The Maid Read online

  "I could think of some things to do with that," said a voice behind her.

  Jehanne turned. It was Michel Le Buin.

  "Like what?" she said, her eyes cold, her heart itchy with hatred.

  The oily-nosed boy pinched out a smile, scratched his neck. "You'll just have to wait and see."

  Jehanne turned away and addressed the vendor, who was squatting like a monkey in the purple shade of the cart. "How much for this," she said, hoisting the rope.

  "Three deniers."

  "How about one?"

  "Settle at two."

  She looked at him, smiled. "I've only got one and a half."

  The man scratched his beard. Considered the rope.

  "Fair enough."

  "Any chance you could tie it into a set of reins for me while you're at it?"

  Jehanne was smiling beautifully now, her eyes shining like river stones.

  The man looked away. Then he picked up the rope and began to fold it and knot it for her.

  "Jehannette, if you don't marry me, I'm going to take you to court and sue you for breaking an oath."

  "I never made any oath."

  "Your father did."

  "He can say what he likes. Doesn't mean I'm going to do it."

  A dazzling high summer afternoon. A light wind rippling across the poppy fields. Cows dozing in the shade of the alders. In the westernmost field of Neufchâteau, far away from the river, Jehanne sat atop a split-rail fence with a bunch of clover hay in one hand and the rope in the other. The horse ignored her, flicked flies with his tail, until she quietly hopped off the fence and crouch-walked toward the animal with the hay held out before her in offering. Its ears twitched, a glossy black eye rolled toward her, but the horse remained still. "Look what I got for you," she said, lifting the hay to the animal's black lips.

  A display of long yellow teeth and pink gums then, the horse's jaw rotating as it took the hay in, Jehanne moving slowly, slowly closer to the animal, cooing softly as she went. Slowly, ever so gently, she slipped the homemade reins over the great dusty head and manipulated the rope deep into the animal's mouth along with the hay, setting it in behind the wet molars, and then creeping alongside the horse, taking hold of its mane and leaping smoothly up out of the grass, mounting it once more, this time calmly, and then gripping the sides of the horse so forcefully with her thighs and knees that when the animal bolted forward, she remained in place on its back, leaning over its warm brown neck with her elbows dug in and the rope tight in her hands as the animal took off across the high green field, speaking softly in the animal's ear as it went, and guiding it with her reins until slowly its gait smoothed out to a long and fluid run, and they were moving as one through the grass in the clear summer afternoon with the earth thundering beneath them and the hills a blur of green all around, the enormous blue bowl of the sky overhead and the smell of clover in the air and the sun on their skins and she thought, I can do this.

  27

  A thick, pale man with slablike cheeks stood in the door of Madame La Rousse's inn, his eyes dull as wax. "Summons for one Jehanne d'Arc, daughter of Zabillet and Jacques d'Arc to appear at the high court in Toul on November 16, 1428," he said.

  Jehanne's dark brows came together like crow's wings. "What's the charge?"

  "Charge brought by one Michel Le Buin of Domrémy, stating that mademoiselle has broken her solemn betrothal promise to enter with him into the most holy estate of marriage."

  Jehanne burst out laughing. She had not thought Michel capable of it. She sat by the hearth with a long purple curl of turnip peel hanging from her knife, shaking her head. "I never promised any such thing," she said finally. She looked at her father. "Did I, Papa?"

  And this was more than her father could bear, the girl once again defying him, making a fool of him in front of a perfect stranger. His face swelled up with hatred, and he said that she was an arrogant bitch. Then he stood and punched her in the mouth.

  When Jehanne opened her eyes, the world was tilting wildly above her. The table and chairs leaned at strange angles, everyone stood over her, tall as trees. Her mother was shrieking like she always shrieked. Useless. Her father was looking down from his great height, still red and pop-eyed, like a bull, his fists clenched, as if he expected her to say something more. But Jehanne remained still on the floor, and at last her father sat down in his chair. "You had that coming," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand.

