Blood Red, Sister Rose Read online

  With her daughter, Zabillet took a new attitude. Since the cycles of womanhood didn’t occur in Jehannette’s body, the girl must be specially chosen.

  Zabillet: If you wanted to join the Augustinian nuns in Neufchâteau …

  Jehannette: No, I don’t …

  Zabillet: It’s a rung up in the world.

  Jehannette: They’d think I was possessed by devils.

  Zabillet could make up fables of her own to soothe the girl.

  Zabillet: Some women use their organs so badly. God has to ask others to do without their womanhood.

  Jehannette: Some women …

  She was thinking in fact of sensuous Madame Aubrit.

  Zabillet: Queen Isabeau. She lets herself be fucked by wildcats and big German dogs.

  Jehannette: My womb’s dead because of what the whore does?

  The concept half amused Jehannette.

  Zabillet: What else can we believe?

  Jehannette: I don’t believe it.

  Zabillet: Why not?

  Jehannette was angry now.

  Jehannette: Does God have to balance wombs out? Like a money-lender? I don’t believe it.

  Zabillet (hurt): You’d talk more politely with Madame Aubrit.

  For Zabillet still thought Jehannette had a passion for Madame Aubrit.

  When she was expecting her first bleed and it was late she thought it’s because I don’t love anyone here enough. The house-loves and town-loves aren’t sharp enough in me. She thought that she would not begin to bleed till some larger demands were made on her organs than Zabillet, Jacques and the others could make. Other girls, finding the kitchen and the town a total world, broke open like pods, bled into their surroundings, found some ripe boy by their seventeenth year, became the kitchen, became the town and a fount of harvests and children.

  Jehannette knew it wasn’t going to happen to her. The more she learnt about Zabillet and Jacques, the further she felt from them: it wasn’t meant to be that way.

  Now Zabillet had three moles on her soft upper-belly under the left breast. It was a good skin, not a peasant’s. She was having a lot of pain in her belly about 1422 and when she bled it was a massive, disordered business. Jacques’s body was gingery and where the freckles left off in the direction of the fish-white hips a sort of sweat rash began down his thighs. He had a funny navel, scarcely indented, and eye-shaped. All these and any other items Jehannette had picked up seemed to distance her further from that mesh of intimate and cherished specialties her family was.

  One night she woke from a dream of copulation with a goat-skinned god wearing horns and the face of her godmother’s husband (that Monsieur de Vittel who was taken at the little battle of Maxey, and was sold back to his wife at a ruinous price). Jehannette woke to find herself cleaving to Catherine. In the long bed that had once carried the whole family there was just herself and Catherine and small Pierrolot. Catherine pushed her away. No rancour in the pushing, Catherine knew what it was all about, she was engaged to be married.

  Catherine: I can’t help you, ask a friend. But just be a little careful you don’t break the maidenhead.

  Jehannette was even grateful that Catherine knew there was some lust in her: it balanced somehow her parents’ fear of her freakishness. But she knew straightaway in the dark, with Pierrolot abandoned in seven-year-old sleep at her back, that if she took part in the body games Catherine and Mengette played and which were played with boys under the bored eyes of cattle out on the slopes of Bermont then she would vanish into some pattern of family and kinship. As would Catherine, very very soon.

  In her scared night flesh she whispered.

  Jehannette: I want to get married.

  It was almost true.

  But she didn’t ask any of the boys and girls up in Bermont pastures for physical aid. She saw all that by-play as a sort of suicide – dragging her down into a foreign population.

  However, some mania might come and then I’ll bleed. She wondered if it could even be some cowboy seen in a new way, with an eye that hadn’t yet grown in her head. The songs had it that way. Yet she didn’t believe the songs.

  Zabillet, Jacques, Catherine all went on talking about convents. Convents – it seemed they believed – were bivouacs for dead wombs.

