I
DOMRÉMY, SUMMER 1428
SIX YEARS LATER
Saint John’s Eve. A bonfire burns. This year there is no wheel, and the fire takes on a ghostly human form, like a sacrifice.
The top of Durand Laxart’s head just reaches Joan’s shoulder. She has grown and grown and grown and now towers over everyone: the women, her brothers, even her father. How did this happen? No one knows, but this bodes ill for Jacques d’Arc. He can no longer raise a hand to her. Strike her with a stool leg, and it won’t be Joan’s arm that breaks.
Jehanne jokes, “Did your mother betray her husband with a giant, Joan? It would explain a lot if she did.” Then Jehanne looks away, aware she has gone too far, but Joan takes her meaning. Time hasn’t made her grow fonder of Jacques. They still hate each other. Only the odds have changed.
Her uncle nudges her arm. They are standing a distance from the bonfire; the sound of a stream floats under the crackle of flames.
“What are you thinking of?” he asks.
She is quiet. “Nothing.” She glances at him. “Nothing,” she repeats. This is his sixth visit in as many years.
When he arrived, she had news for him. “You will hear about it from my mother, so I want to tell you first,” she declared as soon as she set eyes on him. “Earlier this month, to get rid of me, my churl of a father tried to marry me off. I refused. Then the fool, the man he had pledged me to, said I had promised him personally and broken my promise. We had to go to court. Me! In a breach-of-promise suit!”
“How did you get out of it?” Durand hesitated. “Or did you get out of it? Are you married, Joan, and I have missed the wedding?”
She shoved him, though she was smiling. “I made a speech worthy of Jacques d’Arc. It astounded everyone. My father looked like a ghost by the time I was finished.”
This is the most exciting thing that has happened to her in six years. That and three years ago, a band of Burgundian and English marauders drove off some cattle. “Lucky it was only cattle,” her uncle said at the time. “Lucky they left quickly” was her answer.
She doesn’t like war. She doesn’t like the stories she hears, the same ones she’s heard all her life: convents desecrated, churches plundered, wheat days away from being harvested reduced to cinders, livestock that the attackers can’t take with them slaughtered, blood and meat to feed the flies. It is bad enough that some years the crop is ruined by bad weather. Winter alone, she thinks, is sufficient to starve and to kill. We don’t need the English and the Burgundians to aid winter. It isn’t the work of the English that makes a calf stillborn or a child stop breathing in its cradle.
But she does like the idea of change. A world in flux is a world where something may happen, and for the better. Only it hasn’t happened to her.
Sometimes in secret and under the cover of night, she cries. She cries because if you have churned butter once, you have done it a hundred times. After several years, the novelty of turning sheep’s tallow into candles grows old. She did not expect that her body would grow and grow, that she would become a giantess among the men and women of Domrémy, but nothing else would change.
In church, she has stopped praying. What is the point? If you don’t even know who you are praying to, then you may as well pray to a wall and expect the stonework to answer you. So, she uses the time to rest her eyes, and sometimes the priest catches her asleep, which makes him angry.
The flames of the bonfire are dying down, but she can’t look away. Life is hard. The earth is not always fruitful. There are some parts of the kingdom where people would be glad to say, All my days are the same; I have lived to see the sun rise and set again. She knows she should be grateful.
But there is a pain in her heart as the fire dies out. All my days are the same, she thinks. It is like a prayer, spoken into the last of the flickering embers, then emptied into the bubbling stream. All my days are the same.
In the morning she rises. For some time, she has slept every night under her father’s roof. No more days beneath the Faerie Tree for Joan. He can’t kick her out anymore.
If once she carried two bags of grain under her arms to take to the miller’s, now she carries six. Ox dead? Horse half-starved? She can lift the plow as easily as pick up a head of cabbage. There is Joan swinging a scythe; there is Joan threshing, with a flail. There is Joan crouching on a roof, thatching a hole, and chopping wood to build a new fence. And who can forget the time a neighbor’s cart got stuck in the mud after days of heavy rain? He was an old man, though in good shape for his age. Hard as he pushed, it did no good. But Joan took up a corner of the cart. In her grip, the wood groaned before the cart jolted like a living thing and shuddered onto the road. She recrossed the lane and went back to her work.
This balmy morning in August, the sky is clear, the sun a washed-out yellow, and the air fragrant with fresh-cut hay. From the treetops: the hum of birdsong.
But by midday her body feels cold, and when she touches her arm, the skin is damp. On the stump of a tree that her uncle has transformed into a table, he is showing her brothers a trick with three cups; a pebble is concealed beneath one of them. Her brothers keep their eyes on the cups: a mistake. She turns, sees Catherine in the distance walking in the direction of the Virgin’s shrine just outside of the village.
It is when she looks away from Catherine that she stumbles; her head spins. She had been tilling her mother’s garden, and the ground moves, actually tips, beneath her feet. She is never sick, but her cheeks are feverishly warm. Her legs give out just as her uncle and brothers notice her. Panic closes up her throat, like a strangling hand, so she can’t cry out.
Above her, church bells thunder, but the timing is wrong. It is too early for the bells to ring the hour of Nones. As she lies on the ground, she hears shouting. The shouting isn’t coming just from her uncle and brothers. It is the whole village in uproar. Why, she wonders. Why is everyone making so much noise because I have fallen?
