Into The Fire (59 page)

‘Unlike your protestations of love?’

Luc pulls a face. ‘How else was I to get you on board? Particularly when the delightful Patrice had—’

There are three CCTV cameras in the walls, but a basic rule of thumb says …
There is nothing to say. She looks away, finds a blank space of wall and stares at it.

She wants to be calm and is not. However much she might want to be free of him, it is only now she discovers how much she still had invested in the idea that Luc was an innocent, drawn along in the slipstream of the Family’s ambition; that he was not culpable, not involved.

Lise, on the other hand, she had always thought an instrument of her own ambition, her need so welded to the Family’s as to be inseparable.

Which may not, after all, be true.

She glances across to where the other woman is now standing.

Picaut has watched Lise Bressard’s slow return to wakefulness, to pain, to remembering, to rage that has curdled, over the past two or three hours, to an insidious, unsettling fear. Picaut cannot imagine Lise being readily afraid, but there is no question that she knows what is coming, and it isn’t good.

She manages to regain some of her hauteur in Luc’s presence, quite an achievement for a woman with an open wound from a gun sight down one cheek, filthy clothes, and hands cable-tied behind her back.

He glances at her derisorily and asks of Arnaud, ‘Was I right?’

A nod. ‘She went for Auré’s gun. She was going to let the bitch go.’

‘How distressingly predictable.’ Luc favours his cousin with a blistering smile. ‘Did you think we didn’t know?’

What colour is left in Lise’s face floods away. She is alabaster-white. Flatly, she says, ‘Luc, there is still time to stop this. Just because Landis treats you as his glove puppet doesn’t mean you have to jump to each twitch of his finger.’

‘Oh, I shall miss you, cousin!’ Luc slaps his thigh, but Picaut knows him well. Lise has scored a point, or else he would never let her divert him. He chews his lip, thinking. Lise glares. The air aches for release.

And it comes with a soft tread down the corridor.

Landis Bressard.

His arrival seems to remove some of the oxygen from the surrounding air. The cousins lower their weapons.

Their uncle’s gaze passes from one to one to one. It lingers last, longest on Lise. He shakes his head.

‘Lise, my dear, you of all people should know that the needs of the Family come before any call of the heart. Even Luc understands that.’ A nod to his left is the only indication that he has seen Luc standing there.

‘Luc is a spineless puppet.’ The scorn in Lise’s voice would strip any normal man to the bone. ‘Orléans may fall for his charade, but France has more sense. The world’s media will see through you long before the presidential election.’

This has the ring of a long-standing argument. Landis’s smile never loses its charm.

‘So you have said. But we—’ a circle of his hand includes Luc, ‘shall be alive to usher our dream to reality. And if by some slim chance we are wrong, only the ghost of your memory will remain to tell us so.’

He turns away from her, as clear a dismissal as any Picaut has seen. His gaze, as if for the first time, returns to the lesser cousins. He nods to each a greeting and then to Arnaud, says, ‘Don’t leave her body here. Luc’s grief must not be sullied by any hint of an alternative liaison.’

At last, he turns to Picaut. ‘I could apologize for what is about to occur, but it would be hollow, and pointless. It will be little consolation, but I intend that your memory will live in the annals of French history for every bit as long as the Maid’s. You played your part well, simply by being who you are. Luc was right. The Family is proud of you.’

‘
TOMAS! WAKE UP!
Tomas, in God’s name, wake!’

He is lost in the marshlands of exhaustion, where his dreams and his waking are interchangeable, and both are nightmares.

Weights hold down the lids of his eyes. Old blood sticks them shut, the bone-glue of dead men. With levers, he prises them open, clambers back to wakefulness.

‘My lady?’ The Maid is standing over him, shaking his shoulder, weeping. Behind her are de Belleville and Huguet the priest, red-eyed, discomposed. The sight of that wakes him faster than anything else.

He makes himself look at her. The light is bright and coming from the south; dawn passed a long time ago, and noon. Always, he wakes at dawn, except today. He tries to hold her in focus; fails. ‘How are you out?’

‘I’m not.’ Crossly. ‘That is, she isn’t.’

