Jacques: Duckling, do they look after you? Tell me.
He began to hold her lightly but stiffly in his arms as you hold a person with wounds.
Jehanne: I eat with the king, I call marshals by their first name …
Everyone listened, plush burgesses, Italians, poets, highcoloured Jehan. The opulence of her experience seized them.
Jehanne: I always have apartments in the châteaux with the dauphin.
Jacques: Imagine it!
Jehanne: When I’m in a field the king’s cousin d’Alençon sees to my billet. Don’t take any notice of Jehan.
Jacques hugged her wildly now, a glee-hug.
Jacques: All expenses paid! All expenses paid!
After Matins in the cathedral next morning, four notables in dazzling blue and gold rode the little way to the Abbey of St Rémy to fetch the chrism of kingship. They rode their horses up the nave of the abbey church to the chancel screen. The horses were scarcely horses at all, islands of silk drapes, their heads formalized by steel facings from which candle-light bounced. It was only when they left and there was dung on the stones that the Grand Prior accepted their reality.
The four horsemen were the Marshals of France, St Sévère de Boussac and Gilles de Rais, the Admiral de Culant and Lord Graville who had fought at the Herrings, Orleans, Beaugency, Jargeau, Patay. They accepted from the Grand Prior a gold and enamel dove.
The dove lived in the tomb of St Rémy behind the high altar. In its belly lay the crystal phial of oil. It was the same Rémy had used at the coronation of Clovis. The story was that after each coronation the oil remained undiminished. Heaven in this way paid its compliments to the abounding kingship of the French dynasties.
Jehanne was called from her town house to the king’s apartments to hear mass with him. She found him dressed like a peasant. Charles intended to walk to the cathedral in a grey shirt and hose. On this poor kernel kingship would descend layer by layer.
Seeing him, she felt her womb kick. He took her hand and they knelt together at bare, unhassocked prie-dieux. She was delighted somehow by the self-wonderment in him.
After Mass they ate nothing – the king was fasting to undergo the mystery of kingship.
Charles: Jehanne?
Jehanne: Dauphin?
Charles: Soon to be king. But what I wanted to say, it’s time to ennoble you.
Jehanne: Make me a lady?
Charles: Ennoble your family. Now that it’s over.
She felt panic.
Jehanne: Over. It isn’t over, dauphin. There’s a new English army. You don’t have Paris. Your cousin’s still a prisoner in England. It isn’t anywhere near over …
Charles: A victim under Christ …
Jehanne: What?
Charles: You said it in Chinon. You were the victim. And I feel the strength of your sacrifice in me now. Like an advance. From a banker. (He closed his eyes.) If only a person could do something for a victim.
Jehanne: I’ll try to put up with any death that’s asked …
Charles: I’ll protect you from my people. I will. From the council. From the Constable.
It was their conspiracy and it had an illicit flavour to it.
Jehanne: There are still English in Normandy … you don’t have Paris.
She saw he knew she was finished.
Charles: Do your Voices tell you to go after Paris …?
Jehanne: I … I dream of Paris.
Charles: Ah.
Jehanne: I hear them in dreams.
Charles: We all dream.
She had to admit it.
Jehanne: That’s right. Everyone dreams.
Charles: I’m an affectionate person. And a grateful one. But a king isn’t made to be affectionate or grateful the way a farmer can be. He has to dole out his affections and gratitude according to the kingdom’s good. The gift to do it comes with the oil of kingship. You led me to the oil of kingship. Remember all that when I neglect you for others …
Jehanne: Of course, you have to do whatever …
He got up and kissed her on the nub of the head and went back to the chapel.
Alone in the hall she covered her face for a little while. Then she thought, I’ll go home with Jacques tomorrow, I’ll see Zabillet, I’ll be a Domremy spinster. She knew it was a fantasy but it soothed her.
On her way downstairs she met de la Tremoille, who had never spoken to her. Today his eyes took her in and he smiled. His teeth were very bad, some of them had died and gone black in his head. His voice was soprano, as people said.
