Into The Fire (52 page)

—Will you speak the Pater Noster?

Does he think he is her priest, this black crow, flapping? This is an assault on all the structures of the Church. Just for this, Tomas could kill him from here, with a single thrown knife. He could strangle him as he strangled Stefan in an alley. Blue veins writhe like slow worms on the backs of his hands. The pulse at his neck is fat and slippery. By its rhythm, not just Tomas but the whole court can count how much she angers him. Just now it thrums like a struck string, and the withered parchment-skin beneath his eyes is inky dark.

She looks Cauchon in the eye.
Lady, have a care.
‘Hear me in confession and I shall gladly say the Lord’s Prayer to you.’

His veins will burst, and spread across his face. ‘I adjure you not to escape, for if you do, we tell you now that you brand yourself a heretic.’

‘That is not so, sir. For I have taken no oath not to escape, nor shall I. It is the duty of every prisoner of war to escape. I say now that I do wish to escape and shall avail myself of any opportunity. But you have dishonoured yourselves by leaving me in the hands of ruffians of the lowest sort. I should be kept by women, in a convent, as is proper.’

He might die now, of his rage.

—Take her away.

This is the day that Tomas remembers best; the first, in many ways the easiest. Cauchon does not know how to handle her. Do you swear? I will swear to tell you what I am permitted to tell you.

She doesn’t vary, but then she can’t. They are forty and she is one and they interrupt her when she answers, and interrupt each other, talking over themselves, throwing questions, questions, questions, with no order and no theme, so she cannot see where they are driving. All those questions Tomas had, to which he never truly got an answer: who is your father, who your mother? He knows Jacques d’Arc is not her father, but he does not know the truth and he prays now that he does not learn it here, in open court.

Under questioning, she relays with some reluctance vague details of her childhood: the names of her godparents, her brothers, her sisters, a certain attack by Burgundy on her village. She doesn’t know whether it was her father or her mother who gave her the ring with the
Jhesu Maria
inscribed therein that was the basis of her pennants. She cannot remember her exact age. She swears she did not herd cows when all the witnesses swear that she did. If they were going to catch her out on failure to admit to herding cattle, she’d be burned and gone already. But that’s not what they want. Herding cows – or not – won’t bring down a king.

She will not cease her reference to her counsel, her voice. She taunts them with it. If you were well informed about me, you would wish me to be out of your hands. I have done nothing, except by revelation.

Oh, my lady.

He does not sleep. He can barely eat. The Maid alone is peaceful. In her cell, quietly, she says, ‘Tomas, you have done all you can. This is not your battle. Do not put yourself in danger on my account.’

‘Do you want to burn? You do understand what they will do to you?’

‘I understand, and I assuredly do not want it.’

‘Well then …’

She is lying on the bed, her wrists behind her head, watching him. She is thinner, her eyes bigger in her face. He cannot read beyond them. ‘Go, Tomas. Find Marguerite. Tell her not to come again; it’s too dangerous.’

‘
What?
’

‘She was in the court, did you not see? At the back, near the door. She and Huguet. They shouldn’t be here, it’s not safe. Tell them to go home and not to grieve.’

As well tell a pike not to hunt, a deer not to run, a falcon not to stoop to the kill. Marguerite’s natural language is prayer, but God is not answering; He is not letting the Maid walk free, not striking off her chains and striking dead the enemy all around her. Faced with this lack, what else is there but grief, unless it is an impotent, murderous rage?

Marguerite is raging, who is not built for it. She is too fine, too fragile. Tomas, who watches her as closely as he does the Maid, can see the way it builds in her marrow, in the hollow places beneath her collarbones, pressing outwards, thickening her blood, causing her humours to rise and boil over.

Simply to stand near her is to be scalded by her fury. He aches to hold her, to fold her in his arms and kiss her hair and make her back to the smiling, radiant woman who nursed him when his own schemes had broken his elbow. He cannot. His heart breaks twice, for the Maid and for Marguerite. He loves both. He can have neither.

