Blood Red, Sister Rose: A Novel of the Maid of Orleans

BOOK ONE

Shadow Kings

When young Charles was seven he lived in his own suite of apartments at the Hotel Barbette in the capital. His mother lived on other floors of the Barbette and sometimes visited him. Since she would bring with her a leopard on a leash or a baboon with smelly breath, Charles never liked her visits.

His mind was already subject to priest tutors, Dominican theologians from the University of Paris. They began to teach him that he would be king under God, that France and the Pope were consanguineous through God.

The head nurse at the Barbette, a fat Breton, twenty-eight years old, was a woman called Madeleine. It is important to consider what she taught him.

Madeleine: A king is a god.

Charles: There is but one God almighty, Deus Omnipotents …

He’d already begun learning Latin.

Madeleine: Oh, but there’s small gods. Kings and saints are small gods. Now a king needs a pair, a brother-king who’s king secretly. And the brother-king has to be sacrificed and the brother-king’s blood feeds the power of the king himself.

Madeleine showed him her two index fingers.

Madeleine: This king is king openly.

She waggled her right index finger potently.

Madeleine: He wears the crown and people make oaths to him and sing Noël.

Her left index finger shifted subtly.

Madeleine: This king is the king who has to be sacrificed. Like Jesus died for us and made all of us wonderful. This king never wears a crown. His blood makes the king a firm long-reigning king.

Charles: Who’s the king that’s dying for Papa?

Madeleine: Duckling, your father hasn’t got a shadow king.

Charles: Maybe Uncle Louis was Papa’s shadow king …? Uncle Louis bled …

Uncle Louis had been murdered three years ago outside the Barbette. Madeleine and Charles had heard the screams. The murderers had certainly made a copious sacrifice of Uncle Louis.

Madeleine: Duckling, your Uncle Louis was a nice man, but a witch.

She was able to say whatever she wanted to Charles, because when Queen Isabeau came visiting her son she had enough trouble stopping her wildcats from savaging the servants. And therefore no time to see whether her boy was being taught the right things.

Madeleine: It’s because your father’s had no shadow king to die for him that he’s mad.

Charles: Will I have one?

Madeleine: You’re a good boy. God will provide …

But the boy felt all the blood run from his chest into his belly. There it boiled about hopelessly. He knew it wouldn’t happen: no shadow or brother king for him.

Unaided kingship, Madeleine implied on most days of all his years till he was ten and she was dismissed, unaided kingship was a terrible onus – it invited assassins, it bred wars inside and outside the king.

His father the king had wars inside him. He lived in locked apartments in the Louvre. He was incontinent in the clothes he wore. He beat up his attendants.

The little boy was very thin. He thought, I’ll be like that. But I won’t even be strong enough to bully the servants.

Madeleine: Now there’s just you. You’re the darling of the Armagnacs.

The Armagnac party was the party that upheld him.

Earlier that winter, in the Royal Castellany of Vaucouleurs, the girl-child of two peasants called Zabillet and Jacques had her baptismal day. She had two brothers and a sister. She was baptized Jehanne but the brothers and sister called her Jehannette. The village they lived in was called Domremy-à-Greux. It had an interesting location, speaking politically. Only to say for now that the forests there were dark green and the Meuse wide and sombre.

To my honoured principal, the Esteemed Francesco Maglia-Gondisi, of the Bank of the Family Gondisi of Florence, from his newly appointed agent in Poitou and the Loire region, Bernardo Massimo.

Dated 23 July 1419

You must forgive me if other agents of the bank in other areas have already given you some of the information contained in this letter.

The fact is that since I came here I have found it difficult to acquire much real information at all. The dauphin’s Armagnac Council and his foster-mother Queen Yolande of Sicily let go of news reluctantly. One of the reasons must surely be that the news is so consistently bad. They certainly want capital, they want bankers to underwrite their armies, they seek mortgage and credit arrangements. But they will not tell me the simple business facts and probabilities that any client seeking finance is usually anxious to detail. I have discussed this with other bankers, who are all treated in this same way. We can only conclude that with the English in Normandy and the south-west and the Burgundians in control of the north and of Paris, our Armagnac clients’ dependence on us is so strong that they resent it.

Two most important items I have learned.

In the first place, the Duke of Burgundy, Jean (called sans Peur) has managed to introduce the dauphin’s sister Catherine to King Hal Monmouth of England. There are a number of speculations on the subject of why he arranged the meeting, in fact it was simply one item on the agenda of a long conference Jean and the English king held west of Paris. What else happened at the conference few seem to know: only that King Hal met the dauphin’s elder sister. Besides seeing the political merit in marrying her he is said to have actually fallen in love with her. I do not know when the marriage will be celebrated. But I am sure you understand how it will effect the dauphin. He will have one sister queen of England and another, Michelle, duchess of Burgundy. If my honoured principal would permit a sketch map.

You can see how the Armagnacs are not only outflanked but out-married.

In the second place, I have discovered that Duke Jean of Burgundy and the dauphin intend to meet again somewhere south of Paris, perhaps at Montereau, in September. There is a danger to our interests in that Jean will put heavy pressure on the boy, attempting to talk him into going north to visit his father and mother. In this way Jean hopes to absorb the boy the way he has absorbed the father (whom he keeps a raving prisoner in the Louvre) and the mother (who is said to be his mistress).

