by Midnight- Three Women at the Hour of Reckoning (retail) (epub)
Right away, said Cauchon. There was one small formality that they’d take care of tomorrow, Tuesday, and they could burn her the next day. Wednesday. First thing.
Warwick didn’t smile at his former friend, but he dispatched a military escort to see him home. Cauchon was relieved. They all knew the streets wouldn’t be safe until after the burning. A group of his priests had been chased to the Seine and nearly drowned by English soldiers. Several had already fled Rouen.
“Farowelle!” Cauchon called gaily now, in English to Warwick. Bad English—Massieu, who was lingering there outside the castle, looked up.
“Farowelle, my lord!” Yes, Cauchon’s lord, thought Massieu.
“It’s done now! Be happy!” called Cauchon.
Is there a God? Massieu wondered, as Cauchon hurried off with his military escort.
XIV.
Massieu managed to stay close, just outside the castle. The other French priests, Isambart, Martin Ladvenu, others, had been chased off by the English soldiers—“Traitors!” “French dogs!”—but the English didn’t seem to mind Massieu. It occurred to him that he’d become invisible against the castle walls, the way beggars do. He’d been keeping watch since Thursday, waiting, hoping, praying—anything to see her again.
“Let’s go in,” he heard Warwick say to the French priest Jean d’Estivet, who was, as usual, trotting at his side. Warwick and d’Estivet—the worst of both lots. What would she think if he, Massieu, slipped in with them? That he was one of them?
Still, it was his chance, and he took it, followed them in, Warwick marching erect in his power, d’Estivet submissive, curved toward him, the two of them a perfect portrait of England and France that day. Warwick had, in this sordid affair, at least the excuse of being English. Doing his duty, burning her for “his king,” as he was wont to put it.
In a way, perhaps, he was right. He had been given charge of the boy-king’s education, when his father, Henry V, had died, and Massieu had heard that he’d beaten the child so badly that he stopped speaking. Warwick’s king.
The great knight Richard Warwick—he’d hosted one of chivalry’s most famous tournaments not long ago, in Calais. Ridden around bedecked in pearls and ostrich feathers, bested all the other knights at the jousting, and feasted all the people afterward. A day already renowned for its pomp and chivalry, but what was Warwick here but a glorified guard?
Top brute, like the ones he’d selected to guard her, and it was Warwick, after all, who had ordered the chains.
But why, since he knew she couldn’t escape? No one had ever escaped from that dungeon, it was impossible—unless, of course, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret decided to take a hand in it, and then chains and brutal guards would be as nothing.
But Warwick didn’t fear Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. He was English—and Massieu had come to see that what the English feared was disgrace. Hence, Joan of Arc. Did she know, Massieu wondered, that she’d given Warwick the fright of his life? Disgraced this flower of English chivalry, sent him and his men fleeing in terror from what turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl?
Massieu wished he’d been there when Warwick first laid eyes upon her. Once he’d spent more English gold for her than had ever been spent on any prisoner, once he got hold of her and she was his, and he saw—a French country girl. Nothing more. The typical stocky build, the dark hair—Warwick must have been expecting a witch with a broomstick, showering sparks.
And here instead was this plain girl, simple, solid, already brought down, and hardly dangerous—and Warwick had her clamped in irons anyway. Hand and foot, all the tighter, once he saw that his disgrace had come at such unpracticed hands. The cruelty with which he imprisoned her tempered only by his ultimate goal—keeping her alive long enough to burn her.
Warwick and d’Estivet stopped at the dungeon door, d’Estivet giving way, elaborately, to Warwick. Warwick, who took this submission as natural, as his due, barely acknowledged it—did he know, Massieu suddenly wondered, that the last laugh between them had nearly been d’Estivet’s? Was the great and all-powerful Lord Warwick aware that this minion bowing and scraping by his side had very nearly murdered Joan of Arc, just last month, during Lent?
