Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans

by Thomas Keneally

  To my honoured principal, the Esteemed Francesco Maglia-Gondisi, of the Bank of the Family Gondisi of Florence etc.

  Dated 22 June 1420

  By now you would be aware that Charles Dauphin has been disinherited at Troyes. I am therefore both amazed and delighted that you have increased my domestic and office allowances. We have taken over an entire townhouse in rue St Euphrosyne. Might I be frank, sir? I understand perfectly that you must have excellent business arrangements with members of the English and Burgundian parties, but I am a little anxious that even these may not offset the losses we may incur as the Armagnac cause fades.

  I have nevertheless, as you instructed, given sympathetic consideration to Queen Yolande’s request for a credit note of 150,000 pounds tournois. She offers as collateral the following properties …

  [Here follows a list of estates and châteaux.]

  I have sent my good assistant Dumeo south to Provence to value these properties and shall forward his report to you on his return. I must say however that it is likely that by the time you receive the report the Dauphin may have abdicated all claim to the throne. Only Yolande, his confessor, and such friends as Monsieur de Giac have prevented this from already occurring …

  Bernardo Massimo

  On the borders of Lorraine, they held no effete doubts about their own existence. Life could have pungency there. It wasn’t as bad as places where they’d simply stopped work, closed the seasons down more or less, despaired that seed would ever germinate again. It was nearly as bad though. It could easily get as bad.

  When the girl Jehannette lay down east-west at night she had a war to either side of her and one at her feet. At her feet for example, over the chalk cliffs, there was an Armagnac army vandalising the towns of the Barrois. Its general’s name was simply la Hire – The Anger. That was the sort of nomenclature to make seed shrivel in the pod! That was where they’d given up – over where The Anger was.

  And in the Vaucouleurs area, in the southern corner of which she slept, there were free companies from Burgundy and even some English and Welsh. Vaucouleurs was a region of France, but there was no real line between the free companies and the French. La Hire wouldn’t go up into Vaucouleurs to seek and destroy the Burgundians, nor the Burgundians go west after la Hire. The subject-matter of war was the cows and stores and crops and flesh of the people. The line of battle lay at the peasant who wouldn’t tell a free-lance where the horses were hidden, or at the peasant’s wife or daughter screaming no.

  Bertrand was in garrison at Vaucouleurs and sometimes stayed with Jehannette’s family. He told what the war had done a little way to the north and west.

  Bertrand: You remember last Easter when I was escort to Verdun for the Cardinal’s secretary. We got to a little place where there were four or five childless couples, nothing else. All the people with children had gone. God knows where. In the fields an old man had hitched his wife to the plough. She was naked – you know the custom. Her breasts were like flaps. She didn’t have teeth.

  Jacques: Not like Mauvrillette.

  Mauvrillette was the whore they used at Domremy each spring to pull the plough. The shadow of her good breasts and her belly fertilised the Meuse mudflats for the year.

  But Bertrand didn’t easily talk about village whores. For a soldier he was full of mysterious restraint. He got around with a lot of the priests from the collegiate church in Vaucouleurs.

  Bertrand: It was sad. The Cardinal’s secretary didn’t like that sort of thing, he thought it was superstition, the old religion. One of the clerics in the party called out to the old man. He said, do you think that’s really going to help you grow corn?

  Jacques: Superior bastard!

  Bertrand: The sad part was the old man said they weren’t going to plant this year. He stood there and said we aren’t going to plant. That they were going to let themselves die. And the priest said why are you doing this then, putting a naked woman on the plough, why are you doing it when you don’t even mean to plant? The old man just blinked. His poor old lady was bent over in the traces, out of breath. He just said he was doing it for luck.

  Jacques understood in spite of his flippancy about Mauvrillette. Everywhere people were doing the old rites but the old rites had no basis any more: at Agincourt the knights doing the inane rite of knighthood; in a paddock on the Meuse two old people doing the futile rites of luck before dying. Jacques and Zabillet knew they could be reduced to that insanity themselves.

