Blood Red, Sister Rose Read online

  The spectacular man told Jehannette to kneel by him.

  Jehannette: Bertrand! I didn’t know you had clothes like this.

  Bertrand: In the confraternity, I’m Messire. That’s Messire St Michael who speaks for Christ and guards France.

  Jehannette: Ah-h-h.

  Bertrand: That’s right.

  Jehannette: You wouldn’t change your mind?

  Bertrand: Change my mind?

  Jehannette: About being Messire St Michael.

  Bertrand and Aubrit frowned at each other. Bertrand was nervous. He thought he was having some onus pushed on him that only Jehanne knew about.

  Jehannette: What are we here for?

  Bertrand: For the king’s sake. A little sacrifice … we crown the king. In a sort of way.

  Jehannette: Bertrand, have you ever told me before to crown the king?

  Bertrand: I don’t think …

  The girl seemed to be petulant suddenly.

  Jehannette: Do you ever stand behind things and call out to me about crowning the king?

  Bertrand: Jehanne, what a question …

  Jehannette: Do you?

  Bertrand: Jehannette! What do you think I am?

  Jehannette: I think you’re Messire and Messire is you.

  The girl dropped on the ground and took a fistful of the hem of his cope.

  For some reason Bertrand flinched. All the ladies around him had a look of minor distaste to them. As if they saw some childish eroticism in Jehanne’s behaviour.

  When Jehannette got up on her feet again, Madame Aubrit stood close on one side and, on the other, Madame Hélène de Bourlémont, the spinster, the last de Bourlémont left in the area.

  Bertrand/Messire: This is Madame Ste Margaret in our confraternity and this is Madame Ste Catherine whose church is in Maxey over the river. You’re to do what they tell you.

  Jehannette turned to the old soft-skinned Hélène

  Jehannette: What do you want me to do, Madame?

  Catherine/de Bourlémont: We’ll tell you later.

  Jehannette: It’s just that I know your voice, Madame. I know your voice.

  Bertrand/Messire frowned. Again he thought Jehannette was finding perilous meanings all around her, that she was the one holding back news of some even more exotic protocol than he and d’Ourches and their ladies were pursuing for their Friday night devotions.

  He pointed to d’Ourches.

  Bertrand/Messire: This is Monsieur St Denis who turned tail on France and gave up the battle banner at St-Denis to the English. This is Madame Ste Clotilde …

  Jehannette: It’s all right. I can’t take in any more.

  Madame Ste Margaret who, incarnated as Madame Aubrit, knew a little about Jacques, whispered to her sister saint.

  Aubrit/Ste Margaret: Her father has trouble controlling her.

  They sang. The singing went on for an hour. The last song was an ecstatic acclamation for a king. Since none of them was a cleric they did not know that some of the Latin was corrupt and wizardly, a debased incantatory jumble. It elated and exalted them however. Jehannette looked from Messire to Madame Margaret to Madame Catherine and sometimes she shook her head as if a simple conclusion had come to her after a lot of grinding confusion.

  St Denis, who had deserted France, was shivering with the night chill, although it was mid-summer.

  But the others seemed so enriched through their long song that the woods were dwarfed by the dimensions of their happiness.

  Sumptuous Messire came up to her.

  Bertrand/Messire: You know about the king, Jehannette?

  Jehannette: Of course.

  The saints in the circle took up the questioning.

  Saints: That he’s called a bastard? And is disinherited by his scabrous mother? And foreigners hold the holy oils of kingship in Rheims?

  Jehannette: I’ve heard that.

  Saints: That they intend to uproot him? That if he is uprooted his screams will split open the heads of all us his children.

  The girl thought that last idea too fanciful. For privileged people like these saints it was an easy thing to escape the authentic harshness of the war. As for example the day last November when Jacques and the family had been travelling to Sermaize to see Zabillet’s three brothers. It was a quiet time and, so it was said, a safe area. There was a burned homestead on their right all at once. In the yard were three pregnant wives piked open at the womb, and their disembowelled husbands in a heap. There was a smell of flesh in the smoking farmhouse but Jacques forbade her to look there. She was happy to be dissuaded. But that was the war in France. That was what privileged people should talk about.