Warwick knew that she’d gotten very sick and almost died. He’d even sent his own doctors, the best doctors, and then every doctor in Rouen, to her bedside. “The king has paid high for her,” he warned them, “the king does not want her to die but by his justice.”
The doctors suggested that the prisoner’s chains be removed. Warwick hesitated—“Make her swear not to escape first,” he said.
She refused. Anyway, she murmured, it wasn’t the chains that had made her sick, it was a poisoned carp that d’Estivet had brought her, from Cauchon.
D’Estivet was there, at her bedside. “Slut! Whore!” he shouted. “You lie! You made yourself sick, stuffing yourself with herrings, you trollop!”
She tried to rise then, tried to speak, but she began vomiting so violently that the doctors, panicking, took off her chains even without permission, and bled her, bathed her, their whole repertoire, but she fell into a higher fever still.
She begged feebly for last rites. D’Estivet, as resident priest, refused them. “Die like a Saracen!” he spat.
“I was baptized a Christian, and I shall die one,” she murmured. And then she commended her spirit to God, and turned her face to the wall.
And didn’t die. Alas, thought Massieu. She told him that her saints had come back to her then, renewing their promises of salvation. So she found the strength, somehow, to get better.
Why did you do it? Massieu asked d’Estivet silently now, as they descended the seven steps to her cell. Pity? Mercy? No chance of that. D’Estivet had addressed her regularly as “filth” throughout the trial. When he got wind that Massieu was letting her pause in the doorway of a little chapel they passed on their way to and from the trial, he waited one day, hidden, until she had fallen to her knees and started praying tearfully, even joyfully, to her saints and angels—then jumped out and blocked the door from the “ex-communicant whore!”
They’d both lost their breath then, Massieu and Joan of Arc. D’Estivet was Massieu’s superior, Cauchon’s “Promoter General.” He warned the usher that if he ever “let this whore” stop to pray again, he’d put him in “such a tower” that he “wouldn’t see the sun or the moon for a month.” And then d’Estivet took the trouble of having the chapel closed up, lest she be gleaning some modicum of comfort from simply looking in as she passed by.
So why had d’Estivet done it—the poisoned carp? For it surely would have been a mercy, for her to die in her bed. And there was always the chance, too, that Warwick would discover what he would consider highest treason—why did he risk it? Or rather “they,” d’Estivet, and Cauchon, too, for d’Estivet had come from Beauvais with Cauchon, and scarcely scratched his own ear without the bishop’s consent.
Was the idea to get Cauchon off the hook? Make a swift and relatively easy end to what was moving each day further from the bishop’s finest hour? For Cauchon, unlike Warwick, could understand every word of colloquial French Joan of Arc said during her trial, all the nuances, and he had to know, as did every French priest there who could understand her words in a way their English lords and masters could not, that she was holy, and it was not only a crime but a sin to burn her.
“Say nothing to her,” Warwick warned d’Estivet now, as they entered her dungeon. Fearing what? wondered Massieu. That she could still die of rage, insult? Warwick motioned the guards to one side, away from her.
She was in her pants. They could see it. She favored her visitors with only the briefest of glances, but it was enough for them to take in her blackened eyes, her cut and swollen lips. Her bruised and tear-streaked face. Warwick opened his mouth to speak, and closed it.
Now leave, said Massieu silently. You got what you came for, you can see it plainly. The combined might and power of the English army and the established Chu
rch of France have brought down this formidable enemy. This girl.
And how many men had it taken? Massieu had counted over a hundred and fifty churchmen during the various sessions of the trial, working very hard, all of them, since January, to burn her. To say nothing of the secular force of the English, and now they’d just about done it. One girl, he said silently to Warwick.
But rather than making “good cheer,” as Cauchon had advised, even Warwick stood silenced. She didn’t dignify him with another glance, but he had seen her face.
Well done, Captain Warwick, flower of English chivalry, thought Massieu. Your big guards beat a girl in chains, and now you’ll burn her. Have you nothing to say to her now?