  The messenger coughed, said it didn't matter what the truth was. "You have to come to Toul to answer—" Abruptly he stopped speaking. Jehanne was on her feet and moving up behind her father with the kitchen knife flashing in her hand. The world red and rippling. She took his neck in the crook of her arm, pulled back his chin, and held the point of the blade against his tonsils.

  Her mother screamed. "Stop it!"

  Jehanne leaned in close to her father's ear and spoke quietly. "You ever touch me again, I'll kill you. Understand? I will slit your ugly throat."

  "Get off me," he said.

  Jehanne pressed the knife blade in deeper until a bright bead of blood appeared on his skin. Amazed at her own ferocity. "Understand?"

  Her father said that he did.

  She spent the night outside, walking up and down through the hilly, narrow streets of the town, trembling. For hours she knew nothing. Knew only the cold, damp air on her cheeks and the thrilling wind roaring in her head. She walked fast, blindly, walked until she came to the top of a steep hill where she stood panting, her nostrils red with cold as she looked down the crooked street. A flash of cobblestone shone in the torchlight outside a tall stone house. A chicken clucked softly in the darkness. The roaring in her head had stopped now, and she felt tall and calm, standing in the darkness at the top of the hill, looking down at the rooftops below her. She knew then that it was possible. She felt as if someone had untied her. The wall of fear was gone.

  Go to Vaucouleurs, said Catherine. The man your father knows, Governor de Baudricourt, will give you the help you need. And Jehanne saw how it would go then very clearly. She saw that she would go to Toul and answer the judge's foolish questions. She would make him believe her. Then she would leave Domrémy forever. She would go to Vaucouleurs, and she would find men to escort her to the Dauphin's castle in Chinon. She would go to war against the English. She would crown the rightful king.

  28

  In the end it was Durand who helped her escape. Durand who appeared that winter with his slumped, meaty shoulders and his high black boots several months after Jehanne and her parents had returned to the charred remains of Domrémy. A month after the judge in Toul had heard Jehanne's testimony and declared her innocent of the charges brought by Michel Le Buin. Durand pulled up outside the house in his wagon on his way back from the market in Nancy, came lumbering across the frozen yard with a basket of green duck eggs in one hand and a fresh loaf of sa fleur bread under his arm.

  Before he was halfway to the front door, Jehanne came hopping out over the hard icy ground in her bare feet, hugged her cousin hard, and dragged him over to the black stump that had once been a rose bush by the side of the house. "Listen, Uncle," she whispered, shivering, her eyes feverishly bright. "I need your help."

  For months she'd been trying to find a way out of Domrémy. Her voices whispering hot in her ears each day, Go, little one! Go! The English had laid siege to the city of Orléans in October, and the saints had been relentless ever since. Coming three or four times a day. Michael standing on the air before her in his wild, feathered sunlight, his brow pressed into long stern pleats, his eyes like burning stones. You must make it to Chinon by mid-Lent if we are to save Orléans, little one. Go now. You must go now! If she did not, he said, everything would be over. Orléans was the gateway to the last free part of the country, the last line of defense keeping the Goddons out of the unprotected heartland of the south. If the Goddons took Orléans, there would be nothing to keep them from taking the rest of France too.

  Twice that fall
Claude had brought updates from Orléans to Domrémy. Tales of families hunting for rats by torchlight, drinking blood from the necks of their horses. "Just when you thought it couldn't get worse," Claude said. But there was none of the old storyteller's joy in him now. His cheeks had gone gray. His eyes were frightened.

  They followed Jehanne into her dreams, the people of Orléans. Their sunken, purple-ringed eyes reproached her, pleaded with her until at last she could not eat or sleep at all, could do nothing but stand by the window in her father's house with her hands knotted together, staring at the empty road, praying to the empty road. There must be a way. There must be a way.

  When at last Durand appeared in Domrémy with his great toothy smile and the basket of eggs beside him in the wagon, it seemed as if she had conjured him right out of the dust and ashes, and the sun shone in her heart for the first time in months. "My best girl!" he roared as she came across the yard.

