Into The Fire (7 page)

Their flesh does not touch. Her gauntlets and his gloves separate them, but, truly, it might as well be that her naked palm burns into his. His bones become as candle wax, soft of an evening. His blood surfs in his ears. His world halts.

He kneels on the summer-hard dirt, offers no speech, no thoughts, no offence against her person, and she steps on him so lightly he barely knows she’s been there. There’s a shared glance, full of humour – is she laughing at him? Or with him? Neither? Both? And she is past, looking to the walls, and his hammer is still in his belt and La Hire is there and d’Alençon, God rot his sycophantic soul, and she lifts off her helm and runs a mailed hand through her scandalously short hair and something mellow and meaty twists in the nether portions of his belly.

He is nothing to her. She no longer even knows he’s there. Looking right, looking left, she says, ‘We need to get to the south tower. Bring the ladders,’ and his chance is missed and gone.

Men run to her order. Tomas Rustbeard rises from his knees, reeling. In time, his hands close again on the haft of his hammer. The wood is planed to his grip, smooth, cool. He gathers himself, takes a breath. Another. Presently, he follows her to the foot of the wall. Here they walk on wood.

There was a ditch, which is now full of faggots. This is how she got close to the Tower at Orléans: wood in the ditch to walk on. Here, near the wall, is chaos. He thrives on chaos. It is his milieu. He flexes his fingers.

A ladder is flung up beside her. Nobody hurls it down. He says, ‘Lady, let me go first.’

Him up, her behind, there’s his chance, but, ‘No. I’ll go first. The men need to see me go up.’

She can climb in full plate. You’d think she was born in it, raised in it. She swarms up to the place where Jean-Pierre’s guns have taken down the top third of the wall. Tomas follows her up.

Nobody on the walls makes any effort to stop her. The defenders are all at the gate where another ram is breaking down those parts that Jean-Pierre’s guns have not destroyed.

She’s within three rungs of the top, sword out, climbing half-handed when he hears a shout. ‘She’s there! Get her!’ and –
finally!
– stones start to fall. The fools inside don’t have oil or water or sand in a vat on a fire (how long have they had to prepare? Over a month? They deserve to lose), but they have pieces of their broken town in abundance.

Thus, the sky rains rocks; small ones that a child could lift in one hand and great boulders the size of half a sheep that must have taken three men to lift.

Tomas grasps the sides of the ladder and slides straight down, fast. And then the Maid falls after him, uncontrolled.

She has been hit by something big, and falls without caution. He is her cushion, her straw-filled mattress, a beetle, crushed flat by the weight of her armour. She’s not light as thistledown now, and he is smashed beneath her, the breath stunned from him, his whole chest bruised.

‘My lady!’ D’Alençon, of course, bends over, all solicitude. And then La Hire, d’Aulon, her squire; little Louis de Coutes, her golden-haired page. They’re all gathered round, patting at her, stricken. Nobody attends to Tomas Rustbeard.

He squirms out from under her and pushes up, fighting for breath. Croaking, he asks, ‘Is she dead?’

His question sparks a wildfire; men hear the one word they fear and spread it.

‘She’s dead …’

‘The Maid is dead …’

News flashes outward as oil across a millpond and the entire French army stops in its tracks for one heartbroken breath; a gap, with a world of grief pressing around it.

What follows when that breath ends is a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a bull erupting in a catastrophe of rage. The noise! Sword hilts pound on shields, axes clash on blades, men scream their hearts out in a fury such as Tomas has never heard, not at Agincourt, not in the siege of Orléans, not anywhere.

Just with the power of their anger, the French could smash the walls of Jargeau. Those inside are buffeted to silence. No rocks fall. No man will dare to stand against them now. Here, in this moment, five thousand men and boys swear a lifetime’s vengeance and know that they can win. This is not a bluff. This is the certain promise of victory.

And this is new. It didn’t happen when Tomas’s arrow hit her at Orléans, but she hadn’t won a battle then, not a big one. She hadn’t led a charge from the front. She was admired, she was different; she was a novelty and a source of hope. Now she is adored, and will be avenged.

