The Maid (12 page)

It was not as they said, her first meeting with the King. She did not miraculously recognize him in the great hall at Chinon. The great Armagnac dukes and courtiers and knights were not there, standing on tiptoe, looking on in their furs and jewels beneath the flickering chandeliers. There was no grand public event. Their first meeting was a secret.

A few hours after Jehanne and her men had arrived in Chinon, the King's messenger came to the inn near the river where she and the others were finishing supper. Metz and Bertrand speedily dismantling a brown roasted chicken, Jehanne picking at a piece of bread.
Better to be hungry. Keep the senses sharp.

"You are to come with me to the castle at once," the messenger said.

"What about my men?" she said.

No. It was impossible. "I cannot stress enough the need for secrecy at this moment."

Her stomach went cold. She felt as if she'd been slapped. She looked at Metz and Bertrand across the table, their pale, stunned faces. "I'll be back soon," she said at last, forcing herself to smile as she pulled her stiff, mud-caked boots back on. But even as she spoke, a voice in her bones said:
You'll never see them again.

They were too stunned to say much, too stunned to do more than hug her awkwardly, mumble their good-byes. Metz stood watching, holding on to the doorway of the inn so as not to fall to his knees.

When they were outside, the messenger handed Jehanne a cloak, said she must wear it. "Keep your face down," he said. "Don't let anyone see you." Jehanne had disliked him on sight: a thick, square-headed man with a wide gap between his front teeth and an ugly, wet smile. He made her sit in front of him on the horse and insisted on keeping his big sweating hands on her waist as they rode toward the castle. "I have just ridden eleven days across the countryside, sir," Jehanne said. "I know very well how to sit a horse." But he ignored her. His sweating hands stayed where they were.

They followed a long, narrow, zigzagging road uphill through the town and the high curling forests above the town toward the pale gold cliffs where Chinon Castle loomed over the valley with its towers and dark slate-roofed turrets, its winding walls sprawling along the clifftops. It was evening now, the hour when the air is violet and everything else stands out in silhouette, black and sharp. A landscape in cameo. Jehanne kept trying to look and see the castle towers up on the cliffs, but every time she tried, the man pulled the hood back down over her face so she could not see anything. "You want trouble?"

Jehanne said that she did not.

They did not enter the castle by the main gate. Instead they went through a battered green door in the outer wall, and then up a long drafty flight of stone steps and out into a darkening courtyard. There the castle towers rose darkly overhead as Jehanne and the messenger passed by a stone chapel and a monstrous old oak tree, and at last they entered a tower in the far corner of the courtyard, overlooking the dim blue valley and the town of Chinon, the broad river Loire winding through it, thick with white reefs of ice.

Inside the tower, five or six people were sitting around an ornately carved oak table. It was a strange room, small and dark, even with the fire going. There were nets of cobwebs in the corners, a close, mossy smell in the air as if it were never used. They all stared at Jehanne as she came through the doorway and pushed back the awful hood at last. "This is her, then?" said a fat woman in a tall red cone hat with its veil folded back like a dinner napkin, her bright dark eyes flashing. On her finger, an emerald the size of a walnut.

A man in a blue tunic with a faded gold fleur-de-lis embroidered on the chest nodded, stepped forward, and cleared his throat. "Your majesties, may I present Jehanne d'Arc. The Maid of Lorraine."

He introduced the Dauphin first. Charles VII. The uncrowned king.
As soon as I saw him, I knew he'd betray me.
She saw it in his face: in the small, shifting eyes; the pale, weak chin; uncertainty wafting off of him like perfume. The words flashed in her mind like lightning:
He'll be the death of me.
A complete knowledge. Instantaneous. Fear drenching her insides as the judgment was laid out like cards on a table: He's a jellyfish, spineless, no conviction, no will of his own. A broken man.

Still she knelt down before him, steadied herself. Still the mission must continue. She kissed the hem of the King's houppelande—a tattered yellow silk thing, stinking of mildew—and gazed up at him, "Gentle Dauphin, I bring you good news and hope."

The King said nothing. Regarded her briefly, then rubbed the side of his long drooping nose and nodded at the courtier to continue with the introductions.

Next came Yolande. The Queen of Sicily. The Dauphin's mother-in-law. Yolande in the red cone hat and the fat emerald, nodding gravely. Her eyes bright and black as currants. Her hands small and white, tufted with dimples. "If you are in fact the Maid of Lorraine, we will have much use for you," she said.

