Sparrow (10 page)

Swallows and swifts swooped and screamed over the rooftops and reminded her of home, of Domrémy, and summers when she was little. A tide of sadness threatened to overwhelm her utterly. And then white amongst the swallows and hovering like a lark, she saw Belami. “Dear Belami,” she breathed. “Dear faithful Belami.”

The cemetery was crowded with all manner of people, soldiers, merchants, priests, nuns, restless now with expectancy as she mounted her stand; Master Erard, one of the court’s many lawyers – she
had had no lawyer to defend her all through the trial – was at her elbow. On another stand opposite were ranged her accusers. She counted five bishops, Cauchon amongst them, priors, abbots, and behind them the English lords, Warwick and Stafford, watching over it all.

A hush fell as Master Erard began his speech. It was a long speech and Joan was faint from the heat of the sun and had to clutch the rail to stop herself from falling. That was when she first saw below her the executioner’s cart, waiting. She saw the upturned faces of the crowd, watching her, hating her, longing to see her burn. Master Erard ranted on at her, berating her for all her wickedness, listing all her crimes and iniquities, all the charges against her. When he had finished, everyone waited for her answer.

She spoke out firmly so that all could hear her.
“I have already told you that everything I have done, I have done at God’s command.”

At this Cauchon rose from his seat and began at once to pronounce the sentence on her.

“Then we declare you excommunicate and heretical and pronounce you shall be abandoned to secular justice, as a limb of Satan severed from the Church…” As Joan listened, still reeling in her stand, she saw the executioner’s horse tossing his head impatiently. She saw the cruel smile on the executioner’s face. She could bear it no more.

“I submit,” she cried, “I confess it all. My voices were false to me. All I did, I did against the laws of God and Holy Mother Church. I submit myself to the Church, to the mercy of you, my judges. I do not believe my voices, nor in my apparitions. I made them up. I pretended it all. I confess it.
I will do whatever you desire, whatever the Church desires. Only not the fire. Please, not the fire.”

For a moment the crowd were stunned to silence, aghast at what they had just heard. They had come to see Joan burnt as a witch, not to witness her recantation, not to see her escape at the last moment. During the fearful pandemonium that followed, someone thrust a paper into her hand, and told her to sign. She could see nothing but the executioner’s cart. She would have signed anything. “But I cannot write,” she cried.

“Make your mark then,” said Master Erard. And he took her hand and helped her mark the document with a trembling cross. Then he flourished it in triumph above his head and then he read it out loud, straining to make himself heard against all the jeering of the crowd. They scarcely heard a word of it. But Joan did.

“She has signed. The Maid has signed,” Erard began. “Here it is. Here it is. ‘I, Joan, called The Maid, a miserable sinner, after I recognised the snare of error in which I was held; and now that I have by God’s grace, returned to Our Mother Holy Church; I do confess that I have grievously sinned in falsely pretending that I have had revelations from God and his angels, St Catherine and St Margaret, etc… All my words and deeds which are contrary to the Church, I do revoke; and I desire to live in unity with the Church, nevermore departing there from. In witness whereof my sign manual.’ And see, she makes her mark with this cross.”

As she listened, Joan hung her head and cried bitterly. Through her tears she looked down at the seething crowd below her, lusting for her death. They were shaking their fists at her, cursing her, screaming at her.

“Witch! Slut! Fiend! Harlot! Whore!” She put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes to shut it all out.

By the time she opened them again, Cauchon had almost finished pronouncing her new sentence. “Wherefore we have condemned you to perpetual imprisonment with the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction that you may weep for your sins and never more commit them.”

“Take me, then, to your church prison,” she cried, “so that I may no longer be in the hands of these English.”

But Cauchon simply said, “Take her back where she has come from.”

Belami was there at the window of her cell when Cauchon and other priests came that evening to see her.

“The Church has dealt kindly with you, Joan,”
said Cauchon. “Learn humility, learn obedience. Leave all your revelations and stupidities behind you. If you do not then you cannot count on our protection and we will be forced to hand you over to the English. You do understand that, Joan?”

“Yes, my lord bishop. But may I say Mass? May I be released of my chains?”

“If you will at once leave off your men’s clothes and henceforth wear only women’s clothes. Your boy’s hair will be shorn.”

That night, her head shorn, and wearing women’s clothes for the first time since she left Vaucouleurs two years before, Joan sat and endured the coarse jibes of her guards. Her men’s clothes lay in a heap in the corner of the cell.

There was no sleep for Joan that night.

Belami came to her whenever he could, but it could not be so often. She was ever more closely
guarded now, and one guard seemed always to be awake.

