Blood Red, Sister Rose Page 4

  Machet: Be happy, my son, because you are God’s King of France.

  Charles: I suffer from an urge to pronounce the name of our Lord Jesus backwards.

  Machet knew not to waste such ripe obsessions.

  Machet: It’s an enchantment. Perhaps your closest friends have put it on you.

  Charles told Machet that he believed a martyr must die for him, a sacrifice must be made to seal and augment his kingship.

  Machet: Christ’s sacrifice is the one.

  Charles: No, it must be a sacrifice like Christ’s. But a different one.

  Machet: A sacrifice will be given.

  Charles: You guarantee me?

  Machet: A sacrifice will be given.

  The royal confessor meant de Giac would be sacrificed. He was helping Yolande arrange it.

  But after a year, in spite of Machet’s best efforts in the confessional, Tanguy still had treasury privileges. De Giac still slept with his king.

  The council wanted Charles to demonstrate his reality by sending an army into Normandy. They suggested the money could come from mortgages. Some of them were willing to advance cash against royal property. The king’s small bedrooms began filling up with mortgage papers again.

  Sometimes a special clarity would enter his eye. He would send for Maman Yolande.

  Charles: All my friends are working on treasury credit and using it to lend money back to me.

  Yolande: I know. It’s bad. It will end, I promise you. But it’s time to send an army into Normandy.

  On best advice, Charles bought some likely Italian companies, some Navarrese. He signed orders to put his Gascons and Scots back in commission.

  Outside Verneuil, which was a quiet town in low Normandy, the English dug themselves in as they always had, behind slanting palisades of sharpened stakes.

  Like Tanguy at Montereau Bridge, Charles’s knights believed the only ordained way to hurt an enemy was the personal and intimate way. When the English kept winning with longbowmen, making impersonal deaths at a distance, French knights thought that was a temporary dislocation of the purer cult of war. Now Bedford, the English Regent in France, was using cannon and culverins on the battlefield, not just around towns. That too was a snide de-focusing of the fine nature of battle.

  This state of mind had achieved the stature of a mental illness with the French. Man changes his nature by changing his tools and at Vemeuil the tools made carcasses and captives of the ideologues, the men who followed their code, Charles’s knights. All those inflexible Scottish lairds failed as well. High horses impaled on the stakes, they lay wriggling in their armour, ripe for slaughter or ransom.

  Three days later the bad news got to Charles. He looked stolid and arranged a requiem Mass for the Count of Aumale, Constable of France, who had perished of the longbow the Tuesday before. At the post-communion however he fell off his priedieu. Marie was dutiful enough to do the same and both of them were carried away to their bedrooms. Maman Yolande went with Charles, not with her daughter. She ordered him undressed and had warm bricks put in his bed.

  Charles: It’s the indecent money. Nothing useful could come from it.

  Yolande: Money is the most unmagical thing in the world. It has no supernatural qualities and it’s always real inside its limits. The whole business is very sad nonetheless.

  Charles: O Jesus, I have sinned.

  He wanted his long fingers in her thick ones.

  Yolande: Bedford never thinks like that. He never frets about the nature of his money.

  Charles sensed what she was telling him: that a king could fill his kingdom to its limits with his self-disbelief. His money would then stop acting on events as money infallibly should. His armies would fail for no good reason and go on failing.

  Charles: I wish we could just say yes that little English boy is the king. Then we could all rest.

  Yolande: Rest?

  So remotely, so alien to the word that he knew she was nowhere near the end of her political energy.

  All the boy wanted was to go and lose care in Scotland or Spain. But he groaned because she wouldn’t let him.

  Yolande: We have to get the Bretons into alliance now.

  He whimpered.

  Yolande: You understand that Brittany is on our left flank and the English right.

  Charles: Of course I understand it, Maman.

  Yolande: Well, we need them in alliance for when the English march on the Loire. As they will.

  Charles: Oh God.

  Yolande began to arrange it straight away.

  On a day in summer Jacques and Bertrand were sitting at the front of the house in Domremy-à-Greux. They had been drinking since mid-morning. Jacques was a born pub-keeper, Zabillet said.

