Blood Red, Sister Rose

by Thomas Keneally

  De Gaucourt: The sort of suggestion you’d expect from someone not putting up the money.

  Stooping, la Hire lit up with hilarity. In his eyes, seeking those of others, was a conviction of his own decency of soul.

  De Gaucourt: I’ve seen all the royal armies go out. This is likely to be the last. It isn’t for gambling with.

  La Hire: I won’t go back. With your permission, Monsieur Bastard, I want to go into the city.

  Gilles: You always knew you’d do that. Hence your transfer of two hundred lancers to the girl.

  La Hire: An improvement on choirboys, Monsieur Marshal.

  There was no hiss or fury between them, they were masters of dispassion.

  Gilles: We’re permitted a few comforts.

  Jehanne was distracted by the Marshal’s sublime ripe throat stretching in discussion.

  Alençon: Jehanne, if you go into the city with the Bastard and la Hire, I swear to you that I’ll bring the army back. Along la Beauce.

  Her hand lamely beat the table top, its knuckles still smarting.

  Jehanne: … the way I wanted it to come anyhow.

  She thought how right I am never to apologise to this crowd for my strange view of matters.

  Alençon: Monsieur de Rais has kindly written off my ransom.

  That roused them.

  Culant: On the basis of your Normandy properties?

  Alençon hung his head. There was a poor boy’s shame there.

  Gilles: We’re going to get Normandy back. It’s in the stars.

  La Hire: Jesus Almighty.

  Alençon: So I’ll take the army back to Blois and return with it. Will you go into Orleans, Jehanne?

  Jehanne: If you guarantee this: Père Pasquerel, with my standard, will lead the army. All soldiers will continue to confess. No whores will be admitted to the camps, even dressed as men. No soldiers will lose his fighting edge on a whore or swear on the genitals of King Jesus or the saints – the French will die by that sort of talk. Do you promise?

  Gilles: A new idea. The virgin’s virgin army. Beautiful.

  Downstairs delegations of businessmen, magistrates, ridden out through the supposed English cordon, to invite her into their city, into the unreality inside the stones and towers. They all knew so much about her. Cowled Franciscans with no more than a cheese knife for defence, had crept through the night or fogbound English siege with a freight of legends.

  At eight that evening she rode out of the Checy walls on to the Orleans road. There were hundreds of men with her: knights from the Bastard’s garrison, the Bastard, la Hire with his or her two hundred knights-mercenary, de Gaucourt with a similar company of horsemen, the Marshal de Boussac with more still.

  She could see fires burning in the dusk on the left of the road. She knew whose they were. The coués, lighting their night-fires in la Beauce, in Brother Jesus’ vengeance garden. The kindling was damp, long grey streaks of smoke blew towards the city, melancholy smoke such as from the burning of garbage or old clothes.

  Bastard: That’s their St Loup bastion.

  He didn’t disapprove of their St Loup bastion – he didn’t sound angry – brotherliness instead, as if he knew things were hard for them in there. He said the town militia and some of the garrison had attacked the bastion that afternoon, had broken down the palisades and climbed up the earthworks inside. An English knight had been killed and his pennon taken. Five other Englishmen had died. The English in St Loup had few horses, so weren’t likely to pursue.

  Then there was enough light to see the city walls.

  Bastard: This will be tiresome for you.

  There was a low barbican at the city entrance, and beyond it the walls with nine towers on that side alone. Braziers and pitch torches burned all along the walls and sometimes men moved there and threw shadows over the lights. She saw lights too on top of the square cathedral spires; and bouncing from a tangle of roofs. A tangle. She felt terror of the smothering city encircled with armies.

  Bastard: The house you’re to put up at belongs to my father’s treasurer, Monsieur Boucher. He lives right across the city, on the central street called rue des Talmeliers. The main gate on that side is called the Renard Gate. From it you can get at St Lorent, la Croix-Boisée, the Rouen, Paris, London forts. At Talbot.

  Jehanne: They’re holding Guyenne over there?

  Bastard: Yes.

  She called to Minguet, Raymond. She’d been going to ask them to hold off the crowds, but she could see they were children in a column of full-grown men. Poor little Minguet had to ride first with her buckram flag into the teeth of the welcome.

  Jehanne: It’s all right. Don’t get lost in the crowd.

