The Lady of the Rivers Read online

  We are all lined up at the great gate of Bouvreuil as he rides in, and his dark gaze rakes us all, looking from one to another as if to sniff out treason. My aunt and I curtsey low and my uncle John doffs his hat and bows. Our house has been in alliance with the English for years; my other uncle, Louis of Luxembourg, is the duke’s chancellor and swears that he is the greatest man ever to rule France.

  Heavily, he gets off his horse and stands like a fortress himself, as the men line up to greet him, bowing over his hand, some of them almost going down to their knees. A man comes forwards and, as Bedford acknowledges him with a lordly tip of his head, his glance goes over his vassal’s head, and sees me. I am staring at him, of course – he is the greatest spectacle on this cold winter day – but now he is looking back at me, and there is a flash in his eyes which I see and cannot recognise. It is something like a sudden hunger, like a fasting man seeing a banquet. I step back. I am neither afraid nor coquettish, but I am only fourteen years of age and there is something about the power of this man and his energy that I don’t want turned in my direction. I slide back a little so I am behind my aunt, and I watch the rest of the greetings masked by her headdress and veil.

  A great litter comes up, thick curtains tied tight with gold cord against the cold, and Bedford’s wife, the Duchess Anne, is helped out. A small cheer greets her from our men: she is of the House of Burgundy, our liege lords and relations, and we all dip in a little bow to her. She is as plain as all the Burgundy family, poor things, but her smile is merry and kind, and she greets her husband warmly and then stands with her hand comfortably tucked in the crook of his arm and looks about her with a cheerful face. She waves at my aunt and points inside the castle to say that we must come to her later. ‘We’ll go at dinnertime,’ my aunt says to me in a whisper. ‘Nobody in the world eats better than the Dukes of Burgundy.’

  Bedford takes off his helmet and bows to the crowd in general, raises a gauntleted hand to the people who are leaning from upper windows and balancing on garden walls to see the great man. Then he turns and leads his wife inside and everyone has a sense that we have seen the cast of players and the opening scene of a travelling show. But whether it is a masque, or a party, funeral rites, or the baiting of a wild animal, that has brought so many of the greatest people in France to Rouen: it is about to begin.

  ROUEN, FRANCE, SPRING 1431

  And then they bodge it. They harass her with erudite questions, query her replies, double back on her answers, write down things she says in moments of weariness and bring them back to her later, define their terms in the most learned ways and ask her what she means, so that she does not understand the question and tells them simply ‘pass on’ or ‘spare me that’. Once or twice she just says, ‘I don’t know. I simple girl with no learning. How would I know?’

  My uncle gets an anguished letter from Queen Yolande of Aragon, who says she is certain that the Dauphin will ransom Joan, she just needs another three days, another week to persuade him, can we not delay the trial? Can we not ask for a few days’ delay? But the Church has the girl wound tight in the web of inquiry and now they will never let her go.

  Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then another, and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense. Sometimes they accuse her in Latin and she looks at them, baffled by a language that she has only ever heard spoken in church, in the Mass that she loves. How could these very sounds, these familiar beloved tones, so solemn and musical to her, now be the voice of accusation?

  Sometimes they bring scandal against her in the words of her own people, old earthy stories from Domrémy of vanity, of false pride. They say she jilted a man before marriage, they say she ran away from good parents, they say she worked in an alehouse, and was free with her favours like any village slut, they say she rode with the soldiers as their doxy, they say she is no Maid but a harlot, and that everyone knew it.

  It takes Anne, the kind-hearted little Duchess of Bedford herself, to assert that Joan is a virgin, and to demand that the men who guard her are forbidden from touching or abusing her. They must be ordered that it is not the work of God to assault her. Then, as soon as this order is given, they say that, since she is now so safe, guarded by the word of the duchess, she has no excuse for wearing men’s clothes and she must dress in a gown, for now they tell her it is a sin, a mortal sin, to wear breeches.

  They turn her head, they puzzle her beyond bearing. They are great men of the Church and Joan is a peasant girl, a devout girl who had always done as the priest ordered until she heard the voices of angels who told her to do more. She cries in the end, she breaks down and cries like a child, she puts on the gown as they order her, and confesses to all the sins that they name to her. I don’t know if she even understands the long list. She makes her mark on her confession – she writes her name and then signs a cross beside it as if to deny her signature. She admits that there were no angels and no voices, and that the Dauphin is nothing more than the Dauphin and not the King of France, that his coronation was a sham and her beautiful armour an offence to God and man, and that she is a girl, a silly girl, who tried to lead grown men as if she could know the way better than they. She says she is a vain fool to think that a girl might lead men, she is a woman worse than Eve for giving advice, an assistant to the Devil himself.

  ‘What?’ bellows the Duke of Bedford. We are visiting his wife the duchess, seated in her rooms before a good fire, a lute player twanging away in the corner, small glasses of the best wine on every table, everything elegant and beautiful; but we can hear his deplorable English bellow through two closed doors.

  We hear the doors bang as the Earl of Warwick flings himself out of the duke’s apartments to find out what has gone wrong, and in this revealing burst of rage we see – as if we had ever been in any doubt – that these English never wanted the Church to wrestle with the soul of a mistaken girl and restore her to her senses, bring her to confession, penitence and forgiveness – it has all akeseen nothing but a witch-hunt determined to find a witch, a bonfire looking for a brand, Death waiting for a maiden. The duchess goes to the door and the servants throw it open before her so we can all hear, disastrously clearly, her husband bellow at Pierre Cauchon the bishop, Cauchon the judge, Cauchon the man, who is there apparently representing – all at the same time – God and justice and the Church, ‘For the sake of Christ! I don’t want her pleading guilty, I don’t want her recanting, I don’t want her confessed and shriven, I don’t bloody well want her imprisoned for life! What safety is there in that for me? I want her as a pile of ashes blowing away in the wind. How much clearer do I have to be? Goddamn! Do I have to burn her myself? You said the Church would do it for me! Do it!’

  The duchess steps back rapidly and gestures for the doors to her room to be closed, but we can still hear the regent, swearing and damning his soul at the top of his voice. The duchess shrugs – men will be men, and this is wartime – and my aunt smiles understandingly, the lute player increases his volume as best he can and starts to sing. I go to the window and look out.

  In the market square they have a half-built pyre, a strong structure with a big central beam and the wood stacked around it. Joan has confessed and recanted, she has been found guilty of her crimes and sentenced to imprisonment.

  But they are not taking the wood away.

  My aunt gives me a nod that we are going to leave, and I go to the hall to wait for her as she delays inside the duchess’s rooms, saying a few words of farewell. I have my hood pulled up over my head, my hands tucked inside my cape. It is cold for May. I wonder if Joan has blankets in her cell, as the big double doors to the duke’s public rooms are thrown open and the duke himself comes quickly out.

  I sink down into a curtsey, and I imagine he can barely see me, wrapped in my dark cape in the shadowy doorway.