The Maid Read online

  At times, in the deep of night, she dreamed of Gilles de Rais. "How are you, Jehanne?"

  She looked at him. Said nothing.

  He sat on the bench outside the cell and pressed his face against the bars, gazing at her. "My little twin. You look so sad, my little twin."

  "I'm not your twin. I'm nothing to do with you."

  He cocked his head. "You believe that?"

  "I know it."

  He smiled. "You forget that I fought beside you, my love, that I've seen the bloodlust in your eyes. You say you fought for God, that you did not want to kill, that you mourned those who died at your command, but you lie to yourself, Jehanne, when you say such things. You dress up your wild hunger and call it a holy mission, you tie a white bonnet around your sharp-toothed heart and fancy yourself an angel, but I know otherwise, Jehanne. I know the deep caves inside you, that cave of ecstasy that you love so much and its opposite, the cave of rage that you refuse to acknowledge, though it directs your every step. I recognized them the first time I saw you. I looked into your eyes and I thought, Ah, there she is. My secret sister."

  "You're crazy."

  "You think there's such a thing as a good war, a justified war? You think there's such a thing as honest blood?"

  "They were killing us. They were destroying France."

  "True. But nobody forced you to get involved, did they?"

  Silence.

  He smacked his forehead. "Oh, I'm sorry, of course. God told you to get involved, God made you do it. Let me ask you this, Jehanne. What kind of a god would tell you that it's wrong to kill, and then send you forth to do just that? To murder your fellow human beings—His own creations—in His holy name? Can you not see that such a god is a false god, a god who hates your innermost nature and wants to do nothing but set you at war with yourself, and that the only true one is he who sees your murderous heart for what it is and loves you for it, celebrates you as his own."

  "Get out of here. You're disgusting."

  "I speak the truth and you know it."

  "The Devil's truth is the only truth you speak."

  "The Devil's truth is the only truth there is."

  She turned away from him and faced the wall. The Baron continued speaking. "We are one and the same, Jehanne, both holy freaks, driven to a life of extremes where the stakes are life and death every day. You think it's an accident that you're here in this prison, that they're going to burn you at the stake? You've been making your way here every day of your life. This is all you've ever wanted. To do a great deed, become a great saint."

  "I never wanted to become a saint."

  "Well, so you say. But your secret heart tells another story."

  "You can say whatever you want, it doesn't matter. I loved Him. I loved Him and I did as He asked me. I served Him with all my heart. That's all I know."

  "Yes, and look how He thanks you," Rais said. "Look at the splendor with which your King rewards you." She noticed his hand moving in his lap. She saw the red flash of his cock, enormous, his hand fast, up and down.

  "Get away from me," she said. "Get out. Right now."

  His voice changed, became high and pleading. "Let me finish, Jehanne."

  "Get out."

  He sighed deeply and dropped his hand. Then he stood up and walked away, the enormous member jutting before him. At the door he turned and faced her, smiling. "You tell yourself pretty fairy tales, Jehanne."

  She awoke gasping, her hair wet, plastered to her face. Everything in the dark cell seemed wicked, the walls closing in, the ceiling lowering, filled with malevolent intent. She got out of bed and knelt on the floor, her hands clasped tight in front of her face. Tell me it isn't true. Please tell me it isn't true. She looked up at the ceiling. Are you there? Please come, she said. I'm so afraid.

  15

  At dusk they came to her cell and walked her out across the long-shadowed courtyard, her feet bare, chains scraping the stones as she went. A cold, raw wind at this hour. Wind blowing Jehanne's hair across her face, blowing the tops of the raw, budding trees and wrapping the churchmen's red robes around their legs like flags as they guided her through the high iron gates and into the walled cemetery of the Abbey Saint Ouen, where an enormous crowd stood chanting, "Burn the witch! Burn the witch!" Their eyes wild with excitement as they stood, clapping their hats to their heads and turning their faces away from the wind, tears streaming down their cheeks.

