Massieu managed to stay close, just outside the castle. The other French priests, Isambart, Martin Ladvenu, others, had been chased off by the English soldiers—“Traitors!” “French dogs!”—but the English didn’t seem to mind Massieu. It occurred to him that he’d become invisible against the castle walls, the way beggars do. He’d been keeping watch since Thursday, waiting, hoping, praying—anything to see her again.
“Let’s go in,” he heard Warwick say to the French priest Jean d’Estivet, who was, as usual, trotting at his side. Warwick and d’Estivet—the worst of both lots. What would she think if he, Massieu, slipped in with them? That he was one of them?
Still, it was his chance, and he took it, followed them in, Warwick marching erect in his power, d’Estivet submissive, curved toward him, the two of them a perfect portrait of England and France that day. Warwick had, in this sordid affair, at least the excuse of being English. Doing his duty, burning her for “his king,” as he was wont to put it.
In a way, perhaps, he was right. He had been given charge of the boy-king’s education, when his father, Henry V, had died, and Massieu had heard that he’d beaten the child so badly that he stopped speaking. Warwick’s king.
The great knight Richard Warwick—he’d hosted one of chivalry’s most famous tournaments not long ago, in Calais. Ridden around bedecked in pearls and ostrich feathers, bested all the other knights at the jousting, and feasted all the people afterward. A day already renowned for its pomp and chivalry, but what was Warwick here but a glorified guard?
Top brute, like the ones he’d selected to guard her, and it was Warwick, after all, who had ordered the chains.
But why, since he knew she couldn’t escape? No one had ever escaped from that dungeon, it was impossible—unless, of course, Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret decided to take a hand in it, and then chains and brutal guards would be as nothing.
But Warwick didn’t fear Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. He was English—and Massieu had come to see that what the English feared was disgrace. Hence, Joan of Arc. Did she know, Massieu wondered, that she’d given Warwick the fright of his life? Disgraced this flower of English chivalry, sent him and his men fleeing in terror from what turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl?
Massieu wished he’d been there when Warwick first laid eyes upon her. Once he’d spent more English gold for her than had ever been spent on any prisoner, once he got hold of her and she was his, and he saw—a French country girl. Nothing more. The typical stocky build, the dark hair—Warwick must have been expecting a witch with a broomstick, showering sparks.
And here instead was this plain girl, simple, solid, already brought down, and hardly dangerous—and Warwick had her clamped in irons anyway. Hand and foot, all the tighter, once he saw that his disgrace had come at such unpracticed hands. The cruelty with which he imprisoned her tempered only by his ultimate goal—keeping her alive long enough to burn her.
Warwick and d’Estivet stopped at the dungeon door, d’Estivet giving way, elaborately, to Warwick. Warwick, who took this submission as natural, as his due, barely acknowledged it—did he know, Massieu suddenly wondered, that the last laugh between them had nearly been d’Estivet’s? Was the great and all-powerful Lord Warwick aware that this minion bowing and scraping by his side had very nearly murdered Joan of Arc, just last month, during Lent?
Warwick knew that she’d gotten very sick and almost died. He’d even sent his own doctors, the best doctors, and then every doctor in Rouen, to her bedside. “The king has paid high for her,” he warned them, “the king does not want her to die but by his justice.”
The doctors suggested that the prisoner’s chains be removed. Warwick hesitated—“Make her swear not to escape first,” he said.
She refused. Anyway, she murmured, it wasn’t the chains that had made her sick, it was a poisoned carp that d’Estivet had brought her, from Cauchon.
D’Estivet was there, at her bedside. “Slut! Whore!” he shouted. “You lie! You made yourself sick, stuffing yourself with herrings, you trollop!”
She tried to rise then, tried to speak, but she began vomiting so violently that the doctors, panicking, took off her chains even without permission, and bled her, bathed her, their whole repertoire, but she fell into a higher fever still.
She begged feebly for last rites. D’Estivet, as resident priest, refused them. “Die like a Saracen!” he spat.
“I was baptized a Christian, and I shall die one,” she murmured. And then she commended her spirit to God, and turned her face to the wall.
