by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
“Go,” he said, “go, and come what may.”
Actually, she told him exactly what would come. She would cross France safely, despite the civil war and all the raiding parties that made travel so perilous; she would enter the little town of Chinon, where the Dauphin had taken refuge; she would have an immediate and successful audience with him; he would give her his army, with which she would hand the English their first major defeat in France in a hundred years. After which she would march the Dauphin down the Loire Valley, with one town after another throwing open its gates and declaring loyalty, all the way to Reims Cathedral, where she would see him anointed with the sacred oil and crowned Charles VII, king of France.
And it turned out that she was right.
VI.
The beginning. Girl X opened her eyes, then closed them. She coughed. There was blood in her mouth. One of the guards had pushed her into the door the last time she’d had to get up. She’d fallen then, and hurt her knee as well. But she was alive.
That spring, two springs ago—but it hadn’t been spring yet, when she set out for the court in the beginning. She and her small party left Vaucouleurs, traveling at night because the roads were too dangerous during the day, too many soldiers. The men who slept beside her on the trip were inflamed neither by “desire nor carnal motive,” they informed her, in wonder.
But that was why she’d cut off her hair and put on pants, she told them.
“Do you know what you’ll say when you get there?” they asked.
She didn’t, but, “Don’t fear, my brothers in paradise will help me,” she said. And sure enough, eleven days later, when she arrived in Chinon, that far corner in France where the Dauphin was holed up, they did.
Or so it had seemed to her at the time. She’d felt protected, almost surrounded by help, and when she was ushered into the throne room, she wasn’t afraid. She was trembling, true, but with deepest reverence, not with fear.
It was night—the giant hall was lit by fifty torches, the kind of splendor she’d never seen before. In her previous life, one torch was a luxury. There were more than three hundred knights in attendance, to see her. She was led past them, up to the throne, as her saints had said she would be, but just as she was about to throw herself at the feet of the man sitting there, something stopped her.
It must have been her saints, but what she found herself suddenly thinking of, there in the throne room, surrounded by all the knights and ladies of the realm, were not her saints, but her sheep.
And the wolves who crept down from the hills, and the foxes who lurked occasionally in the brush around the barnyard. The sheep and chickens always knew it first, before you could see it. Before anything happened—probably they smelled it. “They dream it,” the old tales claimed. Anyway, if you paid attention, you could always catch the signs. The animals couldn’t speak a word, but they didn’t have to.
Nor did these strange creatures in the throne room that night. Something was wrong. Jeannot, the keeper of sheep, daughter of Jacques d’Arc, knew it.
She turned away from the throne, from the man posed there, and walked slowly around the room until whatever it was, whatever was happening there that night, made her stop. She stood before a man, hardly princely, with a long nose, thin lips, and skinny bowed legs. Wolf or sheep? She could feel both power and fear. But she held the rod and the staff that night.
“God grant you a good life, gentle king,” said Joan of Arc.
“I am not the king, he is the king,” said he, pointing to one of the knights.
“In the name of God, gentle prince, it is you and no other. You are the king.”
Silence. What had started as a little joke was no longer funny.
“How do you know?” he said. Meaning not How did you guess me out in this little game? but By what authority do you call me king, if my own mother calls me illegitimate?
His father, Charles VI, Charles the Mad, had spent extended periods of his life, weeks, months at a time, lying in darkness, completely comatose, “turned to glass,” as he would afterward put it. The king’s wife, the Dauphin’s mother, Isabeau of Bavaria, barely spoke French. She had few friends among the courtiers, who mocked her sauerkraut compote, to which she was “more faithful,” it was said, than to the king of France. When she confessed that her son’s father was someone other than her husband, no one had reason to doubt her.
Except for the timing of her statement, made to coincide with the signing the Treaty of Troyes with her friends the English, a treaty that not only declared the French heir to the throne illegitimate, but also married her daughter to Henry V of England and gave him, through her, the French throne.
“France destroyed by a woman”—the thing was knotted, and then tangled, and knotted again. Whether the allegation was true or false or both, for it was also possible that the queen had no certainty as to her son’s paternity, it had done its work for the English. It had rendered the French heir to the throne impotent. Under the shadow of illegitimacy, the Dauphin, upon the death of his father, had been unable to muster either the will or the support to push forward to his own coronation.
“Charles the Weak,” they called him, “King of Bourges,” an obscure provincial town. His court was impoverished, his kingdom rent by civil war. His two powerful uncles, the Dukes of Orléans and Burgundy, had murdered each other. Paris was in English hands.
But, “You are king,” said Joan of Arc that night.
“How do you know?” the Dauphin more begged than asked. He took her hand. No one spoke.
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret have assured me. It is the will of God that you be crowned king of France.”
“Saved by a virgin.” Slash, the knots cut. In one fell swoop, all doubt sundered. Girl X tried to remember if Joan of Arc had even understood the question, the concept of illegitimacy, when she refuted it definitively that night.
