The Maid (13 page)

She spent the night in the chapel under the fretful watch of Madame du Bellier. Praying and weeping while Madame du Bellier sat stiffly near the entrance to the chapel, doing needlepoint, acting as if she could not hear everything.
Oh please!
Jehanne sobbed.
Oh please, won't you come?
Tell me how to make him listen. I am so afraid.

Silence.

After a time Madame du Bellier stood and approached the girl, who had at last stopped praying and simply lay sobbing on the floor of the chapel. "Come, darling," she said, touching Jehanne's shoulder. "It's all right now. Nothing's going to happen tonight. Come let's get you into bed with some hot milk."

"If only my men were here," Jehanne said. "I'd feel safe then. Why won't they let my men come be with me?"

Madame du Bellier looked at her, stroked her hair. "Soon enough you'll have new men," she said. "Make a friend of the King, and he'll have the best men in France keeping you safe."

"Trémöille's threatened," Madame du Bellier said later, once it had become clear that Jeanne would not sleep that night. Would only pace back and forth before the low, red fire, cracking her knuckles and saying,
What shall I do? What shall I do?
"He's very jealous. Very possessive of the King. I've seen it before, with others here at court. Others who are gone now. He hates the idea of anyone knowing more about Charles than he does." She looked into the fire. "You must find a way to befriend him, Jehanne. Make him see that you are not a threat."

Jehanne stopped walking. "That man will never be a friend of mine."

The next morning two pages ran through the castle in opposite directions. The first clutched a letter from the Maid to the King, as dictated to Madame du Bellier. It read:
Gentle Dauphin, if you love your country at all, I beg you, come to me this night in my chambers. Let me deliver the message that God has commanded me to bring you. Come alone, Dauphin. I beg you.

The second page bore a letter from the Maid to Trémöille. It read:
You do not scare me. God and God alone will decide who among us suffers.

She was awakened in the night by a sharp banging at her door. It was the Dauphin, clutching a long tattered fox-fur coat at the neck, his eyes wide. His hands trembling. "Let me in quickly. I can't be seen here."

"But Madame," Jehanne said, nodding to the plump older woman who lay snoring softly in her bed.

"Tell her she has to go," he said. "Tell her she can come back in an hour."

Jehanne woke the sleeping woman, and when she was gone, she and Charles sat down in the two tall chairs by the fire. The Dauphin stared at the little bed Jehanne had made for herself on the floor: her cloak and a pillow in front of the hearth. "Our bed is not to your liking?" he asked as he laid his fur over the back of the chair.

"I am a warrior," Jehanne explained solemnly, as she had explained earlier to an offended-looking Madame du Bellier. "Warriors sleep on the ground so as always to be ready for battle."

Metz had told her that on the way to Chinon. "Never get too comfortable," he said. "You get comfortable, it's all over." Bertrand roared when he heard that. "What do you know about war, stripling?" Metz blushed red to the tops of his ears, and when at last he admitted that he'd read it in a book ("I've read a great many books about war and chivalry, for your information"), Jehanne and Bertrand looked at each other over the fire and then burst out laughing. But the words had stayed with her. She believed them.

The Dauphin looked at her. Then he took a deep breath through his nose and said, "Tell me, what is this secret you cannot say in front of the Chamberlain?"

"I saw you in a dream." He'd been in a castle by a river. "Luges, Laches?" she asked.

"Loches," said Charles. "The summer castle."

"But it wasn't summer anymore," she said. In the dream, the leaves were red and yellow on the trees and there was an edge of chill in the air. It was evening. The Dauphin walked into the oratory by himself, knelt down before the altar, and begged God for guidance. "You asked that if you were in fact the rightful heir to the throne of France, that God would keep you and protect you until such time as you could safely ascend it. Then you prayed that if you were not the rightful heir, that God would permit you to escape to Spain or Scotland and take refuge there instead of being put to death in prison."

When she was finished talking, Charles was very pale. He looked so vulnerable that she suddenly felt sorry for him. "But how could you know that?" he said. "No one knows about that."

