Midnight

by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)

  And “perpetual imprisonment”—well, that’s all Girl X had ever known, since her strange incarnation this morning. At least her guard would be a woman now. She would be relieved, at least, of the constant fear. Terror, really.

  Cauchon moved to the door.

  “The Church prison,” she reminded him.

  One of her guards grabbed the pants roughly away from Cauchon. He had never been treated this way by the English before. He was frightened again.

  “The Church prison!” Joan of Arc cried to him. “A woman guard! Now that I’m in a dress—”

  Cauchon turned. Couldn’t she see?

  “She submitted to the Church, she belongs in a Church prison now!” cried the idiot Massieu, deaf and blind, too, both of them. He made no move to leave with them, but the guards pushed him out with the rest of the churchmen.

  Then one of the guards walked over and punched her, hard, in the face. Deliberately, before they shut the door, so the French priests would see. Cauchon gasped, in spite of himself. One of the guards raised a stick at him, as if he were a dog. Still, he stared for a moment, before he turned away.

  “If you fall again, you are dead,” he called back to Joan of Arc, then fled. The door slammed shut behind him, in the face of Massieu, who stood there, frozen, until one of the priests grabbed his arm and pulled him up the seven steps.

  IV.

  She lay on what they called her bed. She wasn’t quite sure how long it had been since the priests had left. A day, maybe. Half a day. Maybe two.

  Time had changed. She lay on her back and breathed in and breathed out. She was proud of that—she’d gotten that for herself. She had no one else to thank for the fact that she was still breathing.

  Not even her saints and angels—well, that was something new. Even here, in this black hole, quelque chose de nouveau. One just had to look. She passed her hand over her head—this time, she remembered. Last time, she’d forgotten, and when she felt the stubble, her shaved head, tears had sprung into her eyes, and that had been bad. But this time she was prepared, and it was all right. “My hair is a small thing,” she’d said, throughout her trial, when they complained that her short hair, too, “men’s hair,” was “an abomination.” “A small thing,” she said then, and it still was, especially when compared to the stake.

  She touched her eye, gently. It had swelled shut. The guards had never hit her before. They’d struck her just as the priests were leaving, probably more to scare them. She’d had a glimpse of Massieu and Cauchon, just before the door was slammed, looking back at her, frightened, but nothing frightened her anymore.

  Except the stake. Fine. She’d admitted it, publicly. They all knew it, they’d all seen: she couldn’t burn. Some people could, Saint Apollonia, and Saint Cyril. But not Joan of Arc.

  She’d thought she could. She’d said it all through her trial: “I’d rather burn than deny my saints!”

  It had sounded good, and she’d meant it when she’d said it, with all her heart, or so she’d thought. But it turned out to be just words.

  Which, she now knew, were easy—words. For five months: “You may burn my body to cinders,” or “You may torture me so that you separate my soul from my body,” or “Even if the executioner comes to take me and I am in the fire,” and so forth, “I shall never deny my saints!”

  Fine, bold, shining words, until the first real intimation of what she’d been talking about, the fire. And then those words had given way so fast, to other words, words she didn’t even know she knew.

  “Your saints led you to the sin of insubordination—”

  And she’d said, “Yes,” just as fluently as she’d said, “No,” before.

  “—and heresy.”

  She, easily: “Yes.”

  “They caused you to defy the Holy Church—”

  She, eloquently: “Yes.”

  “They are devils.”

  One hesitation, and then finally, loud and clear, “Yes.”

  Girl X turned over. But those yeses were just words, too. Maybe Joan of Arc’s saints understood that, would have understood, if they’d been there. Understood at least that it was Girl X who was talking by then, and she knew nothing of saints. Her words, too, were just words.

  And her legs were cold. Joan of Arc’s never were. She wore pants. Always and by first definition: Joan of Arc wore pants. Take away the pants, and you’ve got—what? Girl X. Anyway, not Joan of Arc.

  The priests must have known that during the trial, the way they dwelled on it so. Every day, pants and hair, pants and hair.