  Thousands of townspeople were packed in amid the slanting rows of tombstones. At the end of the cemetery stood two high, freshly built wooden platforms: One was crowded with various official churchmen, bishops and cardinals, abbots, priors, and doctors of both law and theology. On the other stood a great wooden stake surrounded by a pile of firewood, and beside it stood Jehanne in her chains, her ragged boy's tunic and leggings, and the tall, gray-cheeked Maître Erard with a deep frown on his face, as if he had been forced to sip from a sewer.

  Erard spoke for a time, shouting his sermon into the wind. "The branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except that it abide in the vine." Explaining that all Catholics must abide in the vine of the Church, planted by Christ himself, and telling the people of Rouen that they had been abused and misled by Charles, he who called himself their King, and by the infamous and dishonored woman who stood before them, a heretic and schismatic, an enemy of France. "Those who deliberately deny and disregard the supremacy of God on Earth will not be tolerated by this court and will pay for their heresy with their lives."

  She won't submit. That's why she must be killed. Won't submit to the Church, won't let them judge her revelations, won't accept the Church as her authority, won't abide by its rules. "God must first be served," she said, and this was the heart of it, the thing that drove them mad. The audacity. The gall. If a filthy peasant girl can talk to God, can receive divine wisdom, who needs the Church?

  Impossible. It could not stand. "For these reasons we declare you excommunicate and heretical, and pronounce that you shall be abandoned to secular justice, as a limb of Satan severed from the Church ..."

  Excommunicated. It's more than she can bear. The stake piled high with firewood, the executioner coming toward her in his cart, the crowd quivering, roaring in an ecstasy of horror and delight. "God's sake, girl," shouted a doctor from the platform. "Do you want to be burned alive?"

  "Hurry up, do it! Burn the bitch!" cried an Englishman. People were throwing stones, screaming. And Erard was next to her, watching her with furrowed brow. "Submit now or you will end your life by fire," he said. Her eyes on the firewood, imagining the red and yellow flames rising, licking at her feet. "Wait," she cried.

  Wait.

  16

  So she took off her beloved boy's clothes. The tunic, the leggings, the woolen vest, the tall, cracked boots. She folded them carefully, lovingly, and stacked them in a little pile at the foot of her bed. She looked at the rough brown dress the guards had brought to her. The Bishop's dress. She allowed them to shave her head—to rid her once and for all of the offensive boy's haircut that the Bishop referred to as part of her "vain and wicked heresy." What else did she agree to? What other lies did she agree to in her terror?

  She didn't know. They'd handed her a long piece of paper full of unknown words, told her to sign it, and she did. She was too afraid to ask that someone read it to her, and in truth, she did not care. Was so terrified of the fire, the idea of being burned alive, that she would have signed anything. Anything to live.

  Later they told her. The paper said that it was all a lie. The voices, the revelations, the saints—none of it had come from God. Nothing. She'd promised never to bear arms again, never to wear male clothes again, and to submit completely to Church authority.

  Once she'd signed the paper, Cauchon sentenced her to life imprisonment. "Let her live on the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction so that she can weep for her sins and never commit such vile acts again."

  So she put on the brown dress. And with it came memories of another girl,
a frightened girl who lived on a farm in the hills of Lorraine with her family, whose father beat her, and whose sister was murdered by the Goddons, a girl who could not ride a horse or carry a lance, or command an army, who had no idea how she would carry out the impossible mission she'd been given. She turned her face away from the memories. Turned her face to the wall.

  Later her voices came to her. The voices waking her in the chill blackness, hissing in her ears. Traitor, they said. Traitor, betrayer. Lying, greedy girl. You damn your soul to save your life.

  I'm sorry, she said. Forgive me, I beg you.

  You lie for fear of fire. You betray the King of Heaven for fear of fire.

  Forgive me, she said. Please, I beg you. Forgive me.

  He is displeased, child. He is most displeased.

  She wept again. It seemed her tears would never stop. She said, I'm sorry ...

  The saints did not reply.