De la Tremoille: Well, we’ve done everything you wanted.
Jehanne: Monsieur.
She didn’t have the resources to argue with him.
De la Tremoille: And such a new way of proceeding on the matter of prisoners! One would think you were trying to destroy the rules of knighthood.
Jehanne: In my tiny knowledge of the business, my lord, they look stupid without any help from me.
He did his high laugh and began climbing the stairs again.
De la Tremoille: Well, a great day for everyone. I didn’t think I’d see it … And now it’s all done I suppose you can wear skirts again.
When she put weight on the ball of her foot her whole leg trembled. She thought that fat man would crucify me this morning if he could.
She had a place in the cathedral close to the chancel. First she held her flag herself but was feeling tired and passed it to Minguet.
The nave was thick with flags – Boussac’s, la Hire’s, the Bastard’s, de Culant’s, de la Tremoille’s, Machet’s, a thousand or so others. Only Jehanne’s was the flag of a visitation, manifestation, something outside mere genealogies.
Charles came in in his humble clothes. The choirs sang the coronation motet hurriedly written out for them overnight and rehearsed at dawn.
Bastard: Wouldn’t it be strange if they’ve brought the nine-year-old to Paris? If they’re singing these same songs for him in Notre-Dame right now.
Jehanne: It wouldn’t happen.
Regnault came out of the choir and met the king. On Regnault’s back and chest were a quarter of the cathedral’s treasures; he was a metallic god in a cope woven of beaten gold wire. As long as one didn’t look too closely at his complexion …
Dazzling Regnault intoned a coronation litany. He treated the words woodenly but the sweet choir took them up. Jehanne’s right side glowed. Messire is coming, she thought, not too hopefully.
Messire didn’t come.
The choir finished after perhaps an hour. Charles knelt on the stone all that time. No cushion. He was in awe of himself, his awe seemed to command the cathedral. No one laughed at his funny legs.
In the new silence everything sounded strange, sharp; the clack of a flag-butt, the grind of a shoe.
The king-of-arms of France came to the king’s side. He called the names of the twelve peers of France who were to stand at a dauphin’s side on his coronation day. Only six were present. All the others were imprisoned or senile or sitting pat with the enemy.
In their places rose:
Jean, Duke of Alençon,
The Count of Clermont,
Georges de la Tremoille,
Regnault,
and others.
A priest opened Charles’s shirt to the chest and eased it down from his shoulders.
The Lord of Richemont hadn’t come to hold the royal sword. He too had to be substituted for. As the Bastard said, only Rheims and the oil could not be substituted for.
Indeed there was powerful joy at the chancel screen. It had its core in Charles; it was larger than Charles. All down the nave people were getting drunk with it. Alençon turned round to take from a young knight the arms of knighthood. He put them down at the king’s knees. He saw Jehanne and wagged a finger towards her. Come up here, the finger said. Be in it.
She went and stood beside and a little behind Alençon and watched him put sword, furled flag, studded scabbard, helmet at Charles’s knees. Yes, it’s w
orth any agony, she thought. Though she knew she’d change her opinion for a tiny while in the future. When – to use Messire’s phrase – the steel went in.
Charles said his oath after Regnault. That took a long time. Then the irreplaceable oil went on the shoulders, eyes, forehead and wish-bone.
In the end Regnault went to the high altar and took off it the crown found the day before in the cathedral treasure-house. He raised it high above Charles’s head, the brown cropped hair. Eleven other lords put their hands out to touch it. Of its own force, it seemed, pulling against them, it descended on his head.
A shocking blast of trumpets hit them all. Everyone roared and gushed congratulations. Jehanne thought, Lavignac and me, we’re well-spent if we’re spent on this mystery.
That night, Jehanne found, the day’s exquisite clarity got clouded.
