VII
They are in a small private room, brightly lit and warm. A strong fire burns. Beeswax candles flicker, illuminating, on the writing desk, a pair of dancing angels worked in gleaming silver. On the opposite wall: a tapestry of the Tree of Knowledge. Before Joan casts down her head and kneels, she glimpses Adam and Eve, huddling for shelter from the first storm cloud to visit Paradise. The tapestry hangs beside a door, and it is this door that leads into the chamber where the Dauphin sleeps each night with an obliging servant at the foot of his bed and a pair of armed guards outside.
But now she and the Dauphin are alone. Joan’s vision lingers on a carpet, a swirl of indigo and vermilion dye, placed beneath the Dauphin’s chair. In her blurred periphery, a figure detaches itself from the chair and rises. A swift, careless turn of the wrist indicates that she may stand. He has summoned her only hours after their initial meeting in the chapel. A good sign, according to le Maçon.
Her gaze shifts from plush carpet to royal person, wrapped, in spite of the heat, in heavy velvet robes dyed a deep blood-red, the collars and sleeves trimmed with black fur. He has changed his clothes since receiving Communion in the chapel. Self-consciously, he shuffles away from the tapestry, as if to say, What happened there has nothing to do with me. I cannot account for all of mankind’s troubles, only the troubles in its most Christian kingdom, and this, too, gives me such grief. He moves to the pair of dancing angels, rests his hand across both of their heads, as if that is what they were made for: to be petted, to bear the weight of a prince’s smooth and unscarred palm.
Le Maçon has warned her: Don’t stare. The Dauphin doesn’t like to feel that he is being watched, as who, unless he were a very vain individual, would? And His Majesty is sensitive about his looks, his appearance and his wardrobe, ever since circumstances forced him to make his home in Chinon. Yes, Chinon is a beautiful place. You may ask yourself, What else could a monarch possibly ask for? But you would be wrong. The Loire Valley boasts some of the finest lands in France. Its soil is rich; its vineyards are full. Heaven only knows the fresh air here surpasses any day that of Paris’s stinking sewage and waste, both human and animal. But isn’t even the absence of sewage a reminder that Chinon isn’t Paris? This castle, grand though it is, isn’t the Louvre. It isn’t the Château de Fontainebleau, located some thirty miles south of the capital, another favorite of kings, though now out of His Majesty’s reach.
The Dauphin doesn’t speak, so Joan’s gaze moves to the snake in the tapestry. Its forked tongue tickles Eve’s white heel, like a single flame. But if the Dauphin doesn’t address her, he still commands all attention to himself. So, he gently clears his throat. He rustles his sleeves and, turning sideways, offers Joan a profile to look at and to admire, the prominent Valois nose, which, some argue, is his best claim to the French throne and physical proof that he is, in fact, his father’s son. He tilts his head and the glow of candlelight beams across his cheekbone, makes his skin shine a liquid, silken gold, as though all his features were in the process of being melted and sculpted to classic Romanesque handsomeness from scratch. The effect lasts for a heartbeat. The candle’s flame shifts, and when she looks again, he is no longer glowing but dim, even slightly drooping beneath the collective weight of robes and black fur. He is tall, a slender young man twenty-six years of age, and his clothes, despite their opulence, have the impression of being passed down from a father or older brother. They are tailored for a person with fuller shoulders, a broader chest, someone with a healthy appetite and a rotund, protruding stomach, not one flat as a plank of wood. From a steeple of red cloth, the narrow gatepost of his body, his face juts like a pale moon.
Joan thinks, Perhaps the Dauphin does not look like a king because he was never made into one, not properly. Le Maçon had told her that when his father died, the Dauphin was named king by his own court in Mehun-sur-Yèvre with the first suitable crown the Archbishop could find. But the holy oil, which baptized the first Clovis nearly a millennium ago, was missing from the ceremony. As was Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, and his crown. Still, she does not know if either would make the Dauphin droop less, if they would fill out his body so his robes do not sway so much like sheets drying in the wind.
