Into The Fire (19 page)

The door behind them sighs shut. An electronic lock snicks into place. Picaut feels the afterburn of the interview sing through her veins. A glance to her left shows Christelle Vivier standing loose-fisted, staring into nowhere.

Picaut says, ‘I think they call it an ambush.’

‘What? Who?’

‘Television executives. This. What happened. It’s the aim of every current affairs producer to have one ambush per week and we were it. Don’t worry, Troy will be ecstatic. You said all he could have asked for.’

Troy Cordier, the
Front National
’s Aryan-blond attack-dog of a campaign manager, is an enigma. His record is entirely clean: not once has he been in any extremist party, but there are whispers upon whispers and they all say that he has channelled money to the Golden Dawn movement in Greece, and to the EDL in England, and that he is the kind who will cleanse Orléans by force if he is ever given the chance. If Christelle is not afraid of him, she is stupid, and she has just shown herself far from that.

There could be a moment’s connection; the edge of it is there, in spite of everything, a whisper of empathy, of adversity shared. Picaut has no idea how old Christelle is. She hovers somewhere in that ageless space between twenty-five and forty-five when women change only their wardrobe. Hers is chosen for her, and is no indicator of anything. Just now, with her mask down, she looks at the very low end of that range, a vulnerable young woman, out of her depth in an increasingly vicious political war.

Then the door opens and Troy Cordier is there, with his blond hair a halo around his head and his teeth perfect. When he smiles, sharks cower.

Christelle spins to face him. Her hair spins with her, a weapon and a cloak. Her face closes over; her mouth sets back in its line. Age settles on her, and a loathing that relishes the fight ahead.

‘Five days.’ She makes a half turn back and points her finger at Picaut. Her voice is shrill. She
is
afraid of Troy Cordier. ‘We have five days until the polls open. Tell Landis Bressard that this is a beginning, not an end. Tell him we shall have Orléans, and when we do, there will be no place here for him. Or his family.’

I am not his family. Picaut thinks but doesn’t say this. She watches Christelle Vivier stalk out on to the street to be absorbed into the heart of Troy’s team, the perfectly sharp young men and women in their perfectly tailored suits and wraparound shades. These are her Praetorian Guard, ready to whisk her off to the next appearance. Picaut has nobody to greet her. She was afraid the Bressards might have sent a limousine, but they have had the sense not to. She walks back to the car park and takes the long route in to work.

Orléans is slowly waking to another Tuesday morning. No demonstrators wreck the streets. But one of the three posters of Christelle Vivier by the cathedral has been replaced with a shot of Picaut in the shimmering bronze dress. There are no words; none are necessary. The heavy lifting has been done; people are free to draw their own conclusions.

Driving through town, she sees the same poster at least eight times, always overlaying one that previously showed Christelle, and when she stops to pick up
Le Monde
on the way into the station, she sees that the early editions have been replaced and that La Nouvelle Pucelle has lost its question mark.

A scrum of press photographers has gathered outside the front door of the police station and there’s very little hope they’re waiting for anyone else.

Fuck.

Fuck and fuck and fuck them all. Fuck their mothers and their grandmothers. Fuck their ancestors back twenty-three generations.

In a foul temper, she dumps her car in the marked slot and sprints up the steps with her head down, dodging the flashing cameras.

RHEIMS IS IN
celebratory mood. Until yesterday loyal to the English crown, the city is now resolutely, overwhelmingly, ecstatically French, rolling out all manner of pageantry to mark the consecration of his august majesty, King Charles VII.

If the fountains do not yet flow with hippocras as they did at Troyes on the occasion of the king’s sister’s marriage to Henry of England, it is only because those who might have made it happen did not have sufficient warning.

A month ago, nobody believed the king would safely come this far north. Even a week ago, there was every chance that Bedford might raise an army to match the Maid’s and march to meet her.

But he didn’t and he hasn’t and now the Maid is in a hurry, so the mould is being sponged from the banners that celebrated the last coronation nearly fifty years ago, and the velvets are shaken out and steamed and young women with bony fingers stitch pearls on to stiffened collars and mount scarlet and lemon silk on high, conical bonnets and the sun is out, blessing it all, which proves that God is on their side.

