‘It will not.’
‘Because the minister won’t permit it? Very well. But I do not think you will be digging up any bones this side of Christmas. You should go home. Remind yourself of who you are.’
Jean-Baptiste nods, taps around his toes with the edge of the spade. Home. He would like nothing better. He aches for it.
‘And you?’ he asks.
‘Christmas? I shall stay drunk for three days. Lisa will berate me for the dog I am. Then I will grow sober, make love to her for hours, go with her and the children to Saint-Eustache for mass. Have ungodly thoughts about the young wife in the pew ahead of me. Perhaps find a way to press against her at the communion rail.’
‘And your friends? Renard? Fleur, de Bergerac?’
‘Ah, you did not like them much, did you? In fact, there is not much to like about them. By the way, that paint on your cheek will wash off eventually. In the meantime, you can pretend they are beauty spots. Now, talking of beauty. .’
The girl Jeanne, a heavy shawl over her shoulders, is walking towards them from the sexton’s house. She raises a pink hand in greeting.
‘You are back,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘I wondered where you had gone.’
‘I had some business,’ he says, ‘in another place. I travelled.’
‘That’s nice,’ she says. ‘Was it nice?’
‘It served its purpose,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘And does she know,’ asks Armand, ‘what its purpose was? Does she know what you have in mind for us?’
Jeanne looks at Armand, then at Jean-Baptiste. ‘You have something in mind for us?’ she asks.
‘Others do,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘Important people.’
‘Oh,’ she says.
‘Oh, indeed,’ says Armand.
‘You must have wondered, Jeanne, what I was doing here. When you were helping me, you must have wondered.’
‘I enjoyed helping you,’ she says. ‘I will help you today if you wish.’
‘I will not need it today,’ he says.
‘The cemetery,’ says Armand, ‘for I shall tell her if you won’t. The cemetery is to be got rid of, Jeanne. The cemetery and the church.’
‘The matter was settled long ago,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘The place is to be made new. Pure. It is what the king himself wishes.’
‘The king?’
‘You have nothing to fear. The remains, the bones, will all be taken to a place, a consecrated place, where they may be kept safely.’
‘All of them?’ she asks.
‘Yes.’
‘And you can do this?’ She looks at the spade.
‘I will have others to help me,’ he says.
She nods several times. ‘If it is what you want,’ she says quietly.
‘You and your grandfather, you will be provided for. You have my word on it.’
‘You want to be careful what you promise,’ says Armand.
‘The cemetery,’ says Jean-Baptiste, ignoring him, ‘cannot just be forgotten about, can it?’
‘Oh, no,’ she says, ‘it cannot.’
‘And you know how the people complain of it.’
She frowns. ‘Grandfather says they used to be proud to live by such a famous place. They boasted of it.’
‘People’s noses,’ says Armand, ‘have grown more delicate.’
She nods again, more emphatically, as if the matter was entirely proved.
‘And the house?’ she asks.
‘You will have a new one. Perhaps even here when the land has been cleared.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Grandfather will be well if I am with him,’ she says.
‘Of course. You must be with him.’
For a quarter-minute they stand without speaking. They look about themselves. They can see nothing to suggest that anything will ever be other than the way it is now.
An hour later, warming themselves with brandy and hot water in a mirrored booth at the Café de Foy, Armand says, ‘She agrees only because it is you. You have used some Norman enchantment on her. But have you not misled her? Once your miners get to work, they will fling the bones around like firewood. And this house you have promised her. Did you not invent it on the spot? You have no more power to give her a house than you have to give me the organ at Saint-Eustache.’
‘I will do what I can,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘You will do what you are told,’ says Armand. ‘Isn’t that more like it?’
‘The minister. .’
‘Your great friend the minister.’
‘I do not believe he is. . unfeeling.’
‘And you think he will feel something for Jeanne? Or is it you who feels something for her? I can see that it might be nice to curl up with a girl like that on a cold night.’
‘She is barely more than a child.’
‘Barely will do. Our beloved queen was wed at fourteen. And she’d go with you. You could smuggle her up to your room at the Monnards’. Though no doubt it would put Ziguette’s nose out of joint.’
‘It is you, I think, who is interested in Ziguette.’
‘If you mean would I do it with her if the opportunity presented itself, the answer is yes. So, I assume, would you. Which makes me think we should go and ogle our Persian princess. What do you say?’
‘Not today.’
‘No? You are being very dull, Monsieur Bêche. You want to beware of dullness. It is not modern. But it shall be as you wish. When you’ve paid for the brandy, I will do you the honour of escorting you to your lodgings.’
At the edge of the market, as they are crossing the top of the rue des Prêcheurs, they encounter the Austrian. She is carrying a small parcel of books, wrapped and neatly tied with black twine. She gives the impression of being only a very little disturbed by the cold, the slush on the cobbles, the eddying wind others scowl into. Armand salutes her, then catches something of the glance, the second’s worth of to-and-fro between the whore and the engineer.
‘Oh, no. Not her as well?’ he asks. And starts to laugh.
SECOND
One day I shall mourn for those who are dear to me, or I shall be mourned by them. . At the thought of death, the oppressed soul longs to open itself completely and envelop the objects of its affection.
1
The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping. How much has changed in two hundred years? Did the people not live much like this in the days of Henri IV? They may have lived better, with fewer of them and the land less tired and the lords, with their just glimpsable chateaux, less numerous.
He is going home! Home for the first time in eleven weeks, though in his heart it might as easily be eleven years, himself a grizzled Ulysses straining his eyes for the blue shadow of Ithaca.
The roads, thank God, are passable. Last week’s snow has thawed and the new weather — a low, icy sun, the air cracking at night — has turned the mud to stone.
He has changed coach twice. The driver of this one is worryingly drunk, but the horses know their way. He looks out at the wall of a forest, frets when they are held up by a flock of geese being herded on the road ahead by some dreaming girl with a stick. Then a final hill, a church tower purple in the afternoon light and the coachman’s voice bellowing, ‘Bellême! Bellême!’
He climbs down in the market square. His bag is unlashed, dropped into his arms. As ever, a small group of townsfolk are stood nearby, arms folded, watching. In Bellême, curiosity will never go out of fashion. One of these watchers, a widow who deals in cures for the toothache, for palsy, wet ulcers, recognises him and he speaks to her and hears of the deaths of two or three whose names he knows, of the wedding of a local girl to a cloth-shearer in Mamers, of a man caught poaching on the cardinal’s estate and sent for trial at Nogent. Nobody, it seems, is making any money. The soil grows only stones. And yet somehow everyone is managing and the church clock is being repaired and God will grant them a better year next year, for they are not bad people and their sins are only small ones.