The Maid (2 page)

There were seven of them in her family. Her mother, her father, and five children. The three oldest were boys: Jacquemin, Jean, and Pierrelot. Cowards, the father called them. Wastrels. And so they were. Sullen and slump-shouldered, sleeping late, kicking the dog. Next came Jehanne's sister, Catherine, the beauty, named after the saint. Catherine with the bright plum mouth and the thick blond waterfall of hair. Hair that everyone stared at in church. She, Jehanne, was the youngest. A tomboy. Dark and watchful, with short, sturdy legs like a donkey.

They lived in the rolling green hill country of northern France, far away from Paris. Far away from everything. Theirs was a land of wide, slow rivers and tall ancient oaks. In summer the fields filled up with poppies, their red upflung skirts glowing in the sun. In winter their forest was silent as a church.

They were common people, unschooled, sunburned. Their hands and feet were calloused. The new lambs and goats slept with them inside the house during the spring frosts, huddled and snuffing in the red glow of the hearth. Jehanne and Catherine wrapped rags around their feet to keep warm, waited until summer to wash themselves in the river. But they were respected in their village. Because their father owned his land, they were respected.

They believed in one God. They were Christians. Jehanne and her mother and Catherine went to church every evening for Compline, knelt together on the dark packed-earth floor, their hands knotted in prayer. The whole family went on Sunday mornings. Jehanne's mother prayed for God's help and forgiveness. Her father begged God to smite down the Goddons the way He once smote down the Ethiopians.
Send them all to Hell.

They disapproved of the old forest gods, the pagan superstitions. Thought them shameful, blasphemous, stupid. Jehanne's mother tucked in her lips and shook her head when their neighbor Mariette hitched herself naked to the plow each April and dragged it through the muddy fields on her hands and knees, singing and praying to the old gods for a bountiful harvest, the fat bells of her breasts and belly swinging back and forth, slick with gray mud. Jehanne's father did not keep a mandrake under his bed.

They lived in a stone house near the river with four rooms and two small, but finely made, glass windows. Those windows were her father's great delight. "See how fine the mullion work is," he'd say to visitors. "Even Lord Bourlémont doesn't have better windows."

A proud man, her father. He saw himself as a kind of country king. He worked tirelessly, at a run all day, plowing the fields, planting wheat and rye, taking the cream and hen's eggs to market, collecting taxes, organizing men for the village watch. The family sat in the front pew at church on Sunday. After services were finished, he went around shaking hands, smiling, clapping shoulders. Her father, King of the Peasants.

As a child, Jehanne had adored him. On summer afternoons, he'd take her along with him to bring the cows down from the high pasture near the old oak forest, the
bois chenu.
She can remember his enormous hand, rough and warm around hers, his long dark shadow going ahead of hers on the road. His hand making her safe. At the top of the hill, he'd take her to where the little
fraises du bois
grew in the green and white sunlight at the edge of the forest. Small ruby-red berries, cone-shaped and so sweet. Intoxicating. They ate handfuls of them as they walked. When they finished, their palms were wet and sticky, stained red. Her father held his up and laughed. "Guilty," he said. "Guilty, guilty."

Jehanne didn't know what the word meant then, but she sensed it meant something bad. A cold snake of warning slid through her stomach.

When he began to go mad, no one outside the family knew it. He confined his rages to the house. The red-eyed beast that reared up only occasionally in Jehanne's earliest memories began to appear more and more, circling the house with his long teeth bared, striking out at anyone who got in his way. "Who do you think you are?" he would scream at her suddenly, for no reason. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

Her mother blamed it on the war. "It kills him to see all his hard work destroyed," she said, squeezing one hand very tightly with the other, as if to keep it from flying away. Or later she'd say, "It's because of Catherine. He was never like this when Catherine was here." Her mother, pious and loving, but a coward too, hiding in her prayers, her dreams of Jesus.

It made me very tall, my secret. It made me very tall, and it made everyone around me very small. Like dollhouse people. Little dollhouse people with little muddy problems. Cattle, pigs, taxes, harvests. My problems were huge, vast as the universe. God. War. The King. France. And I knew I was worthy of them. I knew when the time was right, God would pour His courage into me, and I'd stride across the country like a giant, stepping over forests and villages, rivers and mountains, leaving my enormous footprints behind me. Footprints the world would remember forever.

