Valjean dug his spade into the mound of loose dirt and lifted a full shovel. It had been a hot early September day, but now that the sun was approaching the horizon, the air had begun to cool. A light breeze stirred his hair and blew through the loose linen shirt he wore.
It was quiet in the cemetery. The priest and his acolyte had left. The hearse and the bearers had driven away. The groundskeeper had not shown. Despite the work in front of him, Valjean was grateful for the solitude. For the last five years, he had worked side by side with old Fauchelevent: in the heat of the summer's toil, in the quiet of the winter's rest, in moments of laughter and in rare moments of disagreement. The prospect of working next to another, a stranger, on this task of all tasks, was unthinkable.
He tossed the first shovel into the grave. The dirt made a hollow thud as it hit the plain wooden box. It was not a loud sound and to someone standing on the other side of the path from where Valjean was working, it hardly would have been audible. To Valjean, it was a thunderous crash. It brought him back to that moment, five years gone, when he had been encased in the nun's casket and Fauchelevent and the cemetery's groundskeeper had buried him alive. He started to toss aside his shovel, to jump into the grave and pry the lid free.
But no. He took a breath and tightened his grip on the shovel. Old Fauchelevent was dead. Most people die with the dawn, Fauchelevent had told him once, and indeed he had as well.
Valjean woke in the hut they had shared. It was in the dark hours before dawn, when the sisters had gathered for Matins but the girls had not yet come for Lauds. He laid in bed, listening to the pleasant dawn racket of birds and the distant sound of singing. For several minutes, he tried to remember the rapidly fading dream he had been having. He had been laughing with his brother, being chased through the dewy grass of the cow pasture. "Madeleine!" his brother had called. Valjean had stopped and turned to look at the boy who had died of measles before his tenth birthday.
What an odd dream, he thought to himself. In the drowsy dark, he let it slide from his thoughts. The finches were having quite a squabble in the tree that shaded the hut. Suddenly, he jerked upright as he realized that it was quiet in a way that was unfamiliar. He could not hear Fauchelevent's snores. He climbed out of his bed and crossed the room to check on him.
He did not know what registered first: the unnatural stillness of his body or the vague smell of urine. He shook the old man, "Fauchelevent! Wake up!" When there was no response, he tried again. "Old Fauvent! The mother is ringing for you! Wake up!" He shook the man again, but there was nothing. "Please….Fauchelevent!" The body was still warm as Valjean rolled him on his back and put his cheek over the old man's face, but no breath stirred.
His efforts faded off. He crumpled on the floor next to the bed, "Fauchelevent," he whispered.
The tears collected in Valjean's eyes as he stared at the face of his companion of these last years, relaxed at last. The never-ending pain in the old man's knee and shoulder and hands, his constant companion in recent months, were gone. The creases that pain had made on his face, even in sleep, had smoothed out. He looked years younger. Peaceful.
The bells rang for Lauds and Valjean looked up. Within minutes, he would hear the chatter and laughter of the girls. They were supposed to walk to Mass quietly, but they never did. A bit of a smile had crossed his damp face as he thought of Cosette walking hand in hand with Charlotte, her inseparable friend of the last year.
Just yesterday Cosette had been visiting with Fauchelevent. They had sat at the tiny table in the hut, shelling beans, while Valjean had been on a ladder outside mending a leak in the hut's roof. He had not really been paying attention to their talk, but it sounded like Fauchelevent was telling her increasingly absurd stories about growing up in the years before the Revolution. It seemed the nobility had horses that could fly and elephants that could sing. From his perch on the ladder, he had only heard bits of the conversation but every time her laughter rang out, the sound had brought a smile to his face. He thought of her delight of yesterday and the sad news he was going to have to break to her today.
He turned back to Fauchelevent and gently composed the body, laying his limbs straight and resting his hands on his chest. Valjean brushed the hair from the old man's eyes. With the distant sound of voices raised in song, singing God's praise in the dawn's light, Valjean got to his knees and prayed for his friend.
Valjean rested on his shovel, looking up into the sky. A thin scattering of clouds had gathered and the setting sun was lighting them up a brilliant red. "Red at night, great hope," he murmured, speaking the first line of the familiar saying about the weather. He picked up another shovel of dirt and tossed it in the hole. "Looks like you got your wish, old man," he said. "God is welcoming you home."
Overhead, the soaring of a kestrel spiraling upwards into the sky caught his eye. He stopped shoveling again to watch the bird making lazy circles in the fading light. Soon it would give up and return to roost. He leaned on his handle of his spade and recalled another night almost six years before.
"Move your ass, you lazy bastard!" The guard's cudgel came down on his shoulder and he grunted in pain. The seagull he had been staring at as it soared across the evening sky was driven from his mind. "Dig, 9340. I don't want to be out here 'til midnight!"