There had been a feast in the hall of Tau. Charles had eaten and been served by Alençon and Clermont. The table extended out of the archiepiscopal palace, down the stairs, into the street. In the rue du Parvis, where Jacques’s pub was situated, a bronze stag, hollow, was wheeled full of wine into the street. People drank from a spout in its mouth. The wine was Charles’s gift. Though the municipality paid for it.
At the Bronze Ring, doyen Jacques of Domremy slept against a wall with his arm round his landlady, widow Alix Morieau. Jehanne saw him there, on the first floor, on the floor. Clutching Alix for warmth in the hot night. Jehanne remembered that he’d got on well with the red-headed landlady in Neufchâteau.
She went to her apartments early and sat by the open window. There was a bonfire under her window, sparks flew perilously under the gables. It doesn’t matter, she thought. Not a random fire, she thought with a little arrogance, I won’t die by random fire. Pasquerel was in the other room hearing the confession of a pale and – it seemed – devout Gilles.
But in the morning people in a side street called rue Cénacle would find in a sewer the eviscerated corpse of a thirteen-year-old boy. Gilles’s work? Without the close help of demons? No.
Yet she would remember the pale excessive Gilles muttering at Pasquerel.
Late on that day, Sunday night, her brother Jehan and Jean de Metz lunged in.
Jehanne: Well?
Jehan: We want to get ennobled, Jehanne.
Jehanne: You too, de Metz?
De Metz: It’s safest, Jehanne. Before our luck runs out.
Jehanne: Luck?
Jehan: Fat Georges says you’re a witch.
De Metz: The word catches on.
At least, even drunk, he was more ashamed than her brother.
Jehan: While we’ve still got some say.
De Metz: And think – a man stands more chance if he’s a Monsieur. And if he’s a Monsieur he can say I knew her and she was good. That’d carry weight.
Jehan: We deserve it.
Jehanne: Do you? This poor hack maybe. You’re just lucky enough to come from the same womb.
Jehan: I’m going to become someone. A figure.
She yelled at him.
Jehanne: I’ll arrange it. I promise.
They grinned and fell down the stairs. After you, Monsieur, they kept telling each other.
Pasquerel: Do you mind if I go to bed, Mademoiselle?
Jehanne: No. You sleep.
He went, the child-priest. Easy to control but no support. Now that she wanted it.
At her window towards midnight she saw Mesdames Aubrit and de Bourlémont pass down the street dressed – she would have sworn – in the exact clothes used for the Boischenu rites. She called to them and thumped downstairs. She saw them making a golden retreat around a corner and ran for that corner and for the next, for they were always at the ends of streets gliding over drainage pits. Always the streets were unlit, all the lights that were burning that night in wider places could almost be seen and all the shawms, pipes, flutes, violas, drums and jangling instruments and tenors and counter-tenors and boy-singers were always audible like a festival coming or still to come. But the coped Mesdames of Boischenu didn’t want to speak to her or have her see their faces, and risked no crowds or lights. And always found the dark streets. And glided. At last she stood and begged at the top of her voice.
Jehanne: Mesdames!
Around a corner she ran into Bertrand.
Bertrand: Jehanne!
He wasn’t too far gone with wine. She looked at him narrowly.
Jehanne: Where are they?
Bertrand: Who?
She hit him with her knuckles right across the face.
Jehanne: Get them!
He was crying. It had been a hurting blow.
Bertrand: Who?
She caged her eyes with spread fingers of both hands.
Jehanne: Oh Christ.
After a while choking, she told him. Mesdames Aubrit and de Bourlémont.
Bertrand: They’re not in Rheims, Jehanne.
Jehanne: I saw them.
Bertrand: They’re in Lorraine. Ask Jacques.
Jehanne: Oh God.
Bertrand: Be comforted, Jehanne. They aren’t here.
She began mourning down in her throat, she fell on to her knees and felt fresh dung under them. He fell with her and had her shoulders.
Bertrand: I would swear on all my hopes they’re not here.
