The Maid (31 page)

In her last dream she goes up the dark tower stairs. They lead to her cell, the same tower cell she's been in all these months. The guards are there, but they're asleep, snoring. Carefully she picks up the sack at the bottom of the bed and takes out her boy's clothes. It's wonderful to see them, like seeing old friends. She hugs them before she puts them on. Presses her face into the rough cloth, inhales deeply. Then, on tiptoe, she goes to the door of the cell, and it's open, so she runs quickly downstairs. She runs to the market square, where a stake has been set up, and Christ is there, wearing an executioner's cloak and smiling at her. He reaches out his hand and helps her up onto the platform, and when she looks out, everyone she knows is in the audience. Thousands and thousands of people, her father and mother and Pierrelot, her cousin Durand, and Metz and Bertrand, also King Charles and Alençon and La Hire and the Bastard and Gilles de Rais. They are all crying out to her, "Let us pray! Let us pray!" She doesn't understand what this means, so she looks at Christ, who is standing by with the torch, and she asks him, "What are they waiting for?" "They're waiting for you," he says, smiling. "Are you ready?" Jehanne says that she is, and he helps her up onto the stake, but as he does this, she becomes very frightened. "I don't want to," she says. "I don't want to." "No one does," says Christ as he touches the torch to the woodpile at her feet and the yellow flames leap up. A great admiring
Ah
goes up from the crowd, and suddenly everyone kneels down and bows their heads in prayer. They are very sad, many of them are weeping, but they're also very happy, ecstatic even. Suddenly Jehanne feels very lonely up on the stake, and the fire looks wicked and hateful to her. It's as if the flames are laughing at her. She looks through the smoke to see if she can see her mother, but she cannot see anyone she knows. Then she remembers that she can look up, and when she looks up, the sky is made of stained glass—a great sprawling glass mural of blues and greens and reds all glowing with sunlight, and she sees her whole life there in the glass, sees Michael and Catherine and Margaret standing tall in their golden light with their long robes and their sweet spoon faces, sees herself, the girl down among the cucumber plants, collecting the beetles in her father's garden, sees her village burning, the little hunchbacked house with the fine leaded windows, the church, the black horse running, all in flames. She sees herself riding over the frozen yellow fields toward Chinon in her boy's clothes, sees herself kneeling before sad King Charles in his big velvet hat, sees herself in her armor, galloping over the fields with the ten thousand soldiers behind her and the violent, holy joy burning inside of her, and the fire is very hot and red, crackling beneath her, and the flames are leaping up, and she can feel the soles of her feet beginning to burn, and suddenly she's terrified, she understands nothing. Nothing at all. "Why?" she cries out to the sky. "Why?"

At last God answers. He opens his enormous eyes in the sky, and says,
My love, did you not wish to be a saint?

She wakes up very early, before dawn. She knows now what she must do. In the dark she creeps to the bag, lifts it onto the bed and opens it up. Inside lie her boy's clothes, the soft gray tunic and the snug brown leggings. In them the smell of the forest and of campfires, of horses and freedom. In the dark she puts them on, the gray linen tunic first, over her head, then the leggings, her fingers working quickly, expertly, as she laces them up and knots them at the waist. She slips her feet into the stiff, cracked brown boots and fastens her gray cape over her shoulder, smiling as the familiar wooden button slips into the loop at her neck, for the clothes give her back her power. Her joy. They return her to herself. When she's dressed, she sits on her bed and leans her head back against the wall. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, in and out, preparing herself for the arrival of the guards. And she feels that she is home.

They burned Jehanne's body three times. When at last it was reduced to ash, Massieu raked the pile of gray powder into a wooden box and dumped it into the river, as the Bishop had ordered, so that the townspeople could not keep any of it for relics. He turned the box over and hit the bottom of it hard with his hand. Weeping as he did this. Howling like a lost dog. Most of the ash fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.

Jehanne d'Arc's campaign definitively turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War, and in 1453 the French succeeded in winning their country back from the English.

In 1455 Jehanne's mother and her brothers petitioned the new pope, Callixtus III, to make an investigation into Jehanne's trial. On the findings of the investigation, an extensive nullification trial was held, and on July 7, 1456, Jehanne was found innocent. The court described her as a martyr and implicated the late Pierre Cauchon with heresy for convicting an innocent woman in pursuit of a secular vendetta.

In 1920 Jehanne d'Arc was recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church. She remains the patron saint of France, and of soldiers and prisoners, and an inspiration to people all over the world.

Almost everyone who has read
The Maid
asks the same question: How much is true? The short answer: almost everything. Almost all of the characters are real people, and the book adheres closely to the established historical facts surrounding Joan of Arc's life.

