Blood Red, Sister Rose

by Thomas Keneally

Lassois: Not with me.

  Jehannette: Well, it’s the least you can do, I’ll be helping with the confinement.

  Lassois: Confinement?

  Jehannette: Your wife’s.

  Lassois: She’s not pregnant. Or are there prophecies in Merlin about that too?

  Jehannette: She’s missed a period. She told me last week. The child will be January.

  It would be his first child. He didn’t know whether to sulk or give a shout.

  Lassois: She could have told me.

  Jehannette: They always tell a friend first, they don’t tell husbands till they’re certain.

  Lassois: It’s not certain.

  Jehannette: Oh yes, it’s certain. How else can I get away from Jacques in the new year?

  Lassois: If I was going to have a daughter like you …

  Jehannette: Don’t worry. It only happens to a few people.

  Poulengy came to take her home the next day. At six o’clock he arrived outside the le Royer basement with his two archers and his piker. They wore oddments of armour and looked a little ragged. Lassois rode pillion with the piker in the rear of the party as far as little Burey. His wife was waiting for him. It was early June and she had more signs still that she was carrying a child.

  If he took it a little dully it was because he had never had so many people mislead and misdirect him in such a short time. His wife, the mad girl Jehannette, de Poulengy. Poulengy had told him not to make any ardent reports to Jacques. Not to set up the punishments the general had ordered, to climb down at Burey-le-Petit many miles short of Jacques.

  There was a pack-saddle well forward on the shoulders of de Poulengy’s mare for Jehannette to sit on. Though their bodies did not touch he seemed to be weighing her; as if he really wanted to pick her up and test how she hung in his arms. As if that would give him clues.

  He said the English were letting out contracts in Champagne. It meant there should be an assault on Vaucouleurs before autumn. Therefore the confraternity had put off the midsummer rites for that year. She could feel in him the attraction for, a terror of vision, prophecy.

  They rode into Greux. Women looked up from the presses and boughs in all the gardens of Greux on a fine June day. Even the two archers and the piker grinned behind their sire’s back as if Bertrand were a comic knight grotesquely in love with the square girl.

  The highway went straight here. At the last homestead of Greux you could see the first homestead of Domremy-à-Greux.

  Bertrand: The general can be frightened all right. He likes to have all possibilities covered. He can be frightened by the sort of things you say.

  Jehannette: I know that.

  She thought, I’m understanding people as I’ve never understood them before. She was full of the wonder of that. In her cool dead womb was manipulatory knowledge.

  The first brats of the town, Thiesselin’s boys and Guillemette’s, were already running beside them.

  Bertrand: But you have to know the sort of people you’re dealing with. For example, the general has written off to an agent of his in Chalon to offer a tender on wine and timber to the English forces Bishop Cauchon is supplying. If he gets the contracts the English could be outside Vaucouleurs in September drinking wine he sold them. Shoring up their excavations with his timber. They’re very strange, these big nobles. None of them is as straight-out as you. Or even as me.

  The Domremy bells roared, dull village bells, no refinement in their throats today. Was it a death or marriage or famine or hour of the office?

  Both he and the girl, together, in the same instant, felt a crippling sadness and crouched on the big horse.

  But three days later the sun-face of Messire took her again from the right.

  Messire: Great Christ and brother Jesus knows you are a true sister, duckling. Seed and fire in his heart for you!

  Jehannette: Is the new year all right then?

  Messire: You can’t do wrong. Little red apple.

  A boy called Nicolas Barrey, who had once waved his manroot at Jehannette, got interested in her because she had ridden home with an escort. Jacques encouraged him, let him sit in the garden in the long evenings and feel the enchantment of the girl’s rugged disinterest.

  Barrey: Come out with the cows and me? We could have a nice day, Jehannette.

  Jehannette: I couldn’t take the excitement.

  The Barrey boy was nineteen, you couldn’t wish for anyone more pleasant, and his father was one of the girl’s godfathers. And Jacques couldn’t help feeling that the joy of a young husband might loosen up the frozen machinery of her womb.

  The boy pretended light irony but was actually hurt and jealous.

