Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans Read online

  At five o’clock Navailles and the others came for him. The duke’s secretary Père Sequinat went along too. As if the sanctions of canon law weren’t likely to save him, he wore a cuirass under his Augustinian habit. One of the lords rat-tat-tatted on the heavy serge of the monk’s chest. The sound was metallic.

  Lord: Expecting trouble?

  Twelve lords marched in front of Jean sans Peur to the ante-room on the bridge. There was little waiting. Very soon Tanguy opened the meeting-room door impassively, without any word or flourish.

  Navailles went through first, and the others flanked him, on either side, like clerics peeling off either side of the sanctuary at the start of solemn high Mass. Tanguy remained holding the door. So that he was in their rear.

  Sequinat stood back to let the duke through but when it was his time to step across the threshold, and there was only himself and Tanguy peering at each other through narrow eyes, a seizure of fear stopped him on the doorstep. Tanguy took him by the arm and pulled him through, feeling the metal under the sleeve of the habit of St Augustine.

  Round the flank of the Burgundian lords, Tanguy moved back to his own side of the room.

  Dauphin Charles stood close to the door there. He wore his white armour. It was splendid, a gift from his foster-mother Yolande, the Queen of Sicily. On most other sixteen-year-olds it would have been breathtaking.

  Charles’s thin Valois head stuck up inappositely out of its nest of steel. The pendulous end of the nose hung close to the lips.

  When Jean, earlier in the year, had presented Charles’s sister to the English King Hal Monmouth, it had been feared that the family nose (from which Jean himself also suffered through a common grandfather) would be the feature to disenchant the Englishman. Jean and the whore-queen Isabeau feared it. But Henry had been infatuated.

  Charles had bulbous eyes too. Expectant of witchcraft and severing of limbs. He stood by the door on the Montereau side, and his lords stood V-ed in towards him. Because he couldn’t be expected to stand bareheaded to his cousin, he wore a blue turban. Either side of his nose, his face was greased with sweat.

  Jean Sans Peur walked straight up to the boy and curtsied to him and kissed his hand. The boy felt reassured that the kiss was painless and not demonically cold. The large lips made a painful smile.

  Charles Dauphin: Put your hat back on, Jean. It’s a hot day.

  Tanguy was whispering to de Giac.

  Tanguy: Even their pig’s-arse secretary has armour on.

  De Giac looked at the priest’s habit and frowned.

  Tanguy: Underneath! Underneath! If they make a movement, push Charlie out through the door.

  They couldn’t afford the loss of Charles. Charles was their mandate for being what they were, executives in the Armagnac enclave, which was still a going business.

  Jean: Your mother sends her best love.

  Charles: Oh yes.

  Jean: Don’t say it like that. She thinks of you a lot.

  Charles: How are all her animals?

  Jean: Have you ever seen a black and white bear from China?

  Charles: She’s got one?

  Jean: It’s devoted to her. One day it reached out and sliced the ham out of a servant’s leg. It wears pads now.

  Charles: I see.

  It wasn’t that he hated his mother. You could somehow tell, even in the tremulous way he carried his head when her name was mentioned, that he yearned to be himself her pet monkey. Her little bear.

  Since Madeleine died, his de facto mother had been Yolande, Queen of Sicily, whose present of armour he was wearing. He was engaged to Yolande’s daughter and for the past two years Yolande minded daughter and son-in-law together.

  Jean: Don’t believe that Spanish lady when it comes to forming an opinion of your own mother.

  Charles: Very well.

  Jean: It’s time you were all together again.

  He spoke with authentic pity.

  Jean: You and your father and mother. I mean, your father can’t be moved. Have you thought how it would look if the English took Paris off me? Your father with it?

  Charles: What about my sister? Does the English king want her?

  Jean: I think it’s going to be a good thing for everyone.

  The dauphin began trembling. There was a little anger in it, but largely loss.

  Charles: If they have a baby boy it’ll be a good thing for the baby boy. He’ll be made king of both countries, won’t he? That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? To make a baby in place of me?

