The Lady of the Rivers (5 page)

I show him into her room and he kneels at the side of her bed. She puts her hand on his head as if in blessing. Then she pushes him gently away.

‘I cannot bear this weather,’ se says crossly to my uncle, as if the cooling days are his fault. ‘How can you bear to live here? It is as cold as England and the winters last forever. I shall go south, I shall go to Provence.’

‘Are you sure?’ he asks. ‘I thought you were feeling tired. Should you not rest here?’

She snaps her fingers irritably. ‘I’m too cold,’ she says imperiously. ‘You can order me a guard and I shall have my litter lined with furs. I shall come back in spring.’

‘Surely you would be more comfortable here?’ he suggests.

‘I have a fancy to see the Rhône once more,’ she says. ‘Besides, I have business to do.’

Nobody can ever argue against her – she is the Demoiselle – and within days she has her great litter at the door, furs heaped on the bed, a brass hand-warmer filled with hot coals, the floor of the litter packed with oven-heated bricks to keep her warm, the household lined up to say farewell.

She gives her hand to Joan, and then she kisses my aunt Jehanne, and me. My uncle helps her into the litter and she clutches his arm with her thin hand. ‘Keep the Maid safe,’ she says. ‘Keep her from the English, it is my command.’

He ducks his head. ‘Come back to us soon.’

His wife, whose life is easier when the great lady has moved on, steps forwards to tuck her in and kiss her pale cool cheeks. But it is me that the Demoiselle of Luxembourg calls towards her with one crook of her skinny finger.

‘God bless you, Jacquetta,’ she says to me. ‘You will remember all that I have taught you. And you will go far.’ She smiles at me. ‘Farther than you can imagine.’

‘But I will see you in spring?’

‘I will send you my books,’ she says. ‘And my bracelet.’

‘And you will come to visit my mother and father at St Pol in the spring?’

Her smile tells me that I will not see her again. ‘God bless,’ she repeats and draws the curtains of her litter against the cold morning air as the cavalcade starts out of the gate.

In November, I am awakened in the darkest of the night, and I sit up in the little bed I share with Elizabeth the maid, and listen. It is as if someone is calling my name in a sweet voice: very high, and very thin. Then I am sure I can hear someone singing. Oddly, the noise is coming from outside our window, though we are high up in the turret of the castle. I pull on my cloak over my nightgown and go to the window and look out through the crack in the wooden shutters. There are no lights showing outside, the fields and the woods around the castle are as black as felted wool, there is nothing but this clear keening noise, not a nightingale but as high and as pure as a nightingale. Not an owl, far too musical and continuous, something like a boy singer in a choir. I turn to the bed and shake Elizabeth awake.

‘Can you hear that?’

She does not even wake. ‘Nothing,’ she says, half-asleep. ‘Stop it, Jacquetta. I’m asleep.’

The stone floor is icy beneath my bare feet. I jump back into bed and put my cold feet in the warm space near Elizabeth. She gives a little bad-tempered grunt and rolls away from me, and then – though I think I will lie in the warm and listen to the voices – I fall asleep.

Six days later they tell me that my great-aunt, Jehanne of Luxembourg, died in her sleep, in the darkest hour of the night, in Avignon, beside the great River Rhône. Then I know whose voice it was I heard, singing around the turrets.

As soon as the English Duke of Bedford learns that Joan has lost her greatest protector, he sends the judge Pierre Cauchon, with a troop of men behind him, to negotiate for her ransom. She is summoned by a Church court on charges of heresy. Enormous sums of money change hands: twenty thousand livres for the man who pulled her off her horse, ten thousand francs to be paid to my uncle with the good wishes of the King of England. My uncle does not listen to his wife, who pleads that Joan shall be left with us. I am too unimportant to even have a voice, and so I have to watch in silence as my uncle makes an agreement that Joan shall be released to the Church for questioning. ‘I am not handing her over to the English,’ he says to his wife. ‘As the Demoiselle asked me, and I have not forgotten, I have not handed her over to the English. I have only released her to the Church. This allows her to clear her name of all the charges against her. She will be judged by men of God, if she is innocent they will say so, and she will be released.’