Jehanne: In their Boischenu glory?
Bertrand: It wasn’t much glory. They’re not here.
He lifted her. She had to be guided home. There were two chairs set by the empty fireplace and they sat there. He kept an arm around her.
Jehanne: You ought to be out celebrating.
Bertrand: No.
But he went to sleep, his arm still round her. It was just like Jacques and the landlady three streets away.
Jehanne: Dear old Bertrand.
Jacques stayed in Rheims two months. It was a May feast for him. He never breakfasted before eleven, was fit to start on the Beaune whites with spiced poultry by two or three. Alix called him Jacquemin. Though her tenderness did not go further than that she knew a number of younger women in the city who liked figures of importance.
Meanwhile the king, his darlings and armies moved on. Sometimes in those months the king would put a gem in a cup of wine at banquets and hand it to a councillor or diplomat to whom he was grateful. But he never did it for Jehanne.
Yes, he ennobled her and her collateral family. That pleased Jehan, but Jehanne knew it was a thing done on paper by clerks.
The omens thickened around her. She was sent campaigning against mere outlaws. When Jehanne, Alençon, Gilles marched on Paris, Charles and his diplomats made arrangements with Philip behind her back. In camp in Senlis, before the king’s eyes, she broke her sword Fierbois across a harlot’s arse. She attacked the St Honoré Gate of Paris on a Sunday and, when wounded in the thigh by an arrow, was dragged away not begging absolution but shouting that one more rush would give her friends the town. But the town they never got and the people of the town remembered a howling witch bleeding under their palisades on a Sunday. Alençon kept riding to Senlis to beg the king to keep up with Jehanne and the army, but Charles’s darlings now were diplomats of the Fat Georges species. All the generals felt lost with the lost girl. Poton, at her side, wept, saying there are the battlers and there are the statesmen, and the statesmen won’t speak to the battlers any more. And when Messire came, he was often silent at her side – not displeased however. More grieving for her. In the end she was pulled from her horse by a Burgundian Bastard in a skirmish outside Compiègne.
Nothing ever went right again with the old rightness that had made pale Charles a king.
EPILOGUE
A letter from Jacques to all his dear relatives in the region of the Meuse and in Sermaize and the surrounding districts of Champagne. This letter is written for him at his bidding by the parish-priest of Greux.
You must have heard of the reports of the death of my sweet daughter Jehanne in a Goddam fire on the last day of the month of May. Did you know that they k
ept her in a soldiers’ prison, amongst the worst of Goddam looters and rapists. But they feared her witcheries and did not touch her. I did not fear her witcheries when I took her on my knee or dealt with her with my heavy hand. But they chose to fear my duckling, and I thank Christ for that.
She would not give in and say that the Voices that led the king to Rheims were false. I saw her in Rheims and there were no false Voices in her, I swear to you, and the king that was anointed there was King of France. In Orleans and the King’s France they mourn her, but imagine, friend, how Zabillet and I who made her softly from our bodies cry out for her … that her soft flesh has gone into unbearable fire. When the court had finished with her, the Goddams dealt appallingly with her organs, throwing her heart into the river at Rouen, where it would not sink. I curse the fire that ate the flesh away and then the bone so that my duckling’s charred heart lay there for the executioner’s hand to lift and hurl into unconsecrated water. I do not curse the judges and the executioner, I do not curse Bedford or that Bishop Cauchon who calls himself a Frenchman. Lord Christ will see them each and every one to their proper agonies. I leave them to him.
Pierrolot is still a prisoner in the north, but we have had words that the Burgundians will treat him as a gentleman.
When they burned my daughter they put a mitre on her head on which these words were written: Jehanne, self-styled the pucelle, liar, pernicious, abuser of the people, heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolater.
Be my witness, King Jesus, that her last word from the flames was your name.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1974 by Thomas Keneally
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4044-0
Distributed in 2017 by Open Road Distribution
Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans Page 38