  Jacques was on the village watch council, himself as doyen, and the mayor and the sheriff. They made out no roster for the middle of the day, expecting that travellers on the road would tell them who was coming on behind. If the news was bad they kept their livestock hidden away on the slopes and brought them to water at night. They dug pits a good half mile from the town and left their bacon there, fetching it when it was needed. For the mercenary companies asked travellers that sort of question: are there towns along the road where you saw lots of cows in pasture, where they hang their bacon in the kitchen?

  The watch was kept from late afternoon until the next mid-morning. The highway yielded up its daily visitors, equerries and businessmen, and lawyers going to Avignon and visionary refugees who had seen the apocalypse down the road.

  Even nine-year-olds knew it was a bad year. In Champagne the peasants ate snails, in Touraine grass-roots. Acorns and horse-chestnuts were a staple food up and down the country. Stories of a thousand different ways of dying washed through Domremy, Greux, Burey-le-Petit. In these places however, there was still flour, beans, bacon.

  Jehannette, at nine, saw her first battle. She was expecting something more vicious, less leisurely. She saw it all from the bluffs above Greux: her big sister Catherine took her. She twitched because over in Maxey, in what could be called a French force, Madame de Vittel, one of her godmothers, had a husband. The Lorrainers who were to fight the French had camped the night by the side of the Greux-Maxey bridge. The idea was this: the Lorrainers were allies of Burgundy and the English. The French over there were in Lorraine (Lorraine began at the river). Their generals were two brothers, Didier and Durand St-Dié. A nine-year-old girl might expect to see the state of the country encapsulated and displayed in the fight at Maxey. She might expect too to see there a sort of summation of the wounds and bereavements all the refugees carried up and down the Verdun road.

  In fact it was a game with the Lorrainers and Didier and Durand. The St-Dié brothers put their forces on the slope outside Maxey, dismounted troopers in the middle. They spent the morning drinking while fatigue parties put up a sparse screen of stakes along their front. The unsporting Lorrainers attacked at one o’clock, from one side, across open fields and vegetable gardens. It made the morning’s lazy work futile. All the French ran to the church, a few of their pikers got gored and trampled. But the nine-year-old couldn’t see that from over the Meuse. She got the impression that the men in Maxey were enjoying themselves. The French stayed in church all afternoon and shot bolts out of the church tower. Then you could hear culverins or mortars. Holes were knocked in the church door. The brothers surrendered.

  That night a party of Lorrainers rode into Madame de Vittel’s yard, assessed her property and told her how much she had to pay to get her husband back. Five pounds tournois, they assessed her at, nearly thirty Paris pounds. She raised it from the bankers at Neufchâteau but when Jehannette left home years later the Vittels were still paying off the interest.

  From watching the little battle of Maxey, and other phenomena to be related at another stage of this account, Jehannette came to see that the process of battle was indecent. Because it failed to imitate what happened to ordinary people when troops came to town. The etiquette and enterprise of ransoming was an insane business in France’s hectic graveyard.

  Not long after being decreed bastard, while he was at la Rochelle, Charles had an upper floor collapse beneath him.

  His bed, his chamber pot, his chests and wardrobe and two servants with b
roken hips and internal lesions lay splintered all around him. His host, the military governor there, wouldn’t forgive himself. But it seemed to Charles that structures refused to hold him up. Creatures that prided themselves for their solidity – planks and mortar – fled him. He began to favour small rooms then and slept in closets when he could and kept old familiar clothes too long. He wanted time, like masonry and flooring, to learn some quiescence. So he encouraged it to sleep by wearing last year’s stockings. The gold thread of the royal lilies on his gowns began to unravel. Fresh lilies would bring fresh shocks he was sure. The old lilies and the digested shocks of yesterday were enough for him. So he sent his doublets out to the mender.

  Yolande feared this refusal of fresh clothing – it reminded her of his crazy father. Also it encouraged jokes about him being hard-up.

  Certainly, that year, there was lack of ready cash. The Estates were slow paying up their subsidies. Direct tax was hard to raise from people who were already parting out to local lords of war.