Finally, La Trémöille. The King's Chamberlain, Georges de La Trémöille.
Jealous, wicked La Trémöille.
He was the King's chief counsel. An enormous bald mountain of a man in a black velvet tunic, fatter even than the Queen of Sicily. Thick gold rings on his fingers. A slow, reptilian glitter in his eyes. He did not smile when they were introduced. He simply glanced at Jehanne for a moment from under his sagging eyelids. Then he looked away, nostrils flaring. As if he were offended to be in the same room with her.

Jehanne hardly noticed. Jehanne could think of nothing but the King. The narrow balding head, the weak, shifting eyes. The sullen, petulant mouth.
My betrayer.
She felt as if the walls of the room were closing in around her.
What did you expect? A tall, strapping thing with blond curls and a gold crown? A hero to help you complete your mission?
And she saw then that she had. She had expected something like that. And she saw that she had expected him to love her. To recognize her immediately as God's Messenger, his long-awaited savior, and welcome her with grateful, open arms. She had not expected to see her death.

The Queen of Sicily came toward Jehanne, her eyes sharp, searching. She took Jehanne's chin in her hand and looked at her, turning her face, first to the left and then to the right. "Does not appear to be mad," she said at last to no one in particular. "But of course appearances can be deceiving."

She questioned the girl, the same questions everyone asked.
Tell me about your voices, your mission, your family, your visions. Are you truly a virgin? How do you know it's God's voice you hear and not the Devil's? How do you know you're not possessed?

As she answered, Jehanne could feel the Dauphin watching her. From time to time he raised an eyebrow and sighed loudly, as if he were bored. But he did not speak.

"What sign can you make to prove that you are sent by God?" Yolande asked.

Jehanne was silent. She wanted to run, to get away from these strange, cold people and never return.
Bold!
Michael whispered.
Answer boldly, love!
As he spoke, his fury flooded through her, the fire rising up from her belly to her chest until she felt like biting the air. "Majesty, take me to Orléans and I'll show you the signs you want," she said. Her voice loud, arrogant. "Take me to Orléans and I will show you the greatest victory France has seen in a thousand years."

La Trémöille's eyes went wide. "The gall," he said.

"It is not gall. It is God's will."

Yolande smiled, a long, thin smile, like a dolphin's. "Perhaps it is," she murmured.

"Well, if it's not, you'll be killed," said La Trémöille mildly, from under lowered lids. "We don't take kindly to pretenders here in Chinon."

"The room they gave me at the castle was very beautiful," she says to Massieu, her head tilted back against the cell wall, a sad smile on her face. Neither of them has any idea what time it is. The tower is dark as a well. Massieu's candle is still burning, though it's lower now, a yellow pool of wax shines and quivers around its base. "Very beautiful and very cold. A million miles from the rest of the world."

Her room had sat at the top of another tower, Coudray Keep. It had three diamond-paned windows that looked out over the Loire countryside. Heavy moss green velvet curtains pooled on the floor, a thick satin comforter gleamed on the bed. Even the chamber pot under her bed was painted with delicate green vines and flowers—finer than any dish she'd ever eaten from. That evening, when she was alone in her room, Jehanne picked it up and turned it around in her hands, looking at it in the candlelight.
All this is very dangerous.

She stood up and walked over to the windows. Looked down through the blue valley at the little rooftops in the town of Chinon, the little silver river flashing in the moonlight, the hills and barns beyond—barns so tiny she could crush them between her fingertips.
This is why we don't seem real to them.
This is why nothing about us seems real to them.

They would not allow her to sleep alone there. "Your hosts at Coudray Keep will be Monsieur and Madame du Bellier," the Queen had said. "They'll see to it that you have everything you need."

And it was Madame du Bellier who had greeted Jehanne after the interrogation and took her to her quarters. Short, quivering Madame du Bellier with a stiff red-gold halo of hair that puffed out from beneath her cone hat and hands that smelled of vinegar. Cheerful and nervous at the same time. As if she were very excited to be near Jehanne, but also afraid she might bite. "I'll be keeping you company at night so you don't get too lonely all by yourself," she said as she led Jehanne through a bare winter garden toward the tower, the square hedges wrapped up in burlap against the frost. Jehanne knew what that meant.
Someone watching me at all times,
she thought.
Someone to tell them everything I do.

