The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc Read online

  Sir Robert came and stood beside him, stroking the stubble on his several chins and looking out to where Jehanne stood in the courtyard, talking with his soldiers. A strange, radiant day outside. It had rained earlier, and the cobblestones were still dark and shining, the sky itself a wild mix of dark gray storm clouds and brilliant yellow shafts of sunlight. Jehanne stood in a column of sun with the dark mountainous clouds massed behind her, her face bright, eager, her red skirt just visible beneath her cloak, her dark hair hanging down her back in two thick braids. Sir Robert cocked a brow, hoisted his belt up over the great barrel of his belly.

  Together they watched as Metz handed her a sword and adjusted her short fingers around the handle. Then Metz set his right hand on his hip and took a few dancing steps forward across the cobblestones, leading with his left foot and slicing the blade back and forth through the air as he went, finishing the dance with a sharp, elegant thrust. He turned and spoke to Jehanne, and a moment later she too came dancing across the cobblestones with one hand on her waist and the sword glinting in the sunlight, the red hem of her skirt swishing about her knees. She shouted "Ha!" as she thrust her sword forward with a flourish, and Sir Robert shook his head. "She's got stones, I'll say that."

  Duval squinted at the girl, who was clowning now, balancing the butt of the sword on her palm and walking forward slowly with the blade pointing toward the sky. "The sheer oddness of the thing," he said. "A virgin sent by God to murder the English ... something wonderful about it."

  Baudricourt snorted and turned away from the window. He squeezed the base of his nose, as if to remove some filth there. "It's ridiculous. What's she going to do, put on a suit of armor and lead Charles's army in a charge?"

  "They say she's got Metz and Poulegny offering to take her to him."

  Another snort. "They're just thinking with their cocks."

  "Maybe."

  Sir Robert shook his head, walked away from the window. "I'm not going to get behind this foolishness. France may be in bad shape, but we don't need some peasant girl telling us what to do."

  41

  One afternoon, when Jehanne had been in Vaucouleurs for about a month, a messenger appeared at the Le Royers' house. An enormous bald black man dressed in a splendid yellow satin tunic and thick gold hoop earrings. His skin was very dark, almost purple. Gleaming like an eggplant. His features were composed and elegant, still as stone. Thérèse gasped out loud at the sight of him and took a few steps back. "Oh, I ... can I help you?" she said at last.

  The man introduced himself as a messenger from the Duke of Lorraine. "I bear an invitation for the Maid," he said in a deep, melodious voice. His words shocked Jehanne, who sat at the table with Metz and Poulegny; they made her ears and arms prickle with delight. She could not believe that anyone in Nancy had ever heard of her, much less the Duke himself. "I am the Maid," she said.

  The messenger said that the Duke was gravely ill and that his doctors expected him to die within the month. "He has heard of the Maid's great healing powers, and hopes perhaps ..."

  Jehanne shook her head. "I have no such powers."

  The messenger appeared not to hear her. "The Duke would be most grateful."

  Bertrand leaned over and whispered in Jehanne's ear. "He's very rich, the Duke. Couldn't hurt to meet him ..."

  42

  For a long time now Jehanne had been longing to shed her dress and braids. Reminders of the scared peasant girl from Domrémy. The coward. But it was Metz who got her to do it. The afternoon before they left for Lorraine, she sat in her bedroom, packing her things into a blanket. Metz came and poked his head in the open door. "Almost ready?"

  Jehanne nodded and reached for the red dress that lay folded beside her on the bed.

  Metz opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again. "You can't wear that," he said. "Not to travel." He was silent for a moment. "Not for any of the things you're talking about doing, actually."

  A strange sensation then. Joy and terror at once. Her heart glowing, her belly cold. To dress as a member of the opposite sex was expressly forbidden by the Bible. A cold spider walked down her spine. It was happening. It had begun. She asked Metz what she should wear instead, knowing what his answer would be. "Let me lend you some clothes," he said. "It's better if you travel as one of us."

