The Lady of the Rivers (7 page)

But it is worse than this, far worse; she just looks at me steadily, and my sense of outrage slowly drains from me, for she does not ask me what I was doing with her husband, she looks at me as if she knows already. She looks me up and down, as if she knows everything. She gives me a small complicit smile as if she thinks I am some little thief and she has just caught me with my fingers in her purse.

Lord John, the Duke of Bedford, has his way, the great Earl of Warwick has his way, the great men of England have their way. Joan alone, without advisors to keep her safe, changes her mind about her confession, takes off her woman’s gown and puts her boy’s clothes back on. She cries out that she was wrong to deny her voices, wrong to plead guilty. She is not a heretic, she is not an idolater, she is not a witch or an hermaphrodite or a monster, she will not confess to such things, she cannot force herself to confess to sins she has never committed. She is a girl guided by the angels to seek the Prince of France and call him to greatness. She has heard angels, they told her to see him crowned as king. This is the truth before God, she proclaims – and so the jaws of England snap shut on her with relish.

From my room in the castle I can see the pyre as they build it even higher. They build a stand for the nobility to watch the spectacle as if it were a joust, and barriers to hold back the thousands who will come to see. Finally, my aunt tells me to put on my best gown and my tall hat and come with her.

‘I am ill, I cannot come,’ I whisper, but for once she is stern. I cannot be excused, I must be there. I must be seen, beside my aunt, beside Anne the Duchess of Bedford. We have to play our part in this scene as witnesses, as women who walk inside the rule of men. I will be there to show how girls should be: virgins who do not hear voices, women who do not think that they know better than men. My aunt and the duchess and I represent women as men would like them to be. Joan is a woman that men cannot tolerate.

We stand in the warm May sunshine as if we were waiting for the starting trumpet of a joust. The crowd is noisy and cheerful all around us. A very few people are silent, some women hold a crucifix, one or two have their hands on a cross at their necks; but most people are enjoying the day out, cracking nuts and swigging from flasks, a merry outing on a sunny day in May and the cheering spectacle of a public burning at the end of it.

Then the door opens, and the men of the guard march out and push back the crowd who whisper and hiss and boo at the opening inner door, craning their necks to be the first to see her.

She does not look like my friend Joan – that is my first thought when they bring her out of the little sallyport of the castle. She is wearing her boy’s boots once more, but she is not striding out in her loose-limbed, confident walk. I guess that they have tortured her and perhaps the bones of her feet are broken, her toes crushed on the rack. They half-drag her and she makes little paddling steps, as if she is trying to find her footing on uncertain ground.

She is not wearing her boy’s bonnet on her brown cropped hair, for they have shaved her head, and she is as bald as a shamed whore. On her bare cold scalp, stained here and there with dried blood where the razor has nicked her pale skin, they have crammed a tall hat of paper like a bishop’s mitre, and on it are written her sins, in clumsy block letters for everyone to see: Heretic. Witch. Traitor. She wears a shapeless white robe, knotted with a cheap piece of cord at her waist. It is too long for her and the hem drags around her stumbling feet. She looks ridiculous, a figure of fun, and the people start to catcall and laugh, and someone throws a handful of mud.

She looks around, as if she is desperate for something, her eyes dart everywhere, and I am terrified that she will see me, and know that I have failed to save her, that even now I am doing nothing, and I will do nothing to save her. I am terrified that she will call my name and everyone will know that this broken clown was my friend and that I will be shamed by her. But she is not looking at the faces crowding around her, alight with excitement, she is asking for something. I can see her urgently pleading; and then a soldier, a common English soldier, thrusts a wooden cross into her hands, and she clutches it as they lift her and push her upwards to the bonfire.

They have built it so high it is hard to get her up. Her feet scrabble on the ladder and her hands cannot grip. But they push her roughly, cheerfully, from behind, hands on her back, her buttocks, her thighs, and then a big soldier goes up the ladder with her and takes a handful of the coarse material of her robe and hauls her up beside him like a sack, turns her round, and puts her back to the stake that runs through the pyre. They throw up a length of chain to him and he loops it around and around her and then fastens it with a bolt behind. He tugs at it, workmanlike, and tucks the wooden cross in the front of her gown, and in the crowd below a friar pushes to the front and holds up a crucifix. She stares at it unblinkingly, and I know, to my shame, that I am glad she has fixed her eyes on the cross so that she will not look at me, in my best gown and my new velvet cap, among the nobility who are talking and laughing all around me.

The priest walks around the bottom of the pyre reading in Latin, the ritual cursing of the heretic; but I can hardly hear him above the yells of encouragement and the rumble of growing excitement from the crowd. The men with the burning torches come from the castle and walk around the pyre, lighting it all the way round the base, and then laying the torches against the wood. Someone has dampened the wood so that it will burn slowly, to give her the greatest pain, and the smoke billows around her.

I can see her lips moving, she is still looking at the upheld cross, I see that she is saying ‘Jesus, Jesus’, over and over, and for a moment I think that perhaps there will be a miracle, a storm to drown the fire, a lightning raid from the Armagnac forces. But there is nothing. Just the swirling thick smoke, and her white face, and her lips moving.

