Into The Fire (58 page)

‘Lise?’ Picaut stops. Two men crash into her, cursing, but that’s not enough to get her to move. ‘Lise Bressard? What the
fuck
are you doing here?’

There is no question: the biker is Annelise Bressard. Possibly it should have been obvious, given the effortless panache with which she wears the leathers, but Picaut hasn’t been paying that kind of attention.

Lise pulls off the black helmet, frees a long snake of hair from the scarf that binds it, and takes the sunglasses from her face.

Meeting Picaut’s gaze, she says, ‘Following orders. It’s a Family thing. When our elders say “Jump”, we jump. Please move on. Whatever my feelings for you, cousin Arnaud is rather too keen to shoot. If I were you, I’d do my best not to give him an excuse.’

Her voice is as acidly amused as it has always been. Her eyes flash complex counterpoints: anger, resentment, warning. Any or all of these. Picaut doesn’t know her well enough to hang meanings on their messages.

She does as she is told and walks on, and the cavalcade marches down the rail tracks. Here is too much proximity to fire, however old it might be. She does not want to burn.

They come to a cavernous room carved out of the bedrock. The furnace is not here. Picaut comes to a halt and stands sweating in the cold. Around her, the three remaining men turn round, and so reveal themselves as minor cousins of the Bressard clan. A-branch: the kind who came to her wedding with their beautiful, well-bred, fantastically well-dressed wives, and then turned up to Luc’s wilder parties with their mistresses. They drank, gambled, whored and spent money without restriction. She never knew how they earned their keep. She may be in the process of finding out.

Her many hours spent in hostage training had included remarkably little information on what to do if she herself were taken prisoner. She falls back on the advice they were told to give to the targets: build relationships, keep talking, be polite, unthreatening, positive.

She says, ‘Why here? Why now?’

She doesn’t ask ‘Why me?’ because when the Family has spent the past month framing her as the new Maid, and they are standing more or less directly beneath the chapel dedicated to the old one’s sainted memory, in the city that owes her its freedom, ‘Why me?’ is a redundant question.

The polls will open in around forty-eight hours and the Family wishes to seal Luc’s victory in fire and blood. So she has to keep them talking, and bland conversations about the state of the economy won’t cut it, so she asks, and waits while they stare at each other and not at her and fail to answer.

Lise can’t hold the silence. She says, ‘Here, because it will make the most impact. Now, or at least in a few hours from now, because we have to wait until midnight so that we make the morning’s news. The national outrage at your death, the sense of mourning, the wish to make it up to Luc, will all peak when the polls open on Sunday. In the time between, he will have made impassioned speeches that sound dog whistles to the right while the left will be content that this is grief speaking and he is really their man.’

‘I’m going to burn, so that Luc can win an election? I thought you were the sane one in your family?’

Lise’s gaze traps hers, holds it, tightly. Whatever she is trying to say with that look, Picaut can’t read it. Heavily, Lise says, ‘Not just this election; this will carry him to the presidency – but then you know that. It will be painless, I can promise you that much. You won’t be alive when the fire is lit.’

‘A stiletto?’

‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me that kind of detail, but it will be something of that sort.’

This is not a small mercy. Picaut bites back the obvious retort but something must show in her eyes, because Lise says, ‘If you had been less obviously heroic …’

‘Lise, I didn’t do anything! Not a single act of heroism. I didn’t run into any burning buildings to drag out the children, didn’t scale trees to direct the firefighters, I didn’t work out who’d lit them until just now. I knew Jaish al Islam was a scam, but I didn’t work out it was you. It was, I take it?’

‘Not personally.’

‘But the Family has done this? They – you – are Jaish al Islam?’

‘So I am led to believe. Landis tells me that cousin Arnaud and his minions have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into the roles of Islamic jihadi—’

‘Shut it!’

‘Arnaud,’ Lise’s voice is the epitome of weary distaste, ‘grow up. You’ve been war-gaming this for the past six months. Don’t try to tell me you don’t enjoy it.’ Her gaze flickers towards the other two. ‘You and your simpering catamites.’