  Jean: Please! You’re not made for any of this. Let me look after things for you. You call the Estates-General and I’ll levy an army for you, thirty or forty companies. We’ll hit the Commons for half a million.

  The boy raised both thin hands and vibrated them in front of his face. The numbers Jean conjured up did that to him.

  Charles: Nothing can happen unless you do public penance for killing Uncle Louis.

  Tanguy: Hear, hear!

  Jean: Listen Tanguy, it’s between my cousin and me.

  Charles: I want you to do public penance at the Cathedral of Bourges now and at Uncle Louis’s grave in Paris at a time I’ll nominate.

  Jean: I won’t do penance. Charles, it was a service to this country.

  Charles: Don’t say it, don’t say it.

  Jean: Come with me to your father. If he says do penance I’ll do penance.

  Charles: No, no, no. I know what you did. You bought Uncle Louis’s servants and my father’s valet. You cut his dear left hand off and poured out his brains in the mud.

  The duke sighed and gestured a little with his left hand.

  Jean: It’s always like that when people get killed, it’s sad but true. Did they tell you, Charles, that he was persecuting your mother that night?

  Charles: Persecuting?

  Jean: Charles, the poor woman had just had a child still-born? A brother of yours! I don’t want to hurt you with these things. But your uncle was insatiable.…

  Tanguy: Listen, the boy knows his mother’s a whore. Let’s begin on that basis.

  Jean: If you call the Commons, and come to your father with me, I’ll beg public pardon at the man’s grave. Not in Bourges though. At the man’s grave. If you come with me.

  Tanguy: You can’t make counter-demands. First do your penance at Bourges. That’s an absolute condition. Then we talk about other things.

  Jean: Charles, I can’t damn well do any penance at Bourges. Bourges is a sort of joke. The very name.

  Charles: Is it?

  Jean: Well in Paris they call you the King of Bourges. It’s a nickname. The word Bourges has overtones.… I’ve got nothing against the town, but I won’t do penance there. I’ll do penance in Paris. If you come with me back to your father.

  Charles: You can’t tell me when to go to my father.

  Jean: Perhaps I have that much power.

  The boy began squealing.

  Charles: Under God have you? Under God’s mandate?

  Jean: Power in fact. It’s from God too. And it works well enough.

  Charles: The authority has to come from God.

  Don’t tell me God is changing (the boy was trying to say). Don’t tell me God is giving you some special power underhand, contrary to contract.

  The boy knew he had a chance only if God kept to the accepted forms.

  Jean: Listen Charles, don’t let’s get theological. You’re sixteen and you know what’s happening in this country and who has the power.

  Jean saw his poor cousin had closed his eyes again.

  Charles: I have scholars to tell me the power is mine. That you’re sinning …

  Jean: Oh Christ. I have the faculty of Paris in my pocket. I can get them to tell me anything I like.

  Charles: I have the chancellor of the University of Paris. You threw him out. He says …

  Jean: And you believe him Charles?

  Charles: Yes.

  Jean: He’s a liar.

  You were never m
eant to tell a dauphin that sort of thing. When a number of lords on both sides of the room spoke at once, Jean silenced his.

  Jean: I’m giving you the lie, Charles. I intend to. Because what you have to see if you want to have a sane life is that I can make you come with me in the end.

  Tanguy, Brabazon, de Giac were screaming in the dauphin’s ear as if it was the poor boy who had said the scandalous thing.

  Navailles came up to Charles, reaching for his elbow in an avuncular, child-fetching way. His face had a sort of self-conscious good intent in it. Benevolence for the boy.

  Tanguy rammed him. Steel hip against steel hip, a dissonant impact. The blood of all those twenty-six men leapt and squirmed. That’s the sound, the blood told its owners.

  Tottering Navailles was drawing his sword. Some thought he had the thing by the handle as he tripped about and it was slipping out, not being drawn with intent.

  Monk Sequinat was already dancing sideways for the door and so was the dauphin for his door, on his side of the peace-chamber.

  The Burgundy lords saw that the Armagnac lords had their swords drawn. It won’t happen, they thought. It’s such bad politics. Even Tanguy can see what bad politics it would be.

