by Dan Davis
The men in the hall were confused and I am sure that they assumed the Marshal was speaking to Stephen or to Captain Labbe.
“I only wish I had come sooner,” I said, drawing surprised looks from everyone in the hall. “And seen to your end before all this.”
“A shame for you, then, that I shall be free and safe once more,” the Marshal said. “In time.”
We stared at him, all of us confused by his mad confidence.
“Surely, my lord Marshal,” I said, “you understand that this warrant spells your imminent death? You are to be taken into custody and then you shall stand trial for your crimes and they are crimes that you cannot escape from, even if you deny them. No, you cannot wriggle free of this, sir. Not for all your wealth.”
He grinned again, pulling the pale skin of his face tight over the bones of his skull. “You have no conception of my rights as Marshal of France. The King himself will intervene to free me, by his command. Oh, you shall see it happen, sir, yes you shall. You know, do you not, that the Duke and his cousin the Bishop, stand in opposition to our King, who loves me dearly?”
I was astonished and felt a knot of disquiet forming in my guts. The politics of the French court were a special kind of insanity and for all I knew, he spoke the truth and the King of France would personally ride in and free his beloved Marshal with his own hand.
But we had a duty to perform and I said as much. “Even if all that you say is true, my lord, you shall still come with us, now.”
“Shall I, indeed?”
I could not help but glance up to the gallery. To my relief, I saw Rob and Walt’s faces up there, looking down. I always felt better knowing Rob’s bow was in his hand.
“Us, is it?” the Marshal said, a knowing smile on his face. “You say us, as if you yourself have not engineered this entire sham.”
The Duke’s and the Bishop’s men looked at me in even more confusion.
“You have it wrong,” I replied. “It is no sham. The lords and the people of this land have long recognised you as a monster and finally they have moved to end your crimes. I have done nothing but facilitate them and am here now to protect these men, should you, in your madness, decide to resist by force.”
“Ha!” he cried, dramatically throwing his hands into the air. Many of the men flinched. “And you would stop me, would you?”
“You know that I would,” I replied.
And yet, I was far from certain. The Marshal was certainly quite ancient himself, having survived two centuries or more as an immortal and had clearly been gorging himself on far more blood than I had in that time. His strength could have been greater than mine, and he was an experienced soldier and a knight. He had defeated me once before, when he commanded the forces that had slaughtered mine.
“If you are so strong, sir,” he said, smiling a knowing smile, “then why did you not save your people when you had the chance? Did you men know that there is an Englishman in your midst? They all are. All of his men, also. As English as King Henry.”
“Nonsense,” I said, not daring to catch the eye of Captain Labbe or the others. “We are Normans. Now, hand over your sword to the Captain, give yourself up into his custody, and let us be done with this.”
“Me alone?” he spoke lightly, as if it were a small thing. But he seemed tense as he waited for the response.
Stephen spoke up. “The warrant names also as your accomplices Etienne Corrillaut the one they call Poitou, Henriet Griart, Prelati the Florentine, and Dominus Eustache Blanchet. Also, the woman they call La Meffraye.”
Casually, he nodded, and yet it was as though that great tension had gone out of him. “Oh, very well. If you insist.” Sighing, as if it were little more than an irritation, he unbuckled his sword and held it so that Captain Labbe could take the hilt. I expected the Marshal to suddenly spin it about, whip the blade free, and begin cutting his way through the mortals. Or still I was ready for the hidden soldiers of his army to descend upon us from all sides and so free their master.
But the sword was taken.
Gilles stepped down from the dais and Captain Labbe’s soldiers surrounded him, ready to escort him from his own hall. I could imagine the sense of unreality that those soldiers felt. It was unheard of, literally an unknown event, for commoners to arrest a noble of anything like the Marshal’s standing. He was a great baron and rich beyond any commoner’s conception. For all Stephen’s whining over the years that the common folk needed the legal means to challenge their overlords, in his heart every man knows the powerful are supposed to rule over the weak and to witness something different is to see the natural order being undone before one’s very eyes. The profundity of the moment seized every soul present, of that I am certain.
Up at the top of the hall, the Marshal’s men became greatly anguished and Henriet and Poitou, I am sure, strained to resist their arrest. They could certainly have killed the bailiffs, if they chose. A handful of them, at least. Perhaps they feared me and my men and knew they would ultimately fail. Or perhaps some other reason stayed their hands.
Henriet, eyes darting around the room, jerked into action and cried out.
“I cannot, my lord! I cannot do it! Forgive me!”
Even as he spoke, he drew his knife and began to saw at his own throat. I was already rushing forward before he acted and managed to grasp his wrist and pull his hand away from his throat so that only a little blood was spilled and before he was able to cut through the great veins. He was stronger than any normal man, of course, but I was stronger still. As I held him, the bailiffs prised the blade from his hand before he could do himself mortal damage. We clapped the irons on him while he wept in despair.
“Why did you stop him?” Rob muttered, coming down with Walt as the bailiffs rounded all the Marshal’s servants up and prepared them for the journey.
