Into The Fire (49 page)

He is a conscientious man. He draws a sheet over the body and pushes the gurney himself to the numbered racks of cold storage units. By the time he returns, Picaut has ground the coffee beans (Fortnum & Mason’s Ethiopian Tchembe, promising
an explosion of fruit aroma and an unusual cocoa-banana flavour
) and is filtering the first cup.

‘You got the picture of the skull?’

‘I did. I never thought Patrice would be sending me pictures of old relics, but this is entirely fascinating.’

He nudges the mouse to clear the screensaver and she sees the skull again, enlarged on the one-twenty screen that takes up half the wall. The green mould, the break at the back of the cranium – she knows these, as an old friend.

Éric asks, ‘This is from Iain Holloway’s chip?’

‘It’s the second file. Apparently he thought it might be the Maid.’

‘She was burned.’

‘I know. So we have to work out why an intelligent man with an obsession for detail thought it might not be impossible.’

The coffee has filtered through. They drink it black, because Éric thinks that adding milk and sugar is as barbarian as watering your Scotch. It has taken Picaut nearly two years for her mouth not to ache for the milk, but now she’s here it was worth the hell. She closes her eyes to the first taste and yes she can, more or less, taste a faint flavour of banana. She smiles, and finds Éric watching. ‘So,’ she says, ‘tell me about the skull. It’s a woman. I can tell that much: shape of cranium, ridge by the eyes … Those three cervical vertebrae look rough, as if she had arthritis in her neck, so I’m thinking she’s in her fifties at least, maybe more?’

Éric looks as if he wants to hug her, gets halfway there, thinks better of it and wraps his hands around his forearms. ‘You’re learning. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. So yes, she had arthritis in her neck, which, coupled with the dentition – she had all her teeth still, which is pretty good, though the teeth were loose in the sockets – makes her somewhere beyond middle-aged when she died. If I had to make a guess, I’d say possibly as far as mid- to late-sixties, but we’d need more of the body to go on and a proper forensic anthropologist. This is beyond my field. The right person could read this like a book.’

‘Have you got someone in mind?’

‘I did a preliminary search and came up with a certain Dr Iain Holloway, which is interesting, if not altogether useful. I can get you someone by this afternoon if it matters. Does it?’

‘Definitely. Whatever he may or may not have found, I’d bet my career that Iain Holloway died for this, which means someone, somewhere, wanted him silenced. I am prepared to believe the priest that it wasn’t the Church, but that still leaves a lot of people with a vested interest in maintaining the myth of Jeanne d’Arc, visionary peasant from Lorraine.’

‘I’ll find someone.’

‘Do. Thank you. Patrice says he’ll have answers from the chip by three. I’ll send them over if there’s anything relevant.’ She pours the coffee into a lidded travel mug. ‘Right now I have to sort out the clusterfuck that took out Christelle’s campaign this morning. Somebody sent us out chasing our arses and I intend to know who, why and how. Wish me luck.’

TOMAS’S WALL-EYED CHESTNUT
mare is breaking down. He has pushed her too hard, over ground that is baked to granite. He feels the jolt of an uneven pace when he is still three miles out of Rheims and he flogs her on, keeping the pace, watching the black sweat grow on her neck, smells the rank, sharp odours of pain, hears the groan and shudder in her outbreath, and pushes her on, and on, and on.

She is lame in both forelegs by the time he ducks in through the gate arch at Rheims. He pulls her up, drops the reins, throws himself off. The royal stables – which is to say the stables used by the royal party during its sojourn in the town – is on the left, three dozen stalls set in a square around a central fountain, with a tack room to one side, and grooms’ quarters along the northern, shaded boundary. He pulls at his purse as he runs in under the arch. A dark-haired horse boy steps out to greet him, face shaded against the sun.

‘The mare outside … a silver coin if you can bring her sound again. She’ll need to stand in a river for half a day, and she needs feeding. I need another horse to match her that I can ride out tomorrow. Four men will be here soon, bringing the Maid’s battle-horse. Make ready stables for five mounts. Find me rooms for four men. And …’ And find a tanner who calls himself Stefan, but that Tomas must do himself.

The boy is lean, angular, clear-eyed. His white teeth make indents along his lip. Was she like this once, the Maid? In her past, did she help men to find good mounts and send them on their way?

