trying with a touching inefficiency to hide her breasts and pubis, then looked up, squinting a little as a man held a torch above her head.
It was Hal Bolingbroke. Joan recognised him instantly from the vision Christ had
vouchsafed her.
―Well met, Joan of Arc, Maid of France,‖ Bolingbroke said. ―You seem strange to me,
for I had imagined a maiden of great strength and bravery. Instead, I find this crouching,
trembling peasant.‖
He stepped back, turning the torch towards a wall. The chamber was quite roomy, and the
torch barely lit what covered the wall.
But Joan saw clearly enough.
―I found this,‖ Bolingbroke said conversationally, ―in the great guildhall of this fair city.
Apparently the guild‘s seamstresses and embroiderers had worked at it ceaselessly for a year. It
has only just been completed. I brought it here.‖ His voice hardened. ―I thought it might cheer
you.‖
Joan could hardly bear to look upon the huge tapestry. It was most beautifully wrought,
and most perfectly designed (although unintentionally on the part of its makers) to serve
Bolingbroke‘s need to humiliate Joan.
It took as its subject Joan of Arc herself, depicting her at the height of her fame as she led
the French forces against the English at the siege of Orleans. She was clad in gleaming white
armour, riding her roan stallion. One arm was held on high, carrying a great banner depicting the
heraldic devices of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel. Her visor was open, and her face shone
with heaven‘s glory, her eyes fervent, trusting, believing.
―Where your armour now, Joan?‖ Bolingbroke asked as Joan finally tore her eyes away
from the tapestry. ‖Where your glory? Where,‖ his voice hardened into vindictiveness, ―your
angelic companions?‖
His arm lowered, thrusting the torch almost into Joan‘s face. ―Look at you, dirty, ugly,
teary girl. How could I have thought that you were ever a worthy opponent of mine? Ah! Put her away, for I cannot bear to think that I wasted a night of my life, let alone thirty pieces of silver, on this sorry wench.‖
The two men-at-arms grabbed Joan by her upper arms, dragging her towards the centre of
the chamber. She cried out, lifting her legs against her abdomen and attempting to hide her breasts with her hands.
They gave her no chance. Even as she dragged her legs upwards, the men lifted her high,
throwing her through the opening of an iron cage suspended from the ceiling of the chamber.
Joan landed with a jolt and cried out in distress, for the floor of the cage was made of
nothing more than crisscrossed roughened iron bars, and her skin scraped and tore as she slid
across to the far wall of the cage, slamming her right shoulder and arm against it.
The cage door slammed, and she heard the sound of a lock being turned.
The two men-at-arms left and, after a very long pause, so did Bolingbroke.
The door banged shut behind him, leaving Joan suspended in her iron cage in the dark of
her gaol.
After a few minutes of staring blankly into the silent darkness, her arms wrapped about
her breasts in a vain attempt to negate the horror of her earlier humiliation, Joan began to cry,
crushed by the hatred of Bolingbroke.
IV
Tuesday 20th August 1381
—i—
The door swung open suddenly, violently, crashing into the wall and springing halfway
back into the room.
Joan jerked out of a half slumber, crying out. She began to shake, as much from fear as
from the cold that had almost frozen her.
A guard stepped in, holding out a torch. He grunted at the sight of Joan, huddled in the
furthest corner of her cage, dirty and shivering.
Then he stepped back, and bowed.
Two men came in, awkwardly, carrying something between them.
Something that cried out as they stepped down into the chamber. Something they carried
with the most infinite of gentleness.
A third man followed these two. He carried, not some as-yet-undetermined bundle, but a
simple wooden chair with several blankets and a pillow on its seat.
Behind him came yet one more person. A woman, but she was hidden by the shadows
and the shapes of the men moving in front of her, and Joan did not see her clearly.
Joan returned her attention to the two men who carried the bundle. The third man had
placed the chair directly before Joan‘s cage, arranging upon it the pillow and blankets, and now
the two men lowered their charge toward the chair.
As they had carried it, so now they lowered it with such infinite gentleness, respect and
love that Joan lost some of her terror. If this bundle was so loved and respected, then how could
it mean harm?
The bundle—a woman, Joan could see that now—moaned as the men deposited her into
the chair. She clutched at the right-hand arm of the chair with her hand; her left arm was bound
up tightly in a sling. The two men hurried away, searching for more torches to place into wall
sconces, while the other woman now came forward, and murmured soothing words to the woman
in the chair, and wrapped her about in the blankets.
When the torches—five in all, their light now exposing Joan‘s shame for all to see—had
been set into their sconces, the woman in the chair spoke.
―Leave us alone now with the Maid,‖ she said, her voice firm and clear. ―She can do us
no harm.‖
The guard who had been standing all this time by the open door looked uncertain.
The woman in the chair, even though she did not turn her head to see him, sensed this
uncertainty. ―Go now,‖ she said. ―I will come to no harm.‖
The guard grunted yet again, shuffled about for a moment, then turned and left the
chamber, closing the door behind him.
Joan, still huddled in the far corner of the cage, her arms wrapped about her nakedness,
stared at her two visitors.
The woman in the chair was many things.
She was a queen, for although she wore no crown or jewels proclaiming her status, the
essential majesty of her soul shone through her beautiful hazel eyes.
She was a woman dying, for Joan could clearly see her skeletal frame underneath her
simple robe of white wool, overlaid at the shoulders by a sky-blue shawl. Her forthcoming death
was also apparent in the colour and texture of her skin, for it was grey and papery, and in the
thinness and dryness of her hair, which had fallen from her scalp in great patches.
And she was a woman somehow indefinably magical. This ‗magical‘ Joan could not
clearly determine; it was merely something about, or, rather, within the woman. An unknown
secret, perhaps. Something unknown, but…but something very, very blessed indeed.
She strongly reminded Joan of someone, but Joan could not quite place who. That she
had seen this woman before Joan had no doubt…it was just that she could not place the when or the where.
But that did not matter. All that mattered was that this magical, otherworldly woman was
here now.
Joan‘s eyes filled with tears of joy that she should be so graced with the presence of this
woman.
The other woman, standing beside the chair of the dying queen, was incomparably
beautiful. Joan did not think she had ever seen any woman so beauteous. She had dark, bronzed
hair, shot through with ripples of gold. Her face was wonderfully moulded, her eyes the deepest
black, her figure that of the most intimately desirable woman.
But this woman‘s beauty was tempered with sadness. This woman grieved. For what,
Joan was not sure. Certainly for this dying queen, but her grief went deeper and further than that.
―Margaret,‖ said the queen in a soft, gentle voice, ―take my shawl and give it to this poor
girl. I cannot believe that Hal would treat her so.‖
―No,‖ said Joan, her voice cracking after almost twentyfour hours locked in this cold,
damp prison. ―No, madam, I beg you. Keep it about yourself, for it is so cold in here.‖
―I soon shall not feel the cold,‖ said the queen. ―Margaret, do as I ask.‖
The woman, Margaret, lifted the shawl away from the queen and carried it the two paces
to the cage.
―Joan,‖ she said, ―wrap yourself in this. Please. It will give Mary pleasure that you do
so.‖
Now that she was close, Joan realised that Margaret was a demon. Joan reached out a
hand, took the shawl, and hastily wrapped it about her shoulders and over her breasts.
―I thank you,‖ she said to Margaret, but including Mary in her words. Then, exclusively
to Margaret, she said, ―Who is your father?‖
―My father is the Archangel Michael,‖ she said.
Joan nodded. ―Then I pity you.‖ No wonder this woman was so sad, for she had been
conceived in grief and born in yet more.