Midnight

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

  Like the Duke of Alençon. He’d marched with her from Vaucouleurs, then stuck with her in court, and was always beside her in battle. He knew how to fight, and he was brave in the same way she was.

  Did he know, she wondered, about her now? He had gone back to his estates in Normandy when it all broke up. She sat up suddenly—Normandy! Near here? Did he know she was chained in a dungeon in Rouen? She, his ally, the best fighter he knew, he said. If he found out she was here, mightn’t he at least try to save her? Even now?

  For they had really been friends then. She could still almost see them, Alençon and herself, Joan of Arc, that is, laughing, riding, thundering like war gods, from Orléans straight to Reims.

  Though it hadn’t been straight. She’d thought it would be. After Orléans, they’d rushed back to court, where she expected to find the Dauphin mounted and ready to ride out with them. He wasn’t. That is, he almost was, or claimed he would be soon, and would like to accompany them now, if only the roads were safer. Or the English not likely to be reinforcing, even as they spoke. Or if the towns along the way were his, not theirs.

  “But they will be yours!” she cried to him. “All France shall be yours!” She was in a great hurry to get him to Reims Cathedral, where one drop of the holy oil there would turn the Dauphin from questionable pretender to the king of France, the point of her mission. She would ride in front, she assured him, and “win by battle” what didn’t come “from love.”

  “Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret will be with us!” she assured him, swore that she stood ready to leave, morning or evening, it didn’t matter, just the sooner the better, that was all.

  “Let it be today,” she prayed, every day, before breakfast, but the Dauphin was wavering. His chair was soft, his horse was hard, plus there were his councillors, all of them, advocating delay. Some were false, he suspected, some lazy, others afraid, but their consensus—that if he sat still, the crown, Reims Cathedral, would come to him—was not without resonance in his own heart of hearts.

  Still, against all this there was one clear voice, positing saints and angels, and a holy coronation, and towns where people were waiting to throw open their gates to him. All of France would receive him as the duly crowned king, that voice repeated, for a month, longer, until finally, one night, just after midsummer with Scorpio rising, the Dauphin crossed to a window and looked out.

  He stood there for a while, sniffed the air, and must have sensed something. Change, for though he’d never been moved before, and hardly would be again, that night as he retired, he announced to the court that he would set out to Reims with Joan of Arc in the morning.

  They went first to Jargeau, which Suffolk was holding for the English. She and Alençon charged, and Suffolk surrendered. On to Meung, which they took easily, and then to Beaugency, which surrendered without a fight. They arrived next at Patay, where Lord Talbot himself, who had fled from Orléans, was captured, after his reinforcements retreated to Paris, terrified of the witch.

  “You didn’t expect this to happen this morning, did you?” Alençon asked Talbot.

  Talbot shrugged. “The fortunes of war.”

  No, no, not fortune, said Joan of Arc, the way it would always be! That summer of dreams, dreams more than realized but surpassed. That march through France, with her army swelling daily, not just with knights and regular soldiers, but also with civilians, her people, more of them every day. Peasants, “jacques,” with their sticks and stones, and women and children. For them, the campaign was a pilgrimage to Reims Cathedral, where they would finally get their king.

  They were stopped before Troyes, though, the biggest city on their way. The English were there in force, but Joan of Arc wasn’t daunted, and the feeling was that “nothing could resist her anymore.”

  But after two days of inconclusive fighting, the Dauphin’s military advisors wanted to withdraw. This time, though, she was prepared. She refused them further audience, and went around them, right to the soldiers.

  “Fill the moat with brush,” she commanded. “Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret say the city will be ours!”

  The people of Troyes watched nervously through the night as their moat disappeared under brush and wood, and with the first light of morning they surrendered directly to “the Pucelle,” notwithstanding their strong English garrison.