  Barrey: It isn’t any use trying to interest a knight’s lady.

  Jacques: There won’t be any more of that knight’s lady horseshit.

  Selectively misinformed by Bertrand, Jacques had beaten the girl up nonetheless as any good father would. After, Zabillet told him there was no question she was still a virgin. Sometimes he wished something unequivocal would happen to her body so that he could take up a permanent attitude to her.

  Jacques: According to the Sire de Poulengy, she was carrying a letter from Madame Aubrit to the general.

  Barry: Oh-h-h-h!

  Jehannette: If you think she wrote it for her own sake …

  Jacques: For whose bloody sake could she have written it? Dear General, this is my little friend Jehannette and I’d like you as a personal favour to marry her off amongst the gentry or make her an abbess. (He turned to the girl.) What was in this bloody letter?

  Jehannette: I don’t know. I never had it read to me.

  Her remote eyes flickered over Jacques, keeping him mercilessly confused.

  Jacques: I’ll have a word with Madame bloody Aubrit.

  But he knew he couldn’t: he was disqualified somehow because he had had her by accident at Hallowe’en and here she was writing off to a general. The arrangement gave him a form of vertigo.

  Barrey: We could have a great time up on Bermont. (He knew he had Jacques’s permission to roll his eyes when he said great time up on Bermont.) Don’t tell me you’re not interested.

  Jehannette: I won’t tell you then. You can guess.

  She sat actually lusting for the blazing return of Messire.

  Jacques went to old Jean Barrey and agreed on a dowry. Then a dowry agreement was drawn up by the notary in Greux. Two good milkers, a family of pigs and two pounds tournois would go with Jehannette if she could be got into church for the betrothal ceremony.

  Jean Barrey found out from the parish priest in Greux that you could bring breach-of-promise pleas to court even if the betrothal hadn’t taken place in church. A dowry agreement between the two families was good for evidence. He told Nicolas and they both told Jacques.

  Jacques: Get a subpoena from the court in Toul and I’ll pay the fee.

  When de Poulengy went to see Madame Aubrit that summer they talked about Jehannette for the whole visit. Aubrit’s eyes twinkled with some intoxication of fear for the girl. In fact she had been very sad to miss out on the repetition of the rites.

  In the end she invited Jehanne to visit. Jehannette brought her spinning gear to keep herself amused.

  Aubrit questioned her about General de Baudricourt. The girl told her what was said by the general, de Poulengy, herself.

  Aubrit: And you’re still a virgin? (Aubrit was trying to make the business chatty, whimsical.) After meeting all those handsome soldiers.

  Jehannette: A virgin has to be a virgin. Inspect me if you like.

  Aubrit: No. No.

  All at once she began shivering.

  Aubrit: I’m not a good woman for a god to use my voice …

  But the girl could somehow see an erotic content to the lady’s terror, a history of sexual spasm there. A weird anger buzzed in Jehannette. She could have hit Madame Aubrit very easily, many times. For not being pure. For the coyness of the confession. I’m not a good woman for a god to use my voice …


  Bertrand visited her in July. Jacques wouldn’t invite him in or pour him a drink. So Bertrand and the girl went out and sat on stools in the orchard.

  Bertrand: The general’s mentioned you in a report to Chinon. The king believes in visionaries, he has an astrologer, Germain de Thibonville, with him everywhere he goes. He sends off for horoscopes to Pierre St-Vallerien and others. They charge him the earth but he’s happy.

  Jehannette: I wouldn’t charge a cent.

  Bertrand: I know. Look, nothing’s possible for the moment. If Antoine Vergy’s army arrives at Vaucouleurs by the end of summer, the general hopes to come to an arrangement with him, a conditional surrender.

  An arrangement. It sounded characteristic; farmers’ families would be eaten whole. All over the castellany would be unburied corpses, on doorsteps, in the yards. But when the forces faced each other, there’d be an arrangement then.

  Bertrand: Like this: the general will say let’s stop fighting and if I’m not reinforced by Easter I’ll march out and you can march in. I can see you don’t like the idea of this sort of thing.

  Jehannette: I don’t understand why it can’t be done for peasants.