  The idea of a convent appalled her: she didn’t want the sort of obedience they had to have. She didn’t want a pyramid of nuns above her all empowered to tell her to be silent and how to pray. Nor did she want the anonymous chastity of the good convents. The promiscuity of the bad ones bored her more than the flesh-play of the Bermont slopes. And nun-raping was one of the war’s best sports: that had to be remembered. A disappointing way to lose your carefully kept chastity. Last, she couldn’t read, had never learned her hom-book. The nearest school was in Maxey where they were Bungundian. Without learning, she’d be worked in a convent no differently from the way Jacques worked her.

  At court on the Loire, Richemont, invited in by Yolande to clean out Tanguy and de Giac, was himself beyond control. In the end he took his army away and occupied Bourges, just to show Charles.

  Charles, in his sleep, sang cantatas of longing for his secret and blood brother. When will you come, my special one. His kingship had near-vanished. The new chamberlain was a man called Georges de la Tremoille – Fat Georges, they dubbed him. He had a high voice which he knew sounded ridiculous. So he used it as little as possible.

  Fat Georges (to Charles): I am totally devoted to your majestic kingship.

  He nonetheless had grain, wine and timber concessions with the Burgundians.

  A man must live, after all.

  When he wrote to the Duke of Burgundy, Philip, strong son of the murdered strong man, he always began the letter:

  My dearest and exalted Philip …

  He even hoped Philip forgave him for working inside the assassin’s camp.

  Domremy-à-Greux was a strange town, legally considered. If you sketched it it would look liks this:

  The top half of the town stood in country belonging more immediately to Charles the boy than did the southern thirty homesteads and the island. The Duke of Bar was, like his father-in-law the Duke of Lorraine, in a loose alliance with the English and Burgundians. The equivocal nature of the town sang to and echoed the two-headed nature of the war. But in the end peasants only had one nationality: they were victims. Their mothers and fathers had been victims too so that the strain was – by the year of the blind knights of Verneuil – getting strong. Knowing this, all the town paid the rent for the de Bourlémont ruin. All the town paid the same protection money with the same high sense of the insanity of the word protection.

  Jacques lived just inside France. At the back of the house, there was the manure heap, then his half-dozen apple trees. Then a little strip of common pasture, and the churchyard and church. By the churchyard was a slab of stone that took you over a little gush of water into Bar where the other victims lived. No one could take seriously the business of the border. There was a border like that at Goussaincourt where companies of English, Welsh and Irish had already done an unsubtle massacre, not giving a damn for the feudal borders.

  On a Saturday at the end of autumn a little after her insight in bed with Catherine, in the year in which her womanhood should have begun, she felt a warmth on her right side. It came from the direction of the belfry which at the second was ringing noon and angelus. With the warmth in her jaw and down her right shoulder and side she heard a man’s voice speaking in very loud, very jagged diction, putting weight on the words, filling them to the peals of the bell.

  The Voice: Jehanne, Jehannette, a virgin, a virgin Jehanne, the king’s sister, sister in the blood.

  The radiance had a sort of face to it, like a lean sun with a beard of gold. You had no doubt that it was prince, god. Your guts leaped to it, your guts said yes, yes, tell me more.

  The radiance went out of her eye, the delicious warmth out of her right side. She shivered amongst bare apple boughs. In her hands were P
ierrolot’s torn breeks. She would sometimes do domestic things for Pierrolot, her little brother.

  She thought that’s the last word then: virgin, virgin, sister in the blood. Because I’d do anything for that voice, that radiance in the side.

  Till Tuesday Jacques kept complaining.

  Jacques: What’s wrong with that bloody girl?

  On Tuesday it came again, warmth, the sculptured sun for its face.

  The Voice: Jehannette, Jehannette. King. Poor brother king. King without a crown. Poor brother king, Jehanne.

  Then the bells stopped ringing but it stayed, the god, and wanted an answer.

  Jehannette: I love you.

  The Voice: It can’t be helped.

  Jehannette: I love you. I love you.

  The Voice: Yes.

  It spoke quite everyday talk when the bells weren’t there for it to fit its conversation to.

  Jehannette: How do I know you aren’t a devil?

  The Voice: If the devil were as lovely as this it wouldn’t be a sin to love him. By the way, we love you. You’re our darling, our sweet little one.

  Jehannette: You’ve got to tell me … please.