Joan sat all the while, unmoving and staring into space. Belami waited till the moment was right, till the guards were distracted, and landed behind her, where he could not be seen. It was nothing then to flutter up and perch, hidden behind her shoulder. “What I have done today, Belami, I should not have done,” she whispered. “So I will undo it. I will. I’ll make you proud of me again, Belami, that much I promise you. I will try again to be brave, I will try.”

The next day the judges were called to the prison. They found Joan dressed once more in her man’s clothes and refusing to change back.

“Why have you done this?” Cauchon asked.

“Because being with men it is more convenient and more suitable. Because you have not allowed
me to say Mass as I asked, nor to have my irons removed.”

“Have you heard your voices again, Joan?” the Bishop asked her.

“Yes. They have told me what I ought to do, and I’m doing it.”

“So you claim again that these are the voices of saints, of St Catherine and St Margaret?”

“Yes.”

“What did they say to you?”

“They told me that in saving my life I was damning myself, that if I were to say that God had not sent me, then I should be damning myself, for it is true that God did send me. My voices have told me that I did very wrong in doing all I did. It was only the fear of the fire which made me say what I said.”

“Out of your own mouth you have condemned yourself to the fire,” said Cauchon.

“I know it,” Joan replied. “Let it come swiftly. But before it happens let me say my confession. Let me have a last communion. And no chains, for once, no chains. It is all I ask.”

As Cauchon looked down at her, he felt for her for the first time and pitied her.

“I should not allow it,” he said, “but I shall.”

She spent her last night on earth sitting with Belami in her lap, just as she had done when she first found him all those years before. She said little, but stroked him constantly. At dawn she took him to the window. “When it is over, Belami, go back to Domrémy. Hauviette will look after you.”

She took communion in her cell and made her confession to Brother Martin, looking to him for a last reassurance.

“Where shall I be tonight?” she asked.

“Have you no faith in Our Lord?” he replied.

“Yes, God helping me. Today I shall be with Him in Paradise.”

They came for her at once and took her out, again in her chains, to the market square. There must have been ten thousand people waiting there, faces at every window, children clinging to chimney pots. There was a platform for the judges, a platform for the priests, and in the centre a scaffold with a great stake piled all around with wood. And in front of the stake was a board, with writing printed on it for all to read: “Joan, who called herself The Maid, liar, pernicious, deceiver of the people, sorceress, superstitious, blasphemer of God, presumptuous, disbeliever in the faith of Jesus Christ, boastful, idolatrous, cruel, dissolute, invoker of devils, apostate and heretic.”

They led her first up on to the platform where the priests stood, Cauchon amongst them. Many
of them were in tears. Here she knelt and prayed aloud, beseeching God to show her mercy and to forgive her judges for all they had done to her. When she had finished Cauchon read out the sentence of death.

“Since you, Joan, have been found by us relapsed into diverse errors and crimes and wickednesses, as a dog returns to its vomit, we do cast you forth and eject you from the communion of the Church as an infected limb, and hand you over to secular justice.” The rest was drowned in a great cheer as Joan was dragged down the steps and across the market square towards the scaffold. Rough hands bound her to the stake. One English soldier stuck a paper hat on her head, and spat in her face. On the hat he had scrawled: ‘Heretic. Relapsed. Apostate. Idolatress.’

Already the executioner had his torch alight. But
then, just as he lit the fire, another English soldier sprang up on to the faggots, a wooden cross in his hand. He held it to her lips so she might kiss it. She looked into his face to thank him and saw, under the English helmet, that it was Louis; her page and friend. “God bless you, sweet Joan,” he said.

“Get down,” she cried. “They are lighting the fire.”

But Louis stayed till the very last moment, with the smoke rising now through the faggots, he sprang back to safety just in time, stumbled backwards and fell. By the time he looked up again the flames were all around her…

“Jesus! Jesus!” she cried, and then her head fell forward and she never spoke again. All that could be heard was the crackle of the flames.

There were no cheers now. Many cried openly
at what they had just witnessed. “We are lost,” said one of the English soldiers. “We have just burnt a saint.”

Another soldier standing close to Louis, gripped his arm suddenly, and pointed. “Look,” he cried. “A white dove flying up out of the fire. It’s her soul. It’s a miracle, a miracle.”

But Louis could see well enough that the bird rising from the smoke was no dove, but a white sparrow and one he knew well. Belami hovered for some moments over the square, then flew off back home, back to Domrémy. Louis watched him until he could see him no more.

I woke, and looked about me. Somehow I expected Jaquot to be there, but he was not. There was no sparrow to be seen, no bird at all in the sky above me, only a plane flying high, silver in the sun, a vapour trail blossoming in its wake.

I glanced down at my watch. I had been all day down by the river, yet it seemed to have passed so quickly. School would be over by now. I could go back home as if I’d been at school all day long. No one would know the difference.

