The Maid (3 page)

Later Jehanne walked down the dirt road toward the church. She was sorry for what she'd done. Her heart felt heavy, like something chained to the bottom of a well. "Forgive me, Father, I have sinned," she said as she sat beside Père Guillaume in a dim corner of the church. It was always slightly terrifying in the beginning, sitting beside the old priest with his sharp, bony knees and his sour, musty smell. His dark hands braided with blue veins. "Tell me your sins, Jehanne," he said. She stared down at the rough wooden bench, traced the grain in the wood with her finger. She thought of what she'd done, the unexpected doughlike softness of Valerie's stomach, Valerie's stunned face as she sat down on the ground. She whispered to the priest. "I got so angry," she said, her ears hot with shame, tears prickling her eyes. But with every word she spoke, she grew lighter, cleaner, the rage pouring out of her, the light pouring in. "God forgives you, my child," he said at last. "You are forgiven."

And the feeling then!
Forgiven.
It washed over her like the ocean. Wave upon wave. Eventually the priest coughed, shuffled his boots against the rough stone floor, and said, "All right, dear, you can go now."

But she didn't want to leave the church yet, didn't want to leave the feeling. She walked out into the pale, still nave and stood for a while in the great stone silence, feeling it on her skin, the coolness, the peace. She looked up at her saints in the stained-glass windows, Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, Saint Clare ... those tall, sad, lovely women illuminated by the sun. She thought of their enormous love for God, their heroic lives, their miracles. How they'd found a way to be bigger, better, to do good, fight evil, escape the mud, the smallness of life. She thought they were the luckiest people in the world.

She never considered telling the priest about her voices. She knew he would hate her for it. Would not be able to help hating her for it. He was a gentle man, Père Guillaume, a decent man even, but fearful too. Scared, trembling beneath his holy robes. You could see it in his face. The thin purple lips, the dry, papery white hands, the cold, silent judgments ... She knew if she told him, he would see to it that she suffered. He would not inflict the suffering himself, that was not his way, but he would tell someone who would be sure to inflict it. "I'm concerned about Jehannette ..." he'd say, and then it would be all over. They'd beat her until she broke and begged for forgiveness, swore it was all a lie, a fantasy. Madness. Beat her until she promised to behave, be silent. Repent.

The only person she wanted to tell was Durand. Her cousin's husband who lived in Burey-le-Petit. Durand of the tall black boots and the deep windy laugh. The one Jehanne called Uncle. Every year at Christmastime they visited him at the big cracked house in Burey. He kept a little pet fawn that slept in a basket by the hearth and would come right up to you and press its face against your thighs like a dog. Eat oats right out of your hand. Durand's wife, Marie, was sour—a cold, frowning woman who shouted and slapped your hand if you went for a second slice of meat at supper—but Durand was different. Durand, Jehanne thought, was so kind it was as if he had two hearts pounding in his chest. When she was a child, he was always pulling her up onto his lap and telling her stories about the saints. Of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who ate only boiled beech leaves. And Saint Anthony who was tortured by demons in the Outer Mountain near Pispir. Saint Anthony who said, "I fear the demon no more than I fear a fly, and with the sign of the cross I can at once put him to flight."

Durand loved God as she did: hot and fierce. He had traveled all over France on pilgrimages to visit the holy places. He'd seen the Black Madonna at Le Puy and the golden statue of Saint Foy in Conques. Stood in line all day to see the chin bone of the Virgin or a lock of Saint Peter's hair. The little girl in Rodez who bore the stigmata—the wounds of Christ. "They say she was seized one day by a vision of the crucifixion," he told Jehanne during one of her visits, "and afterward, holes opened up in her wrists and feet and blood poured out, as if nails had been driven straight through them. The day I saw her, the poor child was sitting there in the church with blood all over her, weeping and wailing one minute, laughing hysterically the next, the whole time with this fixed look in her eyes, as if there were people in the room that only she could see." He looked at Jehanne, his eyes shining. "It was real. I know it. God was there, inside her."

How she'd wanted to tell him then! To pull him in close and say, "I know. He visits me too." But she did not dare. Even with Durand, she did not dare. It was too precious, too fragile a thing to put out into the world yet. It needed to be protected, like the rosebush her mother covered with hay in the early spring. It needed time to grow safely, silently, in the dark.

From Durand and her mother she knew about the saints. Everything else she knew of the world came from Claude, the peddler. Her father's friend. Once every few weeks he came over the hill, his big wagon lurching behind him, piled high with wonders and junk—old pots and kettles, glass jars, dice, kitchen knives, mirrors, spices, oils, candles. Once he had shown her a coconut all the way from Majorca. "Got it off a sailor in Le Havre," he said. A brown hairy thing, ugly as a monkey. He hacked it open with his big rust-spotted knife and gave Jehanne a piece of the crisp white flesh inside. A delicious taste. Creamy and sweet, slightly nutty. She remembers how neatly it had broken apart in her hands. "That's what the islands taste like."

