The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc Read online

  The whole country, Claude said, was rotting from the inside like an old wedding cake. All the nobles knew it, but nobody would do anything about it. They'd either been swept along into the madness themselves, dining on roasted swans and peacocks at their banquets, drinking and sobbing into their champagne cups as their country toppled down around them, screwing each other silly, or else they watched from the shadows and plotted to seize the crown for themselves. "Louis, Burgundy, Henry, they're all circling the throne like wolves," Claude said. "All three of them screwing Isabeau, each one taking his turn, lying there with her in the dark, stroking her breasts, and telling her how rich he'll make her if she'll just convince poor Charlie to sign over the Regency to him."

  "My God, she'll be the end of us," Jehanne's father would say, his face going dark, ugly with hate. "She'll be the end of us all."

  Jehanne hadn't believed this at first. She thought: It's all so far away. It will never come here. But by the time the raids on Domrémy began, poor mad Charles was dead, and Isabeau had done exactly what Claude said she would. Sold their country off to the English—married her daughter to their King, Henry V, and denounced her own son, Charles VII, the true heir to the throne, as illegitimate, a bastard. Unfit to rule. Henry became King of France, the monster Duke of Burgundy was put in charge of governing Paris, and the Dauphin, Charles VII, had barely escaped with his life. "Now young Charlie hides in his castle down there in the Loire, poor as a squirrel, afraid of his own shadow," Claude said. "And the Goddons win more territory every day."

  The south of France, they knew, was still loyal to the crown, but the English and their Burgundian allies had snatched up almost all of the northern part of the country. Jehanne's little village of Domrémy was one of the last pockets in the north that still held out. But it was clear they couldn't for much longer. Every month more villages were burned, more horses and cows were stolen, more towns occupied, more peasants slaughtered in their beds. There was no one to help them. No law. No sheriff. They were abandoned, marooned, easy targets for Goddons, Burgundians, bandits.

  "Doesn't she see what this is doing to the country?" her father would shout as Jehanne watched from the hayloft—her jaw knotted, her fists clenched tight.

  "Does she not care that the finest vineyards in France are burning? All the great farms and castles of Lorraine being looted, destroyed?"

  "Isabeau can barely hold on to her own chateaux," Claude said. "You think she gives a damn about us?"

  Once, when they were drunk, very late at night, Jehanne's father had looked up from where he'd been staring into the fire, his eyes desperate like a drowning man's. "Is there no hope at all?" he said. "Are we doomed to become slaves of the English, no country at all, just a million broken-down wretches for them to rob and rape and murder whenever they please?"

  Claude was leaning back in his chair, his long, skinny, blue-stockinged legs stretched out in front of the hearth, the curled tips of his shoes silhouetted in the firelight. He took a deep drink of his wine, then swirled his cup, gazing into it as if it held a vision of the future. "Well, you know the prophecy la Gasque d'Avignon made, don't you?"

  Her father flapped his hand, rolled his eyes. "Spare me the wives' tales."

  Up in the hayloft, Jehanne leaned in closer to listen.

  Claude grinned, told the story in a singsong voice. "France will be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from the forests of Lorraine."

  A snort of laughter from Jacques. "Not bloody likely, given the ones around here."

  "You asked if there was any hope," said Claude.

  "Hope, sure. Not a fairy tale."

  13

  La Belle. That was what they called Jehanne's older sister in the village. The Beauty. She was named after Saint Catherine, Jehanne's favorite saint, her mother's favorite saint too. Her laugh was deep and silvery and musical, and her eyes were clear pale green, like freshly sliced cucumbers. The only unbeautiful thing about her was her feet, which were short and bulbous and yellowish in color, and which she was careful to hide under her skirt. La Belle. Catherine La Belle. "Who am I?" Jehanne would ask her mother. "You're the brave one," the mother said. "The strong one."