  Bertrand/Messire: Do you love the king, Jehannette?

  Jehannette: Kings are there.

  There wasn’t any argument about loving them.

  Bertrand/Messire: Through your blood you are the king’s sister.

  He touched her face. She could smell spice on his gold clothes.

  Jehannette: Blood? Bertrand, you’re not going to cut me or anything?

  Aubrit/Ste Margaret: No one wants to hurt you.

  Mesdames Ste Margaret and Ste Catherine told her to turn her back on Messire Michael and the improper Denis. They turned away themselves, and so did the rest of the saints.

  Behind them a flogging began. Jehannette understood: it was Messire Michael beating up Monsieur Denis for his unwise loyalties. The ugly pliant noise of willow on flesh went on for fifteen minutes. Madame Aubrit could see the girl did not like it yet understood she would break some wholeness of the event if she interrupted.

  At last Bertrand/Messire began reading the prophecies of Merlin. On the earth sat Monsieur Denis, shivering with his cloak over him.

  Bertrand: Descendit Virgo dorsum sagitarii … a virgin shall fall on the rear of the bowman – the bowman is quite clearly the Goddam English – et flores virgineos obscurabit … and her shadow will protect the fleur-de-lys. Virgo prudens florebit et Gallia a meretrice destructa … France, destroyed by a whore, shall be restored by a wise virgin from the marshes of Lorraine. From the oaky wood, the Boischenu itself, shall come a virgin for the healing of nations … Then she’ll be slain by the stag with ten antlers … and on six of the antlers there will stand golden crowns.

  Jehannette thought, he thinks it’s me.

  Incantations broke out again all around her. She was pushed forward by Mesdames Aubrit and de Bourlémont. At one end of the open place was a small shrub with a peasant brown cloak around it. The girl was told to remove the cloak. The plant underneath was a mandrake, a knock-kneed and tortured little growth, cleft-rooted, threatening and precative at once, poisonous to a peasant’s touch.

  As the saints had said earlier, its yell – if it were uprooted out of season – could make whole populations berserk. The promise of its screams hung in the summer night.

  D’Ourches took from beneath his cloak a slender purring cat. He held it above the mandrake, first gently, then by the hind legs. All the demons in it squealed like women. As it hung trying to claw him he decapitated it with a sword. Blood jumped in one viscid splash on to the mandrake.

  Bertrand/Messire took her hand and she saw he had a thin little knife.

  Bertrand/Messire: Put your blood with the black creature’s, Jehannette.

  Jehannette: Why? Why do I have to?

  Bertrand: So that the cat’s black world and the virgin’s white one will all enhance the king.

  Jehannette: I’d rather not …

  But she let Bertrand lift her sleeve and slit her on the underarm. Madame Aubrit/Ste Margaret waved the cut arm about like an aspergillum.

  Then Jehannette got down on her haunches and, without instruction, removed the sodden puppet’s peasant cloak and put on top of the bush the gold coronet Bertrand/Messire gave her, and poured oil over its waxy, pink, narcotic blossoms, and dressed it in a blue cope with gold fleur-de-lys.

  The evening rite was over. The pattern they had imposed on the night would convey itself in the
thin air, would be transmitted by wind to large events farther west.

  Aubrit/Ste Margaret and de Bourlémont/Ste Catherine were radiant.

  Events farther west …

  Yolande was having private and public meetings with the Bretons.

  Yolande: Do you know de Richemont, Charles?

  Charles: De Richemont?

  Yolande: Arthur de Richemont, the Breton. A month ago, Bedford jostled Arthur out of an office in Rouen. They had an argument over some fiscal matters. Arthur’s a very good soldier.

  Charles: What do you want done?

  He shivered in his bed, amongst the warm bricks. Though he wanted new friends he didn’t want ferrety little ones like Monsieur de Richemont, who stank of crises.

  Yolande: We could assure an alliance if you made Richemont Constable of France.

  Charles: Don’t ask me.

  Yolande: The position is sadly vacant. Since Aumale passed on at Verneuil.

