News had reached Fleur and Gabriel in late December that Joan was imprisoned in a tower of Rouen’s castle. Of course they had gone to Rouen immediately, finding both work and lodging in a run-down old inn. They had followed Joan’s ordeal as best they could, befriending some soldiers and even some clergy who frequented the tavern and spoke when their tongues were loosened with wine. Gabriel prayed as never before that Joan’s Voices would somehow touch the hearts of the men who held sway over her destiny.
The castle’s chapel was crowded to capacity and beyond. Gabriel did his best to ensure that Fleur, who was of a height with five-foot-two Joan, could see. A least, in this space, they could hear.
There were around forty tribunal members, all scholars—doctors and bachelors of theology or canon law. Some were experts in civil law. One, he’d heard, was both. Seated with them were Bishop Pierre Cauchon and the promoter-general of the diocese of Bauvais, Jean d’Estivet, the two formal judges.
Gabriel had heard that Joan had not been well treated during her imprisonment. He’d heard reports of everything from men watching her as she slept to leg irons and even a cage that held her at neck, hands, and feet, lest she try to escape.
A murmur went through the crowd, followed by muttered epithets. Fleur clutched the small pouch Joan had given her at Melun, when the Maid’s Voices had told her of her impending capture. Like Joan had done, she now wore it around her neck at all times. It seemed to bring her comfort.
“Gabriel? Is it her?” Fleur asked.
For a moment, Gabriel was so shocked by what he saw he couldn’t answer. Joan’s hands and feet were chained. She wore a dress, dirty and of common make, and her curly black hair had grown down to her shoulders. She was thin, so thin, and pale; her muscles wasted away and her healthy color leeched from her by nearly a year of imprisonment.
“It’s her,” he said, his mouth dry as sand. For a long time, he couldn’t even focus enough to make sense of the droning voices of those describing the process. He couldn’t take his eyes off Joan, thin, pale, but still lifting her chin in defiance.
At last, the questioning began. Cauchon, who looked to be in his early sixties, tall, bony, and imposing, strode to where Joan sat with her chains fastened to a bench. Towering over her, he demanded, “Swear to tell the truth concerning whatever will be asked of you.”
“About my father, and mother, and everything that I have done since I took the road to come into the heart of France, I shall willingly swear.” Her voice was strong and clear; prison had not dimmed her spirit. “But never have I revealed certain revelations made to me by God except to Charles, my king.”
And me, Gabriel thought. But he knew to Joan, that did not “count.” He was her Shadow, placed beside her to witness; her Voices had said so.
“And even if you wish to cut my head off, I will not reveal them,” Joan continued. She was stubborn, and strong, and even as he watched d’Estivet’s expression turn sour and Cauchon’s temper rise, Gabriel was glad.
It went on for hours. Questions came not just from Cauchon, but from everyone on the tribunal. Oftentimes, several clergymen spoke at once, bombarding Joan so that she had to beg them repeatedly to ask their questions one at a time. And the queries seemed so random. One moment Cauchon was asking about the sacring of Charles at Reims. The next, he was asking if she had ever seen fairies at the Ladies’ Tree.
“They’re trying to trick her,” Fleur whispered, and Gabriel nodded. “Trying to make her say something against herself.”
“Are your Voices angels?” Cauchon inquired.
“They are saints. Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret. Saint Michael spoke to me first,” Joan replied promptly.
“Tell me about Saint Michael,” Cauchon said in a patronizing voice, looking out over the crowd knowingly.
“He came to me in my father’s garden when I was thirteen,” Joan said. Gabriel listened as she told this stranger, this enemy, what she had confided in whispers to him long ago. “I saw him with my eyes as well as I see you.”
Cauchon’s lips curved in a cruel smile, and again he regarded the crowd as he continued. “What did Saint Michael look like when he appeared to you? Was he… naked?”
An outraged gasp rippled through the crowd. Joan looked at Cauchon, amused. “Do you think that God doesn’t have the wherewithal to give them clothes?”
