Blood Red, Sister Rose

by Thomas Keneally

  Jehanne: Oh lies, Messire.

  The wound was so sharp and deep and had definition now. While they unbuckled her, a knight brought yet another sachet to tie round her neck. D’Aulon was furious. Of all people.

  D’Aulon: Go to hell!

  Knight: It stops haemorrhaging.

  D’Aulon: Take it away. They already think she’s a witch.

  It seemed he too had felt personally wounded by that Goddam shouting about witch’s blood.

  D’Aulon: All of you, go away. Don’t steal her air. Go on.

  Jehanne: Am I dying, Jean?

  D’Aulon smiled off-handedly.

  D’Aulon: Not this time.

  People didn’t smile that way if they were lying to the dying. She encouraged him to go on in the same way.

  Jehanne: Jean, you mock me all you like.

  D’Aulon: We have to undress you, that’s why I sent the others away.

  Gamaches: Mademoiselle, would you like me to go?

  Jehanne: No. I think I won’t die if I’ve got enough friends around.

  Armour came off, thin padded jacket, shirt. A rush of blood had run between her breasts and down her right side. She saw a gobbet of thick gore on the end of her nipple. She could get an impression of the wound if she closed her left eye. It was like an eye itself and it bled but not with that surge that they called haemorrhage.

  Minguet put to it a plump smear of bacon fat and olive oil. This might be grand blood, enriching kingship. But when it started to flow, and when it stopped, and when the linen went on it, she roared and pleaded like any animal.

  The English were blowing monotones on flutes and bashing drums.

  Jehanne was carried on a litter back to the Bastard. Sometimes she saw soldiers shield their eyes from the bad omen of the blood on her chest.

  She lay on the litter all through the middle of the afternoon. A blanket covered her bare breasts. The Bastard came to see her but she was not aware of him. Mesdames Margaret and Catherine were nagging and not very golden presences on her right, injured side.

  At les Tourelles three assaults failed and everyone stopped to eat something.

  By four o’clock her head was clearing, at five she ate a little bread and said she would get up. Her legs were still in steel, but she kept wincing when the breast plate went on and chose to go forward in her padded jacket. She walked amongst the knights, smiling, then around the militia lines. They yelled for her. Then more assaults were made across the ditch to the walls. Fifty men were killed the way she had so nearly been. She climbed the mound with Minguet, d’Aulon, the flag. Lines of militia protected her with raised shields. She stood sweating and feeling remote from herself, sending the pulsations of her wound against the palisades. She was there at seven o’clock when the Bastard had Retreat blown.

  Militia-men chaired her back to the Bastard’s flag.

  No one was going home yet. Everyone was chatting. The militia-men moved too quickly with her. She couldn’t find air whichever side of her body she put her mouth, or if she painfully lifted her lips to the sky.

  When she found it at last somewhere on her left, her eyes cleared. They were holding her upright in front of the Bastard. There was unreasonable hurt in his eyes, as if she’d been lying.

  Jehanne: You’re going home too early.

  Bastard: Back to my brother’s city.

  Jehanne: Too early. Try again. Nothing to lose.

  Bastard: Orleans, that’s all.

  Jehanne: You haven’t lost it all day.

  Bastard: I came and felt your brow while you were ill earlier. You didn’t seem to notice. You’re well enough now.

  She brushed aside his consideration for her wound.

  Jehanne: Another try!

  She was as tough as Messire had been when Charlotte rolled on her foot in the small hours.

  Bastard: I have a force under de Giresme on the bridge – they were to try to put a span across to les Tourelles from the city side. I have a string of barges loaded with pitch, tow, faggots, old bones, resin, sulphur, God knows what, to float under the wooden bridge between les Tourelles fort there and les Tourelles itself. You can’t say I haven’t backed up your special vision, Jehanne. But nothing’s happened and we haven’t broken into the fort and it’s time for everyone to go home.

  Jehanne: I told lies for you this morning. At your damned begging.

  Bastard: And it was just as well and thank you.

  Jehanne: For Christ’s sake, we’ll be in there in an hour!

  He yelled.

