Pure (22 page)

For several seconds no one moves. Rain falls on the dead girls’ faces. Then the doctors kneel and with their umbrellas shelter them, anglers who have suddenly become suitors. They make their preliminary examinations. Thouret touches the hay-coloured hair of one; Guillotin gently shifts the lips of the other with the tip of a metal spike he has, a silver toothpick perhaps. They confer. Guillotin orders the coffins closed up and carried immediately to the workshop.

‘A form of mummification,’ he says to Jean-Baptiste. ‘A remarkable instance. Remarkable! Like a pair of dried flowers . . .’

Manetti’s handcart is employed. The doctors, walking either side of the cart, escort the coffins on their journey towards the church, the workshop. All labouring has ceased. The men are priming their pipes. The afternoon is still and rain-hushed. Now that death has looked so like life, should there not be some ceremony to make the moment decent? Should Père Colbert not be led out of the church to say a prayer, sprinkle holy water? But Colbert, even if they could find him, would come among them like John the Baptist with a raging toothache. He would be quite likely to throw someone into the pit – the young engineer, for example.

Lecoeur, with the rain dripping from the brim of his hat, looks at Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste nods. Lecoeur gives the order to go on, fairly barks it. Without a murmur, the men obey.

After dark, Armand, Lecoeur and Jean-Baptiste are invited by Guillotin to view the preserved women or, rather, to view one of them, for the other has already been investigated by the doctors and is, as a result, less viewable. Lecoeur has a candle, Dr Guillotin a lamp of smokeless whale oil. The coffin is on a trestle table in the canvas workshop. They remove the lid and gaze at her.

‘I have named her Charlotte,’ says Dr Guillotin, ‘after a niece of mine in Lyon who I think in life she might have resembled.’

‘She is young,’ says Armand, his voice, like the doctor’s, subdued almost to a whisper.

‘Young and old together,’ says the doctor. ‘I estimate she died about her twentieth year and was committed to the ground some fifty years ago. Our good sexton claims to have a memory of burying two young women about the time he was first employed here. A pair of local beauties, unwed. The occasion, apparently, of much public lamentation.’

‘Then they died virgins,’ says Lecoeur, something like reverence in his voice.

‘Few local beauties die virgins,’ says Armand.

‘Perhaps it is true,’ says the doctor. ‘I have not yet ascertained if Charlotte is
intacta
. But for the other, Dr Thouret and I believe there was some evidence of her having conceived.’

‘There was a child in her?’ asks Jean-Baptiste.

‘I cannot say for certain. The internal organs have taken on the consistency of wood pulp or papier-mâché. There were, however, indications.’

‘What will you do with her?’ asks Armand. ‘Your Charlotte? Cut her up like the other?’

‘I think,’ says Dr Guillotin, ‘I would rather endeavour to preserve her as she is. We might construct a glass cabinet for her. Present her at the academy.’

‘And she will keep,’ asks Jean-Baptiste, ‘now she is in the air again?’

The doctor shrugs, then looks past Jean-Baptiste’s shoulder and smiles. ‘Were you curious to see her too?’ he asks.

The others look round. Jeanne is standing at the entrance of the workshop. With the exception of Dr Guillotin, the men look momentarily uneasy, as if surprised in the strong flow of some improper enthusiasm.

‘I wondered if you wished for anything,’ she says. She does not step inside, does not approach the box. After a few moments, Guillotin and Lecoeur carefully replace the lid.

10

The new pit offers no more local beauties. As they reach its depths (it is the deepest yet: twenty-two metres at the last drop of the plumb line), the coffins are mostly broken, their occupants muddled with their neighbours, shuffled. All through the middle of the week they stay at it until eight or nine at night, digging and hauling and stacking by the illumination of pitch torches, lamps and bonfires. Then, on Saturday – the serene light of some planet shining in the fading glow of the western sky – they come to the end of it. The men below look up; those above peer down. The engineer gives the order to suspend work. He asks Lecoeur to gather the men by the preaching cross, then goes up the spiral steps with Lecoeur and announces his decision that each time a pit is emptied, each time one is finished, every man will receive a bonus of thirty sous. He did the calculations the previous night, moving figures between carefully blotted columns until he found the money he needed.