And didn’t die. Alas, thought Massieu. She told him that her saints had come back to her then, renewing their promises of salvation. So she found the strength, somehow, to get better.
Why did you do it? Massieu asked d’Estivet silently now, as they descended the seven steps to her cell. Pity? Mercy? No chance of that. D’Estivet had addressed her regularly as “filth” throughout the trial. When he got wind that Massieu was letting her pause in the doorway of a little chapel they passed on their way to and from the trial, he waited one day, hidden, until she had fallen to her knees and started praying tearfully, even joyfully, to her saints and angels—then jumped out and blocked the door from the “ex-communicant whore!”
They’d both lost their breath then, Massieu and Joan of Arc. D’Estivet was Massieu’s superior, Cauchon’s “Promoter General.” He warned the usher that if he ever “let this whore” stop to pray again, he’d put him in “such a tower” that he “wouldn’t see the sun or the moon for a month.” And then d’Estivet took the trouble of having the chapel closed up, lest she be gleaning some modicum of comfort from simply looking in as she passed by.
So why had d’Estivet done it—the poisoned carp? For it surely would have been a mercy, for her to die in her bed. And there was always the chance, too, that Warwick would discover what he would consider highest treason—why did he risk it? Or rather “they,” d’Estivet, and Cauchon, too, for d’Estivet had come from Beauvais with Cauchon, and scarcely scratched his own ear without the bishop’s consent.
Was the idea to get Cauchon off the hook? Make a swift and relatively easy end to what was moving each day further from the bishop’s finest hour? For Cauchon, unlike Warwick, could understand every word of colloquial French Joan of Arc said during her trial, all the nuances, and he had to know, as did every French priest there who could understand her words in a way their English lords and masters could not, that she was holy, and it was not only a crime but a sin to burn her.
“Say nothing to her,” Warwick warned d’Estivet now, as they entered her dungeon. Fearing what? wondered Massieu. That she could still die of rage, insult? Warwick motioned the guards to one side, away from her.
She was in her pants. They could see it. She favored her visitors with only the briefest of glances, but it was enough for them to take in her blackened eyes, her cut and swollen lips. Her bruised and tear-streaked face. Warwick opened his mouth to speak, and closed it.
Now leave, said Massieu silently. You got what you came for, you can see it plainly. The combined might and power of the English army and the established Church of France have brought down this formidable enemy. This girl.
And how many men had it taken? Massieu had counted over a hundred and fifty churchmen during the various sessions of the trial, working very hard, all of them, since January, to burn her. To say nothing of the secular force of the English, and now they’d just about done it. One girl, he said silently to Warwick.
But rather than making “good cheer,” as Cauchon had advised, even Warwick stood silenced. She didn’t dignify him with another glance, but he had seen her face.
Well done, Captain Warwick, flower of English chivalry, thought Massieu. Your big guards beat a girl in chains, and now you’ll burn her. Have you nothing to say to her now?
But the silence was unbroken. Massieu looked from one to the other. D’Estivet, Warwick—nothing? No crowing? They looked like ravens, or more, cormorants. Envoys from hell.
Finally, Richard Warwick turned on his heel and walked out. D’Estivet followed so closely he bumped into him when Warwick paused to bark something at a guard. They forgot Massieu—or maybe he really had become invisible. Whichever it was, he uttered a prayer of thanks.
He crossed to her then. No one else was there but the guards. He knelt and took her hand. “Tell me,” he whispered.
“You didn’t come.”
“They wouldn’t let me in. I’ve been here, day and night, outside—”
She looked at him. “Yes, I can see.”
“You took back the pants! They’re going to kill you now!”
“They always were.”
“You promised to wear the dress!”
“It’s better this way.”
“Where’s the dress?”
A long pause. He looked into her eyes. She had been his enemy, it was true. He was a Norman, from Rouen, under English rule his whole life. He’d grown up hating the king she’d crowned. But as he looked at her now, he felt he’d give his right arm to have ridden out from Orléans beside her.
Behind her, near her, following her that glorious summer up the Loire to Reims. There must have been all the magic, all the light in France around her then. And as he looked at her now, bruised and beaten, he saw that, somehow, she seemed to be in the light again.
She told him the truth about the pants.