  “All through fear of her”—the English garrison was granted permission to withdraw with their “possessions,” but when Joan of Arc saw them leading away the manacled French prisoners which this included, she revolted. She was taxed with this during her trial; the prisoners, soldiers taken in battle, properly made part of the English possessions, argued the priests.

  “But the hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I saw them,” she explained.

  “They are French!” she cried, there at Troyes, and her cheering army set them free. The common soldiers had never been cared for by a commander before. Nor had they ever cared for one as they cared for her.

  Loved her, even—every true French heart loved her that summer. The next few cities sent her their keys without further fighting. Her march now became a procession, a triumph. The army hadn’t been paid, but no one wanted to leave her. They entered the town of Reims to the ringing of bells and cries of, “Noel!” Praise and joy, as she’d foretold.

  Foretold, too, dreamlike, the way it swirled all around her. Only the coronation itself stood out clearly in her memory from those days. It was July 17, 1429, high summer by then. The cathedral was thronged with the people, as well as the priests, bishops, abbots, canons, white and purple and gold. The archbishop of Reims stood at the front, flanked by two knights of St. Remy who held the ampoule of holy oil, given by God directly into the hands of Saint Louis specifically for anointing the kings of France. Joan of Arc, in new white armor, knelt right behind the Dauphin, and she wept, and he wept, and he was crowned king of France, Charles VII.

  And it was over.

  She could see that now. It was too bad she hadn’t seen it then, in Reims Cathedral. Her mission had been specific, “Orléans and Reims,” and she’d fulfilled it. She should have gone home.

  But she was seventeen. People were calling her their “Hector,” their “Alexander,” their “Caesar!” “O France,” bards were singing, “though you’ve had many heroes, you may stop now with this Pucelle!”

  “Singular virgin! Marvelous, brave, the glory of France, of all Christendom!” Looking back, she should have thanked them all kindly and said adieu, but what she said was, “Let’s take Paris!” to Alençon.

  But her saints hadn’t said “Paris,” and she didn’t take it. Could have, said the generals, if she’d listened to them and marched straight from Orléans, instead of to Reims.

  Might have, she felt, when she finally did get there, if they hadn’t carried her from the battlefield when she was wounded, just slightly, in the thigh. She could have fought on, she felt sure—how many hundreds of times had she seen it in her mind? Her rising to rally her holy army, and Paris wanting her suddenly, as Troyes had wanted her, and throwing open its gates. Welcoming her, and her king, who would have marched beside her into his capital to greater rejoicing than either of them had known till then. And then, surely, she would have gone home.

  But the generals ordered her carried from the field, and then it was shouted through Paris that “the witch” had “bled red blood!” The defenders took heart from that, and her own soldiers lost their way without her. They remembered, suddenly, that they hadn’t been paid.

  And her army broke up after that. It was September. Summer was over. Even Alençon went home, and though they had great plans to rejoin in the spring to launch a new campaign for Paris, she never saw him again.

  IX.

  Her winter at the French court was a nightmare—the beginning of the nightmare. The factions of conservatism regrouped against her. The archbishop of Reims had started speaking down to her at council meetings. Worse, the king was no longer meeting her eye. Nor did
he show the slightest interest when she spoke of her projected spring campaign.

  “Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret say we shall take Paris!” she urged him—not knowing that he even then had a secret envoy in Paris, treating with the enemy, and no one cared about Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret anymore.

  She tried believing in small favors—an exemption from the poll tax for her native village; a position for her brother in nearby Vaucouleurs. She tried to keep her head. She was asked to raise a dead child, decide between the two Popes, touch crosses and rosaries—“Touch them yourselves,” she said with a laugh to the village women. “Your touch is as good as mine.”

  Her family was ennobled, she was granted the fleur-de-lis. The king presented her with richly embroidered men’s clothes, woven in gold—meaningless to her.

  . . .

  Joan of Arc. The truth was she didn’t really want to go home anymore. She had acquired a taste for the action. She was, Girl X realized, a very different girl from the one who’d hoped to take Orléans without killing any English soldiers. Even her sword had changed. It had been “holy” when she first went into battle. Now it was “excellent,” both “for thrusts and cuts.”