  Catherine was the only one their father never screamed at. Even when she stole a fistful of butter from the cellar and gobbled it up right in front of him, laughing. He was helpless, gazing at her as if he could hardly believe he'd made something so lovely. When it rained on Sundays, their father would pick her up and carry her in his arms all the way from church back to the house so she wouldn't spoil the hem of her good pink dress in the mud. "Jehanne, run open the door for us quick," he'd say. "There's a good girl."

  Jehanne hated her sister in these moments, but it never lasted long. It was impossible to stay angry with Catherine. Impossible not to love her. Living with Catherine was like living with Durand's fawn. The room turned magical whenever she walked into it.

  The night before she married the mayor's son, Colin, Catherine and Jehanne had sat up together in their room, talking late into the night. Catherine had combed all the snarls and tangles out of Jehanne's impossible hair and braided it with red satin ribbons for the next day, her fingers strong and firm, her nails raking deliciously over Jehanne's scalp. At one point Jehanne felt so close to her sister that she grew bold. "Have you seen it yet?" she asked. Catherine's eyes flew open. "Jehanne!" she said. But later she said, "I did see it once for a minute." She wrinkled her nose. "It was so ugly." Then she laughed. That lovely musical laugh. Deep and gurgling like a baby's laugh. "But kind of beautiful too. Like a big blue mushroom."

  Jehanne had lain awake in bed that night for hours, picturing the big blue mushroom and trying to think of something she could say the next day to make her sister laugh that way again.

  They never knew for sure what happened to her. Two years after she married Colin, she disappeared. Jehanne was fourteen when it happened. Catherine was very pregnant. Colin had seen her out by the road, picking daffodils before sunset. When she didn't come in for supper, he went looking for her there, but she was gone.

  A week later, Jehanne's brother, Jean, found Catherine's body under a pile of leaves in the forest. He carried it as far as the front yard and then stopped there, frozen, like a statue. They'd taken her hair—the golden waterfall—and hacked it off at the nape. Taken her dress and shoes too. Pierrelot told her this later, in secret, for the adults would not let Jehanne see her sister's body. "Nothing for a child to see," they said. They told her that Catherine had died of a blow to the head, but later, Jehanne heard her father say it was the shame that killed her first. "Shame at what the Goddons done to her. Oh my darling little girl."

  That was the end of him, her father. He walked the fields for days, screaming, sobbing at the sky. Hurling himself against the trees. Pounding his fists against the earth. Later he came home and lay down on his bed. He stayed there for a year, staring at the wall. Jean and Pierrelot took over the farming, proved good workers without the father there to scream at them. Eventually Jacques got up. He resumed his place in village life, became good old Jacques d'Arc again, smiling, collecting taxes, clapping shoulders. But at home the mask came off; he beat Pierrelot for dropping an egg on the floor. Beat Jehanne for giving him a haughty look. Beat her so savagely she could not walk for a week.

  It made the father clairvoyant, the madness. Allowed him to see Jehanne's future in his dreams. And what he saw there appalled him. His child, his youngest, galloping across the fields, dressed in a gleaming suit of armor, followed by a howling sea of soldiers, her jaw set, her eyes wild, the men thundering and screaming behind her, all of them riding, running toward war.

  He woke in the night, screaming. Grabbed his wife by the throat and pressed his thumb against her windpipe. "She'll be the ruin of us," he gasped. "She'll be the ruin of this family." It was beyond him. His mind couldn't do anything with the images but think that his child was doomed to run off and become an army whore, a camp prostitute, bedding down with any man who woul
d pay. And it killed him, the thought of it, the ruin of his good family name. His hard-earned reputation. The thought that this girl, this child, could destroy his life.

  In the wan early morning sunlight he studied her, sullen and slump-shouldered, eating her bread by the hearth. A small, sturdy girl, dark hair, big black eyes, round and wet like a seal's, pink brown cheeks, a country loveliness to her. Also a fury. A righteous, carefully bottled fury that terrified him.

