Into The Fire (51 page)

The next day, she will not see him, or the day after. But by August, she is sitting up, talking to him, making plans for her defence, for her priorities, for how she can perhaps stay alive, and if not that, how she can be certain not to shame her king or lay on him the taint of heresy. It is December before the physicians say she is well enough for a journey.

By Christ’s Mass, she is in Rouen, wholly owned by the English, kept in an unheated cell in a tower, chained.

MORNING HAS MERGED
into afternoon and Picaut is in the interview rooms at the station. Garonne has bought her a sand wich, which is the kind of thing he used to do in the old days.

The bread is fresh and hard and she gnaws her way through it as she questions Yves Perusse, Christelle Vivier’s driver. She is expecting an older man, veteran of a dozen campaigns, but what she gets is yet another of the perfectly plastic aides whose only distinguishing feature is that he has an evident crush on Cordier’s PA – older, wears her sense of purpose effortlessly – which is not remotely reciprocated. That apart, their stories corroborate and neither of them has the kind of technical knowledge needed to alter an email en route from her laptop to his phone.

It’s just gone three o’clock by the time Picaut finishes the interview. Patrice has not texted.

Upstairs in Picaut’s office, Sylvie is using Picaut’s computer. Picaut hooks up a chair with her foot, then leans on the back, looking down at the screen. ‘What have you got?’

‘Dead ends.’ Sylvie pulls up three pages on separate screens. ‘I’ve accessed the two Vivier backups either side of the email, but I can’t follow the trail through to what was actually sent to the driver: it looks exactly the same, but it can’t be unless the driver changed it himself.’

‘Do you think he did?’

‘Why would he? More to the point, how could he? He didn’t have that kind of technical intelligence. I think someone else has been here, but that’s only instinct. It’s like walking through a room with someone else’s scent hanging in the air. It just doesn’t smell right.’

‘Ducat doesn’t count virtual scent as evidence.’

‘I know.’ Sylvie chews on a nail. ‘I hate to say this, but we need Patrice.’

‘Right.’ Picaut dials his number from memory and can’t think how long she has known it. It doesn’t ring. She throws her phone down in disgust. ‘He’s out of signal. Can you email him?’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Why not? We have all his addresses.’

‘No, I mean it’s not possible that his phone is out of signal. Patrice has ways of linking to every mast in Europe. He’s
never
out of signal.’

Picaut flips her phone to speaker. ‘You try.’

Sylvie does. The tone is the same. She hands the phone back, pinches her nose. ‘So he’s either taken the battery out, or wrapped the phone in aluminium foil so we can’t reach him.’

‘Email him anyway.’

Sylvie does. They wait. There is no reply. They send a text. There is no reply.

Sylvie says, ‘He could have gone to sleep.’

‘He wouldn’t switch his phone off. I’ll go. You stay on this.’ Picaut tries to sound carefree. She’s not sure she succeeds. The look Sylvie gives her could as easily be knowing as apologetic.

Sylvie says, ‘I looked up his address. Do you know he lives in Blois?’

‘Fuck.’ That’s an hour away. ‘I thought he had an apartment in Orléans?’

‘No. Blois. And not just Blois. He’s in the old town, on the same side of the river as the castle. It costs upwards of five million euros just to put a roof over your head there.’ Sylvie’s brows tie complex knots. ‘Do you think he still lives with his parents?’

Picaut grabs her jacket from the back of the chair. ‘I’ll get him. You keep working on the servers. Text me if you get anywhere. We’ll be back before five.’

‘
FOR YOU, RUSTBEARD;
for your trouble.’

‘It is no trouble. I serve your lordship at all times.’

Another meeting, another lie. Not a stable this time to meet with my lord of Bedford, but a freezing, windowless room in the tower of the citadel at Rouen. Rush lights cringe on the walls. The shadows are fatter than the shapes they surround. If he looks up, he fancies snow drifts between the rafters.