  “Why do you wear them?”

  “Which saint commanded you to wear them?”

  “Wouldn’t you feel more honest in a dress?”

  “Don’t you know it’s a mortal sin to dress the way you do?”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “Won’t you at least take off the sinful pants on Easter?”

  “And why, once again, have you abandoned the clothes that are fitting to your sex?”

  She had answered them variously, with passion, with common sense, with theology, from the bottom of her heart, and the furthest reaches of her brain. Fool that she’d been. Trying to make them see, when she was the one who wasn’t seeing. She finally did see, that morning in the cemetery behind Rouen Cathedral, where they’d stood ranged, ready to kill her. Saw at last that they were out to destroy her. Willing, even, to burn her alive.

  What a fool Joan of Arc had been, what a child! She hadn’t seen that the priests were her enemies, simply because she saw them first as priests. Holy men, that is, sanctified by the Church. Every one of them—it took her breath away even now—had been consecrated by the Holy Spirit, which, she’d been taught as a girl, changes men forever, like water into which one has dropped even a bit of wine.

  “Gentle priests,” she had called them. Girl X hit the wall with her fist. Joan of Arc brought tears to her eyes.

  “If only you could see my saints!” she’d said to them, her enemies, taking them into her deepest confidence, opening her heart to them, her soul. To the point of wishing that these deadly enemies could be blessed with a sacred vision of her saints.

  “For if you could only see them once,” Joan of Arc had testified earnestly, “you would know, right away, just as I do, that they are holy.”

  Girl X cringed. How could she have dragged her beloved saints into that wretched courtroom? Served them up in that unholy place, her “beautiful” Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, “gold crowns on their heads,” smelling “fresh and sweet,” speaking in voices “beautiful, worthy, and good.”

  And to what avail? For then Cauchon would bang down his gavel and repeat, “Your saints are devils. Your pants are the proof that they lead you into sin.”

  And then, rather than standing up and saying, as Girl X would now, You men are my enemies! This trial is the devil’s work! Joan of Arc, poor thing, would try then even harder.

  “No, no, if only you could see, even once, gentle priests! My saints aren’t devils! They’re Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret—”

  And so on. She should have seen it, of course. She almost did, that day with Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael.

  “You say Saint Michael came to you,” the priests began. “How did you know it was a man?”

  “Did he come to you naked?”

  At least she hit back on that one. “Do you think our Lord has no clothes for him?” But they went on.

  “Did you kiss him?”

  She: “Yes, of course.”

  “Where?”

  She: “On the knees.”

  “Did he smell good?”

  She: “Of course, he was a saint.”

  They were interrupting each other: “Did you feel his body?”

  “What part of his body?”

  “How did you know it was a man?”

  Poor Joan of Arc. “Gentle priests!” she’d cried. “Please! I know it was Saint Michael, the very one who suffered passion and death for us! I believe i
n him, as I believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord—”

  The gavel.

  She closed her eyes. That was over now. And they hadn’t gotten her in the end, even though they’d all gone out there to kill her, to burn her. Well, she didn’t burn.

  They had all been shocked. That was at least some measure of their respect, she supposed. So brave did they think Joan of Arc, they even thought she would go to the stake.

  She’d thought so, too, not that she’d ever expected it to come to that. She hadn’t once considered the possibility. She had gone out that morning still believing that a last-minute miracle was more likely than a trip in the cart to the stake.

  And even then, when it came to her slowly, gradually, that she was alone, that there were no angels there, no saints, and there weren’t going to be any miracles in Rouen that morning, she was still surprised when she sold her saints for her life.

  Or rather, Girl X’s life. “Perpetual prison.” Bread and water. Skirts among rapists who had already started hitting her. No saints or angels now—she hadn’t heard a word from them since her recantation, not even a whisper. She missed them badly, missed even the promises of salvation that had turned out to be untrue.

  What had been true, however, was that she’d been publicly revealed to be a coward who didn’t have the courage to burn.

