Into The Fire (14 page)

Did he hear that the French excuse for a king took a room one night in an inn and woke halfway to midnight with his bed falling through the floor? Yes, he heard it. In fact, he saw it. He may even have caused it, although he will kill any man who suggests so.

He says, ‘She has sworn in God’s name to see Charles anointed king at Rheims. That’s where they’re heading.’

‘
What?
’ Bedford’s blade comes clear of its sheath. He, Tod Rustbeard, loyal servant, could die here, now, the bearer of bad news. But then, ‘Ha!’ and ‘Ha!’ and ‘
Ho!
’ and Bedford is doubled over, both hands to his weapon, weeping tears of mirth. The chestnut mare stands quite still, ears flagging back and forth over the noise.

‘Rheims …?
Rheims?
A month’s march through our territory. Can she fly?’

‘There will be those who claim she can. Once they invoke God, they can say anything, and there will always be someone to believe them.’

This is a sobering thought. Bedford’s brother invoked God on every step of his military journeys, and look where it got him.

Henry the fifth of England was a man to make his brothers look genteel, humorous, kind; even this one. God took him early and as many men sighed relief as wept in mourning, but he was the victor of Agincourt, of Sens, of Melun, of countless other bloody battles, and he married Catherine de Valois, the mad king of France’s unmad and beautiful daughter. Nobody questioned
his
right to rule; not twice, at any rate.

Bedford pulls himself upright and fits his sword back into its sheath. He is not laughing now. Perhaps he is remembering his brother. Perhaps he is seeing Henry’s ghost, hearing promises of the future and what he must do to make it happen. With this family, you can rule nothing out.

He turns and leans over the mare, finds the sweet spot on her withers and scratches it. His face, when he raises it, is heavy with dark thoughts. ‘So what now?’

‘She must die, but it must not be in battle. As William Glasdale said with his dying breath, she must be defeated wholly, fully, publicly, and then captured and tried. The church must arraign her. Her lies must be shown for what they are. If she pretends God’s aid, then that is a heresy. One lie is enough to unravel the rest.’

‘And for heresy, she can burn. Good.’ Bedford does not flinch from this, the crisping of human flesh, of a woman. His war is total, his need to reign paramount. ‘But it must be done by France, not England.’

Thus do they ease on to safer ground. Breath by breath, the sense of close and pressing danger diminishes until Tod Rustbeard can say, ‘It will help in our destruction of her if we know who she really is.’

‘You have a plan?’

Of course. Why else has he shaved off his beard? Why else refrained from meat and mead that might otherwise have let him regain the bulk he lost on the hell-ride from Patay?

‘I will get close to her, but not as a man at arms; she has too many of those. What she lacks is a priest she can trust: a confessor.’

‘She does not confess?’ The heavy brows spring upwards. Bedford’s brother was the one who instigated the idea of confess-on-the-march. He thinks, now, that this is what all armies do.

Tod Rustbeard shakes his head. ‘She confesses daily, sometimes hourly, but it is to a priest the king pressed on her, and who has made it abundantly clear that he disapproves of a woman who fights. She needs a confidant, a friend, an ally.’ At some point, he must reveal his hand. This is his second point of danger. He licks his lips. ‘You have a … correspondent … I believe, who is high in the French king’s regard? A man of the cloth, one might say? One who might facilitate the entry of a new priest into her circle?’

‘How do you—?’ Bedford scowls. ‘You have told no one this?’

‘My lord, I would never tell anyone.’ He is not supposed to know the name, not even to know the existence of an English agent in the French king’s innermost circle. He would have to be stupid not to have worked it out, but still …

Bedford nods, slowly and then with more force. ‘I will not endanger him. He has been ours for too many years now to risk it. Yourself notwithstanding, he is our greatest hope for the saving of France. Besides, the French know you as a man at arms, not a priest. How will you conceal yourself from them?’

‘It’s what I do: change who I am.’

You’d be amazed how a man changes without beard and hair. Lose a bushel of weight and put on the cloth, dye the skin a little, stoop, round the shoulders, look at the edges of men’s faces, not into their eyes. Truly, nobody will know. He’s done it before, in more straitened circumstances than these, and his own lover didn’t know him.