‘And something else,’ he says, feeling for the appropriate register, a voice that might combine paternal indulgence with something bluff and worldly. ‘Tomorrow, the cemetery doors will be open and you will be free to go out until sunset, when the doors will be locked again. As for tonight, the doors may find themselves open for an hour in case any of our friends should wish to visit us.’

Lecoeur claps. He intends, perhaps, the men should join him in a show of appreciation, but there is nothing but some muttered talk, some shifting from boot to boot. Have they understood him? He looks at Lecoeur, but before he can ask his advice, ask him perhaps to put the whole thing into a growl of Flemish, Lisa Saget is beating the saucepan and the men file off to their tents to fetch knives and tins.

‘It is very good to let them out,’ says Lecoeur, once they have descended the steps. ‘Their hearts lifted.’

‘You think so?’

‘I saw it plainly.’

Jean-Baptiste nods. What
he
has seen plainly is himself on Monday morning without a single miner, or with a ragged half-dozen blind from drinking and fleeced of everything but their shirts. They may be tough as janissaries, these men, but they will be no match for the patter, the quick hands of the locals. Yet if he tries to confine them any longer, he will have a revolt, and one that will not be remedied with clay pipes and tobacco. At Valenciennes – though he did not see it in person – there were stories of the men running amuck, smashing machinery, torching company buildings, even laying siege to the managers’ compound until the militia arrived. Most of them are northerners, like himself. Slow to rouse, but when the spirit takes them . . .

An hour after the men have eaten, the women arrive, cautious at first, the face of the boldest peeping round the half-open door from the rue aux Fers; then the door is thrown wide and in they march, calling as they come, cooing, waving their arms.

Lecoeur, Armand, Jeanne, Lisa Saget and Jean-Baptiste watch them from a moat of night-shadow at the foot of the church’s western wall. It is not easy to count them. Lecoeur makes it twelve. Armand tells him he has missed one, then names a few – Simone, Marie-Anne, and that skinny one at the back who is called La Pouce. The youngest looks no older than Jeanne, while the oldest – a big, brassy creature with a voice like a colour-sergeant – is almost grandmotherly, and moves over the rough ground with a grim and purposeful hobbling.

The miners wait like the crew of an enchanted vessel. The women wash over them, through them. A party starts in the light of the fire. The men pass round their bottles, their tin mugs primed with brandy. The women drink, grow professionally wild, choose their mates, price themselves. The first couples steer into the darkness, arm in arm, like lovers anywhere. The watchers by the church, who have been standing quietly (and something in the manner of explorers observing the ceremonies of primitives on a beach beneath the Southern Cross), now retreat to the sexton’s house. Block and Manetti are sitting either side of the kitchen fire, the sexton asleep, his head against the wing of his chair, Jan Block drowsily awake, flinching a little at the others’ arrival and returning the engineer’s nod with some awkward deferential movement of his own head.

They sit at the kitchen table. There’s brandy here too. (Brandy everywhere, thinks Jean-Baptiste. I shall end up floating the bones to the Porte d’Enfer on a tide of the stuff.) They talk, but their conversation is pierced by the whoops and laughter of the revelry outside. Thoughts are diverted. A carnal magnetism creeps around the edges of the house like wisps of blue fog.

‘We must have music,’ says Lisa Saget, and immediately she starts to sing in a plain but pleasant voice, light, girlish, quite different to her speaking voice. Armand joins her. Lecoeur enthusiastically mistaps the beat on the tabletop. The sexton wakes, looks, in his own house, briefly lost. Jeanne settles him, rubs the wrinkled brown backs of his hands.

Armand reaches for his coat. ‘We shall have music after all,’ he says. ‘We shall raid old Colbert’s candle store. You two –’ he points to Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur – ‘will man the bellows. The ladies will prettily sit, and I, the director of music, will play for your delight.’