  Jacques’s sons did the day’s work, Catherine was away with the cows and her boyfriend. Jehannette was crushing coleseed in a press in the sun, and listening. A messenger with an escort of lancers cantered through the town on the highway Caesar had built. The messenger wore the Pope’s tabard and seemed intense. To see and hear them as they passed made you think they were carrying some ultimate good news down to Avignon: the resurrection of the dead has been arranged for eleven o’clock tomorrow morning – some message such as that. It made Jacques angry. He stood up.

  Jacques: You’d think all these bloody officials who roar up and down were doing something useful. But none of it works: they’re not saving anything. Sermaize was burnt to the ground again last month. They can’t do anything for us, they might as well sit by the road and pick nits out of their arses. The whole set-up is useless.

  Bertrand, who liked to think he was part of the set-up, blinked a little.

  Jacques: Why are you looking like that?

  Bertrand flinched. He’d always feared Jacques might, in the end, resent having to fête him.

  But it was the girl Jacques was yelling at.

  She laid the brown eyes on Jacques. Bertrand felt an indefinite thrill to see the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old virgin’s contempt in them. At least, it seemed contempt. She seemed to pass the message to Jacques that she was waiting. Waiting for the day when he would become, through old age, a child and would have to sit respectfully under the apple tree in her yard. And listen to her dominating the house. She was the sort of girl who would keep a husband and an old man bluffed by the time she was twenty-three.

  Jacques: Does your old man make you sick?

  Jehannette: No.

  Grey beads of coleseed oil eked down the sides of the press into the tub.

  Jacques: Why the eyes then? Why the bloody eyes?

  Jehannette: Because what you say is true.

  Jacques: Oh good, good.

  She’d been the youngest and the pampered one. Nothing sustained in the way of work was ever required of her – the others had a sort of routine to follow, but Jehannette chose what she did each day. Sometimes her brothers could bargain her into doing what they wanted. What they wanted her to do most of the time was to take the cattle out in the mornings. It bored her. She could put on a terrible act of lethargy. She could droop at table. Looking at her, you nearly went to sleep yourself.

  But, as this account will show, she could be a frantic vigorous girl with outsiders. It was only with Jacques and cattle that she slumped.

  Bertrand whispered at Jacques.

  Bertrand: I don’t know how to put this. Jehannette … she’s still a virgin?

  Jacques thought, my girl married to the Sire de Poulengy! Madame de Poulengy! Then he remembered she had an affliction of the womb, a family secret.

  Jacques: She’s a virgin. Of course, Bertrand.

  Bertrand: It’s hard to explain. We need a virgin for our confraternity.

  Jacques: Confraternity?

  They did wild things in confraternities and secret coteries. It depended what the confraternity honoured: gods of black love, gods of white love, Christ God, Christ’s saints.

  Bertrand: Listen, Jacques, I’ll tell you about ours. Myself – am I a rapist? Then Mada
me Hélène de Bourlémont, a nice old lady, Madame Aubrit …

  Jacques: She’s one of Jehannette’s godmothers.

  Bertrand: There you are. Myself and d’Ourches are the only two men. D’Ourches is a genuine … a genuine knight baronet.

  Jacques: Is he good?

  Bertrand: He’s in the garrison. He’s good. (Pause.) She’ll come back a virgin. There’s no need to tell you …

  Jacques: What do you want a virgin for?

  Bertrand: Some ceremonies only a virgin is fit to do.

  Jacques: Not like the autumn riot over is Boischenu?

  Every autumn there was an orgy in the forest of Boischenu. Mauvrillette in particular was favoured by the men. It was supposed to help the cattle and sheep in their breeding.

  Bertrand: Can you imagine Madame de Bourlémont …?

  Jacques: No.

  Bertrand: Madame Aubrit?

  Jacques had scored the young Madame Aubrit one Hallowe’en in the forest. He’d thought I’ll never have anyone more beautiful than this. He’d been right.

  Jacques: Madame Aubrit’s all right, I suppose.

  He thought imagine Aubrit getting a redneck like me. All over the forest farmers with women, softening the year’s death. And Madame Aubrit drawn from her good house into the groaning mists …

  Bertrand: What we do, Jacques, is Christian. It helps the king.

