by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
Still, there they all were, all the English, in what was left of their power and glory in France, Winchester, and Captain Warwick, even the Duke of Bedford, the regent of the realm. They and all their horses and men had come out this morning to burn this girl who’d not only disgraced them in battle, but had also, for all intents and purposes, put a decisive end to their hundred-year dream of combining the French and English crowns, by beating them to Reims Cathedral and crowning a king of her own, a French king. A hundred years of English victories, and all the careful marriages, all those miserable French princesses dragged to London to produce half-French English heirs—all turned to dust by Joan of Arc. The English had come out this morning in full regalia to return the favor. Cauchon wasn’t sure that a legal technicality would stop them.
But it did, it had to, for the English wanted not only to burn her, but to burn her legally, in an attempt to delegitimize the coronation of the king she’d crowned. Negate it, as the work of a heretic, whom the Church had legally burned.
Cauchon turned to Winchester: “What should I do?”
Winchester, cardinal of England, didn’t look at him. Just snapped, “Admit her to penance, of course.”
He didn’t say, Fool, though it was implied. His secretary took a scroll from his sleeve, with a standard recantation. Hastily written—lucky he’d brought it. They’d all thought she’d go down like a fanatic. He handed it to Cauchon.
Who took it and started forward toward Joan of Arc. “Perhaps you favor her!” one of the English lords called out to him.
Cauchon threw down the scroll. “You lie!” he cried. Favor her? He hated her! Sinned, actually, in hating her so much, for them, his friends the English.
“You insult me!” he shouted.
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, stepped in. “Gentlemen.” He was captain of the English garrison in Rouen. His soldiers had already started picking up rocks, understanding that something was wrong, and that Joan of Arc might not burn this morning. They’d been waiting for a year.
“Look how she laughs at us, the witch!” one of them had shouted to him.
Warwick turned. She did have an idiotic smile on her face.
“Look how she mocks us!”
It had been hard, almost impossible, to recruit men to fight in France once she’d taken the field. She had terrified the English soldiers, disgraced them in battle. These men had come out this morning to get even.
And now she was escaping them, as their own lives were escaping them, those promises of wealth and glory that had enticed them to France—a few rocks started flying. Warwick wasn’t entirely sure that he could stop them. The French crowd was already melting away.
And now this: “He insults me!” Cauchon was crying. “I’m a bishop of the Holy Church! Of course I seek her salvation, and not her death!”
Ha! thought Warwick. “Beg forgiveness,” he muttered to the English lord. Quickly. He picked up the scroll and handed it to Cauchon. “Proceed,” he said, glancing at his soldiers. Quickly.
. . .
Cauchon, red in the face now, stepped forward to Joan of Arc. He didn’t even look at her as he rapped out the standard formula for repenting heretics: “The Church unbinds you from the chains of excommunication. But since you have sinned rashly against God and the Church, you are finally and definitely condemned for salutary penance, to a life of perpetual imprisonment, on the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction, so that you weep for your sins and sin no more.”
Joan of Arc nodded. “Bread and water”—better than fire. “Perpetual prison”—much, much better. Someone handed her the scroll. She turned to Massieu. “I can’t read it.”
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Just sign and save your life.”
He gave her a pen, and she signed, either a cross or a circle, an X or an O, she couldn’t remember afterward. There were six or seven lines written on the paper. Someone took it from her.
Rocks were flying. One of them grazed her face, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d been so frightened this morning that she had a whole new standard for fear. She looked around—the hooded man was gone, without her. She laughed.
Cauchon looked over at her now, standing there, smiling like a monkey, or like a crazy woman and he was the monkey, he, the bishop of Beauvais.
The exiled bishop, ever since Joan of Arc had liberated his town from the English two years ago, and he, a known collaborator, had had to flee, a refugee.
“Now take me to your Church prison,” she called out to him, almost gaily.
Cauchon stared. Invincible ignorance. Impressive, really. “Church prison”—how should they get there? Fly? Over the heads of the English soldiers, half savage in the best of times, and now within an inch of falling on them both?
“Take her back where she came from,” Cauchon snapped.
“Where she came from”—for a moment she wondered if he could mean Domrémy? Where she’d been just another farm girl, straggling up and down hills after the sheep, not someone anyone would ever burn. Until her saints had come and told her, You were born to save France.
Another rock hit her, a solid blow this time. Cauchon was gone. The soldiers were shouting, pushing, but someone led her off the platform and away. She was alive.
II.
Though she soon realized that they were taking her back to her cell in the dungeon, not the “mild” Church prison with a woman guard to which she was legally entitled, and as she’d been promised. But it could have been worse. They could have been taking her to the stake.
She looked around—birds, trees, sky! She hadn’t been outside since they’d brought her here in January, and now it was May.
May! The trees in full leaf, like June, but still the freshest green, like April. She sniffed the air. Where she grew up, they treasured May, day by day—the day of planting, the day of lambing, the day of the fairy tree, and then the Pentecost. Each day better than the last, longer, with midsummer still to come.
“They’ll come later, Joan, and take you to the Church prison,” said Massieu.