"Let me help you, Dauphin. You have been wronged these last years. Let me give you the help you deserve."

He blinked several times. Scratched his nose. "Do you say you know the truth of my paternity?"

She took his hand, held his chilled blue fingers in hers. "You are no bastard, Sire. You're the King's true son and heir. You alone are the rightful ruler of France."

They spent six weeks interrogating her, examining her. First the churchmen of Chinon in their tall black hats, then the churchmen of Poitiers in their tall red hats. All of them staring at her, pelting her with questions.
How do you know it's God who speaks to you? How do you know you're not possessed? Why do you dress as a man? How do we know you're not a witch? What spells do you know? What curses? What magic?

Yolande was always there, watching from the corner, with her veil folded back. Watching, listening, taking notes in a small leather book. Whenever Jehanne said something brash, Yolande smiled, the left side of her mouth curling up, a little black dimple appearing in her cheek, so Jehanne spoke brashly often. "No one in the world can save France but me," she said one day. "I wish it were not so, but it is so, and you must use me quickly, for I will last little more than a year."

How Yolande stared then!

"How do you know that?" the Queen asked.

"My voices tell me many things, Your Majesty. Not all of them pleasant."

One day Madame du Bellier woke Jehanne up before dawn, the light from a candle flickering over her face in the darkness. "Here, put this on, darling," she said, handing the girl a long white nightgown. "The Queen's physician is going to examine you."

"Why?" said Jehanne, still half asleep as the woman helped her into the gown and wrapped Jehanne's cloak around her shoulders. "Nothing to worry about, they just want to make sure you're healthy."

She brought Jehanne to a room in the castle she had not seen before. "Be strong now," Madame du Bellier said, looking away. She squeezed Jehanne's hand, then left. In the room there was a bed with a sheet thrown over it. Yolande stood near the bed with five or six women around her, all of them with solemn, stiff-looking faces. A hard, unseeing look in their eyes that made Jehanne think of the exorcism in Vaucouleurs. "We have to examine you, you understand," Yolande said. "Make sure you're really a virgin."

Jehanne took a step backward. "I am indeed a virgin, Majesty. I give you my word."

"Nevertheless, we must be sure."

Jehanne blinked. Stammered. "Where is the doctor?"

One of the women stepped forward. "I am Madame de Gaucourt," she said. A tall, angular creature—thin as a grasshopper with a long, hooked nose, lavender skin. "I will be examining you."

"I thought it was a doctor," Jehanne said, taking another step back.

"Madame de Gaucourt is the wife of one of my most trusted advisors," the Queen said. "It's best for a woman to do this."

"Be a good girl now and this will all be over quickly," Madame de Gaucourt said. She told Jehanne to lie down on the bed, and when Jehanne had done so, she lifted the girl's skirt up around her waist and spread her legs open.

"Bend your knees."

A terrible feeling, the cold air on her tenderest part, the women gathered around, staring as if they expected a hissing cobra to emerge from between her legs. "Majesty, I swear," Jehanne cried. "No man has touched me there."

Madame de Gaucourt rolled up her sleeves. Spoke for the group: "That may be, but we must see for ourselves."

She held a long metal spoon in her hand that glinted in the sunlight.

"What's that?"

"It'll be over soon. Just think about the God you say has sent you here."

Her scream, when it came, echoed through the castle corridors, made the cooks in the kitchen jump. "Now, now," said Gaucourt. Taking her time, fidgeting. Jehanne began to weep. Great fat tears rolled slowly down her face. "All right," Gaucourt said finally, her hand slick as if it had been dipped in jelly. "She's pure. No one's had her." She wiped the instrument clean on her apron, smearing it with bright blood. "Amazing," she said, looking down at Jehanne. "A peasant like you, keeping it all this time."

A thousand examinations, it seemed. A doctor with peeling lips looking her over for marks of the Devil, a tiny theologian with yellow hands who wanted her to recite prayers, the Bishop and his men in their long black robes peering into her eyes, asking the same questions the other men of the cloth had asked: How do you
know
it's God? Show us a sign. Where is your proof?