  Therefore, on a Friday Bertrand had nominated, Jehannette went at mid-afternoon to the best stone house in the town. Madame Aubrit’s maid let her in and took her upstairs where Madame Aubrit herself sat in the long hall sewing by the front window. She had a straight nose and a sweet pallor: she didn’t let the weather at her.

  When she made stitches with her needle you didn’t doubt their permanence, the permanence of her womanhood and all it touched. No free companies were going to gut this house or tear the drapes off the walls.

  Aubrit: Come in Jehannette. Did you bring your spindle?

  Jehannette: I thought I’d better.

  Aubrit: We’ll have a nice afternoon then, working here together.

  Jehannette: I’d rather do this than anything.

  Aubrit: You’re like me. We’re not made for field work.

  Jehannette: I get sick of it, Madame. It isn’t the weight. It’s the boredom.

  Already she had the distaff under her left arm and was winding thread on to the spindle at an hypnotic rate.

  Aubrit: You were no more than ten when you were here last time.

  The girl frowned at her through a long silence. The red disassociated hands kept working. Madame Aubrit kept a sweet face, coughed, made a stitch.

  Jehannette: It seems I’ve seen you a lot. It seems I’ve heard you talk.

  Aubrit: But you haven’t, have you?

  Aubrit was a little off-balance from all this virgin intentness in the girl. She even blushed. She had a lover in Neufchâteau. It seemed – for a second – an outside possibility that the girl somehow knew. And Aubrit couldn’t stop herself making some confession.

  Aubrit: You flatter me. You shouldn’t. I mightn’t be a very good person.

  Jehannette: I know your voice though, Madame.

  Aubrit: Now …!

  Jehannette: I love you.

  Aubrit felt liberated and laughed. She thought it’s just infatuation, it isn’t second sight.

  Jehannette was thinking, it’s a lie, I loved her till last year but now … well, I don’t love her anyway.

  Aubrit: Do you mind fasting this evening?

  Jehannette: No.

  Aubrit: It’s for the king’s sake.

  Jehannette: I’d like to be a woman in my own house. I’d like to bear children.

  Jehannette asked herself why she’d said it. They were both uttering things they didn’t want to.

  All the time, the stealthy noises of her hands unravelling the fibre.

  Aubrit: Jehannette, it will happen.

  The girl shook her head.

  Jehannette: There’s something wrong with my womb. You can ask Catherine.

  Aubrit: You can tell me.

  Jehannette: I didn’t want to tire you. I just wanted to say what I’d like.

  At dusk Madame Aubrit had her hair done up and fitted under a net embroidered with roses. Jehannette watched in that remote avid way that distressed her father. Then the lady put on a scarlet and gold underdress. The girl blinked. It had heraldic sheep on it. Was Madame Aubrit really a noblewoman in a big way? Some great man’s bastard?

  Over it all she put a light cloak but fastened it up to the neck.

  The girl smiled broadly. She picked up the hem of her knee-length overdress.

  Jehannette: And I thought this was smart.

  Aubrit: I’m not trying to outdress you. You’ve got what’s necessary.

  Her fingers softly tested the contours of the veil.

  They rode the one mare south from the town, uphill away from the river. Below and behind them was a river island. It crowded the arm of river flowing past Madame Aubrit’s place, making it a mere ox-bow. On the island stood the vacant castle of the Bourlémonts. All the town paid the rent, month per month, so that when raiders came every one could go there. It had a long apron-wall with its own vegetable garden inside. The rooms were damp in the keep, but the sight of the place could sometimes give men like Jacques a luxurious sense of safety.

  Far across the river, where the highway ran lined with infrequent shade trees, some businessmen were nearing town with a line of mules.

  Aubrit: You don’t see that often. How can they expect to get where they’re going.

  Jehannette’s thigh was against Madame Aubrit’s. The girl thought some cure might enter her womb from the direction of the lovely woman.

  Around them now was forest. Chestnut, ilex, great oaks. Enchanted timber, all of it. Here you might face the aboriginal Europeans, the small people, primitive, magical, green-skinned from woad-paint, habitués of the old gut gods of the trees.

  Madame Aubrit spoke loudly, as if the ceremonies – whatever they were to be – had begun already.

