Sparrow (7 page)

Such statements had made her few friends among
the marshals and dukes. But she had firm allies and admirers now – the faithful Duc d’Alençon of course, and La Hire and the Bastard of Orléans himself. “Hasn’t she always been proved right so far?” La Hire argued. “Isn’t she winning for us? Isn’t she winning for France?” Her critics had no answer to that.

Next morning they attacked across the river, just as Joan had commanded, the soldiers crossing over a hastily built pontoon bridge, in effect a bridge of small boats, and then marching unopposed along the far side of the river towards the Bastille of St Jean de Blanc. The English garrison saw them coming. They saw how many there were, and how strong too. They quickly abandoned the fort and fell back behind the much stronger walls of the Bastille des Augustins which they knew they could defend more easily. It was some time before Joan,
La Hire and the Duc d’Alençon could bring their horses across the river, for the horses were too heavy for the pontoon and had to be ferried over by boat. By the time she arrived, the French army was milling about in wild celebrations at having captured a deserted fort. Joan could see at once that there was little enough to celebrate. And she was right.

Suddenly the English were pouring out of the Bastille des Augustins and charging through the fields towards them. Joan, La Hire and d’Alençon did not hesitate. With a cry of “Jhesus Maria” on their lips, they couched their lances and rode straight at the English. The rabble of the French army was suddenly no longer a rabble. They were regrouping. Then they were charging
en masse
, coming on at the English crying “Jhesus Maria!” A few brave English stayed to fight, and the battle that followed was swift and bloody; but the rest
had taken to their heels and fled to the safety of the Tourelles, the great fortress on the bridge. Joan was content to let them go. “We want no more slaughter,” she said. “Besides, two forts is enough for one day. We have done well. We shall leave the Tourelles for tomorrow. It will still be there.”

Joan had been hurt: her horse had stumbled and fallen on her. As the Duc d’Alençon gave her a ride on his shoulders back to the pontoon bridge, Louis going ahead of her with her standard, the whole army cheered till their throats were raw with it. Above her flew a single white sparrow who cheered in his own way, soaring high over the river, then over the city where the great bells pealed thunderously and where every citizen crowded every street and every window for a glimpse of their beloved Joan, their Maid of Orléans, their saviour and already their saint.

Belami was there waiting for her in her room when she came in. She threw herself down on the bed and cried, unable to banish from her head the terrible sights she had witnessed during the battle. Everyone was clamouring to see her, but she told Louis she would see only her dear brothers and the Duc d’Alençon. They all tried to comfort her, but she was quite inconsolable. When they left her that night, she asked Louis to rub her foot for her. “This pain you can relieve,” she said. “It is a little thing. Tomorrow, Louis, I shall have an arrow here below my shoulder, but that again will be little enough to bear. Tomorrow by this time, there will be hundreds of French and English dead in the Tourelles. If only the Godoms would just go, Louis, then none of it would have to happen. But what must happen, will happen – my voices have told me so – although
I do not understand why. I will never understand why.”

All Orléans knew what Joan and her marshals knew, that once the Tourelles was taken, Orléans would be safe at last. But the Tourelles was not like the other forts. It was quite impregnable. On the south side it was protected by a deep ditch, and on the city side by a great gap in the bridge from the city, a gap far too wide for a man to leap.

Lying in bed that night Joan stroked Belami and spoke her thoughts. “It will have to be a frontal assault across the ditch, Belami, there is no other way,” she said. “But those walls are so high and they will be waiting for us. I cannot see how it can be done. I cannot. I cannot.”

She could not sleep, and after a while she did not even try. She prayed constantly and aloud, asking St Catherine, asking St Margaret, asking the
Archangel Michael how it was to be done, but none of them would speak to her. “Why have they deserted me, Belami?” she cried. “In my hour of greatest need, why have they deserted me? I need to know what to do. Until now our victories have been easy, but not tomorrow. If we try to cross that ditch, we shall be beaten back, I know it. The bloodshed will be terrible. Yet we can do nothing else. So many will die, Belami, so many. I cannot bear it.” That night Joan of Arc cried herself to sleep.

But when she woke the next morning, she woke fresh and ready for battle. “Come, Belami,” she said, as she left her room. “Let’s get it done.” Downstairs Louis had prepared her a breakfast of a fine sea trout. “In God’s name, no, Louis,” she laughed. “Maybe I’ll have it when we return this evening. I’ll share it with a Godom for
supper, if any live to eat it, as God knows I hope they will.”