  But she wasn’t supposed to burn! She was supposed to be saved.

  But now she was thinking like Joan of Arc, and Joan of Arc was gone, as gone as “the snows of yesterday,” as she’d once heard a bard sing at the king’s court. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Maybe where Joan of Arc is—fine, let her go. She was brave to a point, though not, it turned out, to the end.

  And anyway, she had understood nothing.

  V.

  But maybe that was the only way it could have been. If Joan of Arc had known anything, she wondered if she’d ever have left her father’s house.

  Wouldn’t she have run from her saints, when she first heard them? Called them witches, or fairies, or the wind? Run down from the hills, inside to her mother? Or turned, at least, to other children, whose voices might have stopped her from hearing, even once, Daughter of God, you were born to save France.

  For, once she heard it, everything else fell away. Everything she knew, that is, all the cautionary tales, the stories, the sayings. The whole canon of common knowledge that advised “slow and steady,” and kept most French peasants from lives of art and danger—“the Grasshopper and the Ant,” “the Crow and the Cheese.” All this safe-and-sound advice gave way to, Go, daughter of God, to the king.

  If Joan of Arc had been wiser, Girl X realized, she wouldn’t have listened. Wouldn’t have even been able to hear her saints in the first place, but she did hear them, from the time she was twelve. The cautious voices of the village wise women were replaced by Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, the same two who stood carved in stone beside the altar of her church in Domrémy. At first they spoke to her in general terms of her destiny. You were born to save France. Joan of Arc would lean against the trees, standing among the fields, listening, dreaming.

  But when she was sixteen, the situation in France worsened. The English laid siege to Orléans. It was the last stronghold of the Dauphin, the uncrowned French heir to the throne; if the English took Orléans, they would have France.

  At that point, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret became specific. Go to the Dauphin, and tell him to give you an army. You will raise the siege of Orléans, and then crown him king. We are with you.

  She heard this, and went. How? Girl X marveled. With not the first preparation, not a thought of the near future, or even of where she’d sleep that night, Joan of Arc placed herself in her saints’ hands, and set out.

  Lightheartedly, you might even say, in the coarse red skirt and long braids of the Lorraine countryside. Thus she slipped away from home, from parents and chores and sheep, with no farewells; walked, trekked, scrambled, the ten miles to the French garrison at Vaucouleurs; and presented herself, as she thought her saints had commanded, to the captain there, Robert de Baudricourt. Who took one look, and sent her home for a beating.

  She was mortified, and, worse, confused. Her saints had said, Baudricourt will help you. Were they lying? Was it all a deceit? Was she a fool, or, worse, mad? Overreaching? Some of the stories came back: Was she the girl who comes to a very bad end, out chasing visions while her sheep were left to the wolves?

  Her heart was heavy and her mind clouded, and she returned home to worse than a beating. She found herself betrothed.

  News had traveled from Vaucouleurs to Domrémy: Jacques d’Arc’s daughter had run away to join the French army. A girl, the army—a camp-follower, then? A prostitute? What else could there be? Everyone was shocked. Her father went shouting through the village that he’d “rather see her drowned,” he’d drown her himself!

  Though by the time she got back, he’d turned from homicide to the standard remedy for wayward young women: he found a young man, and arranged a marriage.

  “I’d rather die!” cried Joan of Arc. She refused the marriage in terms that left neither doubt nor hope. But to her dismay, her suitor sued her.

  “Breach of promise,” he claimed, in the ecclesiastical court at Toul. Not only was she betrothed to him now, he told the court, but she’d sworn to marry him when they were children, under the ancient beech tree where the fairies danced in May.

  Even her father testified against her, agreeing that this might have been so.

  No one expected her to plead her own defense. Girls in these cases mostly didn’t. What they did was cry at their own weddings and then settle down to real life, dreams of the king of France, or convents, or poetry in the streets of Paris giving way to swaddling cloth and mutton stew.

