Blood Red, Sister Rose

by Thomas Keneally

Jehanne: Listen. Listen, my lord. I don’t want to be a general. I just want to tell the generals what to do.

  Again they laughed.

  Jehanne: But seriously …

  De Baudricourt: Aren’t you ever going to marry anyone?

  Jehanne: Of course. And have three sons. One Pope, one Emperor, and the other one King.

  The general murmured in a thin voice made for conspiracy and womanizing.

  De Baudricourt: Let me start your little Pope off.

  Jehanne blinked but his desire stayed in his face, was no missighting. After the afternoon’s clowning with tradesmen he wanted her. He thought she was a nice little piece. Her backchat had an erotic sting. Seeing him thinking it, she felt a little aggrandized.

  Jehanne: Someone will let us know, if it’s ever time for the little pontiff.

  Her lids prickled with tears and she couldn’t stop herself smiling.

  De Baudricourt: Do you mind going to see the Duke of Lorraine?

  Jehanne: I’m not a circus bear, Monsieur.

  De Baudricourt: I know that, my love.

  Jehanne: I am not your love.

  De Baudricourt: He can give you a safe conduct. That will help you a little, as far as the Loire. No one’s really safe out there.

  Jehanne: He’s on the English side.

  De Baudricourt: The alliance isn’t active.

  Jehanne: The alliance?

  De Baudricourt: He doesn’t help them much. You might have gathered by now: the lines of alliance aren’t kept very strictly.

  She remembered his wood and wine contracts with Cauchon. She wondered why she was gentle with this mean-shouldered fat-gutted traducer? Because he had once – for ten minutes – desired her?

  One day de Metz spoke to her as she dismounted in the inner yard of the fortress. He watched her closely, for she’d been riding country-style, her dress tucked up in the middle into her girdle. All rednecks gaped when girls got down from horses – it was just a country custom.

  De Metz: You won’t travel like that, will you?

  Jehanne: Why?

  De Metz: You’d be much safer dressed like a boy. I don’t have to explain, do I?

  Jehanne: No.

  De Metz: I mean, I know.

  Jehanne: I suppose you do.

  De Metz: I’ve been in this business since I was twelve. I was a big child.

  Jehanne: When will the general let us go?

  De Metz: When do you want to go?

  Jehanne: Better today than tomorrow. Better tomorrow than the next day.

  De Metz: Jesus, you’re impatient.

  Jehanne: No one else can save him.

  De Metz: The king?

  Jehanne: Yes, no one else. Even if he marries his baby boy to the Scottish princess …

  De Metz: Who told you he would?

  Jehanne: Monsieur the General.

  De Metz: The general doesn’t tell me things.

  Jehanne: You’re just a country boy. You have to be something special to be told things by a general.

  De Metz: You little tart.

  Jehanne: You think I ought to wear boy’s clothes?

  De Metz: Doesn’t the idea interest you?

  She thought it ought too. It ought to be significant. But I don’t give a damn.

  Jehanne: Either way it makes no difference.

  De Metz: That might be truer than you think.

  Jehanne: I suppose that’s a joke.

  De Metz: Well, you’re not the prettiest little piece …

  She shook her head.

  Jehanne: No, I know I’m not the prettiest little piece!

  His grin made him seem seventeen yet his eyes were blunt and antique, two old stones, a statue’s weathered eyeballs. All the fires he had seen set, and the rapes and cuttings and impalings, had convinced him this was the only way things had ever been done in the world. It was the way the world rolled on.

  Hence a dozen de Metzes with their attendant archers would make a short hell of any town, just because that was their picture of the world.

  In the end Baudricourt got a letter by king’s messenger. It said that with the emergency in Orleans there was no chance of reinforcing Vaucouleurs. And yes, His Majesty would consider seeing the sibyl, the pucelle, the virgin. She could come to Chinon if she wanted and make application to the Master of Requests. Neither message surprised the general very much.

  First Jehanne had to go to Nancy, to see the old duke. She didn’t think she could tolerate the trip, the fifty dead miles she’d have to travel. In the old red dress she’d brought from Domremy. She remembered that de Metz had said she’d be safer as a boy. Now, apart from safety, she thought suddenly she would reveal and assert herself in menswear. She started to tremble.

