Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans
Bastard: You make everyone very angry, Jehanne. You keep telling everyone you’re the only one who wants the best for France.
Jehanne: Silence me then. Go on. Or find the key on my body.
Machet: We’re not here for games.
Jehanne: Listen, Messieurs, I’ll free the king when he says Rheims.
Charles: You could be …
Jehanne: Beheaded? Quartered? Sacrificed?
Charles: Don’t be childish.
Jehanne: Till you say Rheims we’re the one animal. We walk together, eat together, sleep together, make water together. If the idea upsets you, say yes to Rheims and you’re a free king again.
He dragged at the chain wildly.
Jehanne: Please. My wound.
Charles: Holy Jesus! Tell her, Maître Machet.
Machet: You might like to hear, Mademoiselle, that I’ve just got back from Dijon, the capital of Burgundy. The Duke of Burgundy has sworn in writing that he will not send an army out against us if we go to Rheims. But there are a lot of strong cities in our tracks. He can’t give those up without losing face with Bedford.
Jehanne: Are you going then?
The king whimpered.
Charles: Yes, I suppose I’m going. We’re all going.
Jehanne: Would you all turn your backs?
Bastard: What?
Jehanne: The key is down my drawers.
Charles: Oh Jesus in Nazareth.
The army mustered at Selles in early June. Here a vast camp grew all over the river-flats of the Cher.
Sitting on a balcony with Pasquerel one day she found herself making a lunatic claim. She turned to him and said there wouldn’t be an English soldier left in France by mid-summer. Before she could stop him and bind him to ethical secrecy, he went off to circulate the word.
The statement was like a rebellion in her blood; her blood was a long deep cunning animal that wanted its own voice and had found it for a moment. It wasn’t the untruth that terrified her: the Franciscans were telling people even wilder things about her. It was that the blood might utterly rebel and take her voice for its own use, its insane opinions, all the time.
This terror was still with her on 6 June. On that day the widow of the venerated French general du Guesclin sent to her asking for some, any keepsake which she’d touched with virtue and affection. She sent a ring. The courier she gave it to didn’t notice how she trembled.
Likewise she had to look grateful that afternoon when she was told the king had granted her arms. The Master of Requests read her the details.
Azure, a sword argent hiked and supporting on its point a crown or between two fleurs-de-lis. Minguet had these arms painted on a plaque and welded to the crown of her helmet. It was done in time for them to move towards Romorantin and Orleans with the army.
D’Alençon, his ransom paid off, led the army. On the night of 9 June it camped in le Portereau. The raked and levelled earth showed where les Augustins and the les Tourelles bastion had been. La Hire’s cavalry and Alençon’s knights put up tents close by a mound on the Toulouse road which was the massed grave of English bodies burned beyond dignity the evening les Augustins was set on fire. Jehanne, d’Alençon, the Bastard, de Boussac, la Hire, and others dear to the memory of Orleans rode over the bridge to billets in the city. Stonemasons were working double-shifts under the wooden spans between les Tourelles and the town-end of the bridge. There was a salute of raised trowels.
Gilles de Rais had been in the city a week. He had mortgaged some of his Breton properties with the help of Bernardo Massimo and other Italian bankers’ representatives who had rushed into Orleans as soon as the siege ended. He had taken it on himself to pay the expenses of the siege. His reasons were partly sentimental, even having to do with her. They were also that he knew the king would be generous to him with the estates of those who co-operated with the English in Normandy, Picardy, Champagne and the south. His astrolabes told him the day of delivery for those provinces was close.
Gilles: There’s even a new prophecy, dear Jehanne, that there won’t be one Englishman left in France by mid-summer.
Jehanne: That doesn’t sound very likely to me.
The war began on the Loire again. The girl in armour again, and off-hand and dominant with Alençon.
Orleans gave 1600 men, smiths, carpenters, militia-men. It also lent the municipal culverins, its biggest cannon la Bergère, and two master-gunners.
