Into The Fire (22 page)

He is following, has gone three dozen steps, when he sees her: the Maid.

She is not in cloth of gold now; no gilt or silver, precious little shine, except it’s still there about her temples and the cut of her collarbones, a fine eldritch glow that lifts her as she walks, makes her seem as if she is floating.

She’s done her best to hide herself: dressed in dark hose and a doublet, a belt with one knife and that old, a cap that hides most of her shining black hair. If you only looked at her clothes, you’d think she looked like a stable boy; even her boots are scuffed and worn through at the heels. So you
were
a horse boy. I believed it before. Now, I know it. Perhaps a horse breaker, too. These two are not incompatible.

Tomas, who knows what it takes to change his looks, admits to a small flicker of … something. He calls it interest. He will not admit to admiration of her, who is the destruction of all he holds dear. Nobody else seems to notice her, which is good.

She, too, is following this man who claims to be her father. Tomas has not time to call back the butcher and his son. He has to hope she doesn’t see them, but that hope is dashed.

She doesn’t stop and turn, or run after them, or shout; nothing so obvious. She sidesteps into an alley where the grey dusk light is dimmed to night darkness, and from there she watches, and does not follow.

Which means he must watch her, and not follow. And not be seen.

She is good. He is better. He is not seen, but he loses sight of the red feathers in the jaunty little cap and the two flat-faced butchers who follow it.

The problem with his guise as an Augustinian friar is that he has to wear white. It may be a trifle dusty now, with mud at the hem and the occasional spot of blood from some broken nose or other from men overwrought with heat and lack of English to fight, but the stains are not what you’d call concealing and so he has to keep well to the shadows. He sees the Maid vacate her alleyway and they drift northeast, back towards the cathedral, a dark-clad horse boy and his off-white shadow.

The butcher and his son have made themselves scarce. He can feel them, but can’t see them; they are a malevolence in the night and the Maid can feel them too. She leads him a circular route that jinks in and out of alleys, and by the end of it the sense of a knife-thrust heading for his kidneys has faded away.

The night is nearly dark when she comes to a particular door, old, with peeling paint, no other distinguishing marks, and raps on it a particular rhythm with her knuckle.

Inside, a man is snoring. It could be her father, or it could be almost any man in Rheims. Whoever he is, he jerks awake at her knock, cursing foully. If the Maid heard him, she’d have him on his knees with a priest in a heartbeat confessing his sin, but this is not the Maid, not outwardly. To anyone watching, this is a youth in dark hose and a cap with a knife at his belt. The door opens.

‘Oh, it’s you.’

Tomas watches them meet: the man who has spent all day celebrating the good fortune of his daughter, and … his daughter. They stare at one another. This is not their first meeting, but nor is it a heartfelt reuniting. He does not invite her in.

She goes anyway, a foot in the door and then a shoulder. She
is
taller than him, and leaner, and while she does not look like him any more than she looks like her ‘brothers’, she has the same air as the butcher and his son: she could kill this man and not feel the need to confess it after.

The man backs away. She kicks the door shut with her heel. Damnation. Still, it is an old hovel and they are not known for the solidity of their walls. This one is made of thin brick held by sour old mortar easily picked at, a door that has warped in the summer’s heat, shutters that she closes. But they don’t shut tight.

The cottage stands at the end of the line, so Tomas can slide round the side, out of sight. Inside, the Maid lights a candle, which is just perfect, because the thing about standing in almost-darkness is that slivers of light snick through the gaps, little gifts to eye and ear, so that he can press his eye here and cup his hand there, and if he is not quite in the room with the two of them, he is not so far off.

The Maid’s candle sits within a lantern, its light cut by the frame. Blades of black and silver slice across the wall. Tomas sees straw strewn on the floor, an unlit fire by the door, cobwebs everywhere. A wooden bench, a table, a fat candle, wilting, and Jacques d’Arc propped at an angle, his arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle, leering at the girl.

He looks her up and down and when he speaks, it has the air of something he has planned for many months; the words come out folded over themselves, kneaded into shapelessness from the times he has practised them in his head. Tomas hears them with perfect clarity.

