— I'm sorry, Isabelle, he mumbled. You know I would have nothing to do with this but because of Pascale. If she had not made the dress I wouldn't be obliged to help now. But — he shrugged and put his hat back on. I'm sorry.
Petit Jean hissed between his teeth and pulled savagely at the reins. Isabelle lost her grip on the bridle.
— Help with what? she shouted as Petit Jean kicked the horse into a flying start. Help with what?
As they galloped away Gaspard's hat fell off and rolled into a puddle. Isabelle watched them disappear down the path, then leaned over and picked up the hat, shaking it free of mud and water. She held it loosely in her fingers as she followed the path home.
It was raining harder. We ducked into the devant-huis, my flashlight picking out the padlock on the door. Lucien gave it a brief tug. ‘This was put here to keep les drogués out,’ he announced.
‘There are, um, druggies in Moutier?’
‘Of course. There are druggies everywhere in Switzerland. You don't know this country very well, do you?’
‘That's for sure,’ I muttered in English. ‘Jesus. So much for appearances.’
‘How did you get in yesterday?’
‘Jacob knew where the key is hidden.’ I looked around. ‘I didn't notice where. It shouldn't be hard to find, though.’
We used the flashlight to check all the obvious places in the devant-huis.
‘Maybe Jacob accidentally took it with him,’ I suggested. ‘We were all upset yesterday. It would have been an easy thing to do.’ I felt vaguely relieved that I wouldn't have to go through with this after all.
Lucien looked at the tiny windows on either side of the door; their broken panes of glass could easily be pushed in, but neither of us would fit through them. The windows at the front of the house were also small and high up. He took the flashlight from me. ‘I will look for a bigger window around the back,’ he said. ‘You can wait here alone?’
I forced myself to nod. He ducked out of the devant-huis, disappearing around the corner. I leaned against the doorway, hugging myself to keep from shivering, and listened. At first I could hear only the rain; after a while other sounds began to emerge – traffic on the main road below us, a train whistle – and I felt a little comforted by the normal world so close.
I heard what sounded like a shriek from inside the house and jumped. ‘It's only Lucien,’ I told myself, but stepped out into the yard anyway, rain and all. When the light flashed through the window next to the door and the face appeared I stifled a scream.
Lucien beckoned me to the window and handed me the flashlight through the jagged pane. ‘I'll meet you at the window at the back.’ He disappeared before I could ask him if he was all right.
I headed around the house as Lucien had a few minutes before. It was hard turning the corner: the side and back of the building were private territory, the part hidden from public view. Circling the house I was stepping into another, unknown world.
It was muddy at the back of the house; I had to pick my way between puddles to find drier, firmer footing. When I saw the open window and Lucien's dark outline just inside I stepped too quickly and slid to my knees.
He leaned out. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
I staggered to my feet, the flashlight beam swinging wildly. The knees of my pants had soaked up two circles of mud. ‘Yes. Fine,’ I muttered, flapping the pants legs to shake off whatever mud I could. I handed him the flashlight, which he kept trained on the window sill while I scrambled in.
It was cold inside – colder, it seemed, than outside. I pushed the wet hair out of my eyes and looked around. We were in a tiny room at the back of the house, a bedroom or storage room, empty except for a pile of lumber and a couple of broken chairs. It smelled musty and damp, and when Lucien shone the flashlight up into the ceiling corners we could see tatters of cobwebs fluttering in the draught from the open window. He pushed it closed; the frame made the shrieking sound I had heard a few minutes before. I almost asked him to open it again, to leave an escape route free, but stopped myself. There's nothing to escape from, I told myself firmly, my stomach somersaulting.
He led the way to the main room, stopped by the hearth and shone the flashlight on the chimney. We looked at it for a long time in silence.
‘It's impressive, isn't it?’ I said.
‘Yes. I have lived in Moutier all my life and heard about this chimney, but I have never seen it.’
‘When I saw it yesterday I was surprised that it is so ugly.’
‘Yes. Like those ruches I saw on television. From South America.’
‘Ruches? What's a ruche?’
‘A house of bees. You know, where they make honey.’
‘Oh, a hive. Yes, I know what you mean.’ Somewhere, probably in a National Geographic, I had seen the tall, lumpy beehives he was referring to, encased in a greyish cement that hid a ridged form, like a cocoon before it hatched, graceless but functional. An image of one of the ruined farms in the Cévennes flashed through my head: the perfectly placed granite, the elegant line of the chimney. No, this was nothing like that; this was made by people desperate for a chimney at all, where anything would do.
‘It's strange, you know,’ he said, staring at the hearth and chimney. ‘Look at its position in relation to the rest of the room. It's not where you would expect a hearth to be. It does not set the room up the way it should. It makes it – awkward. Uncomfortable.’
