At the Palais, the night air shimmers with superfluous light. Flambeaux, chandeliers, strings of Chinese lanterns. If he could illuminate the cemetery like this they could dig all night. Another thirty men, one gang sleeping, one digging, then a change of shift at dawn and dusk. At Valenciennes, there were seams worked like that, men and women, pumps and horses, working round the clock. God knows he will need to think of something, some innovation if they are not still to be digging up the dead when the new century arrives.
He fights his way forward, his black coat brushing against green and reds, silvers and golds. Faces swim out of the crush. A man, heavily powdered, pokes out the tip of his tongue at the engineer. Two women, who may or may not be courtesans with apartments on the first floor, glance up at him from their game of teasing a monkey, the creature tethered by a length of silver chain to a spike. .
Outside the Café Correzza, a young man with yellow hair stands precariously on a chair making a speech. What is it? The usual stuff. The hearts of men, the requirements of Nature, the promise of philosophy, the destiny of mankind, indomitable justice, virtue. . And did he mention Bêche? Bêche the Avenger? Impossible to hear over the din the others are making, the gossip, the laughter, the broken marching of harlots and gentry, the half-dozen little bands playing in the courtyard.
He goes into l’Italien, gets a seat near the porcelain stove, orders brandy. He is, he fancies, served more quickly these days. It is the black coat? A black severity that makes him appear half priest, half functionary, the wielder of ambiguous powers? Or is it something Ziguette Monnard unearthed? A newfound willingness to press a key to a man’s throat? Violence is respected; he has learnt that much about the world. It may even be one of those virtues the young man on the chair was preaching about. Gentlemen with blood up to their shoe buckles, bowing and making to each other un beau geste. Virtuous violence. The virtuous necessity of it. Violence as a duty. It is, very likely, the coming thing.
When he reaches into his pocket to pay for the brandy, he pulls out Ziguette’s satin shoe-thing. The waiter treats him to a waiter’s almost invisible grin. Outside, he steps through a family of female mandolin players, abandons the satin thing on the windowsill of Salon No. 7 and regains the dark, the sudden hush of the streets behind the Bourse. A little brandy has sobered him up. He knows what he’s about now. When he reaches the buttresses of Saint-Eustache, he starts to run.
Coming in, he is momentarily disappointed to find her looking less unhappy than he had imagined she would. In fact, she does not really look unhappy at all. She smiles at him, calmly, holds out her book above the head of Ragoût, who has curled his bulk tidily on her lap. She points to a word halfway down the page.
‘I cannot see it,’ he says.
‘You are not looking at it,’ she says.
‘You cannot read it?’ he asks.
‘ “Refraction”,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ he says, laughing. ‘Yes. I know it. Refraction. To use a lens to change the angle of the light.’
He carries the cat onto the passage (set down, it shivers with disgust), then comes back into the room, takes off his boots, coat, waistcoat. They sit side by side on the bed. She wets two fingertips, puts out the candle. There is light enough from the fire. They lie down. They kiss. Their mouths at first feel cool to each other, then warm. She is, unsurprisingly, good at buttons. He struggles out of his breeches, presses his face into her breasts, clings to her. Gently, she disentangles herself, works her shift up until it is rucked about her hips. When he dares to look, he sees flame-light on the skin of her thighs. Under his shirt, he’s hard as a bottle, too hard. Almost as soon as she touches him, he convulses, lets out the sort of strangled half-shout he might have made the night Ziguette Monnard brought the ruler down on his head.
It is another week before, in an unexpected mid-afternoon encounter, neither of them much undressed, he finally enters her. Once he is inside her, he lowers his brow, lets their skulls press lightly against each other. With her thumb she traces the line of his scar, the ridge of nerveless skin. From that moment on, in his own heart, he considers her to be his wife.
11
At les Innocents, there is a sharp increase in the number of rats. Rats visible. Guillotin is of the opinion they are leaving. The men acquire cats. Each tent has at least one, though not even Lecoeur seems to know where they have got them from. From their Saturday-night women perhaps, their moppets. Sometimes the engineer thinks he sees Ragoût among them, patrolling in the dusk, but at a distance one cat can seem much like another. At night, they fight epic battles. A cat is killed, but so too many of the rats, their bodies, whole or sundered, found in the lengthening grass or left as trophies on the steps of the charnels.
A new pit — pit fourteen — is opened in the vicinity of the south charnel. In addition to this, the engineer decides to broach the first of the private crypts. He gathers a small team — Slabbart, Biloo, Block, Everbout — and walks them to the west charnel under the windows of the rue de la Lingerie. They will start with the Flaselle family, the tomb sealed in 1610. With chisel and mallet they break the mortar, loosen the top-stone, then drive in their long, wedge-tipped steel bar and haul down until the stone shifts. They lower a ladder; it only just reaches. The crypt, it seems, has aristocratic dimensions. Jan Biloo is the first man down. As he descends, his light begins to flicker. Somewhere near the bottom of the ladder, it goes out. They call; he does not answer. Jean-Baptiste and Jan Block go down to get him. They hold their breath like scallop divers. They find him with their groping hands, drag his dead weight up the ladder until Everbout and Slabbart can take hold of him. He comes to almost immediately, but he and the engineer and Jan Block are some minutes together crouched on the grass outside the charnel, spitting, sucking in air.
Later, in the sexton’s kitchen, Jean-Baptiste sketches designs for breathing equipment, masks with filters of treated lamb’s wool or powdered charcoal. Or something more complete, a closed hood with an air-pipe and some manner of clapper valve to allow exhaled air to be expelled. He tries to interest Lecoeur in his ideas, but Lecoeur’s mind is elsewhere.
‘Monsieur Lecoeur is exhausted,’ says Jeanne, perhaps more sharply than she intended. ‘Everyone is exhausted.’
He nods. She knows about Héloïse Godard, of course; the whole quarter knows, though only Armand will speak to him about it. He folds the sketch, pockets it.
Lecoeur smiles at them both, dreamily. ‘We Lecoeurs,’ he begins, ‘we Lecoeurs. .’ Then he shrugs and turns away and gazes out of the window again.
12
Each morning, in the liquid half-light of spring dawns, he wakes from blank sleep beside Héloïse. Some mornings he wakes to find her watching him, wakes into her smile. And some mornings he is the first and lies very still, studying the lovely imperfections of her face, the privacy and mystery of her shut eyes. Then, when she opens them, her gaze, its roots deep in sleep and dreams, often has some taint of sadness to it, though it is a sadness she denies if he ever asks her about it. With dry mouths they lie a while talking of intimate, unimportant things. With dry lips they kiss a little. And this is medicine to him, this gift of mornings, the doggish warmth under the covers, the birdsong on the neighbours’ roofs, the new heartbeat in the bolster. He hardly notices how much he has ceased to notice, how much of the world beyond this room he has ceased to properly attend to.