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

by Thomas Keneally

  De Metz: This is going to be a nice night, duckling.

  Bertrand: Jean, myself and Jehanne in this bed, the four of you in the other.

  Archer: That isn’t very brotherly of you, Monsieur.

  Bertrand: Jean and I will sleep with all our points done up.

  There were rude noises of disbelief from de Vienne’s end of the room.

  De Metz began to unlatch his hose, shivering. His boots were still on as if he intended to wear them in bed.

  Bertrand: I mean it, Jean. We’ll all keep fully dressed.

  De Metz: Oh God, Bertrand, it’s cold.

  Bertrand: She’s never bled.

  De Metz: What?

  Bertrand: Madame le Royer says she’s like a child. She belongs to gods. Do you want someone who’s got diseases and belongs to Messire?

  De Metz groaned. He didn’t want to interfere with anything as strange as that. As portentous. He believed Bertrand. Bertrand was reliable in that area.

  The girl had got into bed wearing even her cloak.

  De Metz: Don’t you want to go out the back?

  Jehanne: I wouldn’t dare.

  Fatigue seemed to have brought out freckles on her face.

  He grimaced with a sort of pity.

  De Metz: I’ll take you.

  Jehanne: No thanks.

  De Metz: It’s all right. I know what sort of virgin you are.

  Jehanne: You know I might just as well be dead as raped.

  De Metz: I know.

  Jehanne: Nothing will stop me. Something will happen to you if you try to spoil me.

  The electricity of the gods ran down his neck.

  De Metz: Trust me.

  Jehanne: I’m really very uncomfortable.

  She got up.

  The latrines were in a narrow earth-floored corridor. He stood back, holding the torch. He wasn’t at all curious, when there is a world of women it was lunacy to touch a freak, a girl with omens.

  When the girl was finished she laced up her hose to her doublet tightly and let herself be taken back to bed where she fell asleep straight away. It wasn’t so easy for Jean de Metz. He went and roused de Honnecourt.

  De Honnecourt: What’s the matter? You’ve got the girl.

  De Metz: She’s some sort of magic virgin. Didn’t you know? Come on. It won’t take you long.

  De Honnecourt: Oh hell.

  De Metz: Come on.

  Colet and the archer knew their business. They knew where to cross the Aube after rain, every wrecked homestead, and the whole mad filigree of secondary tracks. Colet was all sour dedication. He watched the girl lie down fully dressed in some barn, between Bertrand and de Metz. For some reason the sight made him seem to hate the three of them. Bertrand was a little frightened he might have Burgundian contacts and arrange through the pub in some village or other to sell the three of them.

  The Seine above Bar was beginning to flood but Colet knew a place where the horses could be swum over. By travelling at night they got to the hills above Auxerre on Sunday morning. It had been raining all night, and their skin was puckered and half-rotten with water. Colet said there was nowhere they could cross the Yonne in flood time except the bridge on the near side of the city.

  Jehanne: Let’s all go down there then. We could see the cathedral. And have a meal.

  Archer: They serve Chablis.

  In the crypt of St Etienne’s Cathedral that noon the girl saw a wallpainting of Christ in doublet, cloak, boots, riding out with four friends. On the road to be God, King, and Sacrifice. She shivered but felt glorified – validated.

  At the end of a long meal at a good hotel, de Metz and Honnecourt and Julien all said there was no reason why everyone shouldn’t spend the night there.

  De Metz: You could even take your hose off for the first time. In a nice house like this.

  But Colet said some of the Burgundian knights in the Auxerre garrison had a business going: they went around the pubs in the evening, found out who was staying there and – if the trouble was worth it – met them on the Gien Road next morning and made them pay extortion.

  So they dragged off through the suburbs. The hills ahead looked mute in the rain. You couldn’t believe there were fires or warm cordials in all that countryside. According to Colet the King’s Loire was over there.

  The girl was singing.

  Jehanne: King Noah he had a golden Ark.

  There’s one more river to cross.

  Now there was no trouble using the towns. But Colet said the free-booters here were as bad as in Burgundy. They would take you and keep you in a pit until someone paid for you. Still he kept them on the minor tracks, and Bertrand and Jean wondered was he paying them back for something by making the journey long and uncomfortable like this.