  Bertrand: Anyhow, if there is a conditional surrender all the general’s professionals will have to look around for new work by next Easter. So some of them might be willing to travel and join the army on the Loire. You see, we might get an escort that way.

  Jehannette: You’ll come too?

  He closed his eyes tight and swallowed. Just like a man nagged. He had never been in a skirmish and true fighting men were as remote from his understanding as titans would be. The idea of Vaucouleurs besieged by English and Burgundians made his hands sweat. Even though everyone in the provost’s office seemed to yawn and say it would just be a tableau, a set play.

  Jehannette: You’ll come too?

  Bertrand: On conditions. The general should have settled things well before Christmas, but I don’t want you hanging about till then. I want you to be good for Jacques. If people in this area get convinced a person is mad, you know what they do?

  Jehannette: Sometimes they chain them up in the woods near Bermont.

  Bertrand: Yes, and they also put them in ducking-chairs and half-drown them. So behave.

  The girl yawned.

  Jehannette: Is that all the conditions?

  Bertrand: No. The last one is: never take for granted I believe what you say. You might be straight up and down crazy. But the king seems to listen to strange people. All the despatches – and all the rumours – say that.

  Jehannette: So there’s nothing to be lost.

  Bertrand: Holy God!

  Vergy came early. His Swiss burned Commercy in mid-July and the accustomed horrors were performed in the little towns. Lassois and his wife and parents-in-law went and crammed into the le Royer cellar in Vaucouleurs. Lassois was sure from what he had seen of the general that nothing too uncomfortable would be allowed to happen in the general’s city. A lot of people came down the road from Greux making for Neufchâteau which was wholly inside Lorraine and therefore safe. The nine-year-lease the town had on the de Bourlémont castle had expired. If they locked themselves in there and the place was taken, they would all be killed on the grounds that it wasn’t decent for peasants to hold a castle against professionals. Even the Swiss, who were a peasant army which had sliced up knightly armies, would have felt that the proprieties had been violated.

  The town doyen, sheriff, mayor and elders voted for a quick remove to Neufchâteau. The cows and wives of Domremy-à-Greux joined strangers’ cows and wives on Caesar’s road.

  Neufchâteau stood on a hill of vines. It had a public house called the Ancient Cock where Jacques himself had stayed a time or two. The landlady was a brash woman with wiry ginger hair. She rarely covered it with a hood. All the men liked her and called her la Rousse. The pub was full, but she let out the stables cheaply to refugees. Because she and Jacques winked at each other and pretended to have had robust times together in the past, she gave him two stalls for a few sols and let him keep his horse illegally in the yard.

  The provost of Neufchâteau had made a regulation that refugees were to pasture their livestock day and night on the hills outside town, and boys like Nicolas Barrey stayed out there with them all the time. One day Jehannette took Jacques’s plough horse out of town for exercise and the boy saw her.

  Barrey: Why don’t you stay? It’s nice out here in the evening.

  She wouldn’t answer.

  Barrey: My old man has a paper for you. It came from Toul, just before we left home.

  Jehannette: What sort of paper?

  Barrey: It’s from the bishop’s court in Toul. The bishop doesn’t like bitches like you.

  You could smell the town of Neufchâteau half-a-mile down the road: all the sewers had overflowed. The locals were saying that’s what the provost gets for being merciful. Did he think none of these people were going to shit?

  The stableyard at the back of the Ancient Cock was paved with raw sewage which had overflowed at night and was baked dry by the sun. You held your breath when entering the yard, it was like coming into a new element. Then, after half an hour you began to take the stench for granted.

  At one of Jacques’s two stall doors, old Jean Barrey presented a subpoena from the bishop’s court in Toul. It called on Jehannette daughter of Jacques formerly of Sermaize to explain in early August why she would not make a betrothal in church to back up the dowry agreement Jacques and the Barreys had made.

  Toul was twenty-five miles north, beyond the cinders of the abandoned harvests Vergy had set light to. Jacques looked around the fouled yard. He hadn’t suspected that canon lawyers would go on issuing cool Latin subpoenas in the hot stink of this summer crisis.