  17

  That night Massieu did not come. She waited and waited, shivering in the corner of her cell, her dress pulled down over her knees and bare feet like a tent, her arms pulled inside the dress so she could warm them on her flesh. But he did not come. It was just the four guards now—Berwoit and the others. "Where is he?" she says at last. "Why isn't he here?"

  "Your boyfriend?" says Berwoit, smiling. "Your boyfriend's not coming tonight. The Bishop wants you to have some time alone. Think about what you've done."

  He's drunk. Already he's drunk. She can see it in his eyes. The wicked black glitter. "Anyway, gives us a little more time together, don't it? Not quite fair, Massieu keeping you all to himself."

  Jehanne says nothing. Holds his stare. Don't look away. Don't let him see you're scared.

  "I like your dress," he says, opening the cell door, coming toward her. "What do you think, boys? Big improvement, eh?"

  "Still think she's got a dick under there," says another.

  "Oh no," says Berwoit, standing above her now. Smiling terribly. "I don't think so."

  18

  "What else about Paradise?" Jehanne had asked her mother one day in Domrémy, back when she was very young. They were sitting down by the river; Jehanne crouching in the cool green shallows, looking for minnows while her mother washed clothes. "Tell me what it looks like."

  "Oh," she said. "It's very beautiful. Everything there is made of the finest sea pearls. All the houses and the streets and the churches and the buildings. A whole city made of pearls."

  "And it sits on a cloud?"

  "Yes, on a pink cloud. And when the sun shines on it, the whole city lights up like the moon."

  "And God is with them all the time there?"

  "Yes, God is there all the time."

  "And everyone is happy?"

  "Everyone is happy."

  "And everyone is safe?"

  "Everyone is safe."

  19

  At night, now, she lies awake thinking. So much time to think, to doubt. A night in her mind like a maze of questions without end. Was it not what You wanted? Did I not do as You wished? Did I misunderstand You, I who have loved You with all my heart, who have worked so hard to please You and be Your faithful servant? Is it possible I was wrong? Is it possible the voices were not Yours? I cannot believe it. I know it was You. But then why do You make me suffer this way? Why let them keep me like this, like an animal locked in a cage, beaten, mocked? Why let them murder me? Oh, please, don't let them murder me. Please, tell me if I have displeased You, if I have sinned in Your eyes, show me how, that I may learn from my sins and work to serve You better. Oh God, please don't let them kill me. I wanted nothing but to love You and do Your will. All I have ever wanted was to love You and do Your will.

  Is it my pride You punish now? That I so loved the mink cape they gave me, the fine horses, was that my sin? I see that I loved them too much, I see it, and I see that I was full of bitter rage toward the English, that I was wrathful, vengeful, but was it not You who told me to raise the army and fight them? Was it not You who wrapped me so gently in Your golden light, who touched my cheek with such love and told me of my mission?

  Is it possible I was deceived? Is it possible the Devil spoke in such honeyed tones, with such tenderness that I mistook him for You? Is it possible he cloaked himself in feathered robes and so enchanted his wicked face that he came to appear as light and love before me, singing so sweetly that I could only think him God? Did he throw a halo over his horns, lasso a cloud down from Heaven on which to stand? Is it possible?

  But how could I feel such love and goodness, how could such joy, such perfect belief exist inside me, radiate through me like the sweetest sunlight, if it was not truth? Am I mad? Am I a fool? Has this all been a deranged hallucination, have I been nothing but the Devil's pawn, seduced and betrayed into believing I did Your will? Do You wish instead that we should give our bodies and our homes, our lives, to the English? Do You wish that they should continue to steal our land, burn our crops, murder us in cold blood? Is that, as the Bishop says, Your wish? I cannot believe it, Father. To believe it would be to call my own heart a liar, a poison flower, to call my faith a mere raving, my soul a mad cave for demons and fiends. How can I do that? How can I doubt the one true and beautiful thing in my life? The one thing that made me smile in darkness and strive to do good when those around me despaired and sank into lives of sin? How can I doubt You, whom I saw so clearly each morning when I walked out into the fields, when I heard the wind shaking and riffling the high trees, splattering light across the forest floor, when I splashed my face in the icy creek? How can I doubt what sang to me everywhere I turned? How, when everything in me sang yes and wept with gratitude, how can this be a lie? How could I believe that this was not You?