He sees it now, or rather, hears it: Hanne’s voice is a tone higher, more like a bell, less like a drum. In all other ways, they are almost identical; the last five months have hewn away their differences. They are both thin now, both drawn, both have shadows beneath their eyes, and the strawberry mark behind their ears. And both are now wearing blue woollen gowns, with a veil of the sort the merchant women wear.

He pushes himself upright, fumbles for his linens, his habit; the nights are still and muggy and he has been sleeping naked. Hanne flinches, but she doesn’t leave; rather Huguet looks away, and then de Belleville.

He stands. Sleep still drags at him, drapes his shoulders. Sunlight pierces his head.

‘They have taken her gown, her veil.’

‘Who has? What do you mean, “taken”?’

‘The English. Bedford ordered it. She sleeps in her shift, leaving her robe hanging over the beam. They put hemlock and poppy in her meal and took her clothes while she slept.’

‘Why?’ Hemlock and poppy, half the constituents of the dwale he used when she was injured. His mouth is furred, but he knows that taste. He ate with William Haiton last night; a potage of beans and pigeon breasts stewed in prunes and wine with many spices. So Haiton is against him. He will not be alone. If they have drugged him, then they know he is not for Bedford, so why is he still alive? What do they expect of him? Some last confession wrung from her?

‘Why did they take her clothes?’

‘They have left her doublet and hose. The clothes she has sworn not to wear. If she puts them on, it is against the terms of the
cedula
she signed.’

‘Body of Christ.’ His head in his hands. ‘She will become a relapse.’

‘Yes.’

‘So they can burn her.’ Not only can they, they must; relapsed heretics cannot be allowed to live or the entire fabric of the Church Militant falls apart. If one heretic flourishes, whatever will keep the rest in check? ‘But she doesn’t have to put them on, the clothes they have left her; the doublet and hose.’

‘She does. The privy is along an open corridor. You know her pride. She will not walk it naked.’

He is dressed now; ready. ‘I’ll go to her.’

Huguet catches his arm. ‘Tomas, it’s too late. She will have woken at dawn. We tried to wake you, and failed, and we went ourselves. We can’t get near her, but the English are celebrating. You can hear them in the streets.’

‘Where is Cauchon? Has anyone see him?’

De Belleville says, ‘Cauchon is with her now. He knows she’s not a heretic; he damns himself by calling her one, but he dare not go against Bedford. He has made this happen.’

Huguet is pacing; a serene man no longer. ‘They are going to burn her tomorrow. They will allow her to hear Mass, to take the Eucharist, to make confession. And then they will shave her head ready for the stake. Or rather, we will.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Huguet looks sick. Tomas has seen this look on the faces of men ready to go into battle, to face guns and archers they know will kill them. He has thought himself immune to this kind of horror. Now, his stomach roils and he tastes bile in his throat. His gaze flickers from one to the other and they all look away.

Desperately: ‘Tell me.’

De Belleville says, ‘The Maid’s father in heaven has told her she will be saved. But she is not alone in hearing the counsel of heavenly voices and Hanne’s have told her … something different.’

‘I hear what God tells me.’ Of them all, Hanne has the strongest tones. And so he hears her plan first from herself. And when he argues, he hears it next from Huguet, and last from Jean de Belleville.

At each iteration, he says no. You cannot do this. We cannot. She will not allow it, the Maid. I will not. It cannot be done.

Huguet says, ‘We said that. All through the night, we have said that, but will you listen to Hanne? Will you see her lay her hands upon a copy of the testament and swear that what she hears is the true voice of God, with her father, the king, in agreement? And will you be the one to tell her she is wrong in it?’

LANDIS LEADS THE
way back up to the chapel of Sainte Jeanne. Aurélien goes next, driving Lise viciously forward, his gun in the small of her back.

Luc takes Picaut. She is cold now, and stiff, and her first steps are awkward. He grabs her arm and hauls her on, but he does not bind her wrists as Lise’s are bound. It occurs to her that neither Iain Holloway nor Cheb Yasine’s cousin had marks on their wrists and that there is a point being made here about willing martyrdom, a narrative being shaped for the longer history.