Again and again they said that they needed to be sure. Jehanne could think only of the poor people in Orléans, starving, eating rats and dogs. Sucking on stones to keep the hunger pangs at bay. She felt like shouting, "People are dying! Let me go save them!"

The Dauphin attended Jehanne's daily interrogations in Poitiers, but unlike Yolande, he never spoke. Seemed to pay little attention to the proceedings. Several times he fell asleep, snoring loudly in his chair. Other times he doodled on a piece of paper, not bothering to hide what he was doing. Jehanne's heart sank whenever she looked at him. She had hoped, after the night in her room ... But no, it was worse now. His eyes were flat, inscrutable. His face closed. A wall.

One day he came in very late, well after the proceedings had begun. Everyone stood, watching him walk his slow, slouching walk across the room, his stained pink satin houppelande billowing behind him like a sail as he fell into a chair beside Yolande. He had deep brown bags under his eyes, and his hair was so greasy it looked wet. He smelled as if he had bathed in wine. Jehanne grew furious at the sight of him. Disgust rose up in her, hot and wild.
How can you call yourself King? They should cut you into pieces, drag you through the streets.

"You say your voices tell you that God wishes to free the people of France from their present calamity," one of the churchmen said. A small man with a bristly white beard and a large brown mole on his cheek. His lips were pressed together tightly, as if he were hiding gold in his mouth. "But if He wishes to free them, surely it is not necessary for Him to use an army."

Jehanne stood up and banged her fist on the table. "For God's sake, the soldiers will fight, and God will give the victory!"

The churchmen looked aghast. Charles blinked.
Well, that's the end of me,
she thought.
Tonight I sleep in the dungeon.
But Yolande was smiling. A radiant smile, like a bouquet of flowers flung high in the air. "Thank you, Jehanne," she said. "You may leave us now."

"It's not his fault," Yolande said later. "The King has had it worse than anyone." She and Jehanne were walking together through the castle's outer courtyard that overlooked the valley. It was early in the morning. The sky chill and white. Pale scarves of fog still nestled among the budding hills. Already Jehanne knew some things about Yolande from Madame du Bellier. Yolande owned vast estates in Anjou, land she did not want destroyed by the English. Yolande was rich. "Owns half of Spain," said Madame du Bellier. "She's worth more than Charles and La Trémöille combined." In her message, Yolande had said: "There are some things you must understand about the King if you are to help him."

He'd had a terrible life, she said, from the start. First the mad father, murdering his own knights, throwing his shit against the windows of the Louvre, thinking he was made of glass. Then the Whore Queen Isabeau, betraying him, her own son, disowning him, proclaiming him a bastard in public, not the King's son at all—making a fool of him in front of the entire country. "A monster, that woman," Yolande said. "She should be killed."

As she spoke, Yolande's face changed. Suddenly she looked older. Older and darker. As if a shadow had passed beneath her skin. "And so much death around him ... always death, at every turn." There had been four Dauphins in line for the throne before Charles. Four older brothers who now lay with their arms crossed over their chests in the Abbey at Saint-Denis: Charles, Charles, Louis, and John. The first two hadn't made it out of childhood. The last two died suddenly, as youths, while in the Duke of Burgundy's care. "He said it was illness both times," Yolande said. "But of course it was a lie. He poisoned them, Burgundy. Poisoned them to get them out of his way."

Jehanne was staring now, but the Queen did not seem to notice. She seemed to be somewhere else. "I took Charles away then. I had to. He was already engaged to my daughter; I had come to think of him as a son. We left Paris in secret, by night. It was in the middle of the riots. Burgundy was trying to take over the city, and I knew if he got his hands on Charles, he'd kill him the way he did his brothers. So I took him. I got him out, took him down to my castle in Provence."