It’s a long time since Tomas Rustbeard has been afraid of the power of an army, not one he’s notionally part of at any rate.

The shade of William Glasdale appears to him, solid under the afternoon sun; plated, wry, dry of eye and leaking weed and river water from the hinges of his harness.
Did I not tell you? Killing her is not enough. You must destroy her. And for that, you have to find out who she is.

Matthieu knew and Matthieu is dead.

There are others who know. What about the men who brought her to France? Find them! Question them!

Tomas eases his hammer from his belt, swallows on a throat gone dry, looks to where he can insert himself into the action in a way that won’t lose the respect he’s creating for himself among these people.

‘She’s not dead.’ He’s at the wall when word passes from Raoul to Ricard to Patrick Ogilvy, to him. ‘She’s not dead. Praise be to God, the Maid is not dead. She’s coming back to the fight. We shall take Jargeau in her name. Pass the news. The Maid is not dead.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Thank God.’

Tomas is not a godly man; he has killed too often in far too venal circumstances for that, but he thanks God aloud with the rest, and continues to make a fine acquittal of himself.

The army breaks into Jargeau in the evening. The Maid has recovered from her fall and been back in the fray again. She comes into the main square at dusk, to supervise the securing of the town. Tomas, naturally, is nearby and so is witness yet again to the moment when she sweeps off her helm and runs ungloved fingers through her boy-short hair.

She is not a boy, whatever the English say. He has never thought she was. Her eyes meet his. Her black eyes, sharp, hot, prideful. He can sustain this. He can. He is not a man to hide from his enemies.

Her gaze passes on. He is one amongst thousands, no different from the rest. His loins ache and it doesn’t help to know he is not alone. A thousand men, five thousand, are with him. They have all turned to face her, waiting.

‘France!’ She raises her fist.

The army echoes, five thousand throats as one. ‘France!’

And then she lets them loose. This is war. If you resist a siege, you will suffer. Over the next forty-eight hours, the Maid’s army lays waste to Jargeau, to its wine, its women, its velvets and linens, its goldware and silverware and pewter. Nobody cares that the defenders were French, that the women they rape may be the cousins of their wives, that the men they rob were once their friends. They were allied with the enemy, and now every man in every town between here and Paris knows that if you resist, your women will suffer the fate worse than death, and you will be ruined.

What Tomas Rustbeard knows is that he has missed his chance, and he is not – even now, lying in another man’s goosedown bed – sure quite why he did so.

HER APARTMENT IS
empty. Picaut knows this as she puts the key in the lock. Relief slips down her spine as she mounts the steep stone stairs from the door.

The restaurant below is closed and quiet, although by the first turn of the first flight she would be unable to hear anything even if the occupants were in full party mode. Luc’s mother, who bought this place and furnished it for herself in the last year of the last millennium, had it soundproofed to industrial standards. A bomb could explode outside, and provided it was less than six kilograms of plastic explosive no sound would penetrate the living space above.

It gives a strange, dead feel. When she lived here, Picaut made a habit of throwing the windows open to let life back in again. Now, standing at the top of the third and last flight of perfect grey-pink marble, the soundlessness is her guarantor of solitude, and she is grateful.

She keys an eight-digit number into the pad on the right-hand side of the door and waits for two further hot-cold seconds to find out if Luc has been up here and changed the code.

He hasn’t. On the third count, the door swings wide on buffered hinges.

She steps inside. This is her home, and at each return she feels more alien. This is why she sleeps elsewhere. Whatever Garonne thinks, it’s not about sex or the comfort of intimacy, it’s about avoiding the pale marble Louis XIV floors, the eau de nil walls, the kitchen that looks like the flight deck of a 747, the dustless, soulless, silent judgement that weighs her as she walks through the door and finds her wanting.

The apartment is a shrine to a France that does not exist: a post-revolutionary monarchy, where the rich rule and the peasants know their place. Picaut has been the blot on its landscape from the moment Luc’s mother gave her the deeds as a wedding present.