‘I could tell the king who you are.’

The Maid leans against the door, holding it tight shut. Something moves on the room’s far side, becomes a scarlet and gold cockerel, and three shabby hens scratching for grit in the dirt. Her attention is all on them; this man is not worthy of even a look. She laughs.

Jacques bristles. ‘I can!’

‘Do you really think he doesn’t know?’

Outside Tomas holds his breath. Say it. Say your name. It’s all I need to know and then I have everything.
Say it!

She doesn’t. Even here, she is careful.

The man who is not her father says, ‘Regnault de Chartres doesn’t know. Men say he is your enemy.’

‘Certainly he thinks I’m a fraud. He has said so repeatedly and in all kinds of company. He questioned me for ten days, trying to prove it.’

‘He’ll pay, then, for that proof.’

‘He might do. But he has just held the crown for the king, has just had the chance to dip his needle in the oil of Clovis; the first archbishop so to do for forty-nine years. He may prefer that the whole of Christendom not laugh at him for a fool.’

‘He would see you burn.’

‘And you, possibly, for having waited so long to tell anyone.’

The Maid turns away from the window. Jacques d’Arc takes a step away from her, lifts his hands as if she has just unsheathed her blade. Sweat leaks down his brow. His mouth moves but no more words fall out. The spiders have caught them all, hung them out in dried husks on the laceworks that droop in the corners of the room.

She says, ‘The king will honour you and your family: a stipend, and a family name.’

Jacques’ eyes flare. He is avarice made mortal. A knife in the gut would do the world a service. ‘How much? What name?’

‘In amount, twice what the old king gave when you took Hanne in. As to the name, that is up to the new king, but you will be noble, and your sons after you.’

Hanne. There’s a warmth in the name, the first time Tomas has heard the Maid speak of someone as if she cares. So the mad king paid this oaf to take in … Who? A waif? Another of the many orphans of Agincourt? Were there so many he had not room under his own roof?

Whatever the reason, the payment must have been good, because Jacques likes what he hears. His eyes bulge.

‘When will this happen?’

‘Before the year’s end.’

It is July. The year’s end is six months away. Jacques grunts, calculating days and dates and how much else he can ask.

Tomas is increasingly inclined to use his knives to good effect on this man. He is not surprised, therefore, when the Maid slides her hand under her cloak and pulls out what hides there, only disappointed that it is not cold iron. The old man flinches, even when he sees it is a copy of the testaments.

She sets it on the table, a challenge. ‘You will lay your hand on this now and speak an oath to hold secret all that you know. If that oath is broken, I swear by all that is holy that you will die, and not swiftly.’

Oh, nicely done!

Jacques’ tongue smears across his lips. ‘You are more likely to die before me. You insist on riding into battle like a man, against God’s will. What then?’

The Maid laughs again, a sound that scorns every breath he takes. ‘If it were not God’s will, I could not do it. And if I die, that shall be His will also. But trust me when I tell you that there will be those left alive whose pleasure in life will be to kill you and all you hold dear. You won’t know their names, and you will not know when they will come, but no amount of gold in the world will bring you to life again, I promise you this.’

Outside, Tomas thinks he will remember that line, and use it. He also thinks that what she says is true. Bertrand de Poulangy would kill for her, and Jean d’Alençon, and Jean d’Aulon, her squire, or indeed any one of twelve thousand men at arms who would kill any man they thought was a threat to her without needing to know the detail.

Inside, Jacques too knows the truth when he hears it. His tongue lies trapped between his lips. His eyes disappear with the effort of his thinking.

She says, ‘You understand? Your immortal soul will suffer if you break this oath.’

Jacques doesn’t care. He is about to be free of her. He discovers his courage. ‘Twice what I was paid before, or I go to the archbishop.’

It’s extortion, but he gets what he wants. She nods. He lays his hand on the bible and swears to keep his truth and it would be a very brave man who would risk his soul’s chance of heaven after that.