Walt nudged Rob in the ribs. “You want him to get tortured to death, that’s it, ain’t it, Richard?”
Rob ignored him and looked at me strangely. “Are you perhaps not taking this legal approach a little too far?”
Why had I stopped his attempt at self-murder? Partly, yes, I wanted him to suffer before he died but there was something else nagging at me. His cry to his master that he could not do it. Clearly, he meant that he could not give himself up but the way he spoke it, intoned the word it, seemed to suggest it was something he and the Marshal had discussed before our appearance. Had Henriet agreed to give himself up peacefully, only to give in to despair? Or was there something more to it? Was there something else he had promised?
“I want him to confess, that is all,” I said. “And so condemn his master with his words. He cannot do that if he is dead.”
“As long as he dies eventually,” Rob said.
We took them all back to Nantes where they were to be tried. All the lands we rode through belonged to the Marshal. Every field, every village, tree, and beast were his. His lands stretched for miles beyond the horizon to the east and to the west and brought him vast incomes that made him fabulously rich. Yet, he had not fought to protect them. There were over a hundred soldiers in his private army and yet he had not used them. In fact, he had perhaps even dismissed them from his service. Why had he given himself up?
He sat straight-backed in his saddle, wrapped in his gorgeous sable cloak with his head held high beneath his hat, as if he were simply out for a ride. As if he were perfectly content with his life and with where he was in that moment.
I felt that disquiet again, that I was missing something obvious, something before my eyes and yet I had not the wit to make note of it.
But were his actions so suspicious? Very little he had done for some time made any sense, so it seemed likely that the man had simply lost his mind and could not accept that he would soon hang for his crimes.
Either way, I was sure, riding behind the arrested men in grim silence, that it was over. That not the King nor God Himself could now save Gilles de Rais from his fate.
He was the man resp
onsible for our defeats nine years before, at Orléans, but soon I would make amends.
12. Siege of Orléans
May 1429
We had no idea of the danger we were in. After Joan came to the city of Orléans in April 1429, we still thought it was laughable. There was some nonsensical old myth, some confused prophecy, that said a maiden would drive away the enemies of France. It seemed to be utter nonsense.
Inside Orléans, Joan acted like a holy woman or even like royalty, parading herself around the streets of the city handing out food to the people as if she had arranged and brought it herself, rather than simply accompanied a convoy that was coming anyway. But the people did not care. And the garrison received their long-awaited salaries that the King had sent. But Joan, with her natural cunning, made sure they believed that it was her who had been responsible for the issuing of the coins.
She began sending messengers to each of our forts, demanding our departure. These messengers were cursed and jeered by all. Some of the commanders of the forts threatened to kill the messengers, accusing them of being emissaries of a witch, and they were driven off.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, Joan was even engaging in discussions of tactics with the lords in Orléans. According to what I heard later, she urged nothing but direct and immediate assaults on all of our forts, one after the other or even all at once. Those commanders would not hear of it. The French had not properly attacked the English for decades and they were afraid to do so. Most had never participated in an assault. Their most recent attempt, at the Battle of the Herrings, had once again resulted in their defeat. They knew, in their bones, that attacking the English, when we were prepared and ready, with stakes and archers, would always end in failure. It had been that way since Crecy, since Poitiers, since Agincourt.
And yet, somehow, Joan’s utter conviction was infecting even those weak men. Her assertion was that all the French had to do was try an assault to be successful. Her madness poured out of her and into them.
One of the commanders left the city in the night and ran for the forest, along with a sizable bodyguard. They were spotted and I was ordered by Talbot to chase after him and to stop him. I took Rob, Walt, and a score of other veterans on good horses and with spares and set off. We tracked them down river toward Blois, but they had too long a lead and we could not catch them before they reached the city.
When we returned, I discovered that the Maiden had come out of the city and personally surveyed our fortifications.
“She was dressed in full harness!” the men told me. “Shining polished armour, all over. Like a man!”
“What did she look like?” I asked them.
“Ah, she was hideous,” Old Simon assured me. “Like a deformed dwarf, she was.”
“You are mad!” another said. “She was tall, with long, flowing blonde hair.”
“She wore a cap the entire time,” another man said, cursing the others for their ignorance. “But one could see she was a great beauty.”
Half the men howled in derision.
“Nonsense,” Old Simon roared. “She was pinched in the face, with a turned-up nose like a fat skeleton.”
None of us could understand it and Walt and Rob put it down to the typical ignorance and argumentative nature of the English soldier on a long campaign. But I felt some disquiet. How could they have seen such different things? It hinted to me of some vague unnaturalness. Perhaps, I thought, she was a witch after all. And I was not the only one.
Seeking clarification, something solid I could cling to, I asked Talbot what she had looked like, seeing as he had exchanged shouted words with her over the palisades.
“What do you care what the witch looks like?” Talbot snapped when I asked him. “Who are you to ask me such a thing? Mind your duties, man, or I will have you shipped back to England in chains!”
I knew he did not like me and was threatened by my expertise, but I was shocked by his open hostility.