It’s a blatant attempt to provoke them into … what? Picaut has no clue, but it’s a change in the dynamic and she is not the focus of attention, which has to be good. Her eyes are on the doorway; her mind plotting the route back as Lise ploughs on.

‘Do you enjoy your time together? Landis tells me the three of you haven’t been home to your wives since the fires began. I’d have thought—’

‘Shut the fuck up!’

The Mazda driver – Antoine? Aurélien? Something like that – aims a slap at Lise, but he signals it too obviously and she moves with predictably fluent skill. Blocking his arm with her own, she makes a grab for his gun.

She has her hands on the barrel. She is not Patrice, with the core strength to sweep her body, board straight, a foot from the ground, but she is stronger than she looks and she is taking him down, round and … ‘Inès, run!’

Picaut is already sprinting across the room like a hunted deer, but Arnaud, the Audi driver, is sharper than he looks; swifter, closer to the door.

He reaches it a fraction ahead of her. They meet in a body slam, flesh on flesh, bone on bone, and she is lifted and hurled back across the room to smash against the stone wall.

Her head snaps back and her teeth clack shut and she slides down and only muzzily sees Aurélien step up behind Lise and crack the butt of his own gun hard behind her right ear. She folds slowly at the knees and ends up lying face down, inelegantly sprawled.

The three men crow. There are debts and old, long-nursed resentments at play here that Picaut knows nothing about. And now a fresh betrayal. She has only an outsider’s guess at how the Family might view betrayal, but it is not good.

She wants to ask questions. Why? What does this cost you? What can we do now? But Lise is either unconscious or feigning it. Even so, the men are taking no chances. Kneeling, Arnaud draws a cable tie from his pocket and fixes Lise’s wrists behind her back. Picaut holds herself very still, eyes down. They have not bound her yet. While she has her hands free, there is still hope.

She draws into herself, hugs her knees to her chest, wills herself invisible, and the immediate danger passes. When she dares to look again, Arnaud has stepped back and stationed himself against the wall near the entrance, but not so close that someone coming in would be able to take a shot at him from the tunnel that leads here. The other two take other walls, lean back against them and retreat into whatever inner place it is that keeps them alert for hours at a time.

These are hard men, practised in the art of waiting, and their guns do not waver. Picaut is not hard, but she can wait as long as she has to. Midnight is not so far away. She endeavours not to think of fire.

THE NEWS COMES
with the rising sun, on the morning of the twenty-fourth of May. Hanne pounds her fists on his chest before he has broken his fast. ‘They are taking her to the stake. They are going to burn her! Tomas, you must do something!’

Tomas has much in common now with the men of Paris who have publicly stated that this trial has gone on for far too long. He doesn’t know how the Maid is staying as strong as she is. For himself, he would have walked into the fire by now, just to get it over.

‘There is nothing I can do. Chérie, listen to me.’ He catches her flailing hands. ‘If there was anything, I would have done it. Bedford has threatened to remove Cauchon from the case and try it again with all English judges. There is nothing we can do except be there, to bear witness for her.’

Weeping, she says, ‘I cannot. I cannot. I would rather burn in her stead. I am in God’s hand. She is not. She has fought. Tomas, she has
killed
men.’

‘She killed in battle. God does not forbid that. And she has made confession. I swear to you, daily, she made confession.’

Her eyes are round, red and swollen. They rise to his from the shelter of her palms. ‘With a proper priest?’

What can he say? There are those of us who think it doesn’t matter?

He rises, throws on a coat. ‘Wait here. I will go.’ De Belleville is here now, and Huguet. They gather round Hanne, hold her. They are a family, welded together, and left unbalanced by the one who is not with them. He leaves her in their company.

He has to fight through the crowd to get to the market place, all the while searching the sky above them for the first feathers of smoke. Not yet. Not yet … Thank you, madam, thank you. And you, sir. Good day to you, sir. My apologies. Please? Thank you.

And through into a space and the stake, and the faggots piled high and stained with resin for heat and swift lighting, and Thirage in his element, oiled muscle and a blazing pitch pine torch.