  Lassois’s second doublet lay in a corner.

  Jehanne: Hey, Durand, have you got any long hose?

  She began to dress behind a screen in the corner and felt light, recreated by Durand’s black doublet which was tight on her breasts and over the shoulders.

  She called out to Mother le Royer.

  Jehanne: Catherine, see if Alain’s got a doublet. Durand, what about those long hose or haven’t you got any spares?

  Lassois: What about a cloak?

  Jehanne: I’ll slit mine up the back.

  Mother le Royer came in with a wool cap of Alain’s, and long liripipe she could use as a scarf. And a riding cloak, red wool. The girl groaned, choosing whether to wear it: she liked its cut and colour.

  Jehanne: I was going to alter mine.

  Mother le Royer: No, use this one. Look, it’s got warmth, you’ll be glad once you’re on the road.

  There was difficulty getting the light brown hair up under Alain’s cap.

  Jehanne: I ought to get it cut but there isn’t time.

  Lassois: Wear my hood if you like. I’ll wear the cap.

  Jehanne: I don’t want to hurt you, Durand. But the cap’s much nicer. This nice blue …

  Looking down at her body rendered strange in Alain’s and Lassois’s oddments, she felt reinforced. She liked the tightness at the crutch and in the legs, the altered limbs. It occurred to her that the dead womb didn’t weigh on her now. Perhaps it’s just the newness of the clothes. But now I’m someone else. I’m not Jacques’s disappointing child.

  De Metz was to escort them into Lorraine, but de Poulengy rode out along the Toul road with them for a mile or two.

  De Metz: How do you like the style?

  He asked Bertrand so that Jehanne could hear. But Bertrand wouldn’t joke about it. For a few hundred yards he rode at Jehanne’s side.

  Bertrand: I’m sure it was the only thing to do. But you must realise that once you’ve dressed like that nothing will ever be the same.

  Jehanne: But I didn’t want it to be. I can’t sit back and enjoy sameness.

  De Metz took them as far as Toul. Whose bishop Nicolas Barrey had appealed to against her breach of promise. Then they were in Lorraine with the duke’s pass. No one would have touched them.

  Three days later, at cold dusk, they came back to le Royers. The girl was silent, unwinding the liripipe from round her neck, but Lassois was riotous, pacing the cellar, giving the le Royers the story as if the girl wasn’t there. In ways, she wasn’t. As de Poulengy had said, nothing was the same. The way the duke had treated her told her this; that she was on the line of godhood now, she was launched. No one again might ever think, there’s a girl, let me father, mother, or love it.

  Lassois: She was so bloody rude at times. But the old duke ended up giving her five francs and a black mare. (Lassois had never known before that arrogance paid.) That house of his – the fireplaces are bigger than Burey! And the furniture … Jesus! But she walked about as if she’d always lived that way.

  Jehanne spoke in a daze.

  Jehanne: It’s the only way to behave.

  If you were bemused at this or that item, they remembered you were from the country.

  Lassois: All the old duke was worried about, all he th
ought of, was his bowels and kidneys. He asked her did she know any incantations for those organs. She said she was sorry to say she wasn’t any good at that sort of thing. He asked her what she was specially good at and she said saving the kingdom was her only specialty. He asked her was she worried to tell him that because he’s an ally of the Goddam-English? She said she wasn’t worried because he didn’t believe in her anyhow. If he believed in her he’d send his son-in-law to help Orleans. He laughed, he laughed … if I’d said it … but he laughed with her. And gave her presents.

  The girl snorted. Five francs! A present of contempt. She went and lay on a bed, still wearing Alain’s good red thigh-cloak.

  Lassois went on informing them, more secretively, of her ways with great men.

  Lassois: Then she told him that his kidneys might improve if he went back to his wife. She said those six bastards worry you and they worry ordinary people. Jesus, I didn’t want to be there then. But that old duke’s a gentleman. He didn’t tell her to go to hell like the general always does. He was just a bit thoughtful and coughed a lot. Then he gave her a horse, a bloody horse!

