The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (24 page)

—Why not over here, at Chantilly? After all, the Continental horses are otherwise engaged.

Ashley grins and sets his revolver on the table.

—Brilliant, Ashley agrees. They’d be our legacy to the French. Fitter rodents. Fleet of foot. The veritable flower of their race. We’ll start the first studbook right here.

Jeffries takes a box of cartridges from a shelf. He releases a tab on his pistol and tilts the barrel down. The bullets in the revolver’s cylinder extrude outward and Jefferies replaces the two spent cartridges with those from the box.

—Sorry, Jeffries says. That beast interrupted. You were saying—

—Crécy.

—Of course. The battle or the town?

—The battle.

—Hundred Years’ War?

—That’s right, Ashley says. Beginning of the end of knighthood proper, all that bosh. English longbows mowing down the flower of French chivalry.

Jeffries sets the pipe back in his mouth.

—Shame we can’t re-create that.

Ashley grins. —Rather. But the part I was thinking of was after the battle. Ordinarily the victors would take the enemy knights prisoner and ransom them. But some of the French were too badly wounded for this. So the English sent out footmen to kill these wounded knights. This wasn’t meant to happen.

—Only other swanks ought to have done it, Jeffries offers. Not peasants.

—Precisely. At any rate, I was thinking of how these footmen used daggers.

Ashley takes a bayonet from a shelf. He holds the blade before the candle on the table.

—The daggers were long—longer than this—and came to a fine point. The old
miséricorde,
the mercy giver. Plate armor was too hard to pierce, so you’d lift the wounded knight’s arm and plunge the dagger through the armpit into the heart.

—And so the end of chivalry.

Ashley watches the reflection of the slinking candle flame on the blade.

—You see, I wrote an essay on this at Cambridge. At the time it struck me as rather unsporting.

—It’s not so bad, Jeffries says. Sharp dagger to the heart. Quick at least.

Jeffries lifts the bottle of whisky from the shelf.

—Have a drink? Fine stuff. Bennett picked it up on leave.

—No thanks.

Jeffries shrugs. He pours some whisky into an enameled mug. Ashley is still looking at the bayonet.

—What do you think it feels like, Ashley asks, a dagger straight in there? If one’s dying already—does it even hurt?

Jeffries shakes his head, but he does not answer. He takes a sip from the mug.

—First-rate whisky, Jeffries finally murmurs.

Ashley puts the bayonet back on the shelf and sits down. Jeffries strikes a match to relight his pipe.

—Shame about Kameraden. Bringing in wounded often turns out like that. But the men can get some sleep tonight. You kept your own skin, that’s what counts.

—I suppose.

—Very decent of you to go over.

—Tristan, she whispers. Wake up, it’s the next stop.

I open my eyes to the white light of the train car. Through the window I see autumnal trees, their yellow leaves carried off by a gust of wind. Picardie.

—The autumn has come early here, Mireille says. I heard it was cold all last week.

The conductor announces the stop over the scratchy loudspeaker, but we are still ten minutes away. I look at my notebook in Mireille’s lap.

—Did you read the letters?

—All of them.

—What did you think?

She hands me back the notebook.

—
Elles sont belles
, she says.
Mais c’est une histoire triste.
I kept hoping things would work out for them, even though I knew they wouldn’t. And the war—Tristan, it’s all so dark. Of course it’s interesting, but I couldn’t read it for pleasure. I know you have to learn about this to get the money—

—It’s not just about the money.

—But isn’t that why you’re here?

I look out the window at the flat brown fields.

—When I first heard about the money, all I thought about was where I could live and what I could do with it. But after I came to Europe and heard about these people, after I read their letters—

I shake my head. —It just makes me feel terrible to think about it. The money’s dirty. The only reason it’s still around is because of all the bad things that happened to them. I bet that’s why Imogen never wanted it.

The white building of the station appears in the window. We take our bags from the luggage racks and sit back down. Mireille looks at her hands.

—I know you care about this story, she says. It’s part of what I like about you. But you can’t spend your life feeling sorry—

—I don’t feel sorry for them. However badly things went for Ashley, I bet you anything he wouldn’t have traded his life for mine. They knew what they cared about, both of them. Even if they lost it, at least they knew.

—You care about things. Last night you were talking about so many things. Paris and Notre Dame, the old man in Toulouse—

The train is pulling into the station. We go down the aisle and wait beside the sliding door. I adjust the straps on my backpack, looking out the window at the station house, a one-room brick building with its windows painted over in white enamel. I shake my head.