She looks at him as blankly as if he were Death himself, and I wonder if he believes this nonsense, or if he thinks that we, being women, are such fools as to think that a church dependent on the English, with bishops appointed by the English, are going to tell their rulers and paymasters that the girl who raised all of France against them is just an ordinary girl, perhaps a little noisy, perhaps a little naughty, and she should be given three Hail Marys and sent back to her farm, to her mother and her father and her cows.

‘My lord, who is going to tell Joan?’ is all I dare to ask.

‘Oh, she knows already,’ he says over his shoulder as he goes out of the hall, to bid farewell to Pierre Cauchon at the great gate. ‘I sent a page to tell her to get ready. She is to leave with them now.’

As soon as I hear the words I am filled with a sudden terror, a gale of premonition, and I start running, running as if for my own life. I don’t even go to the women’s apartments, where the pageboy will have found Joan to tell her that the English are to have her. I don’t run towards her old cell, thinking she has gone there to fetch her little knapsack of things: her wooden spoon, her sharp dagger, the prayer-book that my great-aunt gave her. Instead I race up the winding stair to the first floor above the great hall, and then dash across the gallery, through the tiny doorway where the archway knocks my headdress off, tearing at the pins in my hair, and then I hammer up the circular stone stair, my feet pounding on the steps, my breath coming shorter and shorter, my gown clutched in my hands, so that I can burst out onto the flat roof at the very top of the tower and see Joan, poised like a bird ready to fly, balanced on the wall of the turret. As she hears the door bang open she looks over her shoulder at me and hears me scream, ‘Joan! No!’ and she steps out into the void below her./diight="0">

The worst thing of all, the very worst thing, is that she does not leap into nothing, like a frightened deer. I was dreading that she would jump, but she does something far worse than that. She dives. She goes headfirst over the battlement, and as I fling myself to the edge I can see that she goes down like a dancer, an acrobat, her hands clasped behind her, one leg extended like a dancer, the other bent, the toe pointed to her knee, and I see that, for that heart-stopping moment as she falls, she is in the pose of
le Pendu
, the Hanged Man, and she is going headfirst to her death with his calm smile on her serene face.

The thud when she hits the ground at the base of the tower is terrible. It echoes in my ears as if it is my own head that has struck the mud. I want to run down to lift her body, Joan, the Maid, crumpled like a bag of old clothes; but I cannot move. My knees have given way beneath me, I am clinging to the stone battlements, they are as cold as my scraped hands. I am not crying for her, though my breath is still coming in gulping sobs; I am frozen with horror, I am felled by horror. Joan was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led her to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.

They pick her up lifeless, and for four days she does not move or stir, but then she comes out of her stupor and gets up slowly from her bed, patting herself all over, as if to make sure that she is whole. Amazingly, no bones have been broken in her fall – she has not cracked her skull, nor snapped so much as a finger. It is as if her angels held her up, even when she gave herself into their element. Of course, this will not serve her; they are quick to say that only the Devil could have saved a girl who went headfirst like that from such a tall tower. If she had died they would have said God’s justice had been done. My uncle, a man of dour common sense, says that the ground is so sodden, after weeks of winter rain, and lapped by the moat, that she was in more danger of drowning than being broken; but now he is determined that she shall leave at once. He doesn’t want the responsibility of the Maid in his house, without the Demoiselle to keep everything safe. He sends her first to his house in Arras, the Coeur le Comte, and then we follow, as she is transferred to the English city of Rouen for trial.

We have to attend. A great lord such as my uncle must be there to see justice being done, and his household must stand behind him. My aunt Jehanne takes me to witness the end of the Dauphin’s holy guide – the pretend-prophet of the pretend-king. Half of France is trooping to Rouen to see the end of the Maid and we have to be foremost among them.

For someone that they declare is nothing more than a peasant girl run mad, they are taking no chances. She is housed in the Castle Bouvreuil and kept in chains, in a cell with a double-locked door and the window boarded over. They are all in a terror that she will run like a mouse under the door, or fly like a bird through a crack in the window. They ask her to give an undertaking that she will not try to escape and, when she refuses, they chain her to the bed.