Into The Fire (15 page)

Television cameras. Plural. Someone, somewhere, will pay a lot for this when it’s over. If it goes right. Picaut has given too many press conferences to count. She should be used to them by now. But this is different. The thought sucks the saliva from her mouth, sets her heart crashing into her lungs. She holds her head high and walks up the steps at Luc’s side.

They reach the stage and the clatter of dessert, the hum of conversation, fade to silence. On her own, Picaut has never commanded this kind of natural deference. Her palms prickle and the back of her neck is damply cold and all of her attention is focused on maintaining balance and poise. This is the price of her freedom.

Uncle Landis is at a table towards the right, and she gives him the full benefit of her calm. He raises one index finger in salute. She lets her gaze drift on past and counts, but does not look directly at, three cameras. There will probably be more, but she dare not look for them overtly.

Moving to the audience, she counts the heads, notes the names: the political columnists of the national press who have travelled down from Paris and will stay overnight at the Family’s expense; the editors of the local and national and international news channels; the editors of
Time
, the London
Telegraph
,
Der Spiegel
; the bloggers from the
Huffington Post
and
Daily Kos
. Everyone is here who needs to be.

Luc halts at the podium. Picaut moves on past him to stand fractionally behind his right shoulder. In some things he is perfectly correct: she does know her place. If Landis were to catch her eye now … but he doesn’t. He’s looking down at his table, careful not to throw either of them off their game.

Cousin Lise – more properly Annelise – sits three tables away, from where she can command the left half of the room. Tall, dark, dangerously intelligent, her authority is as effortless as Landis’s, only differently applied.

‘Ladies and gentlemen …’

There is no autocue, no written speech, no prompt cards. Christelle Vivier uses none of these and so Luc, too, must dispense with them. This election will be fought from the heart.

From the heart, then, Luc is funny, he is friendly, he is eminently reasonable. He mentions by name several of those in the room, always with a warmly amusing anecdote and a political point.

At its heart, his message is clear: Orléans is no longer an impoverished outpost of Paris that has to look back to the fifteenth century to find anything or anyone worth talking about. We who live here might honour our most famous saint, we are proud of her peasant origins and her meteoric rise to fame, but we have moved on. Our city has become a cultural and industrial heartland. We are growing. We are good. We are proud. The only flies in our ointment are the recent arson attacks.

‘About which all of you know the sorry and distressing facts. I don’t need to go into detail, but I can say that my wife’ – they turn a little, each of them, and again they are intimate, richly alone in the gaze of the world’s press – ‘is working insane hours to find who has done this, and to bring them to book. She was up last night at a time the rest of us were safely in bed, and I have to say I think she looks better than anyone I know on less than three hours’ sleep.’

Picaut feels the slither of silk as the curtain is swept aside, and the whole room can see what’s on the wall behind them, except for her.

All she can see is the widening eyes, the round ‘O’ mouths, the nods, the thoughtful smiles, and the smattering of applause that is not started by cousin Lise and uncle Landis but is fostered by them and still she cannot, must not, turn round to see what they have seen.

‘There are those who will tell you that we must root out the foreigners, those who would destroy our land, our livelihoods, our very lives. The fires are their battle cry, the dead are their martyrs.

‘And yet those who weep the loudest, our opponents in the coming election, are not the ones who have suffered. Have they died? No. Have they spent their nights and their days working to rid our city of those who would assault it? No. And have they plans to build and rebuild, to move beyond the horror of the fires to a city that teems with life and productivity? I think not.

‘The fires, in so many ways, are their friends. Without them, who are they but the same old tired reactionaries we have rightly dismissed so often before?

‘So when my wife has found the perpetrators – which she will – and our prosecutors have convicted them – which they will – those siren voices will be silenced. I hope at least the first of these will be in sight before the polls open on Sunday. But if not, I will continue to offer the voice of reason against the extremes of those who would paint us as children. We are heading towards an election, ladies and gentlemen, and for everybody’s sake I intend to win it.’