  She could see the le Royers watching her. Thinking what is it? Has the world turned over? In the morning will the dukes and generals come along to get their orders from us?

  Not that Mother le Royer was perfectly happy about the clothes. She still had a parental conscience for the eccentric creature on the bed.

  Mother le Royer: Were the clothes comfortable?

  Jehanne: Oh yes, comfortable. The hose were baggy.

  Mother le Royer: Do you think you’ll wear them a lot?

  Jehanne: Yes, Kate. It’s only sensible.

  Mother le Royer: Goodness, we didn’t know what was starting, did we? That day you came here first.

  The girl slept dressed like that, in some sort of dedication to her new lineaments.

  Later on people would say she dreamt Messire. But she lay stark awake when Messire showed up on her right, obliterating with his dazzle the sleeping hump that was Kate le Royer.

  Messire: My little he-nun, my little she-soldier. You’re ready now for arms and armour.

  Jehanne: Armour, darling Messire.

  Messire: Your brother-king has armour to offer you.

  Jehanne: Amen.

  My little he-nun … She could feel the rightness of the male clothes in which she immediately turned on the side warmed by Messire and slept deeply.

  In the morning Catherine and she went to the collegiate church to Père Fournier’s Mass. She was such a different being now, in garments of male musk and shape, she wanted to be reassured all over again: by the test of the bloodless blood sacrifice of Christ which made the wrong gods writhe, spit, convulse. Nothing happened, though people looked. They knew, however, that she was travelling to the king and there was reason for disguises.

  Straight after breakfast, at a barber’s at the Avignon Gate, she had her hair cut à soldade, a basin-crop, the hair shaved to above the level of the ears.

  Mother le Royer: Oh, that’s ugly.

  Jehanne: Yes, but Jean de Metz and Bertrand tell me it’s the only way to get a helmet on.

  Mother le Royer: My God!

  The story was that postulants in convents always wept when their hair was cropped. Hair was supposed to be a crucial sacrifice for a girl to make. In fact Jehanne felt no emotion at the barber’s for the brown hair she lost. It had been foregone since she dressed up to go to Nancy.

  The evening of that same day the general arrived outside the le Royers’. He had an escort of four men-at-arms and a priest and a young Benedictine attendant. The priest and the monk dismounted with de Baudricourt and followed him into the cellar. Getting up from the le Royers’ table, Jehanne saw the priest, Père Fournier, saw the demon-hunting firmness of the face. She was frightened, she could sense the line of terrible authority rising from Père Fournier through bishops to the Pope. This was the price of speaking: that they’d never stop testing the question: was she virgin, whore, demon, possessed by demons?

  Out, out, out de Baudricourt called to the le Royers and Lassois.

  Lassois had learned something about talking up from his cousin-in-law.

  Lassois: It’s cold out there.

  De Baudricourt: Sad. Get out!

  Jehanne was in her dress. Her cropped hair beneath a capuchon.

  De Baudricourt: You know Père Fournier? And this is Brother … Brother Etienne. All right?

  Meanwhile Père Fournier had kissed a purple stole and put it carefully around his neck for protection.

  Jehanne: What are you going to do?

  Brother Etienne took from under his scapular a gilt pot of holy water.

  Jehanne: No! This is nonsense.

  De Baudricourt: Is it? Better you have a holy-water fit here, in front of a friend, than way over there. They’re subtle, witch-hunting bastards over there in Viennois.

  Fournier: Adjuro te, Satane …

  The priest began, feeling for the holy-water pot.

  Jehanne: But I confess to this priest! I confess to him two and three times a week …

  The general assured her above the burr of Fournier’s Latin exorcisms.

  De Baudricourt: He doesn’t know if you’re lying or not. I’d kneel down if I were you. They’re convinced … all these people … that witches will not kneel to them.

  Jehanne: Damn!

  But she knelt. Fournier noticed it but kept on with the exorcism formula.

  De Baudricourt: You can say the Paternoster in Latin?

  Jehanne: I don’t think so.

  De Baudricourt: Sad. They’re convinced witches can’t say the Paternoster in Latin. I don’t think it’s much of a proof.

