Into The Fire (31 page)

Hardly. Not now. He says, ‘You won’t get back to la Chapelle like this, and we can’t pull any of the knights off the field. I’ll take you. Your squire will help.’

The friends of her childhood are gathered round her now. D’Alençon takes the standard back and hands it to Jean de Belleville. He lays a hand on her shoulder. ‘My lady, you were hit before, at les Tourelles, at Jargeau. We won there, both times, and we shall win here, now. Nobody will say God has abandoned you.’

Around them is a moment’s darkness, a keening desolation. She hovers on the borderlands of death.

Her eyes grow dull.

She says, ‘The king, maybe. But not God.’

AT DUSK TOMAS
is alone at her bedside, in her sick room in the inn at la Chapelle.

She would have preferred her tent, but she is royal in all respects that matter and there are appearances that must be maintained. Thus Tomas has brought her to this room with its stone floor, and windows shuttered against the ill humours of the day, and dark, heavy furniture, a hundred years old, pushed back against the walls. Candles fret and droop in the four corners of the room, and a brazier sulks by the bed, barely hot enough to cook more valerian and melt the honey into it.

Brother Tomas is the epitome of compassion and practical care. He has had the mattress dragged out and burned and a fresh one filled with straw they brought from Rheims; it carries neither lice nor mould.

He has had water drawn from the well, and his medicine box retrieved from his tent. He has had her page remove her armour and then sent the lad off to grieve in the chapel for his slain brother.

He has mixed poppy, hemlock and henbane, juice of lettuce and gall of a gelded boar into a mix that sends her so completely to sleep that her squire is not required even to hold her shoulders still, and can instead help to hold the tourniquet on her leg while Tomas works the honeyed Musselman spoons down around the bolt’s head, until he can grasp it and draw it out without doing further damage to her thigh.

The tourniquet, once released, spews out gouts of dark blood, but he plugs beeswax and linen in the wound and binds it tightly and makes sure he can still feel the throb of life at the crook of her ankle that will keep her foot vital. He thinks she will not die of this if he can keep the wound from festering. She must not die yet; it would undo all he has worked for.

It is evening by the time they are done, and her squire is as grey as his mistress, with fatigue and hunger. Tomas sends him off to see to the Maid’s devil-horse and then feed himself, and is left to care for her alone.

He is mixing possets of lavender and honey with the bitter poppy beneath when d’Alençon knocks and enters. In the gold-red light their eyes meet, two men united in grief.

Tomas asks, ‘How went the day?’ He keeps his countenance sober, but his heart thrums with the nearness of everything. It takes more effort than it has ever done to keep his knowledge tight to his chest.

D’Alençon leans back on the door, holding it closed. ‘We have not broken through, but we shall. The men are in good heart. My lord of Montmorency has joined us with fifty men at arms and their retainers.’

A day before and that might have turned the whole battle. Montmorency is good, but he comes too late. Tomas says, ‘With their help, and God’s, we will prevail.’

‘Indeed. And the Maid?’ D’Alençon crosses to her bed. Without asking, he pulls up a stool, a clumsy, brutal affair in heavy oak with a padded seat that might once have been velvet, but has since seen the slide of ten thousand buttocks and is worn to threads. He sits at her side and picks up her hand as if he were her husband, father, brother. He has known her since childhood. It never does to forget that. If anyone knows her truth, d’Alençon does.

Tomas says, ‘She sleeps. I have given her that which will keep her free of pain until morning. My lord, have you eaten?’

‘Not yet.’ The duke waves his other hand. ‘There was rumour of a goat stew out there somewhere.’

‘Stay with her. I shall see to it.’ He wants d’Alençon relaxed and he won’t be relaxed until he has eaten, and Tomas has heard the same rumour.

Men are clumped near the door of the inn. He tells them what they need to hear. ‘The Maid is well. She recovers. She hears how you fought and is pleased with it.’ This is true in spirit if not exactly in fact. She has that skill of the best commanders, of making each man in her army feel as if she has singled him out for her especial attention.

The goat stew has been boiled with barley meal and beans. He tracks down better wine, clean well-water, pewter goblets. Returning, he lays them out on a board, with a linen cloth beneath.

