‘The men? What do you know about the men? You know nothing of them.’
‘I do not think they will hurt you if I am with you.’
‘You will be my protector? And then what? A trial? Or shall I be sent to join that mad girl who broke your head? Where was it she went?’
‘Dauphiné.’
‘Why did you bring me here, Baratte? Could you not have left me to rot in Valenciennes? Do you imagine you have helped me?’
‘Then let me help you now.’
‘Idiot! You cannot even help yourself. Look at you, standing in a stinking cemetery with your spade, wondering if you can get close enough to batter me with it. When you came to the mines, you were gentle. Shy as a girl. When I first saw you, I thought. . I thought, here at last is a man I can open my heart to.’
‘There is no time for this, Lecoeur.’
‘We were friends.’
‘I have not forgotten it.’
‘Was there nothing to value in such a friendship?’
‘The light is coming up. This cannot last much longer.’
‘The light! Ah, yes. The light. Tell me, then. She will live?’
‘Yes. I think so.’
‘I had some good in me once,’ says Lecoeur decisively. ‘Do not let them say otherwise.’
There is a pause — a dense, seashell hush, several seconds long — then the clear, mechanical articulation of a pistol being cocked. The engineer does not move. He waits, outlined against the growing light. The shot, when it comes, is both loud and muffled, a noise as though, in one of the crypts, a great stone-headed hammer had been launched against the slabs above. Echo, reverberation, silence.
He steps forward. ‘Lecoeur?’ he calls. ‘Lecoeur?’ He does not expect an answer.
13
Between eight and nine in the morning, a relentless downpour reduces the preaching-cross fire to a heap of smouldering black beams like the doused wreck of a small cottage. The men keep to their tents. There is bread to eat but nothing more, nothing hot until, in the late morning, Jean-Baptiste and Armand brew two large cans of coffee, lace them heavily with brandy and carry them over the wet grass.
A strange somnolence has settled over the cemetery. No one imagines any work can be done. Not today, not tomorrow either perhaps. And the day after? The day after that?
Guillotin (who, to the high amusement of his colleagues, has dubbed himself ‘physician to the cemetery of les Innocents’) examines Jeanne in the upstairs room where she has been made as comfortable as possible in her grandfather’s bed. When he comes down — his feet heavy and unhurried on the bare wood of the steps — he tells them that the only immediate danger comes from the operating of her own mind, from the morbidity that is the inevitable consequence of such an ordeal. Grief, terror. The loss of maidenhood in such doleful circumstances. And so on. The wounds to her flesh are survivable. A probable fracture of her left cheekbone, some lacerating of the soft tissues of her mouth — lips, tongue, gums, etc. Bruising — extensive — on both arms and much of the torso. .
‘She is young; she is hardy. You, my dear engineer, might convincingly empathise with her, though, I think, not yet. It may be a while before she finds the company of men agreeable again. Madame Saget can remain with her?’
‘She will wish to,’ says Armand.
‘Good. As to whether there will be any issue, any. . Well, let us hope it is not so.’ He smiles in kindly fashion at the sexton, who sits by the unlit grate and who may or may not have taken in much of what he has said. ‘A little time, monsieur. Time will put things right. You have not lost your Jeanne.’
The engineer accompanies Guillotin to the doctors’ workshop. Lecoeur is on the trestle table nearest to the entrance.
‘He was not unlikeable,’ says Guillotin, bending his knees a little to squint into Lecoeur’s head. ‘And at least he had the decency to put out his own light.’
‘I mistook him,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘Mistook? Perhaps. Yet a man may be one thing and then another. He was not some drooling degenerate from the Salpêtrière. He was diligent, well read. Courteous.’
‘If I had been less distracted. Or had been with him more. Outside of here, I mean.’
‘Ah, so you think the cemetery is the culprit? That he was too much among lugubrious scenes?’
‘It is possible, is it not?’
‘Poisoned by them?’
‘Yes.’
‘And thus was uncovered some criminal weakness.’
‘Yes.’
‘He told me you once planned together an imaginary city. A utopia.’
‘When we worked at the mines.’
‘And what was it called? Your city?’
‘Valenciana.’
‘After Valenciennes?’
‘It was. . a game,’ says Jean-Baptiste.
‘You were idealists. Dreamers.’
‘We were young.’
‘Of course. And clever young men like to play such games. You are free of the vice now, I suppose?’ He looks up, grins, then goes to the other trestle table, lifts the lid of the casket. ‘Poor Charlotte,’ he says. ‘These post-mortem adventures have not improved her. You say you carried her back yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘One presumes he attacked Jeanne upon realising Charlotte could not serve his purpose.’ He settles the lid, taps it thoughtfully. ‘And the priest? There is any news of him?’
‘None.’
‘He has vanished?’
‘It was still dark and there was much confusion. My guess is that he is inside the church.’
‘Gone to ground, eh? And you do not much feel like looking for him? Not, at least, without a shovel to protect yourself with. You have had quite a morning. None of it could have been easy. But no doubt the minister saw that you were a man who might be trusted to manage in such a circumstance.’
For some seconds the pair of them gaze down at the corpse on the table. The eyes are part open and give to the shattered face the air of someone intent upon remembering. Then they look away from him, turn away, as if he had passed beyond all relevance.
14
Héloïse comes to the cemetery. Jean-Baptiste has not sent for her; she comes on the authority of her own misgivings. She raps on the door. One of the men — Joos Slabbart — opens the door to her. Though she has often looked down at the cemetery from the windows of the house it is the first time she has been inside the walls of les Innocents. She pauses a moment to take it in — the cross, the stone lanterns, the charnels, the bone walls, the tents — then Slabbart escorts her to the sexton’s house. When she hears what has passed she rests a hand on the sexton’s arm, then takes down Jeanne’s apron from its peg by the stairs. She reminds Jean-Baptiste that she grew up in an inn, and that whatever the failings of her parents (not seeming to care for her much being one), they knew their business and made sure she knew it too. She hikes her skirts, crouches by the empty grate. ‘This first,’ she says, long fingers picking quickly among the kindling.
The next to arrive is Monsieur Lafosse, to whose office in Saint-Germain the engineer sent a runner with a letter as soon as he was able to put his thoughts in order. The letter, written at the kitchen table, was intended to be a dry, almost technical relation of the night’s events, though when he read it through before sealing it, it struck him as more like one of those disturbing dramas full of blind mortals and intractable gods he sometimes flicked through in the library of the Comte de S—, those days when it was too wet to work on the ‘decoration’.