Blood Red, Sister Rose

by Thomas Keneally

  Before going he asked the girl to swear in front of Monsieur de Gaucourt (who is afraid of her rashness) that she would attempt nothing military before he got back to Orleans. She swore.

  She is said in any case to have pleurisy. Madame Boucher pointed out at table that a man’s spleen and kidneys are further from his backside than are a woman’s from hers. (This on a night I had been invited to Boucher’s.) The girl said she hadn’t come all this way to be held up by the closeness of her spleen to her behind. She is argumentative but succinct. To prove her equality with men she rode out in front of the Paris fortress with la Hire and six hundred knights to cover the escape of the Bastard. The English in the fortresses simply watched them and yelled abuse …

  Bernardo Massimo

  Tuesday. La Hire had her woken at five. The first outriders of the army had just cantered down through the rubble of the suburbs to the Bannier Gate. La Hire took her up into the Michaud tower and she could see a haze of movement far out beyond the farthest olive bay of forest in the north-west. An hour later riders, a few dozen, raced their horses down past the Paris fort towards the city. By then, she could see her own banner, and hear Magnificat being chanted. Pasquerel was even bringing the priests back.

  La Hire: I suppose we have to feed all those bloody clergy.

  Jehanne: They won’t have an easy life. The army will stay confessed. There’ll be no whores. Anyone who gets hurt will have to have last rites.

  La Hire’s cavalry rode out to face the Paris fort again and screen the army’s entry to Orleans. The bombards of Orleans were let off for celebratory reasons and all its bells tolled. And you could hear the solid line of hate and curses the English threw up, for it was the best they could do by way of solid lines. For the first time it came to Jehanne that yes, they were very frightened, those poor coués.

  Jehanne, Raymond, Minguet, Bertrand sat their horses by a heap of old bricks outside the Renard Gate. The first general Jehanne saw was Marshal Gilles de Rais. He was grey-faced from his all-night ride, wheezing from some – as yet – mild fever. His remarkable lips were parted and dry.

  Jehanne: Where’s your choir, Monsieur Gilles?

  Gilles: The Bastard says he can’t afford to feed them, dearest Jehanne. But they sing better than the priests.

  Jehanne: They can’t absolve people.

  Gilles: There’s that.

  Jehanne: What do your astrolabe things say about today?

  His improperly beautiful eyes looked at her with the appearance of knowing her down to the wish-bone.

  Gilles: They say that today you’ll see your first dead coué.

  One delicious tremor snaked out of her belly and swelled in her throat.

  More supplies came down from the Sologne side that morning. The Bastard was up at Checy, everyone said. D’Aulon rode in, Pasquerel, ecstatic with exhaustion. Alençon (said Gilles) had been retained in Blois by Maman Yolande, for she thought he had some talent and should use it on Fat Georges to sustain the flow of money and supplies. Jehanne did not quite believe that story.

  Noon rang. Jehanne lay beside Madame Boucher in the screened-off bed of the large apartment upstairs. D’Aulon, who had ridden all night, was sleeping with his boots off on a settee far down the room near the windows. The sun lay over exactly half his face, like a clown’s paint, but he was too deep asleep to know it. In a courtyard at the back of the house Charlotte sang.

  ‘Brown squirrel, brown squirrel,

  Tell me where’s your store,

  If you’ve more than seven nuts you couldn’t love them more,

  If you’ve more than six nuts you’ll hold them in one paw,

  If you’ve more than five nuts you needn’t close the door …’

  The cry from that distant and entrenched childhood in which Charlotte subsisted drugged Jehanne to sleep. Immediately she was deep in a forest of veins, pale red and umber, thick as aspens. And beyond this curtain Madame Aubrit and Madame Hélène de Bourlémont looked around lost and moved gingerly on their feet. She saw then that they were stepping around something wide-eyed and scarified. It was a young man’s face, not Nicolas Barrey’s nor the king’s nor Alençon’s, but she had travelled all her life towards the sighting of that face in her sleep. His throat was half cut through and its face at weird right-angles to its body.