She looked at him with some surprise—he seemed to be speaking almost like a friend. She knew him—that is to say, recognized him, he’d been one of the ushers, all through her trial, escorting her back and forth from the dungeon, but he’d barely spoken to her then. Always looked past her, which had been fine with her.
But now she was grateful to have him by her side, watching her face almost like a partisan, a follower. Like old times. Like Joan of Arc.
She winced. Joan of Arc was over. She realized she didn’t even feel like Joan of Arc anymore. Though till now, even in shackles, she’d still been Joan of Arc.
Joan of God, Joan of the saints, savior and lover of France, and nearly burned this morning.
Yes, that was what she had to remember. Joan of Arc would be burning on this May morning, to cinders, her flesh and bones turning black, even now, as she was smelling the May flowers and catching glints of sunlight in the tops of the trees.
Who, though, she wondered, was smelling May flowers, if not Joan of Arc? But who cared? She laughed again. Girl X, or O—how had she signed that paper? It occurred to her that something strange had happened that morning. Joan of Arc had been dragged out of the dungeon, and someone else would be dragged back in.
Where was Joan of Arc, then? Hard to say, though she hadn’t burned, couldn’t burn, it turned out. There had been the executioner, dressed in black, and then a sudden terror so big it had covered the sky and turned it black, too, and in that darkness, Joan of Arc had disappeared.
Had there been a miracle, then, after all? Her enemies thought they had her, but maybe Joan of Arc had gotten away. What was left might look like Joan of Arc, but it wasn’t. It was Girl X, the one who’d submitted that morning. Joan of Arc would never submit.
She laughed. It was true. There had been some kind of miracle—did anyone know but her?
They came to the dungeon, Massieu still by her side. Had he seen? she wondered.
Did he know? He’d been right there. She searched his eyes.
“Don’t worry, Joan, you’ll soon be out of here.”
He still called her “Joan.” Maybe he meant a different Joan. Joan of the Chains, Joan of the Dungeon, Joan of the Bread and Water.
Clearly he hadn’t seen. Though he’d been there, closer than anyone. And still he had no idea that Joan of Arc was gone.
“They’ll come later,” he said, “and take you.”
“Take who?” she asked him, but he didn’t seem to hear. It was such an amazing thing, this miracle, so clean, seamless, perfect. She almost told him. He seemed trustworthy, though if her saints had wanted him to know, they’d have shown him.
They went down the seven steps to the dungeon.
“I’ll stay with you,” Massieu said.
With who? she almost said.
Later, amid the church bells, “They should be coming now,” said Massieu. He walked over to the door again. One of the guards looked up.
“What are you doing, priest? Think you can slither under?”
“It’s all right,” she said quickly, to Massieu. The guards were quiet, in their corner now, playing their game, some kind of lots. Let the sleeping dogs lie.
Massieu came back and sat beside her. He was unused to the long rhythms of prison life. “Soon,” he said to her, “soon.”
She nodded. She had time. She’d learned that over the five months she’d been here.
“It’ll be a gentle prison, maybe with a window, you’ll be able to see out, it won’t be dark like this, or damp”—poor Massieu; he wasn’t accustomed—“and they’ll bring you a dress.”
She turned—“No!” Not this again! All through the trial, they’d been at her relentlessly.
“To show that you’re penitent, and you’ve renounced your former error.”
She felt suddenly ill and had to take a quick breath.
“But you won’t need men’s clothing in the Church prison, you’ll be safe there.”
Ah! So he understood? Did they all understand, then? Not one of them had acknowledged even once during her trial, as they berated her, endlessly, for the sin of wearing men’s pants— “insubordination” and “an abomination,” they called it—and none of them admitted once that they understood why she wore them.
Not one of them granted that she was a prisoner, alone in a cell guarded by English soldiers so brutal that the people called them houspilleurs, goons, brutes, from the phrase “to abuse, to maul and throw about.” Known in Normandy by their signature treatment of girls of the countryside: gang rape, followed by disembowelment.
Horrible, and why? Why did they hate the girls after they’d attacked them that way? She’d seen pictures in the Bible, the tiger beside the snake, hate and lust, and she knew her guards hated her, but they’d kept their hands off, thank God.
But then, she wasn’t a woman to them. Women didn’t wear pants.
Which was the point, though she hadn’t wanted to talk about rape during her trial. In fact, it had sickened her altogether to sit in a room with fifty men sworn never to “know” woman and discuss what covered her nether parts.
She had tried to keep to the high road. “I wear pants,” she repeated, in the early days of her trial, “because my saints command me. Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine—”
But the gavel would always crash down when the talk turned to her saints. Though that’s where it all started, the pants and the hair—with her saints.
Because the first time she’d set out to save France, she was still wearing the red skirt and long braids of her native Lorraine. When she went to the local captain and told him that she needed a horse to ride to the king, he’d laughed at her and told her to go home.
“And tell your father to spank you, or I’ll spank you myself,” he’d said.
But then her saints told her to cut off her hair, and change her skirts for men’s pants, and when she went back a year later, dressed as a boy, that same captain gave her not just his horse, but his sword as well. Just as her saints said he would.