  The boy moved about a great deal after the floor fell under him. His phobia of big houses kept the court shifting from city to city. That was expensive: local businessmen expected top price for serving the court.

  Tanguy had been ambiguously rejected by Charles. The boy never wanted to be carried out of falling cities by him again. But he was still a member of Charles’s council. With all the contracting and letting of tenders that went on at each move Tanguy made entrepreneurial fortunes, took commissions at both ends of each transaction. The boy had to mortgage properties both to Tanguy and de Giac to borrow that sort of money back.

  This was the pitiful nature of Charles’s finances in the years after the murder of Jean. Maman Yolande anyhow thought it pitiful and did as much preventive book-keeping as she could. Yet she knew that if she told the boy how much his friends were cheating him the disillusion would send him mad. For the moment he had an infinity of nice land to mortgage. He could mortgage till he was eighty and still have good houses and river meadows to hock.

  Bertrand was Sir Bertrand de Poulengy. Jacques liked to think a knight wanted to spend time with him, and Bertrand was some sort of knight, local and barely, and belonged to the provost office in the Vaucouleurs garrison. Jacques’s father had been a freehold tenant, so had Bertrand’s. There was a right balance of affinity and distance in the relationship. Both men felt flattered. Jacques always brought out wine for him.

  Sir Bertrand acted up to it.

  He already liked the little girl Jehannette.

  She had large brown judgmental eyes more appropriate to a five- than a ten-year-old. Jacques thought she was lazy – she didn’t like field-labour, she liked kitchen-work better but not well enough to be enthusiastic.

  Bertrand: Jehannette, would you like to become my lady on your fifteenth birthday?

  Jacques: You’ll be sorry, Bertrand. She won’t take your cattle out to pasture.

  Jehannette: A knight’s lady doesn’t have to mess around with cows.

  The girl said things in a detached way – they didn’t sound like cheek.

  Jacques cracked her ear for being a little bitch and cool as well.

  For a year she had daydreams of being Bertrand’s lady. But there was a pallor about him she couldn’t get used to.

  About the time she stopped dreaming of Bertrand she began on Madame Aubrit. Madame Aubrit wasn’t really an aristocrat. Her husband was secretary to the local aristocrats, the de Bourlémonts. She owned a house outside Domremy-à-Greux and a town house in Neufchâteau up river. She had a large face, sensuous – though at eleven Jehannette didn’t know that’s what its quality was. She dressed in velvet and brocade and wore silk in the summer. The house outside Domremy had Flemish tapestries on the wall. In church she had a seat and prayed frantically, like a real sinner.

  Jehannette dreamt of sharing a bed with her, of being her lady companion, sewing for her, bringing her jonquils.

  In fact Jehannette would dream of being child or bride or sister to anyone who dressed well, spoke more softly than Jacques, didn’t fart as loudly, and looked at her eyes when talking.

  So she made fantasies also about Madame Hélène de Bourlémont, spinster relict of the great family. Madame Hélène had a white, soft face. She always visited the sick, even in high winter, when her high blood didn’t stop frost-bite sores on her nose and both cheekpoints. She was short but always put her hand on top of children’s heads, even on children taller than she. She said the same to everyone.

  Madame de Bourlémont: The king is frail and the kingdom is frail. Weep for the king.

  But Jehannette didn’t weep. Only sometimes internally, when she knew all at once and for ten seconds or so at a time, she was part of the king, the same way she was part of God.

  So Sir Bertrand, Madame Aubrit, Madame Hélène took turns as Jehannette’s secret passions in the last years of her childhood. Yet by the time she was twelve she’d grown out of them.

  Yolande worked to rid Charles of de Giac and Tanguy. De Giac still often slept with the boy. Driving his gross member at Charles’s thighs he actually implied this is all you have to fear, the friendly, good-hearted, coarse-grained but not too painful surprises you’ve already had for your own good.

  Père Machet, the boy’s confessor and Yolande’s theologian, kept her informed about these sodomies. What Maman Yolande feared was that since the boy lived by obsessions, he might become as devoted to the love of men as he was to last year’s jackets. Then her daughter Marie might not get a child from him.