The battle for the Tourelles was every bit as brutal as Joan had feared. Time and again the French charged across the ditch to the walls, threw up their ladders and hurled themselves at the English. But each time the English were ready for them, with their arrows, their long lances, their battleaxes and their maces. The very few French who did manage to gain a foothold on the ramparts were butchered at once, their throats cut and their bodies hurled back down into the ditch below. And all the while there was the dreadful roar of the cannon, and the stifling smoke and the screaming and the terrible stench of blood. Yet still they came at the walls, and they came because Joan was always with them rallying them, leading them, her red cloak flying about her, her standard held high, so that all could see it.

The arrow that struck Joan pierced her armour above her left breast, just as her voices had told her it would. The force of it spun her round and sent her tumbling into the ditch. A great cheer went up from the English. Louis was there first, then her brothers and Jean and Bertrand, all of whom had never been far from her side throughout the battle. They carried her from the field. Word soon spread that the Maid was down. The soldiers looked about them for the flash of her scarlet cloak, for the white and blue and gold of her standard. But they could not see Joan, nor any sign of her. They fell back, disheartened; and from the walls above the English cheered wildly, revelling in their triumph.

Hidden from their sight in a nearby wood, Joan lay deathly white on the grass. “Back to the walls,” she cried and she grasped Louis by the hand. “Take
my standard, Louis. Be me for a while. I won’t be long.”

Once Louis had gone she took the arrow and jerked it out. As the blood flowed out on to the grass, the Duc d’Alençon and her brothers did what they could to staunch it. They poured on olive oil. They rubbed it with lard. She hadn’t the strength to sit up, but she would not stay lying down. “I must see what is happening,” she said. “I must know.” And her brothers helped her to a tree where she could lean and watch. She wept openly now at what she saw. The ditch was full of French dead, but still the ladders were going up against the walls, still they tried. She could see her fluttering standard through the smoke, and Louis waving the soldiers on towards the walls. But she could see too that the soldiers were tired, that it was hopeless to go on as they were. “Call them back, La Hire,”
she said. “They need food. They need water, they need rest, and I need to pray. When I have finished praying, I promise you I shall find a way to take the Tourelles.”

Stronger now, she mounted her horse again and rode away into a vineyard to be on her own. Here she dismounted and knelt and prayed. Belami, perched on a nearby vine, could see her swaying on her knees, and clutching on to a vine to steady herself. She was a long time praying, but at last she crossed herself and pulled herself up on to her feet. “My voices have spoken to me at last, Belami,” she whispered. “We wait out of sight until evening, until the English think we have given up and gone home. Then we attack, and we attack on both sides. The English think the gap on the bridge side cannot be crossed. Until now, we have thought the same. Well, it can. With God’s help, it can.”

Joan rode back and summoned La Hire and the marshals, and told them of her plan. “Have the men march away wearily so the English can see them. Once out of sight, have them hide almost until darkness. Have them pray too. And then, when they attack, have them fall on the English like ravenous wolves.”

Later that evening, with the French army lying hidden in the vineyard and woods, Belami flew over the ditch of death into the Tourelles. The walls were almost devoid of defences now. The English were down in the courtyard celebrating their great victory, and the killing – as they thought – of the Maid. The ale and the wine flowed fast and freely. Through the darkening shadows the French rose up and crept towards the walls, not a whisper, not a sound. Suddenly the English heard the war cry go up: “Jhesus Maria! Jhesus Maria!” They rushed
to the battlements to see the French storming up their ladders, to see Joan already on the ramparts, her standard waving about her. The French poured over the walls into the Tourelles driving the English before them. The English fought fiercely, but the French were all around them now. The gap between the bridge and the fort had been spanned, great planks of wood thrown across the divide until there was enough of a bridge to enable the French to break in behind them. The English looked about frantically, but there was no way out. In desperation, they tried to escape over the drawbridge, but it was already in flames, the French having sent a fireboat underneath to set fire to it. Those caught in the flames, and that included Glasdale, the English commander of the Tourelles, died a dreadful death. The slaughter everywhere was terrible. Joan could not bear to look upon it, nor hear it. She turned
her face to the wall and cried up against it, her hands over her ears.

