Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans

by Thomas Keneally

Jehanne: You must give me that bag, please.

  The king and Yolande had come in behind her.

  Charles: Jehanne, Jehanne, let it go.

  Jehanne traced the outline of the impossibility with her hands, a little tentatively, since the man was clergy.

  Jehanne: You just can’t sell the king’s touch.

  Deacon: Mademoiselle, I … Your Majesty … I must obey the Dean.

  Yolande suddenly broke the impasse.

  Yolande: Give it up Brother Deacon. I’ll speak to the Dean.

  The deacon came up and surrendered it to Jehanne.

  Yolande: Tell the Dean the money will be returned to all with king’s evil.

  Charles: Tell him I’m sorry.

  He had said in Poitiers she was his limb. Now he was begging pardon for some unmanageable part of his anatomy.

  The deacon turned away. Jehanne imagined the Dean in the sacristy, his cope off, his accounts book open, waiting to make the tally.

  Jehanne: You ought to have more pride, dauphin.

  Charles wiped his nose.

  Charles: No doubt, no doubt.

  Yolande left them – out of some sort of sensitivity.

  Charles: Those people – they get their scrofula cured. Who cures me of my king’s evil? Who cures me?

  Jehanne’s ears prickled.

  Jehanne: You know who.

  Charles: And you’re like the glove that gets burnt.

  She bit on her fear, but found with pain that it was her chapped lower lip her teeth were savaging.

  Jehanne: It ends, my pain will end. And Brother Jesus …

  Charles: Yes?

  Jehanne: His heart will open to me. I’ll walk about … in there. In his garden.

  Charles: I don’t want you to suffer.

  But she could tell his mind had already drifted from her. She could suspect that he might not feel any deep fever of bereavement on her day.

  Except that when he was an old king, refined by her sacrifice, he might wake with an inconsolable pity in his thin heart.

  She was sent to tailors in Tours! They ran up a houppelande, blue with lilies, for wearing over her armour. She had forgotten what a lust for good male clothes, for cloth-textures, she had.

  Then a terrifying fitting at the armourer’s, in the stink of metallic dust and metal polish. Putting on the tomb of metal.

  The armourer told over the names of the pieces as apprentices strapped them on.

  Armourer: Well, first we have the breast plate, then the back-plate. Then further down the pansière to protect your belly and the garde-reins to look after your kidneys. And just to prevent a lance getting under your breast plate, these metal strips from the waist down called tassettes. Then six pieces for the arms: the canon, the épaulière … you’ll get to know them … and four pieces for the legs. The shoes are called solerets.

  They were strapping her legs in greaved steel. All the time she sweated and felt she might scream in panic.

  Jehanne: It seems very heavy.

  Armourer: It’s the lightest we make – you’ll get used to it. About sixty-five English pounds.

  On her walks around Tours she kept meeting knights whose property was now in English hands. Each of them wanted her to say that, once Orleans was relieved, her insight would tell her to lead the army in exactly the direction of his lost real estate.

  So when someone called Sir Jean d’Aulon stopped her in the street she thought it’s just another hard-up gentleman with a mortgage and lost property north of the Loire. He was a quiet man, but direct.

  D’Aulon: They call me honest Jean. By that they mean I’m the poorest knight banneret in the army. I’m not married because no girl’s old man is very interested in estates that have been in the keeping of the Goddams for the last eleven years. I have to state I live off the credit of Monsieur Georges de la Tremoille, the Chamberlain. But I’m not his spy, he keeps me out of kinship. I’ve fought with la Hire and Poton, who are the only two decent generals in the French army, apart from the Bastard himself.

  She nodded – she’d been listening to the same speech all week. The next sentence would be I think that after Orleans the offensive has got to be in the direction of Le Mans/Châteaudun/Etampes/Montereau/Montargis. They could prove it always by making little invisible maps on the palm of their left hand with the index finger of the right.

  D’Aulon: I’ll be very happy to give you every service.