Joan of Arc was an illiterate peasant girl who, in 1429 at the age of seventeen, rode across war-torn France and convinced King Charles VII to let her take charge of his army so she could kick the English out. She believed that she was on a mission from God (though many today dismiss her as schizophrenic or epileptic), and that the Saints Michael, Catherine, and Margaret spoke to her and provided her with guidance.

The predictions that Joan makes in the book are all true: She did predict that the French would be defeated at the battle of Rouvray. She also predicted that she would raise the siege at Orléans and escort King Charles to be crowned in Reims. She knew that her time in power would be brief, telling Charles early on: "Use me. I will last little more than a year. During that year let as much as possible be done." On the day of the assault on Saint Loup, she did wake up at the Bouchers' house in Orléans shouting that the generals had begun fighting without her. The night before the attack on Les Tourelles, Joan did tell Father Pasquerel that she would be wounded in the coming fight, saying: "Tomorrow the blood will flow from my body, above the breast." Joan also predicted that she would be captured by the English and Burgundians before Midsummer in 1430.

Perhaps most spectacularly, Joan of Arc did jump from the roof of the tower at Beaurevoir (a distance estimated between 60 and 70 feet) and survived without so much as a sprained ankle.

The areas where I have taken novelistic license with Joan's life are as follows: Though Joan's sister, Catherine, did die in Domrémy around 1429, the cause of her death is unknown. Given the amout of Goddon-related violence in the area at the time, it seems plausible that Catherine died at their hands. Bertrand de Poulegny did not die during the attack on Les Tourelles, but does so here for dramatic purposes. And Bertrand's account of the Battle of Agincourt is a tale told round a campfire and therefore is subject to the sorts of embellishments that tend to take place in such tellings. It should not be taken as statement of fact.

The question of how much Joan actually fought in battle has been debated by historians for the last six hundred years. We know for certain that she was mounted on a warhorse and dressed in a suit of armor that the King had made especially for her, and that she carried Charles Martel's sword, which had been unearthed for her at the shrine to Saint Catherine in Fierbois. We also know that Joan was present on the front lines for most of the battles in which she was involved and that she was wounded three times in the process. At Augustins she stepped on a caltrop; at Les Tourelles she was shot in the neck with an arrow while she was climbing one of the scaling ladders (she later pulled the arrow out herself); and during the attack on Paris, she was shot with a crossbow bolt that split her armor and pierced her thigh. Although Joan claimed that she did not use her sword—or kill anyone—this seems unlikely given her active role in the field.

Finally there is the question of whether Joan was raped in prison. Historians are divided on this point. What we know is that throughout her trial, Joan insisted on remaining in her boy's clothes—stating that they protected her from the guards and others who regularly attempted to sexually assault her. When Joan finally took off her boy's clothes after her abjuration and replaced them with a woman's dress, she was left completely vulnerable to the guards' assaults for three days. We also know that Bedford had made it clear that Joan's trial must result in her death sentence, and that when it looked as if her abjuration would save her from this fate, he was furious. At this point, the English stepped in. Suddenly, the courtyard around Joan's prison tower filled up with ax-wielding English guards who refused to let any of the clergymen in to see her. Jean Beaupere, Nicolas Midi, Jean Massieu, and Guillaume Manchon all attempted to visit Joan during this period, and all were turned away. At Joan's nullification trial in 1456, Manchon testified that when he entered the courtyard "about 500 Englishmen surrounded them, roughing them up and calling them traitors, saying that they behaved badly during the trial. Only with great difficulty and fear were they able to escape." The Dominican priest Martin Ladvenu testified that in Joan's final confession (on the morning of her execution), she said she had been violently assaulted by an English nobleman who attempted to rape her during this time.

Of course, no one will ever really know what happened in the tower over the course of those three days, but we do know that Joan—wearing nothing but a dress, chained up and guarded by five English-sympathizing guards, with no clergymen in attendance—was completely vulnerable; anyone who wanted to rape her could have. Which leaves us with the final question: If Joan was in fact raped in prison, why would she not just have admitted as much to Ladvenu? Here, we must remember two things: The first is her fierce and enormous pride—a pride that would undoubtedly have made an admission of rape seem like an admission of defeat. The second is the great importance that Joan had placed on her virginity (she called herself "the Maid," after all) and how inextricably the notion of her virginity was bound up with her sense of specialness and mystical power and self. If the Maid was no longer a maid, then who was she?

As her admirer, I can only offer my humble opinion that, virgin or not, she remains the most extraordinary woman who ever lived.