  The Voice: I’m Messire, you know me, the Messire of France. Monsieur St Michael, Brother Jesus’ right hand. Or left. You’ll listen to me, my love. And to two other suns and luminaries. Brother Jesus looked at them, two sun-women, and was smitten. His god-heart broke open.

  Jehannette: How do I know you’re telling the truth?

  The Voice: Don’t be a mean little witch making bargains. You hear my voice, that’s enough. Brother Jesus’ heart broke open like a pod for Madame Ste Margaret and Madame Ste Catherine. Listen to them. Brother Jesus’ sweet heart will break open for you. You’re his little sister. You’re his duckling. I carry his messages. That sums it up. You’re Jesus’ brother-sister and the king’s. You are the one who bleeds for the king like Jesus bleeding for you.

  Jehannette: Bleeding?

  The Voice: Do you know what I’m going to ask you to do?

  Jehannette: No.

  The Voice: I’m going to ask you to take the king to the holy city of France and have him anointed there.

  Jehannette: But I can’t …

  The Voice: You’ll get your instruction and bedazzlement from me. For comfort you’ll have Mesdames Margaret and Catherine.

  Jehannette: How do I know you’re not one of the old gods, the bad beautiful ones?

  The Voice: My love, my love …

  But he wouldn’t reassure her. You’ve got to take that risk, he seemed to say. Take it? She took it.

  But still she worried about the old gods.

  The old gods, who were many and called devil, poisoned politics, stole babies and bodies, punctured the virginity of nuns in the small hours. At night they came into the yards, up to the edge of the road, breathed on the crops. For jealousy of lovely prince Jesus had turned them malignant.

  The old gods took a thousand incarnations. Lovely voices were some. The shape of farmers was another. One day only two months before, when Jehannette had gone moping up to Bermont by herself, Mauvrillette had come out from behind gorse and said did she want to see the devil?

  Mauvrillette’s smell and plentiful body enchanted the girl. She felt the way the men felt: I can spend a little time with her on the rim of a mad seamy hinterworld and still get home in time for dinner. They hid behind the gorse together. Mauvrillette had her arm around Jehannette: they were sisters for the moment. Within ten minutes a farmer from Greux called Guillaume Mosquillat came by with a bull he had got cheap in Gondricourt. Mauvrillette sighed and her free hand caressed the tips of the gorse fronds. But even she couldn’t go out to him. The witches could greet their devil only at the Esbat.

  Mauvrillette: I know his great cold prick.

  The whore was proud of her knowledge and wanted to share it some active way.

  Jehannette would not be recruited and dragged herself away.

  Jehannette: I wouldn’t have guessed the devil had gone into the shape of Mosquillat.

  But the world was full of the incarnations of gods. Everyone knew it.

  Two women luminaries came to her with heat in her side any old time of the day. Madame Margaret. Madame Catherine. Strong presences in France, known friends of the king’s earth. She believed them outright – there was feminine softness in them. Their faces ran golden.

  Jehannette: He means it, Messire does? Anointing the king?

  She was in the orchard when she asked that. Mesdames Ste Catherine and Ste Margaret blossomed and blazed at her side.

  Ste Catherine: He means it.

  Jehannette: What do I do to make it happen?

  Ste Margaret: The event presents itself. You don’t make it. It presents itself.

  Jehannette: I love you.

  Ste Catherine: If we could we’d fuse you into our fire. Right now. Without you losing blood.

  Jehannette: Blood?

  Ste Margaret: Everyone loses blood. Be consoled, darling. Jehannette coughed.

  Jehannette: Me too?

  Ste Margaret: Your blood is signed over to the king.

  The girl screamed.

  Jehannette: Jesus!

  Catherine, her sister not the apparition, came out to see what she was yelling for in the slumbering orchard.

  The Mass was a test. Because if Messire and his two beauties were old gods the Mass would rout them. The old gods were blood gods and sperm gods and the chaste and white-bread God of Mass threw them into fits and tortured the bodies of their familiars.

  She went to Mass every day and there were no convulsions.

  Then she wondered if she was some god herself, some incarnation.

  The voices filled in her godhood word by word: virgin, whore, king, crown, France, Rheims.