While Jean-Baptiste is searching for some objection to this ridiculous plan (go into the church now? Play music?), the others are buttoning their coats. They look at him: it is hard to resist such looks. He shrugs, stands. If he cannot stop them, he can at least ensure there is no excessive behaviour, though the sudden prospect of it – excess! – wakes in him a kind of lively thirst, and he follows them out of the house willingly enough, eagerly perhaps.

They take the door into the south transept. Armand is at the front, holding high a lantern that throws a feathery light across walls dense with Latin couplets, dates, good works, blazonry. They shuffle, one behind the other. Their whispers fly about their heads. Things lean towards them from the dark, briefly loom. The gilt-flecked wing of an archangel ripples as they pass. A Virgin, her yellow face full of secret amusement, importunes them from a pillar . . .

In one of the chapels, Armand loots candles from an iron box, passes them back. They huddle to light them from each other’s flames. As the light grows, Jean-Baptiste sees, lined up on the other side of the chapel, a half-dozen large containers, jars of thick greenish glass in snug wicker baskets, some clear liquor inside them. Around the glass necks, labels hang from twists of wire. He leans with his candle to read one.

Ethanol.

He steps back so rapidly his candle goes out.

‘You put these here?’ he hisses to Armand.

‘These? They came last week. Something for our friends the doctors.’

‘It is ethanol! Pure spirit. Put a flame near it and the whole church could burn down.’

‘Peace,’ says Armand. ‘The tops are in tight, see? Sealed with wax. There’s nothing to fear. And would it matter if the church burnt down? Would it not save us all a great deal of trouble?’

The engineer ushers them out of the chapel, is easier only once they have crossed the nave and gathered around the organ. On either side of the instrument’s keyboards are brass rings in the form of delicate wreaths, and into these go four of the candles. Armand settles himself. Jean-Baptiste and Lecoeur go round to the pump, a metre of priapic oakwood, thick as an oar.

‘I shall be glad of the exercise,’ whispers Lecoeur, his breath emerging in a silvery gas. ‘This place is cold as the moon.’

‘Colder,’ says Jean-Baptiste.

The women sit thigh to thigh on the nearest pew, holding their candles in front of them like penitents.

‘Begin!’ calls Armand.

They begin. Down, up. Down, up. Down, up. In its depths on the far side of the panelling, the instrument starts to click and wheeze. For Jean-Baptiste, it feels as if they are having to crank the whole machine into the air, to physically raise it. Or else it is as though they are resuscitating some collapsed leviathan, something like the elephant the minister said so frightened the dogs at Versailles. Then, from the thing’s attic, comes a long sigh, the last breath of the world, and upon it, delicate as drops of rain, the music begins. Voix céleste, voix humaine, trompette, cromorne, tierce – the sounds building in layers, breaking in waves. Lecoeur is shouting something to him. Jean-Baptiste grimaces in reply, but he cannot understand him, cannot hear his words. The low notes are feeling out all the architecture of his chest; the high notes are doing something similar to his soul. Sweet Christ! They may as well be inside it. And this pumping! Up, down. Up, down. Beauty, it seems, has hard work at its root, and he begins to imagine a device, an automatic bellows, steam-driven, perfectly doable, and almost has it, the whole mechanism laid out in oiled parts in his head, when the music breaks off, mid-scale.

He lets go of the pump and walks to the front of the organ. In the pews behind Jeanne and Lisa Saget, in the wash of thin light from their candles, a scatter of ghostly figures are sitting, while others are quietly taking their places beside them. The miners and their whores. The whores with their miners. Men and women under a spell.

‘You have your audience at last,’ says Jean-Baptiste. Armand is watching them in the little mirror he has above the music stand. He turns a page of manuscript, smooths it, orders Jean-Baptiste back to his station.

It begins again: an opening just as delicate as the last (think of seamstresses, watch springs) and then, with no gradation, recklessly huge (think of mail coaches, cannonades), and then . . . then something very like a brawl, a riot. The engineer and Lecoeur abandon their oar. A voice – one Jean-Baptiste has been assaulted with before – is booming from the dark directly above them, and missiles, little black books – missals? – are flying down on their heads, now hitting a miner, now hitting a whore, now – stupendous shot! – slapping the flushed cheek of the organist himself.