  The costume that Metz presented her with consisted of an old pair of black woolen leggings with holes in the feet and a scratchy gray wool tunic that smelled of mildew. A pair of tall, ancient brown boots that looked as if they'd been dug up out of the earth. "Sorry they're not finer," he said, blushing. "My servant Jean's the only one of us sized small enough to fit you."

  Jehanne smiled, thinking it was all in better shape than her old red dress.

  And she knew when she took her dress off, that it was for the last time. She knew she'd never put it on again. She folded it tenderly and put it on the blanket with the rest of her things. Good-bye, Jehannette, she thought. Good-bye, old life.

  The hose felt strange at first. She'd never worn them before. It was odd to have the wool snug like that, right up against her sex. The seams biting into the tops of her thighs. Odd to feel the loose, rough cloth of the tunic brushing lightly against her nipples instead of the snug linen bodice she was used to. The sleeves hung down past her hands like bells, the hose bunched at the ankles. But it delighted her too. It transformed her, made her into someone else, a creature of her own invention. Not Jehanne, daughter of Jacques and Zabillet d'Arc of Domrémy, but Jehanne the Virgin, Child of God. And it seemed to her that she had crossed a bridge of some kind. Left one world behind and moved forward into another.

  The room was full of people when she walked back into it. News spread fast in Vaucouleurs. The women gasped and crossed themselves when they saw her, for it was illegal to dress as a member of the opposite sex. Not just forbidden by the Bible, but an offense punishable by death. Henri looked at the ground. Letice stood next to Thérèse, whispering in her ear. A wicked look of delight in her eyes. Thérèse was pale as salt, her head pulled back like a turtle's. Metz stared with hot eyes, followed her legs in their black stockings as she crossed the room. "Oh, wonderful!" he said. "That's bloody wonderful!"

  "Get a pair of scissors."

  "No, Jehanne," said Thérèse. "You mustn't."

  Jehanne looked at her calmly. "My council has approved it. Do you question the word of God?"

  Afterward the pile of hair on the floor was so large it looked as if a wild animal had collapsed there. "Jesus help us," said Letice, crossing herself and staring down at the mass of dark curls everyone had always said was Jehanne's best feature. It was beautiful, the hair. Dark brown like a block of oak, with bronze lights in it. "You have stars in your hair," her mother had said once while she braided it. "Tiny gold stars." But Jehanne liked herself better without it.

  They walked her over to a window and Bertrand brought her the little shard of mirror he used for shaving, and there she was, all neck and dark eyes and mouth. The bangs short, chopped across the forehead, her hair curling up over her ears. A bird she was then, free and light and new and clean, the chill air on her neck, the past left behind her on the floor.

  43

  That night Jehanne dreamed of wagons. A great tower of wagons, all piled up on top of each other. An evil tower, it was clear. There were long, sharp wooden stakes sticking out of it from all sides, like porcupine quills. In the dream, French soldiers dressed in long pink skirts and big pink hats that covered their eyes were running up the tower and hurling themselves onto the stakes. It was all strangely well organized, like a dance. A group of maybe ten soldiers would get together in a circle around the tower, then silver trumpets would sound, and they would run and throw themselves onto the stakes at the same time, the long wooden poles thrusting out, red and wet, from their backs. Once the men were dead, other soldiers came and lifted the bodies off the stakes and carried them away on wooden boards. Then a general—also in a long pink skirt and a pink hat—gave the o
rder, and another group circled up and waited for the sound of the trumpets.

  When she awoke in the morning, she knew what it meant. She ran up to the château, grabbed Metz's arm and said, "Tell Sir Robert that France will suffer a terrible defeat at Rouvray tomorrow. Ask him how many more men need to die before he listens to me."

  44

  They rode to see the Duke of Lorraine at his palace in Nancy. An unreal place with gleaming gold-leaf ceilings and swans floating in the moat, a greenhouse full of potted orange trees. Jehanne walked among them, sniffing the air, thought she'd never smelled anything so sweet. As they were led toward the Duke's quarters, Bertrand kept looking over at her, as if to say, Is this real? Are we actually here?

