by Dan Davis
My own mind returned to thoughts of Ameline. The poor girl had simply been at home with her father, living her life, and she was taken in such a manner only because of me. Because of my actions.
“If the girl ever was from Lorraine in the first place,” I said. “If she was a revenant at the time, and surely she was, then why believe anything else about her? She was a myth, originally, that notion of a maiden from Lorraine who would be the saviour of France and so surely it was a prophecy that Gilles fulfilled when he created her. He moulded this girl into the shape of that myth and then set her off to charm the lords, and the people, and even the Dauphin. Her true home, where the human girl was born before she was made, could be anywhere in France.”
Stephen massaged his temples. “Reason would dictate that you know where she went.”
“Stephen, you ever assume that others are as reasonable and logical as you are. Most men are fools, monsters, or madmen, and women are even worse. The girl may have lost her mind long ago. In fact, if she is Joan the Maiden then surely we know she is madder than a box of frogs and nothing she says or does can be assumed to be due to reason.”
“That is noted,” Stephen said. “So, to where would a madwoman go?”
“Paris?” Rob said.
“She failed to take Paris, she would not return there,” I said.
Stephen turned. “What makes you speak with such certainty?”
I could not say but something I had said to Ameline came back to me.
People stay away from pain, like an animal fleeing attack, or a child flinching from a hot candle. But we are also drawn to places where we once felt strength and love. And no doubt that is why he returns home.
“Where was Joan’s greatest victory?” I said.
“Patay,” Rob said, his face darkening. Of course that was where his mind would turn, the place where thousands of archers were cut down.
“That was Gilles de Rais’ victory more than hers,” I said. “Besides, what is there at Patay? A few houses? Fields, a woodland? It is nothing.”
“Bloody Orléans, weren’t it,” Walt said. “They smashed us, over and over, when they had no right to and they did it because she riled them up into believing it.”
“What is in Orléans?” Stephen asked. “Why would she go there?”
“She must be with the Marshal,” Rob said. “Is that not what we think, sirs? Joan may have taken Mistress Moussillon but where she has gone, she has gone with Gilles de Rais at her side. The pair of them together won Orléans. And he was rich beyond mortal imagination. He could have bought anything, on the sly, through middlemen and agents. Like you do, Stephen.”
“Dom Eustache Blanchet,” I said. “He said something about Orléans during his confession, did he not, Stephen? What was it?”
Stephen frowned. “He went there with Prelati on the way back from Florence.”
“By God, yes. Blanchet said he went to Gilles de Rais’ house in Orléans. Prepare the horses. We will not wait for sunrise. We ride for Orléans.”
21. Desperate Pursuit
Oct 1440
It was a hundred and eighty miles up the Loire to Orléans. Pushing the horses, it took us four days of riding ten hours a day, through bitter rain and the howling winds of the fall. Every mile of it, I swore vengeance and murder and pictured myself tearing my enemies to pieces when I caught up with them.
But also I recalled my conversations with Gilles and his servants. I remembered all over again the battles I had fought where Joan had been their talisman and Gilles had been their commander. Searching my memories for the times when I should have said or done this or that thing differently. If I had acted with great virtue and clarity of purpose. If I had just killed them both myself years ago instead of acting like a lawful commoner instead of a righteous lord of war.
“I have been going over my words with Gilles,” I said on the first night when we stopped, exhausted, at nightfall, at a small inn beside the road. “He confessed when he realised he would have to speak about Joan during his torture. Like a fool, I believed he wished to protect her good name. But in truth, he wished to hide the fact that she was still alive.”
“You could not have known,” Stephen said.
“More like he was hiding his plan,” Rob said. “Didn’t want to admit he was going to get taken away.”
“Yes,” Stephen said, as if struck by inspiration. “Surely, Richard, it was his intent to confess all along. Think on it. It was only due to his confession and his vile apologies that he was able to strike his deal to avoid being burned to ashes.”
“Why delay such a confession, then?” I asked.
“Can’t admit you done wrong right off,” Walt said. “People don’t believe it if you do that.”
Stephen nodded. “The Inquisition would have put him to the Question if he had confessed at the outset. As it was, he seemed contrite and so avoided giving up his plan.”
“Might be they took time to plan it,” Rob said. “Who was them women who took his body away? Do you reckon Joan was one of them?”
I slammed my fist down on the table. “I should have taken my revenge from the first day. Damn the peasants and their need for justice. Damn the law. Damn the Bishop and the Duke. Next time, I will wait for none of it and I shall kill the bastards wherever I find them.”
My men would not meet my eye. We retired early and got up and on the road before dawn, pushing the horses through the freezing dark until we were warmed by our exertions and then exhausted by them.
It seemed I was not the only one wrapped in my thoughts during the long days in the saddle.
“I think I saw her,” Walt said suddenly, at the close of the second day while we shoved bread and cheese down our throats in a busy inn. He stared at his wine cup, a deep frown on his head.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “When? At the execution?”
