They arrived at the Old Market Square, and there was the stake, high on a platform—why so high? It was so big, and there was so much wood, and something smelled bad. Sulfur? Pitch? Boiling?
Please God, no! Girl X started to whimper.
Don’t look, whispered Joan of Arc, turning away. Just take each moment, each moment. No good looking ahead. Like the cart. It had been terrifying at first, and now she’d done it, gone in the cart.
It wasn’t the cart that terrified you, it was the stake, said Girl X.
Yes, maybe, but what of it now? She looked across at them, the men of the church, the usual ones. All those priests and bishops and captains, on another platform. They were all in black, but looked small, suddenly.
Like rats, said Girl X.
Small, said Joan of Arc.
But a rat’s bite can kill you.
But they’re still just rats.
. . .
One of them got up and started to preach. From the Bible, Corinthians. The one right before her favorite one.
God’s word.
In the mouth of a rat, said Girl X.
Still God’s word.
“ ‘For as the body is one and hath many members . . . God hath tempered the body together . . . that there be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care, one for another.’ ”
Yes, that’s true, thought Joan of Arc, remembering Orléans, and Troyes, and Reims, when all of France seemed to be one body, caring for one another, tempered together, moving as one to put a crown on its head, the head of France. She had been close to the head then—it came to her that she’d been the heart. The heart of France! She could live long, she thought, and never do better.
“And when one member suffer, all the members suffer . . . or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.” They had rejoiced that summer, all of France, it seemed to her. She remembered looking out at her army one day, after Troyes, on the way to Reims Cathedral, and seeing women and children trotting along with them, and thinking, Yes, this is fitting. No longer a military campaign, but a pilgrimage, for the love of God, full of people.
Now Cauchon began: “Joan, we declare you a relapsed heretic today . . .”
For she had truly done it for them. She had put their needs first. That’s why she marched first to Reims, when she could have taken Paris. The generals said she’d made a mistake, but the truth was that the people needed a king more than they needed Paris.
“ . . . we cast you off . . .”
Like a boat down the river. Like the deep blue sky. She’d been nearly overwhelmed with joy then, that summer, she was nearly overwhelmed with sorrow now, and what was either, to the immensity of the deep blue sky? She’d been born nineteen years ago in Domrémy, and could have been kicked by a cow or fallen into a well and died right then. Instead, she’d lived to die here today. And yet another throw of the dice, and she might have lived too long, in some obscure village. Lived to be lonely and forgotten.
“Johanne, vade in pace,” went the formula Cauchon was reading. Go thou in peace.
Massieu turned to him, her words—“
Bishop, I die through you!”—still ringing in his ears. Had Cauchon even heard her? She’d said it to him, straight out, this morning.
“I die through you”—did Cauchon know the truth about the dress? That the guards had taken it, and forced her back into the fatal pants? He must have known, someone must have put them up to it. It was a clever ruse, and the guards weren’t clever—or freethinking, or independent. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been in there all those months, the lowest of the low, wouldn’t have been given the job of kicking around a girl in chains.
No, it was someone clever, someone higher up who’d lost patience, Warwick, or maybe Winchester, and Cauchon would have been told. So he’d known as well that when she stood there in front of his tribunal and declared that she’d taken the pants “freely,” she was lying.
So, was he impressed? Massieu wondered. Did he appreciate her progress? She’d come to him a simple country girl, but she’d gotten an education at his hands. And was still heroic.
More heroic—it was a choice now. Her eyes were open.
“Bishop, I die through you!” Cauchon had to know, too, that she had taken measure of the extent of his corruption. How could he live?
Unless, thought Massieu, looking quickly around, he does something now. It wasn’t too late—she was still among them, standing there breathing, alive. Surrounded by English soldiers, true, with their lances and swords—But look at the people, Cauchon! Look at the French here, many more than the English, thousands more.
If you say, No! now, Cauchon, if you shout out, No!, scream it, they will rise. All of them. Massieu could feel it. They were disposed.
But they needed a leader. Someone they recognized—Cauchon could do it, if he did it right now. He could set her free, and turn himself, with just one word—No!—from a wretch to a hero. And he might die here this morning, but he would die holy, redeemed, and people would remember him forever, his name would live. “Saint Pierre,” they might call him.
But Cauchon merely cleared his throat. “The Church can no longer protect you,” he intoned. He looked up into her eyes then, and quickly away. Massieu knew that Cauchon’s life hadn’t been without merit. He had been young once, was known to love art, and had even spent one summer among some mystics in Paris, a few decades back. Since then, though, he’d clearly made his way, with much success.
And within the overall narrative of that success, he must have understood this affair as a footnote. Politics, a detail, the price of the archbishop’s palace in Rouen. When Winchester had asked him to oversee the trial, which was to say, the burning, of Joan of Arc, Cauchon could have slipped out of it. Pled illness, clerical business, a sore foot—but he must have thought it would be a small thing. Quickly done and soon behind him.
But would it ever be behind him? “Bishop, I die through you.” How easily could even a rising prince of the church walk away from that?
And there was the rest of it, every word she’d said to him during the trial. The other day, Massieu had seen the bishop looking over his shoulder, twice, three times, and hitting his ear, as if he were hearing something. “You tell me to beware—beware yourself!” And now, worse, “Bishop, I die through you.”
And then there’d been the trick question, the trap Cauchon had laid for her. When he’d gotten one of his men to ask her, cruelly, almost sinfully, “Joan, are you in a state of grace?” There was, of course, no safe answer to that question. If she’d said yes, she would have been guilty of the sin of presumption; if she’d said no, then she was, by her own admission, outside of grace and certainly not, as she claimed, sent by God.
But almost miraculously—yes, miraculously, Massieu would say now—she’d found the answer. “If I am in grace,” she’d replied, “I pray that God keep me there. If I’m not, I pray that God lead me to it.”
The men in the room had gone speechless at that, and Cauchon had quickly adjourned the trial. And another time, worse, actually, when they’d asked her if she knew the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria, and she’d turned to Cauchon and said, “Let my lord the bishop hear me in confession, and I’ll gladly say them to him. . . .”
“Gentle bishop,” she’d called him then, before she knew, when she still took him for an honest man of God.
Cauchon looked up then, right at Massieu. With a look in his eyes that Massieu had never seen, pleading almost. What do you want from me?
Just one no! Massieu shot back at him, silently pleading himself now. And Cauchon could have, right then. Shouted, “No!” and lived as a hero, or maybe died there, but heroically. Having thrown it all off, all the hypocrisy, the double-dealing, just come clean and gone down fighting beside Joan of Arc.
Say no, Massieu was still praying, and we’ll follow you, and you will live forever and the little children will revere your name—when Cauchon intoned, “We turn you over to secular justice, and hope it will be gentle,” and took his seat.