  Later, drunk on wine, he announced that she had to be watched. "Watch her or she'll run off the first chance she gets," he said. "Become a filthy army slut." He told her brothers that if they caught her trying to run off, they must take her and drown her in the river. "If you don't, I'll do it myself, you hear me?" he shouted at her. "So help me God, you will not shame this family. You will not drag our good name through the mud."

  Jehanne looked at him, her eyes lidded, unreadable. "I'm not going anywhere," she said.

  14

  But watch her now as she moves through the blond wheat fields behind the little hunchbacked house by the river. Watch her walk uphill, this small, intent figure in a rough red dress, moving through the fields beneath the summer sky, a fire, a kind of possession growing in her eyes as she goes, running her palms over the velvet tops of the wheat tassels, whistling lightly through her teeth. At the brow of the hill stands the high, rustling oak forest. She approaches it slowly, with reverence, pushing carefully through the branches into the green cathedral of leaves, the twigs reaching out, tugging at her dress, her braids, as she moves, pulled forward through the sun-dappled world until she comes to the old stone altar deep in the trees.

  A small collapsed ruin, roofless and forsaken. Open to starlight, thunderstorms, lightning. The walls are half fallen down, saplings have sprouted here and there, and at one end of the space stands the old statue of the Virgin, her head cloaked in a hood of green moss. Jehanne steps toward the statue, strokes the velvet moss with the ball of her thumb, takes in the shimmering forest once more, then kneels down carefully before the statue, bowing her dark head, speaking softly as she brings her hands together in prayer. Are you here?

  She remains this way for a long time, her eyes closed, her head bowed, waiting. Occasionally she shifts her haunches slightly or sighs, lowering her shoulders as if a slight change in posture might help her case. A lark sings out high and clear above her, its song piercing the upper vaults of the trees. The old branches lifting slowly and falling in the breeze, their leafy sleeves articulate, sad as fingers.

  Later she lies on her belly on the forest floor, palms down, arms extended like Christ. The cool, nutty scent of pine in her nostrils. Won't you come? she says. Tears leak from her eyes. The sun sets, a red ball sinking through the trees. The forest grows dim, cool, and menacing. Still she does not move.

  15

  "Where were you?" says the father when she comes in hours later, after dark. The family is gathered around the table, a brown ham gleaming in the firelight. Beside her father sits a plump, pug-nosed boy who stands when he sees her, grins like a fool.

  Jehanne takes a step backward, blood roaring in her ears. Her mother stares at her. "For heaven's sake, Jehannette, what's become of you?" Jehanne looks down. Her feet, her legs, are streaked with mud. A stiff hem of mud ringing the bottom of her dress. "Why do you have leaves in your hair?"

  She mumbles something about falling asleep in the fields and runs to her room. From there, she hears her mother calling her, but something holds her back. It is as if her feet are nailed to the floor.

  She stands behind the door, listening to them talk. Her mother's high, unnatural laughter. Her father's forced, jovial public voice. After the boy leaves, her father comes into the room and hits her hard. Her nose begins to bleed. A feeling like a knife jamming into her brain. "What the hell is wrong with you? Don't you know a suitor when you see one?" He drags her by the hair into the main room and says to her mother. "Look at this little bitch, this daughter of yours. What man would want her for a wife?"

  Outside the moon is full. The great black shadow of the beech tree in the yard stretches across the bedroom floor and up the wall. "He doesn't mean it," the mother says. The mother sitting on Jehanne's bed, holding her, stroking her hair, wiping the black crust of blood from her face with a damp cloth. Jehanne lies motionless, stiff as wood. "It's those dreams he's been having. Those horrible dreams ..."

  Jehanne is silent. She lets her mind wander until she sees the old beech tree in the garden twist and flex and burst into flame. The tree suddenly hot and alive, red and yellow and crackling with fire, reaching a branch into the house, breaking through the glass window in the main room (the treasured window broken!) and picking up her father, pulling him out into the darkness and holding him tight in those burning branches until he too catches fire, until he too is burning and screaming, then burning and silent, melting, crumbling to a pile of ash on the ground.

