Sometimes — rarely — she sees the old priest in his glasses, a big wingless bat in the dusk. And sometimes the red-haired musician, who comes out to relieve himself and always waves when he sees her. She would like to look at his hands. His hands must be special because only special hands could make the sounds he makes, that music that once or twice a month seeps through the black walls of the church and makes her heart race.
Outside the house, she looks up to let the autumn sun rest its warmth on her face, then, revived, comforted by its touch, she goes inside. Grandfather is in the kitchen. She brings the bird to him, holds it up for him to put his fingers into its feathers. He makes a little grunt of approval, then tilts his chin towards the room off the kitchen, the sexton’s office, a whitewashed room with a narrow, arched window where who knows how many volumes of records with their dust, their mouse droppings, their crazy marblings of damp, are lined up on sagging shelves. A man is standing at the desk with one of the volumes open in front of him. He stares at it, turns a page, presses a cloth to his face, shuts his eyes, inhales deeply, then pushes the cloth back into the pocket of his coat. The coat is unbuttoned and beneath it she can see a line of his suit, green like the heart of a lettuce.
The hen clucks; the man turns towards the kitchen. He nods to her, and when she says nothing, he tells her his name. ‘I am looking at the records,’ he says.
‘I can see it,’ she says.
He nods again, returns to the book.
‘We can offer you wine, monsieur,’ she says. ‘And we have a little coffee too.’
He has put the cloth to his face again and shakes his head. There is a perfume in the cloth she finds almost offensively strong. Grandfather takes the hen outside.
‘Are you a foreigner?’ she asks.
‘I am from Normandy,’ he says. He is running a finger down a meticulously inked column. Seven Flaselles expired, one after the other, in the autumn of 1610. Seven in less than a month.
‘I thought so,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘I have not seen you before.’
‘You know everyone in Paris?’
‘In the quarter,’ she says.
‘You know a family called Flaselle?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘There are no Flaselles here.’
‘There were once,’ he says. He closes the volume and walks towards her. From outside comes a frenzied clucking, an abrupt silence.
‘You are Jeanne?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ she says, grinning at the lilt of his voice.
‘Your grandfather said you would show me the cemetery. That you know where the pits are.’
‘The pits?’
‘The common graves.’
‘They are everywhere,’ she says.
‘But you can show me?’
She shrugs. ‘If you wish.’
The old man comes in, the bird’s head in one hand, the softly kicking body in the other. Drops of blood fall like seeds onto the stone of the kitchen floor.
They start with the south charnel, a gallery of blackened stone adjacent to the rue de la Ferronnerie. Of the arches into the gallery, some are barred with man-high gates of rusted iron; others are open. Above the arches — and immediately visible to anyone coming into the cemetery — are garrets where bones, some black as the stones, have been packed behind iron grilles.
After a second of hesitation, Jean-Baptiste steps through one of the arches. On the stone beneath his feet is an inscription. He crouches, touches the lettering with a fingertip. Henri something, struck down, and his son also, beloved something, wife to, late of, devout, fleeting, merciful, the flesh, eternity, 14 something.
He stands and walks a little way along the gallery. Light falls oddly, shows some things clearly, others not at all. He sees the delicate tracery of stone flowers, sees a stone woman holding a stone veil across her face. Narrow steps presumably lead up to the garrets. His shoe kicks a fragment of masonry, the sound of it followed immediately by the sudden scuttling of live things, invisible but close. He turns, hurries back into the open.
He has a notebook with him, a roll of linen tape. When he takes measurements, he asks Jeanne to hold one end of the tape; then, with a steel-tipped pen, a portable inkwell, he writes and sketches in the notebook. He has many questions. She answers them all, and he scratches her replies onto the paper. Sometimes he shuts his eyes and takes out the cloth. He asks if she can read.
‘A little,’ she says, and points to the inscription on a stone. ‘ “Hic Jacet,” ’ she says. ‘And there, “Hic Requiescit.” And there, “Hic est Sepultura.” ’
He nods, almost smiles.
She says, ‘You can read.’
‘I’m an engineer,’ he says. ‘You know what that is?’
‘A kind of priest?’
‘We build things. Structures.’
‘Like a wall?’
‘Like a bridge.’
He asks her the location of the most recent of the common graves. She leads him to it. He looks down, looks around. There is nothing obvious to distinguish it from the patch beside it.
‘You are sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it was closed, sealed, five years ago?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were a child then.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you remember?’
‘Yes.’
They go on. (He needs to keep moving.) Pit after pit.
‘And this? It is older than the last?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this one?’
‘Older still.’
He makes a map. She watches how he can make a line thinner or thicker with a little adjustment of the angle of the nib. And the figures and the little words. There’s a beauty to it.
‘What’s that?’ she asks, pointing to a squiggle, one of several she has seen him make, a shape like a half-skull.
‘A question mark,’ he says. ‘For when there is some uncertainty.’
Her face falls. ‘Then you have not believed me,’ she says.
He tells her that he has, but that what is under the ground is hidden. What is hidden cannot accurately be known.
‘Not by you,’ she says. There is no pertness in her reply. He seems to consider it a moment, then shuts the book, the inkwell, wipes the nib of the pen.
‘We are finished for today,’ he says. As they walk back to the sexton’s house, he asks, ‘Wouldn’t you like to leave here? Live somewhere else?’
‘I don’t know anywhere else,’ she says. ‘And who would look after them?’
‘Them?’
She gestures to the ground around them. ‘The dead,’ she says.
When he has parted from the girl, from the old sexton, he goes into the church. The girl has pointed out a door he can use, not the big door the corpses and the mourners must have come through, but a smaller one to the side of it, its lintel low enough to make him bow his head. For a few strides he is in a vestibule, black as Hell, then a second door lets him into the body of the church. He is at the back of the south aisle. Ahead, he can see part of the rose window above the altar. There is no sound or sign of any presence other than his own. He starts to navigate, right to left, passes behind the backs of pews, passes dreaming pillars, crosses the nave, passes a large, railed tomb on the top of which an armoured man lies beside his metal wife, their slim hands gathered in prayer. He reaches the north wall, walks down to the organ. There is no Armand Saint-Méard today. He is a little disappointed, a little relieved. It might have been reassuring to have heard the organist’s admiration of the new suit. It might also, of course, simply have been the prelude to another wasted day of drinking and rambling.