She also thinks he looks tired, which is why he is yawning. A rumor has spread that he is considering a move to sunny Castile, just south of the kingdom’s border. And Castile would welcome him with open arms, give him sanctuary for the term of his natural life. But don’t bring that up, le Maçon warned her. We want him to stay where he is.
Again, the Dauphin sighs. He wavers, and she reads his thoughts as he glances back at the chair, the plump cushion. He is wondering whether he should remain on his feet or sit. The result is a compromise. He hovers closer to the chair but stands.
As soon as they left the chapel, le Maçon sat her down for another lecture: A king’s mood can change faster than good weather to bad, so let him work out flares of temper or sudden fits of sorrow for himself. Don’t cajole him. Don’t coax him into a sweeter, sunnier frame of mind, unless he invites you to. If the interview seems to reach an impasse, be patient. A king may sigh. He may rub his eyes or dab a square of linen to his nose or to the corners of his mouth. He may suddenly take up a book, open it, and begin reading from a verse, as though he thought you had already left the room and he was alone. He may eat a grape and chew slowly and when you think he has finally surfaced from his reverie, when you see him leaning forward as if to return to affairs of state, he may instead reach out to pluck the strings of a harp and entertain you with a song: “The work of a single morning,” he might say with pride. If the fire is low, he will expect you to build it. If a candle goes out, be prepared to light it for him, even if a dozen, nay, two dozen others are shining around the whole room. “You may consider this strange behavior,” le Maçon explains with a shrug, “but it is strange only because you are not used to it, because you have grown up surrounded by sheep. You may believe it erratic, ill-mannered, or even cruel. But it is none of these. It is merely kingship.”
So Joan both looks and doesn’t look at the Dauphin. She thinks that le Maçon knows him well, for at the moment, what is His Majesty doing but nibbling at the corner of a small sugared tart taken from an arrangement on a gold platter? What is he doing but chewing slowly and staring out the room’s one arched window, to blink at the fine nighttime view of torchlight and turrets as if she were invisible? When the pastry is eaten, he touches a clean napkin to his lips and to the tips of the fingers that handled the food. He picks up a thin folio from the desk, holds the book in one hand, as if it is a prop and he is about to be painted, puts it down again. He resumes his seat, taking his time to settle into cushioned and velvet-draped softness, and turns to his guest, as if to say: Now, and only now, do we begin. You have my full attention.
One thing you cannot say about the Dauphin: that he is among those lords of royal blood who have never known suffering or pain. God knows, the whole of Europe knows, he has had his share. Misfortune seems to follow him, closer to his person than his own shadow. Yet there may be something to a ruler who has been through so much. You can open a book of misery, turn to any page, point at a random word, and the Dauphin will probably say, Yes, I have been through this. Wretched childhood: yes. Mother who hates me: yes. Sister married to an enemy kingdom: yes. Infighting at court, my favorites cast out or murdered under my nose: yes. Receiving news of the very worst kind—that is, another battle lost to the English; finding out your father has died and you are banned from attending his funeral; being disinherited from your throne through a sham treaty and called by your enemies the greatest offender of God’s law since Judas Iscariot sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver: yes, yes, and yes. This is a prince who knows what it means to run and to hide, to look out a window and see not the pleasant view below but everything lost. He has lived for years in the uncertainty of whether he will emerge from this war monarch or prisoner.
Joan’s thoughts return to the present. She thinks this room too small for so large a fire; every surface is bathed in light, as though its occupant were afraid of the dark, each candle meant to scare away an imp loosed from hell. The Dauphin is a haunted man. One does not need to be a courtier, learned in manners, fluent in Latin, Roman quotations tripping like folk songs off the tongue, to see this is true.
How much time has passed since she first entered the room, she wonders. Five minutes? Ten? She feels she has been here whole years, that if she stuck her head out the window, a guard would shout back to tell her the war is officially over. They can all come out now, unlock their doors, fling open the shutters and casements, let fresh air in. As for her, she can return to Domrémy to help her parents on the land, or she can get married, bear several healthy children, whatever she would like to do. Except she can’t. She can never go back.
Just as she thinks this, the Dauphin stirs.