  She longed to be fighting again. Her only consolation at court was her plan for her spring campaign. She and Alençon would meet again—they could start in Normandy. She was just waiting for the rains to finally stop. Once they did, she felt sure the king would grant her an army.

  But then he didn’t. Wouldn’t? Couldn’t? She couldn’t comprehend it. His ministers were against her, were always against her—why?

  True, she had been having trouble hearing her voices in the din of the court, but even without her saints she thought her case for another campaign was a sound one. The English were still afraid of her, Alençon had confirmed it, now was the time to take the rest of France back for her king! For their king, too, she cried to the ministers—why not?

  Why not? Well, for one thing there was the secret deal that Georges de La Trémoille, the king’s chief minister, his trusted favorite, had made with the English just that spring. They would refrain from laying siege to any town that belonged to him, or interfering in any way with his personal income, in return for him keeping Joan of Arc in check while their men were still terrified of her.

  . . .

  Treachery and perversity—she had been in over her head there. Neither her practical country upbringing nor her saints had prepared her to fathom those depths. She pressed on, begging to be allowed to continue a victorious campaign. The English were in disarray, Paris was waiting, the Duke of Alençon and all the rest of them were standing by to march, to fight, to fly with her again. The spring had come, the time was right. And still—and still—her king refused to move.

  “Perhaps I will go home,” she murmured, for the hundredth time, to her page.

  But it is only the oldest and the wisest, she knew now, who go home. And she was the youngest and the simplest, and she was floundering there at court, and when she heard that the town of Compiègne was besieged, she grasped at it, though it proved a straw.

  A small town to the east, of no importance, really. Still, she remembered how the good people there had thrown open their gates to her last summer, when she was the Pucelle of Orléans, on a victory crusade through France. She had been in her glory then, and they had responded, they had been part of that time, and now they were besieged, and she resolved to go to their rescue.

  Compiègne—it would go to her rescue, too. She would be on her horse again, at the head of a group of fighting men, doing what she did best, what nobody did better. Once they started fighting, God would be with her again, her voices would come back, and none of this would matter. This court scene where she couldn’t find her footing would fade back into nothingness, and she would hold her famous banner high again and know why she’d been born.

  What she was living for—as at Orléans, when she rode a white horse through the streets, bells ringing, “Te Deum,” people thronging to kiss her hands, her feet. As on the way to Reims, when her voices were still saying, Go, go, daughter of God.

  She gathered with her the few she could inspire—her brother, some other loyalists from home—joined up with a small army at Lagny-sur-Marne, and arrived at Compiègne in such a state of excitement that she rode into battle that very first day.

  Before she’d looked around properly—before she’d done even rudimentary reconnaissance. So desperate was she to prove that nothing had changed, that she changed everything. Joan of Arc had always paid close attention. She had always looked carefully around.

  But at Compiègne—maybe it was that year at court, the ease, the flattery. Or maybe she’d heard too many versions of her own myth. Joan of God, Joan of the Saints—at Compiègne she didn’t ask even the first questions, which would have informed her that the Burgundians outside the town had been reinforced the night before by some allied forces who were passing through.

  Not the best time for an action; and one might sit in one’s chains and wish, till one nearly went mad, that Joan of Arc had stopped and asked a few questions. Or that Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret had been there with her.

  But they weren’t, and all the wishes, all the regrets to the dregs, change nothing. Joan of Arc still rides out that bad day in Compiègne. She holds her banner high, crying, “Forward! They’re ours!” as before—but instead of the brilliant clarity that had always preceded her, there was a sort of fog, smoke, dense confusion. She never could quite get a sense of the battle in its entirety that day.