Then she hears: beneath all the shouts, the beating of horses’ hooves. The sound is like a sudden storm, a torrent of summer rain pummeling the earth. She hears, from a distance, words she can’t understand. The language is foreign to her, the speakers of this language even harsher than her father. As her brothers lift her arms, she catches sight of torches. Torches in daylight? She shakes her head. This makes no sense. She must be dreaming. Yet she watches as a man mounted on a horse, a man she doesn’t recognize, tosses a torch as if it were a pebble into a pond, and the first cottage in the village goes up in flames. The people inside, a whole family, run out. She is aware that she is sweating. Her body, her very insides, shake.
The English are coming, she thinks. They have come to Domrémy at last. So, this is the fear the English inspire. She is ashamed that now the enemy is here, she is afraid.
With the rest of the village, they flee to Neufchâteau, a neighboring town. The roads become a maze of jostling carts carrying poorly knotted sacks and people. Dresses and tunics have been turned into bundles, and already there are disputes over what belongs to whom. She, too, is a weight, carried into Neufchâteau. Noise and the swaying of the cart make her head hurt, and new beads of sweat drip into her eyes. She can only look up; her gaze is fixed on a cloudless blue sky, a too-bright sun. She hears her father say, as she is carried into the inn by her brothers, “Of course she would choose such a time to fall ill. What else would you expect? Any trouble she can give me. Any trouble.”
She tries to speak, though nothing comes out. Later, she thinks. Later she will answer him with a few choice words.
Her body sinks onto a pallet not her own. Outside, there is a commotion. Men are already counting their losses, and mothers consoling weeping children sing them snatches of songs. She hears the creaking wheels of carts as more from Domrémy arrive.
On the landing, footsteps stamp up and down, and Jacquemin is swearing oaths. “I will kill them,” he declares. His voice is high-pitched. He is practically squeaking. Yet something in it sounds hollow, even false, to her. “They are cowards, those English barbarians. What does it take to light a cottage on fire? Hm? Tell me what it takes. A woman can do it. So, is that what they are proud of? Slaying a few chickens! Leading some pigs away!” It reminds her of another moment in another year: a day as fine as this one. She thinks, before her world turns dark: When a boy was dying, you made the same oaths. You could do nothing then. You can do nothing now.
When Joan wakes, there is a new pain to contend with: hunger. The sky outside the single window is nearly dark, the last of the light slipping fast away.
She is still dizzy. The room teeters, as though balanced on a single sharp point. In the far corner by a low table, she thinks she sees the shape of her sister.
She is tired but wants to talk. She is in the mood for swapping stories. “Do you remember,” Joan begins, “that time when I returned home, and as soon as our father saw me he threw a cloak over my head and told me to fix a hole in it.”
“Do you need it now?” she’d asked in protest. Her voice then was small. She was young. Maybe seven or eight.
“Now,” her father said.
It was night and too dark for sewing. But she took the stub of a candle and, crouching, lit it from the last few embers in the hearth. When she stood, she felt the cloak slip out of her hands. Above her, Catherine said, “Hold the candle while I sew for you, Joan,” because Catherine saw she wanted sleep.
So she raised the candle close to where Catherine’s needle moved, darting up and down like a silver fish, but not so close that she would set the cloak on fire, though she was tempted.
As she watched, she felt the candle wobble in her grip; her eyes closed, opened, closed again. She was falling asleep on her feet. Melted tallow dripped onto the cloth in a column of shining, pearly beads. “Careful,” Catherine said.
It was so still, Joan could hear her sister’s breathing. Neither of them spoke, until she saw that the flame was about to go out. Her pulse quickened. Before the last thread is cut, Joan thought, a wish must be made.
“Quick,” she said, a whisper in the near darkness. “You must say what you want. What you want more than anything else in the world.”
Her sister bowed her head, as if she were about to pray. She considered, then spoke quietly, unrushed though the flame was already dying. “I want to make a good marriage,” Catherine said. “Healthy children. One boy, two girls.”
It was a wish typical of Catherine: sweet-mannered husbands, rosy-cheeked babies, the peace of the hearth is the peace of the kingdom.
Then she turned to Joan. She said, “And you?”
In Joan’s hand, the flame sputtered before dying. She saw nothing but smelled smoke.
“I want…I want too many things.”
When the cloak was finished, she heard Catherine sigh. In the dark, her sister’s arm was like a swan’s neck. It wound itself around Joan’s shoulders and brought her close. Joan felt the top of her head kissed twice. “Have only good dreams,” Catherine said before she went upstairs to sleep.
The next morning, her father picked up the cloak and examined the place where the hole had been. He grunted.
“Soon you shall be a seamstress,” he told Joan. And for a whole week, there were no beatings. A record for Jacques d’Arc. For her, a small miracle.
Her story finished, she waits for Catherine to speak, to confirm the facts of her memory or to laugh at her for remembering wrong. But there is no answer.
“Can you bring me some water?” she says after a pause. “And is there anything to eat?”
When she turns her head to look, the corner of the unfamiliar room is empty. Outside, the town has become still. The sun has set; the light of the day is gone. From behind the wall, in another room, she catches the sound, like a strange humming, of someone softly weeping.