“No, no,” he said. “At the church in Tilleuls. When you got them peasants to promise to make statements. When I come in, there was this woman at the back. Young, short, little thing she was, with a hood over her head even though she was inside the church.”
“What makes you think it was her?” Stephen said.
“She was alone, keeping in the shadow. I thought at first maybe she was that old lady, the Terror, but then I see she was right young. Something off about her. The peasants kept away from her. Seemed like a spy. I thought maybe she was one of the Duke’s or the Bishop’s or maybe even the Marshal’s but then when I went back to nab her after I spoke to you, Richard, she was gone. Weren’t outside, neither. Forgot about it until just now. Sorry, Richard.”
“You could not have known,” I said, though internally I cursed his witlessness. “Do not give it another thought.”
“She was under our very noses,” Stephen said. “I wonder where else she came so close to us?”
“He was nervous,” Rob blurted out. “When we went to arrest him and you read out the charges, Stephen. Do you recall when he asked if the charges were for him alone?”
“My God,” Stephen muttered. “How relieved he seemed when I named his servants also. I, too, thought it strange and now I realise it was that he dreaded the name of Joan of Orléans in the warrant.”
“If we had made more effort to seize La Meffraye,” Rob said, “you know, lain in wait for her more, we could have nabbed her and the girl at the same time.”
“Only, you’d have thought her a girl, hiding under her hood, and gone to grab her and the little monster would have cut your head off,” Walt said. “Be glad we never tried it.”
“That is why she was always hooded,” Stephen muttered. “And none knew her for a young woman of small stature. It was because she is a revenant and had to cover her skin even more than we do.”
“And she needed to hide in case anyone did recognise her,” Rob said. “Might be many thousands what saw her in Orléans and elsewhere.”
“That old woman kept up the lies,” Stephen said. “She claimed even to y
our face that the girl was her granddaughter, did she not?”
I rubbed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “It might be that I let my expectations get the better of me. Now I recall it, she said that the life of her family would be in danger if I found the girl. Something of that nature. They had threatened her family, I assume, should the secret be revealed.”
“I thought I misheard,” Rob muttered, before looking up. “So many times, the villagers spoke of the Terror, La Meffraye, and it seemed that they were speaking of the girl, not the old woman. The little demon, they called her. The demon spawn. Words such as that. And I thought they misspoke, or I misheard. But the Terror was the girl all along. La Meffraye was Joan of Orléans.”
“It is all in the past,” I said, still so angry at myself that I could barely speak of it. “All that matters is that we find her, in Orléans. Find her and kill her and tear Gilles limb from limb.”
When we arrived at the city, our horses were in bad shape and our valets were miles and perhaps even days behind us.
But we did not need them. Walt, Rob, and Stephen had drunk their blood and I commanded them to reach Orléans when they could. If they found us dead, they were free to share our wealth between them. They were good lads and they wished us well as they begged our pardon for their weakness.
Orléans was almost unrecognisable without the English forts and camps outside the walls and the thousands of soldiers inside and out. We came into the city through the western gate just before it closed for the night and though the rain had stopped it was still bitterly cold and we were all sore when we dismounted to stable our horses. The stable hands claimed to be ignorant of the location of the house we sought, though they crossed themselves as they did so.
“I will pay you for the location,” I said but none would so much as look at the silver coins I held.
“Where’s the market?” Rob asked them, and they told him readily enough.
We hid our weapons as best as we could, keeping them out of sight beneath our coats. Rob used his bowstave as a walking staff and kept his arrow bag close behind his back and covered himself with his cloak. Praying that we would be unchallenged, we pushed deeper into the city through the stream of people heading home, their business done for the day.
“Pardon me, sir,” I said to a man closing up his leatherwork shop. “Can you direct me to the home of Marshal Gilles de Rais?”
He looked me up and down from beside the table that displayed his wares. I was filthy from the road and moving as stiffly as an old man from the hard riding. His son or apprentice began to answer but the leatherworker clipped the boy about the ear, spat on the floor and turned his back on me to finish closing his workshop.
“Don’t be wanting to go there,” a woman said from the shop next door. “It’s cursed.”
I walked up the street to her shop, which displayed an array of ready-made shoes. Her husband the cordwainer sat within the workshop behind her. “Where is it, good woman?”
“What business you got there?”
“We are not friends of the Marshal,” I said. “Far from it, in fact.”
She screwed up her face. “On the river. Past the bridge.” Crossing herself, she closed her eyes. “Got red painted doors on the front, don’t it. Red as blood.”
We hurried on through the streets, looking for the house as darkness fell.
“There,” Rob said. “Is that door red?”
If the doors were red, it was the russet colour of old blood. The house was enormous, a high wall built all around the perimeter, with two and three storeys and a tower on the riverside reaching even higher and the gateway with the red doors was high and wide enough to allow a mounted man or a small cart into the courtyard beyond.
We ducked into the shelter of a dark doorway across the street and a few yards up. The fine porch had an awning and hid us remarkably well from casual glances, though if the residents came or went then we would be swiftly ejected.
“Can’t see no lamps lit within, can you?” Rob said.