“I have been informed of you,” he says. His voice, when he speaks, croaks at first, like a person who has just risen from a nap. He does not wait for her to confirm or deny the statement but goes on: “There are those who support you at court; otherwise it is unlikely I would have granted you an interview. You have traveled some distance to come here.”
Some distance. If over three hundred miles is some distance, then yes, His Majesty is correct. She nods.
“From Vaucouleurs,” she says, looking up.
The Dauphin tilts his head. He is thinking, Vaucouleurs, Vaucouleurs, where in my formerly vast kingdom does this place lie? The answer comes to him. He seems to smile, or possibly it is the leap and glow of candlelight stretching the ends of his mouth.
“They have remained loyal to me,” he says. So perhaps it was a smile she saw. “Sir Robert is an able captain. The English tried to take this town and failed. I remember the letters informing me of their attempt. You were born in Vaucouleurs, then?”
“No, I was born in a village called Domrémy. I doubt Your Majesty will have heard of it. I have lived there most of my life.”
Again, the head tilts, this time in the other direction. The eyes blink, counting over duchies, cities, rivers, towns, as the map of France turns and turns.
“A little too close to my cousin Burgundy,” he says at last.
“Domrémy is loyal to Your Majesty,” she replies.
A pause, filled with the pop and crackle of fire. When he speaks next, it is a new beginning.
“What protection were you given for your journey from Vaucouleurs to Chinon?”
She names the men who were her guards: the knight, Bertrand de Poulengy; the squire, Jean de Metz; and Richard the archer. She names Colet de Vienne, the royal messenger in the employ of His Majesty’s mother-in-law, and the two servants of de Poulengy and de Metz who accompanied them, tasked with guarding the supplies, though they all took their turn keeping watch.
“We traveled by night and kept off the main roads,” she says. “In daylight, we took sanctuary in churches and abbeys, and if none were to be found, the trees and hedges protected us from discovery. It was the safest way.”
“How long did your journey last?”
“Several days. Eleven in all.”
It registers: the danger, the sleepless nights, the fear of betrayal. From the book of misery, the Dauphin nods, acknowledges the shared experience. So when he replies, “A quick journey, all considered,” you know he is thinking back to a not-so-distant memory, eleven years into the past, his adolescent self on horseback, hair standing up on scrawny arms and neck. That night, no matter how hard he rode, the screams of Paris were never far enough behind him. Blood washed the streets when John the Fearless took the capital for his own.
The Dauphin sighs. He looks tired. What is a decade, a mere eleven years, when so little has changed?
She wonders, Is this why the Dauphin has memorized the shape and lines of France: its valleys, its rivers and lakes, its major cities, its rural clusters of wattle-and-daub cottages, its forests, meadows, and pastures, its marshes and swamps, its caves and nooks, its mountain passes? Imprinted in his mind is a map stuck with miniature flags, like a general’s plan of battle. Red for England, my enemy. Blue for France, my friends. He has drawn, with a mental stick of charcoal, various escape routes. If this and this are blocked, then we can still flee to such-and-such a place, which has remained loyal to me and my ancient forefathers. And if the English are at our backs, we can escape along this tributary, which empties into this river. All other options exhausted, we can always jump into barrels and trust to the current.
“I am pleased God has favored your journey,” he says, and does not say, Because goodness knows, He seems to favor little about France these days. “I am pleased that you and those who traveled with you have arrived safely in Chinon.”
She senses a shift in the air. The courtesies are over, idle talk come to an end.
“We remain unclear, however, as to what services you may render for our benefit,” he says with another sigh.
For a moment, she marvels at the smooth transition, the sleight-of-hand swap of pronouns, the personal “I” tossed aside for the royal “we.” For a king, shedding his human skin is the equivalent of changing hats: the fashionable chaperon, with its liripipe, its tail of cloth, switched for the heavy crown. In an instant, the mortal body swells into something less definable: one part flesh-and-blood man, one part sovereign whose power derives from none less than the Divine.
“Do you claim to be a holy woman?” he asks when she hesitates.
She shakes her head. “No.” The word falls like something heavy dropped.
A frown creases the Dauphin’s forehead. His expression says, Haven’t I been informed I was to be served a dish of salmon tonight, which I was looking forward to, and now I do not even recognize what has been placed before me?