  Though she knew fairly soon that something was wrong, but by the time she figured out what it was, she was trapped. The enemy had gotten between her men and the town. All her experience till then had been with forward movements, offense, and when she finally realized that a retreat was in order, it was too late. The captain of Compiègne had already been compelled to draw up the bridge to save the town.

  She rode off wildly then, helter-skelter, into some fields, but she found herself surrounded, increasingly closely. “Saint Margaret! Saint Catherine!” She spurred her horse, tried to break through, called desperately on her saints, her colleagues, her brother, but they were held off at a distance, horrified, unable to help. A party of Picards, who were closest to her, chopped madly at anyone near her, even killing soldiers who would have made valuable prisoners, in their frenzy to be the man to take the maid.

  “Rendez-vous!” “Rendez-vous!” “Surrender!”—and then an archer, “permitted by Fortune to end her glory,” got close enough to grab the side of her golden tunic. He pulled her from her horse, “flat onto the ground.”

  He led her off, “happier than if he had a King in his hands.” It was the twenty-third of May, 1430—little more than a year since she’d ridden in full glory into Orléans. She was eighteen.

  X.

  Girl X looked up. There was someone coming. No one had been there since—whenever it was.

  Footsteps, voices. Massieu, maybe? She moved in her chains a bit, and tried to sit up. She wouldn’t mind talking, even hearing her own voice, though her lips were parched. There had been no water for some time. She’d even dreamed that she’d been at the well at home, and she was hauling up water, it was splashing, there was so much, and she was just about to drink it.

  She heard the lock turn outside, then laughter. English, not French. She lay back. English. It wouldn’t be anything good.

  An English lord came in with some men. Laughing. “Kah, kah, kah, kah.” Like crows. A bad language. Rough and cruel.

  One of the guards yanked her up. Her chains caught, she half fell. More laughter.

  Funny to you, yes, you people of the law. Of the book, because you need a book to tell you right from wrong, so empty, so dry, is the desert that makes your hearts.

  “So you’ve got a dress on, harlot,” said the lord to her in French. “Are you any prettier now?”

  What was he saying?

  He walked closer. “Let me see you.” />
  Her stomach clenched. No man had ever looked at her this way. What was he planning? “Holy God, help me!”

  He came closer. She could smell the beer on his breath. She started to cry. He touched her neck.

  “Preserve me, Mother of God!” She fell to her knees.

  The guards pulled her up. “What did you say, little whore?” The lord put his hand on her breast.

  “Saint Catherine! Saint Margaret!” She swung her manacled hands, and caught him—on the arm, on the chest. He staggered back.

  “Slut! Whore!”

  One of the guards hit her, hard, on the side of the head. She fell.

  “The filthy slut”—the lord was on her, they were grabbing her legs, pulling them, but she was chained.

  “Holy Mother of God! Hear me now!” Someone hit her again.

  She closed her eyes. Just as she fell, though, she saw it—the ray of light that came in, through the tiny little slit of window, once a day now. Now that the days were getting longer. Just one ray, but it came every day, and she could ride it out of there, as far away as it went.

  Back to her mother’s house, her mother who had held her close and cried in her hair when she left. And to the woods, with her friend, the sweet Mengette. It was May, they could gather flowers for “the ladies.” The fairies who danced around the beech tree, in spite of the priests’ holy water.

  Speaking of miracles! Walking free, unchained, through the woods in May! Birds and beech trees, and flowers! Sun and rain, and sky. Friends and mothers, and no English. No one shouting in English, anywhere.

  Was it possible—such grace? So much happiness? Could it still be there, that miraculous place? Maybe that was where Joan of Arc was now.

  At home, with her mother, and her friends, and her sheep. She opened one eye. The light was gone. It came and it went, and no one saw it but her. The guards didn’t notice—or if they did they couldn’t keep it out, though they’d covered most of the window. But still, that ray of light came every day now, as it pleased, and they couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t chain it, or hit it, or throw it on the ground and grab its legs. It was free, and, since she was still alive, it would shine tomorrow for her.