‘Only get me close and I will do it. We may not be able to stop her crowning the chinless bastard king, but by the year’s end I shall have found truth enough to burn her. You, meanwhile, must see to the defences of Paris. They are sadly lax.’

‘You think the bitch will go for
Paris
?’

‘In her place, I would.’

ORLÉANS IS AFIRE
with election fever, and its name is Christelle Vivier.

Walking from her apartment to the hotel where Luc’s family is holding its press conference, Picaut passes three separate posters. Each one is larger than life, vital with Christelle’s scorching red hair, her emerald green Lanvin suit, her polished smile.

In the first of the three, she stands alone before a perfect sky with a flagpole starkly white behind her. This is Orléans and the inference is obvious, but for infants or foreigners, or the hard of thinking who might not immediately grasp that the flagpole is a metaphor for a stake and Christelle’s hair for fire, and that she is therefore the new Maid of Orléans, the
Front National
’s emblem of a flame wrought in the red, white and blue of the French flag is stamped at her side. There is no text; none is needed.

In the remaining two posters, she is standing with her arm looped touchingly through the elbow of her Resistance-hero grandfather.

Old René is in his nineties. He stoops with the beginnings of scoliosis, and what’s left of his hair is white, tinged to yellow with tobacco smoke – but that’s not where you look. You look at his left hand, which is resting on the handle of his carved hickory walking stick. You look at his thumb and first two fingers, or rather, you look at where they should be but are not, because they were hammered to bloody pulp, slowly, one joint per day, by the Gestapo, down somewhere near Lyon.

As everyone knows (because he has said it himself and his story has become a national legend) he is lucky they didn’t gouge his eyeballs out with a fork. He thinks he might have talked if they had done that. As it was, an Allied air raid destroyed the prison where he was being held and Old René escaped.

You might expect him to have run to London, to the shelter of de Gaulle’s ex-patriot government-in-exile, but no, he stayed in France, hunting the enemy, his kill total by the war’s end in the dozens. He was awarded a Croix de Guerre and palm before the war ended. In 1947, he was made a Knight of the Légion d’Honneur, among the youngest ever. He has been a hero ever since.

Now, in his dotage, still proud, still a fighter, Old René’s poster-sized gaze is a challenge, set in delicate counterpoint to Christelle’s glowing youth, her vitality, her absolute conviction that her cause is right, and she will prevail.

Beneath them stands the slogan ‘No More Fires!’ and, because Christelle is on every news bulletin, radio channel and talk show, making her fluent, media-tutored case, it is easy to remember that this means ‘Vote for the
Front National
, because only we have the heritage, the courage, the conviction of belief that will rid France of the unFrench and so keep you safe.’

The proto-feral youth gangs are listening to this. They have taken to wearing the tricolour flame on their sleeves. Some are now tattooed with it, proof that their convictions will never waver.

Picaut doesn’t quite spit as she passes the third poster, but she comes close and her own vehemence surprises her. She thought she was too caught up in the arson that is eating the city, or too awed by Old René and his wartime valour. She thought she was too impressed by his legendary loathing of the Bressards. Rumour has it that a scion of the Family betrayed him to the Nazis, and even Ducat cannot hate them more than does Old René.

Most of all, she thought she didn’t care about politics. Evidently, now that her future depends on Luc’s success, or at least on his not failing abysmally on her account, she has a new and personal interest.

Propelled by this thought, Picaut leaps up the stone steps to the Maison de la Pucelle, the small, chic-beyond-stars hotel that Luc has hired in its entirety to use as his venue for tonight’s press conference. It stands a mere three doors west of the Maison Jeanne d’Arc, the house-turned-museum where the Maid of Orléans is reputed to have stayed when she came to break the English siege. If Luc wants to wrest her mantle from Christelle Vivier, this is the place to do it.

Whatever his intent, Luc has booked Picaut into a single suite on the third floor, into which he will not intrude. He has provided a Chanel dress for her, in a deep bronze silk that cost many times her monthly salary and hugs her figure in a way that would normally repel her but this evening, unaccountably, does not.