  On a muddy Thursday they rode into the mean little town of Fierbois. The pub was called the Blind Godefroi.

  De Vienne: It’s time to write your letter.

  Chinon was fifteen miles west and she was meant to pause here, to write a letter to the king.

  De Metz sent Honnecourt to fetch a secretary to the Blind Godefroi. But when the man arrived it seemed preposterous, just to come into a miserable little place like that and begin a letter to a king.

  Even if he was a drunk, the arriving notary could see her doubt.

  Notary: Monsieur, Fierbois is the threshold of the court. I myself have composed dozens of petitions for visitors to our sovereign. You begin Most Benign Majesty, a humble servant begs …

  He seemed to know what he was talking about. She wanted him to cast a letter that said these things: She was a virgin from Lorraine (close enough) who was meant to send the English from Orleans and lead him to his anointing. She had been ordered to do these things by Messire who was king amongst gods … no, make that King Jesus’ right hand …

  Notary: As you say, Monsieur. A more seemly phrase. More calculated to reassure.

  Jehanne: And beg him can I see him.

  Notary: All right.

  Bertrand: Can you embellish the thing?

  Notary: Yes, Monsieur.

  Bertrand: Do it as well as you can. We’ll pay for good work.

  While they were all waiting at the Blind Godefroi for the letter to be embellished, Colet came and sat by the girl.

  De Vienne: You are a virgin, Mademoiselle.

  Jehanne: Yes, you were told …

  De Vienne: A man of my experience doesn’t necessarily believe just anyone. But you put it in your letter …

  Jehanne: Yes.

  De Vienne: You know, they’ll check.

  Jehanne: Of course.

  He sighed and gave her the name of a respectable pub in Chinon.

  Three hours later the notary came back. The hands that offered the letter were trembling. De Metz poured the man a glass while Bertrand inspected what had been written. He grimaced at a few of the extravagances.

  Bertrand: It’s all right. It’s fairly strong. But there’s nothing anyone could complain about.

  Jehanne was the only one who saw Colet and the archer away. The others still resented their professional arrogance and that joke of theirs in the mist.

  Jehanne: You’ll see the king before I do.

  De Vienne: I never see him, Mademoiselle. I just deliver the letters. Some go to the Chancellor’s office, others to the Grand Master of the Household, others to the Master of Requests. I saw him once in Poitiers. He was walking by the river. He’s an awkward young man. But he likes walking.

  Jehanne: Thank you for bringing us.

  But he wouldn’t be complimented.

  De Vienne: I’ll let them know at the Requests offices where you’re staying.

  She went walking in the freezing mud of Fierbois. A girl of fifteen was milking a steaming cow in a yard. There’s a shrine? Jehanne asked her. Gravid with the Loire winter, mute in a sad nation, the girl pointed to a broad track up into the alder forest behind her. She was not a happy girl. Jehanne however felt suddenly all the lightness of the tourist who is not
bound to the meannesses of a particular landscape.

  The forest was a miserable place in its final and totally silent death before a spring now one month away. Two hundred yards in stood a little church, no bigger than the wrecked church of Domremy-à-Greux. When she was near to it two frightful people jumped out of a birch-bark hovel at the side of the track. They seemed ravenous for her. They had a sort of scabies all over their faces and their throats were bloated with goitres. In intimate birch-bark squalor they had given each other terrible things. The man saw it was one visitor and ducked back into his house.

  Woman: Do you want to see Madame Ste Catherine’s chapel and hear some of the amazing stories …?

  Jehanne: Yes.

  Woman: It’ll cost you a sol.

  Jehanne: With all my heart.

  For the woman was so commandingly ill. She wasn’t as old as Zabillet, probably not thirty-five or thirty.

  Inside, the place looked a little like an ironmonger’s. Chains hung from the beams, old armour, swords, lances, pennons.

  The terrible scarlet and lumpen face, its eyes shining, spoke to her.

  Woman: All the gifts of grateful and gallant knights, Monsieur.

  Jehanne: Oh?

  Woman: Escapers, tournament-winners, sires held for ransom. Maybe you’ve had trouble yourself in that way?

  Jehanne: No, not yet.