“Perhaps we have it wrong,” I said. “I have brought us to the wrong town, or to the wrong house within it.”
Walt nodded. “There’s light behind them shutters,” he said, nodding. “Faint enough but it’s there, sir.”
“I will take your word for it,” I said. Their eyes were better than mine.
“Is that smoke coming from the tower yonder?” Stephen muttered. “Or from a neighbouring house?”
Smoke rose from chimneys all over the city, of course, and so it was difficult to make out for certain. But it seemed as though the Marshal’s residence was in use by someone, at least.
“Break it in, you reckon?” Walt said, nodding at the door.
“I’ll use my axe,” Rob said, patting the weapon where it was hidden beneath his cloak.
I was afraid to go in because I knew, in my heart, that Ameline would not be inside. Not alive, at least. It had been a ruse to bring me to a place of strength so that they could kill me, but they had no need to keep her alive and so she would be dead. Drunk dry and discarded, like so many others. Still, I had a faint glimmer of hope that I expected to soon be snuffed out.
“They are expecting us to come,” I said. “They wanted this, precisely this, and we have done as they designed and so they will be well prepared for us to rush in. They know we are three, at least. How can the Marshal and one girl, revenant or not, expect to stop the three of us? The three soldiers that is, Stephen.”
“Perhaps they are not within after all,” Rob suggested, his eyes flicking up and around us. “Might be it is only mortal servants within, but the immortal lords sit watching this place, awaiting our arrival. Might they not trap us within and burn us alive?”
I shuddered at the thought. I had been in raging fires before and knew that there was no more agonising way to die. “It would have to be a quick fire to be sure of killing us before we escaped.”
Walt cleared his throat and mumbled. “Hold up, my dear fellows. They have men within. Soldiers. Bound to be revenants.”
“Perhaps,” I said, nodding. “Perhaps he does have more men and so when I go rushing in, they will take me by force of numbers.”
“Begging your pardon, Richard,” Walt said. “It was no suggestion I was making but an observation.” He pointed up and across the street at the Marshal’s grand residence. “A man walks upon that wall, do you see the top of his helm bobbing along? He has a spear or polearm, which you can see bobbing beside him. And in the alcove there by the window, another man, unmoving.”
“I thought it was a statue.”
“On the tower,” Rob said, nodding. “A man turned from the top with a crossbow in his hand. Gone now to the river side of the tower.”
“Damn me but your eyes are good, lads,” I said. “How many more does he have within? A dozen? A score?”
“Plate armour and mail, a steel helm,” said Rob, nodding at the unmoving man in the shadowed alcove. “They are his famed army, are they not? Some of them, at least.”
“How can we kill so many veterans, clad in such fine harness?” Stephen whispered, his eyes wide. “Four against a score? What if it is more? What if he has fifty revenants in there with him?”
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “Stephen, it is three against however many are within. I do not expect you, a monk, a merchant, and a lawyer, to fight soldiers. Revenants nor mortals, neither a score nor one alone.”
“I am immortal,” he said, shrugging my hand off his shoulder. “I have strength, I have speed. I can fight.”
“You will help us, that is certain,” I said. “But not by killing. That is our trade. Look at our brother Walter, here. His is a face made to do violence and one that declares to the world that he can do nothing else but that. Look at Rob, feel the breadth of his shoulders and the steel of his eyes and know that his trade has ever been the piercing and hewing of the King’s enemies. Yours trade is and has always been your wits.”
Stephen sighed. “Shoul
d I ready the horses?”
“I’m afraid that you may have the most dangerous task of all,” I said, surprising him. “For you must spring the trap.”
22. The Master
Oct 1440
Clinging to the wall, I inched my way out along the outer edge of the city wall with the dark river flowing below me. I could barely see my hands in the gloom and found my way more by feel than anything else.
We would attack the building from multiple sides at once and so take the enemy by surprise, cutting through whatever guards there were and forcing our way in to meet in the interior, tapping Gilles de Rais and the Maiden of Orléans before they could escape.
Against my men’s wishes, I had taken the riskiest point of entry upon myself. With every sidling step, I regretted my decision.
My task was to climb the outer wall of the house’s tower that thrust up in the corner of one wing, which meant first finding access to the river bank fifty yards away at a landing stage before picking my way along the walls that guarded the city from incursion by the river. It had not looked such a long way before I had committed to it and I had confidently declared it to be in a poor state of repair, with ivy clinging in patches and great chunks still missing from the damage caused by English cannonballs.
And yet, I found it was taking me far longer than I expected and already I was tired. The stone under my fingers was freezing and damp and I had lost most of the feeling in my fingertips immediately. The hard riding and lack of rest were taking their toll and I fretted that I would fail even before the assault began. Though night had fallen, I was exposed to view from anyone watching from across the river or from the bridge downstream. I also had the furthest to climb, all the way up the wall and then up the tower built alongside it. One slip and I would fall into the river.
I wore no armour and carried no weapon but my dagger, having learned from experience what an impediment they are and yet it meant placing myself at a disadvantage if I did make it to the top.