  The girl was so furious she said she’d go.

  Jacques: They can’t expect you to do that.

  Jehannette: I’ll go. Who are you sending to lie for your side of the case, Farmer Barrey?

  Jacques: You little sow! You can’t say that sort of thing to Farmer Barrey!

  Barrey Senior: No one can go. Vergy’s men are all round Vaucouleurs. They’ve started mining the walls. (He stood regretting the legal advice he’d taken in Greux.) When things settle down, we might be able to arrange another hearing.

  Jehannette: I’m going now. (She made movements of her hands as if she were actually putting spare petticoats into a sack.) Because you’re not going to marry me off, that has to be settled.

  Barrey Senior: Jehannette, we’d be very proud if you’d consider …

  Jehannette: Would you be proud to have no grandchildren? Because I don’t have periods, I never have had.

  Barrey Senior: I don’t understand you.

  Jehannette: Oh, my old man didn’t tell you that. He would have had to promise you an extra porker for it. Given that I’m not very bloody pretty in the first place.

  Jacques was set to punch her but she took hold of a rake.

  Jehannette: No more of that knuckle stuff.

  She held the rake by the neck and there wasn’t any doubt the intent to punish him was there.

  Barrey Senior: Look, what if we forget it for now?

  Jehannette: No, get a notary to say in a letter to the bishop’s court that you made a mistake. You made the settlement without knowing enough about Nicolas and me and you don’t want to go on with it. You don’t have to go as far as saying I’ve got a dead womb.

  Barrey turned to Jacques who still stood under threat of the rake handle.

  Barrey Senior: I think we’d better do that, Jacques. Nothing seems right at the moment … I’ll pay the fee.

  When Barrey began to leave he saw that there were dozens of people watching the quarrel from the back windows of the Ancient Cock and over the stable partitions.

  He told them, with a tired movement of the hand, to go inside and called to Jacques.

  Barrey Senior: I don’t believe everything she says. I know she’s upset.

  Jeha
nnette: You’re a decent man.

  She put the rake down. Instantly Jacques punched her full-force on the bridge of the nose. She fell hard, no bending at the hips. No one came to help her as she woke. She understood after some minutes that her capuchon had been knocked off her head and her hair hung loose in the sewage.

  For the rest of her time in Neufchâteau she waited on tables for la Rousse and slept with the servants. At Vaucouleurs, early enough to save Neufchâteau from an epidemic, General de Baudricourt made exactly the contract with Vergy that Messire/Bertrand had predicted that July. Vergy would go back to the Marne. At Easter next year de Baudricourt would give him the whole castellany if he still wanted it.

  While the people from Domremy-à-Greux were marshalling the cattle and pigs at the north end of Neufchâteau to drove them back home, Jehannette saw old Jean Barrey. He called to her in his gentle way.

  Barrey Senior: Nicolas went off, did you hear? He went missing just after your father and I had our talk.

  She felt a coldness in her belly. As if he were the first casualty of her mission.

  Barrey Senior: Oh, he wouldn’t sulk, I don’t mean that. I wonder why he went, that’s all. He took a horse.

  The unmarried girls helped drove the cattle home. The dead dust of burnt crops filled the wind that blew down the valley; the waste of the year fell in black smuts on their heads.

  At the first houses of the town women began to leave the column to mourn the damage. Broken oak furniture filled the yards, fires had been lit anywhere and many roofs had been burned. The houses were full of excrement. Apple trees had been cut down. Women kept screaming Oh look, oh look! as they verified that the beds consecrated by loves, deaths, fevers and dreams had been chopped up and some Swiss piker had crapped in the stew-pot.

  Madame Aubrit’s house had had its top floor burnt down. The roof had fallen in. Fragments of Flemish needlework blew around the threshold. The church was burnt too, the roof of Jacques’s place gone. People wandered the streets looking vacant. Vergy’s men had done all this quickly, it was clear. They may have stayed only one night, lit their celebration fires, put a torch to the crops, broken up the furniture and then gone on. That’s the measure of our permanence, you could see people thinking; one night’s quick work and all our meaning’s burnt or has shit on it.