Into The Fire (38 page)

‘I thought to follow him, and, because I thought it, that was what we did. Poseidon walked on air, the reins as silken moths in my hands. I had worked a year to feel such a thing and now it was there I was too afraid to celebrate, too caught up with watching the king crack open the seal and read.’

Tomas knows what the message said. He was there when the Duke of Orléans wrote it, held flame to the wax, pressed on the cooling blob the imprint of his own ring, handed it to the messenger who was himself trusted to return to captivity. The battle over, the laws of chivalry had been reinstated. Except they never were, not fully.

He hates himself. She goes on.

‘I had always known that words have power. That afternoon, in the late sun, I discovered they could crush a man’s soul. The king read through to the end. His face was ashen, his eyes lost in an otherworld of horrors. He could not speak. He handed the message to me, and because my tutors had not all let me go outside to fight, I was able to read it.’

I knew it! You were taught to read and write. Claudine, he is prepared to bet, was not so taught. Who were you? What made you special? He cannot ask yet, but perhaps soon. Very soon.

‘So I learned of a battle fought almost by accident against the small, disease-ridden army of Henry of England, caught while trying to lead his men to escape at Calais, and of the terrible destruction they had wrought.

‘I read of battle without quarter, of English villains slaughtering French knights with no mercy, no thought for the laws of chivalry. I learned of the destruction of the flower of France, of the Admirals, the Constable, dukes, counts, knights. All the great warriors of France were dead; the king’s friends; the backbone of our nation. Without these, how could we ever fight again?

‘I pressed the letter back into his hand. I slid down from his horse, looped the reins on his arm, and, together, we walked back through the alley and the black gate to take the news to the men and women who waited, thinking still of victory. France did not just lose the best of her men that day; she lost her heart and her reputation. In the minds of all Europe, her name was defeat.’

What can he say? I, Tomas de Segrave, fought on that field, and I killed men whose death you mourned. I was there when Charles d’Orléans was taken prisoner. I was party to the decision to hold him in England until the young king, Henry VI, reaches his majority and can decide for himself whether it is safe to let him go.

He could say all of this, but he prefers not. They ride a long time in silence. She glances across at him. He feels the touch of her gaze. Is it any wonder she loves France? That she hates England? In her place, would he not do the same?

The silence cannot hold all this. She shakes herself like a hound out of water, and tightens her lips and turns to him, and, seeking consolation in other avenues, asks, ‘Who taught you to ride? Was it your father?’

‘My father?’ He wants to laugh, but this is not the time. She does not know him; the question is innocently asked. ‘My father was the bishop of Bordeaux, although I didn’t know that until I was older than you were on the day of Agincourt. I grew up thinking I was sired by an English archer, settled near Bordeaux with some gold and a bit of land as a gift from the king, a good yeoman of a good family; the old stock who used to patrol the Marches back in England in the old days of the Black Prince. They were called Red Men, once, long ago, and rose almost to be knights. I was proud of him. I thought he was proud of me.’

‘How did you find out you were not his son?’

‘I heard my mother scream it at him. They were fighting, as men and women do. He was not … he was not a man for women. But I didn’t know such a thing existed. I thought every man tupped a woman, that every woman was tupped. So did my mother, I think, when he agreed to marry her. She got a husband when she might have faced shame. He got a child to call his own, and if I came sooner than nine months after the marriage, nobody thought less of them for it.’

‘Except you.’

‘He lied to me. So did she. How could I not think less of them? I stayed a year longer, but it seemed that everybody knew. I crippled a boy who taunted me with it and so it became time to leave. I sought out my real father. He had been granted a new see by then, of Exeter, in England. I thought he would welcome me.’

He thinks that’s the end to it, but some half a mile further down the track the Maid says, ‘Children are allowed to believe things of the world that, grown, they find to be wrong.’

‘Indeed.’

‘But he trained you to be a churchman, your real father?’

‘Not him. Those who took orders from him. They were not unhappy that I had come. I was a red-headed boy with fair skin, tall for my age.’

‘You were beautiful?’

‘I was told so.’