—That was before. Now all I do is go around looking for old papers. So what do I care about now? Dead people?

Mireille looks at me.

—They’re not dead to you.

Mireille’s friend waits for us in the station parking lot, a tall girl leaning against an old Peugeot hatchback wearing a pair of headphones. When she sees Mireille she runs up and embraces her.

—This is Hélène, Mireille says. She’s lending us this beautiful car while we’re here.

Hélène pulls off her headphones and we exchange awkward kisses on each cheek. She opens the hatch of the tiny Peugeot and I toss in our bags. As we drive off Mireille warns me that the house we are staying at has been in bad shape since her grandfather died twelve years ago.

—It’ll be a little dirty, she says. But you like old things, don’t you?

We drive to a supermarket in town to buy groceries for our stay. Mireille tells me to get anything I’ll need. I wander the aisles with wide eyes, staring at the exotic wares labeled with words I’ve seen only in textbooks. Mireille laughs when she sees the cheese and bread in my corner of the cart.

—There’s a kitchen there, she says. You don’t have to eat like that.

—I like to keep things simple.

Mireille puts a blue can of
sel de mer
in the shopping cart. She looks at me.

—No one has lived there for years. You’ll see.

We drive for half an hour through desolate farmland, chestnut-colored fields and shedding trees. I snap pictures with my camera as Hélène and Mireille talk quietly in the front seats. They seem to be having a disagreement about Mireille coming to Picardie early. They’re talking in French and the conversation is hard to follow from the backseat.

We turn off the road and follow a long driveway to an old farmhouse, two stories tall and in great neglect. Ivy grows erratically up walls of chipped brick; copper gutters sag under the weight of dead leaves. A few of the windowpanes have long and curving cracks in the glass. We load the groceries into a wooden shed that links to the house.

—The refrigerator is broken, Mireille says. But it’s cold enough in here.

I unpack vegetables and cheese onto an old workbench in the shed. We enter the house through a side door. In the kitchen we test the faucet and it burps brown water, then runs clean and clear.

Mireille shows me the large living room with its fireplace and a set of worn armchairs. The wooden floor is coated with antique grime and partly covered by a huge threadbare carpet, the fringed ends fraying to nothing. Hélène and I collect firewood outside and stack it beside the fireplace. Mireille takes me upstairs to the bedrooms.

—You can choose first, she says.

The rooms are all similar, so I choose one for its wallpaper: curling ivory flowers on a dark purple background. In the corners the paper is sliding off the walls. Beside the window there is a metal bed with creaky steel springs and a bare mattress. Mireille kneels before the fireplace and frowns.

—It’s filled in, she says. But we can use the one downstairs.

She stands up and dusts off her pants.

—My grandfather never wanted to fix anything. My parents don’t use the house, but they can’t sell it for some reason, taxes or something. When we were at
lycée,
Hélène and I used to come here to drink, but I never had a reason to sleep here—

Mireille looks at me.

—Not until now, she adds. Do you have your sleeping bag?

I get my sleeping bag from my backpack. Mireille pulls it out of the stuff sack, fluffing the feathers in the air and spreading the bag gently over the mattress.

—
Et voilà
, she says. I know it’s dirty, but I thought you might like it—

—It’s perfect. Better than the Ritz.

Mireille smiles. —I’ll go look for a pillow.

2 November 1916

Patience Trench

Somme, France

The misery begins long before the attack. The nights grow long and longer still, the days only a gray smoke of clouds and chilling rain. The rain begins in October and does not cease for three weeks. The soldiers can hardly remember the sun.

The ground becomes its own galaxy of wretchedness, a cesspool of failed ambition. Land that begins as green fields and neat villages is pulverized by explosive shells for days and weeks and months. All relics and histories of civilization sink back into the earth, pummeled into dirt or dust, divided and subdivided into finer particles and finally fused with icy rain into a single sucking gray morass, the binder and fixative of this chance apocalypse.

The mud is everything. It is contagious, the destiny and endpoint of all mankind. The mud coats and replaces all things until men no longer believe in anything else, until they can stare with wonder at any surface that has survived, clean and immaculate. The frontispiece of a King James Bible. A silk scarf, still faintly scented with perfume. If the soldiers take out these objects to admire, they will also become tainted, so they preserve them inside their tunics or haversacks as long as they can.