Blood Red, Sister Rose Read online

  Lassois: Things are slack.

  Messire had instructed her.

  Messire: Be rude the way Brother Jesus is with Pharisees. They remember you, you see. They won’t forget you, my love.

  A large sewer ran along the front of de Baudricourt’s fortress. She asked the man at the door where the provost’s office was and was sent to it. It lay in the main wall behind the outer yard. Inside, five young men were sitting talking quietly. Their off-duty, untrussed hose hung down their thighs. One spoke wild French with a Scots accent. They became silent and all together looked round at Lassois and the girl. Their eyes were very cold: they had, or pretended to have consumed dozens of thick-set girls in red dresses in their trade. They had no professional doubts about the management of farmers and farmers’ daughters.

  Jehannette: I want to know where Sire de Poulengy is.

  The girl’s bluntness frightened Lassois but the officers didn’t seem to feel any insult.

  Where’s Bertrand? they asked each other in bored voices.

  Someone: He’s up with the old man, they’re doing the fodder accounts.

  Another: He’s not here.

  Jehannette: As soon as you see him, tell him I’m in the city.

  Lassois flinched. The insane way that girl talked to them!

  Someone: He’ll be excited.

  Jehannette: Tell him his pucelle is in the city.

  They thought a second. Pucelle meant virgin-whore, it meant witch-madonna. It was a hazy word, a bit exciting. It had come into her mouth in a rush.

  A young one looked at her and said she’d better go. She turned to Lassois and talked with him quite loudly.

  Jehannette: Do you think the le Royers would put us up?

  The le Royers were cousins of the family.

  Lassois’s voice (saying yes yes) was diminished and his eyes on the ground.

  She walked up to one that wasn’t even looking at her. He was in his middle twenties and his eyes seemed close together. His hands were big. You could see the tops of his legs between the drawers and the untied hose that fell away from his hips. The skin was dark, obviously peasant, beneath its pretensions.

  Jehannette: What’s your name?

  She was choosing one of them for the responsibility of telling de Poulengy that his pucelle had come to town! Lassois’s turbid unhysteric anger was rising. He was sure he’d strangle the bitch if they got home.

  Jehannette: What’s your name?

  The knight-or-peasant answered. He told her to go to hell.

  Jehannette: What’s your name?

  Someone: Tell her.

  Knight or peasant: De Metz. Monsieur Jean de Metz.

  Everyone whistled when he said Monsieur – it must have been as suspect a Monsieur as Bertrand’s.

  Jehannette: Monsieur de Metz, I want you to tell Sir Bertrand his virgin is staying at the le Royers. Henri le Royer makes wheels. (She talked over her shoulder to Lassois.) Who’s the man he works for?

  Lassois shook his head. He was too panicked to remember names. He kept thinking, that bloody letter, why doesn’t she just give them that bloody letter?

  Jehannette: Anyhow, he can find the place. It’s somewhere down by the wall.

  Someone: Jesus!

  She walked away. Lassois walked quickly at her side. She could very nearly see the back of his neck prickling. He expected some reprisal to catch them up.

  At last they were back in the sane open squares.

  Jehannette: Don’t be angry with me, Durand. You’re nearly choking with anger.

  Lassois: You didn’t tell me anything about this! This Sir Bertrand stuff! This pucelle horseshit! This staying with the le Royers!

  Jehannette: We’ve got to stay somewhere till Bertrand turns up.

  Lassois: Bertrand! Wait till your old man hears …

  Jehannette: Go home if you want.

  But he understood all at once that he didn’t want to: he felt stimulated.

  The le Royers lived in the basement of a fuller’s shop. There was powder all over the stairs. Buying their three sons apprenticeships had broken them. Mother le Royer therefore coughed proudly in her four walls that ran with damp, amongst clotted deposits of fuller’s earth washed down from upstairs.

  She ran about in a frenzy of hospitality.

  Mother le Royer: Durand can sleep with Henri, and you with me Jehannette. I hope my croup won’t keep you awake.

  The le Royers, Durand Lassois, Jehannette all ate out of the one pot, like country people. They were at the long table, in a heavy mist of damp and wet fuller’s powder when Sir Bertrand de Poulengy knocked on the door.

