She lay on what they called her bed. She wasn’t quite sure how long it had been since the priests had left. A day, maybe. Half a day. Maybe two.
Time had changed. She lay on her back and breathed in and breathed out. She was proud of that—she’d gotten that for herself. She had no one else to thank for the fact that she was still breathing.
Not even her saints and angels—well, that was something new. Even here, in this black hole, quelque chose de nouveau. One just had to look. She passed her hand over her head—this time, she remembered. Last time, she’d forgotten, and when she felt the stubble, her shaved head, tears had sprung into her eyes, and that had been bad. But this time she was prepared, and it was all right. “My hair is a small thing,” she’d said, throughout her trial, when they complained that her short hair, too, “men’s hair,” was “an abomination.” “A small thing,” she said then, and it still was, especially when compared to the stake.
She touched her eye, gently. It had swelled shut. The guards had never hit her before. They’d struck her just as the priests were leaving, probably more to scare them. She’d had a glimpse of Massieu and Cauchon, just before the door was slammed, looking back at her, frightened, but nothing frightened her anymore.
Except the stake. Fine. She’d admitted it, publicly. They all knew it, they’d all seen: she couldn’t burn. Some people could, Saint Apollonia, and Saint Cyril. But not Joan of Arc.
She’d thought she could. She’d said it all through her trial: “I’d rather burn than deny my saints!”
It had sounded good, and she’d meant it when she’d said it, with all her heart, or so she’d thought. But it turned out to be just words.
Which, she now knew, were easy—words. For five months: “You may burn my body to cinders,” or “You may torture me so that you separate my soul from my body,” or “Even if the executioner comes to take me and I am in the fire,” and so forth, “I shall never deny my saints!”
Fine, bold, shining words, until the first real intimation of what she’d been talking about, the fire. And then those words had given way so fast, to other words, words she didn’t even know she knew.
“Your saints led you to the sin of insubordination—”
And she’d said, “Yes,” just as fluently as she’d said, “No,” before.
“—and heresy.”
She, easily: “Yes.”
“They caused you to defy the Holy Church—”
She, eloquently: “Yes.”
“They are devils.”
One hesitation, and then finally, loud and clear, “Yes.”
Girl X turned over. But those yeses were just words, too. Maybe Joan of Arc’s saints understood that, would have understood, if they’d been there. Understood at least that it was Girl X who was talking by then, and she knew nothing of saints. Her words, too, were just words.
And her legs were cold. Joan of Arc’s never were. She wore pants. Always and by first definition: Joan of Arc wore pants. Take away the pants, and you’ve got—what? Girl X. Anyway, not Joan of Arc.
The priests must have known that during the trial, the way they dwelled on it so. Every day, pants and hair, pants and hair.
“Why do you wear them?”
“Which saint commanded you to wear them?”
“Wouldn’t you feel more honest in a dress?”
“Don’t you know it’s a mortal sin to dress the way you do?”
“Don’t you care?”
“Won’t you at least take off the sinful pants on Easter?”
“And why, once again, have you abandoned the clothes that are fitting to your sex?”
She had answered them variously, with passion, with common sense, with theology, from the bottom of her heart, and the furthest reaches of her brain. Fool that she’d been. Trying to make them see, when she was the one who wasn’t seeing. She finally did see, that morning in the cemetery behind Rouen Cathedral, where they’d stood ranged, ready to kill her. Saw at last that they were out to destroy her. Willing, even, to burn her alive.
What a fool Joan of Arc had been, what a child! She hadn’t seen that the priests were her enemies, simply because she saw them first as priests. Holy men, that is, sanctified by the Church. Every one of them—it took her breath away even now—had been consecrated by the Holy Spirit, which, she’d been taught as a girl, changes men forever, like water into which one has dropped even a bit of wine.
“Gentle priests,” she had called them. Girl X hit the wall with her fist. Joan of Arc brought tears to her eyes.
“If only you could see my saints!” she’d said to them, her enemies, taking them into her deepest confidence, opening her heart to them, her soul. To the point of wishing that these deadly enemies could be blessed with a sacred vision of her saints.
“For if you could only see them once,” Joan of Arc had testified earnestly, “you would know, right away, just as I do, that they are holy.”
Girl X cringed. How could she have dragged her beloved saints into that wretched courtroom? Served them up in that unholy place, her “beautiful” Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret, “gold crowns on their heads,” smelling “fresh and sweet,” speaking in voices “beautiful, worthy, and good.”
And to what avail? For then Cauchon would bang down his gavel and repeat, “Your saints are devils. Your pants are the proof that they lead you into sin.”
And then, rather than standing up and saying, as Girl X would now, You men are my enemies! This trial is the devil’s work! Joan of Arc, poor thing, would try then even harder.
“No, no, if only you could see, even once, gentle priests! My saints aren’t devils! They’re Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret—”
And so on. She should have seen it, of course. She almost did, that day with Saint Gabriel and Saint Michael.
“You say Saint Michael came to you,” the priests began. “How did you know it was a man?”
“Did he come to you naked?”
At least she hit back on that one. “Do you think our Lord has no clothes for him?” But they went on.
“Did you kiss him?”
She: “Yes, of course.”
She: “On the knees.”
“Did he smell good?”
She: “Of course, he was a saint.”
They were interrupting each other: “Did you feel his body?”
“What part of his body?”
“How did you know it was a man?”
Poor Joan of Arc. “Gentle priests!” she’d cried. “Please! I know it was Saint Michael, the very one who suffered passion and death for us! I believe in him, as I believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord—”
The gavel.
She closed her eyes. That was over now. And they hadn’t gotten her in the end, even though they’d all gone out there to kill her, to burn her. Well, she didn’t burn.
They had all been shocked. That was at least some measure of their respect, she supposed. So brave did they think Joan of Arc, they even thought she would go to the stake.
She’d thought so, too, not that she’d ever expected it to come to that. She hadn’t once considered the possibility. She had gone out that morning still believing that a last-minute miracle was more likely than a trip in the cart to the stake.
And even then, when it came to her slowly, gradually, that she was alone, that there were no angels there, no saints, and there weren’t going to be any miracles in Rouen that morning, she was still surprised when she sold her saints for her life.
Or rather, Girl X’s life. “Perpetual prison.” Bread and water. Skirts among rapists who had already started hitting her. No saints or angels now—she hadn’t heard a word from them since her recantation, not even a whisper. She missed them badly, missed even the promises of salvation that had turned out to be untrue.
What had been true, however, was that she’d been publicly revealed to be a coward who didn’t have the courage to burn.
But she wasn’t supposed to burn! She was supposed to be saved.
But now she was thinking like Joan of Arc, and Joan of Arc was gone, as gone as “the snows of yesterday,” as she’d once heard a bard sing at the king’s court. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Maybe where Joan of Arc is—fine, let her go. She was brave to a point, though not, it turned out, to the end.
And anyway, she had understood nothing.