Regnault de Chartres, Archbishop of Rheims, returns to his see, which is a sight to behold in itself. In theory, he is ecstatic to be reunited with his flock; certainly, he must appear so.

He is not good, though, at dissimulation. The smile he has fixed on his face bears the look of one who has strained many hours to pass a stool and been interrupted partway through its completion. His cheeks are ruddy, his face sweats. When, in the robing room of the cathedral, he finds himself happily alone with Brother Tomas, he lets drop the pretence and smashes his fist off the oak panelling in sheer frustration.

‘This was not supposed to happen.’

‘But it has.’

‘What do I do?’ This is the first time they have dared to meet alone, but the ciphered letters have been fulsome in their detail of the archbishop’s distress.

Today, it is evident that Regnault de Chartres has not been sleeping. His skin has the translucency of age; the folds beneath his eyes could nest a dormouse. He winds his hands one round the other.

‘Bedford will sew me in a leather sack and throw me in the Seine if I anoint the snivelling little bastard with the oil of Clovis. It’s sacred, do you understand? The kings of France have been marked with this oil since before there was a France. You can’t undo it. Nobody can.’

‘My lord of Bedford understands. Just do what you must. It matters more that the king trusts you and listens to you. We have to destroy the Maid before we can destroy the king and that won’t happen overnight.’

Tomas pats the archbishop’s arm. He is the kindly uncle, the priest with the penitent, finding words that will work to the right end. ‘It’ll all be over in a year, you’ll see. Just don’t let them march on Paris after.’

‘How might I stop them, pray? The little whore doesn’t listen to me. She doesn’t listen to anyone except her “father in heaven”.’ The archbishop rolls his eyes skywards. One might almost think him angry with his god, were he not one of those who helped make the latest pope. He knows that God’s will is what he says it is.

Tomas shrugs, a man of the world. ‘But the king listens to you, and he holds the purse strings. He gives the orders. He will listen to her less once he is consecrated. He doesn’t want Paris. And he doesn’t need it. He must be made to see that it is not in his interests to take it by force. Begin peace negotiations with Philip of Burgundy.’

‘Burgundy? Are you mad? He thinks Charles ordered the assassination of his father. He’s sworn to see the entire house of Valois ground to dust and blood.’

‘Even so.’ Tomas ticks off the reasons, finger by finger. ‘He is the king’s cousin. Notionally, he holds Paris for the English. Send word that the Maid won’t be allowed to attack Paris if Burgundy agrees not to harass the king.’

‘Harass the king? That girl has twelve thousand armed men at her back and all of them begging God to let them kill an Englishman. Only a fool would go near them!’

‘But the king doesn’t know that. Burgundy’s a knight. He’s proved he can fight. The king isn’t and hasn’t. Make sure the boy knows that you’re all that stands between him and a big man with a mace.’

‘And the Maid?’

‘We shall destroy the Maid, you and I. But we need time to find out who she is …’

‘I know only that she is not what she claims. She is a liar and a heretic.’

‘Then we shall prove it, and in proving it, destroy her. You do your part; I’ll do mine.’

He leaves carefully and is accordingly late for his next meeting, in the stables behind his lodgings. The location may be unoriginal, but he has learned the value of setting his meetings in stables; high born or low, horses will always tell you if someone is to be trusted.

He has a new horse now, a wall-eyed chestnut mare, on loan from the Maid so that he might not overturn his vows of poverty by ownership. She flicks her ears at him, and rests her off hind, wary, but not restless; here are new, unknown men, but not yet danger.

The butcher and his son who sit on the upturned barrels rubbing oil into a headpiece are not overly concerned with his punctuality or lack of it; there is enough silver involved in their current transaction for time to matter exactly as much as he says it does.

They set aside the harness as he enters. Their flat, hard gazes follow him from door to stall to the wall-eyed mare. They are big men, easy with their knives, dressed alike in unremarkable wool and a soft leather jerkin. You wouldn’t look twice at them in the street, but they stand in balance, and the son has a knife in his boot.

They could kill Tomas, probably, or at least make his life briefly difficult. He comforts himself with the thought that Bedford’s men are picked for their level heads and they wouldn’t attack him in here even if they were sure he needed to die. He leans into the mare, speaks from the far side of her neck.