But the silence was unbroken. Massieu looked from one to the other. D’Estivet, Warwick—nothing? No crowing? They looked like ravens, or more, cormorants. Envoys from hell.
Finally, Richard Warwick turned on his heel and walked out. D’Estivet followed so closely he bumped into him when Warwick paused to bark something at a guard. They forgot Massieu—or maybe he really had become invisible. Whichever it was, he uttered a prayer of thanks.
He crossed to her then. No one else was there but the guards. He knelt and took her hand. “Tell me,” he whispered.
“You didn’t come.”
“They wouldn’t let me in. I’ve been here, day and night, outside—”
She looked at him. “Yes, I can see.”
“You took back the pants! They’re going to kill you now!”
“They always were.”
“You promised to wear the dress!”
“It’s better this way.”
“Where’s the dress?”
A long pause. He looked into her eyes. She had been his enemy, it was true. He was a Norman, from Rouen, under English rule his whole life. He’d grown up hating the king she’d crowned. But as he looked at her now, he felt he’d give his right arm to have ridden out from Orléans beside her.
Behind her, near her, following her that glorious summer up the Loire to Reims. There must have been all the magic, all the light in France around her then. And as he looked at her now, bruised and beaten, he saw that, somehow, she seemed to be in the light again.
She told him the truth about the pants.
XV.
He was still there that night, when they brought her bread and water. They had been praying together, and she’d shown him the little ray of light—she’d even startled him, the way she jumped up when it came in through the crack in the window. He, too, took it as a gift from a God who hadn’t entirely forsaken her, and they’d given thanks for it together, but mostly they’d sat in silence.
“You didn’t tell Cauchon—or anyone? About the dress?” he asked her, for the tenth time, when the guards finally came over to chain her.
“Would it help?” Girl X had asked him earlier that afternoon, but now Joan of Arc said, “It’s better this way.”
Massieu just shook his head. He, too, had been simple, the same way she had. They’d grown up together in the last few days. His world, too, had turned from white to black, black to white. He was considering leaving the monastery. He would not, at any rate, stay in Rouen with Cauchon as archbishop.
“Still here, priest? Get out!”
The guards were still houspilleurs, though less avid now. Done with their job, less watchful. What if he traded clothes with her? Gave her his cassock and hood, and she could simply walk out? The main obstacles were the chains. But if he brought some tools from the blacksmith tomorrow, and then figured out a way to distract the guards, and then put on her clothes, himself, and something over his head—
“When will it be, do you think?” she called after him.
“I—don’t know. There’s still some procedure—”
“Will you come tomorrow?”
“I won’t have to come!” He crossed back, grabbed her hand. “I’ll still be here—just outside, all the time! Even now. I won’t leave! I’ll be there, just outside the castle. I’m like a beggar, the English don’t even see me anymore—”
She half smiled. He touched her swollen cheek. “I’ll get in tomorrow somehow. Be brave, and try to sleep.” The guards pushed him out, slammed the door.
She was brave then, but she didn’t try to sleep. It came on her sometimes, now and then, but she no longer sought it. Heading as she was for so much sleep.
Massieu seemed more frightened than she was. Maybe because she was still in this dungeon, where change was very slow in coming. Change, she had learned, was a stranger here. Here, there was long, slow time, redefining itself constantly, as each hour was a day, each day a year.
So maybe she was old, then. Old and gray—or would be, when her hair grew in. What if time really had changed—not just for her, but for everyone? What if not just one year, but long years had passed? What if they opened the door tomorrow, and let her out, no longer Joan of Arc but an unkempt hag with long gray hair over her shoulders, blinking in the sun and babbling of great victories and a girl in pants whom no one remembered?
She took a deep breath. It was done now, she knew it. Still, she didn’t want to die. More tears, she couldn’t stop them. What is life—what is it? Why had she ever been born?
To save France, whispered Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine.
XVI.
May 29, 1431. A Tuesday, full of grace. Not a burning day.