  But the Duke himself was horrible. Useless. A terrifying man with a large yellow head that sagged like an old gourd and a gleaming mink blanket pulled up to his chin. A stink of rotten meat hovering around him. A bluish scum over his eyes. As soon as he learned that Jehanne could not heal him, he lost interest, did not want to hear about her voices, her mission to save France. He let his sagging head fall back on the pillow. Rolled his eyes to the fire that raged in the hearth beside him. "There is no saving France," he said. "France died years ago."

  "I assure you, Duke," Jehanne replied. "France is not dead."

  But the old man would not look at her. Would only stare into the red light of the fire that roared beside his bed, his breathing slow and wet, as if he had jelly in his throat. When Jehanne spoke again, he cut her off in the middle of her sentence with a wave of his hand. "Give her five livres and the old black rouncey out in the stables," he said to his servant. "Then leave me alone."

  "Couple of pennies and a horse that moves slower than I do," Bertrand fumed on the way home. "Why give us anything at all?"

  But it did something, that trip. It changed things for the people of Vaucouleurs. When they saw Jehanne come riding back into town after her travels with her cropped hair and her windburned face, her boy's clothes, her sword at her side, and Sir Robert's two soldiers behind her (Metz and Poulegny, no less—good, solid men) she became real to them in a way she had not been before. It was clear: She was a warrior, a soldier of God. And as they watched her, they realized they had missed her during the two weeks she'd been gone, missed the bright, hopeful feeling they got in their hearts whenever they saw her walking up the hill to the chapel each morning. As she rode past their houses with the two knights behind her, people came running out into the streets and cheered, "The Maid! The Maid returns!" Jehanne stopped her horse and allowed herself to feel for a moment the swelling wind of goodwill that was rising up around her, the sense of things gathering and shifting. Perhaps, she thought. Perhaps.

  45

  There was an open bottle of red wine on the table when they entered the Le Royers' house. Thérèse was sitting at the table with a half-empty glass in front of her, furiously plucking feathers from a pheasant, its blue neck exposed on her knee. Letice was spinning by the fire, her eyes bright. A strange little smile on her face. "Curate was here to see you," Thérèse said. Her eyes flashed. Her voice was cold. "Says they want to perform an exorcism tomorrow, make sure you're not a witch. I said,'How do I know what she is?'"

  "Thérèse," said Henri.

  She ignored him. "Seemed like a normal enough girl at first, praying, God-fearing, but now, with this going about in boy's clothes, cutting off the hair, riding about the countryside unchaperoned with soldiers, I don't know." She gave her head a fierce little shake. "It's not right," she said.

  The word exorcism was all Jehanne heard. It froze her blood.

  Metz stepped forward. "Well of course they want to do an exorcism, mam. Have to make sure the girl's not sent by the Devil, don't they?" He smiled, but Thérèse's face remained set. "We've known this would most likely happen," he said finally.

  "I didn't know, and I don't like it," Thérèse said. There was a new look about her—as if her eyes were closed, although they were not. "I tried to help her out, Durand being an old friend of Henri's and all, but it's six weeks now she's been sitting around my house, filling the air with her holy-mission nonsense, not lifting a finger to help with the cooking and cleaning, running around the countryside acting like she's so bloody important ..." She turned and looked at Jehanne with narrow eyes. "How long 'til you admit it's just a lie, a crazy bid for attention, and go home where you belong?"

  Jehanne flushed deeply. "It is no lie, madam. And as for why I've stayed this long, you yourself said I was welcome to stay as long as it took."

  "Not six bloody weeks!"

  Jehanne said that if they did not want her there, she would leave.

  Henri put his hand on her shoulder. "Now don't be hasty, Jehanne." Then to his wife: "We did say she could stay."

  "We didn't know she'd turn into this," she said, flinging out her hand at Jehanne.

  Jehanne spent the night in the church. It was cold, but a better cold than the cold at the Le Royers' house. She begged her saints to come to her, but they did not appear. There was only the drumming of rain on the roof. Rain pelting the stained glass, drilling into the mud of the churchyard. She watched the long blue shadows of the columns and arches in the candlelight, the tall black shadows of the trees outside, shaking in the wind. And she understood then what the old King had said about feeling as if he were made of glass. If someone touches me, I'll shatter into a thousand pieces.