‘The Maid. Watch her. Follow her. I want to know where she goes when she’s not with the king; who she speaks to, who her friends are, her enemies; everything and everyone. Bring it to me here, daily, at this time.’

They nod, get ready to go. They haven’t spoken a word. He doesn’t know if they’re French or English. Or anything else. They could be German, Italian, Genoese, Venetian; there’s a market for foreign mercenaries now. They make no sound as they walk to the door. They could be ghosts. He says, ‘It may be that I bump into her in the street. It may be that I require your help. Be ready.’

His next meeting is less salubrious, in an alley behind a tannery, where the vats of hide soak in urine and faeces and the air furs his tongue and pricks tears to his eyes.

The small man he meets there looks as if he feeds off the scent, cuts it up and chews it, and nothing else.

‘Stefan.’ A hand raised in greeting. He suspects that Stefan is not his name, but he doesn’t want to know the truth. Bedford has sent him to ferret out the Maid’s past and he is here to report what he has found to the man who most needs to know.

‘How went Domrémy?’ Tomas asks. Domrémy is the Maid’s home village, so she says.

A shrug. ‘You’re not going to like it.’

‘Why? You found a maid who is the Maid?’

‘I found a village full of people who think themselves blessed by God to have harboured a prodigy. They all remember Jeannette growing from her childhood through her youth, and not one of them has anything to say about her you wouldn’t want to hear about your sister.’

‘They may be lying. Yolande of Aragon’s men brought her to Chinon. There may be southern silver behind their stories.’

Stefan spreads his hands, sits on the edge of a foul vat. ‘If it is, there’s enough of it to stand up to gold, wine and … affection.’

Affection? Jesu. It’s better not to ask with whom. In any case, it hardly matters because this one thing takes Tomas’s careful theories and destroys them. He falls back against a wall and doesn’t care that it will stain his cassock.

‘She is real? The Maid is from Lorraine? It’s all true?’

That shrug again. ‘In Domrémy there was a maid. And now there is a Maid in Rheims who leads the army. Her father, her brothers all agree they are one and the same. Who is going to say they are wrong?’

Bertrand de Poulangy, Yolande’s man, might do so, if he were pressed in the right way. But it would take blood and pain and possibly many days, which Tomas does not have. Yolande herself, the king’s mentor, saviour and mother-in-law, might be manoeuvred into speaking, but she has kept away from the consecration, perhaps to avoid anyone asking exactly this. He has only one real hope.

He holds out a coin. Silver glimmers. He says, ‘There is a girl called Claudine; straw-coloured hair, a burn on her hand. She used to service the soldiers. Her brother, Matthieu, died on the day the Maid first came to Chinon. These two were wards of the old king. Find me Claudine. She’s an army whore and the army is celebrating. She won’t be far.’

The coin is gone and ‘Stefan’ with it, and Tomas is out, and striding in clean air, trying to shed the stench that clings like a suit.

The anointing of King Charles VII of France takes place on the seventeenth of the month, a spectacle of gold and glitter, a pageant of furs and feathers, of silk and damask and velvet, of calf’s hide and kid’s hide and gold and silver, turquoise and diamond, emerald, ruby and sapphire.

Lacking only Yolande of Aragon, who claims a head cold, the lords and ladies of France gather in the cathedral of Rheims from early morning. Tomas slides in at the back and worms his way forward until he has a view to the front, where stand the lords and the archbishop, the king, and the Maid.

Her armour shines. Today, it could be cast of solid silver, set off with a surcoat of cloth of gold, boots of tooled calf hide and a coat braided with gold thread. Above all of that shines her smile. If she has been on occasion taciturn, moody, angry, vengeful, wrathful, today she is exultant, prideful, blazing with an arrogance nothing and no one can dull.

He cannot blame her. She is, what, twenty-three? Maybe twenty-four at a push. She has fought with blade and axe and lance, but she has also fought the detractions of Regnault de Chartres and his allies. She has submitted more than once to the intimate intrusions of those who would ascertain that she is truly a maid, known by no man. She has been called a whore and a heretic, has been questioned for ten days without break by dusty old men whose sole qualification was gained in Paris in their youth and who concluded at the end, not that she came to the king with God’s blessing, but that they couldn’t prove she didn’t.