  Jehanne: Monsieur general, you make jokes all you want. I’ll always remember this as an insult.

  Jesus, she screamed, sister to brother. Jesus, she began weeping softly.

  At once Fournier stopped enunciating.

  De Baudricourt: I think you can take it. She isn’t a witch.

  The girl faced Fournier. Her face was bunched, intimate, hurt.

  Jehanne: I confessed to you. You knew.

  Fournier: It’s no ultimate test.

  Jehanne: I went to your Masses.

  Fournier: Yes. I hope you come to a good end.

  He nodded to Etienne to take the water bucket back to the collegiate church. There was every chance, such a cold night was it for Lassois and the le Royers waiting outside, that it would freeze over before he got it there.

  Jean de Metz had a squat, solid body-servant called Jean de Honnecourt. Since Durand’s long hose were chafing her in the breach Jehanne rode across Vaucouleurs to ask de Metz for his servant’s old clothes. De Metz lived in two upstairs rooms at the Green Man, and she went there after he could not be found at the provost’s office. In the yard she saw Jean de Honnecourt emptying the slops bucket, as if his master had just got up after a lie-in. But the servant did not see her as she turned up the outside stairs and walked into the room the stable-hands had pointed to.

  De Metz was lying across a girl. One eye focused with a luxurious slowness on Jehanne, then he got up in a hurry and rushed into his drawers. In a way Jehanne was surprised he was so easily shamed.

  The girl on the bed turned on her side and went on sleeping. Jehanne’s belly was a pocket of fury. She wanted to beat the profligate white arse that faced her. As once she had wanted to beat Madame Aubrit.

  De Metz: It’s my sister come over the Novillompont.

  Jehanne: She’s had a hard trip.

  The unanswerable fury ate her: she had to get out of the room. De Metz had a shirt on now.

  Jehanne: I want your man’s clothes. He’s about my build.

  De Metz: All right. Come through here.

  He blew his nose: his discomfort was over and he was actually whispering for the whore’s sake.

  He took her through into de Honnecourt’s thin little closet and forced the shutters open. The room was neatly kept, a little dusty, and in the
corner was a chest de Metz opened. Standing back from it, he looked a very big man with his thick tall legs bare under the shirt. His grey eyes said don’t expect me to change my habits, I’m your travelling companion, that’s all.

  De Metz: Take anything you like. A gift from me.

  Jehame: Shouldn’t we ask your man?

  De Metz: I bought everything he has.

  Jehanne: You ennobled him too, did you? You called him de Honnecourt.

  De Metz: You can get away with these things in a war. Just look what you’re getting away with. No, don’t take the mended ones, take the best pair.

  When she got back to the black mare in the yard she put her forehead against its rump and began weeping privately. She kept telling herself: but you don’t want to be that girl, you don’t like him, there’s no desire there. Why won’t you be consoled, you silly bitch?

  Because now she was dressed for the journey: that was why. There were no chances for her outside the journey. She couldn’t be someone’s sister from Novillompont. She couldn’t even die by accident: the day for her blood had been arranged.

  Later in the day Bertrand came to tell her they were to leave secretly in the early morning of Wednesday. The party would gather before six in the inner yard of the palace. There would be Bertrand and his man Julien, Jean de Metz and de Honnecourt. Then the king’s messenger Colet de Vienne, who had brought the despatches earlier in the week, and de Vienne’s archer Richard.

  Jehanne: Six men! He kept me waiting all this time for six men!

  But six was safer because less noticeable, he said. They would dress like businessmen.

  At the same time, a committee led by Monsieur Alain thought de Honnecourt’s clothes weren’t good enough for her and raised money to buy her a shirt, cloth doublet, long hose, short hose, a red thigh-cloak, ankle boots, a wool cap with flaps.

  To my honoured principal etc.

  Dated 12 February 1429

  Though I have now served the Bank of the Family Gondisi for ten years in its dealings with the Armagnac enclave and have often found their behaviour strange and erratic, I have never seen them in such a state of impotence as seems to have afflicted them this winter. The fact of the Orleans siege has dazed them to the extent that they can manage only pitiably small forces of men, pitiably small supply convoys for that city.