Cauchon decided to hold the last session in the archbishop’s palace, since it was as good as his, he figured. He was already permitting his underlings to address him as “my lord the archbishop.”
A priest from Rouen, a preaching friar with nothing to lose, had asked him if he wasn’t perhaps presuming. “Tempting fate?”
But Cauchon no longer believed in fate. “Make sure you get enough judges there tomorrow for one last session,” he’d instructed d’Estivet.
“Any particular ones, Your Grace?”
“No, any of them will do.” Just as long as there were enough bodies present to condemn her again. It was a mere formality. They weren’t even going to trot her out.
D’Estivet drummed up forty—fine. Cauchon recognized most of them, though some he hadn’t seen for months. Some he’d never seen—maybe they hadn’t even been to the trial. There were even a few medical doctors in the mix—that was all right, too. You didn’t need a Parisian legist to know which way this wind blew.
Cauchon saw no need for preamble. He simply repeated the facts. He had heard that Joan of Arc was back in pants, he had seen that she was back in pants, and she had admitted to him that her voices were back. It was sad but true, as well as indisputable and undebatable: she had fallen. There was nothing for the judges to do now but pronounce her a relapsed heretic.
“Should we perhaps read to her her abjuration again?” suggested Gilles, the abbot of Fécamp, the inquisitor, so to speak. “Remind her of her promise not to wear pants? Try, perhaps, to preach to her?”
Yes, yes, that would be nice, said Cauchon, we can even do it later. But now, right now, shall we simply declare her relapsed? Unanimously?
They would—they did. Cauchon looked beyond the men, his minions, to the beautifully furnished room, the tapestried walls, the thick carpets, gilded chairs, silver candelabras, gold chalices, everywhere his eye might flit. All this was his now, or would be, once Winchester gathered the Rouen chapter to confirm him as their archbishop.
“Shall we go prepare her?” d’Estivet asked him.
Cauchon looked at d’Estivet and remembered that day in the torture room. They’d felt obliged to have her dragged down there to illustrate the lengths to which the merciful Church would go to redeem her soul. The session would be, Cauchon had trusted, strictly formal. A station on the way to the stake.
In fact, Cauchon’s fear hadn’t been that Joan of Arc would stand firm under threat of torture, but that she wouldn’t. He didn’t want to have her tortured, much less watch it—not to mention the fact that any wavering in the face of the rack, pincers, the whips
and chains and flayers, any sign that she might, under torture, be brought to see the error of her ways, would have to be pursued, with all the messiness and delay that this would entail. Cauchon had neither the time nor the stomach for that.
But she’d spared him—she’d been splendid in there, completely undaunted. Stood there and declared, “You may tear my flesh from my bones, you may even separate my soul from my body. I will never deny my saints!” And then, examining the “instruments of torment” again, one by one, with her practiced country eye, she’d precluded any doubt with, “And even if I do say something under torture, I shall deny it afterwards, as having been forced from me.”
Bravo! Cauchon had nearly shouted. He could now have inscribed, in the official record, that “the Church has decided that even the torments of torture would not serve to bring this errant lamb back to the fold.” Thank God. Since they were going to burn her anyway.
But d’Estivet had been disappointed. Cauchon had seen it in his eyes. A yellow gleam.
“My lord the archbishop?” D’Estivet now waited. “Shall I go and tell her?”
Cauchon looked at him. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?
Tomorrow morning, Cauchon told him, would be soon enough. They would reassemble early at the Old Market Square, where she would be brought before them at eight o’clock and burned.
XVII.
Joan of Arc waited all that Tuesday. No one came. She thought of Massieu, outside, or had he gone home? Did priests have homes? She did—but she wasn’t going to think of that anymore. She’d thought it up and down, into every last corner, under every bed and cupboard already, and there was nothing left there to think.
About anything, really. She’d thought it all. Thought childhood, thought the king, thought Orléans, thought Reims. Thought her saints—hadn’t figured it out, but was done thinking about it.