Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans

  Poton: Perhaps you’d take a letter to the council of Troyes from the girl?

  Richard: I would.

  Poton, Jehanne, Richard turned back into St Phal village and Jehanne dictated a letter to a knight templar. She asked the people in Troyes to give the city up to Charles, because Charles was coming and would enter all the towns of the holy kingdom and make peace there no matter who tried to stop him.

  The preacher stuck the letter in his belt.

  Richard: Do your men have mandrake roots?

  Jehanne remembered those ceremonies in Boischenu.

  Jehanne: I’m not sure. Generally speaking … no!

  Richard: No one who keeps a mandrake can be Christ’s friend.

  Jehanne: Perhaps not everyone who’s got a mandrake knows that.

  Richard: In Paris they had mandrakes dressed in silk, crowned with crowns. I preached against them and they were burnt in bonfires that raged two days in all the squares from St Honoré to the Temple.

  Poton: You’re a regular fire-bug.

  Sallow Brother Richard at last took his water-bucket and sprinkler and walked round the St Phal tower bent towards high-lying forests and Troyes.

  The next morning they themselves came down out of hilly forests to Troyes. Here was the core of the disease. In this Judas city nine years ago Maman Isabeau, the animal-lover, had called Charles a bastard, called Hal Monmouth king. It was a fine city shaped like an oval and held in a bow of the Seine. Its inner suburbs had been levelled.

  The French army arrived in groups all day in front of Troyes. They were very hungry, but all Troyes had left for them were green corn on the stalk and broad beans in beanfields. The afternoon was full of the smell of fires and bean and green corn pottage. No one had any salt and spices. It was a heavy but somehow vacant smell.

  D’Alençon found a house for Jehanne in the outer suburbs.

  Since riding the witch, d’Alençon had stayed chaste in a showy manner. In the summer evenings he stripped to his breeches, wrapped himself in a rug and, after praying, lay on a palliasse within sight of Jehanne. So it was that night.

  Next morning soldiers started working at filling in the ditches on the western side of Troyes. At some times of the year these would be filled with water from the Seine but at high summer they were baked dry. A few flights of arrows rose from the walls and fell amongst the long lines of soldiers moving forward with hurdles and faggots. From the walls long-hatted Jews watched, far from their ghetto, which la Hire said was at the east end of the town. It was as if the city council were offering the Hebrews in reparation. A patient race, the Jews scarcely moved on the high walls under hazed sky.

  Jehanne and Alençon sat on portable stools in the garden of their villa. The walls of the house were tumbled and they could see the lines of sedulous infantry and the Hebrews on the wall.

  Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France, found them there when at noon he rode into the suburbs with two hundred Breton knights and squires. Red dust delineated the chasing of their breast-plates. Their plumes were broken, their banners stained. They broke up and looked for billets but Gilles dismounted and walked across a trampled bean field to the garden where Alençon’s flag stood limp beside Jehanne’s.

  Gilles: There’s Israelites up there. You see them, dear lady, the wealthy Israelites of Troyes?

  Alençon: They’re not happy with betraying the Lord Christ … they’ve betrayed their king as well.

  He yawned though. Tomorrow or the next day was the season for retribution, not this hazy noon.

  Gilles: We’ve ridden over from Brionon this morning. The king’s been there the last few days. He’s considering by-passing Troyes. A king can be too merciful.

  Alençon: Troyes has to be punished.

  Gilles: My astrolabes say Troyes will be entered but not punished. What does the dear lady say?

  Jehanne: The king ought to go into Troyes. He ought to show his holy body in Troyes.

  Gilles: Ah!

  An hour later the king and his council rode out of the forests. D’Aulon warned Jehanne and Minguet got her mounted in time for her to meet him in the cornfields on the edge of town. All the corn had been picked by the army now and the stooks bent. Troyes would need to import cornflour next autumn. Where from?

  Jehanne inspected the royal face again, verifying it, looking for signs. The king wore plain white armour like her own. A crown with blue sapphires stood on his head but failed to trap the afternoon sun as brilliantly as it would on days of hard bright summer light.