  Jehanne: You don’t understand, Sir d’Aulon. The king’s paying my bills and they’re big bills. But I’ve got twelve sols in my purse, that’s all. My page is supported by the du Belliers, my clothes are paid for with treasury notes. The Duke of Alençon gave me my best horse. I can’t pay wages …

  He was thin, she noticed, but all that was there had the appearance of muscle. His face: tanned. Features: leathered by pilgrimages or campaigns.

  D’Aulon: They didn’t tell you: the king appointed me your equerry. Yolande arranged it. She trusts me. And I take an oath to you so you can trust me.

  Jehanne: What does an equerry do?

  D’Aulon: He … I manage your staff, your pages and heralds, their upkeep, our upkeep. I act as your treasurer too. I will have ample finances to pay for escorts for you, or outfit a limited number of troops in your name if you order me to. I arrange your accommodation, pay your bills and eat with you and your chaplain if you don’t dine out.

  Jehanne: All with twelve sols?

  D’Aulon: I believe you also got a bagful from the canons of St Gatien.

  Jehanne: If I’d known I was going to have an equerry I’d have kept it.

  He was about thirty-four or five. If Jehanne had always been by instinct angel of contempt for the ageing codes of knighthood, he would be stubbornly perfect knight. Contradicting each other they would get on together very successfully, and he would wonder and she would respect.

  What else can be said about him? If he ever stepped down from his simple dimensions and went out looking for whores or singing risqué songs, no one ever reported it. Or reported if he ever wept.

  Jehanne: Sir Jean, this is my page Minguet.

  D’Aulon: Hello Sunshine!

  In Tours she stayed with the du Puys, friends of Queen Yolande. One afternoon she found visitors waiting for her in the du Puys’ upstairs hall. A young Augustinian monk sat by the wall. He kept his eyes to himself. You could tell he was from a good convent; was freshly ordained priest and awed by it; wasn’t a career cleric.

  A soldier waited there also, in a mail coat, facing and admiring the big fireplace. For it was built like a small cathedral, spired and buttressed. When the knight turned it was Bertrand. He had a smile as broad, as remember-the-good-times, as you could ever expect him to wear.

  He held out a ring.

  Bertrand: Your mother sent this.

  It was a gold-coloured ring with writing on it.

  She held it, believing him, and a terrible lust rose in her for the sweet, tight, unreasonable griefs, loves and pities that filled kitchens in Greux and Domremy-à-Greux.

  Jehanne: My mother.

  Bertrand: We met at le Puy on Great Friday. I know that’s a long way from the Meuse, but the country’s all pretty safe.

  Le Puy was a pilgrimage place: they had a black Virgin there, brought from Egypt by Saint-King Louis. They said that before the Virgin was born the prophet Jeremiah had sculpted this statue in sycamore wood.

  Jehanne: Did Jacques go?

  Bertrand: Just Zabillet. And Madame Aubrit. And Madame Hélène de Bourlémont. They’ve heard all about you. What they hadn’t heard I told them. It frightens them a little.

  Jehanne: Imagine how I feel.

  But she nodded in the direction of the priest, who didn’t seem to be, but must be, listening.

  Bertrand came up and whispered to her. His breath was thin, very sour.

  Bertrand: They’re frightened that if you don’t drive the Goddams out they’ll be burned for impersonating saints.

  The Augustinian went on keepi
ng custody of his eyes and ears in his chair by the wall. He seemed guileless and didn’t want to overhear any secrets: not being a political monk, one would hope.

  Jehanne: What are they, children?

  Bertrand: They feel they started all this off. With the confraternity.

  Jehanne: They think Madame Aubrit in her own flesh and Madame de Bourlémont in hers are that important?

  Bertrand: I worry about it a little myself.

  Jehanne: No one will ever hear about it. It’s my business. It’s no theologian’s business. Madame Aubrit in her own flesh hasn’t a thing to worry about. What are the words on this ring?

  Bertrand: It says Jesus-Maria.

  She found herself not only kissing the ring but sucking at it as if it were nourishing.

  Jehanne: Who’s the monk?

  Bertrand: Père Pasquerel. Your mother and Aubrit met him at le Puy.

  He called out to the boy. He was just a boy and looked utterly virgin with a flat dark face.

  Bertrand: This is Mademoiselle Jehanne.

  Pasquerel: I met your mother in le Puy.