And the crowd laughed. Joan’s smile grew, but Cauchon’s contorted into a grimace. “Did he have hair?” he persisted.
“Oh, that’s an important point.” The crowd laughed again.
“Answer the question!” Cauchon snapped.
“Why would it have been cut off?”
Cauchon paced a moment, gathering himself. “You say your Voices have told you certain things. Do you know through a revelation that you would escape?”
“Yes, indeed, they have told me that I would be delivered, but I do not know the day or the hour, and they said that I should bravely maintain a good face.”
Gabriel felt Fleur squeeze his hand so tightly that he thought she might break the bones. He wouldn’t have cared. Joan’s Voices told her she would escape!
“Why did you jump from the tower of Beauvais?” demanded Cauchon. “It is nigh sixty feet tall. Were you attempting to commit mortal sin and give up the life God granted you?”
A Leap of Faith! Gabriel thought, almost dizzy. Joan had tried to escape using the Leap of Faith she had been taught by the Assassins. Again, he felt anger toward them.
“I did know that I was to be delivered to the English, but
I did not do it out of despair. I jumped in the hope of saving my body and of going to assist many good men who were in need. And after the jump, I went to confession and asked pardon of the Lord.”
“Was any penance imposed on you because of that?”
“I bore part of the penance in the damage I did to myself by falling!” Joan retorted. Beside Gabriel, Fleur stifled a grin.
“Did your Voices tell you to come into the heart of France?”
“I did so only at God’s command. Everything was done at the command of the Lord.”
“Is it God who commanded you to wear men’s clothes?”
The question clearly took Joan by surprise. Gabriel remembered when it had been discussed, and everyone—from de Metz to the good people of Vaucouleurs, who paid for the clothing—thought it was wisdom, to make riding on horseback easier, to not draw undue attention, and to keep Joan safe from unwanted male advances. Joan had agreed readily, and Gabriel knew if her Voices had objected, she would have refused in a heartbeat.
“The clothes are a small matter, the least of all things.” Her face was furrowed in confusion. “I neither put on these clothes nor did I do anything except by the commandment of God and his angels. I was asked about this at Poitiers, where the good clergymen decided that it was—”
“Where is your mandrake?” This time, the speaker was not the looming Cauchon, but the other judge—Jean d’Estivet. He looked like he had eaten a lemon, so drawn with distaste was his expression.
Joan blinked at the abrupt change of topic, but her voice was calm as she replied, “I don’t have a mandrake, and never had one.”
“But clearly you know what they are.” Traps and tricks with every question, Gabriel thought, anger again rushing into him. Mandrakes, he knew, were some kind of magical root—and associated with witchcraft.
“I have heard they are something to make money, but I don’t believe it at all.” Her voice was full of contempt.
On they went—pushing her again for details about the Ladies’ Tree, and inquiring if she had ever seen fairies. Others chimed in, asking about her standard. Joan stated that she preferred it perhaps forty times as much as her sword. Gabriel’s heart sank. If only you had it now….
“I preferred it because I did not wish to kill anyone.”
“Did you?”
“Never.” Her voice rang with inarguable truth.
“But you are no frie
nd to Burgundy or England,” pressed Cauchon.
“My greatest hope is to see my king and the Duke of Burgundy united and at peace. As for the English, all I wished was for them to leave, and I always begged them to surrender before I attacked.” She looked at him, cocking her head to one side, and her blue eyes lost focus for a moment. For the first time since she had entered the chapel, her face exuded a faint radiance.
“Her Voices,” whispered Fleur, and Gabriel, too grateful for what he was seeing to speak, could only nod.
Joan blinked, then looked back at Cauchon. “Before seven years are over, the English will suffer more severe losses than they did at Orléans, and they will lose everything in France. And this will be accomplished through a great victory that God will send the French.”
The tribunal erupted, shouting questions at Joan, demanding she tell them what time, what day, where this would occur. She simply shook her head. “My Voices tell me not to answer you, and I am more afraid of displeasing them than I am of you.”