They'd been at war with the English for as long as anyone could remember. So long that most of northern France had gone over to the English side. No longer just the Goddons to worry about. Now the Burgundians too. "Bloody traitors," her father called them. "Spineless pigs."

Sixty or seventy years, her father said. For sixty or seventy years the Goddons and Burgundians had been ravaging the countryside, stealing their land, slaying them in their beds as they slept, destroying their crops, feasting on their shanks. They all knew about the slaughter at Agincourt, the terrible siege at Rouen. "Poor souls eating their dogs, babies sucking at the blue breasts of their dead mothers." But it wasn't until Jehanne was ten or eleven that the war came close to her—that she began to understand what it meant.

One hot September night she awoke to the smell of smoke. Red light was pulsing on the walls. She sat up in bed and looked out the window and saw the wheat fields burning. A sea of fire. The air black and rolling, thick with smoke. Their harvest destroyed. Her mother sank to the bed, moaning, "Oh my God." Her father shouted at her mother to take the children up and hide in the hayloft. Then there came a great thundering of hooves past the house. Loud, ugly laughter with it. Her father ran out the door naked with an ax, screaming. But the men just laughed at him. Twenty or thirty of them on horseback,
les écorcheurs.
Not even soldiers that time. No flags or banners, no embroidered tunics. Just Goddon mercenaries in old rusted mail, bandits riding down out of the hills, tearing apart the villages and setting them on fire, taking whatever they wanted because who would stop them? "You going to take us, old man? Eh? You and your shriveled little prick?" Laughing as they loaded all of her father's sheep into a wagon and rode off into the night.

For a time her father and the other men had tried to protect the village. They got together whatever money they had and went to Lord Bourlément, begged him to rent them the old ruined chateau on the island in the river. A big roofless place with a crumbling turret, home now only to foxes and some robins that had nested up in the old murder holes, the walls streaked white and pale green with long stalactites of shit. But they were still good, the main walls, still high and thick and strong. Their plan was to hide the entire village inside during the next raid. "Now let them try to steal our livestock," Jehanne's father said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

He and the other men began taking turns up on the rooftops at the edge of the village, standing watch through the night, pacing and slapping their cheeks to stay awake. But in the end it did no good. They couldn't get the animals out of their pens and across the river to the island fast enough. When the bandits came through again, they trotted right up to the villagers who were sliding around on the muddy riverbanks, trying to push the frightened calves into the dark water. Knives drawn, laughing, their faces like carved wooden masks in the torchlight. "Thank you so much for your help."

After they left, her father tore their house apart. Hurled everything across the room, chairs, tables, bowls, pots, candlesticks, pitchers, plates. Tore the door clear off the hinges. Jehanne had never seen him so angry. Her mother stood in the corner, cowering and sobbing. "Please, Jacques, in the name of God." Sobbing until he punched her too.

Jehanne began to spend more time in the forest. It had become a wild place by then. "The forests came back with the English," her mother said. In their terror, people abandoned their farms, their villages, ran to hide from the Goddons and live in the woods. They ate roots, grass, sometimes their own children, it was said. They slept in caves, curled up in the roots of old trees. And the woods themselves grew monstrous, spread out over the fields and old roads and abandoned villages, reclaiming the country. Trees growing up inside of burned-out churches and houses, creeper vines curling out of the chimneys, leaves twisting up into the sky like smoke.

People said the woods were dangerous, full of starving animals, wolves and bears, wild boar, but that didn't scare Jehanne. She'd seen a wolf once in the road right outside her house after a raid. She came out in the morning and saw her cousin Hemet lying very still in a ditch. The wolf was lying beside him, calmly chewing on the shiny pink ropes of his intestines. Jehanne stared, mesmerized by the splendid color, thinking,
We have those inside of us?
Then her mother ran at the wolf with a shovel, screaming, "Get away, get away from him!" The wolf just looked at her, flat yellow eyes like the Devil's. Then it went back to eating. No, the woods were better. She liked it there in the shadows, hidden, silent. Safe.

Often she prayed there, in an old fallen-down shrine to the Virgin Mary she'd found deep in the trees. She'd kneel in front of the wooden statue and press her cheek against the hem of the Virgin's robe, kiss her little wooden feet.
Help us,
she would say.
Please help us.