  Jehanne: Sir Bertrand said.

  Pasquerel: She asked me to … to look after you.

  It was in his favour that he could tell on sight that looking after her was a little beyond his limits, as creditable as these were.

  Pasquerel: I’m lector at the Augustinian monastery here, I went to le Puy to get the plenary indulgence that operates in the years when Good Friday coincides with the Feast of the Annunciation. It did this year. The crowds!

  Bertrand: The crowds!

  Pasquerel got to the point.

  Pasquerel: Mademoiselle, do you want me to be your chaplain? Your mother asked me, my prior says he will arrange it with the Queen of Sicily if you want it. I say Mass very delicately, I don’t rattle through it. If you confessed to me I’d die rather than give anyone any intelligence about what you confessed …

  Jehanne: I would like it. Could you say a Mass in St Gatien for my equerry, my page, Bertrand, and myself?

  As d’Aulon had predicted, she suddenly had a chaplain.

  And although Yolande objected to the man she chose, it wasn’t so important for Yolande to know what a sibyl confessed, to place a corruptible confessor on the girl’s staff when, in any case, the girl talked freely enough at table and wherever else they met.

  On the first floor of a nearby town house Jean, Duke of Alençon was committing grotesque adultery. Madame Christine du Rhin stood above him grinning into an Italian drug-pot.

  Alençon: What is it? Henbane? Hemlock? Belladonna?

  Madame du Rhin: You’ll fly, darling. You’ll see wolves and bears and take on animal shapes and copulate like a donkey or a bull. You’ll think me the sweetest lady bear you’ve ever seen.

  She went on rubbing the grease into his genitals, up the walls of his thighs, over his chest. The influence of the drugs entered his body through lice bites collected in an old inn on the way from Poitiers to Tours.

  He was losing power in his legs, but once the witchcraft took over and he became the menagerie of rutting beasts she promised, then there’d be no chance to talk business. He would wake in the end, but Christine would have gone home.

  Alençon: Did you talk to your husband about Mastracoute?

  He had had the idea of offering a six-year lease on three of his châteaux in Normandy from the date of the expulsion of the English in return for a short-term lease on one of her husband’s châteaux now.

  He wanted her to understand that the offer was serious, not just a pretext for getting her to bed.

  But his animality ballooned at speed and he sank in its amplitude, bounced and somersaulted on its vast elastic surface. In the Flemish tapestries on the walls the animals pawed, barked, roared and moved forward to lick him. A unicorn on his left rose on its hind legs and winked at a vast bear. In the roots of the grass minuscule people roared sexual joy. He felt his feet leave the ground. Soon he would fly like a witch against the rosy firmament of her vulva, leap like a salmon up the falls of his seed. So he had to remind her about Mastracoute now.

  Madame du Rhin: He’s never home, my love. Yolande’s pawning plate, real plate. (His land, she suggested, was – being in occupied territories – almost notional.) He’s spending all his time with the usual people: bankers, financiers …

  Alençon: I might become the only commander-in-chief who’s ever had to live in a bloody abbey.

  A unicorn nuzzled his left ear as if to console.

  Madame du Rhin: Don’t think of it now, little ram.

  Yet his last sane thought was of resentment. Her father had been a silk manufacturer ennobled by the mad Charles. A royal cousin now had to make financial arrangements with people like that and mess around in bedrooms with their daughters! Though, as he was torn into a pink upper air, she was a good craft to ride in, for her belly was firm and her breasts enabled a flying man good hold and emotions of heady safety.

  The peopled earth lay far beneath them now. Imagine, he thought, all those tiny things bothering to raise grotesque structures of finance; imagine them lobbying, imagine them fucking in politic ways, always the right woman. He felt the same contempt God felt. In fact there was every chance – he must think about this when his brain got used to the altitude – there was every chance he was himself that ancient and potent gentleman. Steering her peasant tits he bounced off stars.

  She said his body was sensitive and took in all the witching lotions very eagerly. When they began falling they fell together. In their falling there was no threat of splitting open on hard surfaces. There were no hard surfaces in the unlikely country Madame Christine knew so well.