  She woke on her feet by the bed.

  Jehanne: Why didn’t anyone tell me?

  Poor d’Aulon sat up, shaking himself dutifully out of sleep.

  Jehanne: It’s started. No one’s informed us. But it’s started.

  Madame Boucher had put on a gown and came out of the bed.

  Jehanne: They’re killing Frenchmen, Madame Boucher.

  D’Aulon: Down there!

  Below his windows you could see a middle-aged militia-man with a bolt in his thigh. The bolt iself had been tied with cloths to stop the bleeding but the cloths were slick red. Three friends chaired him down the rue des Talmeliers. He called Oh, oh, oh in a way that clearly said Tell me it isn’t true that my whole skin hasn’t been penetrated. He was white as junket, and his friends had been lugging him for a long time and were cursing each other for being awkward.

  D’Aulon called to them not to carry him like that for Christ’s sake. It kept the wound bleeding. Carry him on his back! Well, get a door or something. For Christ’s sake knock one down and pay damages later.

  Children came running behind this engaging tragedy. D’Aulon asked them where it was all happening. Someone said there was an attack on St Loup.

  Jehanne: Where are those bloody boys? Get me dressed, get me dressed!

  Of course Madame Boucher began to strap her into the uppers of her suit.

  The Sire d’Aulon excused himself and left to look for his squire. There was no fever in his movements.

  Jehanne: I don’t need leggings or shoes.

  Madame Boucher: You’ll be top heavy.

  Jehanne: I want to get there.

  She dodged away as soon as Madame Boucher had strapped the plates across her belly. She carried the long Fierbois sword under its cross-member and ran down the stairs. Madame Boucher came after, little arms heaped with greaves, leg-pieces, helmet.

  From the steps she could see Minguet fifty yards down the street talking to Pasquerel and some monks. For standing so idle she could have beaten them all.

  Jehanne: You damn child! Why wasn’t I told Frenchmen were getting killed?

  Minguet ran up, blinked, reached for the heap of steel Madame Boucher still carried.

  Jehanne: You get my horse! Madame will finish me.

  The boy ran away, shamed.

  Jehanne: Père Pasquerel. (She grunted, Madame Boucher tied the knee-piece tight.) Didn’t you see that old man carried past?

  He could feel the edge on her voice and put one on his.

  Pasquerel: My brothers and I were just saying: we thought that sort of incident happened every day in a city under siege. And the wound seemed hardly fatal.

  Jehanne: My information’s different – there are Frenchmen getting killed beyond the Burgundy Gate.

  Their sacramental duty stirred in them quite automatically, they looked around as if they wanted someone to hand them a horse or a stole.

  Jehanne: Ride over to St Croix for holy oils. You can get horses from Villedart’s.

  Pasquerel: I ought to stay with you, Mademoiselle.

  Jehanne: It doesn’t matter. I’m not dying today.

  Madame Boucher was kneeling in the straw and horse-dung, buckling solerets over her riding shoes.

  Jehanne: I don’t need those, Madame.

  Madame Boucher: I never let Boucher go up on the walls, let alone outside them, unless he’s completely protected.

  A minute later Minguet came running down rue des Talmeliers with her horse. She liked the way its legs bounced on the stones. A young man was carried by on a litter. His face was grey and his eyes gone, only white showed. Blankets covered his injuries.

  Minguet and Madame Boucher pushed her
up into the saddle.

  Minguet: Aren’t you going to wait for me, Mademoiselle?

  His concern for his page’s pride when she knew there was death down the road made her furious.

  Jehanne: How in the hell can I?

  Madame Boucher: D’Aulon. Wait for d’Aulon.

  She put her heels into the grey’s belly and he was glad to run. The heart of the town was empty and the square near the university. She met three or four wounded men, militia, carried by friends glad to be out of battle and to have other wounds than their own to gesture about. At the Burgundian Gate she stopped. D’Aulon, Minguet, Raymond, were only a little way behind her. As d’Aulon reined up beside her a man with a pushed-in chest was rushed into the city. Someone must have thrown large stones at him. His sodden shirt flapped where jets of blood rose under the fabric.