  Bastard: For Christ’s sake, how do you know?

  She felt sick from the wound and bit the pad of her left palm for relief.

  Bastard: Forgive me.

  Jehanne: Please, rest a little while. Then …

  She was aware of a movement, like a small animal shifting, between her thighs.

  Bastard: One more try and that’s it.

  He spoke softly but still with an unfair degree of reproach. If les Tourelles did not fall this evening, he’d be very hard to manage tomorrow.

  He went forward calling to both sides of him.

  Bastard: One more try. Have a rest first. Eat and drink.

  She sent Minguet for her horse and, when he brought his own too, said no she’d go alone where she was going.

  She rode a quarter of a mile south to an untended vineyard in Sologne. The vines had their spring foliage and blossoms, flat pink in the dusk. With her good arm she began to unbuckle the leg-pieces she still wore. When she got her drawers down she found she had a show of blood there. She began laughing as wildly as the wound let her. Was it a joke on Messire’s part? A pat reward for bleeding from a wound?

  After the laughing stopped she lay on the untilled earth. She tasted the bitter stems of weeds quite joyfully between her lips.

  Jehanne: Now Brother Jesus … don’t mess me about any more.

  She realized she was lying with her drawers down and her buttocks bare to the young moon. On her haunches, she bent to wipe the blood from her legs, she urinated in the sleeping vineyard. Soon, she promised it, they’ll be back with the plough. Then, left-handedly, she dressed again in drawers and leggings.

  Two hours before, she’d lent her flag to one of la Hire’s mercenaries, who’d taken it up on to the outer mound every time there was a storming party.

  Now the man was exhausted and beginning to understand what risks he’d been taking, carrying the witch’s flag. D’Aulon went to retrieve it from him. There was a Basque mercenary Jean knew who stood by watching.

  D’Aulon: Listen, we’ve got to get this flag right up under the palisades.

  Basque: It was there this morning when the girl went up there.

  D’Aulon: That’s right. And when she was hurt, Gamaches came in to save her. And Gamaches doesn’t like her. Or didn’t.

  Basque: So?

  D’Aulon: If I go right up to the palisades, will you come with me? Carrying her flag?

  Basque: Anything that lunatic Partrada can do, I can. But it’s been up there already, without any bloody result.

  D’Aulon: But you’ll come?

  Basque: All right.

  D’Aulon gave him the flag and they walked up and down amongst the mercenaries and the militia, the Basque waving it and d’Aulon asking a question.

  D’Aulon: Would you let this flag be lost to the English?

  The English fired their cannon, and the stones lobbed hardly any further than the outer mound. The word went around that the English had no powder left.

  Riding down from the vineyard she saw her flag climbing the mound. She felt irrational anger that someone had taken it without her being asked. Perhaps all that nonsense of Minguet’s was taking root in her.

  She galloped through the lines of the knights, then through the militia. She had no proper armour, no helmet. Her horse got its knees up high because she was so much lighter. Everyone who saw her moving along so fast after her injury remembered it all their lives. It was a divine return.

&
nbsp; Whereas all she light-headedly wanted was her damn flag back.

  At the foot of the mound she left the horse. Militia-men remembered later how it nosed the bare earth for something to nibble. Like any old farm horse. She ran up the mound – the wound wasn’t even in her body’s memory. She caught up with the Basque, who was weaving about amongst arrows like a sensible man. Meanwhile, d’Aulon had gone on to the faggot bridge across the ditch, his head down and shield on top of him. Lumps of stone were falling into the ditch – the English cannon couldn’t carry further than the English arm, but both pitched what they could.

  Just as the Basque was stepping after d’Aulon, Jehanne caught him and grabbed the tail of her flag and wound it under her left armpit.

  Jehanne: My flag please.

  Basque: Let go.

  Jehanne: I don’t know you. My flag.

  Basque: I’m taking it up for d’Aulon, you silly bitch.

  This comedy on the mound didn’t look funny to the army hundreds of metres back. The Basque and the girl fighting over the standard, the silk shuddering between them, looked like the right kind of sign to them.