The fire is slow to catch, the crowd jeer the soldiers for laying a poor bonfire, my toes are cramped in my best shoes. The great bell starts to ring, slowly and solemnly, and though I can hardly see Joan through the thickening cloud of smoke, I recognise the turn of her head under the great paper mitre as she listens and I wonder if she is hearing her angels through the tolling of the bell, and what they are saying to her now.

The wood shifts a little and the flames start to lick. The inside of the pile is drier – they built it weeks ago for her – and now with a crackle and a blaze it is starting to brighten. Tlight makes the ramshackle buildings of the square jump and loom, the smoke swirls more quickly, the brightness of the fire throws a flickering glow on Joan and I see her look up, clearly I see her form the word ‘Jesus’, and then like a child going to sleep her head droops and she is quiet.

Childishly, I think for a moment perhaps she has gone to sleep, perhaps this is the miracle sent by God, then there is a sudden blaze as the long white robe catches fire and a tongue of flame flickers up her back and the paper mitre starts to brown and curl. She is still, silent as a little stone angel, and the pyre shifts and the bright sparks fly up.

I grit my teeth, and I find my aunt’s hand clutching mine. ‘Don’t faint,’ she hisses. ‘You have to stand up.’ We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.

I look through the haze of the fire to our window in the castle, and I see the maid, Elizabeth, looking down. She sees me look up at her and our eyes meet, blank with horror. Slowly, she stretches out her hand and makes the sign that Joan showed us that day by the moat in the hot sunshine. Elizabeth draws a circle in the air with her forefinger, the sign for the wheel of fortune, which can throw a woman so high in the world that she can command a king, or pull her down to this: a dishonoured agonising death.

CASTLE OF ST POL, ARTOIS, SPRING 1433

After a few more months with my uncle John, and then a year-long visit to our Brienne kinsfolk, my mother regards me as sufficiently polished to return home while they plan my marriage, and so I am living at our castle in St Pol when we hear the news that Anne Duchess of Bedford has died and the duke is lost without her. Then a letter comes from my uncle Louis, the duke’s chancellor.

‘Jacquetta, this concerns you.’ My mother summons me to her rooms where I find her seated, my father standing behind her chair. They both look at me sternly and I make a rapid review of my day’s doings. I have not completed the many tasks that I am supposed to do, and I skipped attendance at church this morning, my room is untidy and I am behind with my sewing, but surely my father would not come to my mother’s apartment to reprimand me for this?

‘Yes, Lady Mother?’

My mother hesitates, glances up at my father and then presses on. ‘Of course your father and I have been considering a husband for you and we have been looking at who might be suitable – we hoped that . . . but it does not matter, for you are lucky, we have had a most advantageous offer. In short, your uncle Louis has suggested you as a wife for the Duke of Bedford.’

I am so surprised that I say nothing.

‘A great honour,’ my father says shortly. ‘A great position for you. You will be an English duchess, the first lady after the king’s mother in England, the first lady bar none in France. You should go down on your knees and thank God for this oportunity.’

‘What?’

My mother nods, confirming this. They both stare at me, expecting a response.

‘But his wife has only just died,’ I say weakly.

‘Yes indeed, your uncle Louis has done very well for you, to get your name put forwards this early.’

‘I would have thought he would have wanted to wait a little while.’

‘Didn’t the duke see you at Rouen?’ my mother asks. ‘And then again in Paris?’

‘Yes, but he was married,’ I say foolishly. ‘He saw me . . . ’ I remember that dark predatory look, when I was little more than a girl, and my stepping behind my aunt to hide from it. I remember the shadowy hall and the man who whispered in my ear and then went out to order the burning of the Maid. ‘And the duchess was there. I knew her too. We saw her far more than we saw him.’

My father shrugs. ‘At any rate, he liked the look of you and your uncle has put your name in his ear and you are to be his wife.’

‘He’s very old,’ I say quietly, directing this at my mother.

‘Not very. A little over forty,’ she says.

‘And I thought you told me he was ill,’ I say to my father.

‘All the better for you,’ my mother says. Clearly she means that an elderly husband may be less demanding than a young one, and if he dies then I shall be a dowager duchess at seventeen, which would be the only thing better than being a duchess at seventeen.

‘I had not looked for such an honour,’ I say feebly to them both. ‘May I be excused? I fear I am not worthy.’

‘We are of the greatest family in Christendom,’ my father says grandly. ‘Kin to the Holy Roman Emperor. How would you not be worthy?’

‘You cannot be excused,’ my mother says. ‘Indeed, you would be a fool to be anything but delighted. Any girl in France and England would give her right hand for such a match.’ She pauses and clears her throat. ‘He is the greatest man in France and England after the King of England. And if the king were to die . . . ’

‘Which God forbid,’ my father says hastily.

‘God forbid indeed; but if the king were to die then the duke would be heir to the throne of England and you would be Queen of England. What d’you think of that?’

‘I had not thought of marriage to such a man as the duke.’

‘Think now then,’ my father says briskly. ‘For he is coming here in April, to marry you.’