  The le Royers went out walking to give Jehannette and de Poulengy a chance to talk. Lassois stayed in the corner.

  Bertrand: Jehannette, don’t ever say you’re my pucelle.

  Jehannette: I had to make them listen. That Jean de Metz.

  Bertrand: Look, I have good friends who are canons in the collegiate church here. They don’t understand words like pucelle, so don’t use them. Why are you here?

  Jehannette: It’s no use pretending. I hear Voices telling me to get an escort into France.

  Naturally, he said Voices? and Why into France? She told him. And further.

  Jehannette: The Voice called Messire talks with your voice.

  Bertrand: Mine?

  Jehannette: He’s got to use someone’s.

  He didn’t argue very much. He looked pale. He was the sort of person who knows in his blood that voices and bodies can be stolen away by gods or demons, that every beggar who knocks might be Christ and every pretty boy Satan. He was frightened.

  Jehannette: Also I’m the girl out of Merlin’s visions. Someone’s got to be that too. Someone has to get this king to Rheims where the only royal chrism is. Once that’s on his head and hands no one can say he’s a bastard.

  Across the table Bertrand got a cloth from inside his jacket and wiped his face all over with it.

  Bertrand: I don’t know how to ask … Is it that you want to sleep with me, Jehannette?

  Jehannette: Holy Christ, how could that be the ideal He seemed soothed, as if he wouldn’t have liked that very much himself. Jehannette was surprised by a tiny pulse of hurt.

  Bertrand: Do you know where Rheims is? Do you know where the king is? How far it is to the Loire?

  Jehannette: That’s not my business. That’s my escort’s business.

  There was gravy on the table. Bertrand made four dots in it, labelled them, and drew a rough line for the Loire. In this way:

  Bertrand: This is Vaucouleurs. Away over here is Chinon, where the king is staying, if he hasn’t already moved on. Now between Vaucouleurs and the Loire every town has a Burgundian or English garrison. It’s not till you get to Gien here that you see a French garrison. The countryside is full of free-lances. Welsh, English, Burgundian, Irish. When you get to the Loire it’s teeming with French and Scottish irregulars. None of them would care much if you were Merlin’s virgin. So it’s hard enough to get to Chinon.

  Jehannette: But it can be done. With friends. With the friends I have.

  Bertrand frowned up at her from his gravy-mapping. There was sensitivity of spirit about him: she had noticed that when she said someone has to be the virgin. It had come to him in a sharp way that yes someone had to be. But, in the same voice Messire used, he gave her human discouragement.

  Bertrand: Say this virgin of Merlin’s got to Chinon. All those English and Burgundian troops between Chinon and Rheims. There’d have to be set battles. Bedford would see to it.

  Jehannette: Set battles aren’t bad. Not for soldiers. They sell each other back and forth.

  Bertrand: They can be bad now, Jehannette. At Agincourt Henry Monmouth – the king who died of piles, you know – refused to sell thousands of knights back. He sent his men around to cut their throats. They’d given in because they trusted him, they thought they could depend on him. But it was just as if he hadn’t learned about the codes of war. I’m sure he had, even g
rowing up in a way-off place like Wales.

  Jehannette felt a glow for that dead king who had, at least, cancelled a world of silliness by making battle real.

  Jehannette: He did what he should have.

  Bertrand: You ought to think what you’re saying. It’s a matter of law. Law shouldn’t vanish like that.

  Jehannette: For ordinary people it wasn’t ever there. It’s time it let you others down. But tell me about Rheims.

  Bertrand: It would take years to get there. It’d take bankers, mortgages, treaties, contracts …

  Jehannette: Say Messire decided to move. With gods it’s different.

  Bertrand: Don’t say gods, for God’s sake. Say God. It’s safer. And I doubt God could manage it all at once.

  A giddy love of Messire and rude Brother Jesus and the king came up her body. It pained, emitting itself through her throat as a bubble.

  Jehannette: I know it can all get done if I just talk to him.

  Bertrand: The commandant?

  Jehannette: The king.

  Bertrand: You are mad.

