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Though far from the sea, autumn and winter still brought a damp bleakness to Montreuil. Cold seemed to fill the air and stay, unbidden. When it increased, Madeleine started to keep more to his rooms, for the chill settled in his bones and made them ache.
The cold had robbed them of Inspector Barteau; he had been an old man with a constitution weakened by drink. The town would need a new inspector. Madeleine had been pleased by how quickly word had come from Paris, but as he unfolded the letter and read, he suddenly felt himself caught on a word as on a hook, felt it dig into his flesh and stop him short.
Toulon. Though Madeleine was sitting in his well-heated study, the word made him shudder, as before the sight of a raised whip. It echoed in the depths of his mind, recalling salt on his tongue and pain in his raw-rubbed wrists. Then his eyes fixed on a name and after a moment of contemplation, he whispered it in the privacy of the empty house, trying it on his tongue with hesitance.
Javert. The name tumbled from his lips awkwardly. He could not remember having heard it before and it left an unfamiliar taste in his mouth. However, that did not have to mean anything.
In Toulon, they had known their jailers by name – the strict ones, the mild ones, the ones with a cruel hand quick at the cudgel. Madeleine had chosen to forget. For all his carefulness, this was a luxury he had treated himself to and now he saw that he should not have. Toulon had not been on the forefront of his mind; still it had chased him through the years – yet in his dreams, there were no faces, only brightly starched collars and voices like ice.
At least the prefecture had been considerate enough to include the man’s references, so Madeleine was not left completed unprepared. He gave in to the impulse to pace the study. How his hand twitched for the inkwell to write and refuse this Javert! But for all his fear, Madeleine did not forget what he had learned during all those years. It was likely to invoke mistrust in Paris and he could not afford that.
He passed a hand over his face. It would be so easy to give in to that temptation – yet he could not. He would have to face this trial.
***
The anxiety Madeleine felt to begin with was wholly directed at the prospect of the first meeting. Yet as the weeks passed it became clear that this period of waiting was wearing on him. He had wasted a great number of wood logs before he realized that the shivers chasing down his back had little to do with the weather.
The thought of this man, an unknown quantity in this equation, pursued him throughout the day. His brain seemed to chant the name at him at every moment it was not otherwise occupied, until Madeleine felt like it was imprinted on his mind. He saw it in the patterns on the wooden ceiling when he woke up, smelled it in the salty whiff of cold wind from the sea, heard it in the wind howling outside the house when he sat late in his study.
He spent hours contemplating himself in the mirror and wondering whether he should shave his face. Madeleine had been taking great pains to keep his beard trimmed neatly, caring for it as well as his hair and dress – not particularly fashionable, but clean and orderly – yet it still seemed to carry a trace of prison.
His dreams chased themselves in circles. Where before there had been only shadows, grey and indistinct, one of them had taken a more definite shape. Still faceless, it followed him through the hours of toiling under the southern sun, and somehow he knew that this was Javert, breathing down his neck while he wrestled with stones too heavy for even his strength.
When Madeleine was not anxious, he became angry – why did the town’s new inspector have to have been a guard in that wretched place? During his time, none the less. He could not blame the prefecture, of course, and it did not seem just to blame a man he had never met, either. Yet he could not help himself. He had thought himself free, finally, after years and years of debasement and now this man could jeopardize it all. Surely God would forgive him this moment of weakness.
***
During the days in which the inspector’s arrival grew nearer, Madeleine walked the fields around Montreuil in spite of the cold. Late autumn had made the landscape desolate, but still it was open and free. As the winds swirled around him, Madeleine felt fears rise within him once more – what would happen if this man indeed knew him? He did not let himself linger at this thought, nor did it inspire the violent anxiety of only a few weeks’ past. Still, it weighed on his heart heavily.
Both to refuse the inspector and to run would have been a confession. There was nothing left but to hope and pray.
***
Madeleine had succeeded in composing himself to such an extent that when his secretary announced the inspector, his nod was of utmost calmness and his voice was even as he bade the man to send him in. He had forced the anxious voices inside his mind to silence. No violent emotions could save him now – only composure and an immaculate appearance.
The man called Javert entered, with a gust of cold air following on his heels – it whipped the door open with a bang. Madeleine flinched, but returned Javert’s greetings politely. Just like his name, Javert himself stirred no memories in him. Madeleine’s eyes took him in quickly, his tall figure, his stern features, and he thought more of the future than of the past, how the man would do his work and what differences might arise between them, all the while keeping his face polite and attentive.
Yet relief did not quite flood him and a rest of wariness remained. After Javert had made his leave with a stiff bow, Madeleine sat back in his chair, lost in contemplation.
Javert had a strange kind of look in his eyes, a slippery gaze that reminded him of the caress of a whip’s tails across one’s back, almost tender before brought down with full force. His hands had caught Madeleine’s gaze, too – long and bony fingers with pronounced knuckles, leading into large angular hands. Madeleine could imagine them curled around a guard’s cudgel. Yet he could not remember.
***
The sun burned down without mercy. Javert once more cursed the thick wool of the uniform coat in the privacy of his mind, yet there was no way to bypass it. This, too, was part of the shell they built around themselves, that made them blank to the prisoners’ eyes, invincible.
The trail of prisoners trudged along some distance from them, yet Javert kept his back straight all the same. It was his first time away from the cells and accompanying the convicts to their labouring. Presson, the guard supervising him in these early days, had warned him about the dangers, the unpredictability – anything might happen, his words had been. Yet at the moment, the strength and anger brimming under the convicts’ skins did not look likely to lash out.
His eyes followed the line, surveying the prisoners in this orderly arrangement, and then got caught on one man.
“Monsieur? That one, there… Is carrying a double load a common punishment?” Presson turned his head in the direction of Javert’s outstretched hand.
“Ah, no. He can bear it, so he does. It is likely he could bear another, if you ask me. Number 24601. The name…” He sighed, paper rustling as he leafed through the long list of convicts.
Javert shrugged quickly. “I beg you not to trouble yourself. What is he confined for?”
“Theft.”
He nodded slowly, eyes narrowing. Two bags of stones, when most of the convicts groaned under the weight of one already… There was quite some distance between them, yet Javert could not make out 24601 to be overly exerted. Excepting a strain in his strong arms, he marched along without wavering.
Javert wondered about the extent of his body’s strength. Would another bag make him bow? Could he lift one of the large timber beams which they transported with the help of horses? Would the strength of his arms suffice? Javert imagined him heaving one of those up – it would be heavy even for him, the effort made plain by his sweat-stained face and hunched figure...
He blinked, disrupting this chain of thought. However much he could lift, this was indeed uncommon, Javert thought, and even as his eyes trailed further down the line of convicts, the image of this man and his exceptional strength would not leave his mind.