A shadow shivers in the sharp sun. It is nine days since she was taken. Tomas does not want to think what they have done to her since.

He throws coins to the boy, a tumble of wealth, cleanly caught. ‘You will want food, lord?’

Is he a lord, now? He has forsaken his monk’s attire, taken on doublet and hose, a clean linen shirt, calfskin boots, all sober, all the equal of anything Jean of Belleville might wear; or the Maid when she is not in her armour. ‘Yes. Food for five. And good wine.’

The day is hot. Going out into the town, he takes a top coat only for decency, not for the warmth. The wool is Flemish, dyed a dark, unprepossessing blue; he will have nothing of England now. He heads east, away from the gate, to the taverns he knew, and begins to ask questions, quietly, of men he cultivated when last he was here.

An hour later, he is in a stinking back alley. It is not the tannery – that would be unbearable – but even here the stench is a wall. ‘Stefan?’

‘Here.’ He is smaller, more stooped, his face more lined. And he is smiling. He steps out of the doorway that shelters him. ‘Bedford is happy. There’s a knighthood here for you if you play it right.’

‘So I should go to him.’ This is a jest and Stefan takes it as such; nobody goes to Bedford without a better reason than wanting to claim a knighthood. ‘Where is he?’

‘At Calais by now, I think. The whole of Europe knows about the Maid. Her trial needs to be a French thing: caught by the French, questioned by the French, executed by the French for heresy, and then where will be her false king? If she is a heretic, so is he, and his coronation last summer a sham. The day after she burns, Bedford will bring Henry of England to Rheims to be anointed with the holy oil. Until then, he will keep well away.’

‘What if the French king ransoms her?’ Tomas makes this sound like a bad thing.

‘He won’t. That door is closed. He will not offer ransom for her, and in return, the Duke of Burgundy will enter more fully into the “peace treaties” that the king has been asking for since his anointing last summer.’

‘Which will go nowhere.’ Of course. It is what he would plan, were he still planning this.

‘As you say.’ Stefan raises his palms, the very essence of regret. ‘After many months of negotiations, sadly, Burgundy will find itself still at war with France, and we shall assault their holdings, whatever is left to them. But the whore will be dead by then.’

Regnault de Chartres; this is his doing. Tomas lost the first handful of days after the Maid’s capture in hunting the archbishop, and failed to find him. One day—

‘What are you going to do?’ Stefan peels himself off the wall that has been holding him up, comes a step or two down the alley. There is barely space for the two of them, and barely light enough to see by, even in full summer afternoon sun.

Tomas shrugs. ‘My work is done. I’ll go to Bedford and collect my knighthood.’

He strives for nonchalance, but he is not as good as once he was. Stefan’s smile does not slip, the slant of his eyes does not narrow, his hands do not move to grasp the blade that must hide in his sleeve. Nothing is different, except that death hunts in the alley, where before it did not.

For one flickering moment, Tomas entertains the idea of death; the peace, the blessed release, not to lie awake another night with his eyes open, because in the dark, always, is the fire with the Maid at its heart.

It’s a wire, not a knife. Tomas can see the loop, faint as a dawn-dewed web, between the little man’s searching hands.

He takes a step back. Twenty paces round a left-hand bend to the alley’s mouth; it may as well be in England. Two blades, one in each sleeve, but this is not a cassock: his shirt cuffs are tighter and they are not so easily reached. The alley is empty; no rock, no rope, no broomstick, stave or cudgel. Stefan chose it, knowing Rheims; very likely he cleared it ahead of the meeting. It was sloppy of Tomas to allow it, and he cannot afford risk now.

My dear … while you live, I will not die.

He ducks, which is a risk, given there is a wire seeking his neck, but he goes left, where is a recess, probably a latrine pit, but no risk of falling in because this is a feint, although he must make it seem real, and – yes! – Stefan’s hands snap out, the wire sings of death between them, and Tomas is on the right, his own hands searching; he has no wire, but the way he’s feeling now, he doesn’t need one.

For just a heartbeat, the little man’s neck is hot between his palms, and then gone again, slipping away, a trout in winter water.

At least they are no longer pretending. Stefan smirks. Between feint and counter-feint, ‘Bedford knows you … are not his.’

‘If he did, you’d have come with more … men and more blades …’ Another miss, but closer; his hands sting from the wrench where Stefan pulled his woollen tunic free.

