Into The Fire (57 page)

As before, in the church, the Glock flicks sideways in a get-moving gesture and the silent threat is more compelling than any verbal instruction could have been.

Picaut is shepherded towards the Audi. The driver opens the door. She slides in and is sandwiched between, she thinks, the driver of the Mazda and the Audi passenger. All three are armed; she can see the bulge of shoulder holsters under their jackets. There is nothing she can do. She waits and watches, and learns. The leather-clad biker drives the Mazda and follows them towards Orléans. There is a hierarchy at work here. Biker ranks above Mazda driver, but not as high as Audi driver.

They drive fast, heading east with the evening sun behind them. They follow almost the same road that Patrice has taken, although they drive safely within the legal speed limit. If the traffic police didn’t pick up Patrice, Picaut will see them sacked.

It’s never a busy road, and at this time on a Thursday evening, nobody takes any notice of them. They enter the city limits, keeping to the line of the river, and only turn when they reach the cathedral. It looms in her field of vision, vast, ornate, burnished gold by the late evening sun.

They come to a halt one street away. The Audi driver speaks at last. ‘We will enter the cathedral. You will walk between us. Unless you wish to die, you will not call out or signal to anyone. You will not be seen.’

His voice is the texture of old gravel. His gun is his promise. She wishes to remain alive, and so she wishes to do what he says. But she is Capitaine Inès Picaut, and she has been on every television station and newspaper in the country for days now. Even on a good day people stop to stare at her in the street, and this is not a good day. She has no idea at all how she is going to avoid attracting attention.
Unless you wish to die, you will not be seen …

At the cathedral, she finds that, like everything else, this been taken care of.

A mime artiste has taken up residence in the plaza that lies sunward of the cathedral. Lined with sun-washed stone, the open space is a natural theatre and in it, a white-painted woman dressed in top hat and tails is pretending to be a dove, joining a flock of trained birds that flit from wrist to head to shoulder to raised heel, to the end of a horizontal white cane.

The tourists have been drawn away from the grand entrance and are indulging in an orgy of mobile photography, focused only on what they see.

Flanked on either side by the leather-jacketed team that has taken her, Picaut is ushered past the signs that proclaim the building closed to all visitors and up to doors which open to a touch. Unseen and so alive, she walks inside.

IN THE DAYS
after the assault, the Maid is too injured to be questioned, and the court is suspended for a while. Tomas goes to her each day, and in April there is a day when he brings home good news.

‘Not everything is going Cauchon’s way. The cathedral chapter loathes him to a man. They have refused to consider the articles he has brought against the Maid, and when he forced them they said they should be reframed in French instead of Latin and she should be given counsel so that she knows what they mean. He may be losing this battle.’

‘He cannot lose it,’ Hanne says. ‘The English will sew him in a sack and throw him in the river. He
cannot
lose. What will he do?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tomas delivers the soup he has bought, the bread, the cheese, and goes out again. After that one kiss to her hand, he has not touched her again, nor she him. He is discovering how much it hurts to love two women, neither of them open to him. The Maid has always been out of his reach, but Hanne … he tries to think of her as a sister. Sometimes he succeeds.

With Bedford’s blessing, he becomes known through the town as a friend of the Maid’s. He spends time with the men of Rouen, with the priests. He finds who her friends are, and there are more than he might have thought. In small ways, he encourages them.

For every scintilla of hope, there is a bucket of despair. A week later, news reaches them that the pope has died, who was her friend, however distantly. The new pope is not her friend. Cauchon swells visibly. He sends men back to Vaucouleurs, to Domrémy, to the Maid’s childhood places, seeking any taint of untruth in her story.

Returning to the upstairs room, Tomas brings to de Belleville and Huguet a ham, and to Hanne lighter sweetmeats from the market, small things to pass the time.

De Belleville says, ‘I hear she was ill?’

‘Yes.’ Again, after the assault. ‘Bad fish, from Cauchon’s table. He sent it for Lent.’

‘He is trying to poison her!’

‘If he is, it is a mercy, and to the detriment of his own soul. He swears not. Anyway, they bled her. She is better now.’