Valjean bowed his head, redoubling his effort at digging his shovel into the stony soil. He had been back in the bagne less than a week and every part of him hurt. The months of confinement since his arrest the previous February had taken its toll and he had not yet regained his strength or stamina. The guards, of course, did not make allowances for exhaustion and his shoulders ached with the bruises of the accumulated blows. His hands, sore from the days' labors, were becoming blistered by the rough handle of the shovel. To top it all off, he had already worked a full day at the docks, only to be dragged from his meager supper out to the bagne's graveyard to dig a grave for some poor wretch who died in this hell.
Only a few times in his first 19 years had he been sent out to dig graves. Those were times when the bloody flux or grippe passed through a salle and dozens of men died within a few days. Then a whole work crew would be sent to dig for a day. This assignment was different. Just one dead man, just one grave needed. When deaths like these occurred, they apparently assigned a pair of lifers. The message was clear. Like the nameless man wrapped in a scrap of tattered sailcloth, Valjean would die in chains. He too would end his existence in an unmarked hole in unconsecrated ground not far from here.
He and his chain-mate, another recently returned horse like himself, were digging the grave at the slowest pace they could get away with. The stifling humid heat of the Mediterranean September evening left him soaked with sweat. He shoved his green woolen cap as far up on his newly shorn head as he could manage without it falling off and returned to digging, He wondered if the green caps were made of more prickly yarn than the red ones. Surely the red cap had never been this uncomfortable.
The guard turned away from them to have a conversation with another of his fellows who was passing by on his way off duty. Valjean and his partner stopped digging again and they leaned up against the handles of their spades, taking a breather as a bit of a breeze mercifully blew by them. Valjean looked up and watched as the gulls flitted against the red sky. "Red at night, great hope," he murmured as he watched them.
His partner looked at him with disgust as he picked up his shovel again. "Shut up, Jack. Get back to work."
With a wry shake of the head, Valjean brought himself back to the present. He picked up the spade and tossed more dirt into the grave, aware of the ease of the motion. He usually took the grace and strength of his body for granted, but now he noticed it and it felt good. He was unfettered: free of physical pain, free of the chain, free of the bell. For the moment, he could loose himself in the simple pleasure of movement.
As he worked, his mind wandered over his memories of Fauchelevent. When Valjean had first become aware of him in Montreuil-sur-Mer, Fauchelevent was a bitter man who never missed an opportunity to spread a rumor or say something nasty about Père Madeleine. All of that and much more had changed in a flash on that wild day with the cart. That day had not only changed Fauchelevent's life, it had set motion the end of Valjean's days as a respectable entrepreneur and mayor. Despite all that followed, Valjean had never regretted that decision. God had given him the chance to save a man's life. What greater calling was there? Two years later, Providence had dropped him into Fauchelevent's melon patch in the early spring and two memorable days had followed. Since then, they had found a way to make a life together and they had shared the quiet years.
Overhead the kestrel had disappeared and the evening breeze picked up a bit, cooling the sweat on his skin. He had no one to share his stories of Fauchelevent with. Fauchelevent had had a few friends in the outside world, but Valjean did not know them nor where to seek them out. In the bagne, sometimes people would tell stories of the deceased. In the retellings, the stories would get wilder and more improbable, taking on the texture of fable. Here, now, Valjean only had Cosette and one could not say these things to a young girl.
As he dug, lifting one spade of dirt at a time, his mind wandered over the times he and Fauchelevent had wielded shovels side by side. They had tilled garden in the early spring and every year they had a good-natured argument about the spacing of the rows and the placement of the beans and melons. In the fall, they would dig potatoes and work last year's decayed leaves into the dirt One spring they had sweated and sworn as they dug out the stump of the old crabapple tree that had broken in a snowstorm the previous winter. And of course, whenever there was snow, it was their duty to clear the paths of the convent.
Last winter there had not been much snow, but there had been one notable storm and Valjean had cleared the paths alone. Old Fauchelevent had been laid up with a cold and he had not stopped apologizing for abandoning Valjean for months.
The snow had been falling relentlessly all day. When the bells rang out, they sounded muffled and distant. Valjean came back into the hut, stomping his feet as he entered to shake the snow off, sending the bell on his knee jangling.
Fauchelevent started awake at the noise. He had been drowsing by the fire, buried under every blanket to be found in their rooms.
"Oh!" he exclaimed.
Valjean looked over at him as he shook the snow off his overcoat. "Sorry to wake you," he said.
Fauchelevent shook his head. "I am just glad I still wake up! Every time I doze off, I wonder."
"Stop that!" Valjean ordered. "You are not that sick. It's just a touch of a cold."
"One of these days," he replied, "a touch of the cold will be enough."