  Jehanne threw herself forward until her breasts hit the front-board of her saddle.

  Charles: I’m going to pardon this city, Jehanne. As with Auxerre. The way Lord Christ pardons us.

  Jehanne: Noël. But you must show your sacred body inside it.

  Charles: I want to hold conference straight away. Come with me.

  Jehanne: You don’t mean I’m getting invited to a council meeting?

  Charles: Yes. Doesn’t it happen a lot?

  Jehanne: No.

  Charles: I don’t believe you.

  Jehanne: D’Alençon and me …

  Charles: Monsieur Duke of Alençon?

  Jehanne: Him, yes. We’ve got a villa. Perfect for council meetings.

  Charles: All right, show us.

  The upstairs apartments were cleaned up in the next half-hour. Bedding got bundled up. Minguet and Ambleville sprinkled water on the floor and swept it. All the windows were left open and a few pine boughs burnt to clear the air. Trestle tables were fitted together.

  Council members began arriving – Archbishop Regnault an ill white in a mail-suit. Fat Georges rode in chased armour. Someone said, a distillery on horse-back. The legs were comic thin under a barrel weight of chest and gut. But no one laughed.

  De Gaucourt: It’s all going well. You must be pleased at how well it’s going.

  Jehanne: The king. The king must be pleased.

  De Gaucourt: Oh? I thought it was your show.

  When the king came in you could tell how exhilarated he was. To be in the land of his enemies and find it his land. To have people coming to him arranging for his mercy on them. For the story was that ambassadors from Troyes, sneaking out amongst the French lines, had been begging with him all night in Brionon. A fresh experience for a pale king!

  He began speaking without introduction.

  Charles: I want Jehanne and the Marshal de Rais to lead an attack on the south-west wall this afternoon. I want the walls broken in. You can do it, Jehanne and Marshal de Rais. Because you love me.

  Jehanne stood up at table. It was the first time she had ever been ordered to go straight out and break walls down. She thought, everything’s going to be simple now.

  Charles: Every general, captain, knight is to tell every squire, page, archer, commoner this: that if people inside Troyes are killed or their property damaged I’ll have the guilty ones hanged. I intend to break the pattern of barbarism.

  Jehanne: Noël.

  Maître Jean’s cannon had arrived by wagon and Jehanne rode about with Gilles watching them being set in place in the open spaces facing the south-west gate, called Madeleine. The Hebrews, poor scapegoats, had left the walls. Gilles had two thousand men for the assault, which would be up the mounds, through the ditches to the Madeleine Gate. Jehanne felt elated and talked to them a great deal as she rode amidst them.

  Gilles kept saying to her that they mustn’t expect to do too much and had to remember mercy – as if she were the one who might forget it.

  He had his Breton knights with him. One of them, visited by heat exhaustion, had seen red-scarfed knights riding across the north-west sky where Paris lay.

  Maître Jean, in his lazy way, had two bombards ready to fire by half past four. He lit the fuses and his cannonballs tore two black holes in a tower west of the gate. There seemed to be no one at home there: the town had kept silent. Now a woman began wailing behind the walls.

  Jehanne: Has someone been hurt?

  It was
a dreadful sound and ran across her clarity of purpose.

  Gilles: I wouldn’t say so. It’s siege madness.

  All at once, you could see the garrison on the walls, keeping low. They sent few arrows down. But there were cannon above the Madeleine Gate.

  In the marshalling area Jehanne saw a strange brown-flavoured light isolating one of Gilles’s knights. It was a young man, about twenty. He wore no helmet, had a blue scarf fashionably enhancing his throat. Over his expensive armour he wore a red silk tunic with a white ox-head on it.

  Jehanne: Who’s that fellow?

  Gilles: That’s Lavignac, my second-cousin.

  The boy had lavish brown hair. It was cut military style, but didn’t look severe. Like cousin Gilles he was too handsome, had over-ripe and unlikely boy-loveliness. The horrible brown light inappropriate to the lazy day hung round him. It implied the brown of decay, the brown that sets in on the petals of dying roses; it implied excreta and the skin of corpses. Marking him out as defiled and about to have his defilement confirmed.