A pigskin pouch sprawls across the table, big as a man’s fist, twisted tight about the neck with iron wire: his payment in silver for bringing the Maid to Rouen whole, alive, able to plead, to speak – and to die. He is not sure he is right to have done this. Many mornings, he has thought that death would be a blessing, the way they are holding her. He has not found a way to get her out, nor even to lessen the horror of her captivity.

‘My lord, if she is charged with heresy, she must be held by ecclesiasticals, by women of Christ, not by men who—’

‘
Must?
’

Tomas holds still, sweating in the cold. His hand, resting on the table, not yet reaching for the bag of silver. Bedford’s knife, slammed into the coarse-grained wood, his fist behind it, his face close now, smelling sour, eyes red as a boar’s. If he has ever truly been close to death, he is closer now.

‘Only that it will undermine the trial if she is seen to be treated outwith the law.’

‘Rustbeard, you go too far. Bishop Cauchon is a man of the cloth. He is of the university in Paris. If he says the whore must be held in a cell, guarded night and day by English men at arms, I will not interfere. You will
never
tell me what I must or must not do.’

And that is how it is, and has been, and will be. Bedford, of course, has not been able to keep himself away from this, the greatest theatre of his generation, but he is keeping scrupulously clear of the proceedings. The French are doing this. The French are twisting canon law to suit their own ends. The French are ignoring all the legal precedents. The French, it has to be said, are making of themselves a mockery.

Bedford wrenches his knife from the table. It comes free with the crunching snap of breaking bones. ‘Has she confessed to you?’

‘I have told you her confessions. She says nothing to me that she has not already said to the inquisitors.’ Inquisitors are becoming harder to find. The deputy inquisitor has already excused himself, finding urgent business elsewhere. This process has not all gone the way Bedford wants.

‘You shall move her to a new cell, on the outer walls. It has a room underneath in which a man may secrete himself to listen. You will hear her confession before she goes to trial. She will speak to you. She trusts you. And we shall have its record to use against her.’

Eyes down. Hands clasped behind. To the hairs on his head, the loyal servant. ‘Who will stand beneath and write the record, lord?’

‘A priest. A priest who can be trusted in this nest of vipers. Find me one.’ And Bedford is gone.

Later, alone in the piteous cell they have found for her, where an unglazed window lets in the sleet, the rain, the snow. She is bunched up on the bed, wrapped in her topcoat, her nose red-blue and running, her hands up the sleeves of her coat for warmth, her legs tucked beneath her as far as they go. They are held by iron fetters, and those fetters linked to a chain that rises over a beam and down to a block of iron-oak so big that it takes three men to lift it.

If she moves, they hear it. If she wants to use the latrine, she has to ask them. Four English guards sleep in her cell, so close they can touch her, breathe on her, fart all over her. They are vile men, filthy, who call her whore and piss in her food. It is breaking his heart. He cannot let it break hers.

He brings her a wooden bowl of hot stew, free from contamination. He sits on the bed, and rubs her back while she eats. Outside, the guards huff and grumble, but Bedford has told them that Brother Tomas will win her confidences, that he must be allowed to be her friend.

Into her ear, quietly, he says, ‘My lord the bishop sends to say that you are to attend the public court in the robing room of the Chapel Royal. It will be warmer there.’

‘With you in attendance?’

‘I can be present, but no, lady, they will not let me stand with you. They say the heresy is yours and you must face the court alone.’

‘I will have counsel for my defence? Orléans would pay for it, I think?’

‘Half of France would pay for it. You would have the best counsel gold could buy, more men than Cauchon brings against you; but they know that, and they will not allow it. They say that you have claimed to hear the counsel of heaven and so no earthly counsel will be provided.’

‘They would not treat a man thus.’

‘They wouldn’t treat a dog thus.’

She finishes eating. He takes the bowl and sets it aside, takes her hands in his to warm them.

She is well enough, now, as well as Tomas can make her. The irons gouge into her ankles, but he has done what he can to pad them. The rest of her maladies are to do with her fall from the heights at Beaurevoir. It was, indeed, seventy feet; he checked. And she fell from very near the top while trying to escape. Nobody will say she jumped. To attempt suicide is a heresy in itself.