“But you have enjoyed visions,” he says, insisting. He leans slightly forward. “Have you not? Didn’t my lord the Duke of Lorraine tell me so in a letter? Well, in several letters. He said you were standing in a field one morning and God spoke to you, that you have performed impossible feats—miracles.”
It is like the old Duke to exaggerate, she thinks. “I believe I told His Grace that it was I who spoke to God.”
“About?”
“I made a wish. Several wishes.”
She remembers, Your Majesty was on my list of names. And if you were a better prince, king, whatever you call yourself, then we would all be living in a different world.
But something holds her back, and she feels, just out of sight, the touch of her sister’s hand against her shoulder. Do not be so hard, Joan. It surprises her. There was no stirring of hatred when she first saw the Dauphin in the chapel. She recognized the uncertain step. The bowed head. The pause before he rose to his feet from prayer. This was a man afraid. She felt—and it bewildered her—pity for him. She realized: her list of enemies was also his. So, perhaps they could help each other. When she sees him now, all she can think is, You don’t look much of anything. Aren’t all lords and princes supposed to be lions among men? Yet here was just a person, a thin man, not handsome, with dark shadows under his eyes, probably, she guesses, from bad sleep and nightmares. A face such as his could be found selling cooking pots at a fair—and not doing a good job of it, either. With his luck, he would probably come away with less money in his pocket than what he started out with.
“And have they come true?” he asks, interrupting her thoughts.
“I do not know yet.”
To her surprise, he doesn’t push for details. He does not command her to speak up. She hears him shift in the chair. From the wide hollows of his sleeves, two hands emerge, thin as paper, and press together as if the moment calls for prayer. But he is not praying. He is looking at her and thinking.
“Then, if you are not gifted in prophecy, like certain holy women who have graced our company; if you are not an astrologer and do not possess the skill to read our kingdom’s fortunes in the movement of the stars and heavenly bodies; if you are neither a scholar nor a philosopher nor an ambassador learned in statecraft and religion, then it is a mystery how you think you can be of service to our cause.”
He speaks gently, like a person who is breaking bad news to someone unprepared for the blow. But he is growing bored. Briefly the Dauphin’s eyes close, and he exhales. Another sigh.
“The Duke writes your gifts are such that they could originate from no other source but God,” he continues, as if making excuses for her silence. “So, I ask again, what is it that you can do for us? There are councillors who were against the idea of my meeting you. I would not like to tell le Maçon, whom I trust, that they were right.”
She wonders: Why is it so hard to say what I can do? Why, if I possess strength, must it also be bound up in holiness? The Duke has used these phrases to describe her: Beloved of God; touched by the Divine; favored by our Lord, this simple maid. Why can’t they just say…
Somewhere at the base of her neck, she feels her blood jump. Her nerves skitter away from her. She has only this moment, this chance. If she is to go where her enemies are, she cannot do it alone; she will need help. Behind her back, the fingers of her right hand flex into a fist.
Now it is her turn to surprise the Dauphin. She steps forward to the edge of the carpet and returns to kneeling; her eyes take in a woolen rose, its thorns like tiny green fangs.
It was never decided what she would say if asked. Le Maçon had instructed, suddenly nervous before her meeting, Commit yourself to nothing! Be vague. Don’t boast. Though you are not a woman in holy orders, wasn’t our Lord, too, only a shepherd? And you said you sometimes watched sheep in Domrémy. So perhaps, though you should not say your prayers are more efficacious than ours, you can hint that this is so? Just for this first meeting? You understand, we have never handled someone quite like you before. We don’t know what you are yet.
She doesn’t listen to le Maçon. “Majesty,” Joan says quietly, “I can fight.”
Personal tribulations have instructed the Dauphin in patience, in the kingly art of forbearance. Le Maçon says these are his positive attributes. He is not the kind of prince who will strike a servant simply because he is angry or because he can. He will not rush to judgment. It was a hard lesson that taught him first to think, then to speak, and finally to act—that is, when he acts at all, which these days is rare enough. For if John the Fearless, father of the current Duke of Burgundy, were alive, how things might be different for him, for France…but it never does any good to dwell upon the sins of the past.