  Jehanne: Oh Brother Jesus.

  D’Aulon: The priests will meet him.

  It was quiet outside the walls. This had been the suburb of St Aignan and a few stone houses still stood roofless, but the French had burned the suburb down so that the English wouldn’t have winter shelter. It was a place of charred uprights. The English army, fossicking there in the mud-bound winter, had somehow desecrated the place, so that there was little spring growth. Jonquils bloomed in the ditch by the road, however. A mile up this road they could hear men calling. A little farther, a Breton knight was dying on a palliasse at the side of the road. His pages had stuck his standard in the soft earth. It made its futile heraldic boast to the empty road. A crossbow bolt was under his eye and went down into his head. The right eye was monstrously swollen but the left seemed to watch them pass. The squire bullied the pages, as if there was something that could be done.

  Jehanne: A priest ought to be with him. There’s a whole damned regiment of priests with this army.

  D’Aulon: Perhaps they weren’t told. We weren’t told.

  Ahead they could see earthworks, palisades, and inside them a belfry and cloister roofs.

  Jehanne: This is the one that used to be a convent?

  D’Aulon: That’s right. The convent of St Loup.

  Many hundreds of metres off, in the ruined meadows, war-horses were tethered. Companies of militia rested by the road amongst piles of faggots, ladders, axes. Some lay on their backs in pavis, back-shields, like upturned tortoises. But she got the idea they were more awed than exhausted. They looked at her with staring eyes.

  Jehanne and d’Aulon turned in amongst them.

  Distantly, like a quiet man who finds himself saying something excessive while drunk, she spoke to them.

  Jehanne: There’s no need to feel bad. We’re all going to get inside that place.

  They watched her promises pass. Who could tell if they believed her?

  Further into the fields, across a few irrigation ditches, were groups of mercenaries with General Poton, who waved to her. Beyond them, standing about talking quietly, hundreds of knights and archers, men from Brittany, strung out in groups of a dozen. Fifty metres ahead of them, on his own, Gilles watched the English outworks.

  She climbed down and gave her horse to Minguet. Already her thighs were aching. She felt ridiculous too, waddling over uneven ground with all that steel suiting on.

  Jehanne: Why doesn’t the Bastard let me know?

  Gilles: Know, dear lady?

  He sounded contemplative and his eyes were still fixed on the English earthworks.

  Jehanne: When these things are happening.

  He explained the Bastard had intended only for the militia to demonstrate outside St Loup while the barges slipped down from Checy. But it became a battle and the English had done a lot of injury to the militia. De Boussac found out and had gone round waking up the army. It was as well. The militia companies had wanted to give up the fight at St Loup and return to the city to cut the throats of every uselessly drowsing knight they could find. At the moment, Gilles told her, the Bastard was at Checy, the Marshal de Boussac and la Hire round at Parisis Gate to deter Talbot from coming to help St Loup.

  Jehanne: I mightn’t know much about military things. But it doesn’t look to me as if it needs relieving.

  Gilles: It will, it will. Give us time.

  A Sir Henri de Longnon got badly hurt in an assault on the walls, said Gilles. That had appeased the militia.

  She could see there were weird and plentiful resources in Gilles’s eyes.

  Jehanne: How should it be done?

  Gilles: Well, we ought to talk to Poton and the militia. I think we should go in the middle, dismounted of course. Our archers ought to carry lots of faggots, ladders, axes. Half Poton’s company and half the militia on our right, the other half of each on our left. If we can light enough fires at the palisades we’d blind them with smoke, because the wind’s westerly. Come and see Poton.

  They went and talked, Jehanne thinking all the time how she hadn’t known the planning of death could be a craft, could be so cleanly intoxicating in the brain. Messengers were sent to the militia companies by the road. Jehanne and serene Gilles walked back to the centre. Squires adjusted breast plates and belts for knights. Militia-men hugged faggots under their arms and found the point of balance of ladders and let their grip rest there.