Marguerite is fasting again, if she has eaten at all since last May. He supposes she must have done, but the dark pools beneath her eyes are deeper, darker than the Maid’s. If she were the one chained to the block in the cell, she could not look worse. ‘What are you doing to get her out? There must be something.’

‘If there were, lady, you have to believe me, I would have tried it. Even if I had to knock her on the head and carry her out sleeping, I would have tried it.’

A derisive snort. A raised brow that cuts him deeper than anything Bedford has ever done. He thinks that it’s a good thing she’s his friend or he’d be broken.

She says, ‘Try harder.’

He leaves and the next trial day she is there, bearing witness, offering the support of her presence.

He, then, can only do the same. Day by day, nothing changes, except that the questions become more ludicrous, and the answers match them. Soon, the court is laughing more with the Maid than against her.

—Tell us about the angels who bring you counsel: what clothes are they dressed in?

—I have made no mention of angels. I have counsel.

He waits for her to say ‘the king in heaven speaks to me’, but she is not stupid; far, far from that.

—The angels are naked, then?

—You think God could not clothe His angels?

More laughter. Cauchon’s veins grow fatter. In back rooms of the city, men lay bets on whether he will live to see her burn. The best odds Tomas has heard are ninety to one against.

They are obsessed with the matter of angels and saints and the many recorded ways by which men of the cloth might establish whether laymen – and indeed laywomen – who claim to have had visitations from holy figures are in fact being deceived by the devil. Or not.

Tomas thinks that this is the way by which three dozen learned men, having decided the rules by which an angel might dance on the head of a pin, will then question others on the finer points of those same rules, while keeping them hidden and secret. The whole thing is a sham, but he cannot say this aloud, and nobody else seems inclined to point it out.

Cauchon is determined that the Maid saw angels and no amount of ‘there were no angels, no saints, only my counsel, which advises me’ will satisfy him. He must know what they wore, how was their hair, how their countenance, the tone of their voice.

When, at the end of a hard day, she says that ‘Saint Michael gave me some comfort,’ he fastens on it like a hound on a crippled deer.

‘What were you thinking?’ Tomas asks in her cell. ‘He will never let this go.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She is white, drawn, lying on her bed with her ankles crossed and her hands behind her head, but she is not laughing at him now. Exhaustion drains the colour from her skin, makes weightless her body. If she could slip out of the shackles, he could carry her away. Her hair sticks around her head, held by old, dried sweat. When she was like this before, she had a headache that made her vomit, violently. He finds her water and gives it, and holds her while she drinks.

Gently, he says, ‘Saint Michael is the patron of the Valois. They will know the old king trained you.’

‘Tomas, all day the same questions, all of them, three or four at a time, until my head spins. I thought he might stop. I thought it might get him to … I wasn’t thinking. I just spoke. It was stupid. I’m sorry.’

‘He won’t let go of it.’

‘I know.’ Half a smile, all exhaustion. ‘Whom should I have said?’

He searches in the breviaries and books of his mind. Illumination comes in the form of a memory: a taut face by his bedside, lips framing words of greater piety than has often touched his life. ‘Who does Marguerite pray to?’

‘Saint Catherine of Siena. Saint Margaret. Both are maids: safe, good, kind saints suitable for women.’

‘Them, then. Speak of them.’

‘And we shall make it exciting. What do you think a saint would wear? How would they style their hair? How would their voices sound? You haven’t read Gerson, I suppose, on the topic?’

‘Not recently. Not that.’

‘A pity.’

On 10 March, they cease to question her in public. The humiliation is too great. They find themselves ‘too busy’ to appear in the great chamber of the chateau, and instead file into the chamber of her cell: Cauchon, Jean de la Fontaine, Nicolas Midi, Gérard Feuillet and others, plus the three notaries who transcribe the conversations each day and copy them clean in the evenings. Cauchon will prove this trial is fair, even in its unfairness.