They mount the steps into the cathedral. Faint moonlight pierces the stained-glass windows, picking out in silvered shades the stories of Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orléans, the girl whose visions of saints and angels moved her to ride in the name of France. The colours are muted whispers, barely lit, but after the dark of the tunnels even this much feels too bright.

Walking with care, Landis and his team navigate to the small chapel where it opens into the transept. Here stands the saint herself, wrought glorious in white marble, backed by a curtain of pale blue silk and set atop a pedestal worked in bronze relief that shows her victories.

Two great, gilded leopards flank her as she stands in prayer. Virginal, pure, simple, it would be hard to imagine anyone less like Inès Picaut, but it is to here that Luc brings her, to stand at the foot of the woman in whose image her own has been shaped.

The Family has been busy in the past hours: wood is piled here, bundles of white, pale carpentry timber in metre lengths that will burn like matchwood, and larger, heavier hardwood beams that will sustain a fire until it has eaten away all the wooden chairs and the altar, the blue silk curtain and the bronze relief, and feasts instead on the raw and ancient stone.

Here they will bind her. Blue silk ropes are set to one side, coiled and ready. A freak of moonlight highlights them, and the woman’s skull, green but whole, that lies on top of them.

Picaut knows this skull, the shape of the teeth, the swirls of green on the cranium. ‘That’s her! Marguerite de Valois!’ She rounds on Luc. ‘You killed Iain Holloway for this?’

‘Blame your father; he sent him.’ Luc is round the corner, out of sight. His voice is warped by the distance and the high ceilings. ‘Although it was you who gave us his laptop, which was immensely kind.’

‘I gave it to Guy.’

‘And Guy naturally copied the hard drive before he sold it. You could hardly expect otherwise when your father had been sending difficult letters to the bishop. Or, as we now have to call him, His Eminence the Cardinal. Landis is less than wholly pleased about that. It will be useful to have a man so high in the Vatican, but my uncle hates to be outranked.’

‘The bishop is Family?’

‘Distantly, through Annelise’s mother’s side. Don’t look so distressed; you would have had to be particularly paranoid to have unearthed that. Your father knew of the link, but only very late in his life. We thought the matter closed when he died, but then Dr Holloway turned up and made his discovery. The timing was appalling. It could have derailed half a year of planning, and a chance for power that comes only once in ten generations.’

‘A six-hundred-year-old skull?’

‘Not just the skull; the entire skeleton is there under the ropes. Your father would have liked it. He was right in many ways. Lise found it very touching, didn’t you, cousin? The love that gives itself in sacrifice.’

Lise is propped on the left, by the silk ropes. Picaut can see her from the corner of her eye: her colour is high, her lips sealed. She looks as if she will never speak again.

Luc is toying with her; with them both. Normally Picaut would ignore him, but now she needs to keep him talking. He is behind her and she can see a route out to the transept past Arnaud and Aurélien on her left, past the third cousin whose name she has never been sure of. He’s the one who might catch her. In her head, she maps out a blow to his nose with the flat of her hand.

She says, ‘My father thought the Maid survived and went on to become Jeanne des Armoises, the woman-knight who fought for the pope. But he never explained how she managed to survive, for the simple reason that she can’t have done.’

‘Are you sure? Even the nuns at Lise’s excruciatingly expensive English convent school told her that there had been a last-minute switch: a drugged-out witch burned and thus saved her own soul while the Maid was spirited away down some secret tunnel that only the true French knew about. I’m not sure she believes it, mind you, do you, Lise?’

Lise turns away; the question is beneath her.

Picaut says, ‘It’s a story for school children: nobody believes it. The Maid stood at the scaffold and spoke for thirty minutes in full hearing of eight hundred English men at arms, plus the French clerics who had condemned her. They were all weeping by the time she finished and the flames were lit. They had questioned her for five months; they knew her. They were in no doubt that she was the same woman.’

‘And yet … You really should take a look at the skeleton, Inès. When you meet your father, you want to be able to tell him he was right.’

She wants to say ‘I am not my father,’ but Luc, too, lived for half a dozen years in the shadow of Charles Picaut’s obsession; he knew what it cost him, what it meant, and he is not laughing now.