Her ribs were broken in the fall; they still give her pain. And periodically, she has crippling headaches. He thinks her father is back. Sometime in the month of semi-consciousness after he reached her bedside she seemed to look past him, to someone not-there, who gave her greater comfort than anyone living. She goes silent sometimes, and when she comes back to him she is stronger, more sure of herself. ‘Tomas, don’t worry so. I shall not let them undermine me.’

Oh, my dear.

And tomorrow it starts. He releases her hands. ‘Now let me take your confession.’ This said loudly, so that Huguet, below, can hear it, and they can be sure that their stories correlate.

She knows of the man below, but not yet who it is. Huguet is his secret: that he is here, and Marguerite with him. They are among the hundreds who are come to Rouen to see the circus that is the trial: to be near her.

‘What will they ask me?’

‘I don’t know. On the first day, they will take an oath only, I think.’

She gives a raw, cold smile. ‘That will be enough.’

‘Do you, Jehanne, who calls yourself the Maid, swear that you will speak the truth to any question that is put to you?’

It is not by chance that the first day of her public trial is Ash Wednesday, 21 February 1431. Cauchon seeks to make a point, although it is moot whether she is the child of Christ, persecuted by the Romans, or they are the agents of Christ, bringing the heretic into the holy fold.

Either way, as Bedford had said it would be, the court is convened in the Chapel Royal of the Château de Bouvreuil at Rouen. Painted windows colour the light, sending streaks of boldest blue, of red and green and butter-sun yellow across the floor.

She is wearing her doublet and hose. Her hair is cut short, the length of a helm. She is a small thing in all this great, vast space, facing forty men, forty minds, bent on her destruction.

The learned men of Paris are all about, trimmed in black and white striped squirrel hoods, white and black ermine collars. Their gowns are dyed so deeply black that light cannot escape them. They are pied crows, feasting on her soul, and Pierre Cauchon, England-loving bishop of Beauvais, is the greatest, most hungry of them, the most angry.

He knows himself in the wrong at the start, and it irks him. He has bent and twisted so many rules to bring her here, himself granted a fictional see which allows him to lead her trial. But he is thrashing around trying to find something to charge her with and after three quarters of a year he still has brought no witnesses, no accusations, no list of charges.

He cannot even prove she is not a maid. Twice, he has had her tested, once by the wife of Warwick, the English commander at Rouen, who has confirmed her maidenhood. He cannot impugn so great a lady, much as he would like to cry her false. He would check her himself, but what would that make him? He would never live it down.

In desperation, he seeks now to trap his victim solely in the net of her own words. No charges have been brought against her save the loose one of heresy, and that without foundation. So far, indeed, she has said nothing wrong, not in confession, not in public, not in private. It is without precedent. If he could accuse her of being too good a knight he might have a case, but since when was that a heresy?

Cauchon is beside himself and the proceedings have barely begun. ‘Do you swear?’

‘I don’t know what you may wish to ask me and there are some things of which I am counselled not to speak. I will talk about my father and mother and those things I have done after I came to the king at Chinon. I will talk about my feats of arms, and the war against the English. But I will not speak about those things which are between me and my king and God.’

—You must swear.

—I cannot.

—You must.

—I cannot. I will not. You do not have the power to make me.

—That is not true, as you will find out.

Oh, my lady, have a care. You don’t understand: these are forty of the highest trained legal minds in France and they think you a peasant. They will treat you as if you are stupid and you don’t understand how much power this gives them.

—You must swear.

—I will swear to tell of those things I may tell. Of the rest, I may know later whether or not I can tell you.

Eventually, they bring a bible: a great thing, vast, bearing Christ in His passion in gold, and Saints John and Mary, encrusted with garnets and emeralds, sapphires and pearls, the jewelled heaven. They set it before her. She kneels, and in God’s name swears to answer truthfully those questions concerning her faith; nothing more.

It is not enough; not nearly. Cauchon comes close, bending over. Even to Tomas, three rows back, he smells of old incense and new sweat. He smells of battles yet to be fought, and of garlic.