She said real prayers too sometimes. Prayers her mother had taught her. "Whenever you are afraid, pray to God and He will help you," she said.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name ...
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven ...

It amazed her, that prayer. It was like a secret room inside of her that she could run to whenever she wanted. A place where she could feel safe any time, any hour of the day. All she had to do was close her eyes and say the words, and there it was, safety, the enormous hand of God on her chest, soothing her heart.

Soon she began to pray everywhere. In church, at home, in the fields. Three times each day the church bells rang out, and each time she thought,
Yes, now. Now.
She went down on her knees and lifted her face to the sky. She entered the secret room.

After the day in the garden, there were three of them who came to her. Three saints, standing in the air above her, shining. The first one stern, enormous, kinglike. His hands like antlers. His voice lighting up her bones as if they were candles. He was their leader. She knew as soon as he spoke. The deep lion's voice thundering through her, clasping her between her legs, making her want to drop to her knees, to bow her head, call him Sire.

He never had to say his name. She knew who he was immediately. Knew he was Michael, the Archangel. He who is like God. His face filled up the sky.
Oh Lord,
she said, shaking, feeling as if she would break apart with joy.
Jehanne,
he said. Just one word and it was clear. She'd do anything for him.

He'd be the one to deliver the bad news.

Then came the two virgins. Glowing like dandelions. Motherly, consoling. Saint Catherine with the sad spoon face, the hands like carved ivory. Wise, beautiful Catherine who had broken the spiked torture wheel. Her voice a flute of cool water, so clear it made Jehanne feel as if she understood everything in the world, could count every stone in the bottom of the river. And Saint Margaret. Plump, brazen Margaret with the faint brown mustache and wildfires blazing in her eyes. Margaret who had fought her way out of the belly of Satan's dragon with her sword.
Don't be afraid, cabbage,
said Margaret.
We'll be with you all the way.

What do you mean, all the way?

Nothing, love,
said Catherine, embracing her.
Lay down your worries and rest now, darling. Rest your head in my arms.

They made fun of her in the village. The other children. They mocked her for giving alms to the begging friars, for taking her
choyne
bread out to Volo in his cage. They said she was pious, a righteous little prig. Once they'd tried to destroy her. She'd been playing in the field by the Fairies' Tree with some other girls from the village. Hauviette, Mengette, Valerie. They were making poppy garlands to hang up for the May festival. It had started out a sunny morning, but suddenly a cloud slid over the sun. A large purple cloud, heavy with rain. Everything grew darker, cooler, like evening. The grass looked angry and sharp. Jehanne's heart crawled backward in her chest. She walked a little ways off into the field, to where she thought they couldn't see her anymore, and went down on her knees. She began to pray.

When she opened her eyes, they were all standing around her, staring down at her. Big faces, leering. Valerie with a wicked look in her eyes. "Look at little Saintie Pie," she said, coming closer. "Think you're awfully high and mighty don't you, Saintie Pie?" Jehanne stood up. Her hands had begun to sweat. Valerie took another step closer. She was taller than Jehanne, perhaps a year or two older. A big, sturdy girl with a coarse, pale face, large breasts, and small black eyes. Odd little marks like sparrow tracks on her cheeks. Her clothes were always tattered. Everyone knew her father was a drunk. Everyone knew she'd go into the hayloft with any boy who asked. "What's the matter, Saintie Pie, you scared?" Valerie and the other girls crowded in, with ugly fixed looks on their faces.

She wanted to run then. Or collapse, fall on her knees and beg. "Please, no, don't hurt me." But as she looked up at the older girl, that pale blunt face, she thought,
Who is she? Why should she scare me?
A wild fighting spirit rose up inside her. "Better than you," she said. "Dirty slut." The other girls stared at each other with their mouths open. Everyone except Valerie. She stepped forward and slapped Jehanne's cheek very hard. "Little bitch," she said as Jehanne stumbled backward. "How dare you speak to me like that?"

The world became a red, rippling place then. Everything happening very slowly, as if she were underwater, and somehow also very fast. Jehanne walked over and punched the older girl in the stomach. "I do what I want," she said. The older girl sat down on the ground, her mouth hanging open, round as an O. The other girls burst out laughing. "Jesus!" Valerie cried at last. Then she scrambled to her feet and ran away.