  Virgin was the other test. The blood and phallus gods could not talk in a virgin. That was a principle of lore and politics and theology. She knew that there was no court and no political lobby where a virgin could be impeached on old-god grounds.

  One day –

  Ste Margaret: Did you notice your womb is dead?

  Jehannette: I’d noticed it a lot, Madame.

  Ste Margaret: It’s sacred to the king.

  Jehannette: Holy God!

  Ste Margaret: Holy prince!

  But Margaret was tough too – she couldn’t help it; there were tough demands she was required to make. Of Jehannette.

  Naturally, Jehannette suffered stages of wild fear. Because ecstasy is so temporary. She tried to talk to Catherine her sister whose husband had taken out a lease to farm with big brother Jacquemin on the island of the Bourlémonts.

  Jehannette: Do you think it’s all right to love a king you never saw more than you love poor old Jacques?

  Catherine: It’s easier. I got so tired of the smell of old Jacques. Young men don’t smell nearly so much. Colin doesn’t anyhow.

  Jehannette: Kings must smell too.

  But the argument was already dead. To Catherine love involved smells and skin-textures, ten thousand intimate sensations binding father-daughter, husband-wife. To Jehannette it was a god-pressure out of some deep Hades in her womb.

  Jehannette: My womb.

  Catherine: What?

  Catherine didn’t think there was anything special to wombs. But often Jehannette had this instinct that her own womb was a more universal warehouse than other women’s. All that was permanent of the war found room there. All the fragments of Collot’s scream remaining after his de-faced head congealed around his dead brain. All the lasting fragments of Mengette’s wail. All the belly roars of gutted farmers, and of farmers’ wives who found some Welshman cutting whimsically with sharp edges at their accessible bellies.

  It wasn’t as warm, her womb, as other women’s. It wasn’t a place for babies. But it carried its weight.

  She went up to Bermont on her own, where a glade of blood and phallus gods had been reconsecrated to the virgin. There was a stark shrine to Jesus’ mother there ma
de out of large grey stones. She had no fits in that place.

  Jacques: She goes up there on her own. Cocky bitch!

  She went up there through the birches often. An instinct seemed to prevent Jacques from complaining too much. And coming to danger in the forest was the least of her worries.

  The heat, the weight in the side, the sun-voice on her right.

  Jehannette: Am I a god?

  Messire: The great God? What do you want?

  Jehannette: I mean, Messire, a little god?

  The sun presence said nothing. She could tell it was amused, as if it found her endearing.

  Messire: I suppose a little god.

  Jehannette: Ah.

  Messire: My duckling, you’ll die in your season.

  Jehannette: My season?

  Messire: You’re the one that mentioned gods. Well, gods die in their season. After they do the great acts they have to do.

  Jehannette: Great acts …?

  Messire: Getting the king your darling brother to his holy city Rheims.

  All at once the lady presences were there.

  Ste Catherine: Virgin Jehanne.

  Ste Margaret: Whore Isabeau.

  Ste Catherine: Crown.

  Ste Margaret: Crown.

  Ste Catherine: France.

  Ste Margaret: Blood.

  Jehannette: Whose?

  Ste Catherine: Don’t have any doubts. We love you.

  Every week or so, maybe at the end of a meal, when terror would – without warning – take over Jacques as well as his daughter, they would start hugging each other.

  Jacques: You’re my favourite little cow. You little cow.

  She kissed him about the face madly, as if he was already dead. And sometimes it was worst of all to think she were going to die at some high crazy feast instead of by accident, by eating the wrong thing or meeting Irish cavalry around a bend.

  Jacques himself was always dreaming about her. Because she was his favourite little cow and she wouldn’t have a period or attend to any of the other decencies. He complained at breakfast about his dreams. The one he had most was that she was off on the road with soldiers.

  Zabillet: What nationality?

  Zabillet would have been grateful for any saving symbol, and believed in Jacques’s talent for dreams. He had dreamed her sister-in-law’s death under a falling balcony in Sermaize in 1416. In his 1416 dream a black bird had beaten the sister-in-law to the ground with its wings.