‘Why, when I can kill you alone? I needed only to be certain.’

This is a lie. Bedford has never needed certainty to push him to murder; a half shadow of a suspicion has ever been enough.

Another feint. Fast footwork, and it is Tomas who has felt the wire snap up past his face. He could lose his nose to this. He laughs, breathless, and takes two long steps forward. And trips on Stefan’s outflung foot, and falls into the filth of the alley’s floor, not baked hard here; the sun never reaches it.

He is face down, which is fatal. His left arm is trapped beneath him. He flails back with his right, grabs a leg, could pull, but doesn’t, slams on up to a groin not so far away – Stefan is a small man – and grabs a fist full of loose, dangling flesh.

A wrench, a twist, a shriek—

—and he rolls on to his left side, uses his handhold to pull himself up to his feet. Upright, he stamps on an outstretched knee, on the side, so that the bones angle away from him, the opposite of nature. He feels the grating pop of a joint snapped, hears the choked cry that goes with it.

And then his hands are about the other’s throat. The wire snakes about his feet. He could reach for it, but here is the closest he will get to killing Bedford with his bare hands. His heart sings to the crush of cartilage, flesh and blood, the sense of it pumping between his fingers.

With a vicious joy, he watches the branching veins swell and burst in the whites of the eyes; feels his enemy thrash and kick and gouge … and die.

Too soon. Too soon. And not soon enough.

He snaps his hands open. Stefan bounces dead at his feet.

The alley’s far end is a midden. He drags the body back and stuffs it in under old fish bones, a hog’s head, a dead dog. As an afterthought, he eases a blade from his left forearm, leans down and cuts off the small man’s cock in the universal sign of an adulterer.

Later, at the stables, he greets Louis de Coutes. Here, too, is Jean d’Arc, whose brother is in captivity along with the maid he calls his sister. With them are two Piedmontese who have proved themselves good horsemen and can at least lead the Maid’s devil-horse, if not actually ride it.

Tomas buys them a meal and wine, tells them what he has learned and sends them on their way: Jean d’Arc and Louis de Coutes to Chinon, to find Yolande of Aragon; the other two with him, heading west now, to Belleville-en-Poitou, where are de Belleville and Marguerite de Valois, sister of the King.

‘They took her to Beaulieu-les-Fontaines with d’Aulon and Pierre d’Arc. They kept her in the cellars, alone, but near to the others, so that she could hear them. She knocked unconscious a guard who came to feed her and nearly freed the two men; the Burgundians only caught her because another gaoler came and found her as she was trying to break down the door. They will move her now, away from the men. I think they may take her to Beaurevoir, to the seat of Luxembourg: it is safely in unFrench territory and she is owned now by Jean of Luxembourg, whose man captured her.’

Tomas’s news falls into a kind of horrified hush. He does not mention they will have mistreated her, they will have taken her armour and bound her limbs, they may have assaulted her; they are men and she a woman alone, who has angered them greatly. He is amongst intelligent company, these things do not need to be said.

He stands in silence, and waits. The meeting takes place in the library at Belleville, one of the few rooms of his host’s chateau not currently undergoing renovation and remodelling. Everywhere else is scaffolding, the discord of hammers and whistling, the scents of sawn wood and resin and paint.

Here is quiet, solid as winter fog. The books make it, and drink it up. On the shelves are the illuminations of centuries, thousands upon thousands of hours of candlelit work.

To his left, the
Roman de la Rose
grapples with Jean Gerson’s
Tract contra
. To his right, Herodotus, Homer, Horace, ordered by the alphabet. Their words slide out from the vellum folds, slink into corners, argue themselves into dust. Here is heresy. Here is piety. What man can tell the mind of God? What woman?

In the high-backed chairs on either side of the fire sit Marguerite and de Belleville, both of them lacking sleep. The lady, moreover, has patches on the knees of her gown, where she has knelt often and long in supplication. Her fingers are raw from telling beads, from touching icons, her skin is translucent from fasting.

Also in the room, not seated, are the priest Huguet Robèrge, who stands always a little to the left of his lord; and Yolande of Aragon, mother-in-law to the king. Tomas has not summoned her here – a commoner does not summon a queen – but Louis de Coutes and Jean d’Arc carried each the same message: if we are to save the Maid, we who care must act together. We meet in Belleville. We would welcome your presence.