She is weak, but she is still speaking with care. She has said nothing incriminating, however they twist things to trap her. They fire words at her five at a time, sometimes, and she holds her ground and fends them off. He is astonished by her fortitude.

Hanne asks, ‘Does Father still come to her?’

‘Often.’ This is true. The old king is her constant companion. Now that Tomas knows more of her history, he thinks that some of the old man’s madness has infected her; that she is as present in the company of the dead as she is of the living.

Today, he has bought a cake of rice and ginger stuffed with raisins. He watches Hanne tear off tiny pieces and roll them around in her fingers. He studies the curve of her jaw, the dark, pained line of her brow, the flow of her hair. She is, he thinks, putting on a bit of flesh, which is all to the good.

He says, ‘Cauchon has sent men back to Domrémy to enquire again into your childhood.’

‘I know. They will find nothing bad, I swear it.’

‘Are you certain that Jacques d’Arc has been paid enough for his silence?’ He remembers a hovel in Rheims, and a bitter man, not mellowed with drink, grasping for gold and rank.

A cloud settles on Hanne’s shoulders. She says, ‘It’s not just the gold; she has threatened him. If he speaks, there are men who will do to him whatever is done to her.’

‘I know, but all it takes is for him to drink too much and decide he is not going to let fear rule him.’ It would take very little to kill this man. The question is whether it would attract more attention than leaving him alive.

He looks up. De Belleville is looking back at him. Huguet Robèrge is looking the other way; a man gone suddenly deaf.

‘Bertrand de Poulangy,’ de Belleville says. ‘He would do anything for her. He killed Matthieu when he recognized her outside the castle at Chinon. He will kill Jacques d’Arc when we need it.’

‘He will need to kill him
before
we need it. And in a way that looks like grief, not murder.’

‘Leave it to me.’

De Belleville goes out. Huguet looks tired, or sad, or both. The atmosphere grows cold, dry, dead. Tomas understands why Hanne cannot eat. He takes the ginger cake, opens a shutter and hurls it out of a window for the first stray dog or urchin to find.

He hears a cry, and thinks he’s hit someone, and ducks back in, but Jean de Belleville is running up the stairs, hammering into the room and he has no fragments of rice about him, nor the smell of ginger.

‘My lord, what?’

‘The Maid. Cauchon has taken her for torture. She won’t answer the way he wants and so the fucking bishop – sorry, my lady – has taken her for torture. Tomas, get to her. You have to get to her.’

‘Really? You think those of us who go to war are afraid of pain?’ Her voice reaches him from down in the dark, round a corner, clad in iron; hard, tight, coldly furious.

The stairs are stone, spiralling, and there is no light. The smell rises, thick as fog: tower-dampness flavoured with the iron tang of blood and layer after throat-burning layer of excrement and urine and fear.

Into this they have brought the Maid, alone. Tomas skids on steps so old he cannot imagine the feet that have trodden them. He hurtles into a dark-cornered chamber licked by pools of burning torchlight and the edged glint of blades, of prongs, of hammers and rasps, and a brazier that stinks of skin and hair and white-hot iron.

She stands against the wall, still chained at the ankles. They have not yet chained her fast. Her arms are locked tight across her chest, her shoulders press hard at the stone. Her skin is white as January ice, but her eyes blaze. Every line of her promises battle.

Geoffrey Thirage, the executioner, dominates the room, a hulk of foul oiled muscle whose vocation is pain. But the Maid is focused on Cauchon. It has come to this; he cannot break her any other way, and so he will use iron and rope, levers and angles, nails and blood.

She despises him for it and everyone present can see so. Scorn is her shield, as long as she can hold it.

‘Truly, if you were to have me torn limb from limb so that my soul fled from my body, I would say nothing to contradict what I have already said. And if I did say something, afterwards, I would always say that you had it wrenched from me by force. Is that what you want?’

She is afraid. Tomas, who knows her features as his own, knows this. He is not sure Cauchon does. It may be that the bishop is beyond caring. Were he alone, it seems likely that he would give the order to proceed. But he is not. Nicolas de Venderès is there, lord of Beausséré and Archdeacon of Eu, and William Haiton, and Jean Dacier, Abbot of Saint-Corneille.