  She turned her head to talk to Gilles and saw him watching the luscious boy, a moist pride in his eyes, his lips shining with fresh saliva this dry day.

  She couldn’t help saying it.

  Jehanne: Are you a devil?

  Gilles: I beg your pardon, dear lady.

  Jehanne: Tell him to go back into the suburbs.

  Gilles: Him?

  Jehanne: That boy.

  Gilles’s attention was still misted, one eye on the boy.

  Gilles: Lavignac?

  The name was torn out of her ears by cannon crack. Lavignac’s opulent head had gone. His squire lay bleeding through a chain-meshed chest. However, Lavignac stood, though headless. Blood fell in shawls over his shoulders and he began stumbling sideways, creeping, creeping up to Gilles.

  Jehanne saw Gilles’s mouth open. He snorted, he gagged, his hands went out to his headless cousin. Gilles, beyond himself, offered some obscene welcome. It seemed Lavignac would walk straight between his arms. But life left the boy in a rush, he had to sit some feet short. He fell sidewise, dead. Gilles was still standing open-armed.

  Gilles: Find his head if you can. His father would want his intact body.

  A Franciscan was already anointing Lavignac, though the senses of his sumptuous head lay shredded in a dozen places amongst the Bretons.

  The Franciscan said a porte inferni libera eum – snatch him from the gates of hell. But the air, Jehanne saw, was still stained with the Black One’s gain of that young body.

  She felt heavy. She went to d’Aulon.

  Jehanne: Jean, it’s no good. I’ve got to rest.

  D’Aulon: Back at your place? It mightn’t be free yet, the Council might still be …

  Jehanne: It doesn’t matter. Anywhere.

  Gilles: Use my tent.

  Jehanne: Marshal de Rais, will you confess to Père Pasquerel?

  Gilles knelt there. They were carrying his lovely cousin off. Gilles knelt without a qualm in the middle of the stain.

  Gilles: I want the pardon of the Lord Jesus, whose knight I am and will be. He knows how Satan pulls at our bowels, dear lady, because Satan pulled at his and tempted him with strange women and soft boys.

  Jehanne: Soft boys, Gilles, there’s no mention of soft boys.

  Gilles: All the temptations of the world were suffered by the Lord Jesus. Ask the Faculties of Poitiers and Paris. They’d both say so.

  Some of the Bretons watched Gilles’s repentance. He began weeping gently.

  Gilles: That dear boy. The waste of it. Of the richness. The cleanness of line …

  D’Aulon: He can’t have known anything. That walking – headless – he wouldn’t have known he was doing that.

  Jehanne thought, the one time Charles asked me – direct – to do something, I beg off. Because I see Lavignac go to hell in front of my eyes.

  Jehanne: Just a short rest, Jean. Then back to the walls.

  D’Aulon: Of course, Mademoiselle, it’s a hot day.

  The villa was empty, she slept very deeply. From the right of her pallet Messire sprang a new thought on her.

  Messire: Little he-rose, little she-soldier, when the king is anointed …

  Jehanne: What? What, Messire?

  Messire: The steel goes in, the heat blasts, the rose bleeds.

  Jehanne: Holy Jesus!

  Messire: You’ll never be alone.

  Jehanne: But when the steel goes in …

  Messire: There’s no consolation.

  She woke yelling I deserve better!

  Amongst beanpoles in the outer suburbs stood a temporary chapel of blue silk drapes. Here, while Lavignac lost his head under the walls, the king listened to four Augustinian monks chanting Vespers. He thought he’d never felt more royal than out there in a blue tent amongst his army, on the edge of the town that had legislated against his reality but now, this afternoon, at four, would send frightened ambassadors out to explain themselves.

  The ambassadors: Jean Laiguise, Lord Bishop; Monsieur Guillaume Andouillette, Master of the Knights Hospitallers; the Dean of the Chapter; the councillors of the city.

  Charles had organized a throne to be put out in the beanfields. They would have to approach him over uneven ground and kneel down to him on dry lumpy earth.

