Massieu crossed to the door. “They’re here!” The guards threw down their lots—“Bloody priests!” “Goddamned French!”—and hauled open the heavy door.
Cauchon came in, robes muddy, hat askew, face as red as it had been that morning, even redder. There’d been a scene just now, outside the castle. He’d been surrounded, he and his party, just as they were entering, by English soldiers with unsheathed swords and pikes.
“Hey you, priests! Our king has wasted his money on you!”
Cauchon hadn’t wanted to come, had tried not to come. Tried to send the inquisitor, the scribe, some other high-ranking clerics, but then Winchester had made it clear that only Cauchon, chief judge in this affair, could exact penance correctly, legally, from the prisoner.
Thus Cauchon found himself outside Rouen Castle that afternoon, surrounded by the rabble. He looked around, at first more offended than afraid, for someone to call them off.
“Hey, priests! Anyone who throws you into the river won’t be wasting his time!”
Cauchon turned in fury—where was Captain Warwick, to call off his brutes?—but froze when he saw that Warwick had been there all along. Watching, with a very cold eye.
“The king stands badly in this!” Warwick called loudly.
Cauchon caught his breath. Warwick was his friend. They spoke English together.
“My lord, don’t worry!” Cauchon tried to make his voice sound natural, light. As if it were nothing for Warwick to be standing off, looking on as his soldiers threatened the bishop’s life.
Cauchon took another breath. This would soon be behind him, and he would be archbishop of Rouen. Winchester had promised it to him, in exchange for burning this girl.
“Don’t worry, my lord,” he called back to Warwick, “we’ll soon have her again!”
Warwick said nothing, but Cauchon was allowed to pass unharmed through the soldiers into the castle, with his men, and down to the dungeon, where he stood outside her cell a moment, still breathless with fear.
Which turned to rage when he walked inside. More English soldiers, worse ones, and Massieu. What was he doing there? All soft around the eyes—the idiot, the biggest fool of all time. It was a wonder he could feed himself.
And her, too, still with that half-crazed smile, but why was he even looking at her? She was already dead.
“The Church unbinds you. . . .” He had to do the whole thing again. Where was the dress? That thing they’d brought. Someone held it out.
“Do you submit, Joan?”
“Don’t call me Joan.”
He looked at her.
She looked away. “Only let the dress be long.”
Long, short—Cauchon passed it to her. The creature put it on, over her pants, then slipped them off. These were handed back to him. What was he supposed to do with them? He didn’t want to touch them.
He motioned to the barber.
“Do you agree, Joan, to the removal of your short haircut, offensive in the sight of God and man?”
Joan never would. But Girl X nodded.
The barber shaved her head. Now Cauchon really couldn’t look.
“You are condemned to perpetual imprisonment, on the bread of affliction and the water of sorrow.”
She listened abstractedly. “Bread and water”—she had never eaten much more, really, not even at the table of the king of France. When she’d been Joan of Arc.
And “perpetual imprisonment”—well, that’s all Girl X had ever known, since her strange incarnation this morning. At least her guard would be a woman now. She would be relieved, at least, of the constant fear. Terror, really.
Cauchon moved to the door.
“The Church prison,” she reminded him.
One of her guards grabbed the pants roughly away from Cauchon. He had never been treated this way by the English before. He was frightened again.
“The Church prison!” Joan of Arc cried to him. “A woman guard! Now that I’m in a dress—”
Cauchon turned. Couldn’t she see?
“She submitted to the Church, she belongs in a Church prison now!” cried the idiot Massieu, deaf and blind, too, both of them. He made no move to leave with them, but the guards pushed him out with the rest of the churchmen.
Then one of the guards walked over and punched her, hard, in the face. Deliberately, before they shut the door, so the French priests would see. Cauchon gasped, in spite of himself. One of the guards raised a stick at him, as if he were a dog. Still, he stared for a moment, before he turned away.
“If you fall again, you are dead,” he called back to Joan of Arc, then fled. The door slammed shut behind him, in the face of Massieu, who stood there, frozen, until one of the priests grabbed his arm and pulled him up the seven steps.