Valjean turned his back to the old man to tend the fire. The tears that came to his eyes blurred his vision and he did not want Fauchelevent to see how much such talk upset him. "How are you feeling?"
Fauchelevent shrugged by way of answer. "How is it outside?"
"Snowy. The snow is right up to the top of my boots and still coming down. I got the paths clear, though."
Fauchelevent nodded, "I am sorry I can not help you."
Valjean shook his head. "I told you I can handle it."
Fauchelevent's face nodded unhappily as he looked away. "Of course you can," he said softly.
With a sigh, Valjean stopped puttering with the fire and came over to sit down across from Fauchelevent. He hated when Fauchelevent got in this mood, when he resented the help Valjean provided. "What's bothering you, friend?" Valjean asked.
Fauchelevent shrugged, but he looked back at Valjean, his eyes pleading. "Do you think there will be a place in heaven for me?"
Taken aback, Valjean straightened in his chair. "Why wouldn't there be?" he asked.
Fauchelevent looked away, his eyes distant. "I have committed a grave sin."
"You have?"
Fauchelevent looked back, his eyes earnest. "Yes, Père Madeleine, I have."
Valjean frowned, thinking over their time together. He had no idea what Fauchelevent was speaking of. "What sort of sin?"
Fauchelevent was quiet for a long time and Valjean wondered if he had overstepped himself. Perhaps Fauchelevent had meant he needed to speak to a priest? But then Fauchelevent spoke.
"I spread slanderous lies about an honorable man."
Valjean looked sharply at Fauchelevent.
"About you, Monsieur."
The laugh that came to Valjean's lips had a slightly hysterical feel as he remembered another man making the same confession some years before.
Fauchelevent, of course, knew none of that. He frowned and looked down at his hands. "Pardon, monsieur. I should save my confessions for a priest."
Valjean shook his head. "No, my apologies, my friend. It is just...well, once, another person said something quite similar to me." Valjean reached out a hand toward Fauchelevent, but Fauchelevent did not take it. "I knew we had our differences…" he said.
"It's more than that," Fauchelevent replied. "When you first came to Montreuil, one thing after another went right for you. You were welcomed into town. You started making bracelets and suddenly you landed that contract with those Spaniards. You bought a factory. You turn down mayor twice! And the Cross! Who turns down the Cross? You, who had come into town wearing work-man's clothes and speaking as a peasant, within five years you were rich. And what did you do with that? Anyone else would have bought expensive clothes, flashy horses, a fine house. You though, you spent your millions on that town. Schools! Hospitals!
"I was jealous of you. Angry. I was educated. I did not work with my hands, I was a notary. I had once met the Count of Flanders! In those same five years when you were building your factory and selling your baubles all over Europe, my business folded, my wife died, a fire consumed part of my house. For every one of your great turns of fortune, it seemed that your luck was taken directly from me.
"I am not proud of the man I was then. I was angry and bitter. I did not know you then, only your name and your work. I spat on the ground when I walked by that hospital. When someone mentioned that their child was educated in your school, I openly questioned what kind of things they taught there. When others spoke kindly of you, I spread rumors and lies.
Fauchelevent paused and looked directly at Valjean. "I…I hated you, Père Madeleine."
In the silence that followed, Valjean took Fauchelevent's hand. Fauchelevent did not pull away. The hand was cool and dry, and his skin felt thin, like paper. "You have turned from hate. That is no longer the man you are."
Fauchelevent looked away. His hand tightened on Valjean's.
Valjean continued. "What you did then, perhaps that was a sin, but you have atoned for it. You have done as the Lord commands us."
Weakly, perhaps not quite believing it, Fauchelevent nodded. Very softly, he asked, "You forgive me then?"
Valjean smiled slightly. "Oh, I forgave you years ago."
The dirt Valjean threw in the grave no longer made a hollow thud against the casket. Instead, the dirt landed with a soft plop on the growing mound. The light was fading and the air was cooling off quickly.
His shovel hit a stone and the abrupt ringing of the metal against the rock in the evening quiet jarred him from his reverie. The sound made him think of earlier in the day when the clanging of hammer against nail had rung out in a quiet cell in the convent.
After the death doctor left, Valjean was left alone in the room with Fauchelevent's body and the casket. Where the sisters would wash and dress one of their number for burial, he had worked alone to prepare the body. In the end, Valjean had dressed Fauchelevent in his best shirt and positioned him in the coffin. For a long time he looked down at his friend, thinking of nothing. He fancied he could hear the old man's voice in the distance, too quiet to make out the words, but the cadence of the speech was clear.
The tolling of the bells to mark the hour abruptly brought him back to the present. He shook his head and pulled the casket lid in place. The handful of nails he scooped out of their bucket were cold and sharp. Valjean set them on the lid and selected one. Holding it between his thumb and finger, he rubbed the beaten metal. The iron grew warm in his hand. Hesitantly, he put the nail in position and held it upright. After a few seconds, he pounded it into place, the hammer strokes swift and sure. With each stroke of the hammer, the clang of metal against metal rang out, breaking the silence of the lonely cell.