  Everyone began walking at once.

  Jehanne: What will they shoot at us?

  Gilles: Dear lady! Cannon. Arrows. Bolts. They’ll throw stones too. But of course the stars say you and I shall be untouched.

  Jehanne: Someone says it.

  Gilles: Someone says it.

  Jehanne: Your knights could wait back until the archers get the palisades alight?

  Gilles: Dear lady, do you think knights – once arrived – could tolerate standing back in safety while their poor commoners take the risks?

  Jehanne: All the dead are poor commoners. Your poor Sir Henri was beginning to discover it back there when we passed him.

  Gilles: But you ought to consider: he’s safe dead, with his honour intact.

  Jehanne: My God, you should have seen his eye.

  Gilles: I saw his eye, Mademoiselle. (He made a concession.) When we get to the wall, we will of course help with the equipment.

  They were two hundred metres away. Brother Jesus she kept muttering, as a promise, as an utterance of delight. They would be inside St Loup in la Beauce in Jesus’ garden of vengeance.

  St Loup stood on a hill. There was a ditch, a mound, another ditch, the palisades. Gilles told her the English had manned the mound outside the palisades that afternoon, but been forced to run indoors.

  Gilles: Don’t tread on a caltrop, dear lady, it’s very painful. Keep your face down, don’t look at the top of the walls. A pair of upturned eyes attracts their archers. Once we have the walls broken, stand back and rest.

  They were now within a bowshot of the palisades. Everywhere men were saying incantations and blessing themselves.

  Jehanne: They’ve got a dog.

  She could hear a big dog barking twice inside St Loup. A big blackbird flew above her head.

  Gilles: That’s the cannon, that’s not a dog. You see, the stones landed way behind us. Can you run? Soon everyone will start running.

  From the parapets an Englishman was calling at them in French. Go back. Go back. Quite hopefully.

  A small flock of arrows rose out of St Loup and landed somewhere amongst the mercenaries. There was a scream there so disembodied that it seemed to be the sound of some mechanism.

  Archers with pavis on their back began to run into the first ditch and up the mound. Jehanne, in the bottom of the ditch, put her foot down beside a rusted jumble of iron spike. She had seen it only that second. Against Gilles’s warning, she looked at the parapet, since she couldn’t die today. She saw longbowmen letting fly, but once the arrows left their strings she couldn’t see them.

  Climbing the mound she called for Minguet. He had her flag and he was so close behind her that she bumped him in half turning to look. They both very nearly fell over in a steel tangle. />
  Gilles and Poton stood on the mound.

  Poton: They’re piss-weak. Maybe a hundred archers. Half as many knights.

  By some expert use of tinder, someone had started a torch burning and faggots were blazing against the palisades. French archers were firing upwards, through the smoke. No one seemed to be hurt, or to put ladders up to the parapets.

  And this is battle, thought Jehanne. Simply work. Like burning off the trash at the end of harvest. She noticed too that everything was both very fast and very slow – as time is to the intoxicated. The men under the palisades moved leisurely. A ladder went up the wall. Amongst the smoke an Englishman relaxedly pushed it away with an axe, and without any appearance of malice. She watched, she couldn’t believe this was the nature of war.

  Then everywhere, the walls were burning. Smoke funnelled up the flutes of the wall and you could hear men coughing and shouting oddly, Englishly, to Jesus and Mary.

  Knights and archers like brothers raked the blazes together and began knocking holes in the burned timbers.

  Gilles: Step through, Mademoiselle. If you must.

  Breton knights had rushed in ahead looking for saleable English.

  Inside, the world was different. Wooden shacks burned in the grey fog. Somehow there were dead on the ground, dirty with soot and blood and open-eyed. It wasn’t always clear where their wounds were, though there were cut throats and near beheadings. The sharpest points of the mess were the eyes, the terrified crystals.