  At the last versicle and response, de la Tremoille came into the chapel. He genuflected heavily and with a slump of the fat head that could have been devotion or exhaustion.

  De la Tremoille: Gilles and the girl have started making noises at the walls. The ambassadors have just left town by a gate on the north side.

  Charles himself bowed to the bread species of the slaughtered God-man which sat in the tabernacle. He went out towards his open-air throne.

  He felt this is power. He felt this is her blood washing back to me from the time she’s slaughtered. Her blood thickening mine. It could be felt, blood binding his loose legs, ripening his heart.

  Charles: Poor girl.

  De la Tremoille: What, Lord?

  Charles: The girl. I hope she doesn’t get hurt up there. Near the walls.

  De la Tremoille: No chance.

  Gilles waited by the high chair out in the beanfield, no one had noticed his cousin’s blood on the greaves at his knee, it looked like some kind of weathering.

  The ambassadors crept up in capes, houpellandes, chains of office. They were uncertain how their rights to their regalia would stand by five o’clock. As was intended, their soft shoes slid off the edge of clods.

  Ten yards from Charles they dropped themselves full length on the earth, all at once, a rehearsed gesture. Their forearms folded in front of their face. The eyes stared over the rim of their good fabrics. They were the best-off people in France, from an affluent town. Now they were suffering for its unfortunate allegiance.

  The Lord Bishop Laiguise got up on his knees. Only he.

  Laiguise: Would His Majesty try to understand our problem?

  The bailie and the garrison won’t open the gates to you. Give me time to talk the garrison around. If they can’t be persuaded I think the people will take over anyhow. They’ll open the gates by force and give you the obedience that’s your due.

  Charles: I hope you appreciate: the attack now going on in the west of the city is to help you with the argument. To make it easy for you to say no, there’s no chance of holding out. If I wanted to really inconvenience your walls I would send thirty thousand men to push them down – one, two, three!

  Laiguise: I know His Majesty’s army is massive: I know it can swallow us at a gulp.

  Charles: That’s it. But it’s not only your city but mine, my pleasant city. Everyone knows about the Champagne Fairs. Though St Pierre could do with a steeple.

  He nodded towards the hulking but aborted cathedral of Troyes beyond the Madeleine Gate.

  Laiguise: In His Majesty’s coming peace a steeple will go up on St Pierre. I’m sure the cathedral chapter would give guarantees. But of course there are other guara
ntees you would want if you were to consider mercy towards us.

  Yes, yes, kingship! To have one’s mercy ceremoniously begged.

  Charles: Indeed. Remember, my generals are at the walls. The miraculous pucelle …

  But he noticed that one of his generals was there, out of place.

  Charles: Gilles?

  Gilles: My cousin Robert de Lavignac is dead, gentle king. A cannon on their walls went off and carried his head away. He was eighteen years.

  Charles: Requiescat in pace.

  Gilles: All to make it easy for his lordship the bishop to renege on his present masters.

  Laiguise: Of course, the council will be happy to vote an immediate sum as damages …

  The strange too-blue eyes snapped shut.

  Gilles: He was a child.

  The bishop began tugging at the neck of his alb.

  Laiguise: If anyone has to pay, then I must …

  He tried to expose his own heart. It was hard for him though to find his bare chest under all those pontificals.

  Gilles: The payment ought to be in the flesh of children. Lavignac was a child.

  Then they noticed the dirty blood on his hands, the stains on his knees, and his quivering shoulders. Charles shifted on his throne. He felt his new majesty a little eroded by Gilles’s erratic manners.

  Gilles: You ought to pray to the god of treacheries, Monsieur Bishop, that while you’re talking here with my gentle king, my Bretons don’t get in your walls.

  He bowed to Charles and went away. It seemed to all present that he intended to get his Bretons inside Troyes and then, heighhay! A decapitated population!

  Charles stood up at his throne.

  Charles: Gilles, you know the orders. My mercy over all.

  Gilles turned amongst the furrowed earth to bow to those orders. He had the grace of the high aristocracy, his manners weren’t rough like Fat Georges, who had begun his career as the family’s poor cousin.