It requires, of course, that she wear high heels, which goes against her determination at all times to be able to run at least as fast as anyone she might be trying to bring down. It also requires a ridiculously small clutch purse into which she can barely fit her keys, but since Luc has asked that she leave her mobile phone in her room, it is sufficient.

She has had plenty of time to consider the implications of what he is doing, and so when she emerges, showered again, changed, with her hair blown dry by Luc’s hairdresser and her face oddly tight beneath a fine natural-look make-up that took an hour to apply, and he is standing there waiting for her, it is his unspoken contest against Christelle Vivier that drives her forward, the unnecessary, impossible futility of it; and the irony.

‘You should have married her. She has the right pedigree, the right height, the right accent, very nearly the right politics. Give her some training and she could turn her cartoon rhetoric into pure Family prose. She’s a Bressard in all but name.’

She slows to a halt. Striding in high heels is beyond her. Luc presses a flute of fine white wine into her hand and chastely kisses her cheek. ‘You look stunning. I knew you would.’

He is standing in the anteroom to her suite, which is as close as his new, self-imposed boundaries will allow him. His suit is pale, almost white, and it shows his unblemished tan to best effect. His shirt is bright as packed ice, his tie black, in honour of the body found in the latest fire. He shimmers, alive with that essence of barely suppressed wildness that snared the deep ancestral parts of her brain long before the rest of her caught up.

She doesn’t know how to be with him now. She says, ‘Christelle Vivier would look better.’

He smiles his old smile. ‘Only if she wore that ghastly green jacket and then I’d look as if I had flu standing beside her. It wouldn’t work.’

‘But she’s stolen the fires. They are hers, and she is the new Maid, rising to save Orléans. Have you heard the talk in the bars? On the trams?’

‘So she is unconquerable.’ He is laughing at her, but only with his eyes. His face is serious.

‘You don’t think so?’

‘I think the people are fickle and their love is fickle. At least they’re beginning to care about politics, which has to be good for all of us in the end. And I think you’re wrong about her prospects. No amount of training would get her beyond the cartoon rhetoric. As our American allies say, she hasn’t got the bandwidth. You, on the other hand …’ His expression is pure regret, gone before she has truly taken note of it. ‘I take it you haven’t eaten? No, me neither. In which case—’ He holds out his elbow, and looks like Old René, but six decades younger. ‘Shall we go down?’

The main dining room of the hotel is perhaps four times the size of the living room in Picaut’s apartment; not huge, but big enough to provide intimate, five-cover tables for the thirty or so representatives of the local, national and international media who have received Landis Bressard’s invitation.

Christelle Vivier may be flavour of the moment, but everyone knows that Luc is a serious player. And a free dinner at the Maison is not something one is offered every day.

Wide double doors at one side open into the small and private lobby, from which Picaut can see into the main room. At one end a small stage has been erected, with a speaking podium set slightly off centre. The back wall and the podium’s skirt are both draped in spectacular crimson velvet. It looks like a waterfall of blood. Two shades brighter and it would be the colour of last night’s fire.

She stops on the threshold. ‘Is this setting the tone for the evening? Bad taste in primary colours?’

‘I thought you’d hate it, but we had to find something that would show us both up well without us becoming lost against it. And it’ll be gone by halfway through.’

Luc is being wired for sound. A technician is fiddling with his collar, while another runs a connection down the inside of his jacket. He is nervous, but Picaut can only see it because she knows him exceptionally well. A fall from a horse in the Argentine left him with an injury to his left hip. He can usually disguise the slight drag to his left heel, but she’s noticed it today.

To the manager, hovering close, to the black-tied waiters, the maître d’ whose attention is almost all on the diners and their nearly finished meal, he will, she is sure, seem perfectly at ease.

‘What’s behind the curtain?’ she asks. ‘If it’s going, it must reveal something.’

‘To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m told it will do what we need it to and I trust— Ah, we’re on. Enter the beautiful couple, stage left. There will be TV cameras, but they’re not live. Face the front if you can, stand firm, smile as much as you feel able to, and answer honestly if they fire questions at you. They shouldn’t, though. Cousin Lise is on guard and she’ll deflect most of them.’