The Bastard had not been exact when he tenderly informed Jehanne a month before that there was no Goddam Englishman south of the Loire. There was Jargeau. In Jargeau were two thousand Goddam Englishmen. The Earl of Suffolk for one. And his two young brothers.
The first night of the campaign, in woods south of Checy, the French army woke up to a panic rumour that Fastolf had crossed the Loire and was hunting them. Alençon, la Hire, Jehanne went about soothing them. Pasquerel said mass and they saw the Host he raised.
The French army came in sight of Jargeau at mid-afternoon. There was a suburb, hovels for the vine-workers, from which a few flights of arrows rose.
Jehanne took her standard from Minguet and raced la Hire towards the suburb. All the French cavalry followed on. It happened to be the right thing: all the English ran for the gate of Jargeau and got there safely since they were lightly dressed and fast as any war-horse.
The French were able to sleep in the hovels and houses that night. Jehanne shared one of the houses with Alençon and felt safe enough to undress and sleep sound in a camp bed.
At five o’clock on Friday morning she woke up to an argument outside the partition of her bedroom. It was Alençon and de Boussac.
De Boussac: Who in Christ’s name was it supposed to be? It was supposed to be Vendôme’s people wasn’t it?
Alençon: It was Vendôme and he posted guards at seven o’clock. Just on dark I went round the outposts and sent them all to bed.
De Boussac: Oh bloody nice. Oh bloody nice.
Alençon: It seemed a small risk.
De Boussac: And if the English had made a raid from town – had you considered …?
Alençon: A small, small risk.
De Boussac: The English were never complete bloody stupids. Never.
Alençon: I had to be certain. About the girl.
De Boussac: The girl.
Alençon: She told me I’d survive. I had to test it …
De Boussac: You mad bastard.
Alençon: Don’t call me that.
De Boussac: If you get the urge for any more of these little experiments …
Alençon: Yes?
De Boussac: I’ll take my forces. A man expects some bloody lunacy in the field. But …
Alençon said nothing. He seemed satisfied with the state of the argument. And now of course he believed he was an immortal for the duration of the war. Jehanne’s blood crept at the strange way people took promises.
There were three days of lassitude and parleying. A spiritless heat haze held Jargeau and the French in the one daze. On Friday the carpenters began a siege tower. La Bergère, the cannon, knocked occasional lumps from the Jargeau masonry. On Saturday the militia tried one small sally against the walls. In the afternoon, after a sleep that left her with a headache, she went up to the mound outside Jargeau and called on the English to give in. They didn’t answer, not one voice. She felt foolish, sweating unanswered in the suburbs.
Sunday. By ten o’clock the militia had got through the ditch up to the walls. D’Alençon and Jehanne went forward together. D’Alençon halted on top of the mound and looked down into the ditch where arrows and stone cannon balls were pitching.
Alençon: We’ll wait here and see how the assault on the walls goes.
Jehanne: Didn’t you know you weren’t going to be hurt? Don’t you have promises? Don’t you have signs?
She could hear her voice high and bitter. Perversely, she intended to make him go into the ditch and try out the promises and signs.
They walked down into the damp. Corpse
s lay in the mud.
Alençon: Look at the base of the wall.
Jehanne: I know.
But she looked at the top of the wall just the same and saw the small mouth of a culverin above her. It was a clamant throat, it screamed threats to her.
Jehanne: Come over here or that culverin is going to kill us.
D’Alençon stepped crabwise to his right. A second later a slab of stone from the culverin beheaded a knight who had come forward into the space d’Alençon had left.
At noon Jargeau had not been taken, but when the generals lunched on bread and white wine in the suburbs, d’Alençon talked endlessly, in a high key, about how Jehanne had prophetically saved him.
Alençon: It’s true, you see, she was there to save me.
La Hire: She wasn’t there to save my Lord de Lude.
Alençon: My Lord de Lude?
De Boussac: That’s the poor Angevin bastard who had his head blown off.
Alençon: Requiescat in pace.
La Hire: Amen.