The Dauphin lets her words sink in. He exercises serenity worthy of a bishop. Except for the momentary disappearance of his bottom lip, his expression doesn’t change.
But he must say it. He must say aloud, in order to further the conversation, what needs to be said, for if this hurdle cannot be surmounted, then there is no point in continuing.
“You are a woman.” There. With a slight lilt at the end, as if it could be a question. But it is said, and, she notices, he is sitting a little higher in his chair.
She agrees with him. She nods. “I am—a woman.”
Bidding her to stand, he looks her over.
“You are not a delicate flower. This I grant you.” The Dauphin’s eyes travel slowly over the length of her body, head to foot. He seems tempted to test her sturdiness by poking her in the arm, but there is no servant ready with a basin of rose water and a towel to wash peasant dirt and sweat from his hands.
“And you are tall, taller even than most men. It is clear you enjoy good health. I have heard it is sometimes the way with those who work the land, who are lowborn,” he says easily. “But even a strong woman is not equal to a man. This is well known since the days of antiquity. Strength is not a natural attribute of womanhood. It is not in her body’s composition. This trait is and has always been the provenance of men.”
She is silent. She is tempted to say, Not with me. And to add, And not with you either, it would seem.
The Dauphin’s hands disappear into his too-large sleeves. His expression is questioning, but at least he is not laughing at her. “Are you suggesting you have received training?”
“I have sparred with the knight and squire I traveled with. When I worked in the kitchens at Vaucouleurs, I watched the soldiers train.” She doesn’t add, I broke a man’s wrist with one hand. I took out three strong men with a skillet.
He shakes his head. “That seems hardly enough. A knight begins his training when he is a boy.”
“And before I made this journey, I sparred nearly every day with my father. He was famous in Domrémy for his fists and hated me worse than he hated the English and the Burgundians. I do not exaggerate when I say this: that if every soldier in your army was the equivalent of my father, a Jacques d’Arc, in height, weight, and temper, this war would have ended in your father’s time and we would be living in an age of peace. He would have sent the late King of England running like a serving boy whipped for dropping the soup ladle.”
She sees that the Dauphin cannot help himself. He smiles at the image.
But he tips a beringed finger at her, as if he has caught her out. “So, you were an unruly child then, if your father beat you.”
She hesitates. “I do not think you have to be an unruly child to be hated by your parents.”
The Dauphin looks down. The smile on his face vanishes. It is another entry from the book of misery that rings true for him. He nods.
“Before I was born, my father made a bet. He said I would be his third son and he lost the wager, along with a good sum of money. Ever since, he hasn’t known what to do with me.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother should have been a nun cloistered in an abbey. She lives in fear of my father and subsists off prayers instead of food and drink.”
“Yet you are well built.” It is not a description, she thinks, that would flatter most of her sex. “To be so tall, you must have been well nourished or, at the very least, well fed.”
For a moment, a memory washes through her and she forgets herself, where she is, who she is speaking to.
“My uncle used to joke to strangers, ‘Joan must eat a whole heifer to sate her appetite.’ ”
“And did you?” The Dauphin’s expression is serious.
“No, I ate bowls of pottage and black bread, like everyone else. And when the harvest was bad, we would skip a meal and go hungry. I was no different.”
Another rumor: His Majesty cannot pay his butcher’s bill. No more credit will be extended to the castle at Chinon. Even the battles of the household, of the kitchen, are ones he cannot win these days.
The Dauphin settles his head on his fist; the glow of a ring, a bright ruby, makes it look like he has a boil on the point of his chin. He seems to contemplate what has been laid before him, as if a scribe had written on scraps of parchment her various attributes: tall; young; female; well built; claims she can fight.
So, it seems a continuation of his thoughts when he says, “Then tell me what you know of war.”
This is the question for which she has been waiting.
“Majesty,” she says, “I will tell you what I know.”