Some of the most media-aware men and women on the planet are in this room. They know when they are being played, but Luc has offered them a lever they can use to undermine Christelle Vivier’s hard-core platform.

He has all but written their copy for them. If they didn’t love him before – and most of them did – they love him now.

The applause is long and rich and deep and they stand as Luc gathers Picaut into a deep embrace, kisses her brow, and then escorts her down the three steps from the platform. The spring in his step has returned.

Released, she can at last glance back.

‘My God …’

The screen behind them is a solid wall of fire. Vast flames rendered in high-res clarity lick from floor to ceiling in a way that is so familiar that she is in danger of falling into them. And the focal point of the shot is a small figure in an oversized leather jacket, walking beside a stretcher on which lies a man’s charred corpse.

She might be weeping; it’s hard to tell (was she? She can’t remember), but it’s clear someone has just spoken to her (Ducat? Garonne?), and the look on her face as she lifts her head to answer, the determination, the sheer, undiluted fury, is so raw that it catches at her throat.

‘Why the
fuck
didn’t you warn—?’

‘Inès, won’t you take some wine? And perhaps a canapé? The maître d’ will faint clean away with horror if you refuse. The roulades are smoked salmon and avocado; we told him you’d adore them. The macaroons are chilli, lime and raspberry. Honestly, they’re to die for …’

Luc has gone to meet and greet. Here, in his place, is his cousin Lise.

Like Luc, Annelise Bressard is the product of a hundred generations of blue-blooded breeding. Taller than her cousin, her hair a shade darker, her eyes deeper pools, she was born with perfect skin, perfect features, perfect etiquette.

The only thing that sets her apart from her many cousins is that she has not yet married. Being a woman, she is being held in reserve until the Family needs to make some kind of strategic alliance; certainly there is no other obvious reason why she hasn’t already swept some Rothschild or Murdoch off his feet and into the boardroom.

Now, she is sweeping Picaut off her feet. Arm in elbow, she steers her away from the steps, away from the end-wall mural, away from the crowd, but not too far. They come to rest in the anteroom just through the big double doors, neither part of the party nor yet divorced from it.

A waiter presses a silvered tray between them and yes, the chilli, lime and raspberry macaroons are outstanding and the smoked salmon, of course, is a delight. Another waiter appears with water.

Picaut drinks deeply. Back in the dining room, Luc, the flame, is meandering through the media moths.

From her side, cousin Lise says, ‘Do you want to go back in?’

‘Do you want me to?’

‘I think it would cement certain ideas in their minds if you were to talk to them, but you are under no obligation to do so …’

God, but this is the kid-glove treatment. Picaut wants to change into her own clothes. She wants time to work out what Luc is up to. She believes none of the evening’s rhetoric, but cannot yet read the undercurrents.

‘How did Luc know I’d had so little sleep last night?’

‘Lucky guess?’

‘Taking that picture wasn’t a guess.’

‘No. But we’d had half a night’s warning from the fire’s start to the moment you walked out of the hotel with the stretcher bearers. We had someone in place long before then. She took a great many more images. That was simply the best.’

‘What would you have done if none of them had been usable?’

Lise’s gaze is frank. ‘Made one up, of course.’

Of course.

Of course, of course, of course. This is the Family; what isn’t real, they will fabricate. Picaut starts to laugh, leans back against a wall, slides down it, and sits on the floor, where it seems as if the laughter could last for ever.

A circle of waiters surrounds her; she is invisible to the press pack inside. Lise waits until she runs to a halt and then says, ‘Home? Sleep? In that order?’

‘No.’ Picaut hauls herself upright. ‘If you think my talking to the sharks can help to sink Christelle’s campaign, then I’ll do it. For Orléans. And for Luc.’

She finds a smile and offers it up. ‘Trust me. I’m tired, I’m not incompetent.’

‘
BROTHER TOMAS?
’

‘Aye?’