  Charles: Would he have to go to war? This Richemont?

  Yolande: For you. Yes. Don’t flinch.

  For he was certainly flinching. He could see himself taking out a clutch of new mortgages. He could see the cool venal bankers, Massimo, the Perruzzis, and the rest. He couldn’t complain in front of selfless Maman. She had hocked a third of her great holdings in Provence. Yet he was king and his earth inferior to him. He couldn’t sign it away without a twinge in his guts.

  Yolande knew that Arthur was frantic against witchcraft. He could be a help in ridding Charles of all those bad friends who had killed cousin Jean and given the earth its excuse to subside under the boy.

  So, after Richemont came, the old favourites were encouraged to go. Tanguy was talked into taking up farming Provence. Brabazon went free-lancing in Touraine again. De Giac was nervous. But even in his intimacies with Charles he saw it wasn’t any use asking the boy for protection. For the brain was numb behind conjunctival eyes.

  Richemont acted in the most obvious way. He had de Giac arrested one morning in Poitiers and taken to Issoudun to be tried for wife murder. He found a cook and a number of grooms who would swear to the murder and the witchery. Machet, the boy’s confessor, rode over to the Auron and told de Giac he should offer his life up as sacrifice for the boy, should actually write to Charles in those terms.

  My sweetest dauphin,

  I know you expect that apart from the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus a further sacrifice is needed to feed and augment your kingship. I have slept by your side while you tossed and muttered. Christ dies for mankind, you said, Who dies for the King? You frequently said that: Who dies for the king? Now I offer my death. I am the scapegoat. My blood can be nutriment at the roots of the failing oak of kingship.

  I have always loved you, and did my best for you that unhappy day at Montereau Bridge.

  With my deepest devotion to France’s true king …

  De Giac had only one favour to ask: he wanted his arm cut off and burned. Immediately after the amputation, grey and scarcely aware, he was sewn up in a sack like a cat. He was drowned from a bridge in the middle of the Auron.

  And Charles got the letter.

  Charles: It isn’t any good. Poor Pierre.

  It seemed Charles had an infallible nose for the one his scapegoat would be. Even more he felt remote from himself, so that he wondered was this flesh really favoured and caressed by that man, or was it just a dream of warmth? A man doesn’t stamp up and down for his fantasies and – in doubt – Charles did not stamp up and down for de Giac.

  He nonetheless began another fantasy with a guardsman called Camus. Camus was jumped and hacked about in the river-meadows outside Poitiers. De Richemont was again behind it. Charles saw it happen from the window of a small room in the castle. When Charles’s guard brought Camus’s mule to the courtyard and said Charles might like to keep it as a memory of his friend, Charles grunted and walked away. He did not believe that he was real enough to be bereaved, and therefore felt no bereavement. The emotionally subtle ownership that applies to souvenirs was something he could not indulge.

  He was a mortgagor and that was it. He was paying off the Montereau Bridge debts. Paying off and paying off.

  So there were varieties of deaths for Charles. By them he discovered how lost and null he was.

  For Jehannette deaths had always had strange meanings too.

  One day women had come wailing down the road from the direction of Greux. Someone was wheeling a hand-barrow and it gathered into it women who yelled and began to weep.

  Jehannette went out to see. A sensuous spasm of grief was in her belly. She felt light yet urgent. She had been twelve or thirteen years old then – long before the Boischenu ceremonies. Does every girl have this? she wondered. The lightness, the frenzy, the feel of the frayed edges of all the world’s foolishness coalescing in her guts.

  It was autumn weather, very misty, and the handcart and the women came groaning at her out of a grey fug. Her cousin Mengette wheeled the cart, refusing to yield it up. In the cart, sewn in a blanket, a blood-caked bag over its head, a corpse lay. Jehannette knew it was Collot, nineteen years old, Mengette’s husband, who had joined a free company contracted to la Hire, over in the Barrois. She battled with the other women to touch Mengette, to try to let Mengette know by touch how precisely she understood. For Collot had seen it was mad to be a peasant in this war, that only troopers were safe and made wages. But the god who looks after and prides himself on the zaniness of this very war had found out about him, that he was just a red-neck from the Meuse, not a fine gentleman-devotee. That god had done something terrible to his face.