  Minguet and Raymond went in the Burgundy Gate and then she rode in on the Bastard’s right. There was a sharp roar, not like ordinary barracking, more like some near-limit of pain or ecstasy. Riding into their tight city she punctured the circle of their fever; all the ill breath of their mania came out of their mouths. She could see light on the under-chins of people yelling this way on balconies. On the ground the canons of St Croix cathedral bayed by the walls; on the left the captains of citizens’ militia holding helmets, and themselves roaring.

  She looked at the Bastard. His lips bunched over the line of neat beard. But she couldn’t have heard him even if he did speak. His eyes said You see, you’ve been made necessary to them. He had speciously soft brown eyes which he used for melting women.

  The great moan and bark of the release of the garrisons and people of Orleans! They would hear it in the fort of St Loup, amongst their sad fires. They may hear it in St Lorent, Guyenne too, or in that muddy fort on the cold island of Charlemagne in mid-Loire. They would cross themselves, call for priests, draw magic circles, wrap themselves in parchments, pluck hairs from white horses, dismember rabbits for lucky organs.

  Meanwhile, the pitch pine torches were putting mystery on the grey the king had given her from his stables in Tours. It was as white as a symbol; if Christ God had ridden a horse amongst the people of Israel in the night of some Italian painter’s fresco, the horse would have been as white and moved like this old horse.

  At her entry to Orleans, she felt for the first time in many weeks the intoxication of her godhood. She felt the excitement of exorcising madness, raising it in a cloud above the city, drifting it outwards into the eyes of the English. She reeled with the joy of the light on her simple steel suit. Oh my people, she said. No one could hear her. She stood in the stirrups, in the high-brimmed saddle, and raised her right hand. Women with goitres touched her horse. A large pitch-spark fell from a balcony and the white pennant in Raymond’s hand began to burn. He stared bemusedly at it, trying to focus. She spurred her grey and somehow – the management she had over the horse astounded her – turned him around at Raymond’s side. She could see Raymond’s green eyes, drugged with light, quietly considering the flame. She took the burning tassels in her gloves and crumpled the fire. She felt delighted by this little feat. Likewise the crowd. She rode back to the Bastard, one singed glove raised to him. He laughed. As if he were saying you’re just a peasant after all.

  Boucher’s house was four stories high. It had strange tall false windows with stone tracery and true windows inside them, an expensive way to save on glass. Stone figures leaned realistically over false stone balconies outside the false stone windows. It was all curious and delightful.

  The Bastard shouted to her to dismount, and took her up the steps. A man of perhaps forty-five years, clean-shaven, waited smiling there in a gown of blue and gold and lilies. He bowed and his little speech of welcome could not be heard. He pointed to the crowd. She could see her brothers there, red-faced, beyond themselves.

  All at once she was in the quiet of the front lobby. A thin woman stood by the stairwell, four servants around her. The thin woman had on velvet, green and gold. It smelt of spices. There was a beautiful girl-child at her side, plump. The child’s eyes blazed with disbelief in siege, the true presence of Goddams be
yond her back garden, child-rape, transfixion. If stone projectiles flew over the rue des Talmeliers and broke into someone’s kitchen and shattered to deal a few deaths, then it was an event as disembodied and ordained as lightning or heavy hail.

  The Bastard pointed out Boucher as his father’s treasurer. Madame Boucher. Little Charlotte. Named for the duke who now lived in the Goddams’ misty nation.

  Jehanne: Do you get letters from the duke?

  Boucher: Yes, Mademoiselle. The English go to a lot of trouble to see his letters reach me. It’s one of their gallantries. You must want to disarm before dinner.

  Jehanne: What will happen to my brothers?

  Boucher: They can stay here. There’s a meal in the kitchen for them and beds on the top floor. You must understand it’s hard to accommodate all your attendants on the level they deserve.

  Jehanne: They’ll be quite happy. Could I have my page to help me get out of this stuff?

  Madame Boucher: Let me, Mademoiselle.

  Boucher: She’s good at taking armour off. I never use a page.

  Madame herself talked all the way upstairs.

  Madame Boucher: He’s always up on the walls, poor man. He has to look after repairs to the west wall. Those wretched Goddams are beating away at the stonework half the day …

  Jehanne got the taste of their connubiality, of Madame Boucher doing lover’s and page’s duty after dangerous hours above the Renard Gate. Even on this night she felt a second’s loss.