‘My lord …’

A spoon. A bowl. Good, plain, mouth-aching food. He knows how it is after battle, the desperate gnawing hunger that hits as soon as the threat is gone.

‘Tomas, what would we do without you?’

‘Much the same, I suspect. She is the one we cannot do without.’

She is unconscious, black lashes stark against white cheeks. D’Alençon is eating and cannot reply. Then he is drinking and cannot reply. The moments tick past. Soon, it will be too late. Come on. Come
on …

At last, he looks up, and Tomas can ask the first of his questions. He has to ease into this with great caution, but doors are open now that were not before.

‘Does the king know that the Maid was a ward of his father?’

D’Alençon looks down at his hands.

Tomas says, ‘Claudine came to me for confession. She had been …’

‘Servicing the men?’

‘That, obviously. But she had also drunk too much. On my life, I have told nobody.’ He raises his right hand. This is the truth: he has not sent his knowledge to Bedford yet; some things, he must deliver in person.

D’Alençon looks at him squarely, thinks for a while, nods. The duke has grown into himself these past months: he is better fleshed, his skin no longer prison-jaundiced, his heart shows in his eyes. ‘If he doesn’t, he’s a fool.’

‘I’m not certain, my lord, that the question is therefore answered.’ He could die for that; beheading is the wages of treason.

D’Alençon doesn’t look like a man planning an execution. He eats more of the stew, sucking the juices off his spoon, drumming the index finger of his left hand on his knee. ‘I think he must do. Why else did he prevaricate over Paris?’

‘Does he think she will be a challenge to him? To his kingship?’

‘Don’t you?’ The bowl is on the floor and d’Alençon is up, pacing, restless as a tethered bear. He reaches a wall and blindly spins. ‘The old king didn’t make her what she is, but he saw the potential and nurtured it. She has every part of his understanding of battle, of his martial valour. He may have been mad, but he was a great knight, a great horseman, a great tactician. She is all of these, and they are not tainted by his madness. She hasn’t lost a battle yet, unless she loses this one, and if she does it’ll be only because she wasn’t allowed to attack when the army was at its strongest. If she were a man, she’d be on the throne by now. As it is, the man who marries her, if he has any royal blood in him, if he has ridden once into battle this year, is clearly more of a king than the man who hides behind the robes of his archbishop and claims that he wants peace through treaties. Treaties!’ D’Alençon’s laugh would strip the skin from the king, were he here.

‘His godforsaken treaties have given Bedford time to bring in three thousand more men and build up the defences of Paris to the point where it is well-nigh impregnable. If we’d attacked in July, with the holy oil still wet on his skin, we’d have taken it without effort. Now—’ His closed fist rebounds off his palm. ‘Now we are going to have to rely on Jean-Pierre and his gunners to pound the gate of Saint-Honoré tomorrow to draw them all away from Saint-Denis so the rest of us can endeavour to break in. I tell you, if you hadn’t built us that bridge, we’d be in sore—’

A knock at the door.

All talking stops.

Briefly, the shadow of a shameful death stalks the walls; they both know this is treason and even dukes may be executed for lèse-majesté.

Tomas rises. Can whoever is there hear through this door? He thinks not. It is so old, so heavy, so intricately carved, that it must be a barrier to all but the most forcefully projected words.

The Maid’s squire sways from foot to foot in the doorway. ‘A message for my lord d’Alençon. One is here who would speak to him.’

‘He’s too busy.’

‘Not for this. It’s Regnault de Chartres. He comes directly from the king.’

The king has gone back to Compiègne, where he is safe from possible assault. Nobody has named this cowardice. Not aloud.

D’Alençon is standing by the bedside, his hand on the shoulder of the sleeping Maid, his gaze upon her face.

Tomas turns to him. ‘My lord, you must go.’ D’Alençon looks up. His whole heart is in his eyes, his yearning, his fierce, prideful ache and want.

With care, as one in the presence of an unknown hound, Tomas says, ‘Regnault de Chartres, my lord. Go to him. Find what he wants. Find a way to …’

He loses the words. How often has he imagined this? How hard is it now? Much harder than he ever imagined.

He flaps a hand towards the door, a useless gesture. D’Alençon reads into it what he needs.