  16

  She grew older. She watched her body begin to change. Softness where there had been bones and sharp angles, hair, a musky smell from the hollows. Sadness too, in the afternoons. Pain like a sharp hook, rusting in her heart. Loneliness. Other times joy. Wild soaring joy. Ten thousand birds singing inside her. She walked through the village in the violet light of dawn, swinging her arms, thinking, Thank you, oh thank you! Everything moving in her like wind, shaking her foundations.

  It drove her father wild. Watching his child transform, grow powerful, secretive, defiant. As if an uncontrollable stranger were suddenly sleeping under his own roof. A stranger scheming to destroy his life.

  Soon there were rules. Her father forbade her from going off into the woods by herself. Forbid her from the fields, the trees, the hills. "No more running off," he said. "Do your chores, help your mother, go to church, be polite to the young men when they come calling, that's all."

  She had to think about the future, her mother said. Marriage. She was sixteen now. It was time. The word made her sick to her stomach. She watched the other girls her age, braiding flowers into their hair, pinching their cheeks, smiling shyly or picking up their skirts and dancing, showing off their knees for the boys. Competing over who would live with whom in which dark hovel, who would spend their lives plowing which burned-out field, making which gray stew in which sad hearth, having her hair torn out by which man, dying of which plague or beating or wretched childbirth ... and she thought she'd rather die.

  She'd rather be dead.

  17

  Listen now, darling. It is time for you to know your purpose. It was Michael who told her. Michael who came one day while she was kneeling among the green shadows in the bois chenu with her eyes closed, face lifted, listening to the wind. It was afternoon. Suddenly the light was there, a torrent of feathered sunlight pouring through the trees, the deep Godvoice making the hairs on her arms stand up. You must raise an army and drive the English from France. Take the Dauphin to be crowned king at Reims. This is God's command.

  Her mind rejected it at first. The words floated through her like underwater sounds, impossible to understand. Then, when she did understand, she ran into the trees and threw up, a yellow puddle on the ground.

  It was as her father had dreamed. God had shown His wish in the dream—her father just hadn't understood. Jehanne said it was impossible, what He asked. Impossible. I'm only a girl, a peasant. I know nothing of cannons or lances. I have no money. I can't even ride a horse. Please, ask me anything else. I'll do anything else!

  No.

  This is God's mission, child. We will help you. God will help you. Go to the King, drive the English out of France. Crown the King.

  She sobbed and ran from the forest. "Leave me alone!" she cried. "You ask too much."

  18

  The Church of St. Remy sat beside Jehanne's house, not twenty yards away. Separated only by a shaggy row of willows and a cemetery of leaning stones starred with pale green lichen. The church itself, a small peach stone building with a big wooden cross inside. In her min
d's eye Jehanne pictured Christ stretched and lean as a cat on that cross, his wrists and ankles jeweled in blood, his sad, all-seeing eyes shining from behind the blades of his cheekbones, and seeing him there, she felt less alone. She began spending all of her time there, lying to her parents, saying she was going to work in the fields but instead creeping back behind the house and into the church, praying in a pew up near the altar.

  It was very cold inside the church. The tips of her fingers went numb, turned white and mottled with lavender spots, but she stayed anyway. Eventually she forgot about the pain. Sometimes there were birds up in the eaves, pigeons fluttering and flapping in the shafts of sunlight that poured through the windows. And at sunset came the bells. She sat in the cold wooden pew with her head tilted back, her face lifted to the ceiling as the great bell rang and echoed through the high stone space, echoing off the walls, the high arches, the dim, shadowed corners of the nave, the rings of sound rippling though her body, her blood. In her mind she pictured a whole world of bells, all different sizes, ringing inside her. Big heavy bells in her ribs, her pelvis, her skull, tiny high-pitched bells in her fingertips. Ringing and ringing. And that is God too, she thought. That is you too.