  In an upstairs bedroom Madame Boucher unlatched her quickly. Jehanne felt shrunken and sore in her shirt and hose. Minguet had brought her other clothes up, sulking a little at not being allowed, this night of all, to do his trade: the unbuckling and soothing of knights.

  When he’d gone, Madame Boucher kissed her shoulder between the shirt-collar and chafed neck. It almost seemed she’d forgotten whom she was undressing.

  Madame Boucher: Will my child grow up?

  Jehanne: Yes. Of course.

  Madame Boucher: They have been living in mud, those coués. Boucher knows. They’re thick with lice, the wine they have is very bad. They think you’re a witch.

  Jehanne: My God.

  Madame Boucher: If ever they get inside the walls, they won’t leave anyone standing.

  Charlotte stood with full lips, her eyes blazing with the almost insane security of the sort of childhood she had been given to enjoy. She didn’t seem to hear her mother.

  In the middle of the council at Boucher’s place, in the middle of the Saturday morning, Jehanne could tell that her prophetic tone had lost her the general called Gamaches.

  He called in his ensign and folded up his flag and said he resigned. Bloody little sauce-box, he kept shouting.

  The Bastard spoke to her in the corner. La Hire spoke in his dull authoritative way to Gamaches, who was at last bullied into handing back his flag to his ensign and offering to kiss Jehanne.

  She and Gamaches kissed each other in a cursory way. She could tell he was about to say something sexually demeaning. So could la Hire, whose hand was suddenly on his arm as a warning.

  Jehanne: I’m sick of councils. So sick of delay.

  At Mass at Boucher’s that morning, Messire and Mesdames Catherine and Margaret burnt on her right.

  Messire: The rose climbs towers in Jesus’ vengeance garden in la Beauce.

  Catherine: The rose climbs towers.

  Messire: Blood-red sister-rose, blood-red King Jesus’ sister-rose.

  Margaret: Thorns for their flesh. Quick.

  Messire: Quick, love.

  Catherine: Soon.

  Margaret: Have pity for all poor soldiers. Sister-rose.

  Catherine: Soon.

  Outside in the streets around rue des Talmeliers the militia had been lined up in oddments of armour since dawn. When she walked out on Boucher’s steps she saw their exquisite but fragile conviction of the rightness of the day. She knew it shouldn’t be wasted. But at noon the Bastard, de Gaucourt, all of them, were indoors wasting it.

  Jehanne: Will there be anything to stop me calling out to the Goddams from the bridge?

  De Gaucourt: No. Take your steward and tell him to shout if there’s any sign of arrows.

  La Hire: Especially if they appear suddenly in his body.

  So in the afternoon she went out with d’Aulon and some French knights from the south gate on to the Loire bridge. It was a dry grey afternoon. There were gunners in a wooden palisade by one of the piers of the bridge. They called out Noël, mademoiselle! The commandant of the gunners whistled out of a mouth of rotten teeth. The French knights waved back.

  Jehanne trembled under her armour, the big horse moving lumpily and to her pain between her thighs.

  Knight: That’s Maître Jean the master-gunner. The coués in les Tourelles are so frightened of him that sometimes he throws himself over the stonework as if he’s been wounded, and has himself carried away on a litter into town. The Goddams yell and cheer. Half an hour back comes Maître Jean large as life. Dealing them death.

  I’ve never spoken to any Englishman before, she was thinking. The English knights spoke Norman French. The archers would call out to her in jagged Goddam ways she couldn’t predict.

  Jehanne: I’ve never spoken to an Englishman before.

  D’Aulon: They’re like us. They don’t want to die or go to hell.

  Jehanne: Aren’t you afraid?

  D’Aulon: I was their prisoner for two years. I taught them to play chess. They use a lot of profanity. But then …

  Far out across the pathway of the bridge was a wooden tower with a few French watchers on top.

  Jehanne and d’Aulon went inside: it was cold and dark in there. Around the walls were palliasses, a French guard lay on one of them. There was an incisive smell of sap and sour-wine piss. The staircase had no banister. When she got on to the platform upstairs one of the watchers raised the parley flag. Waiting for an acknowledgement, the French knight pointed out the features of the place. They were only six metres up there and the structure trembled every time someone put down his foot. In front of it, tumbling against it, was a mound of earth and faggots, then a gap in the bridge, perhaps twenty-five metres across. The water looked deep, strong, abiding, muddy, flowing in that gap.