But no one is at the stake, no fire lit yet. He searches round. Here a circle of men on a platform, and there, on its own, a platform for the Maid, and she is on it, but hidden.

Jean Massieu, the usher, holds her hand. Before them both, a slip of white paper, a
cedula
. It will have on it all they want her to say, as if, by signing, she will undo five months of careful argument.

Oh, my dear, have a care. You cannot read! Remember, you
cannot read
.

The Maid says, ‘I cannot read. What does it say?’

‘Never mind what it says. Just sign.’

She casts her eyes across the crowd, past him, past again, comes back, searching still. He lifts his hands. She is not here. Hanne did not come. She turns back, drops her head.

She signs. Not a long signature, just a cross, or perhaps a circle on the foot of the parchment.
Do not listen to this order.
He remembers it from Saint-Pierre-le-Moutier.

Cauchon looks stunned. This, he did not expect. What now? He cannot burn her if she has abjured her heresy. The English may burn him if he does not, but canon law is clear. By a simple mark of pen on paper, she is no longer a heretic. The crowd disperses. Silent guards lead her back to her cell.

‘Rustbeard, she has to burn! I will not believe that the fainting clerics, after five months –
five!
– and seven months to prepare, cannot find a girl guilty of heresy. They say they have to take her to a convent, that she has to do penance, wear a robe, say prayers. As if penance and robes will see Henry anointed king of France.’

The same room, the rush lights cowering, the meaty fist, the dank, cold, unrelenting dark. Tomas is tired of this. He says, ‘If she were to go to a nunnery, somewhere in England, maybe, far away from here …’

‘Not you too? She must burn, do you not understand? The whole of Christendom must see her as a heretic. Only then can her petty princeling be unseated.’

‘Lord.’ Tomas bows out. There is nothing to say, nothing to do. He has no idea what will happen next.

‘They say I have agreed not to wear men’s clothes. They say it is on the document I signed, although that was only five lines long and the parchment they have brought me with my mark on it is a full page of close writing.’

It has taken a day to be allowed in to visit her, and then only by pressing favours from men who no longer trust him.

They must have made the robes for her ahead of time, for she is dressed in coarse blue wool to her ankles, rough at the seams, such as penitents wear, and a veil of undyed linen for her hair. This is as close as he will come to what she was in Burgundy, when her mother taught her spinning and weaving.

She sits on the bed. She is … unmanned is the wrong word, but she is undone, that much is certain. Her skin is blue grey. She has not slept. Her hair, for the first time, is not combed clear.

‘Did you put a circle instead of your name?’

‘Of course. But I am still doing as they asked.’

‘They have to let you go. It’s the law.’

She gestures down to her ankles. ‘Tomas, I am still chained. I am still in the care of England.’

Still in the care of England, which is to say held by men when the law says she should be held by women, and these are new guards, who hate her afresh. He has seen the smiles, the sly, knowing winks. They will have her, but he is not party to how or when or where; they do not speak to him any more.

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘They won’t let me take Mass, or make confession. They won’t strike off the fetters. Tomas, I cannot live encased in iron for ever.’

‘I know. I’ll see what I can do.’

He is a child, repeating phrases he has heard out of the mouths of adults, leaving them less meaning at each repeat, but what else is there? She is drained. He is drained. They are all drained except Bedford, who will burn the whole of Rouen before he will let her go.

‘
HELLO, INÈS.
’

Picaut hears Luc before she sees him. The injury to his hip is troubling him today. The drag to his left heel is amplified by the echo of the tunnel.

By the time he walks through the door, the shock has rippled through her, cleansing, excoriating. She feels liberated, which is ironic under the circumstances, but at least it deprives him of the satisfaction of seeing her shocked.

‘Luc …’ She manages a smile. ‘So now you club us to death and set fire to the cathedral? Is that the grand plan? I had always imagined you to be more subtle.’

‘But we are. And we shall be.’ Luc is at peace with himself, not ready to be goaded by her. ‘I shall grieve for you, Inès, truly. It won’t all be a sham.’