  Woman: Once, only about fifty years back, this place wasn’t anything but ruins. But a local sire called Godefroi used to come here. He’d got an arrowhead in his spine at Crécy. He had paralysis and he was blind and a bit ashamed, because you can’t get an arrowhead in your spine from the front.

  Jehanne: Maybe he got it while he was retreating the legal fifty yards.

  There was a knightly maximum retreat. Ordinary people were permitted to run like hell. Successful soldiers like la Hire were wise enough to adopt the same vulgar practice.

  Woman: You’re too kind, Monsieur.

  Jehanne: Where is blind Godefroi now?

  Woman: Dead.

  Jehanne: Rest in peace.

  Woman: Blind Godefroi knew that Charles Martel himself had buried his sword behind the altar here, so he used to have himself carried here by his servants. The place was a ruin. They had to cut their way through the briars to get blind Godefroi close to it. They put him down here. He told them to leave him for two hours, to wait in the town. And while he was alone Madame Ste Catherine told him he was to build the place up again. It isn’t the first time a god has spoken straight to a person.

  Jehanne: No, it isn’t the first time. You tell the story very well.

  Nonetheless she found an eeriness in eloquence from a face like that. You could see, the more you were with her, that she was younger and younger. Twenty-five?

  And she could read Jehanne. She spoke softly.

  Woman: I wasn’t born with ulcers. I wasn’t born with tumours …

  Jehanne nodded. She began to finger the locks and chains, the entire suits of armour, hanging stained in the damp air. They felt remote from radiant Madame Catherine.

  The terrible woman followed Jehanne about amongst the iron thickets and overgrowth.

  Woman: Godefroi had the place rebuilt. He could immediately see again. He could immediately walk.

  Jehanne: Immediately?

  Woman: I saw him when I was a child. Riding into Fierbois, talking to people, cuffing apprentices’ ears. He got his pride back by doing what Madame Ste Catherine told him. Look. (She pointed to a reliquary with a lump of rusting metal in it.) That’s the arrowhead. A surgeon cut it out of his spine after he died. These manacles here belonged to Cazin du Boys who was taken prisoner by the Burgundians ten years ago and kept in a cage in Sens … He woke up one night to find the cage unlocked and all the guards asleep. Now these are more remarkable still. They were on the hands and feet of Monsieur Perrot of Luzarches. The English caught him at Verneuil. While he was asleep one night in prison he had a dream about Madame, he talked to her. When he woke up he was back in his house in Luzarches. He yelled and his sons came and cut the chains. You can still see the hacksaw marks, here. These belonged to Jean Ducordray who escaped from Belleme castle this year. He strangled two Burgundians, dropped twenty feet without hurting himself, and stole a horse.

  Jehanne: Madame Ste Catherine is pretty broad-minded about strangling people.

  Woman: Nine months back, everyone was here, the Great Bastard, General la Hire. One of the Duchâtel boys had brought along the armour of an English knight he had fought and killed in single combat after asking Madame for help.

  Jehanne watched the vacant armour move itself slightly in the draught from the porch. Was Madame honoured by all this crass hardware?

  Jehanne: Thank you for showing me all this.

  Woman: Monsieur. You can have me in the porch. The porch isn’t sacrilege, as it would be in here, in the body of the church.

  Jehanne stared at her.

  Woman: You wouldn’t catch these things from me …

  Jehanne thought this being doesn’t consider herself beyond the sisterhood. This thing is more woman than I am, this thing has bled. In her own belly she felt such loss. Oh Brother Jesus, what have you made of me?

  Woman: I’m twenty-three years old. Not so old.

  Jehanne’s left hand touched the trim sword de Baudricourt had lashed to her waist. She felt grateful for it now, for having a strong recourse.

  Jehanne: Get out!

  The woman put her body against Jehanne’s right shoulder, the belly against Jehanne’s right hip. As she’d said, it was palpably a young body. It seemed it radiated some sort of useless fertility. Jehanne felt murderous. Her thin sword was unsheathed in her right hand before she’d thought and the woman had begun dodging for the porch amongst the hanging irons. Jehanne landed a blow with the flat of the thing on the woman’s hip.

  The woman yelled from the porch.

  Woman: When Madame takes these curses from me, I’ll still be young. You’ll beg me and I’ll spit at you.

  Jehanne: Go to hell!