Jehanne returned to the walls with the first assaulting soldiers of the afternoon. Many ladders went up against the stonework and she began to climb one. She felt an impact from above. It was like a trapdoor falling shut on her emergent head. She found later that the helmet, loosely fitted, fell off her head and she followed it slowly, grating against the rungs. A stone fragment had hit her. The militia thought her head had been crushed. She woke very soon and very angry at the impact. They told her later that she stood bare-headed, roaring across the ditch.
Jehanne: Up you go, friends, they’re finished.
Before she was clear-headed, the French were into the town and opening the main gates.
All the English made across town for the bridge over the Loire. French knights and mercenaries rushed after them through the thin over-balconied streets.
On the bridge to the north a squire caught up with Suffolk.
Squire: Stop, sir, we’ve got men in the woods over there.
Suffolk: Fair enough. I stop.
They stood catching their breath.
Suffolk: Are you a gentleman?
Squire: I’m a gentleman.
Suffolk: Are you a knight?
Squire: I’m sorry. I’m not.
Suffolk: I can’t surrender except to at least a knight.
Farther down the bridge towards the Jargeau gate French knights had taken his brother. Militia-men had bundled another brother of his, fully entrapped in armour, into the Loire. They resented knights being able to take and sell knights.
Though Suffolk didn’t know it at the time, his young brother was drowning because of the bourgeois chagrin of the militia. He would have been better able to guess what was happening inside the town: French looting, hundreds (five) of his archers dying against walls. All that was understandable and according to pattern. But he did not know, then, about his little brother.
Beyond the south wall Jehanne sat with compresses on her head. Only d’Aulon and Minguet were with her. No one else came near them. Beyond the north wall, Suffolk and the squire. No one else came near them.
Squire: I can hardly help it, Monsieur, if I’m not a knight.
Suffolk: If you kneel I’ll create you a knight.
Squire: It’s tempting. But you might cut me down to the wishbone.
Suffolk: Do you think an earl of the Kingdom of England would come down to that level?
Squire: Maybe not.
Suffolk: All right then, kneel.
Suffolk created him a knight banneret of the Kingdom of England and told him to stand up.
Suffolk: Now I give you my sword and I become your prisoner. You’ll get at least ten thousand livres for me. How’s that?
Squire: Prodigious.
Suffolk: It’s the way families get on the rise. Have you got any daughters, for example …?
And they strolled back into Jargeau to meet Alençon and the Bastard.
Three days later the army began marching west through Sologne to Meung. Poton’s cavalry arrived first and took the bridge across the river away from the English. The rest of the army arrived under thunderstorms during the afternoon. Alençon and Jehanne found billets in a ruined church.
Alençon was still bedazzled by her trick with the murderous culverin at Jargeau. Each solemn time he said so she laughed at him, but he had no ear for that sort of laughter. His wife didn’t mock him enough. Perhaps noble wives didn’t mock their husbands: perhaps that too was part of the code.
As the Marshal de Boussac had in Jargeau, la Hire now ran up against Alençon’s new, fervent certainty. La Hire came up the church aisle. His shoulders stooped forward beneath light rain from the ruined vaulting. Alençon, Jehanne and their staffs were camped behind drapes in the apse.
La Hire: You haven’t set pickets, Monsieur.
Alençon: I won’t be setting any, general.
La Hire: I wondered why?
Alençon: Because now I know.
La Hire: That’s nice for you. But … the knights from Dauphiné were the last to join us. They ought to …
Alençon: It’s no use talking about it, general.
La Hire: You understand my horsemen and Poton’s are the basis of everything … If the English crept out …
Alençon: I’ve had this argument with de Boussac. It won’t happen.
La Hire: You sound like her.
Alençon: Good.
La Hire: You’re a general, she’s a sibyl. A sibyl can do what a sibyl ought to and a general has to do what a general ought to. And one of the things generals do is set pickets.
Alençon: I won’t talk about it.
La Hire: The girl wouldn’t want to inconvenience me.
Alençon: The girl is asleep. She had that blow on the head at Jargeau …
So the knights from the Dauphiné slept and la Hire had to set sentries out of his own men.