  When she woke up, a long slant of sunlight was pouring in through the high window and she could feel its warmth on her cheek. Metz was there, shaking her shoulder and smiling down at her with his long sad face, his warm gray eyes. "Guess what?" he said.

  46

  Sir Robert had heard about the defeat of the French troops at Rouvray. The Battle of the Herrings, they were calling it. And it was as Jehanne had dreamed the night before she left for Nancy. A disaster. Three thousand French noblemen defeated by a small convoy bound for the English troops at Orléans. Three thousand of France's most famous warriors against three hundred English wagons full of dried fish.

  All the most highly decorated generals had volunteered to march upon Rouvray: La Hire, Poton de Xaintrailles, the Bastard of Orléans, and the King's own army, led by young Comte de Clermont. It should have been an easy victory, a joke. But no, it was as she had dreamed: a slaughter. Poton, La Hire, the Bastard, and their men riding in from Orléans in a thunder of horses and armor, their bright flags snapping in the winter wind as they arrived outside Rouvray with their men, hot to fight—only to find Clermont and the King's army nowhere in sight. "Clermont, that ass," Sir Robert said, shaking his head. "While he and his idiots were busy plundering Rouvray's cellars, the English convoy arrived, caught sight of the Orléans men lying in wait, and started digging themselves in for a fight." The Orléans men had requested permission to attack the convoy without Clermont, but he refused. Clermont had been so greedy to see his first big battle that he made them all wait for him while the English got themselves beautifully entrenched, circling their wagons and planting sharp spikes that stuck out on all sides, so when at last the French forces attacked, they charged straight at the spikes in a great crush, impaling themselves row after row after row. "A massacre," Sir Robert said, his jaw set, eyes lowered as if he were watching the battle unfold as he spoke. "Another pathetic massacre."

  He raised his eyes to look at Jehanne, who stood before him. "How did you know?" he said. There was a difference in him that day. He still looked like an old bull, but something had changed. The doors in his eyes had opened. "How did you know that would happen?"

  "A dream."

  He nodded, rubbed his lip with his index finger. "Tell me about this dream. Did God speak to you in it?"

  "I'm forbidden to say more."

  The governor squinted at her for a long moment, his finger pressed against the hollow in the center of his top lip. "You are something, Jehannette from Domrémy, I'll give you that."

  "I am the Maid of Lorraine, sir. I was born for this."

&n
bsp; Sir Robert shook his head. "Whatever you are, you've gotten a lot of people in this town very excited. You'd better hope you don't disappoint them."

  Jehanne's heart bounced in her chest. "Does that mean you'll send me to Chinon, sir?"

  "I'm considering it."

  47

  That afternoon Thérèse came to Jehanne where she knelt, praying in the church, and begged her to return to the house. "I was wrong to doubt you," she said, gripping her apron as she spoke. "It's just been so strange—all this."

  Jehanne was silent. You heard about Rouvray. About my meeting with Sir Robert. That's the only reason you're here.

  "You know," she continued, "the way I was raised, it's a sin worthy of hanging for a woman to go around in boy's clothes ... it's just ... not done."

  "God Himself has instructed me to do it, and I will continue."

  Thérèse nodded. Her eyes were bright with tears. "Of course," she said. "Of course you should, but won't you come home now, please? I hate seeing you here in the cold like this."

  People are terrible, weak as sheep, thought Jehanne. But eventually she allowed Thérèse to throw a shawl over her shoulders and they walked out of the church and down the long hill to the house.

  The curate, Jean Fournier, said they needed to exorcise her. Make certain that she was not a fiend of the Devil. He'd appeared, frowning in the Le Royers' doorway, that evening, rain splashing on his hat, staining his black houppelande. On one side of him stood Sir Robert, Sir Robert with his eyes bright and strange. On the other side stood a boy, thin and wrecked with pimples. A long triangular face, eyes on either side of his skull, like a goat. Jehanne dropped her bowl of porridge on the floor when she saw them. A cold rush shot through her bowels. "Father!" cried Thérèse, jumping up. "What an honor!" But Jehanne knew it was no honor they'd come to do her.