Anyway, what did that one man’s bloodline matter, to her or to any of the poor people, the common people, across whose lands these endless wars of succession had raged? The ones who starved and froze and watched their farms that in the best of times produced only by a miraculous combination of good seed and just the right weather, knowing the moon and when to plant, and then getting the right sun for growing, and enough rain, at the right time, these people whose crops then, having survived, having been blessed by all these miracles, were stolen or burned by every army that came through, “ours” or “theirs,” both had to eat—these people needed a king more than they needed a king’s legitimate son.
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret say you are king,” said their girl, Joan of Arc, to the Dauphin that night. She herself had had to flee more than once with her family and neighbors, to the castle at Neufchâteau, leaving homes, flocks, crops, everything they’d worked their red hands to the bone for, there below, to the passing soldiers.
“You are king,” said Joan of Arc, who knew nothing, only what everyone knew. “Now give me an army, and send me to Orléans.”
Orléans was the first step to Reims, where the Dauphin had to be anointed to become king.
When? he asked her.
“Better today than tomorrow,” but there were factions in the court. She hadn’t known it then, would learn it only too late, the next year, when they pulled her up short, checked her when she was still moving forward—dear God! Why? Why? Was the devil so strong? She hadn’t understood it, until the second spring at court, but that first spring, the beautiful 1429, she still understood nothing.
Lucky her! Joan of Arc, before her—what? Her education? Simple Joan of Arc—how beautiful she was! She welcomed the priests from the University of Poitiers who wanted to examine her “against witchcraft.” They waved stoles again, and threw holy water—so far, so good. She neither melted nor flew away.
But the court was too divided for these university men, clerics and dependent, to give themselves over to early enthusiasm.
They tried a twist of logic: “If God wills victory for
France,” they asked her, “why do you need soldiers?”
“The soldiers will fight in God’s name,” she answered, “and God will grant them victory.”
“Bravo!” shouted her partisans, mostly from Lorraine and Anjou, who would recover their lands should her campaign prove successful.
But, “Give us a sign,” demanded others, whose loyalties were more complicated.
She stood up. “I didn’t come to Poitiers to make signs,” she said. “Give me an army, put me in front of Orléans, and I’ll show you the sign I was sent to make.”
The clerics were impressed, but by good or evil? They couldn’t agree, pointed out that goodness did not preclude the devil’s having a part in it. Examples were cited. Three weeks passed. Joan of Arc despaired, half mad with impatience. “Better today than tomorrow!” she was crying to the Dauphin.
“Yes, yes,” from the Dauphin. Never inclined to exertion, he was starting to wonder aloud if the effort should after all be made.
Queen Yolanda, his mother-in-law and chief advisor, said nothing for the moment. She was waiting for a private exploratory party to get back from Domrémy. When they returned with the word that the girl was just what she claimed to be, a simple peasant of impeccable reputation said to commune with saints and angels, Queen Yolanda made her move.
She convened the priests and reminded them that God was known to work through virgins, though the devil could not. Why not refer the case to the midwives?
Silence from the clerics then, silence from the court. It was a checkmate, they knew, a brilliant move with no possible rebuttal—no surprise, coming from the skilled hand of Yolanda, queen of Sicily, Aragon, Jerusalem, and, more to the point, Anjou, a province wholly and entirely sympathetic to ridding France of the English. “The man of the family,” the courtiers called her, behind her back.
But, “Why man?” she said with a smile. She led in her personal midwives to examine “the secret parts” of Joan of Arc’s body, and emerged with the confirmation that Joan of Arc was a virgin, “whole and entire.” Queen Yolanda then advised her son-in-law to make the girl some armor, put her in front of his army, and send her to Orléans.
VII.
Orléans—“Or-lé-ans,” she whispered. Even the name rang like a bell, calling back her very best days. “Orléans.” Inseparable from Joan of Arc. Even from dreams of Joan of Arc, for she’d known, as soon as she knew that she had a fate apart from the other girls of the village, that she would raise the siege of Orléans. That was how Joan of Arc would save France.
She left the court for Orléans in late April 1429. She was seventeen.
The English had been besieging the city for over a year. It was nearly surrounded. The people were half starved—her first victory was simply to send a party of soldiers to skirmish with the English just as night fell, while she slipped into the town with a herd of swine. There was wild rejoicing. Food, and a virgin, both from God! The people of Orléans feasted and crowded around, kissing her feet and even her horse.
“This is the beginning,” she told them with tears in her eyes. “We shall be free.”
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret are with me,” she said, and went out on the ramparts to look over the English army she was soon to defeat.
The savage, invincible English army, whom the French hadn’t beaten in a hundred years. She stood there, and was overcome with it all. With the mystery of life, and of her presence in Orléans with an army, just as her saints had said, most improbably, absurdly, really, when she was a shepherd girl, no different from the rest, unlikely to go anywhere, much less to Orléans.
But here she stood, at the head of the king’s army, with God’s grace upon her. She would win. She looked out at the English soldiers, the doomed.