  When he woke he had not yet returned to Tours. He could smell butterflies and stallions about him, he was a wolf in the thick randy air and the wolf-goddess of the oak snarled far-off at him down avenues of gaping bears.

  He got up to join her, moved the taffeta bed curtains aside and made for the vixen. He hurt his groin on a long table by the fire-place. He didn’t stop. Christine’s voice came from behind him, from the bed, not from the vixen down the corridor of great bears.

  Madame du Rhin: Jean darling, what’s the matter?

  She came after him and caught him, for he found it hard to make headway against the size of his lust.

  If he got to that vixen, he thought, what a grasp of the nature of things I’ll be granted. How much more amenable will death, hell, goddesses, beasts, timbers, metals and earth be to me.

  The vixen was displaced by an opening door. There stood a monster, badly focused in a red cloak and black hose. It said nothing.

  Lady du Rhin ran back to bed yelling out where were the damned servants?

  The terrible thing in the red cloak, instead of becoming a member of the docile erotic landscape, punched him on the side of the head.

  Giant: You. With the wife you have!

  It punched him again on the ear.

  It pulled out a thin-bladed sword and went to stand near Christine whose head alone could be seen, framed by the blue bed curtains.

  Madame du Rhin: Mademoiselle, have some pity for those who are weaker than you are …

  The deformity swiped at the curtains with its sword. Christine withdrew her head. You could hear her begin to sob, besieged in the draped bed.

  Meanwhile Alençon was sweating with nausea and was grateful to recognize the floor as a floor and sit on it. When he looked up again he was no longer a wolf-head and Jehanne stood over him shrunk to her normal squatness.

  He felt furious at her for finding him in this state.

  Jehanne: Your squire and her maid tried to stop me on the way in. I told them I had a warrant from the king. I’ve just heard from Yolande that you are going to be named commander-in-chief. That it’s settled.

  Alençon: I knew it was more or less settled.

  Jehanne: The smells in here!

  Alençon lost his temper with her, with himself for letting himself be found like this, greasy with lust
and herbal lotions.

  Alençon: You’ve got no right to treat people the way you do. Just because you heard voices out in the pigshit somewhere. (He whispered.) This is only business.

  Jehanne: In your bare balls, commander-in-chief, you don’t look much different from the run of mankind.

  Alençon: Nice talk for virgins!

  Jehanne: I had brothers. All better built than you.

  But she saw she must stop the argument, that she kept it going because she wanted him to beg her pardon, not Jesus’ or the Duchess of Alençon’s. If she had had something soft to weep on at eye height she would have wept with loss as on the morning she found Jean de Metz with a whore and put tears all over her horse. As well, she wanted to be provoked into beating up that soft white tart amongst the taffeta bed curtains.

  This is worse than honest lust, she saw. Be sad for that poor dark businesslike duchess at Saumur.

  He had found a wrap and was putting it around himself.

  Jehanne: I won’t have whores with the army. I won’t have our army pouring its virtue away in whores’ bellies.

  He answered her quietly.

  Alençon: A chaste army’s hard come by.

  Christine had her head, only her head, out of the curtains again.

  Madame du Rhin: Mademoiselle, if you forgive me and agree not to report this to my husband or the Inquisitor, I’ll make a general confession and go on pilgrimage.

  How she wanted to hit the pale sensual face.

  Jehanne: Why does she talk about Inquisitors?

  The commander-in-chief was taking his clothes from the places they’d been dropped. His hose were strung light-heartedly over a lectern near the fireplace.

  The sweet, tainted face appeared again amongst the curtains.

  Madame du Rhin: A total general confession, Mademoiselle, and a Rome pilgrimage.

  She was afraid of what curses Jehanne would leave behind in the air. The suspicion infuriated Jehanne, who turned to the commander-in-chief. Alençon had one leg in his hose and had a shirt on.

  Jehanne: About the army: soldiers won’t blaspheme. No swearing on the netherparts of saints or King Jesus.

  Alençon: You’re very simple-minded about soldiers.

  Jehanne: Am I? I don’t think I am. I know what soldiers are. They start fires in the middle of the floor and shit on the hearth. They cut pregnant women open just out of lack of virtue. Well, ours are going to have virtue …