He sits on the organ bench, lets his fingers move above the keyboards. To the right and left are rows of stops, knobs of elegantly turned wood, some seemingly of ivory. He slides one out, leans to try and read what is painted there, but the script is too elaborately Gothic and is, anyway, abbreviated after the manner of chemical compounds. He slides it back in. The instrument is the only thing in the entire church he feels any interest in, any liking for. Could it be saved? Dismantled, wrapped, stored, reassembled?
He gets off the bench, steps down into the aisle and is trying, among the masonry and plaques, the substantial and insubstantial shadows, to see the door to the rue aux Fers when a voice, one that almost crushes him, falls from some impenetrable part of the darkness above.
‘You! Who are you?’
Horrible to be seen like this, seen but unable to see back. He stares upwards, grimacing, as if in expectation of the thudding of leathery wings.
‘You are not the musician! I know his footfall. Who are you?’
Echoes, black flocks of them under the vaulting. Impossible to locate the origin.
‘Answer me, rogue!’
He sees the door now, gets his key into it on the third attempt, finds it is the key to the Monnards’ house, fits another key, turns it, pulls at the door. .
‘Who are you? Who!’
And then he is out; out on the rue aux Fers. The street is not consumed with fire. There are no abominations out of Hieronymous Bosch, no pale women consorting with demons, or stranded whales spewing tormented souls. A half-dozen laundry wives are at work by the Italian fountain. The ground about them glitters. A pair of them glance over, perhaps surprised to see anyone coming out of the church, a man, one they haven’t seen before, but soon they look back to their work, cold arms plunged into cold water. Linen will not wash itself.
8
He sits in his room, wrapped in damask, and looking through the unshuttered window to the church. The sun is setting, but the stones of les Innocents give back little of its light. The windows are briefly livid with a fire that seems more the show of some holocaust inside the church than anything as distant, as benign, as a red late-October sun. Then the light flares, ebbs, and the whole façade is joined in uniform darkness.
He rises from the chair to see if he can spy the glimmer of the evening’s first candle in the sexton’s house, but there is nothing, not yet. Perhaps they retire like Norman peasants, like the beasts of those peasants, as soon as it is too dark to work.
Was the girl simple-minded? He does not think so. But can he depend on her description of what, under the rough grass, he will find when he starts to dig? He supposes he must, for he has little else to guide him. The memories of an aged sexton, records that have made a dinner for generations of mice. .
He turns the chair, sits facing the table. He fusses with his tinderbox, lights his own candle and slides it close to the edge of the book in which, in the morning, he made his notes. He studies his sketches, runs a finger by the figures, tries to see it all as a problem of pure engineering such as, at the school, Maître Perronet might have thrown among them as he passed on his way to his office. So many square metres of ground, so many cart loads of. . of debris. So many men, so many hours. A calculation. An equation. Voilà! He must not forget, of course, to leave a little room for the unexpected. Perronet always insisted on it, some give, some slack in the rope for that quantum of uncertainty that bedevils every project and which the naïve practitioner always ignores until it is too late.
From the back of the notebook he carefully tears out a sheet of plain paper, opens his inkwell, dips his nib and begins to write.
My lord,
I have made an initial examination of both the church and cemetery and see no reason to delay the work that Your Lordship has entrusted to me. It will be necessary to recruit at least thirty able-bodied men for the cemetery and as many more for the church, some of whom should have experience in the art of wrecking. In addition, I shall need horses, wagons, a good supply of timber.
In the matter of the cemetery, beyond the removing of the remains from the crypts, charnels and common graves, I recommend that the entire surface of the cemetery be excavated to a depth of two metres and sent out of the city to some unpopulated place or even taken as far as the coast and cast into the sea.
May I ask if somewhere suitable has been prepared for the reception of the human material? And what in the church other than those objects of a sacred character, relics, etc., is to be preserved? There is, for example, an organ of German origin that might, if Your Lordship wished it, be dismantled in such a way as to preserve it.
I am, my lord, your obedient servant,
J-B Baratte, engineer
He has no sand to sprinkle on the wet ink. He blows on it, cleans the nib of the pen. From below there comes the flat ringing of the supper gong. More dead men’s food. He shrugs off the banyan, reaches for the pistachio coat, then, before going down, halts a moment at the window with the candle in his hand. It is just a piece of fancy, of course, an impulse entirely whimsical and one he should not much like to try and explain to anyone, but he moves the candle, side to side, as if signalling. To whom? Who or what could possibly be down in that dark field, watching? Jeanne? Armand? The priest? Some hollow-eyed watchmen of the million dead? Or some future edition of himself, standing in the time to come and seeing in a window high above him the flickering of a light? What baroques even a mind like his is capable of! He must not give play to them. It will end with him believing in that creature the minister spoke of, the dog-wolf in the charnels.
Over Paris, the stars are fragments of a glass ball flung at the sky. The temperature is falling. In an hour or two the first frost flowers will bloom on the grass of parade grounds, parks, royal gardens, cemeteries. The streetlamps are guttering. For their last half-hour they burn a smoky orange and illuminate nothing but themselves.
In the faubourgs of the rich, watchmen call the hour. In the rookeries of the poor, blunt figures try to hide in each other’s warmth.
At the Monnards’, in the box room under the slates, the servant Marie is kneeling in the dark. She has rolled up the rug and has her eye to the knothole above the lodger’s room, the lodger’s bed. She watched the musician like this too, but she did not make the hole. She found it with her toe a week after she was taken on.
The air from the lodger’s room rises in a warm, slightly smoky column that makes her eye itch. He has had a fire tonight, and it still burns, enough at least for her to see him by, his figure under the covers, his pale mouth, the softness around his shut eyes. On the table by the bed is an open book, a length of brass for measuring. Implements for writing.
What she likes to see is the moment, the precise moment when they fall asleep. She is, in her way, a collector, and while more fortunate, more moneyed girls may collect thimbles or fancy buttons, she must collect what is free. She has to be careful, of course. The little hole must not betray her. They must not look up and see above them the liquorice shimmer of a human eye.
This one, the new one, the grey-eyed foreigner, is lying on his back, his body twisted a little to the right, right arm and hand extended downwards, outwards, above the covers. The hand is palm up, the fingers loosely flexed. Do they tremble, or is that a trick of the embers? She wipes her eye, looks again. It is, she thinks, as if from that open hand he has let himself go, his mind like a ball of black wool rolling over the floor, unwinding, unwinding. .