They come to a difficult part of the track. The day is blustery; the clouds jostle across the face of the sun, sending spiked shadows to spook the horses. There is a corner, full of darkness and danger, that they must persuade the Maid’s devil-horse to pass, and then Tomas’s chestnut mare. Pushing on afterwards, putting clear distance between them and the evil, for the first time he feels her circling him as he has been circling her, testing how she might ask what she needs to know.

Eventually: ‘Have you … sired any children?’

He has been asked this how often? But rarely so delicately. A laugh catches in his throat and comes out more harshly than he intends. ‘Did the priests infect me with their ways, you mean? No. I favour women over boys or men. But I have not sired any bastards. I know what it means to grow with that blight. I take my women carefully. Not every tumble need lead to a child.’

He looks sideways, at her profile. Something has shifted; the scales of her trust are tipped a little in his favour. It occurs to him that to gain her fullest confidence, he may need to show himself worthy.

On a risk, he says, ‘I have been in the company of my lord of Belleville. He, it seems to me, is not a man for women.’

She does not turn his way, only says, ‘If a man lies with another man, as with a woman, he shall burn for it.’

‘Indeed. So we shall not speak of Father Huguet, priest to the de Bellevilles, who, if I understood Claudine correctly, has known my lord of Belleville since boyhood. But it seems to me that Marguerite’s virtue is safe, married to such a one.’

She does not answer. He thinks he has burned his bridges; that she is never going to speak to him again. In silence they pass a small stream, a well, a charcoal burner in his hut, sweet smoke rising in strings to the sky. Fallow fields lie rutted, still creased with morning frost.

Past the hut, she says, ‘If you tell Bedford this, I shall uproot every tree in France to hunt you down. If I die, the hunt will not stop. You and everything you care about shall be taken from this earth in ways that men will speak of for generations.’

Jesu. If Bedford said that, he would smile, wryly, and know it true. Why does he not smile now, never doubting it? ‘Lady, nobody shall hear it from me. I will swear that on anything that will lead you to trust me.’

She turns to him, eyes black, brow furrowed. ‘But there isn’t anything, is there, Tomas? There is nothing you could lay your hand on that would be sacred to you, to seal an oath.’

He wants to say: your hand, your knee, the plate of your armour; any and every part of you is sacred, and will seal my trust. She won’t believe him. He is distraught. They ride the remainder of the way to the night’s camp in silence.

‘
I WILL KILL
him.’

It is November, two months since the siege of Paris, half a year since the relief of Orléans. The Maid is pacing the poor, torn earth outside her tent. Her armour is buffed to a painful brilliance.

Tomas can see himself twinned; on the breastplate, on the nearest arm. He looks thinner than he has ever done; the remnants of Tod Rustbeard are long gone. He sees his own head shake twice over. ‘Lady, I think you do not need to risk the charge of treason in this way. It would seem that my lord of Albret has realized the depth of his ignorance. Look, he is coming to speak to you.’

November is not the worst time to fight, but it is far from the best. They know this, Tomas and the Maid, but leaving the court it had seemed a worthy gamble. A quick run south, a swift battle, a swifter conclusion and back to the king and his advisers, aglow with the patina of victory. The king promised to knight her at Christmas. What better prelude?

Thus did her men march through mud. They camped – still do camp – in wet tents, watching mail and plate rust before their eyes. They ate cold, slimed, blue-furred food over cold, spitting fires. They slept in their hose and tunics and woke damp, with stiff necks and frozen feet, rotten between the toes.

All of this for love of her. They are her men, but she cannot give their orders. The king has given command to Charles d’Albret, half-brother to the present chancellor, Georges de la Trémoïlle, whose land they are due to liberate from the bandit Perrinet Gressart.

Nothing against d’Albret, but he has no understanding of warfare. He has just wasted nine days and virtually their entire stock of gunpowder, hurling shot at the walls of Saint-Pierre to no noticeable effect.

He and his cohort of lace-decked lords are the dregs of Agincourt; men who either did not fight or escaped without injury, which says all about them that you need to know. They think they will win this by the power of powder alone, with Jean-Pierre as their mascot.