  Jehannette thought: Christ Jesus is God. He’ll make men one in battle. In a decent age the knight and the peasant will take equal risk. Amen.

  She couldn’t explain why she believed this. It was almost as if Collot were one of the last of the unlucky casualties, as if a new kind of equitable war were about to begin in which he would have been safer.

  ‘Mengette, Mengette,’ everyone was screaming at the widow. Jehannette gave up struggling to get close. She thought, they’ve all got a fever in their bellies, all their wombs must feel like hives, where all the corpses and tears come home. Soon I’ll bleed and be more like them. I’ll give babies my breast as if no one is ever going to die again, yet when they die I’ll wail, I’ll wail because of the weight in my womb.

  Jehannette: Mengette. Oh holy Jesus!

  She felt unspeakable passions for the young corpse, for the caressings its burst head couldn’t take from Mengette. Poor, poor Mengette.

  Later the same year a General Robert de Saarbruck came to town with five companies of soldiers and put a protection fee of two pounds tournois on every house. Still Jehannette had not menstruated.

  In the new year, towns up and down the road could sometimes be seen burning at night. Then everyone dragged livestock and children over to the island, to the de Bourlémont ruins. Mad with fright, people trampled on the vegetable gardens inside the apron-wall.

  Jehannette’s breasts grew but there was no bleeding still. She was getting to be a private scandal to Zabillet and Catherine. While Jacques – who’d been told – thought she did it to make him look a fool.

  In yet another perilous summer, the town was caught at noon by Lord Henri d’Orly, in business for his own sake. His interests were furniture, livestock, bacon, grain, and he left with so much that he had to rent a second castle to warehouse the furniture in and extra pastures for the stolen cattle. A de Bourlémont who had married out of the district lobbied all the local gentry. They frightened d’Orly into returning the cattle.

  Jacques: That’s the sort of service you pay for.

  He had lost belief that the system would ever do any good for the people who paid up the money. But this one time it had. As if the world were considering returning to its old form.

  Still that damned girl hadn’t joined the race of women.

  Jacques felt that if she didn’t get over this seizure – he saw it as a seizure – she wo
uld never be any good. He sent Zabillet to consult Mauvrillette. The whore prescribed a perilous mixture made from crushed hawthorn. Already doubtful, Zabillet nevertheless made it up.

  Zabillet: Take this.

  Jehannette: What is it?

  Zabillet: It’s a mixture. For your trouble.

  Jehannette: Whose mixture is it?

  Zabillet: A wise woman’s.

  Jehannette: A wise woman’s?

  Zabillet: An expert’s.

  Expertise ran on a basic level in that part of the country.

  Jehannette: Mauvrillette?

  Zabillet: Perhaps. We have to try everything, Jehannette.

  For the circuits of nature were broken in her, she was an offence to Zabillet and Jacques, and Zabillet’s pity trembled in the eyes so much that Jehannette decided to drink the stuff.

  First her ears began to roar; there was pain in the glands of her throat. After ten minutes her cheeks puffed, and the flesh around her eyes ballooned.

  Jehannette: I can’t die.

  Zabillet put her to bed. She was finding it hard to breathe now.

  Jacques stood back from the bed.

  Jacques: Is it the change coming on?

  Zabillet: It’s poison, you bloody fool. Make some hot compresses.

  She herself made up an emetic of aloes. The girl felt their bitterness pouring in on top of her loss of breath. A jet of bile rose up her body and Mauvrillette’s poison ran from her mouth. They made her warm and soon she was mending.

  Zabillet did not let Jacques forget. She shamed him by confessing in the open to the priest, stopping him in the street, insisting on instant absolution. Everyday she had new stories disqualifying the whore.

  Zabillet: I heard this afternoon that Mauvrillette is pucelle to the witches over in Boischenu.

  Jacques: You ought to report it then. Straight to the Bishop of Toul. I’ve suffered enough for the bloody woman.