‘Disinterment on such a scale,’ says the admirer of Couperin, a prosperous-looking, well-padded gentleman of about fifty, ‘is quite unique. Every stage of decomposition will be apparent, even to the final handful of dust.’
‘Man’s journey,’ begins his colleague, a more angular, more slightly built man, ‘has, historically, been measured from the moment of his birth to the moment of his death. From first breath to last. Yet thanks to the sharp blades of our anatomists, we now know much of those months when we lie invisibly inside our mothers. Your work here, monsieur, will offer us a most complete view of our fate after that event we call death.’
‘Our physical fate,’ says his colleague in an amused tone, gesturing to where, in the half-dark, the altar crouches.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ says the other. ‘The rest we must leave to the wisdom of Mother Church.’
‘Set up a place for them,’ says Lafosse. ‘Somewhere they may work undisturbed.’
From high over their heads, there comes certain small but distinctly carried sounds that might be nothing but the shifting of those birds that roost there, but Jean-Baptiste catches Armand’s eye and quickly offers whatever assistance the doctors may require. He does not care to have Père Colbert’s voice fall on him again, to have it made plain how little he holds sway here.
‘Then our business is concluded,’ says Lafosse. He turns, uncertainly, as if in search of the way out.
‘I am Dr Thouret,’ says the slighter of the two strangers, realising at last that he will receive no introduction from the minister’s emissary. ‘My colleague here —’ the colleague smiles graciously — ‘is Dr Guillotin.’
After the midday meal, the men, under Jean-Baptiste’s instruction, build a pulley from three stout poles lashed together, a wheel, a length of chain. They make a canvas cradle to attach to the end of the chain. They make two ladders with broad and strongly fixed rungs. They stoke the fire. They set to work again.
With his plumb line, Jean-Baptiste measures the depth of the floor of the pit at a little over thirteen metres. The bone wall will soon be too high for the men to reach to the top of it. Such a profusion would be less troubling if he had not, the previous evening received a communication from the Porte d’Enfer informing him that they had suffered flooding from an uncharted spring and that it would be some time before they were ready to accept any material from les Innocents. There was no indication as to whether they meant days, weeks or months. Even a few weeks, at this rate, and the cemetery would become a labyrinth. They would lose each other in corridors of bone.
The gangs — diggers, collectors, stackers — are rotated at hourly intervals. It is evident that no one must be left more than two hours at the bottom of the pit. Near the end of the afternoon — it has been one of those days when the light struggles to impose itself, to convince — one of the men, coming up the ladder at the end of his shift, pauses, lets go of the rung and tumbles backwards. Fortunately, he does not break his fall on the heads of his fellows. He is raised to the surface in the canvas cradle.
‘It is Block,’ says Lecoeur, kneeling by the man’s side. ‘Jan Block.’
In the surface air, Block stirs, looks about himself and, ashen still, gets to his feet.
‘Let him go to his tent if he wishes,’ says Jean-Baptiste. He has already heard someone mutter the words ‘choke-damp’. All of them know it, and at Valenciennes, all will have seen or heard of a man drowning in some undetectable element. Absurd, of course, to imagine that it could exist in the pit, but he calls a break and lets them pass the bottle. They look at him. He sees in their gazes nothing he can put a name to. After fifteen minutes, he sends a new party down the ladders.
Among the items found in the pit today: a green coin from the reign of Charles IX; a rusted but recognisable gorget; a ring with a cross on it — not valuable; more buttons; the blade of a knife — why? For use in the next world? A curious small piece of coloured glass, heart-shaped, quite pretty.
This last the engineer rinses when he washes his hands in the evening, and on some whim, or simply not knowing what else to do with it, he presents it to Jeanne, who accepts it, a strange solemn smile on her face.
6
A man runs away, runs away with his pack in the middle of the night. No one saw him go; no one heard him. Even the men in his own tent look surprised, uneasy, as if he might have been spirited away, perhaps by something they have disturbed in the pit. Lecoeur offers to lead a party in pursuit of him. He cannot have got far and will surely find it hard to conceal himself in a city he knows nothing of.
‘They are not prisoners,’ says Jean-Baptiste. ‘They are not bonded labour.’
‘The men expect a firm hand,’ says Lecoeur, who has this morning cut his neck shaving. ‘After all, have we not rescued them from the mines?’
‘I do not know,’ says Jean-Baptiste, more to himself than Lecoeur, ‘who we have rescued.’
Of the others, all are accounted for, though the man who fell from the ladder, Jan Block, is not fit to work and Jean-Baptiste visits him in his tent, where he lies on his bed of straw like Holbein’s Christ. His eyes follow the engineer’s dark form as it crosses the entrance of the tent and stands above him in the tent’s light.
‘You have pain? You are suffering?’
Block wets his lips with the tip of a pale tongue, says something, says it twice more before Jean-Baptiste understands.
‘You are cold?’
‘Yes.’
‘We will bring you more blankets. We will bring something hot for you to drink.’
Block blinks. The engineer leaves. When he finds Jeanne, he asks her if she could visit the sick man, take him some coffee or broth. And is there a blanket somewhere? He complains of the cold.
In the pit, under Lecoeur’s direction, the men are already at work. Fire, pulley, ladders. The hollow sound of bones laid on bones. A simple call from the men below warns those above that the canvas cradle is filled and ready for hoisting. They are deep enough now to need lights even in the morning, four torches protruding from the walls and burning fitfully. Jean-Baptiste crouches, tries to see the condition of the walls. Does the earth fray? Is there risk of collapse? Could the men be got out quickly if a side of the pit did collapse?
He decides that he must go down and see for himself (it is time he went down), and with no announcement he swings himself onto the nearest ladder and begins to descend. He is aware that both below and above him all work has ceased, that they are watching him. His feet feel for the rungs. The sky recedes. The air thickens.
Stepping off the bottom of the ladder, he suffers a momentary loss of balance and has to grip the elbow of the man nearest him. Now that he is down here, he should tell them to continue with their work, but there is so little room. He looks at them, their long faces lit from above by fire and the feeble light of morning. He looks at the black walls, looks at what he is standing on, looks up to where Lecoeur’s head and shoulders are bent over the pit’s edge. He takes a spade from the hands of the man he stumbled against, presses its blade into the earth wall, twists the blade and watches a piece of the wall come away in a damp slab. He tests the opposite wall in the same manner and with the same result. He returns the tool, gets a boot on the bottom rung of the ladder, is swept by a wave of nausea that, thank God, he is able to control, to let pass. He climbs, reaches the top, steadies himself on the grass.
To Lecoeur, who has come up close beside him, he says huskily, ‘We will build frames. Box-cribs to secure the walls. Bring the men out.’