It was dark by the time Joan led her exhausted, exultant soldiers back across the bridge into Orléans, leaving the Tourelles behind her in flames.

Belami sat now on the pommel of Joan’s saddle, to be as close to her as he could, in her hour of triumph. She rode through the torchlit city streets, the rapturous crowds all about her, some cheering, some chanting the
Te Deum
as she passed them by. They pressed so hard upon her, everyone longing to see her, longing to touch her. But Joan longed only for the silence of her room. Once there, once her wound was dressed, she said a fond goodnight to her brothers and her friends, and to Louis, telling them all she needed to be quiet, to be alone. She sat over her supper; not the sea trout – she had that sent to an English prisoner as her gift to
him – but her usual supper of bread and wine. She fed Belami some crumbs which, as usual, he accepted eagerly and gratefully. “It has been a long day, Belami. The longest of my life. Still, we did it, didn’t we? With God’s help, we did it.”

Joan was shaken awake early the next morning, and found Louis bending over her.

“The English!” he said. “The Godoms!”

“Do they not know when they are beaten?” cried Joan, wincing with pain as she pulled on her chain armour.

Belami flew on ahead of her as she rode through the city streets. Beyond the walls he could see now the two armies drawn up facing each other behind their stakes. The French marshals spurred on by the victory at the Tourelles were about to
unleash their army when Joan rode up and berated them soundly. “What do you think you’re about? Do you not know it is Sunday, God’s holy day? We shall defend ourselves only if they attack us; but we will not attack on a Sunday. Do you hear me? Give the Godoms the chance to retire with honour, and I tell you they will go. Maybe they will go all the way back to England.” The marshals knew better than to argue with Joan in this mood, so that when she ordered an altar to be made and Mass to be said all the way along the line, none of them dared to object. The French army knelt, their backs to the enemy; and when they had finished their prayers they stood up and turned once again to face the English, only to see the entire army drifting away.

“Joan,” said La Hire, his hand on his sword, “let’s be after them. For God’s sake, we will not have another chance like this.”

“No,” Joan replied. “It is for God’s sake that we let them go. You will get them another time.”

And so they did, time after time after time. Castles and towns under English occupation for a hundred years and more fell like dominoes before Joan and her army. With the Duc d’Alençon, La Hire and the Bastard of Orléans as marshals of the army she harried the English everywhere, chasing them out of their strongholds. Where they stood and fought, they died in their hundreds, in their thousands, or were taken prisoner. Where they ran, the word spread with them that Joan the Maid, Joan the miraculous, Joan the invincible, was on her way. English hearts quaked, hearts of oak, that until now had never known fear, never known defeat.

Jargeau fell, then Meung, then Beaugency. She was tireless in her conquests, and suffered no one
who tried to obstruct or delay her. Louis often had to remind her these days who she was, for he could see, as her brothers did, as the Duc d’Alençon did, that her new found power, the constant adoration of her soldiers, of the people, and her own fierce belief in her cause could sometimes make her impatient, even imperious. She would listen to them all, and for a while she would rein herself in; but always she forgot herself again and Louis had to remind her once more that what she was doing was for God, and in His name, that she was merely His instrument, and nothing more.

“Louis is right. They are all of them right,” she once confessed to Belami, alone in her room in Orléans. “I do forget myself. But what they do not know is that my time is short. My voices have told me so. How short I do not know, though I have asked them often to tell me. I have still many
thousands of English to sweep out of France. I have still to see my king crowned at Reims. If I am impatient, then it is because I must be.” Belami looked her in the eye, and she knew he understood. “These are the good times, Belami, the victorious times,” she said, stroking his wings. “But they will not last for ever, and when they are over it will be you and me, Belami, just you and me.”

But the good times were not yet over. Word came that a five-thousand-strong English army was marching south, with Talbot, their great general, in command. Joan and her army went out to find them, but in such thickly wooded country their task was not so easy. The English were marching through the forest near Patay in search of the French. In spite of their scouts each army was blind to the proximity of the other. “Make sure,” said Joan to d’Alençon, as they rode through the trees in the
morning mist, “that you all have good spurs when the Godoms see us.”

“You think, then, we’re going to turn and run when we meet them?” the Duc d’Alençon replied, more than a little hurt at the suggestion.

“Of course not, my fair duke,” said Joan, smiling. “I tell you, it will be the English who will turn their backs. By this very afternoon they will be defeated and you will need spurs to pursue them.”