  Already Navailles had been gashed beneath the jawline and knelt streaming blood on to his hat, which had fallen from his head on to the stonework.

  The Burgundy lords saw Jean, who was himself watching Navailles detachedly, hit on the head with a small axe. One of the Armagnacs, against law and reason, must have been carrying it in his belt, under his huke.

  The boy knew that his Uncle Louis, twelve years ago, had been killed with an axe. The sense of awful re-enactment moved through him and he shambled out the door and performed the crooked action that passed for running in that knock-kneed family.

  The watchers on the walls of Montereau saw the running prince. Terror made his gait uneven, he dragged one leg. His confessor met him at the gate and held him, comforting him through the white armour in which he was sweating.

  He was no fool, that boy.

  Charles: They’ll blame me for this.

  Confessor: For what, Dauphin?

  Charles: They’re killing Cousin Jean.

  Jean stood on his knees, split to the nose. His brains fell out of his forehead. Brabazon was kneeling by Navailles unbuckling his cuirass.

  Navailles: Oh Saviour Jesus.

  Brabazon: How does this damn thing come undone?

  Tanguy, who remembered Uncle Louis’s mutilations in 1407, cut off the duke’s left arm. Louis’s assassins had understood that many of these royal people had made pacts with Satan, contracting a limb to Beelzebub in return for political influence. For Satan was strong in the lobbies and potent in council-rooms. But a man could not see God’s face in paradise unless the limb was in fact paid.

  Louis’s assassins had done it for Louis, now Tanguy did it for the duke, cutting cleanly at the elbow.

  Brabazon killed Navailles terribly, running a sword upwards under the waistline. Navailles’s last scream was heard at the Provins Gate of Montereau. Sobs creaked out of the boy.

  Charles: Won’t they ever stop this sort of thing?

  Two of the French lords left the peace-chamber and went, crazily leisured, to join the dauphin.

  All the rest hacked at the duke’s body. All they cared about for the moment was the electric resistance of his muscles and organs.

  Once he was dead no message came to them along the blades. They sobered. Their ears began to prickle. They’d committed the crime of the age. They knew it was a fountain of murders they’d uncovered with their delving swords. It would take long wars in Champagne and Anjou and the south to settle what they’d done.

  Already the axe lay dropped on the carriageway. Anonymous.

  De Giac and Brabazon began to fight about who’d dropped it there.

  De Giac: I could see it in your belt when you walked in.

  Brabazon: Who’d believe a fucking wife-murderer.

  De Giac was said to have given his wife poison at dinner and then rode with her all night in the forest of Issoudin. Given that she was pregnant, it was a wonder she lasted so long in the saddle with a stomachful of toxin.

  Now Giac wanted to kill Brabazon: the inhuman meat of a duke and a general on the stonework slipped their minds. Except that they were sheepish about going back to town and facing the boy. They would rather keep their tempers up than do that.

  Tanguy lifted the axe. He threw the thing two-handed right across the room, where it resounded against the partition and tore a hole in one of the Burgundian draperies.

  Coming back across the bridge they tried to look bored. They carried their bloodied tunics folded on their arms or crumpled up in one hand. They did not hurry. They didn’t fear the boy, the boy feared them. But they knew the sight of him would awaken them to the subtleties of what they had done to Duke Jean.

  Many of Charles’s officers, down from the walls, ran out to ask them what had happened. Tanguy had a story.

  Tanguy: Navailles tried to kill Charles.

  Brabazon: They had an axe with them.

  They felt better now that they had articulated what must become the Armagnac version; and it seemed robust enough by the afternoon light.

  But the boy, with his priest, overheard.

  Charles: Everyone will blame me. Maman Isabeau, Maman Yolande. What about my sister Catherine? What about Philip?

  Philip was Jean’s son, capable, full-grown, not backward at taking moral advantage.

  Charles: Phillip will make war on me. Maman Yolande will want to know why I didn’t control you.

  Tanguy: We acted from as much love as Maman Yolande.

  Charles: Monsieur Duchâtel, you are never to touch me again.