  I know it was You, and yet, in the darkest hours of the night, when I wake from my fevered sleep and find all the long knives of my mind turned inward, carving at me with questions far worse than those of the Bishop and his men, hissing such cruel doubts, such impossible questions: Does not the Lord say in His commandments to us, Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy. And did you not order the deaths of thousands of men, are you not directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of men? And did you not ride into battle on a Sunday? And did you not oversee the killing of one thousand men on the day I bade you to devote to Me? And in those dark hours, my heart is filled with such terror, and it seems to me that I am naught but a leech scraped from the bottommost floor of Hell, a blind, crazed banshee committing murder from sheerest bloodlust and veiling it in the white lilies of Jesus. In the night my knives turn against me, and it seems to me that I indeed deserve to burn for my sins and my pride and my blindness. But, oh God, then the morning comes. Every morning I wake and my heart brims anew with love for You and Your goodness and I remember how I felt in Your arms in the forest and how I knew it was You, my Father, and how blessed I felt to have been given such a great and wondrous mission, and all the dark knives and foul Hell creatures of my night-mind shrivel before Your love, dissolve into dust and I know that they can do to me what they like for I am safe in Your arms, having sought only ever to do Your will and to love and honor You with all my heart.

  20

  In her last dream she goes up the dark tower stairs. They lead to her cell, the same tower cell she's been in all these months. The guards are there, but they're asleep, snoring. Carefully she picks up the sack at the bottom of the bed and takes out her boy's clothes. It's wonderful to see them, like seeing old friends. She hugs them before she puts them on. Presses her face into the rough cloth, inhales deeply. Then, on tiptoe, she goes to the door of the cell, and it's open, so she runs quickly downstairs. She runs to the market square, where a stake has been set up, and Christ is there, wearing an executioner's cloak and smiling at her. He reaches out his hand and helps her up onto the platform, and when she looks out, everyone she knows is in the audience. Thousands and thousands of people, her father and mother and Pierrelot, her cousin Durand, and Metz and Bertrand, als
o King Charles and Alençon and La Hire and the Bastard and Gilles de Rais. They are all crying out to her, "Let us pray! Let us pray!" She doesn't understand what this means, so she looks at Christ, who is standing by with the torch, and she asks him, "What are they waiting for?" "They're waiting for you," he says, smiling. "Are you ready?" Jehanne says that she is, and he helps her up onto the stake, but as he does this, she becomes very frightened. "I don't want to," she says. "I don't want to." "No one does," says Christ as he touches the torch to the woodpile at her feet and the yellow flames leap up. A great admiring Ah goes up from the crowd, and suddenly everyone kneels down and bows their heads in prayer. They are very sad, many of them are weeping, but they're also very happy, ecstatic even. Suddenly Jehanne feels very lonely up on the stake, and the fire looks wicked and hateful to her. It's as if the flames are laughing at her. She looks through the smoke to see if she can see her mother, but she cannot see anyone she knows. Then she remembers that she can look up, and when she looks up, the sky is made of stained glass—a great sprawling glass mural of blues and greens and reds all glowing with sunlight, and she sees her whole life there in the glass, sees Michael and Catherine and Margaret standing tall in their golden light with their long robes and their sweet spoon faces, sees herself, the girl down among the cucumber plants, collecting the beetles in her father's garden, sees her village burning, the little hunchbacked house with the fine leaded windows, the church, the black horse running, all in flames. She sees herself riding over the frozen yellow fields toward Chinon in her boy's clothes, sees herself kneeling before sad King Charles in his big velvet hat, sees herself in her armor, galloping over the fields with the ten thousand soldiers behind her and the violent, holy joy burning inside of her, and the fire is very hot and red, crackling beneath her, and the flames are leaping up, and she can feel the soles of her feet beginning to burn, and suddenly she's terrified, she understands nothing. Nothing at all. "Why?" she cries out to the sky. "Why?"