At about noon, the French scouts accidentally put up a stag who bounded out of cover. The English saw it and gave chase, with great hue and cry, and so betrayed their position. The French were up on them and amongst them before they knew it. In the vicious mêlée of the battle, the glades of Patay rang with the screams of the dying, the hideous neighing of terrified horses, the clash of steel on steel. Within an hour or so it was all over. Four
thousand slaughtered English lay bleeding in the mud, and the rest were prisoners, including the great Talbot himself. Here was sweet revenge for the defeat at Agincourt all those years before.

But in the din and confusion of battle Joan had been lost and was nowhere to be found. They scoured the forest calling for her. It was Louis who came across her first. At first he thought she had been wounded, for she was lying up against a tree trunk, and there was blood on her face and on her hands too. When he came closer though, he saw she was cradling the head of an English soldier in her lap. “He is dead, Louis,” she whispered as he crouched down beside her. “He died, and without confessing his sins too.” She looked down into the soldier’s face. “There’s a boy in my village who looks just like him. Can all this be necessary, Louis? Can God really have meant this?” And when she wept,
she wept like a child. That was how the Duc d’Alençon and La Hire found her some time later, her head on her page’s shoulder, and wracked with sobbing.

She looked up at them and brushed away her tears. “I did not want this, and I will have no more of it. I shall go now to Reims and see the Dauphin crowned. Perhaps now the English will have learnt. Perhaps now they will go home and leave us in peace. Then I can go back home to my mother and father, back to my village where I belong.” They helped her to her feet. “See there is no looting, that all the Englishmen are buried with honour, and the wounded cared for,” she said. “Dead or living, French or English, we are all God’s people.”

There were those marshals, La Hire amongst them, who argued that with the English so weakened, so demoralised, they should at once attack Paris
and then drive the English out of Normandy once and for all. But Joan would not hear of it. “We go to Reims,” she said. “Let us have our Dauphin crowned the rightful King of France, as my voices said he must be. Paris can wait.”

It was one thing to want the Dauphin to be crowned, but quite another to achieve it. He was grateful to Joan for her victories on his behalf, and heaped upon her great favours and honours. At court she wanted for nothing. He made a solemn declaration that no one living in her village of Domrémy would ever again have to pay taxes, but he would not yet go to Reims. He liked his creature comforts. He was happy enough where he was. Some who had his ear – his scheming adviser, La Trémoille, for one – thought it too risky a venture and told him so. To get to Reims an army would still have to pass through enemy country. “Why
don’t you rest a while, Joan?” the Dauphin told her. “You’ve done so much.”

In the privacy of her rooms, Joan fumed with frustration. “I should not say it, but sometimes I feel like kicking him, Belami. I really do.” As it turned out, she did not need to go to that extreme. Other voices – the Duc d’Alençon’s for one, and La Hire’s too – joined the clamour that at last persuaded the Dauphin he must leave the safety of his castle and have himself crowned at Reims.

The road to Reims was a triumphal one. Town after town opened their gates, handed over the keys to the Dauphin and welcomed their beloved Maid of France, strewing the path before her with flowers. There were a few towns that shut their gates against them. The army did not stop to subjugate them – Joan would not let them. They simply passed around them. She would allow
nothing to impede their progress to Reims and the king’s coronation.

At Chalons-sur-Marne she found herself surrounded by dozens of children all pointing and laughing at Belami, she thought, who was perched, as he so often was, high on her standard. She looked up. “See, Belami, see how many admirers you have,” she cried. And then she noticed that Belami, too, was looking skywards. Above him fluttered a cloud of white butterflies that floated down about them now like blown cherry blossom. Belami eyed them greedily. “Don’t you dare, Belami!” Joan cried. “I’ll never speak to you again.”

While the children laughed at this and marvelled too, their mothers and fathers knelt and crossed themselves. Here was evidence, if any were needed, again of their Joan’s miraculous powers. Had she not changed the direction of the wind at Orléans?
Was she not driving the English out of France almost single-handed? She was a blessed messenger of God, sent by Him. She was their Maid, their saviour. For them the white butterflies were simply further proof of it.

“Well, Joan,” came a voice from the crowd, a voice she knew well. “I see you’ve still got your Belami.” It was a moment or two before she found the face that went with the voice – Durand Lassois from Vaucouleurs.