  But his face changed when she began to speak of her mission. Listening to her describe Saint Michael's orders to lead the Dauphin's army into battle against the English and crown the Dauphin Charles in Reims Cathedral, Durand turned increasingly pale. When he spoke, his voice was cold. "Jehanne, stop. What are you talking about? Do you know what you're saying?"

  Her eyes were very bright; there were hectic spots of red on her cheeks. "Have you not heard the prophecy that France would be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from Lorraine?"

  Durand laughed. "And you think you're her?"

  "I know that I am her."

  "You're out of your mind," he said quietly.

  "You believe a stranger in Rodez with bleeding hands and feet, but not your own cousin?"

  "Not when my cousin tells me she wants to go get herself killed by the Goddons."

  "Uncle, I swear to you, by all that is holy, I speak the truth. I need you to take me to Sir Robert de Baudricourt's château in Vaucouleurs. There's no one else."

  "Baudricourt's not going to see you! Why would he? It's insane, what you're saying. You're a girl! A child! You can't go running around the country with soldiers, fighting wars, talking to kings. It's madness. They'll tear you apart."

  Jehanne looked at her cousin, and she felt the fire surge through her. Her sex, her fingertips, were glowing like stars. "I am protected," she said quietly. "The Lord has said nothing shall harm me."

  Durand made a face. "Don't say such things. And don't look at me that way, Jehanne. I can't help you." He shook his head, rubbed his hand over his mouth. "What do your parents say about all this? Do they know about this plan of yours?"

  She said that they did not and could not. "You know Papa. He'd kill me."

  "And who would blame him?" said Durand, throwing his hands out, his dark eyebrows raised high on his forehead.

  Jehanne continued looking up at him, and Durand could feel her will pulling at him like a fierce tide. She put her small brown hand on his arm. "You have to help," she said. "Please. There's no one else."

  "No," he said. "Absolutely not. That's final."

  Jehanne kept asking. Again and again she asked, and again and again he refused. But each time there was a little less force in his voice. Looking into his young cousin's dark eyes, Durand began to feel slightly hypnotized. And the longer he looked at her, the more it began to seem to him that he must help her, that she was clearly in God's grace, and that to do anything else would be wrong, quite possibly an offense against the Almighty.

  So Durand Laxart drove out of Domrémy with Jehanne crouched low in the back of his wagon, hidden beneath a filthy wool blanket—a cage of stinking chickens on one side of her, an enormous grinding stone on the other. It was a brutal January day. The air so cold it hurt to breathe, the bare black trees encased in ice, clattering in the wind. Overhead the sky was flat white, the sun steaming weakly from a hole inside of it. Jehanne pressed her small chapped hands together between her thighs, trying to keep warm.

  She kept her head under the blanket, but she could see her house through the slats in the side of the wagon as it receded behind them—the burnt, stained, hunchbacked shape, the garden where He had first showed her His light, the ruined garden where her mother knelt now, hunched over the piles of ash and charcoal, digging for turnips amid the ashes. Good-bye house, she thought as the cart rolled into the future. Good-bye family. Good-bye bois chenu ...

  Suddenly they all seemed unbearably dear to her. Even her father. Suddenly all she could remember was the love—her father taking her to pick strawberries at the edge of the bois chenu, giving her the sweetest ones. Or the way she would run out into the road to meet him at the end of the day when she was a child, leaping up into his great strong arms, shrieking with delight as he swung her around in a circle, her body's dark shadow stretching out hugely over the road, her hair flying out like a fan, and she would think, Oh Papa! My Papa!

  She remembered not her mother's fear and cowardice, but the way she'd sung to her before bed at night. Les troupeaux d'oiseaux descendent sur moi. Je salue orioles, et le rossignol ... The way she'd brushed Jehanne's hair back off her forehead, her hand rough and warm and tender all at the same time, the musky fragrance of her neck as she bent down to kiss Jehanne good night. Forgive me, she thought. Forgive me for leaving you.