  To my honoured principal etc.

  Dated 25 January 1422

  This, the coldest month of the year, must be doubly cold for the Armagnacs and poor Charles Dauphin must be shivering more than most. For his sister Catherine has had a son by Hal Monmouth. The birth occurred at Windsor in England. The baby is said to be flawless and to take his milk well. He has been christened Henry of course …

  Bernardo Massimo

  One day de Giac felt sure enough of himself to suggest to Yolande that witchcraft – membership of a coven – might give Charles confidence he wasn’t acquiring from the Mass. Charles went to Mass three times a day in his old clothes. He came out just as certain as before that he’d be usurped in the end.

  De Giac: The old gods are still the princes of this world – we’ve got Christ’s word. Anyone who wants to operate in this world … well, the lesson’s obvious.

  She let him talk. He felt safe. She wasn’t the sort of woman to abhor anything except financial loss. In fact she secretly abhorred witchcraft, having attended a coven as a young girl and been shocked by the manners of the horned god.

  Yolande: Who would introduce him into a coven?

  De Giac: I’m sure people of standing could be found.

  Yolande: One has to vow part of one’s body away to Pan.

  De Giac: Yes.

  Yolande: You’ve vowed part of your body?

  De Giac: You get nothing from Christ or Pan without vowing. And Yolande, the boy is not virile. He needs to run wild. With gods to smile on his wildness. Now, at the end of the Esbat, Pan favours everyone …

  Yolande: I know, I had an aunt who couldn’t stand for months.

  De Giac: Well?

  Yolande: It would send him mad. He’s set on Christ. Don’t mentioned horned gods to him. He’ll give you to the Inquisitors.

  But de Giac gave hints that Satan might be some help to the Armagnacs and to Charles. When the Comte d’Aumale caught the English disorganised on the river bank at Gravelle, there was a celebration banquet at Poitiers. De Giac arranged for a massive pie to be brought in to the dining-hall, and from its crust bounded a ram dyed red for England and gold for the Golden Fleece of Burgundy. An instant later a tall man dressed in animal furs and with ram’s horns on his forehead exploded through the crust and slaughtered the ram neatly, decapitating it one-handed with an axe, ceremonially, in front of Charles and Marie. De Giac could tell the boy didn’t like it, preferred the bloodless mass, in fac
t, to direct blood-red sacrifice. He decided that the therapy of the old religion was not for his prince.

  To my honoured principal etc.

  Dated 2 November 1422

  I am sure you have forgiven the fever that prevented me from writing directly to tell you of the death of tough and brilliant King Hal Monmouth some weeks back. No doubt you received a great number of reports of the circumstances of the tragedy, and therefore I summarise my intelligence of the matter on the off-chance it contains some item of which you have not been informed. The death took place at Vincennes. He had been working eighteen hours a day on the reorganisation of the English administration in the north. According to report he succumbed on the last day of August from gangrenous piles aggravated by eight straight days in the saddle. The Armagnacs are delighted, since the new English king is, at this moment, no more than eight or nine months old.

  But the main purpose of this letter is to inform you of a more recent and equally startling death. The mad King of France has at last died in Paris, less than two months after his English son-in-law. Death came of a fit after thirty years of madness. He died with no one but a few servants around him, and only servants and the Duke of Bedford, who is the new English regent in France, followed the coffin. Bedford’s motive for being there was clear. Over the grave he told the priest and the servants that the new King of France is the unweaned baby of Windsor.

  Charles Dauphin heard the news in Loches. He went into the chapel at the château and stayed alone there for hours. It was expected that when he came out it would be to tell his servants to pack his trunks for an escape to Spain or Scotland. To everyone’s happiness he emerged to tell them that although he had demanded aloud in front of the altar that God should show him once and for all whether he was legitimate heir of France or not, God had not given a sign either way and that therefore, until it was shown to the contrary, he must consider himself King Charles VII. His demeanour was one of extreme depression …

  Bernardo Massimo