“Do you believe you are in the grace of God?” asked Cauchon, with deceptive casualness.
The room fell quiet. There was nothing Joan could say that would not damage—or perhaps even damn—her. If she said yes, she’d be accused of heresy, for no one could know if they were in God’s grace. If she said no, then she admitted that everything she had done was a lie.
Only Joan seemed completely calm. She smiled, softly, and her radiance increased as she said, “If I am not, may God put me there. And if I am, may God keep me there, for I would be the most sorrowful woman in the world if I knew that I was not in the grace of God.”
The silence lasted for a long moment. The clergymen looked flabbergasted. A peasant had just beautifully, brilliantly, and humbly sidestepped a perfectly laid theological trap.
Joan added, “I do believe what my Voices have told me—that I shall be saved. I believe this as firmly as if I were already there.”
The small, cruel-looking d’Estivet recovered first. “After that revelation, do you believe yourself incapable of committing mortal sins?”
Her thick hair moved with the gesture as she shook her head. “I know nothing about that, but in everything I defer to God.”
“That is a very weighty response,” said d’Estivet.
“And I hold it also a great treasure.”
The mists erased Joan’s shining face, almost sadly, swallowing it up in great gray, soft billows. Simon was almost certain it was the last time he would see Joan’s face calm and at peace.
Dammit.
That prediction, came Victoria’s voice, what was it about? Did it come true?
Simon cleared his throat. “It, ah… yes. Paris fell to the French six years later. If only she had lived to see it.”
Have you seen enough? came Victoria’s gentle voice.
Hadn’t he? Perhaps this should be his last memory of Joan of Arc, courageous despite imprisonment, her spirit vibrant and her faith as solid as stone, her body thin and weak but whole, untouched yet by hungry flames.
“No,” he said. He couldn’t let her go. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
… All right, Victoria said reluctantly, and the mists churned yet again.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
THURSDAY, 24 MAY, 1431
ABBEY OF SAINT-OUEN, ROUEN
Gabriel stood in a cemetery. There were several others crowded around him, all of them peering up eagerly at the platforms that had been hastily erected for the piece of cruel theater that was about to be enacted before them. Although he felt the press of dozens of spectators around him, Gabriel had never felt more alone in his nearly two decades of life.
Fleur was no longer with him.
There had been a little boy waiting for him downstairs. Your Flower told me to tell you she cannot bear it any more. She’s sorry, but she had to go, he told a blindsided Gabriel. She said she hopes you find peace, and are happy, and to not try to find her.
Don’t worry, Gabriel had growled to the little messenger, even as he leaned against the wall, dizzy with shock. I won’t waste another breath on that traitor.
Treachery was the one thing Joan said she feared. Fleur had sworn, repeatedly, that she would never abandon Joan. That there was nothing for her without the Maid. But she, too, like everyone else, had turned her back on Joan. God knew it was destroying Gabriel to continue, day after day, but he was still here. He would continue to bear witness to Joan’s story, even if he had to do it alone. In the end, he thought miserably, we are all alone. Except for Joan, and her Voices.
Joan’s trial had been conducted in public for eleven days, then moved behind closed doors. More and more, sympathy was edging her way, and the men who interrogated her looked like the bullies they were. Gabriel was desperate for news, plying those who might have any with drinks. They spoke in slurred voices about things he didn’t quite understand: how Joan was in danger for not surrendering to the Church Militant, God’s representatives in this world. They spoke of the strange angel she saw holding a crown over Charles’s head. This, Gabriel knew about—they were referring to Joan seeing Yolande, the Assassin Mentor, and believing the queen to be an angel. The Assassins, in addition to abandoning Joan, had also placed her in greater danger.
Then there were her clothes. Although no one, including the clergymen who had interrogated her for days at Poitiers, expressed concern about Joan’s wearing of men’s clothing when riding, fighting, and sleeping in the presence of men, it seemed Cauchon and d’Estivet had seized on it like a terrier worrying a rat, deeming it an act of heresy offensive to God. Gabriel had clung to these bits of news until today, when he had heard that Joan was to be presented in public in the cemetery of the Abbey of Saint-Ouen. They were coming, now; at least a dozen clergymen. Gabriel didn’t know all their roles, but many he recognized from the public trial sessions.