“You soldiers!” she called to them. “I have great pity for you! Listen to me! You don’t have to die in France!”
What?
“Go back to England, soldiers, so we don’t have to kill you!”
Orléans was the last significant pocket of resistance in France. The English had only to win here—mop up, really—and then they could put their own king, Henry VI, son of Henry V, on the throne of France.
“Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret send pity! They are crying for you! But you can go back to England, you don’t have to die here now!”
Die? The English didn’t die in France, they killed in France, even if outnumbered, even when surrounded. Crécy, Poitiers, Agincourt! “Few in number but valiant in war”—these soldiers could even say it in Latin. “Ten Englishmen equal a hundred French”—that was the first mathematics they’d learned. They’d followed their fathers to France to do what the English always did there: lead the French to slaughter, “like a flock of sheep.”
And now, this girl? With pity for them? They were dumbstruck at first.
“Go back to England, where God loves you, too! For Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine have promised that we shall win!”
Now the English soldiers found their voice. “Slut!” they shouted at Joan of Arc. “Whore!”
“When we beat you, we’ll put you back in skirts and use you like the whore you are!”
She was stunned. She’d come to them in good faith, dressed in pants! And still, they insulted her like—a woman.
“God is with me!” she cried.
“The only ones with you are pimps and infidels!”
She climbed back down from the walls after that in tears, but her words had found their mark. She was a “whore” to the English soldiers that night, but by the next day, when the fighting started, she had become a witch. And then she was invincible.
The battle lasted for three days. The English were scattered in small forts outside the city, which turned out to be impossible to defend against the large French force that Joan of Arc had inspired. The English didn’t bother to concentrate their own forces, relying on their usual courage and luck, but their courage was flagging in the face of the witch, and the luck this time was with Joan of Arc.
Go, daughter of God, her saints were whispering to her throughout, we are with you, and she felt them, always. The English left their outlying forts, one by one, and concentrated their army in the tower, Les Tourelles, on the bridge in front of the city.
It was the eighth of May, 1429. The night before, Joan of Arc had led her whole army to mass, confession, and Communion. The townspeople had come, too, crowding in, overflowing the church, receiving the blessing, being blessed. Beseeching, together with God’s virgin, what they felt might truly be granted—deliverance.
Victory. “I could die here among you happily,” said Joan of Arc to the people of Orléans that night. It was all she’d hoped, dreamed even, out there alone in the hills of Domrémy. She found that battle agreed with her. She fought hard, feared nothing, sought always to be in the thick of things. She was wounded once, in the soft flesh between her neck and shoulder, but though she bled, she scarcely felt it, and it didn’t stop her. She remained in the field.
That day, she refused to stop fighting, even in the evening, when they’d been at it since dawn. The generals assured her they could do no more that day, and when she refused to call a halt, they held a council without her, and sounded a retreat.
She was furious. “You have been with your council,” she cried to the generals, “and I have been with mine!”
She turned directly to the soldiers. “My saints have promised us victory tonight!” She rallied them despite the high command, and led them herself on another sally, out of the city. And when the English saw the French, the timid, weak, home-for-dinner French, ready to fight on as though possessed—“The witch!”—they panicked and fled.
Stampeded, terrified, out of Les Tourelles, onto the bridge, in their armor, too many of them, until the bridge collapsed under their weight, and they fell into the Loire and sank like stones.
The Siege of Orléans was lifted. Bells rang, people danced through the streets, laughing, singing, cheering—Joan of Arc! She ate
nothing but bread dipped in watered-down wine. She led the townspeople to a mass of thanksgiving, still in her armor.
Her armor, her standard, her sword—they seemed almost part of her now, like her strong arms and short hair. Much later, when some women were helping her to undress, they were shocked to see her entire body battered black and blue.
“From the armor,” she told them. She’d had to sleep in it on the journey from Chinon to Orléans.
No one slept in armor, not the boldest of knights, not the hardest among them, but Joan of Arc always did, she’d told her men on that journey, “to be ready,” she’d said. They were impressed.
She told the truth, however, to the women: she’d found herself there among men, her first night on the march, and couldn’t figure out how to take off her armor without—undressing. Turning from a soldier into a woman who was taking off her clothes.
The first night had been the worst, she said, and the next morning she’d had to grit her teeth even to stand up, much less get on her horse. But that had proved a small price to pay for what she had gained.
The women of Orléans understood her perfectly. “Men don’t feel desire around me,” she told them. “I am free.”
They nodded, and bathed her limbs tenderly, and laid her in their softest bed.
VIII.
One of the guards threw her a crust of bread. She couldn’t eat right now, couldn’t chew. Her jaw.
Does it help to remember? she wondered. “The Pucelle,” they’d called her, the Girl, the Maiden, as if there were no other, as if she were the only girl in France.
Everyone knew her, in those days of glory right after Orléans. Everyone followed her, wanted her, but all she wanted was more. More Orléans. More days in battle, more nights deep in prayer. More horses, more soldiers, more comrades by her side.