But the priests wouldn’t listen. So she tried different tacks. “There are plenty of other women, let them wear skirts!” Or: “Clothes are a little thing! God doesn’t care what I wear!”
But, “Your pants are the sign of your sin,” they squawked back at her. That, and Deuteronomy: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth to the man . . . for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord. . . .”
“An abomination,” they called her, and then threw her back, alone, to the houspilleurs. Who hadn’t raped her, though they knocked her into walls, pulled her chains till they cut her, forced her to relieve herself in front of them.
“The skirt,” said the priests. A roomful of men with their eyes below her waist.
She got to her feet that day. “I stay in my pants to be ready for my escape! For it may be by a great battle, and my saints have commanded me to be ready to fight against you!”
But, “Take back the skirt,” was all they repeated, over their shoulders, as the prison door clanged shut on her.
And the houspilleurs, who occasionally would let her know just how it would be, when they finally did do it. Just what they would do to her body, some dark night, when she was asleep, and too bad if she was a virgin, not that they believed it, they knew she was a whore. But either way, they’d had virgins before, young and old, children, nuns.
And then the priests by day: “Take the skirt.”
Once she even tried to tell them. “My pants are my protection! You keep me among men, my enemies, they say terrible things! They threaten me—”
Crash, the gavel. “Take back the skirt.”
As if she’d been speaking Greek, or Babel.
So she gave up trying to make them understand, but had they understood all along? Massieu had; he’d said she wouldn’t need pants in the Church prison. Admitting that he understood why she needed them here.
What did that mean, his understanding? They’d almost burned her this morning for the heresy of her dressing like a man. Were they so false, then?
And now they were coming with a dress—she couldn’t do it, couldn’t “take the skirt,” as they put it. She wore pants, had to wear pants, just like the English captains, like all soldiers! She couldn’t change her fighting pants for the wretched, submissive skirt.
Massieu took her hand. “You did well this morning, Joan, when you submitted and saved your life.”
“Not Joan!” she pulled back her hand. Joan of Arc wore pants.
Massieu just looked at her, uncomprehending. “Don’t you see?” she wanted to cry to him, but he didn’t see, couldn’t, but she could. See that Girl X could wear a skirt, a shift, a robe, whatever they brought her. It didn’t matter, so long as she was alive.
III.
Massieu crossed to the door. “They’re here!” The guards threw down their lots—“Bloody priests!” “Goddamned French!”—and hauled open the heavy door.
Cauchon came in, robes muddy, hat askew, face as red as it had been that morning, even redder. There’d been a scene just now, outside the castle. He’d been surrounded, he and his party, just as they were entering, by English soldiers with unsheathed swords and pikes.
“Hey you, priests! Our king has wasted his money on you!”
Cauchon hadn’t wanted to come, had tried not to come. Tried to send the inquisitor, the scribe, some other high-ranking clerics, but then Winchester had made it clear that only Cauchon, chief judge in this affair, could exact penance correctly, legally, from the prisoner.
Thus Cauchon found himself outside Rouen Castle that afternoon, surrounded by the rabble. He looked around, at first more offended than afraid, for someone to call them off.
“Hey, priests! Anyone who throws you into the river won’t be wasting his time!”
Cauchon turned in fury—where was Captain Warwick, to call off his brutes?—but froze when he saw that Warwick had been there all along. Watching, with a very cold
eye.
“The king stands badly in this!” Warwick called loudly.
Cauchon caught his breath. Warwick was his friend. They spoke English together.
“My lord, don’t worry!” Cauchon tried to make his voice sound natural, light. As if it were nothing for Warwick to be standing off, looking on as his soldiers threatened the bishop’s life.
Cauchon took another breath. This would soon be behind him, and he would be archbishop of Rouen. Winchester had promised it to him, in exchange for burning this girl.
“Don’t worry, my lord,” he called back to Warwick, “we’ll soon have her again!”
Warwick said nothing, but Cauchon was allowed to pass unharmed through the soldiers into the castle, with his men, and down to the dungeon, where he stood outside her cell a moment, still breathless with fear.
Which turned to rage when he walked inside. More English soldiers, worse ones, and Massieu. What was he doing there? All soft around the eyes—the idiot, the biggest fool of all time. It was a wonder he could feed himself.
And her, too, still with that half-crazed smile, but why was he even looking at her? She was already dead.
“The Church unbinds you. . . .” He had to do the whole thing again. Where was the dress? That thing they’d brought. Someone held it out.
“Do you submit, Joan?”
“Don’t call me Joan.”
He looked at her.
She looked away. “Only let the dress be long.”
Long, short—Cauchon passed it to her. The creature put it on, over her pants, then slipped them off. These were handed back to him. What was he supposed to do with them? He didn’t want to touch them.
He motioned to the barber.
“Do you agree, Joan, to the removal of your short haircut, offensive in the sight of God and man?”
Joan never would. But Girl X nodded.
The barber shaved her head. Now Cauchon really couldn’t look.
“You are condemned to perpetual imprisonment, on the bread of affliction and the water of sorrow.”
She listened abstractedly. “Bread and water”—she had never eaten much more, really, not even at the table of the king of France. When she’d been Joan of Arc.