At supper that evening my mother and father
were prattling on and on about my birthday the next day, about how birthdays seem more important every year you get older, then about how they were pleased to be the age they were, how they wouldn’t want to be seventeen again, even if they could be. They were being kind. They were simply avoiding any mention of the Joan of Arc celebrations the next day. I was hardly listening.

“Good day at school, Eloise?” my father asked me. I was caught completely unawares. I had no reply. Luckily for me the phone rang. My father picked it up.

“Yes. Hello, yes. She’s home now, yes… You mean this evening? All right. I’ll tell her then. Goodbye.” He put the phone down.

“What?” asked my mother.

“He was pouring himself some wine. “Her again,” he said. “Friend of yours from school,
Eloise – Marie Duval. She wants to see you. She’s coming round.”

My mother turned to me. “Oh, we didn’t tell you, did we? She called earlier, came to the door. She said she was looking for you at school today. Couldn’t seem to find you anywhere. No one could, she said. Funny, that.”

I looked down at my plate and wished the floor would just open up and swallow me.

“Where did you get to, Eloise?” my mother asked. “Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick. I mean really worried.”

“The river,” I replied, not looking up from my plate. “I went down to the river. I just couldn’t go to school. Not today. I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry.”

I couldn’t eat another thing. I was close to tears and they knew better than to talk to me. My mind roamed from one thing to another, from Jaquot by
the river to Belami and Joan in the garden at Domrémy, to Joan burning in Rouen, to Marie Duval. Why was she coming? What for? Back to Joan again, Joan storming the Tourelles, Joan praying by the river at Orléans, Jaquot by the river at Orléans.

The door bell rang.

It was strange seeing Marie Duval in my house. There were a few awkward introductions in the hall. Then I took her out into the garden so that we could be alone.

“I looked for you at school,” she began. I said nothing. I didn’t want to have to explain. “Well, it’s about tomorrow,” she went on. “The parade, the procession, whatever they call it.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“The thing is,” she said, “I read it. I read your essay on Joan of Arc. Everyone’s read it. They pinned
it up at school this morning – it’s coming out in the newspaper tomorrow. And then we had a rehearsal, for tomorrow. I had to get up on this huge horse. I was sitting there, and that’s when I knew for sure. I think I’d known it all along really. The truth is, it’s never been right. Me winning, I mean. Me being chosen as Joan. You wrote the best essay. You should have won. They only chose me because I was born here. Joan wasn’t born here, was she? It’s not where you’re born that counts, is it? I was sitting up there and thinking: Eloise should be on this horse. Eloise should be Joan tomorrow, not me.”

I was filled with a sudden stupendous hope. Marie took my hands in hers. “Listen, I talked to all the other essay finalists, and they all agreed with me. So this afternoon we went to the Headmaster, and we made him agree too. Will you do it? Will you be Joan tomorrow?”

“But you don’t mind?” I asked, still incredulous.

Marie smiled. “Not really. You deserve it more than me. Soon as I read your essay I knew that. You didn’t just study her, did you? You got to know her. You got close. And besides, I was getting very nervous about it all. I hate horses. Honestly, I do. They make me sneeze. You can’t have Joan of Arc sneezing her way through the streets of Orléans, can you? So, will you do it?”

“Oh, yes,” I cried. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” And we stood there hugging each other and crying and swaying together under the silver birches.

“I thought you said you’d lost your cat,” she said in my ear. “Black and white, wasn’t it?”

I turned round. Mimi! Mimi, sleek and silky in the glow of the evening sun, was rubbing herself up against the trunk of a silver birch, her raised tail trembling with joy.

Marie stayed on late that evening to celebrate Mimi’s miraculous return. I took her up to my room, pulled my picture of Joan out from the back of the cupboard and showed it to her.

“I’ve had her all my life,” I told her.

Marie wrinkled her nose at it. “Not at all how I imagined her,” she said. “I’ve always imagined her very different – more human, more like you.”

The armour was too big. I did not care. My bottom was sore from long hours in the saddle. I did not care. The cathedral bells pealed the flags waved, the bands played, the people cheered. The whole world seemed happy. I laughed in the sun, and loved every glorious moment of it. I was Joan, Joan triumphant, Joan adored. I was in raptures. Above my head fluttered my standard, Joan’s standard. I
waited for the moment. I was sure it would come, but when it did it still took me by surprise. There was a ripple of laughter in the crowd and they were pointing up at my standard. I looked up. There he was, Jaquot, perched high on the point of it and singing his happy heart out.

“The sparrow and the saint,” came a voice from somewhere, from everywhere. A voice I knew so well, my voice from the river. “The sparrow and the saint.”