Her father loved Claude. After he finished making his rounds in the village, he'd come spend the night at their house. A small, grizzled man, smelling of cloves, with big, sparkling, rich blue eyes that reminded Jehanne of the sky in fall. After dinner, when she was supposed to be asleep, Claude and her father would drag their chairs up close to the hearth and drink late into the night, their profiles gleaming like coin heads in the firelight. Jehanne crept up into the hayloft and hid there in the straw, listening.

The King's madness was Claude's favorite topic. "Not just spells anymore; Old Charlie's completely loo-loo now," he said. He told how Charles had gone out into the forest hunting with his four best knights and murdered all but one of them. Why? "Who knows?" said Claude. It was said that a noise had startled him—a twig snapped or a little animal moved in the bushes—and suddenly he went berserk. Jehanne saw it in her mind's eye, the King's wild red face, the King screaming that they were all out to get him. "To murder me and steal my crown!" Then he drew his sword and hacked away at his men until they lay like broken china dolls on the forest floor. All the birch trees around them spackled in blood. All three heads hacked clean off, their frozen eyes staring at the sky.

"Jesus," her father said.

"They say he's still wild from it," said the peddler. "Won't let anyone near him. Tells people he's made of glass. If anyone touches him, he'll shatter like an icicle."

Sometimes Claude spoke of the Queen too. Isabeau. The Whore Queen, he called her. She'd caught fire with her own brand of madness and was running wild through the kingdom like an animal in heat. "Opens her legs to anyone who so much as blinks at her. The King's best friends, his family, anyone she can get her hands on." Claude knew. His sister worked in the palace kitchens. She'd watched Isabeau's gentlewoman mix up a face cream of crocodile glands, wolf's blood, and boar brains to keep the Queen's skin looking young. Watched Isabeau's maids lug buckets of ass's milk upstairs for the royal bath. "She puts belladonna in her eyes at night and smiles at the poor fools in the candlelight, lets her hand brush their cocks under the table." Isabeau's current favorite, Claude said, was the King's brother, Louis. She'd been seen with her fat white legs locked around his waist one night in a dim stone staircase, pulling his hair, grunting like a sow.

The whole country, Claude said, was rotting from the inside like an old wedding cake. All the nobles knew it, but nobody would do anything about it. They'd either been swept along into the madness themselves, dining on roasted swans and peacocks at their banquets, drinking and sobbing into their champagne cups as their country toppled down around them, screwing each other silly, or else they watched from the shadows and plotted to seize the crown for themselves. "Louis, Burgundy, Henry, they're all circling the throne like wolves," Claude said. "All three of them screwing Isabeau, each one taking his turn, lying there with her in the dark, stroking her breasts, and telling her how rich he'll make her if she'll just convince poor Charlie to sign over the Regency to him."

"My God, she'll be the end of us," Jehanne's father would say, his face going dark, ugly with hate. "She'll be the end of us all."

Jehanne hadn't believed this at first. She thought:
It's all so far away. It will never come here.
But by the time the raids on Domrémy began, poor mad Charles was dead, and Isabeau had done exactly what Claude said she would. Sold their country off to the English—married her daughter to their King, Henry V, and denounced her own son, Charles VII, the true heir to the throne, as illegitimate, a bastard. Unfit to rule. Henry became King of France, the monster Duke of Burgundy was put in charge of governing Paris, and the Dauphin, Charles VII, had barely escaped with his life. "Now young Charlie hides in his castle down there in the Loire, poor as a squirrel, afraid of his own shadow," Claude said. "And the Goddons win more territory every day."

The south of France, they knew, was still loyal to the crown, but the English and their Burgundian allies had snatched up almost all of the northern part of the country. Jehanne's little village of Domrémy was one of the last pockets in the north that still held out. But it was clear they couldn't for much longer. Every month more villages were burned, more horses and cows were stolen, more towns occupied, more peasants slaughtered in their beds. There was no one to help them. No law. No sheriff. They were abandoned, marooned, easy targets for Goddons, Burgundians, bandits.

"Doesn't she see what this is doing to the country?" her father would shout as Jehanne watched from the hayloft—her jaw knotted, her fists clenched tight.

"Does she not care that the finest vineyards in France are burning? All the great farms and castles of Lorraine being looted, destroyed?"

"Isabeau can barely hold on to her own chateaux," Claude said. "You think she gives a damn about us?"

Once, when they were drunk, very late at night, Jehanne's father had looked up from where he'd been staring into the fire, his eyes desperate like a drowning man's. "Is there no hope at all?" he said. "Are we doomed to become slaves of the English, no country at all, just a million broken-down wretches for them to rob and rape and murder whenever they please?"

Claude was leaning back in his chair, his long, skinny, blue-stockinged legs stretched out in front of the hearth, the curled tips of his shoes silhouetted in the firelight. He took a deep drink of his wine, then swirled his cup, gazing into it as if it held a vision of the future. "Well, you know the prophecy la Gasque d'Avignon made, don't you?"

Her father flapped his hand, rolled his eyes. "Spare me the wives' tales."

Up in the hayloft, Jehanne leaned in closer to listen.

Claude grinned, told the story in a singsong voice. "France will be ruined by a woman and restored by a virgin from the forests of Lorraine."