More books have been written about Joan of Arc than any other woman in history, and I have plundered many, many of them for information and inspiration, but I am particularly indebted to Willard Trask's compilation and translation of testimonies from Joan's condemnation trials,
Joan of Arc: In Her Own Words;
to Larissa Juliet Taylor's biography,
The Virgin Warrior;
and to Vita Sackville-West's biography,
Saint Joan of Arc.
Other books that were helpful or invaluable were
Joan of Arc: Her Story
by Régine Pernoud and Marie-Véronique Clin, revised and translated by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams;
Joan of Arc
by Régine Pernoud;
The Varieties of Religious Experience
by William James;
The Interior Castle
by St. Teresa of Avila;
The Structures of Everyday Life
by Fernand Braudel;
Life in a Medieval Castle
by Joseph and Frances Gies;
A World Lit Only By Fire
by William Manchester;
A Distant Mirror
by Barbara W. Tuchman;
The Medieval Village
by G. G. Coulton;
Medieval Civilization, 400–1500
by Jacques Le Goff;
Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry,
translated by William Caxton, rendered into modern English by Brian R. Price;
Chivalry
by Maurice Keen;
The Hundred Years War
by Desmond Seward;
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
by Chris Hedges;
Dispatches
by Michael Herr;
War in the Middle Ages
by Philippe Contamine;
The Art of War in the Middle Ages
by C. W. C. Oman;
Blood Red, Sister Rose
by Thomas Keneally;
The Life of Joan of Arc
by Anatole France;
Saint Joan
by George Bernard Shaw;
A Brotherhood of Tyrants: Manic Depression and Absolute Power
by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, M.D.;
An Unquiet Mind
by Kay Redfield Jamison; and
The Black Baron: The Strange Life of Gilles de Rais
by Tennille Dix. I am grateful to the following websites: Saint Joan of Arc Center (
www.stjoan-center.com
), International Joan of Arc Society (
www.smu.edu/ijas/
), Joan of Arc—Maid of Heaven: All About Joan of Arc (
www.maidofheaven.com
), myArmoury.com: A Resource for Historic Arms and Armour Collectors (
www.myarmoury.com
), Catholic Online (
www.catholic.org
), the Original Catholic Encyclopedia (
oce.catholic.com
), and Wikipedia (
www.wikipedia.org
). I also owe a great debt of gratitude to Carl Theodor Dreyer's magnificent film
The Passion of Joan of Arc
and to Andrei Tarkovsky's awe-inspiring
Andrei Rublev
, both of which emboldened me to begin this journey, and kept me swimming when there was no land in sight.

I want to thank Neil Ryan and Phebe Thorne for their enormous generosity in providing me with the haven of Canfield Island, where I finished this book. I'm also grateful to Cathy Baptista and everybody at the Narraganssett Inn on Block Island, along with Joe and Liza Szarejko at Getaway-on-the-Falls, in Woodstock, New York, for providing me with magical, affordable places to hole up along the way. Celerie Kemble and Boykin Curry, Elizabeth and William Stewart, and Amanda and Christo Brooks saved the day by so generously opening their homes to me when the money ran out!

Profound thanks to the amazing Eric Simonoff, who believed in this project when it was just a glimmer in my eye, and helped me bring it to life in ways both tiny and enormous. Thank you, Eric. Similarly, I want to thank my brilliant editors, Andrea Schulz at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Helen Garnons-Williams at Bloomberg UK; their patience, faith, and insight continue to be a source of wonder to me. I'm indebted to Jim Leonard, Mark Jarman, and Deborah Eisenberg, who've inspired and encouraged me as a writer since the beginning. Mark Gimein, John Stephens, and Lorin Stein gave me the great gift of reading various drafts of this book at crucial junctures, and showing me how to make it better. Robin Bellinger made the book leaner, stronger, and clearer. David Hough was the best copyeditor and fact-checker anyone could hope for. Dr. Ilene Reeman kept me sane throughout. Till Osterland created a world in which the seed of this book could germinate and flourish, and supported me in countless ways throughout. Thank you, Till.

I want to thank Carrie, Christo, Coco, and Zachy Brooks for their boundless love and encouragement. Thanks to my dad and to Little Carrie, for loving this project way back when it was just a tiny spark of an idea, and for their enthusiasm and encouragement throughout. Thanks to AK, Celerie, Fully, Jones, Berly, Christina, Alissa, and Nena, my dearest friends, who cheered me on, even when they didn't know which state I was in. And eternal thanks to my beloved Benjamin for supporting and nurturing and discussing and championing every single page of this novel—and for feeding me pasta ai rapini when I did not have the strength to cook, and making me laugh whenever it seemed like the sky was falling. Words cannot express my gratitude, Ben.

Most of all, thanks go to Piki and William, my amazing parents, for their incredible love and support throughout. This book would not exist without them.