She tells him about a room. It is the room she and her sister slept in. She describes the slanted, low ceiling, the shuttered window, the air that is musty and old because no wind or light is permitted to enter. And next to her, Catherine’s shape in the darkness. The sounds of quiet weeping. She recalls the dust motes like fairies, lit by splinters of sun filtering through the shutters’ gaps, and the spider webs, which grow and widen with the hours and the days, spinning miniature gray curtains in the corners of the room.
“It will be no news to you,” she tells the Dauphin, “to hear the English burned our fields, which were ready for the harvest. It may be no special thing to you that I picked up the black stalks of ruined wheat, and under my fingertips I felt the grain crumble like ash. I saw a child’s straw poppet, which she had dropped, crushed in the center of an Englishman’s boot print, and a woman enter her home not through the door but through one side of her cottage, for a whole wall had been battered down.” Because she knows that His Majesty prays often, she tells him about a saint’s statue: defiled.
And the misery doesn’t end when you have righted your fences and rebuilt your pens or put Saint Margaret’s head back on her shoulders. No, misery, too, must play out its cycle, in the fullness of the seasons. In autumn, food is scarce. But in winter, the meadows for grazing razed, the livestock starve. She has watched the spirits of horses and oxen break. She has witnessed the moment of collapse when they could take no more. Nothing could be wasted. Any beast that died was cut up for meat, though there was always little to salvage. She has pulled out a newborn calf, wet and shining with mucus and blood, only to hold its head in her lap as it died, because there was no milk to spare and its mother was already gone. She has wondered, What is the point of this? To bring new life into the world and then to extinguish its light so soon, a mere hour of consciousness on this earth? What lesson can be learned from this?
And without the horse and ox, the plow must be pulled by a man and his wife, though both are hungry and sick. Even the crows would be hard-pressed to make a meal of them.
She tells him: For war is not just battle plans. It isn’t France’s preeminent chefs de guerre gathered around a table, signing off on orders for provisions and discussing formations of attack. It isn’t the various implements of war: the sword, the special dagger that finishes a felled knight, which she learned about from the men who trained her. It isn’t the shifting borders of a kingdom, the towers and battlements that change names and hands and loyalties in the space of a few violent hours. To her, it isn’t even the dead on a battlefield, the casualties, young, middle-aged, and old, who know that to be struck down is what happens when you choose to stand your ground against those who wish to take it from you by force.
And it’s not about ancient rights, for she doesn’t believe, not a whit, that the English really care about France or adding new subjects to its sad little population. It is an English king who uses the excuse of an ancient claim because he has gazed across the Narrow Sea, into the dim and murky offing, and seen a vision of himself as the richest, most powerful man in Christendom. In the end, it’s about money, the accrual of wealth and land. It’s about making English knights rich with French treasure so they can build more castles on their gray-green island, where, she hears, it never ceases to rain and even the woodland and meadows are as wet and putrid as swamps. For with wealth, you can buy comfort. You can buy prestige, and you can buy culture: carpets to walk on, books studded with sapphires, tapestries, statues, a second castle, a third castle, a smattering of country manors. You can eat peacock meat, swan meat, and fresh salmon every day for every meal. Why not? the English ask themselves upon waking, before they pillage, burn, and destroy. And, she tells the Dauphin, ever since Catherine died, she can almost hear it in her own ears, this question the English ask each morning: “Why not?”
To her, war has become something else, and here lies the problem. When kings have gone bankrupt from the expenditures of war, when they are unable to pay their troops, and soldiers go hungry and feel they have put their lives at stake for nothing, for less than nothing, looting happens. Murder happens. Rape happens.
“I believe God crafted the sound of a woman’s scream,” she says, “to pierce the heart and to test our humanity, whether we still have it or whether we have left it behind.
“But there are men for whom a woman’s scream is as a fist that bounces off armor. I have thought to myself, What choices does a woman have for vengeance, for justice? For we cannot simply pray. I can’t stomach my mother’s prayers. We cannot afford to wait and be still. I won’t live this way—not anymore. So when I spoke to God that morning, I decided, if I am to scream, let it be in battle. There is no chance for peace except at the point of a sword.”
She stops to catch her breath. A silence settles between them. How will His Majesty take this lesson? And from someone like her?
But his face doesn’t change. He clears his throat. He says, as calmly as before, “You talk well. This I grant you, too.”