  Where the gap ended and the bridge began again was another mound of dirt and faggots and a wooden tower just like this one. There were two flags flying there: red lion on gold, black boar on blue. Alarm ran up and down her arms. Men stood on their platform over there, holding up a parley flag. She could see an English knight standing still, waiting to hear with green and white silk around his head. Behind him stood the towers of les Tourelles, a fine little stone castle, and beyond it the complicated earthworks of les Augustins.

  D’Aulon: My mistress wants to talk to Monsieur Glasdale.

  Knight: Is your mistress the cowgirl?

  D’Aulon looked apologetically at Jehanne.

  Knight: Come on, is it the bloody cowgirl you people are using?

  D’Aulon: It’s the girl, the pucelle, the virgin. Monsieur Talbot has her letter. And her herald.

  Knight: There’s a bonfire at St Lorent for her too. Why doesn’t she visit over there?

  D’Aulon: Monsieur Bastard won’t let her. Will you or won’t you get Glasdale?

  The knight went. The men he left behind could speak the language brokenly. They called out cowgirl, whore, harlot, cock-sucker. They invited her behind the earthworks to milk them. She was bare-handed, one glove in either hand. She ground the gloves into her ears. They cackled and whistled and pissed over the ramparts.

  Jehanne thought, I ought to be taking this better. I ought to be laughing them off. Why aren’t I?

  D’Aulon: Would you like to wait downstairs?

  Jehanne: They’re just village wits.

  Ribaude! they kept calling in their weird voices. Vachère!

  Glasdale did not come for half an hour. He was large and moved easily in armour, though not with the hereditary ease
of the Bastard and Gilles.

  No one said anything.

  In the end Glasdale asked was there to be talking or not.

  She began calling to him before she understood what she was saying. She’d been entranced by his movements, by the movements of the other English. All dead and they don’t know it.

  In that state of mind she began the talks.

  Jehanne: Monsieur Classidas (it was his French pet-name) you’re all going to die. Give up that place and go home with your lives. For Sweet Jesus’ sake.

  Everyone on the English platform answered, knowing they were permitted to. It was consecrated hatred over there, Glasdale had somehow let them know it was a holy and right hatred. He didn’t bother to restrain them for some minutes. In the end Glasdale spoke in a jagged passionate voice, a little short of breath.

  Glasdale: My good friend Talbot has a bonfire for your herald. I’ve got one for you. You’re a peasant and a whore and a fucking disgrace and when I get you I’ll let my men at you, then I’ll burn you without consulting the University of Paris or any of that cowshit. They can convene on the question of your blistered arse, sweetie. Can you hear me?

  One of the French knights was sitting in the shadow of the parapet cranking up a bolt into a crossbow. He called out to the man holding the parley flag.

  Knight: Haul that thing down and I’ll put a bolt into the bastard.

  D’Aulon kicked the bolt out from between the man’s greaved legs. He was angry with everyone and didn’t want to be tempted in this way.

  D’Aulon: What if she got captured? What would they do to her after a thing like that?

  The English redoubt thudded with weird sounds, hurrays and hip-hips, whistles, rooster-calls, pig-grunts. Jehanne went downstairs, crying in the dark fort. You silly bitch, it’s just words. But it was like Jacques’s hatred in the days when she first failed to become a woman, a hatred of her organs and of her mystery. Out of all the mysteries they could have chosen to hate – wounds, rape, homesickness– they chose only her mystery. Gratuitously.

  To my honoured principal etc.

  Dated 1 May 1429

  Last night Monsieur the Bastard tried to persuade me to underwrite the garrison’s pay immediately, which including back-wages came to a total of more than seven thousand pounds tournois. I might have considered doing so on security from Monsieur Gilles de Rais, but that gentleman could not be found. The Bastard out of hand presumed him to be holed up in one of the city’s pleasure houses, perhaps one that deals in children. I replied that the Marshal’s vices, whatever they were, had no bearing on his credit, so that I was prepared to wait for him to re-emerge. The Bastard nonetheless saddled up this morning and, with a body of forty knights, slipped round the northern flanks of the system of English fortresses outside the Bannier Gate. Before he left I reproached him for not waiting the little time it would take to find Monsieur Gilles. He replied very reasonably that his purpose in going was not only to obtain the pay cover-notes from the Council itself, but to lead the army back now that the girl is installed and the Orleanais are ready to act.