  Charles wiped his nose and turned his back on his lords. He called for someone to come and start unbuckling him.

  Charles: I will be nothing soon.

  He didn’t have a high sense of his own reality. No one ever told him he was a nice boy, that he spoke well or his manners were charming. He saw himself as a vapid presence affixed to the idea of kingship. Around his consecrated vacancy harsh friends gestured and performed atrocities he didn’t understand. Now there would be so much disapproval that he was frantic he might vanish under it, shrink to nothing.

  When his horse was brought, he rode to the Hôtel St Pierre where apartments had been set aside for him. The Provins Gate was closed when lookouts reported that seven hundred soldiers Jean had in the vineyards behind the tower were forming up. But nothing developed – they knew they’d be paid off next morning, so didn’t want to do anything excessive this afternoon. A party of Burgundian knights went on foot to see the bodies, and came through on to the Armagnac side to shout threats. They called Charles a bastard and a whoreson. A few crossbow bolts were let fly at them but they went on screaming as if they knew what they were doing was worth a military risk. For their imputations filled the air and Charles, being dosed with hyopcras and fondled by Giac, took them in at the pores. It would go a long way to putting meat on the spectre he was if he knew he would be called a king whenever his crazy dad should die. If people could say, without amazement, just with level acceptance, ‘That’s the king.’ But it wouldn’t happen: those Burgundian knights were screaming their certainty that he was outside genealogies, a putative being.

  He groaned and Giac hugged him and kissed his forehead, greasy as it was from the afternoon’s terror.

  Charles: Maman Yolande. Send for her.

  In Domremy-à-Greux young Jehanne went into a coma and they sent for the midwife. The midwife rubbed her closed eyes with belladonna in a chicken-fat base. Later the priest was sent for. But she woke normally next morning, and was up by noon.

  When Jean’s son Philip heard what had been done to his father he fell over in a genuine fit on the parquet floor of the great hall in his home in Ghent. His wife, Michelle, who was young Charles’s sister and could not be expected to be quite so demented at her father-i
n-law’s death, fell down too in reasonable mime of what her husband was at.

  Despite his fit, Philip Charolaise was no hysteric. He did not rush into open alliance with the English, but even sent ambassadors to the frightened boy Charles. Philip wanted reparation and some of the lands south of the Loire. The boy felt once more that if any more earth was yielded up of that south land there mightn’t be enough dirt left to sustain him in existence. He would vanish with a scarcely perceptible explosion. Besides, Yolande and the others wouldn’t have allowed it.

  Philip sent armies into Champagne. It was a savage invasion.

  In the new year at the trade-fair city of Troyes, Henry Monmouth who was King of England, and Philip who was Duke now, made a strange treaty with the insane French king and with Queen Isabeau. Isabeau had been living some time in Troyes, with her leopard and bears, her exotic birds and sables.

  They all assented that Henry would be the next French king and would be regent till the mad king died. Isabeau and mad Charles called Henry son continually. He was in love with Catherine. Isabeau and mad Charles emphatically called young Charles a bastard. He’s not my husband’s boy, said Isabeau. That’s right, King Charles said. To get his affirmation to the treaty, the King of England and the Duke of Burgundy had to watch the lice moving in his clotted hair: the fug of all the body’s secretions was heavy on him, because he couldn’t tolerate being washed and clothed and tried to stab or strangle those who came up to him with clean linen. You think I’m dirty, he’d yell at them.

  Hence Philip and Henry-in-love held their heads sideways and winced as King Charles signed denunciations of his boy with a hand scabbed from jigger bites.

  Fat Isabeau, mightily fertile, mother of squadrons of infants, signed too. The documents said Charles had done an outrageous murder, talked of him as the so-called Dauphin from Vienne. And misbegotten as well.

  When the boy was told that both his mother and father had signed him away as a bastard, he uttered a long grunt like someone winded.

  Yolande, a big dark woman back from her Provence estates, told him that it was a shock, yes, but it was all so obscene a treaty that people would react against it in the end. But here was the day he had foretold: now he barely existed at all.