Without looking at her, he raises a jeweled hand and beckons. “Come,” he says, and when she hesitates, he repeats himself: “Come closer.”
She steps across the carpet of woolen roses. A distance of less than two feet now separates them. From here it is possible to see that they would stand shoulder to shoulder.
“You may know my elder sister’s name is also Catherine,” he says. “And though she is alive, she is as lost to me as your sister who is dead. She married Henry, the late King of England, and had a son by him. If the English and Burgundy win this war, then this boy, my nephew, will call himself King of both England and France. He will wear my crown. So, you see, there is no hope between us for reconciliation, given her loyalties and”—he pauses—“my unique position.” It is like he is reciting from his own book of misery, and it has become a contest between them. Everything you have been through, I have known, and more. “If we are to speak of family—sisters, brothers, uncles, cousins, friends, my father—so many now are gone. I understand loss in its many forms.”
The time for her to speak has ended. On the platter of sweets, there is a gap like a lost tooth where the consumed pastry once rested; he extracts a single golden wafer from a ring of comfits, tarts, and sugared flowers. He holds it beneath his nose and inhales. His eyes close in pleasure.
“Cinnamon,” he says, and she feels her heart skip a beat. She thinks of cinnamon birds, of her uncle, and looks down.
“This wafer, the oublie, is no less than an art form,” he tells her. “The Greeks made these as well, but not like we do. They could not hope to achieve such perfection. I have gone into the kitchens myself to watch the cooks and their helpers, though you can buy an oublie in any street of France. The ingredients are deceptively simple. Only some flour and water.
“But I think a truly fine oublie is the work of an artist. See here…” He points to the front of the wafer. “My cook has stamped a picture on this one because he knows I pay special honor to Saint Michael. It is Michael slaying Satan.”
She steps closer. In the cake, she sees a clear outline of two bodies, one winged and gripping a sword, the other an enormous serpent wriggling on its stomach. The cook has given the angel a crown and wavy hair reaching to his shoulders. He has dressed him sparsely and in the Roman style, in a draped gown that reaches above his muscular knees. A sandaled foot rests upon the serpent’s head, its mouth open, fangs bared.
He holds out the wafer to her. “For your troubles,” he says as she takes it.
The Dauphin is watching her carefully. “This wafer, it reminds you of something? Or you have tasted it before?”
She doesn’t answer. Around them the haze of candlelight blurs into memory. She is thinking of another wafer wrapped in a piece of clean linen cloth, of blancmanger, a dish as intangible as a dream.
“But you are like me,” he continues, still watching her. “We no longer permit our tears to fall.”
A pause. Then, as she leaves, the Dauphin’s voice reaches her at the door: “The time of miracles that cannot be seen has passed. If you are truly blessed by God, it must be proved. You will be tested.”
Le Maçon has given her a room in Chinon, with a bed, a small table, a chair, and a window that looks out onto the starlit valley below. At night, the room is locked and guarded by two men in his own employ. “Why should I be a prisoner?” she asked him in protest, but he shook his head. “You are mistaken. It is for your protection, not for the protection of others.” He is thinking of his rivals at court and the men who work for them: the current favorites of His Majesty, the men Joan saw that morning at the chapel.
“And do not say you don’t need protection!” he snapped, anticipating her reply.
In bed, she inhales the scent of the wafer, holding it under her nose as the Dauphin had done. For a moment, it is as if she has stepped into the body of the French King. The fragrance is like nothing, no flower or herb or sap of a tree she has ever come across. She takes a bite, and her teeth graze the top of Saint Michael’s wavy locks. The warmth travels across the surface of her tongue. She cannot help smiling.
The Dauphin had said, upon giving her this gift, “For your troubles.” She thinks there may be some truth to this, however accidental the wisdom. Perhaps all she has been through feeds into the seconds it takes to finish a single oublie. Perhaps troubles eventually distill themselves into something else, as a few lines of the troubadour’s poetry distill the pains and secrets of love.
On a cloudless night in another time, the moon like a perfect Eucharist wafer, she had dreamed of tasting, if only once, the spice of the cinnamon birds. Now she has.