  Joan of Arc, however, trudged to Toul, where the records noted only that a local peasant girl, Jeannot, “little Joan,” daughter of Jacques of Arc, appeared before the court, defended herself with vigor, and was not, in the end, sentenced to marry.

  Thank God!

  Or not?

  Still, the point was that Joan of Arc didn’t hold back after that. It had been too close for comfort, this brush with the fortune of all womankind.

  Her saints were in a hurry now, too. Go before mid-Lent, they whispered. It was February. She had turned seventeen. It had been hard, saying goodbye to her mother, who must have sensed something. She’d held her close to her breast and wept over her head. She’d had to lie to her, tell her she was going off to assist with the birth of a girl cousin’s baby, when in fact she went to a boy cousin in a neighboring village, whom she got to cut off her hair.

  Straight around, with a bowl, definitive. No one could look at her now and think marriage. But then it was done. Her hair was off. She’d explained to this boy cousin that he had to give her his pants as well, and when she went to Captain Baudricourt this time, it was in pants and a black cap, hair cut short. No longer an errant shepherdess, but Joan of Arc.

  On her way to the Dauphin. Baudricourt didn’t laugh at her this time. “When?” he asked her.

  “Better today than tomorrow,” she told him. “Better tomorrow than the next day.”

  Mid-Lent, the saints had said. Baudricourt sent a letter to the Dauphin, and refused to let her go until he got word back. She felt the loss of every day. Just the fact that he was willing to send to the court should have cheered her; but she was visualizing big victories, and didn’t notice the small ones.

  Meanwhile, excitement was rising around her in the town. There was a prophecy going through the countryside then: “France, destroyed by a woman, will be saved by a virgin.”

  Everyone knew who the woman was—the Dauphin’s mother, Queen Isabeau, wife of the late king of France, Charles VI the Mad. She had declared her own son, the French Dauphin, the heir, “illegitimate” in favor of her daughter’s English son. This essentially gave the throne of France to England.

  But who was the virgin?

  “I am,” Joa
n of Arc told the people of Vaucouleurs. They started gathering in the evenings at the wheelwright’s, where she was lodged, to listen to her tales of saints and angels. She told them that she would set out any day now, from their town, to save France.

  Their town! They wanted to help, but first were obliged to confirm her holiness. They called on the priest, who waved his stole in front of her, and commanded her to fly off if she was from the devil.

  But she stood firm, and then the people of Vaucouleurs started raising money to buy her a horse.

  The powerful young Duke of Alençon heard the talk and came to meet her one evening. “Well, sweet friend,” he said to her, “it looks as if our king will be chased away, and we turned to Englishmen.”

  “No!” she cried. She would get to the Dauphin before mid-Lent, “even if I have to wear my legs down to the knees! For no one, no king, no duke, no daughter of the king of Scotland can save France. Only me!”

  Finally, word came from the court. Let her come, why not? The Dauphin had just lost another skirmish with the English, called the Battle of the Herrings, for the Lenten provisions that had been among the spoils. A bit of a joke, if it hadn’t been his last stand. He had no possibility of raising another army. He was so broke that his shoemaker had refused him credit for a pair of stockings.

  And then came the news of this girl. A virgin sent by God to save France? Well, why not? Everyone knew that virgins had special powers. Unalloyed. Concentrated. As for heaven’s personal concern with the state of the realm, France had always been God’s “eldest daughter,” so no one was surprised. On top of that, Marie d’Avignon, a celebrated mystic at the Dauphin’s court, had recently reported a vision of a virgin and much armor. It was agreed that the Dauphin should send for the girl.

  The word came in February, a bad time for traveling, Baudricourt pointed out to Joan of Arc. The roads were in ruins, the bridges all down, the land either “deserted or infested with soldiers.”

  “Better today than tomorrow,” repeated Joan of Arc. The Duke of Alençon, who stood to recover his own lands should she prove successful, decided to seize the adventure and accompany her. He contributed a group of fighting men. The whole town gathered to see them off. The people presented her with the horse, and Baudricourt gave her his sword.