  Woman: Sow’s arse! If you’re a prisoner ever, I’ll beg Madame to keep you in place. I’ll beg her.

  Jehanne came stamping to the porch but the woman had gone. Outside, she could see both her and her ulcerating mate vanishing into the bare but thickly-sown alders. It seemed they expected the offended young Monsieur to split their hovel with a few sword-blows. Jehanne ran to it as if she would. A sodden blanket lay half out the door and water from the wattle roof dripped on it.

  She felt shame. She very nearly vomited for grief. Secretively, as if watched, she put the sword back. Amongst the black stalks of timber she began running for Fierbois. At one time she heard a low slow voice from the forest.

  Voice: Hey, pretty-boy!

  The board of the Blind Godefroi showed a knight with his head blindfolded. Beneath it Jean de Metz waiting in the mud.

  De Metz: Where’ve you been? Thank Christ you’re back. Bertrand’s buying wine for a heavyweight from Chinon and it’s costing him a packet.

  He dragged her by the wrist into the main hall. The radiance of a fire gave her flesh some enthusiasm back. She began rubbing her hands, then shook the water out of her cloak. All the time she watched Bertrand. He sat at table with a priest dressed in the red cassock of a doctor of theology. Jehanne could always spy by instinct the warm and shaky self-regard of a former peasant or farm-boy. It was something apart from the cold invincible conceit of hereditary rank. She thought the doctor of theology was a peasant. But, across the table from him, Bertrand looked red and honoured.

  Bertrand: This is Maître David Gaucherie, a Canon of Loches …

  Gaucherie: Astrologer-visitant to the court of Charles VII and Fellow of the Faculty at Poitiers. This is the girl?

  De Metz: She had to dress like that for the road.

  Jean had become even a little protective since he’d heard of her affliction.

  Gaucherie: How do I know she isn’t a boy?

  Jehanne: If I’
m a boy, Maître, I’ll be found out, won’t I? You’ll hear my screams in Loches.

  Bertrand could tell the dislike between them and tended to babble.

  Bertrand: Maître Gaucherie has just visited the king.

  Jehanne: You saw him?

  Bertrand: Oh yes, Maître Gaucherie is brought in to do astrologies for the king.

  Jehanne: Soon the king won’t need astrologies. He’ll move the stars himself.

  Gaucherie: I hope not altogether. It’s useful to be called in. It helps pay the wine bills.

  Bertrand: We’ll pay, Maître.

  Gaucherie: I didn’t mean today’s wine bill in particular.

  Bertrand: Tell her about the astrology you cast.

  Gaucherie: It’s rather confidential.

  Bertrand: But you said the king told people at dinner.

  Gaucherie: Some people.

  Jehanne: You enjoy your secrets, don’t you Maître?

  When Gaucherie looked at her he seemed very intent, very official all at once, as if he had been waiting for her to arrive and was carrying a message for her.

  Gaucherie: One secret I can let you have, girl. When he was a child the king got this idea from somebody that there always had to be a special sacrifice to keep a king robust. That some special person had to die to nourish the king, to … to irrigate his aura, you could say. I don’t know who it was told him that. But he always believed it. Like Jean Baptiste dying to nourish the aura of Herod. Of course, Charles always intended to be a better king than Herod. But that gives you an idea. A person never knows, going into his presence, whether he – or she – is that sacrifice …

  The girl frowned for him, looking the way country people ought to when faced with scarlet cassocks, closed capes, doctorates in divinity, inside knowledge.

  Gaucherie went on to tell the story of how de Giac had once tried to become the sacrifice for Charles. When he looked at Bertrand, Jehanne would think he was just gossiping, when he looked at her she again got the idea that it was all a planned message from him, a planned inspection of her.

  Bertrand: I thought you ought to hear all this, Jehanne. (His funny tenderness was on him: he was even a little fearful that hearing these things might be too much for her fabric.) It sheds some little light on the king.

  The girl was thinking, he’s been waiting all this time for my blood. The king’s instincts on the Loire knitting in with hers on the Meuse. A high terror brought out sweat on her. Bertrand saw her skin turn bilious. She could feel the smothering limits of her godhood, like de Giac who’d once tried to be sacrifice for the king, feeling his sack with hand, forehead, excruciating stump, before they drowned him in the Auron.