The wedding itself was a fiasco. Hélène Bressard had so carefully underdressed, not to outdo the bride, that she could have walked naked into church and made less of a sensation. To give her due credit, she kept away from the crowds, but the paparazzi still caught on camera the moment when she cornered Picaut and kissed her on the cheek, pressing the envelope into her hands.

The images didn’t record the conversation, but they caught the look on Picaut’s face as Luc’s mother said, ‘You’re one of the Family now.’

She wasn’t. She wasn’t ever likely to be, but she understands now, as she didn’t then, that this was their way of buying her in. They didn’t know her, nor she them. Her doubt was obvious enough for Hélène to tuck an arm beneath her elbow and press her head close. ‘Landis drew up the deeds. They’re watertight.’

Picaut didn’t know Uncle Landis then, either, but she knew his reputation. The cameras caught her blistering smile and that was the image that graced the magazines and made her a celebrity for the whole of the next week so that her friends walked on eggshells in her presence, thinking her lost to them for ever.

She, of course, thought she was bringing Luc to the light, that he was a wild and radical maverick who had dared to step out of his family’s reactionary straitjacket for the love of ideals based on worth, not on gold, for equality, for grace, for understanding: for her.

Here, now, five years on, this apartment is the morgue in which lies her self-delusion. In the kitchen, where the smell of fresh coffee sharpens the air, is the early row over the morning papers that broke open the sham of Luc’s politics. It took her longer than it should have done to realize that he had never walked free of the Family, never could, never would, never wanted to. He is, was and will always be a dyed in the wool conservative, more dangerous, more insidious than any member of Le Pen’s
Front National
, because he knows how to cloak his extremism in the language of reason.

She carries her coffee to the bedroom, where lies the oversized bed in which it became painfully clear that her role was to bear the next generation of Bressard men – and that conceiving a girl would be as much of a failure as failing to conceive at all.

She had her pills, and never stopped taking them. No children, ever; she had said that from the start. Luc had not believed her. She wasn’t the only one who had grown to regret their early self-delusion.

Leaning into the walk-in wardrobe which still contains her clean clothes, she selects a winter shirt, clean jeans, socks, underwear, trainers. Her leather jacket remains; it always remains. She hasn’t taken it off yet. She closes the bedroom door behind her. She couldn’t sleep here if she tried.

There’s a pile of post in the hallway. She lifts it on to a side table, sorting the bills from the circulars and leaving both for later.

She does not – will not – go into the living room, but she pauses in passing, much as she did just after midnight on New Year’s Eve when she overheard the mellow, man-to-man conversation in which Luc and Uncle Landis rehearsed the detail of her husband’s proposed ascent to power: election to Mayor of Orléans in 2014 and from there to the presidency in 2016.

Hollande, however much they loathe him, proved this route was possible, and the Family is ready to stretch its wings. For generations beyond counting, it has spread its influence across the south of France, into Germany, Switzerland, trans-Alpine Italy. In every conflict, it has posted people on either side: for the English, against the English; for the Spanish, against the Spanish; for Napoleon, against him; for the revolution, for the king … actually, rather more for the king than against him, but that has been massaged out of memory.

More recently, they had collaborators in the Vichy government and the Milice even while others slipped into the forest to join the Maquis, or hid English agents for the Resistance. In ’44, they sent younger members to infiltrate the Communists when it seemed as if they might conquer the whole of France after the war, and they had others already working hand-in-glove with the Americans to make sure such a catastrophe couldn’t happen.

But until now, they have been contained in the south. If you were to draw a line from Lyon to Bordeaux and look down, everything below it is theirs and has been for ever. This is where the money resides, where the sea laps at Marseilles, Monaco, Montpellier. Stretch a little east and you can touch the contacts in Turin, the banks in Zurich, the big families of Barcelona. Now, though, they have a new goal. In two years, the Family plans to sweep Luc along a route that took the current president nearly a decade. Lack of ambition has never been one of their failings.

This, then, is what they were planning, the detail of it, as Picaut passed the door.

‘And what about your wife?’ Uncle Landis asked. All the weight in that one word.