On Thursday 16 June, d’Alençon left the Meung bridge and suburbs garrisoned and marched on to Beaugency. D’Aulon, in conversation but perhaps to warn her against rash prophecy, told her that the English had been in Saintonge and Languedoc so long that French girls married them. Some of them got tenancies on farms down there, as if they intended to be there for generations …
Beaugency was a lovely town above the Loire. Its vineyards were still being worked. Behind its walled hill were other vineyards. Far away stood forested lines of cliff.
There was a vast tower facing the river. The English peopled the suburbs on the east, suburbs intact, not like the suburbs of Orleans. In the early afternoon, they ran back inside the walls, so that the French could catcall and feel something had been achieved.
All towns looked the same, she thought, when you considered their walls and how to get inside them. Only pilgrims see things properly. Perhaps one day she could be a pilgrim.
That afternoon two knights rode down out of the forest and found Alençon. Jehanne stood within hearing when they spoke to Alençon.
They were two Breton knights from the Constable Richemont’s forces. The Constable Richemont wanted to be welcome in Alençon’s army. The word Richemont rolled round from knight to knight. Jehanne could tell from the way they looked on hearing it that it meant different things to different people. She asked Gilles.
De Richemont was Constable of France. He’d brought a cunning cousin to court and the cousin had manoeuvred him into rebellion. Richemont had been in revolt, raiding parts of Poitou for more than a year.
Gilles: He’s a great witch-hunter as well. He used to say he’d burnt out all the witchcraft in Maine and Brittany.
Jehanne: You don’t like him.
Gilles: He’s my uncle. So is Fat Georges.
Fat Georges was the cunning cousin Uncle Richemont brought to court.
Meanwhile Alençon was saying no to the two Bretons.
Alençon: Tell him if he comes near us the girl and I will fight him.
The argument grew. Generals and knights came in on d’Alençon from the flank to argue with hi
m.
De Boussac: If you have to fight, there are the sodding English.
Alençon said he wouldn’t be forced to let de Richemont join the army. If Richemont’s friends amongst the generals wanted him then Alençon would withdraw with the Orleans militia.
The Bastard sided with Alençon. He walked about, stating his partisanship. Jehanne thought: behind all of them there are secret alliances and passions I don’t understand or see. There must even be alliances with women. The Bastard must have such alliances and furies behind his clean brown eyes.
The debate stretched into the evening. She thought this Richemont already occupies the camp, even though he hasn’t appeared. Fastolf himself was forgotten for the Richemont question. The English in Beaugency enjoyed a quiet evening.
At six o’clock on Saturday morning, while Pasquerel was saying Mass, a trumpet alarm was blown in the camp. Jehanne left the small church and found militia marching out of the suburbs and forming up in the vegetable gardens, unsure of what front to take.
La Hire, with a little group of knights, the sun on his neck, was peering north into the high forests.
La Hire: It’s supposed to be Fastolf. He’s supposed to be just up there.
Jehanne: In the forest?
La Hire: I don’t believe it. I think it’s Richemont who’s spread the alarm.
When Alençon and the Bastard joined them la Hire told him he didn’t believe Fastolf had arrived. The four of them stared at the forests where morning had not yet touched. They waited for the sun to pick up a steel surface or a silk banner. Starlings sang loudly in the undesecrated orchards of Beaugency.
Alençon: If he’s there he’ll roll us up into the river.
Bastard: Yes.
Jehanne: It won’t happen.
Monsieur de Rais, who didn’t like having his unloved witch-besotted Uncle Richemont close by, rode out of the Beaugency suburbs with the news that Richemont had come down in the night and had his army bivouacked at the north end of the town.
They all went to see.
At the foot of the vineyards stood a leper hospital, iron gates, a one-storey building around a leper’s well and courtyard. In front of its gates a mass of horsemen with banners were waiting. A small man without a helmet got off his horse and advanced. He bowed slightly all the way up to Alençon’s horse.