In the middle of the night, the golden light woke her. Margaret was there, rising like a sun from behind the wardrobe, her eyes burning, her pink mouth stern beneath the shadow of her moustache.
Be careful!
she said.
Don't get comfortable here. Don't let it go to your head.

Oh no,
Jehanne said.
Never.

Easy to say now. Wait until it's been a few months. Wait until you're used to sleeping in that soft bed with the feather quilt and the hot bricks down at the bottom, keeping your toes warm. How will you feel about returning to the mud then?

Keep me humble!
Please, Jesus, keep me humble!

She tried to go back to sleep, but she could not. Madame du Bellier was snoring softly, steadily in the bed beside her. Outside, hard rain was banging against the windows. Jehanne kept thinking about Metz and Bertrand and the others. Wishing she were back with them.
Back in the forest, riding toward God ...

Jehanne got up and went to the fireplace, watched the fire burning low and red in its iron cradle. She took her old woolen cape from its hook and wrapped it around her. Then she lay down on the floor and curled herself up in front of the hearth. The floor was cold and hard, but at last she slept there.
Better than that wicked bed.
Anything is better than that beautiful, wicked bed.

In the beginning Charles was terrible to her. Cold and rude. His small pig's eyes narrowed in doubt. Suspicion rising off him like smoke. He summoned her to him the day after she had arrived at the castle. Two pages in faded blue velvet tunics with fraying gold fleur-du-lis embroidery lead her through the wrapped, bare gardens to the south wing of the castle: the King's apartments.

Charles sat in a tall leather chair by the window with the Chamberlain standing behind him. La Trémöille's enormous shadow falling over the Dauphin like a cloak. Charles looked at Jehanne with his lips pursed tightly, as if they'd been sewn together. "You may have convinced my mother-in-law of this foolishness," he said. "But you have not convinced us of anything. Why should we believe you are what you say?"

"Because it is the truth," she said.

La Trémöille's face curdled like milk, but Charles squinted, looking at her. "Do you know how many people come here saying they've had holy visions, saying God has sent them to me?"

"I know things about you that no one else knows," she said. "Things only God could know."

La Trémöille rolled his eyes.

"Tell me, why would God choose you, a peasant girl, an illiterate, when he could act through anyone, the most learned man on the planet?" said Charles.

"Perhaps a learned man was not what He needed for this mission."

Charles leaned forward, peering at her, his spindly hands clasped together on his knees. "What do you know about me? What is it you think you know?"

"You would have me say in front of another?"

"I am the King's closest advisor," La Trémöille said. "There is nothing he does not discuss with me."

"What I have to say is only for your ears, Dauphin."

How La Trémöille stared at her then! His eyes shining with hate.

Jehanne kept her eyes on the Dauphin. There was a long, raging silence.

"That'll be all for now, Pucelle," Charles said finally. "Leave us."

Jehanne left the room, but when she was halfway down the hall, she stopped. "I left my hat. Wait for me," she said to the page, and headed back in the direction from which she'd come. As she approached the door, she heard the Dauphin's high, nervous voice coming from inside. "Still, I think it's worth hearing her out at some point, Georges," he laughed. "I mean, at this point, why not, really?"

Silence.

"Well," the Dauphin said at last, his voice rising several octaves. "Don't you think?"

"No, I don't," said La Trémöille. "I think this whole thing is just more of your ridiculous nonsense. The fact that you allowed her to be brought here at all is an embarrassment."

Silence. The scrape of a chair.

"I don't see why you get to speak to me that way, I really don't."

Again silence.

Then La Trémöille: "I get to speak to you that way because you owe me six hundred thousand livres. And because without me, you'd be dead."

When Jehanne returned to her room after chapel that afternoon, there was a note waiting for her on her bed. "Will you read it for me?" she asked Madame du Bellier.

It was from La Trémöille. There were just three lines. A meaningless, spidery black thicket of shapes to Jeanne's unschooled eyes. "Oh," said Madame du Bellier as she scanned the letter, her hand going to her mouth.

"What is it?"

"Oh, it's—there must be some misunderstanding. This can't be for you."

"What does it say?"

She looked at Jehanne, her head thrown back, as if she'd been struck by a sharp wind. After several moments she spoke. "It says:'You will suffer for this, Jehanne d'Arc. You will suffer in ways you cannot imagine.'"