Two months have passed since the miracle of the relief of Orléans and the Maid’s army has grown beyond all dreams. They are big enough now that the King of France has graced them with his presence. The road to Rheims is open, and even were it not, with this many men, no army of England would dare come to drag him away.

Of lesser note, Brother Tomas, white friar, lately come to join it, is standing knee deep in water when the two boys slouch their mounts to a halt at the stream’s edge.

Like most of their comrades, they are poor youths recently given good cloth. Their doublets have the shine of new wool, their hose are unpatched, their boots are almost as good as the ones he put on a dead man when he counterfeited his own death in the forest north of Patay. They ride like sacks of corn thrown on to horses, but then that’s half the army, too.

They are brothers, by the look of them, the one on the left half a handful of years older than the one on the right. And they are shy.

Tomas pushes himself upright, squeezing his bare toes in the cooling mud. The day is catastrophically hot. Twelve thousand fighting men want water, food, latrines. He, who was once Tomas Rustbeard, is now shaved of crown, shaved of face, with brows so dark they might have been dyed with walnut juice, and a gauntness of cheek that suggests much fasting.

So far, nobody has recognized him. They see his cloth, his head, his cross, his stoop. More importantly, they learn in conversation that he was once a water engineer (not a hammer man, never that) and they put him to work.

Today, he is busy organizing the distribution of water from a clean stream. The army must not go down with the flux, which is what happens if the drinking water and the latrines are set too close together.

He shades his eyes with his palm, lets his gaze slide from one boy to the other. ‘Best decide if you want confession or clean water, because you cannot have both and if this siphon does not run you’ll likely have neither.’

The younger one grins, the comedian. ‘Neither. We want you to write. That is, our sister sends to ask if you can write.’

Really? What kind of woman in the middle of the army sends for a—

Their faces give them away, the unaccustomed pride. There is only one woman in the middle of this army who has the authority to send for anything.

‘The Maid is your sister?’ She is not. He would lay his life that she is not. He has studied her at length and while these two boys are evidently leaves from the same tree, their ‘sister’ is of different stock altogether. She is slimmer, taller, her nose more prominent, her cheekbones higher, her chin more angular. That she dares this lie says a great deal about her confidence.

Still, the boys are pleased at his question, not insulted. They nod, more or less together. One day they’ll perfect that, and do it in unison, but this is raw for them, the sense of almost-royalty; they can’t have been with the army more than half a month, and they have not grown into the role. The Maid is their sister. The Maid, who all of France, all of Christendom, knows has come from God to save France from the English. God moulds her to His hand, obviously. If God arranges it, anything is possible.

Brother Tomas eases himself out of the river. He washes his hands clean, takes a while over it.

It matters that he not appear too keen. He has been with the army five days now, and is making a name for himself as a useful man to have around. Brother Tomas, so say the whispers, was a soldier before he found God. He has lately been in Germany, and before that Poland, or perhaps it was Spain, and all manner of other places, always with the small mercenary bands who make their money on the fringes of battle, who kill and come away, but need spiritual support as much as any man. If you need help with clean water, he is your man. It is a useful thing to be.

The boys are waiting. He spreads his hands. ‘I can write, but have neither pen nor ink.’ He is a mendicant, and perhaps quite godly, for nothing hangs on his belt and the scapular that crosses his shoulders is thin and threadbare and was never smart to begin with.

They nod at him, ever cheerful. ‘The Maid has ink.’

‘Then I am at your service.’

‘Follow us.’ They are not trained to ride; they pull their horses round the way men pull gun carts. It would make their not-sister crack her teeth in pain did she see it. Brother Tomas follows across the field to the royal tents. The king is here, and his councillors. Some way to their left stands a smaller pavilion, flung open at the front, with a desk inside, a chair, a dented helm, abandoned in the process of being hammered out, and an armoured figure.

‘In there.’ The elder boy points.

The younger says, ‘We will see to your siphon,’ and they are gone, and Tomas is alone before her tent.