They are wrong. Saint-Pierre may not be huge, but it has huge walls, recently repaired, and Jean-Pierre does not have Rifflard or any of its major cousins. Jean-Pierre has been given an assortment of culverins of various sizes and none of them shoots a stone bigger than a cabbage. Around now, those in command have realized the little gunner was not being uncharacteristically bashful when he said it would not work.

Charles d’Albret, if he is bashful, does not show it. He held something glittery at the anointing in Rheims and has behaved as if he were the king’s brother ever since. Addressing the Maid, he does not even bow. In other circumstances, this would be a mortal insult. ‘My lady, we think it may be meet to assault the town directly.’

‘How?’

He steeples his kid-gloved fingers, as if to a child. ‘A charge by the men?’

Jesu. She
will
kill him if he keeps this up. Tomas considers whether he can place his body between the Maid and the lord, but he does not want to die for someone as trivial as d’Albret.

She tilts her head. ‘I ask again, how? The moat is three lance-lengths across and one deep. If they go armoured, they will drown. If they do not, they will be killed by quarrels from above. If you give that order, the captains will sign it with a circle.’

D’Albret frowns. It is custom amongst the army that an order signed with a cross must be followed and that signed with a hoop or circle is to be ignored. It would appear the good lord does not know this.

The Maid clearly has no intention of explaining it to him. She comes to a halt squarely in front of d’Albret. ‘My lord, may it not, rather, be wise to assault Saint-Pierre in the way the king assaulted Troyes? It was, after all, a similar situation. And a notable success. The king professed himself well pleased.’

In d’Albret’s eyes, a flicker. He wasn’t at Troyes. In the king’s court, the detail of the assault is clearly not discussed; certainly not enough for his chancellor’s almost-brother to know what was done by whom or how or when. ‘Indeed,’ he says. ‘Very much so. Indeed.’

The Maid is fighting not to laugh. At least she hasn’t stabbed him. ‘In that case, I believe it may be politic for me to speak with the men, and repeat the orders of Troyes. By your leave, my lord?’

‘Of course. Go. Do as was done at Troyes. This is our command.’

‘I will still kill him.’

‘You won’t have to. He’ll leave. He hasn’t the stomach for this much mud.’

It has taken three days to gather wood that could have been cut on the way and brought with them if anyone had bothered to ask about the defences of Saint Pierre-le-Moutier. Three days in which the weather deteriorated and the rain began in earnest. It was soft at first, a smear on the horizon, little more than a heavy mist that layered like sweat on mail and plate, but by the eighth day of the month it has become a river pissed by God upon the earth.

On the ninth, the men fill the moat. They march across wood and break open the gates of Saint-Pierre in a wave of dogged fury and the need to be dry. That night, they sleep in beds under solid roofs, but they have not made themselves rich, nor sated the passions of their flesh, neither their stomachs nor their loins. There has been no theft, no rape, no plunder; none of the dues to a victorious army. The Maid is in charge and this is not the Loire. She tells the men that they need to know that God is with them, and God does not condone cruelty to women, or theft from honest Frenchmen.

She has to place herself in the doorway to the church of St Peter to keep them from sacking it. They grumble, but what can they do except walk away and find another meal? She has not told them not to eat, and there is a wealth of food in the town.

When they are gone, and not coming back, Tomas follows her in, and kneels beside her as she prays. It’s hardly the first time, but today, she has a fervour that is new. She clasps her hands, raises her gaze to heaven. There’s a particular yearning about her, a tension of her shoulders.

Tomas watches with new eyes. He has not seen her pray since Paris, not like this. He is sure now that all along she has been asking questions of the one man she can trust; the king in heaven, who led her, at the very least, to Rheims. He believes also – and this disturbs him far more than the notion that she is conversing with a dead monarch – that she is no longer hearing an answer.

Nevertheless, she is a thoroughly competent commander and the ranks are in good heart. After the victory at Saint-Pierre, they march south to Moulins, which is friendly. Charles d’Albret no longer pretends to be in control. The Maréchal de Boussac rides in with fifty men at arms. He reports directly to the Maid. They plan the assault on la Charité, the highly fortified base town where Perrinet Gressart holds court and flies his banner of three cinquefoils and a band across.