  He had got up from the table and its slimy map and made a number of dazed circuits of the table.

  Bertrand: You heard these voices only after the confraternity met in Boischenu.

  It was an accusation.

  Jehannette: Nonsense.

  Looking beset, the almost-knight of Poulengy sat again. One elbow landed in the table-mess and he withdrew and rubbed it.

  Bertrand: You can’t see de Baudricourt.

  She told him however that she had a letter from Madame Aubrit. Aghast, he wanted to see it. He felt it all over.

  Bertrand: I could get you in on this excuse. But don’t expect me to back you up.

  Jehannette: I won’t make you blush.

  Bertrand: You probably will. No wonder poor Jacques used to beat you …

  Jehannette: Poor Jacques …

  Bertrand: Go to Mass. Be seen there. Take the eucharist.

  Jehannette: Of course.

  Bertrand: And you are … definitely … a virgin?

  Jehannette: They can send women to see.

  Bertrand: I don’t know why I’m doing this.

  His long mouth showed fear easily.

  Jehannette: Because you know the way Messire and the others work.

  Bertrand: Be good till I come back.

  She went to Mass in the collegiate church. Jesus was sacrificed under the forms of bread and wine, Jesus her brother, the great god with whom the Father was well pleased. Who had had voices and been unfashionably virgin and whose family had disapproved. And who knew that he would be sacrificed on the sacrifice day, not go by random fevers as Catherine had in Greux.

  Jesus and the old oak king and she, Jehannette, knew the day of mid-summer when they would have to go painfully. Their blood was needed for kingship, people, beasts, earth, the cycles of things, the redemption of lost worlds.

  People in the collegiate church were engrossed by the way she was engrossed in the bread-wine sacrifice. Some of them were there to see her, since the le Royers and Lassois and the officers of the provost’s department had talked. In a dull city she was worth watching.

  On Thursday Bertrand came back and told her to be at the fortress at five in the afternoon. He said she ought to bring Lassois with her. Because the general would behave better if she had a relative there to watch.

  She had never been inside a castle before, or understood how furniture could impose on strangers’ minds in the interests of its master. There were wonderful Flemish tapestries all the way upstairs and great oak cupboards, sideboards, chests, all garrisoned with secrets; and the secrets were wealth and power. Upstairs in a waiting room there were pikers whose tunics echoed Baudricourt’s gold lion shield painted up and down the rafters. You could have ridden a horse into the fireplace. Monsieur d’Ourches, the young St Denis, passed through the room, looked twice quickly at Jehannette. His shoulders moved slightly under his doublet, remembering the punishments in Boischenu.

  A Benedictine priest, probably the general’s secretary, kept coming to the door and calling out names … Maîte Devise, Maître Fremond … and this or that contractor got up and went in to be interviewed. Grocers, produce-merchants, ironmongers.

  They had lit the lights by the time Lassois and Jehannette were called in.

  There was a great desk, racks of ornamental arms, more high tapestries and more gold lions. De Baudricourt had big hips and small unmanly shoulders. His face was tolerant in a commercial way. It stated I understand men. He wasn’t anything like de Poulengy, had no insight into the way divinities worked on people.

  De Baudricourt: How’s Madame Aubrit?

  Jehannette: She’s well, your honour.

  He put his hand out for the letter she was holding. Tearing it open he muttered.

  De Baudricourt: She’s a lovely lady.

  Jehannette: Everyone says that.

  He read the letter. Then he called out to de Poulengy. There was an edge of complaint to his voice.

  De Baudricourt: This is a letter of introduction, not a straight letter. She says this little thing’s a sibyl.

  Though de Poulengy opened his mouth the general didn’t wait for words to come out. He turned to the Benedictine and told him to make a note: they were to write to an agent in Chalon, there were contracts to be tendered for.

  The Benedictine agreed to remind him.

  De Baudricourt: What do you want to predict then?

  Jehannette: I just want an escort to go to Chinon.

  De Baudricourt: Oh Jesus.

  Jehannette: I have Voices that talk to me with a great light. They say I have to go to Charles and take him to Rheims for anointing.