It had been over two months since he had seen Joan, and his heart broke to behold her. She was even thinner than before, her cheeks hollow and her blue eyes dull. Her hair was longer, an unkempt and tangled mess. Her wrists were so small now that it was a wonder the manacles didn’t slide right off her hands. He moved through the crowd, trying to catch her eye without drawing unwanted attention from the soldiers who marched her onto the platform.
The priest, Guillaume Erard, began to speak. Gabriel ignored the sermon, looking through the crowd, spotting possible ways to make an escape, if he could somehow manage to leap onto the platform and—
Do what? He was one man, not even a fully-trained Assassin. He couldn’t hope to fight off hundreds of armed soldiers and flee the city with a young woman, wasted from hunger and perhaps beatings, whose wrists and ankles were wrapped with chains.
The priest railed against King Charles, called Joan a “monster,” a “magician,” “heretical,” and “superstitious.” Gabriel even now found it hard to believe this was truly happening to Joan. Her face, he noted, was no longer radiant as she replied, when told she needed to submit all her words and deeds to the church, “I appeal to God and our holy father the pope.”
“It is impossible to go find the lord our pope at such a distance,” replied Erard. He waved one of the younger clergymen, Jean Massieu, forward. The young man looked very uncomfortable with what he was doing as he handed Joan a slip of parchment.
Gabriel did not know what it was, but Simon did. It was called a cedula, and it was designed to be attached to a separate legal document. In this case, the cedula was a letter of abjuration—a statement in which Joan swore to never again cut her hair short, or don men’s clothing, or take up arms. In return for forswearing these “heresies,” she would be taken into ecclesiastical custody at long last, and would never be returned to secular justice.
Simon also knew that this small piece of parchment was not the one that would be attached to the final documents on the affair. That cedula was nearly five times as long as this one. Someone would later take pains to arrange that Joan’s signature would be affixed to a diff
erent statement altogether.
Joan peered at the cedula and asked, “I wish the clerks to read this to me and advise me as to what it says, and if I should sign it.”
Erard had obviously had enough. “Do it now!” he bellowed, “Otherwise you will end your days by fire!”
Gabriel’s gut clenched. Simon’s heart slammed against his chest.
Massieu seemed to reach a decision, and began to read the cedula aloud to Joan. As he did, murmuring arose from both the spectators and those who stood on the platforms. Gabriel distinctly heard Cauchon’s voice say, “You will have to pay for that,” to the unfortunate Massieu.
The young man didn’t falter. “If you sign,” Massieu said, “you will be a reformed heretic. You will be imprisoned still, but formally transferred to a place where women will tend you, and your life will be spared. You might even be freed, and could go home one day. If you refuse—you will burn.”
To everyone’s surprise, Joan laughed. She took the pen thrust at her and made a circle on the parchment, with the sign of the cross.
Gabriel knew that she could sign her name. Instead, Joan had made a signal he’d seen before: a cross within a circle. The signal to whomever the letter reached that Joan meant nothing she said in it.
She suspected a trap—and his brilliant, beautiful Joan was leaving herself a way out of it.
Gabriel found himself laughing, too. Joan seemed to sense him, and for a moment her head turned and he was gazing into her large blue eyes. A flicker of her glorious inner light warmed her face, and despite himself, Gabriel found himself shoving through the crowd, trying to reach her.
Beside him, unease was turning into active disapproval. “The king has spent his money very badly on you,” someone with an English accent was saying to Cauchon. “It will go poorly for the king if Joan escapes us.”
Cauchon said in his most confident voice, “My lord, do not worry; if she does, we will catch her again.”
Gabriel’s mirth faded, to be replaced by cold fear at the words and at what was happening on the platform. Someone was speaking to Joan, saying, “You have spent the day well, and, please God, you have saved your soul.”
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