  Men began running towards it without knowing they were. Men in les Tourelles were similarly compelled by it and knew they were going to die unreasonably now, when they’d thought the day’s business was over. John Reid saw it, Bill Martin, Matthew Thornton, Thomas Jolly, Geoffrey Blackwell, Walter Parker, William Vaughan, William Arnold, John Burford, George Ludlow, Patrick Hall, Thomas Sand, John Langham, Dick Hawke, Davy Johnson, Black Henry and all the other barbarously named Goddams of les Tourelles.

  D’Aulon reached the palisades and looked to left and right for the Basque and then over his shoulder. He thought the Basque had given up his promise, had chosen some easy posturing with the flag on the safe side of the ditch.

  D’Aulon: Is that the way you keep promises?

  Basque: Oh Jesus!

  He pulled so hard Jehanne had to let go out of sudden consideration for her injury. She fell hard on her spine. Alone of everyone there she sat laughing on the mound. Her laughter too worked potently on all the French and on John Reid, Matthew Thornton and others.

  When she looked up Breton knights and la Hire’s Gascons were all over the mound. She felt dizzy and it seemed to her her wound had begun bleeding again. The solemn visors stared at her laughter. One visor went up and she saw inside its helmet the face of the Duke of Cailly. The night she first crossed the Loire she’d slept at his house. To her mind it was a friendship that had gone on for years, yet it had only been last Wednesday week.

  Jehanne: When my flag touches the palisade you can safely go in, Monsieur.

  It was that know-all gut of hers told her. She let them lift her on to her feet.

  Cailly: It’s touching now, Jehanne.

  Jehanne: It’s all yours then.

  So many ladders went up, the English could not push them all away. Cailly, walking over the ditch with Jehanne, chatted. A bit of an old nagger.

  Cailly: I’ve been telling them all day the Goddams didn’t have the numbers. Even the Bastard and la Hire – maybe even Monsieur de Rais – they’ve got a thing about the English, they’ve had to eat so much cow-dung at English hands. But I’ve been telling them all day the English don’t have the numbers in there …

  She knew she couldn’t climb in, so waited for the militia to open the gate from inside. From the front gate she could see directly across the dead to the back gate where thirty English knights stood swinging at the French with axes.

  Cailly: He’s letting his men get away.

  Glasdale’s squire was beside him with the Chandos flag, a black boar’s head with yellow tusks on a red ground. It all had a beautiful irrelevance, the squire and what Glasdale did amongst all these streets of strewn offal.

  She began crying for him. She wanted to see his face. You want to see the face of a passionate hater almost as much as you want to see that of a passionate lover. She began yelling.

  Jehanne: Glassidas, Glassidas, Glassidas, all give in.

  He couldn’t hear.

  Near her feet some poor Englishman sat up to speak to her. She cocked her ear, was willing to listen. But a drench of blood ran out of his mouth and he died without having had his word.

  Half-way to the back gate she ran into an execution squad of militia-men. They had a few dozen English peasants and were making them kneel one at a time and receive an axe blow across the crown of the head.

  She sent the militia-men away and looked around the faces of the English. Most of them were Jehan’s age. They had mute faces. You could have thought them ungrateful.

  She donated them to Cailly. He wasn’t delighted. They didn’t look as if they’d bring much in on any market.

  Next she found a little balding Englishman, knees up his chin. He made one begging, fluting noise over and over. With her hands she tried to hold him together – she had the idea the agony that kept him so bunched might suddenly snap him apart. He’d been piked in the stomach. She waited till Pasquerel came along. By then he was suffering less – awareness had almost gone out of his eyes.

  There were stains of the Englishman’s blood on her leggings. Blood, blood, blood. She was lost amongst its meanings. In Christ’s garden of vengeance in Sologne.

  Jehanne: Glassidas!

  By the time she got near the back gate, hundreds of men stood around watching twenty or thirty Breton knights fight the twenty or thirty Englishmen. Respect for Glasdale had held up a French rush through the back gate of les Tourelles fortress to the little bridge-castle of les Tourelles itself. So there had been war all day but now it was games again, the way knights had been told, when they were little boys, it would be.