  She kept his eye, she wouldn’t explain any more. She thought, don’t beg pardon. Make them remember you by the size of what you say.

  Jehannette: I’m a virgin.

  De Baudricourt: That’s novel.

  He had a big venal grin.

  Jehannette: Messire – the Voice – tells me to ask for an escort.

  De Baudricourt: Who’s this Messire?

  Jehannette: Messire Michael of France, King Jesus’ right hand.

  She thought Try that on! Fit that in with the fodder accounts.

  De Baudricourt: You’re a mad woman.

  The door opened and Jean de Metz came in. The general stopped caring about the girl’s sanity.

  De Metz: I’m sorry, you said I was to come straight in.

  De Baudricourt: Yes, how did it go in Commercy?

  De Metz: I bought them twelve sols a head. Thirty prime beef. Eleven vealers.

  De Baudricourt: That’s wonderful.

  De Metz: We’ll have to send an escort for them.

  De Baudricourt: You can arrange that, can’t you?

  De Metz: Yes sir.

  De Baudricourt: All right. Would they like this girl down in the provost’s office?

  Jean de Metz came closer to survey her, but when he got near, she saw that although his eyes performed the livestock-judging movements they had been doing all day, they didn’t touch her face or body; as if he was saving someone’s feelings, hers or even his own.

  De Metz: Not while they’ve still got their horses.

  Everybody had forgotten Lassois, who now lost his temper.

  Lassois: You fucking redneck.

  He was screaming at de Metz.

  Lassois: You fucking redneck. You’re the worst kind.

  De Metz beseeched the lord general.

  De Metz: Let me have him in the provost’s office.

  De Baudricourt: No, listen, you’ve done a good day’s marketing. Clear out now.

  After he’d gone, de Baudricourt stood catering, quarter-mastering in his head. The demonic girl wouldn’t let him alone.

  Jehannette: You can afford an escort to go to the butchers in Commercy …

  De Baudricourt: For Christ’s sake, I get meat from the butcher. What do I get from you?

  Jehannette: Mid-Lent I want to b
e with the king. I must have an escort for that.

  She didn’t know where that gratuitous date came from.

  De Baudricourt (to de Poulengy): Has she got a boyfriend?

  Bertrand played Judas.

  Bertrand: I don’t know, Monsieur. Perhaps you could ask the farmer?

  Jehamette: I shall take the dauphin to be anointed in Rheims. I’ve got to have an escort in the new year at the latest.

  De Baudricourt (to Lassois): Has she got a boyfriend? Is she engaged?

  Lassois: She hasn’t. It worries her father.

  But Bertrand balanced this with an ounce of loyalty.

  Bertrand: She seems devoted to the idea of being a virgin.

  De Baudricourt: Why doesn’t she go into the convent?

  She could feel the interview beginning to close in if not close. Needle him, a voice said. Challenge him. Proclaim and be memorable!

  De Baudricourt: Her father still alive?

  Bertrand: They’re good people. Domremy-à-Greux.

  De Baudricourt: Jesus, shit-heaps outside their back-doors and they want to visit the king.

  Jehannette: Merlin says Isabeau the whore would ruin France and a virgin would save it.

  De Baudricourt: Ah, but your village isn’t in the Lorraine, it’s in this castellany.

  Jehannette: It’s close enough. Lorraine’s just over the river.

  What did he want from Merlin Magus – the family name, the year of baptism?

  The commandant shouted over her head to Lassois.

  De Baudricourt: Cousin! Take her back to her old man. Tell him his lord demands he punches her blue and has her named in church on Sunday.

  Jehannette: I’ll come back in the new year.

  De Baudricourt: Jesus.

  Jehannette: Don’t forget me.

  The commandant laughed in Bertrand’s direction.

  De Baudricourt: Don’t forget her!

  They went back to their last night at the le Royers. Lassois was in a furious daze again.

  Lassois: You didn’t tell me you were going to say any of those crazy things.

  Jehannette: There has to be a virgin. Is that crazy?

  Lassois: And that mid-Lent horseshit!

  Jehannette: I made it mid-Lent because I can get back to Vaucouleurs in the new year.