The Whore Queen had been furious when she heard. She demanded Charles be returned at once, her fastest messenger galloping over the yellow fields outside Paris with the Queen's shouting letter rolled up in his pouch. Yolande responded with a letter of her own:

We have not nurtured and cherished this one for you to make him die like his brothers or to go mad like his father, or to become English like you. I keep him for my own. Come and take him away, if you dare.

Isabeau had not dared. "But," Yolande said, her eyes far away, "something else happened, something terrible." Two of Charles's counselors, Tanneguy du Chastel and Pierre de Giac, had secretly plotted revenge against the Duke of Burgundy for murdering the Mad King's brother, the Duke of Orléans, years earlier. "Charles had no idea. He was young; they used him," Yolande said. They told the Dauphin to request a peaceful meeting with Burgundy on the old bridge at Montereau, and then they cut Burgundy's head off right in front of him. Blood coming out in ropes, the head arcing through the air and rolling to rest at Charles's feet. Charles screaming in horror. "He had no idea," Yolande said, "but of course no one believed him." All of Burgundy blamed Charles for the death. The dead Duke's son, Philip the Good, declared civil war on the royal family. The Burgundians versus the Armagnacs. Swore he would not rest until young Charles was dead.

"So poor Charles lives in fear now," Yolande said. He was afraid of everything. He hated crossing bridges, feared for his life whenever he entered any public place. Hated strangers and crowds. Made two different men taste his wine before he would drink it. Even consulted with his astrologer every evening before he slept. "Very bad stars tonight," he would say, and then he'd vanish into his quarters for three or four days. No one allowed in or out.'Lockup,' he called it.'I've been in lockup.'"

There was a good man under there, fiercely intelligent, Yolande said. And kind. But damaged too, in need of healing. "You must be patient with him," Yolande said. "It has been raining in his heart for as long as he can remember."

Jehanne nodded.

"What about La Trémöille?" she said finally.

Yolande looked at her. "What
about
La Trémöille?"

"I don't think he likes me."

"No, I don't imagine he does. Nevertheless, as long as you do what you've promised us, you have nothing to fear from La Trémöille."

The next afternoon Jehanne walked up to the Dauphin after the interrogations were finished and asked him to accompany her to church. "We have much praying to do if we are to save this country, Dauphin."

He looked at her, three pleats tucked between his eyebrows. "Why do you not call me King?"

"I'll call you King as soon as I have you crowned in Reims."

The Dauphin laughed at her, the absurdity. The monstrous arrogance. But it excited him too, being around that kind of confidence. He agreed to pray with her. Yes, an excellent idea. He walked with her down the hill to the Rose Chapel and sat beside her throughout the Mass, watching her in the candlelight. After a time, he got to his knees and bowed his own head.

From then on, he accompanied her to the chapel every day. Sat beside her in the freezing pink-marble room and prayed, marveled at how strong he felt when he was next to her there—her faith, the certainty rising off her like heat, warming him, making him think,
Perhaps. Perhaps it is possible.

When he was alone, without her, his hope vanished quickly. Evaporated like water before his eyes, returning him to the howling desert of his old life. The desert where everyone he loved had died or betrayed him. The desert where La Trémöille was King and he was a slave, cowering and mewling on his knees, begging for mercy. And so Charles stayed by Jehanne's side, drinking in her light, beating back the desert. And when he prayed, he prayed that God would make him strong. Strong enough to keep defying La Trémöille. Strong enough to be King.

***

A month later the churchmen of Poitiers declared that they could find no evil in Jehanne. "We see no reason why, in view of the imminent danger to France, the girl should not be permitted to help the King and go to Orléans."

"Finally!" crowed Yolande. She said they must return to Chinon at once. Must get to work. It was the end of March. The earth was beginning to soften and give off a cool, metallic, claylike scent. The daffodils were leaping up alongside the road. And as the pointed slate-roofed towers of Chinon Castle came into view from their carriage, Yolande clenched her hands into two plump white fists. Looked at Jehanne and Charles with blazing eyes. "Now we have a chance! Now we will give them a fight!"