  Aubrit: Christ save us from the entrapments of the willow. For witches bind their besoms of it. From the lecheries of the hawthorn. For it ravages your sweet brow. Give us the quickbeam rowan when demons block our path, give us a whip of rowan when our horses are unruly. Give us the oak whose fire consecrates mid-summer …

  She went on and on. She seemed genuinely scared, you could smell a musk of fear from her.

  Sitting side-on to her, Jehannette put an arm out, half-caressing the lovely woman’s belly.

  Jehannette: Nothing’s going to happen to you, Madame.

  Aubrit: How can one be certain?

  Jehannette: You don’t know who might be in you.

  Aubrit: In me?

  Jehannette: What god. What saint of God. You think you’ll be let fall foul of any old witch.

  The lady smiled, a thin smile. She felt it was an impoliteness on the girl’s part to suspect someone’s body of containing gods or saints.

  Aubrit: I hate the woods. It’s even worse riding home. But there’s a rule of the confraternity … we travel alone.

  In fact she held her breath at bends.

  Aubrit: I saw them once, Jehannette. I saw little green women one Thursday, over near the Ladies’ Tree.

  Jehannette: You should have caught them. If you were bigger than they were.

  Madame Aubrit had seen them. She looked hard at Jehannette, and embroidered her story.

  Aubrit: Two little green women. Well made. Wearing nothing. It was summer.

  The girl was smiling, her own joke. Aubrit nonetheless tried to share in it.

  Aubrit: Is it funny?

  Jehannette: Priests say Christ God has given up the little people as lost. Perhaps the news never got through to the little people.

  Aubrit: I must tell them next time I see them.

  The great lady of Domremy sat stiff, saying it.

  Jehannette: It’d only be fair.

 
Aubrit gave in and started to smile.

  Aubrit: You’re poking fun at me.

  Jehannette: No one ought to be thrown off. Not little or big people. Just like that. Without being told.

  Aubrit: What about the Goddam English?

  Jehannette: They’ve been told. They’ve been told. They’ve heard it. From a lot of voices.

  Aubrit: I suppose so.

  There was a spring amongst a mesh of gooseberries. It came out of the hill over a lip of stone. When you knelt and looked deep into the place it came from you saw a clear black gloss of immeasurable water, deep and wilful and almost divine.

  This Gooseberry Fountain was an ambiguous place. Every Rogation Day the priest from town read the Gospel of St John over it, as if it needed it. Arthritics washed here and, feeling better, didn’t know whom to praise. Because when they thanked their Saviour for the suppler joints, they thought they could feel cynical old gods behind their backs.

  A little uphill was the big beech, the Ladies’ Tree, where the Oak-King had once been sacrificed at mid-summer. Its roots had taken in his blood and so its big limbs were somehow reprobate and cannibal and it too needed the Gospel read to it. It was made to listen on Laetare Sunday, which was a picnic day at the big tree.

  Witches came to it on Thursdays, everyone said, and everyone thought Mauvrillette was the pucelle of the coven who met at the Ladies’ Tree. Hence (Madame Aubrit understood this) the popularity of Mauvrillette. When you slept with her you got the mad tang of hell in your nostrils, you smelt the hairy sweat of the horned god. For a second you were the horned hairy god. All in the price.

  Madame Aubrit turned the horse from the track and crossed the Gooseberry Fountain. The ground levelled and the forest thinned. Then they came to two peasants minding horses, nearly a dozen horses altogether. The men said nothing. One of them took the reins of Madame Aubrit’s mare, the other helped her dismount and then turned to help Jehannette. Jehannette hadn’t expected courtesies and was already down on her feet.

  When the lady walked off without a word, Jehannette knew to follow in silence.

  The light went quickly and a fire flared amongst the trees. There were people kneeling about the fire and a spectacular man still stood by the heaped timber. He wore a scarlet cope and black monsters writhed on it. His hat was velvet and his gown gold and complicated with heraldic designs. They were nearly all dressed that way, the man, the many women who knelt about. But a boy of perhaps eighteen years wore a thin black cloak pulled tight. He seemed to have a bare chest and to be wearing drawers. Getting up he fetched yet another superb cope from somewhere beyond the firelight and came up to Madame Aubrit and put it around her.