does it himself. He gets to his feet, pushes a lock of hair behind an ear, puts his hat under one arm, the report under the other, goes to the door, knocks twice, listens, then reaches for the cold, curved brass of the handles. The room is empty. Of course it is empty. The desk is there, the great desk, but there are no papers on it, no macaroon crumbs, no minister. Has anyone been here in weeks? Months? He lays the report, tidily, at the centre of the desk, shuts the door, goes through the anteroom into the corridor, turns, goes down a flight of stairs, walks the length of a second corridor, descends more stairs, and is stepping into the mouth of yet another broad, door-lined and feebly lit passage when he realises he is following the exact route he took the previous autumn, that he has retraced all his former confusions, has in some manner remembered how to be lost in precisely the same way. Behind this door the Polish gentlemen were playing at cards. Through this he saw the woman carried as if she were a type of boat. And here are the tightly winding service stairs down to where, a year ago, he found soldiers and laundry girls and boys in blue uniforms. Today, apart from a pair of small dogs asleep on a bench, he is alone.

He opens the door to the hall of lemon trees. The trees too are somewhere else. A few empty terracotta pots (each big enough for a man to hide in), some rolled lagging, a row of rakes and hoes and spades dangling from pegs along one wall. . He crosses to the window, forces the damp frame, climbs onto the sill, onto the water barrel, drops down.

No clocks chime in the palace behind him — it is not quite the hour — but the path offers itself just as it did a year before, leads him to the arbour, the bench, the stone cupid above it. He sits. Why not? The afternoon is nearly warm and he does not expect to be a frequent visitor to the Palace of Versailles. The cupid’s shadow falls across his knees. He closes his eyes, breathes, is briefly touched by a sense — utterly convincing — of the moment’s eternity. Is he asleep? Small birds come to wake him. They gather round his feet, but he has nothing to give them. They come closer and closer, seem as if they might hop onto his hands; then, at the thud of heavy boots running on the path, they scatter into the air. A man appears, pauses by the arbour, regards Jean-Baptiste over the top of the scarf wrapped round his nose and mouth, speaks a few muffled, incomprehensible words and runs on. Some seconds later, another man is there, also masked, also running. Then a third, this one in the kind of leather hood with pointed snout house-searchers used to wear in times of plague. After a fourth has run by, Jean-Baptiste gets up to follow them. It is like following bees to their hive. Every time he comes to a fork in the path and is unsure which direction to choose, he has only to wait a moment for another man to run past him. For twenty minutes he plays this game, moves stop-start through a maze of high hedges until he comes to a gate in a brick wall and beyond it to a sanded courtyard. On the far side of the yard is a large stone shed, the sort of building one might imagine being used to house carriages of the better sort, the sort there are a great many of in Versailles.

He stands with his back to the bricks, watching. It is through the shed’s open double doors that the masked men are disappearing. Some of them reappear, run out of the doors and lean panting against a wall before trudging back inside. One, a boy in blue, staggers to a horse trough, tears down his mask and vomits.

Clearly, it is the moment to leave. Clearly too, it will be impossible to leave without knowing what is in the shed. He goes closer, makes a circling, sidling approach to the doors, then passes into the gloom beyond them. In the centre of the shed, the shadowy tumult at its centre, masked men are hauling on ropes. Four gangs of men, four thick ropes. And attached to the end of the ropes something grey and vast and lonely. Each time the men pull and the grey mass is rocked, there is a chiming like the playing of a hundred small bells. Overseeing it all, this hauling, is a man on an upturned pail. He does not notice Jean-Baptiste, not until the engineer has crept close enough to finally understand what it is the men are trying to shift, the great death-swollen bulk of it in its nest of empty wine bottles, one dull eye big as a soup plate, the delicate veined edge of an ear, a curving yellow tusk. . Then the overseer is raging at him, his breath puffing out the cloth over his mouth. He points to the dangling end of the nearest rope. He flails his arms: despair as fury. For several seconds Jean-Baptiste looks up at him, feels for him a terrible brotherly pity, a terrible brotherly disgust. Then he turns away from him, wipes the flies from his face and hurries back to that soft line at the edge of the shed where the light begins.