Tomas would write his own account, more accurate, but he would be seen and what excuse could he give? My lord of Bedford requires that I give him an honest account because yours is rotten to the core? Nobody will believe that; Bedford doesn’t want anything except a big, hot fire and a clear route through to Rheims at the end of it, and slowly, slowly, one misspoken sentence at a time, one mistake, one exhausted, frustrated, half-ironic answer that can later be caught and teased out and examined in ways that were never intended, Cauchon is giving it to him.

—Do you see the angels bodily?

‘I saw them with my two eyes as readily as I see you; and when they left me, I wept and truly wished that they had taken me with them.’ This by now is true, he thinks; she holds always to the almost-truth, that she might remember it better in the midst of their harangues.

—Do you know that Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret hate the English?

‘They hate what God hates and love what He loves.’

—Does God hate the English?

‘I have no idea whether He loves or hates the English or what He will do to their souls. But I know that they will be driven out of France, except those that die here, and that God will send the French a victory over the English.’

—What support and what succour do you look to from Our Lord with respect to your wearing of men’s clothing?

‘For that, as for the other things I have done, I have not wished to have any other reward than the salvation of my soul.’

Men’s clothes. Is this the worst they can find, that she wears doublet and hose? Nobody has asked her how she came to ride a horse that few men would choose to mount. Nobody asks how she couched her lance on Ascension Day, how she knew how to direct the guns at Jargeau, how she humiliated all of England at Montépilloy. They don’t want that in their court proceedings, but they will harp on endlessly about men’s clothes.

—Did your voice bid you to put on men’s clothes?

‘Whatever I have done that was good, I have done at the bidding of my counsel.’

Later, Tomas hears that Cauchon has had an iron cage made, that she might be tethered standing, unable to move, and might only eat and drink by the hands of others.

He has not used it yet, but it exists and he makes sure she gets to hear of it just before the hearing opens.

That morning, she says more things she should not say. ‘I saw an angel holding a crown over the king of France at his coronation.’

Marguerite leaves the court after that. Tomas sees her go. He chooses not to follow; what is there to say?

THERE IS A
question to which Tomas thought he would never learn an answer, and he was wrong.

The answer comes in late March, in the afternoon.

The Maid is lying on the bed, waiting for the old king to appear to her, which is what she does, evidently, when the days lie long on her.

Tomas hears afterwards how it happened, how she is lying there, with the day creeping on; the rain, then the rare spring sun. She has already told him that she measures time by the changing angles of the shadows on the sill edge where the narrow slit of a window catches the sun. The light is angled sharply across the stone in late afternoon when the door unlocks again.

She thinks, this is it: they have come to burn me. Tomas, where are you? She stands and moves as far as she can before the chains halt her. The irons drag at her ankles. She can smell blood somewhere, iron-bright in the thunderous air.

The door grunts heavy on its hinges. Who comes in is a knight: mail and surcoat with a badge on it quartered in gules and sable, with the three lions of England in the red and a turreted castle in the black. A chevron shows him to be the younger son of a great house. Not Bedford; he is of Lancaster and his sign is the rose. Warwick, perhaps? A younger brother of the man who defeated the Welshman, Owain Glyndwr?

‘So …’ He is a bull, barging to a halt just inside the door, thumbs tucked in his belt. The buckle is silver, thick as a man’s fist. His cloak is a soldier’s, heavy with the weight of campaigning, crusted with mud at the hem. His boots have been worn through at the toes from long wear. Mud peels from them on to the floor.

She thinks, he has been hunting; this is where comes the scent of blood, of horses (oh, Xenophon, what have they done with you?), of terror and pain and the fierce joy of slaughter. It would be something hard; stag or boar: this man would not waste his time hunting hinds. He has matched himself against the biggest and the best and now he comes to prove himself again, against the Maid who terrorized Bedford, Warwick, the whole English army.

He heels the door shut, rips off his gloves. ‘Fucking French whore. The piss-water bishop says you are too pure to have consorted with the devil. Tell that to Salisbury, hey? To Talbot’s brother. To Scales. To Suffolk. To the defenders of Meung, of Jargeau. To the bowmen of Patay. How could a fucking whore beat real men if not with the devil’s help?’