He was right. ‘It's too close to the door,’ I said.
‘Much too close. You almost walk into it when you come in. That is very inefficient – so much heat would escape whenever the door is opened. And the draught from the door would make the fire burn fast and it would be hard to control. Dangerous, maybe. You would expect it to be against the far wall, there.’ He pointed. ‘It's strange that people have lived here for hundreds of years and put up with it in that position all that time.’
Rick, I thought suddenly. Rick would be able to explain this. This is his territory, these interior spaces.
‘What do you want to do now?’ Lucien sounded baffled. What had seemed straightforward in my imagination was infinitely more absurd in reality, in the dark and the damp.
I took the flashlight from him and began going over the chimney methodically, the four square pillars at the corners of the hearth, the four arches between the pillars that held up the chimney.
Lucien tried again. ‘What do you want to find?’
I shrugged. ‘Something – old,’ I replied, standing on the hearthstone and gazing up the tapering tunnel. I could see remains of birds' nests on ledges formed by jutting rocks. ‘Maybe something – blue.’
‘Something blue?’
‘Yes.’ I stepped off the stone. ‘Now, Lucien, you build things. If you were going to hide something in a chimney, where would you hide it?’
‘A blue thing?’
I didn't answer; I just stared at him. He looked at the chimney. ‘Well,’ he said after a moment, ‘most parts of the chimney would get too hot and things would burn up. Maybe further up the chimney. Or –’ He knelt down and placed his hand on the hearthstone. He rubbed his hand over it and nodded. ‘Granite. I don't know where they got this stone; it isn't local.’
‘Granite,’ I repeated. ‘Like in the Cévennes.’
‘Where?’
‘It's part of France, in the south. But why granite?’
‘Well, it's harder than limestone. It spreads heat more evenly. But this slab is very thick, so the bottom of it would not get so hot. You could hide something under it, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’ I nodded, rubbing the bump on my forehead. It made sense. ‘Let's lift the granite.’
‘It's much too heavy. We would need four men to lift it!’
‘Four men,’ I repeated. Rick, Jean-Paul, Jacob and Lucien. And one woman. I looked around. ‘Do you have a, a–in English it's block and tackle.’ He looked blank, so I got paper and pen from my bag and sketched a crude pulley system.
‘Ah, un palan! ’ he cried. ‘Yes, I have one. Here, in my truck. But even so, we would still need more men to pull it.’
I thought for a moment. ‘What about your truck?’ I asked. ‘We could attach le palan here, then attach it to the truck and use that force to pull up the stone.’
He looked surprised, as if he had never considered his truck for more noble purposes than transportation. He was silent for a long time, looking at the position of everything, measuring with his eyes. I listened to the dripping outside.
‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘Maybe we can do that.’
‘We will do it.’
When she got to the farm Isabelle quietly tried the door of the house. It was bolted from the inside. She could hear Etienne and Gaspard grunting and straining, then stopping and arguing. She did not call out to them. Instead she went into the barn, where Petit Jean was rubbing down the horse. He barely reached the horse's shoulder but he handled the animal confidently. He glanced at Isabelle, then continued rubbing. She saw him swallow again.
Like the man on the road when we were leaving the Cévennes, she thought, remembering the man with the pronounced Adam's apple, the torches, Marie's brave words.
— Papa told us to stay here so we wouldn't get in the way, Petit Jean announced.
— We? Is Marie here?
Her son jerked his head towards a pile of straw in the darkest corner of the barn. Isabelle hurried over.
— Marie, she said quietly, kneeling at the edge of the pile.
It was Jacob, curled in a ball and wedged into the corner. His eyes were open wide but he didn't seem to see her.
— Jacob! What is it? Have you found Marie?
Draped over his knees was the black dress Marie had worn earlier over the blue one. Isabelle crawled over and snatched it from him. It was sodden, heavy with water.
— Where did this come from? she demanded, examining it. It had been torn at the neck. The pockets were full of stones from the Birse.
— Where did you find it?
He looked dully at the stones and said nothing. She gripped his shoulders and began to shake him.
— Where did you find it? she cried. Where?
— He found it here, she heard from behind her. She looked over at Petit Jean.
— Here? she repeated. Where?
Petit Jean gestured around him. — In the barn. She must have taken it off before she ran off into the woods. She wanted to show off her new dress to the devil in the woods, eh, Jacob?
Jacob flinched beneath Isabelle's hands.
Lucien backed the truck up as close to the house as possible. He ran the rope from a small metal loop under the truck's rear fender through the devant-huis and the little window next to the door – all the broken glass knocked out so it wouldn't cut the rope – and into the house. He attached the block to a structural beam running across the room and ran the rope from the little window up through the block's pulley and down to the hearthstone, tying the end to one point of a triangular metal frame. Clamps were attached at the other two points.