A snort of laughter from Jacques. "Not bloody likely, given the ones around here."

"You asked if there was any hope," said Claude.

"Hope, sure. Not a fairy tale."

La Belle.
That was what they called Jehanne's older sister in the village. The Beauty. She was named after Saint Catherine, Jehanne's favorite saint, her mother's favorite saint too. Her laugh was deep and silvery and musical, and her eyes were clear pale green, like freshly sliced cucumbers. The only unbeautiful thing about her was her feet, which were short and bulbous and yellowish in color, and which she was careful to hide under her skirt.
La Belle.
Catherine
La Belle.
"Who am I?" Jehanne would ask her mother. "You're the brave one," the mother said. "The strong one."

Catherine was the only one their father never screamed at. Even when she stole a fistful of butter from the cellar and gobbled it up right in front of him, laughing. He was helpless, gazing at her as if he could hardly believe he'd made something so lovely. When it rained on Sundays, their father would pick her up and carry her in his arms all the way from church back to the house so she wouldn't spoil the hem of her good pink dress in the mud. "Jehanne, run open the door for us quick," he'd say. "There's a good girl."

Jehanne hated her sister in these moments, but it never lasted long. It was impossible to stay angry with Catherine. Impossible not to love her. Living with Catherine was like living with Durand's fawn. The room turned magical whenever she walked into it.

The night before she married the mayor's son, Colin, Catherine and Jehanne had sat up together in their room, talking late into the night. Catherine had combed all the snarls and tangles out of Jehanne's impossible hair and braided it with red satin ribbons for the next day, her fingers strong and firm, her nails raking deliciously over Jehanne's scalp. At one point Jehanne felt so close to her sister that she grew bold. "Have you seen it yet?" she asked. Catherine's eyes flew open. "Jehanne!" she said. But later she said, "I did see it once for a minute." She wrinkled her nose. "It was so ugly." Then she laughed. That lovely musical laugh. Deep and gurgling like a baby's laugh. "But kind of beautiful too. Like a big blue mushroom."

Jehanne had lain awake in bed that night for hours, picturing the big blue mushroom and trying to think of something she could say the next day to make her sister laugh that way again.

They never knew for sure what happened to her. Two years after she married Colin, she disappeared. Jehanne was fourteen when it happened. Catherine was very pregnant. Colin had seen her out by the road, picking daffodils before sunset. When she didn't come in for supper, he went looking for her there, but she was gone.

A week later, Jehanne's brother, Jean, found Catherine's body under a pile of leaves in the forest. He carried it as far as the front yard and then stopped there, frozen, like a statue. They'd taken her hair—the golden waterfall—and hacked it off at the nape. Taken her dress and shoes too. Pierrelot told her this later, in secret, for the adults would not let Jehanne see her sister's body. "Nothing for a child to see," they said. They told her that Catherine had died of a blow to the head, but later, Jehanne heard her father say it was the shame that killed her first. "Shame at what the Goddons done to her. Oh my darling little girl."

That was the end of him, her father. He walked the fields for days, screaming, sobbing at the sky. Hurling himself against the trees. Pounding his fists against the earth. Later he came home and lay down on his bed. He stayed there for a year, staring at the wall. Jean and Pierrelot took over the farming, proved good workers without the father there to scream at them. Eventually Jacques got up. He resumed his place in village life, became good old Jacques d'Arc again, smiling, collecting taxes, clapping shoulders. But at home the mask came off; he beat Pierrelot for dropping an egg on the floor. Beat Jehanne for giving him a haughty look. Beat her so savagely she could not walk for a week.

It made the father clairvoyant, the madness. Allowed him to see Jehanne's future in his dreams. And what he saw there appalled him. His child, his youngest, galloping across the fields, dressed in a gleaming suit of armor, followed by a howling sea of soldiers, her jaw set, her eyes wild, the men thundering and screaming behind her, all of them riding, running toward war.

He woke in the night, screaming. Grabbed his wife by the throat and pressed his thumb against her windpipe. "She'll be the ruin of us," he gasped. "She'll be the ruin of this family." It was beyond him. His mind couldn't do anything with the images but think that his child was doomed to run off and become an army whore, a camp prostitute, bedding down with any man who would pay. And it killed him, the thought of it, the ruin of his good family name. His hard-earned reputation. The thought that this girl, this child, could destroy his life.

In the wan early morning sunlight he studied her, sullen and slump-shouldered, eating her bread by the hearth. A small, sturdy girl, dark hair, big black eyes, round and wet like a seal's, pink brown cheeks, a country loveliness to her. Also a fury. A righteous, carefully bottled fury that terrified him.

Later, drunk on wine, he announced that she had to be watched. "Watch her or she'll run off the first chance she gets," he said. "Become a filthy army slut." He told her brothers that if they caught her trying to run off, they must take her and drown her in the river. "If you don't, I'll do it myself, you hear me?" he shouted at her. "So help me God, you will not shame this family. You will not drag our good name through the mud."

Jehanne looked at him, her eyes lidded, unreadable. "I'm not going anywhere," she said.