‘Yes. Of course. D’Aulon, lead me.’

They go. Tomas sits where d’Alençon lately sat, on the ugly, threadbare stool, by the low bed in the stifling air. The candles seethe in the corner, giving off light the colour of goat’s urine. The brazier is all but dead. He lifts her hand, lays it down again, covers his face.

He waits for elation to hit. And waits. It must come, surely, because this is it, his final stratagem, the keystone in the arch of his planning.

Somewhere in a room not far from here, Regnault de Chartres, archbishop of Rheims, is sitting in close conference with Duc Jean d’Alençon, prince of the blood, unwinding at length the final denouement, the knife in the back that will finish the Maid and all she stands for.

He thinks of his bridge. It isn’t a miracle of engineering, but it is solid, and competent and built to exacting specifications, with places at either end under which a man or two might hide, or a gunpowder keg be left. Blown in these two places, its back will break and fall with some neatness into the river. He would like to have seen it, just to know he had done it right.

The Maid stirs on the bed. He did not plan for her injury, but it does mean that he, Tomas, the architect of her downfall, might yet be the one to break the news to her.

He rehearses the words in his head. My lady, you have lost everything: the bridge, battle, the war, your credibility as an agent of God. Your army has been stood down. Your campaign is over. You are nothing now but a chimera, a girl who dresses in armour and fights like a man. You cross halfway to heresy simply by rising from bed each morning, and when they discover your lies the crossing will be complete. How long before they burn you?

Not yet; she sleeps still, although her face is regaining its colour. Life blooms on her cheeks. Images cluster in his head, float in the forefront of his mind: the Maid at Jargeau, laughing after her fall; at Patay, before the charge, locked in white armour, lance aloft, joy alive in her eyes. And something more: the touch of royalty, a mind tutored by a king.

He thought she was the young Henry, coming to her Agincourt, and he was not so far wrong. He remembers Troyes, and the filling of the moat. He stands again before Bedford’s massed armies at Montépilloy and watches her put her devil-horse through its paces while not a knight in the entire English army dares accept her challenge.

He hates Bedford. More, he despises him. The understanding of this has been for some time at the edge of his awareness. He does hate Bedford. And he does not hate the Maid as he did.

Sitting at her side, he lifts her hand again. As at Jargeau, the jolt strikes him to his heart. Unlike at Jargeau, he does not let go. Counting the passing minutes, he wonders what part Regnault de Chartres has reached, whether d’Alençon knows yet that it is all over.

They will have to send the good duke away. Normandy will do; anywhere far from the Maid where she and the duke cannot conspire. D’Alençon loves her. Is it any wonder? What man wouldn’t, having seen her at war? What man wouldn’t, having seen the spark of her courage? What man …?

His heart is suddenly empty, aching, wretched. He feels as d’Alençon looked, and when he rubs the knuckle of his thumb across his cheek, it comes away wet.

He blows his nose on his sleeve. He grips her hand. Without any great thought, he lifts it, kisses the knuckles, just a brush of his lips to her cracked, bruised skin. And thus is he lost.

In the space of one breath, his heart turns over. His guts invert themselves, inside to out, outside to in. The marrow of his bones, which is writ in its oaken heart with the names of Bedford and England, breaks apart and comes together anew and the names it writes are no longer English.

The Maid. France. Jehanne d’Arc.

My love.

He feels himself falling; an old sensation, newly returned.

Once, a long time ago, when a nine-year-old boy named Tomas de Segrave thought he knew who his father was, before he understood the meaning of the word bastard, or how to fight others who used it as an insult, before he saw his mother die, before he left Normandy for England and a better life, long, long before he grew a beard and was named for its hue; back then, in his innocence, he played with other boys through summer and into winter.

There came one white winter, with water made stone, and the lake solid as a limestone cliff, laid flat out between the hills. The boys carved skates from the leavings of the carpenter’s shop and raced each other from side to side and back again, swan-gliding across milky ice under a sky of such perfect, aching blue that it might have been poured by God from His own vessel.

He does not know what it is to be unhappy, and so he does not treasure the happiness, but he does sing the song his not-father has taught him and it is like this, skating, singing, laughing, that he comes to the cracked place in the ice.