Then we dug around one end of the stone until we'd exposed the base. It took a long time because the floor was packed hard. I hacked at it with a shovel, stopping now and then to wipe the sweat out of my eyes.
Lucien positioned the metal frame over the end of the stone and fixed the clamps around it, wedging their teeth into the dirt under the bottom. Finally we went around the stone with the shovel and a crowbar, loosening the dirt around it.
When everything was ready we argued about who would stay inside and keep the block and tackle in place and who would go in the truck.
‘You see, this is not set up well,’ Lucien said, looking anxiously at the rope. ‘The angle is not good. The rope will rub against the window, there, and against the chimney arch, there.’ He flashed light on these points of friction. ‘The rope could fray and break. And the force is not even on both clamps because we could not hang the block directly over the stone, but at the side, on the beam. I have tried to compensate for it but the pull on each side is still different and the clamps could easily slip. And the beam. It may not be strong enough to carry the weight of the stone. It is best that I watch it.’
‘No.’
‘Ella –’
‘I will stay here. I will watch the rope and the clamp, and le palan.’
The tone of my voice made him back down. He moved to the little window and looked out. ‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘You stand here with the flashlight. If the rope begins to fray, or the clamps slip, or there is any reason that I should stop the truck, point the light on the mirror there.’ He aimed the flashlight at the side mirror on the left of the truck. It flashed back at us. ‘When the stone is lifted far enough,’ he continued, ‘flash the light in the mirror also, so I will know to stop.’
I nodded and took the flashlight from him, then lit the way to the back window for him, bracing myself for the screech when he forced the window up. He glanced at me before disappearing. I smiled weakly; he didn't smile back. He looked worried.
I took up my position by the little window, tense with nerves. At least my queasiness had disappeared with all the activity and I felt I was in the right place, as absurd as the situation was. I was glad I was there with Lucien: I didn't know him well enough to have to explain myself the way I would with Rick or Jean-Paul, and he was interested enough in the mechanics of the task not to ask too many questions about why we were doing it.
It had stopped raining, though there were still dripping sounds everywhere. The truck sputtered to a start and sat shaking while Lucien switched the headlights on and revved the engine. He stuck his head out of the window and I waved. Slowly, slowly the truck inched forward. The rope came to life, the slack taken up, the line quivering. The block hanging from the beam swung out toward me. There was a cracking sound as the beam took the strain of the pull from the truck; I jumped back, terrified that the house would fall down around me.
The beam held. I trained the flashlight back and forth along the rope, to the block, down to the clamps around the stone, back along the rope, down through the window and out to the truck. There was a lot to keep an eye on. I concentrated, my body tight as a spring.
I'd let the flashlight fall for several seconds on one of the clamps when it began to slide from the stone. I quickly flashed the light through the window to the mirror. Lucien stopped the truck just as the clamp came free from the stone and the metal frame hurtled up toward the block, knocking into the chimney before smashing into the beam. I shrieked and pressed my back against the door. The frame clattered to the floor. I was rubbing my face when Lucien poked his head through the little window.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘Yes. It was just one of the clamps, it slipped from the stone. I'll put it back on.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course,’ I replied. Taking a deep breath, I walked over to the frame.
‘Let me see it,’ Lucien said. I brought it to him to examine. Luckily the metal wasn't damaged. He watched from the window while I placed it around the stone and tightened the clamps as I'd seen him do. When I finished I shone the light on it and Lucien nodded.
‘Good. You know, maybe we can do this.’ He went back to the truck; I returned to the window as before.
Isabelle crouched in the straw and looked out through the devant-huis. The rain was falling hard now and the sky was dark. It would be night soon. She watched her sons. Petit Jean continued to brush the horse, glancing around nervously. Jacob sat studying the stones from Marie's dress. He licked them, then looked up at his mother.
— They chose the ugliest stones, he said softly. The grey ones, with no colour. Why would they do that?
— Be quiet, Jacob! Petit Jean hissed.
— What do you mean, you two? Isabelle cried. What are you keeping from me?
— Nothing, Maman, Petit Jean replied. Marie has run away, you know. She's going back to the Tarn to meet the devil. She said so.
<
br /> — No. Isabelle stood up. I don't believe you. I don't believe you!
The clamps slipped twice more, but the third time they kept their grip on the stone. Lucien inched the truck forwards slowly and steadily, making a tremendous racket but maintaining an even pull. I had the flashlight on the block when I heard the sound, a sucking noise, like a foot being pulled from mud. I moved the light and saw the hearth separating reluctantly from the dirt, rising an inch, two inches, three inches, steadily. I watched, frozen. The beam began to groan. I left the window, crouched next to the stone and shone the light into the crack. There was a terrible din now, with both the beam and the block groaning, and the truck outside straining, and my heart pounding. I looked into the dark space under the hearth.