Hours later, after the funeral, the gate of the convent had opened to allow the hearse to depart. Valjean stood in the open gate and looked out. For five years he had lived within these walls, never once leaving. Even when he had been in the bagne for so many years, he had never spent so long within walls. The bagnards of Toulon were assigned to work here and there, in many places around the docks and the city itself.
The convent walls were not confining. The convent walls were protection. Standing in the open for the first time in five years, Valjean felt naked. He half expected to see Javert standing in the street, waiting for him. Of course that was ridiculous, but the sudden riot of people and colors was overwhelming. The line of the street that disappeared into the distance. The sky that came right down to the Earth. He looked again at the people. The women's dresses seemed huge and brightly colored, with great puffing skirts and shoulders. He could not put his finger on what had changed in the men's clothing, but it looked uncomfortable.
"Papa?" Cosette touched his arm and he turned to look at her. "Papa, are you well? You're trembling."
He looked down at her, but not nearly so far down as he used to. She came up almost to his chin. He was suddenly aware of how much she had grown in the last year. While she had stopped crying for the moment, her eyes were still red and more tears threatened.
He squared his shoulders and nodded, willing the trembling to stop. "I miss him, Cosette."
She flung her arms around him, tears coming loose from her eyes, "Me too, Papa, me too."
Valjean returned the hug, relishing the warm, vivacious child who loved him so much more than he deserved. Then the hearse began to move. Cosette stepped back as he self consciously pulled his straw hat down over his eyes, shouldered his shovel, and followed Fauchelevent out into the world.
Valjean smoothed the last of the dirt on the grave. Setting the shovel aside, he took up the simple wooden cross the cemetery had left as a grave marker. He had planned to carve something into the cross, but the daylight had faded and there was not enough light for such work. He resolved to return another day. He settled the cross in its place at the head of the grave, held in place by a pile of stones, and he knelt in the accumulating dark to pray and say goodbye.
Walking back through the city with his shovel over his shoulder, he watched the people out and about in the warm evening, enjoying perhaps the last gasp of summer before weather began to turn. After five years in the convent, it was almost a shock to hear laughter from a grown woman, or to see a husband and wife stroll arm and arm away from a café.
He thought of the dour sisters, the innocent prisoners, and he was grateful for what they had done for him and Cosette. Then he thought of Cosette, sparkling with life, among their numbers and his heart fell. Could he let her choose the novitiate without ever knowing this world? That, he thought, was wrong.
A wolf might chase a rabbit into a hole and wait patiently for it to emerge, but eventually it had to leave. Valjean had no idea how long Javert had waited outside the convent, but five years, it seemed, was long enough.
As he made his way by moonlight back through the gardener's gate, he looked over the garden he had tended with Fauchelevent. The trees were laden with fruit, the garden was full of carrots and melons and beans, but even surrounded by the riot of life, the garden was empty. A motion caught his eye and he turned, a greeting on his lips, but it was just the wind, stirring the moonlit leaves.
He put his tools away and returned to the empty hut. There was some bread left, and some apples, but he was not hungry. Sinking heavily onto the bed, he looked across the room to Fauchelevent's bed, to the old man's knee bell still hanging by the door next to his own, to the empty chair at the table. Valjean covered his face with his hands.
He had been happy here and, in time, he would be happy again. It was a good life, tending the plants and watching Cosette from afar. Unhappily, he thought of the life she would lead if he allowed her to grow up here, without ever seeing the world outside. She would shoulder that yoke willingly, he knew, but how could she ever be happy in the life of denial, of self mortification? It was wrong for him to be happy and safe at the price of her life, her freedom. Javert had been thrown off his track. Cosette must learn of the world outside the convent. If she should choose to return, he would not stop her, but for now it was time for them to leave.
The familiar American English phrase, "red at night, sailor's delight" has versions in many languages. The French version is "rouge le soir, bel espoir", or "red at night, great hope".
This work came into existence after several different things occurred. In the miseres exchange, I got a prompt for Valjean/Fauchelevent. What, I thought, am I going to do with that? Then I remembered a post by b-duck tumblr where they point out that part of the gardener's duties at the convent include burying the dead sisters, which mean's that one of Valjean's last jobs as a convent gardener was to bury Fauchelevent and my mind started working. The story I wrote for the miseres exchange, called "The Orchard at Petit Picpus" started its existence as one of the flashbacks in this story, but MissM gave me some very sensible feedback to pull that scene out and make it its own story.
Thank you to Genarti and Esteven who gave this an enthusiastic and thoughful beta read, despite convent husbands not really being their thing.