  Through the wooden slats, her face striped in sunlight, she saw her village go by as if for the first time. The church with its charred black face and its sagging roof, Père Guillaume with his thin, wrinkled apple cheeks and his ugly, misshapen wool hat, taking a holly wreath down off the door. She saw the dim cave of the smith's shop with its red fire glowing in the belly of the oven, the smith with his blackened face, his hammer on the anvil, a family of bristly gray pigs huddled together behind a split-rail fence in the frozen mud. In the square was the well where Quiet Paul had kissed her when she was ten, and at the well itself stood the mayor's daughter, Louise, in her fine green woolen dress, flashing her eyes at André Gachot. And the light Jehanne saw in Louise's eyes made her pine for a moment for a different sort of life entirely. A life like Catherine might have had—graceful and soft, protected. Making dresses and cakes, combing her children's hair, cutting violets in the garden. And it seemed strange to her that she should long for such a thing now, though she never had before in her life.

  She waited until the wagon began to wind its way through the stiff yellow fields outside the village to raise herself up in the cart and let the blanket fall around her shoulders, the air stinging her face and ears as she looked out across the gray and brown winter patchwork of the countryside, out to the line of naked black elm trees on the hill with their long black branches reaching up against the January sky, the red eye of the sun sinking into the horizon. And beyond that, Paradise, she thought. God's beautiful Paradise in the sky where my saints will lead me one day if I do as they say.

  29

  It was dark when they arrived in Burey-le-Petit. At the house of the fawn. Jehanne had fallen asleep. Durand called to her from the front of the wagon, his voice disembodied, strange in the dark. "You alive back there? We're almost home." Jehanne, hoisted from a dream in which she was charging naked into battle without a sword, blinked and looked up at the cold black sky and the bright sprays of stars, and remembered that her journey had begun. She had taken the first impossible step.

  The wagon was climbing slowly up a hill through the darkness, and the air was icy and fresh on her face, and as the night world unfolded around her, a powerful excitement crept over her skin. It has begun, she thought. She could hear the horses huffing up ahead as they labored slowly up the incline, and the clinking of their bits and the creaking of the wagon, and these seemed suddenly like new and thrilling sounds to her, like sounds she was hearing for the first time. And the night sky seemed like a new sky, filled with stars she'd never seen.

  Durand's wife, Marie, stood at the door of the cracked house with narrowed eyes and her heavy white arms crossed over her chest. She was roundly pregnant and dressed in a thin, brown linen shift, a gray bl
anket clutched about her shoulders. A look on her face as if she'd been drinking sour milk. "You promised you'd be back by sunset," she said to Durand.

  Durand smiled and blushed and apologized all at once. "I know I did, dear, and I'm sorry about it, but look, I've brought young Jehanne to stay with us for a patch."

  Jehanne's aunt regarded her bleakly. "Why?"

  Durand hurried Jehanne inside the house. "I'll explain everything, don't worry. It's a great reason. A matter of great importance. Aren't you even going to say hello to her, Marie?"

  "Hello, Jehanne," said the woman without smiling. She tucked in her lips. "You knew," she hissed at her husband as he passed. "You knew tonight was the last night."

  "And it still is," he said, kissing her on the shoulder. "Don't you worry, Pony."

  "I poached a chicken for dinner. Of course it's cold now."

  Durand gave a nervous chuckle. "Ah, cold chicken will suit Jehanne and I just fine, won't it, Jehanne?"

  Jehanne said that it would, though her heart stung from Marie's cold reception. She has never liked me. Well, I've never liked her either. Old shrew.

  After dinner Jehanne lay in a featherbed beside the hearth, watching the fawn, grown to an adult deer now, curled up asleep in its basket and the red coals that pulsed in the heart of the fire. She wondered if it was true what her brothers said, that Hell resembled such a place. Whole pulsing cities of fire, eternal burning. And as she watched those cities blaze in her mind's eye, her heart filled with shame for her earlier unkindness toward her aunt. Forgive me, she prayed. Forgive my hateful thoughts toward Marie. I will try to love her better.