“Uncle Durand!” she cried, and leapt from her horse. She hugged him to her, her heart bursting with joy. He rode with her and her brothers all the way to Reims through the wide open country of Champagne, and all the way they talked of home, of Joan’s mother and father, of Aunt Joan and the baby, of Robert de Beaudricourt, of Domrémy. And the butterflies followed them all the way. The
temptation became too much for Belami. Luckily Joan was too busy talking to notice his feeding forays amongst the butterflies. Belami was a very happy sparrow, and a very well-fed one too, by the time he first saw the great towers of Reims Cathedral.

The people of Reims flocked out into the sunlit streets to greet their Maid, and the Dauphin, and their victorious army. The bells and the cheering rang out over the roofs of the city, and warmed Joan to the heart. “I think, Uncle Durand, I shall never be any happier again in all my life than I am now.”

She was wrong. She was at her supper that evening, alone in her room with Belami, when Louis came in. “I know you do not want to be disturbed, Joan, but there is a man outside who claims he is your father,” he said. “Shall I send him away?”

“Well,” said a shadow in the doorway, “are you so grand now that you would send me away?” The shadow stepped into the light and became her father. The two of them clung to each other, neither wanting ever to let go. “So,” said her father, at last opening his eyes, “so the sparrow came with you.”

“He’ll always be with me,” said Joan. And the two sat down at the table to talk. “And Mother? Is she with you? Is she here?”

“You think a farm runs itself?”

“Is she well? And Hauviette? Have you seen Uncle Durand? He’s here too. And anyway, how did you know where to find me?” There were so many questions they talked together all night and were still talking when Belami woke at dawn.

“But after today your work will be done, Joan,” her father was saying, reaching forward across the table to grasp her hands. “Today, when the Dauphin
is crowned, you will have done enough, done all anyone could ever have expected of you. Come home with me, Joan. Come home.”

“You think I do not want to, Father? You think I haven’t seen enough of this killing? You think I’m not tired of it? Oh, Father, I long to lie again under my apple tree and dream my dreams, to sit spinning beside Mother, to go wandering in the fields with Hauviette. I long for it. But my work is not finished. My voices tell me I may not rest until the last of the enemy is driven from the soil of France. I must listen to them, you know I must. Have they not always been right? Have they not always protected me? They will never abandon me. They have promised me. Dear Father, no more pleadings, no more entreaties; else you will weaken my resolve. And no matter what happens, I must be strong for France, strong for my Lord in Heaven.”

On the day of the coronation they breakfasted together with Uncle Durand and her two brothers and d’Alençon. It should have been a joyous affair, but it was not. The impending parting of their ways hung over them like a shadow.

As she rode at her king’s side that day through the streets to the cathedral, she was blind to the rapture and adoration all around her, deaf to the blessings they called out to her. Belami sat on the pommel of her saddle and she stroked him with her finger, just as she did when she was in bed and crying herself to sleep.

All through the glittering ceremony, the anointing of the royal head, and the crowning itself, the tears welled in her eyes and would not be held back. Tears of joy, the people thought, but they were not. This crowning was all she had strived for. She had achieved the impossible in
just a few short months, yet she could not rejoice in it.

That same evening her father prepared to leave for Domrémy. “I came here to bring three children home,” he told her. “I leave with none. Neither of your brothers will leave your side. No father in France can be sadder than I am today, and none prouder either. Go then, if you must, and chase the Godoms out of France. But when you have done it, come home, Joan. We shall be waiting for you.”

Joan could not bear to watch him go, but ran inside and hid herself in her room. “Sometimes, Belami,” she said, sitting on her bed, hugging her knees and rocking back and forth, “sometimes I know things even my voices have not told me. I shall not see him again, Belami, nor hear his voice, not on this earth, not in this life. I know it, but
I must not think of it. There is Paris still to take. There is still God’s work to be done, and I must be about it. I must go to the king. We must take Paris at once. There must be no delay.”

But there was nothing but delay. The new King Charles, basking in the glory of his coronation, strutted about his court like a puffed up peacock. “Patience, Joan,” he told her. “If things go my way, we shall take Paris without ever lifting a sword.”

“How?” Joan demanded.

And the king, surrounded as he was by La Trémoille and his friends, all of them deeply envious of Joan and only too happy to see her thwarted, put his arm around her, and said cryptically: “You will see, Joan. You will see.”