Dacier is in some disarray, breathing too fast, pink at the gills. It is not hard for Tomas to catch his eye, to quirk a brow, tilt his lips in silent, sober question. What
exactly
is the nature of your discomfort, my lord abbot? Are you like Thirage, perhaps, to relish the onset of pain in another? Is that godly?

A moment, a knife edge of possibility. He thinks he may have failed. He will kill her if he has to, a thrown knife in her heart, to spare her this, whatever they do to him afterwards.

The abbot flushes, shivers his jowls. ‘Stop! Cauchon, this is unnecessary. The girl is right. How can you expect to get from her anything she has not said in public? Cease and desist. There will be other ways to get what you need.’

Once one has spoken, others follow; Jean Dacier, Nicolas de Venderès. Cauchon has authority, probably, but he doesn’t have the majority. It’s hard to tell who is more disappointed, Thirage or Cauchon, but they know when they are defeated.

‘Take her back. Chain her fast. Do not speak to me of this. We shall convene a meeting in my chamber on Saturday to appeal this matter before the whole court.’

THE CATHÉDRALE DE
Sainte-Croix is a mongrel of a construction. The foundations are laid on Roman remains that even now, twenty-one centuries later, still turn up surprises for the archaeologists, and every era since has striven to leave its mark, up to and including the tiny chapel of Jeanne d’Arc by the northern transept that was dedicated in 1920 to celebrate the canonization of Orléans’ most famous maid.

For all that, it’s still a largely Gothic masterpiece with vast, ornately vaulted ceilings nearly thirty metres high that dwarf every other endeavour of past, present and future.

They dwarf the people, too. There was a time when Landis Bressard wanted to hold Luc’s wedding here, but even Hélène, lover of all things grand, was daunted by a space that is too big to leave an echo, where voices bounce to silence between the gargoyles and the tortured Christ.

Picaut has been inside only once, but it was enough for her to know that if the Family had pushed for a wedding in here, Luc would have been marrying someone else. Even then, when she was besotted, no amount of love would have outweighed the horror of this. Now she is here without choice.

Four men are grouped around her. They have brought their scarves down, except for the biker, who has pulled on a helmet again rather than be seen by the crowds outside.

The three Picaut can see are alike in height and colouring; well shaven, with olive skins that have enjoyed the sun. They are men who have the money for good jackets, good shoes, good guns, who wear signet rings on the small finger of their left hand. All four of them have one of these: a small but weighty lump of twenty-two carat gold with a pair of initials – AB – set within a shield. Luc has one exactly like this, save for the first initial. So does Landis. Lise’s, now she comes to think of it, is identical.

Fuck.

Old René Vivier was right: it
is
the Family. All of it: the fires, the deaths, this.

For the first time since the phone call in Patrice’s apartment, Picaut knows real terror.

Names. She badly wants to know the names of the four men who surround her but they are silent as monks, marching her down the aisle and then, just when she thinks they’re heading for the sacristy, or – oh, dear God – the chapel of Jeanne d’Arc (
Inès, they’ve gone way beyond sanity. You’ll be tied to a stake before you reach the front door …
), they turn off and down secluded steps that lead below the floor into almost-darkness.

A torch picks out a truncated cone of light, and a switch. Dim bulbs barely illuminate musty air; there is no height here in which to lose the echo, but rather a confusion of cold, clammy scuffing and the clog of old coal dust that coats her nose and throat and fogs her thinking.

The walls are yellowed stone or packed earth, she can’t tell which, but they bear the marks of long dead pickaxes in a rough-hewn counterpoint to the vast swathes of perfectly smooth stone up above. Just to feel the weight of all that rock pressing down … Picaut has never been good in small, confined spaces and while she might be able to walk upright this far, there’s no guarantee that it won’t grow smaller as they progress.

She trips. Someone catches her elbow, hauls her up; the biker. She sees lean fingers and that ring again, feels a leather-clad shoulder press to hers.

A voice – a
woman’s
voice – says, ‘Do mind the tracks. It’s an old railrun. They had coal-fired burners under here for a while to keep the place warm, and had to move the coal from one end to the other. The kind of thing nobody thinks about until they’re actually here.’