Rob attempted to explain it. “You don’t know your place, Richard.” He hurried on, when he saw my expression. “That is, your place as he sees it. You have no lofty position here, you are merely a lowly captain with a handful of men. You have no land, no income. And so the likes of Lord Talbot ain’t ever going to listen to you.”
Walt gestured at me with the nub end of a loaf of dry bread. “And you scare the wits out of most men, sir. Give men the jitters, so you do. You have a right nasty look in your eye, half the time.”
“I do not,” I said, offended. “I am the most civil man in the world.”
They glanced at each other and said nothing.
A couple of days later, our scouts rushed in to warn us that a reinforcement convoy was coming up from Blois in the southwest. And somehow, there were other convoys converging on us from Montargis and Gien. It was early in the morning of the 4th May when the Blois convoy approached on the north side of the city, close to the fort of St. Laurent.
“We must meet them,” I urged Talbot. “Form up and stop them outside the fort.”
“Be silent,” Talbot snapped. “Someone silence that man, there!”
No one moved to silence me but I held my tongue for a moment while Talbot stared out at the enemy forces.
“They are too many,” he said. “If we pull men out from the forts, the garrison in the city will rush out and take us at the rear.”
I suppose it was a sensible precaution. But war is not a sensible business. It cannot be undertaken successfully without taking risks. Talbot was more afeared of losing the forts than he was of allowing the enemy to go unchallenged in their approach of the city.
The best commanders understand that battles are won in men’s minds as well as in the force of arms. More so, in my experience, and as the English would soon discover. Sadly, Talbot was not one of the best commanders. And as we stood down and watched the French reinforcements riding between our forts and heading into the city, I saw her for the first time.
For Joan the Maiden rode out to escort the convoy in.
She seemed small to me, although she was mounted on an enormous destrier. She wore a helm with a closed visor and held aloft a great banner flapping and snapping in the wind overhead. That banner was one I would come to know and to hate by sight. A great white banner sprinkled with fleur-de-lys all over. On one side was depicted the figure of Our Lord in Glory, holding the world and giving His benediction to a lily, held by one of two angels kneeling on each side with the words Jesus Maria besides. On the other side of the banner was the figure of Our Lady and a shield with the arms of France supported by two angels.
But that day, Joan and her banner were far away and hidden, on and off, by the mass of men around her.
“She ain’t all that,” Walt observed. “They just strapped a harness around some little harlot from Lorraine. She ain’t even got a weapon, has she, what’s she going to do with that banner?”
“Her presence is the weapon,” I said, seeing how the French soldiers swarmed her and cheered her very presence.
“Eh?” Walt asked. “How’s that then?”
I said nothing in reply as the enemy paraded in through the walls to Orléans, cheering and singing.
Watching Talbot, he seemed pleased to have avoided a battle but he was too ignorant to know he had just suffered a defeat. And it would not be the last suffered that day.
***
It was no later than midday when the enemy launched an assault on the fort of St. Loup. That was the most easterly and the most isolated of all of our forts. The fort was there to ward against supplies arriving from the east by land and by river and that was the exact reason the French decided to take it.
Provisions convoys were coming from that direction and our four hundred men in the fort there would have stopped them.
Defending is all very well, and it makes men feel secure and it is simple for less experienced troops to know what to do.
But in such a siege situation, where our forces were divided into groups, it was possib
le for the enemy to overwhelm a single defence point. Talbot and the other commanders were complacent but they were not incompetent. Most of the forts on the north bank of the river were close enough to support each other and St. Loup was the only fort that was too far to receive such reinforcement.
And so our four hundred men in St. Loup found themselves suddenly assaulted by almost two thousand French soldiers.
“We must relieve them,” I shouted at Talbot, who seemed stunned by the moment. Fastolf was speaking in his ear and he turned on me as I approached.
“Be quiet,” Fastolf snapped. “Of course we must. But we cannot risk the other forts falling.”
“Risk?” I said to Fastolf. “This is an opportunity, sir. Look at them, out the walls. Their backs are to us. Mount the cavalry, pin them in place, and bring up the men on foot.”
“Do not think to teach me my business,” Fastolf snapped. “You are not in possession of the facts.” He pointed at the attack. “Our scouts tell us that French reinforcements are converging on St. Loup from the east, coming in from Montargis and Gien. It is our garrison who are pinned in place.”
“That is grim news indeed, sir. But all the more reason for us to commit now.”
Fastolf chewed his lip and looked to Talbot, who was in command. “My lord?”
I held my breath.
“Send word. Order the garrison of Paris to attack the French.”
When he said Paris, he was using the vernacular name for the fort of Saint Pouair which was the closest to St. Loup.
“Is that it?” I blurted out. “One garrison? My lord, if we bring out every garrison, we can wipe out the French and end the siege by the end of the day!”
“Remove yourself from my presence, sir. If you wish to throw your life away, feel free to charge headlong into death.”
I pulled my helm on my head and shouted at Talbot. “It will not be the first time!”