  Just the same, the English detached themselves a few at a time and ran to les Tourelles by a small wooden footbridge. Hedges of flame rose each side of it – Jehanne could feel the heat many metres back in the crowd. The fire-barges the Bastard had spoken of must be in place there. It was only a small-span bridge. If you got aligned with it you could see the open gate of les Tourelles, amongst great flaps of flame, waiting for Glasdale, Moleyns, Poynings, Gifford to come home to it.

  She felt her wound blistering in the heat.

  At last the Bretons simply stood back. They wanted to give Glasdale and the others the option of trying the bridge. Trial by fire, it could fancifully be called.

  She knew what he’d do. She’d never see his face. Her scream rose high above all screams.

  Jehanne: Don’t!

  There were twenty Englishmen on the bridge, running, when it gave way, too brittle from fire. She saw steel arms waving and some flags go down flaming into the river. Not one of those men rose even once.

  She was found wandering in the streets of les Tourelles fortress. She raved, something like this.

  Darling Brother Jesus, who once thought you were the last of sacrifices, make a place in the garden of your heart not only for the rose. Make a place for the bald-headed Englishman and Raymond and Glassidas. As you made a place for them in your garden of vengeance. Amen, amen.

  When la Hire saw the bridge go under Glasdale and the others, he’d spoken like a professional.

  La Hire: Goodbye to a fortune in ransoms.

  To finish the les Tourelles story.

  Les Tourelles itself, the little stone fortress Glasdale had run for, was taken from the town side. Carpenters made a light wooden frame to fling over the gap between Belle Croix and the timber outworks where the English had once called Jehanne Ribaude! They held it upright and lowered it like a ladder towards the far brink, but found it was a foot short. Retracting it, they hammered a few lengths of wooden guttering on the end and raised and lowered it again. It trembled over the deep green river. Stones fell either side of it and arrows studded it. The first knight to cross was a knight-priest, at the crouch, a shield carried over his face. The guttering involved two risky steps but he took them. Now it seemed easy to all the others.

  From les Tourelles fortress the Frenc
h threw flocks of arrows into les Tourelles themselves and Maître Jean Montesclare lobbed stone balls. Later in the evening a raving young English knight captured in les Tourelles said he had seen Sts Aignan and Euverte rising out of the flames from the fire-barges. Others had seen them too and said Jesus we’re finished.

  At ten o’clock the gap on both sides of the little castle had been bridged again with wooden spans strong enough to take horses. The Bastard, Jehanne, Gilles, la Hire rode home that way. Torches crowded the walls. Ste Croix, St Pierre Empont, the University, St Paul, Notre-Dame all rang and buffeted her brain. The canons and the regiment of priests sang Te Deum laudamus.

  Back at Boucher’s they again had the Professor of Medicine from the University to dress her wound. He approved once more of what Minguet had done.

  The Bastard whispered to her.

  Bastard: Talbot lost France for his king today, my love.

  She put her head back, closed her eyes, breathed luxuriously. Again the Bastard whispered.

  Bastard: There isn’t one Goddam south of the Loire.

  It was like all the significances of blood. She had not been able to contain, to assimilate them. She could not contain or assimilate his adoration. But this failure was more enjoyable than the other.

  Sunday morning, so brilliant the river-flat mists had risen by eight. As soon as the lines of the earth stood out clearly, the English came out of the forts on the west of Orleans and deployed from the Forest of Orleans down as far as the river bank. Generals d’Illiers and la Hire rode out of the Renard Gate to face them, and soon the militia and the Bastard and the girl came too. The girl wore a light jacket because of her injury. Her brain and guts were gorged with fragments of many deaths. She simply postponed dealing with her brain and guts. In a dazed way, she felt very clear-headed.

  Pasquerel set up a portable altar opposite some English knights who had taken a position outside Fort de Croix-Boisée. In case there was an all-out battle that day, all the French crowded round to see Pasquerel raise the consecrated host. As he was cleaning the chalice all the enemy’s mounted knights formed up either side of the Blois Road.