The Maid leaves as quietly as she came. Tomas lets her go ahead and follows at a good distance. At a certain point, he feels the tingle at his kidneys which tells him the butcher and his son are back again, ghosting along some distance back. Sometime later, they cut in ahead of him, and he can fall back and let them take over.

She’s heading back to the king’s lodgings, anyway, which is of limited value. Half the court is lodged there, or close to it. If there’s a Hanne amongst the wives and daughters, Tomas hasn’t heard of her. But he will.

This is his new project: to find the girl who was raised in Domrémy. He runs her name in his mind, repeating it in the way he heard it said. So subtle a thing that if he had breathed out at the wrong moment, slid the wool of his tunic against the shutter, he wouldn’t have caught the change in the tenor of the Maid’s voice, the deep, rough edge of care. Hanne matters.

Hanne matters and so he, Tomas, will find her and he will chain her, with gold if he can, with iron if necessary, and then the Maid herself will give up her name.

‘…
CAN REST ASSURED THAT
we are doing everything we can to find the killers of Dr Iain Holloway and bring them to justice. I have every faith in Capitaine Picaut. She is one of our foremost investigators and it is to her credit that we already know the identity of the man who was left faceless and nameless in a burned-out hotel. We shall honour his memory in the best way we know how: by finding those who left him to die.’

Ducat does this well. The big-windowed press room in his office has the cathedral as its backdrop and he has positioned the podium so that every photograph will show him set against the towering spires of
his
city.

More important from Picaut’s point of view, his sheer bulk is armour against the press pack clustered below the small stage. Half of them are British, relishing the horror of a Scotsman murdered in a French fire. They think in monosyllables and have fastened on to the latest new-Maid meme with the tenacity of leeches.

The French press, tutored carefully by Luc, are not noticeably more sane. There are only so many columns you can devote to asking who Jaish al Islam might be and dissecting its possible motives; only so many times you can admire Christelle Vivier and her
Front National
opportunism while asking guarded questions as to their long-term aims.

Picaut is their gift from heaven, and if they treat her with more respect than the British press, it is out of awe for the woman whose mantle they have thrown on her back.

Ducat steps off the podium. His defensive line collapses, and lets them at her. Neon lights glint on their cameras, as on helmets in battle. She steps up on to the boards and into a wall of sound.

‘Capitaine?’

‘Capitaine Picaut!’

‘Inès!’ An English reporter from the
Mail
thinks he’ll catch her off guard like this. Already she hates him and she doesn’t even know what he looks like, only the sound of his voice.

‘Capitaine Picaut, how does it feel to be the new Maid of Orléans?’

She doesn’t smile. Ducat advised against it when they met in his office.
The Bressards have cast you in a light of their devising, but you don’t have to feed the frenzy they have started. Be yourself. They will all have seen your display this morning, but most of their audience won’t, so bear that in mind as you answer.

As herself, then, or as close as she can be, she says what she said this morning, only in a different order. ‘It feels the same as it did when you pinned the same title on Christelle Vivier. It wasn’t true then; it isn’t true now. I am a police officer and it’s my job to find who’s lighting these fires; and since the weekend I have also to find the killers of Iain Holloway. I will accomplish both tasks better if I’m left to get on with them.’

She speaks through a cloudburst of camera flashes. If she were prone to epilepsy, this is when she would be on the floor, foaming. Because of the bouncing light, and the flashes, she doesn’t see Luc until he’s standing beside her, his arm draped loosely on the podium next to hers, not quite touching.

He smiles, nods to a couple of men, and a woman, and like that, effortlessly, he has them holding their breath to see which amongst them will receive his next blessing. They fall silent. The flashes continue, but fewer and further between.

The quality of their attention means that his words have a peculiar intimacy, as if he were speaking to each of them in private; each hears, therefore, as if alone.

‘There comes a point when you have to accept that this is the twenty-first century, not the fifteenth. The Maid was a remarkable woman. So is my wife. But they are different, and as she says, she has a job to do. If, like me, you want her to succeed, you will give her the space – and the respect – to do it without any need to bring up the past. So now, if you’ve taken all the pictures you need, I think you might find it’s time to leave.’