If Jean succeeds in this purpose there will no longer be an Armagnac party. The Royal Chamberlain, Monsieur Tanguy, is so concerned about the coming meeting that he fears the Duke might even consider assassinating the boy if he refuses to go north. Tanguy is taking a very vigilant attitude towards this possibility.

In view of these prospects I cannot see any profit for the Bank of the Family Gondisi in pursuing business with the dauphin, Queen Yolande, and the Armagnac Council. I shall therefore postpone final approval on all business pending until I receive your instructions …

Bernardo Massimo

One hot September day when Jehannette was nine she woke early. She twitched all morning, even in church. Her eyes stared. After Sunday dinner – bacon and bean broth – she had a convulsion, spilt very hot soup on herself. Jacques beat her on the face till her breath came back and she was put in the high family bed. Though she wanted to sleep her eyes kept snapping open and looked to the steamy light lying across the kitchen floor.

In that daylight she could read it: something would happen to put her at a distance from Jacques and Zabillet, to lock her into a solitary future. To cut her out of the thick musk of her family as a vealer is cut, mourning, out of the herd. She didn’t want that. She was sure she wanted to grow up to be like Zabillet, ironic and fertile towards some warm oaf. That seemed enviable. A priceless direction to take.

About seven o’clock she thought well, it’s done now, the fat’s in the fire. She was able to rest soundly.

That day (it was autumn 1419) there were to have been talks between Duke Jean of Burgundy and young dauphin Charles at the walled town of Montereau. Both parties to the talks were letting the fine Sunday go by. They were nervous about assassination and other possibilities.

Dauphin Charles had apartments inside Montereau. There, he heard three Masses that morning. Perhaps he attempted by all these devotions to build up his royalty, which had diminished since Madeleine’s day. He had lost Paris and his father was a prisoner there – yet another layer of imprisonment for a mad king.

On a wet afternoon four years before, the English King Hal had butchered the loyalist army. Agincourt was the place’s bad name. Charles could tell in his blood that other tragedies would grow out of a name like that. Hal, Henry Monmouth, had spent the years of Charles’s puberty in re-acquiring Normandy and courting Charles’s sister Catherine. Successfully.

Maman Isabeau, the boy’s mother, lived in Troyes with all her crazy, ravening or grotesque beasts. Exotic birds left droppings on the candelabra, monkeys ran along the tapestry rails and carnivores stalked around the partitioned rooms. Frequently she slept with little Duke Jean of Burgundy, cleaving her eighteen stone to his eight. No wonder (a political joke ran) they called him Jean sans Peur.

The meeting between Charles and Jean that Sunday was to be at two o’clock. Charles had a plain buffed suit of armour put on his body and stood sweating into it.

On the hour delegates from Duke Jean begged a postponement. When his attendants took Charles’s armour off, he was found to have a heat-rash.

Across the river Duke Jean himself had lunched very light and drank only water. Penitentially. He was saying, God, prince-to-prince, statesman-to-statesman, notice this little courtesy of mine. If there is danger this afternoon, remember my little abstinence at lunch. His family was distinguished in Europe for buttering up all sides in any dispute. He wasn’t afraid. He was depressed, which he wasn’t often, and he had diarrhoea.

At two o’clock, while he was resting, the Count of Navailles came in. It was Navailles’s idea to keep putting off the talks all day: he felt it would make the dauphin’s party nervous, throw into chaos any plans for violence they might have. He was large in his armour beside the thin duke who lay in a shirt and drawers, bare-legged, bare-footed, on the bed.

Navailles: How are the bowels, Jean?

Duke: No problem.

Navailles: We had a carrier pigeon from our man over in the town. He says the houses by the river haven’t any soldiers in them. They’re occupied by the people who ought to occupy them. Meals are cooking. Kids getting put on the breast. All that.

Duke: Good.

Navailles: If they’d let you talk to the little prick. Alone, just the two of you.

Duke: It’s not a perfect world.

Navailles: Would five o’clock suit you?

About ten past four, Navailles and eight other lords went downstairs straight on to the Yonne bridge. The tower in which they and the duke were billeted gave directly on to the carriageway. A trumpeter blew a parley call and the nine lords strode out over the bridge, one standard-bearer ahead of them but no escorts at all. From a tower over in Montereau an Armagnac trumpeter blew an acknowledgment.

The bridge was partitioned crosswise with walls, so that it displayed three compartments, an ante-room at each end of the bridge – one for the use of Duke Jean’s party, one for the use of the Dauphin Charles’s aides. The centre room was the meeting place. It had no furniture, but was hung with drapes, blue, white, red, green. A golden sun and golden lilies showed up on the blue, and the St Andrew’s cross of Burgundy stood out on the red.

Navailles and the others waited ten minutes in their ante-room while the dauphin’s advisers got their armour on and came out of town on to their end of the bridge and into the meeting hall. The protocol was that the French were to invite the Burgundians into the meeting place. The Duke of Burgundy was a vassal of France, according to feudal theories already laughable.

Someone unlatched the meeting-place door at last, but no one called out for the Burgundians to come in.

Sulky, said Navailles, and his colleagues tittered, moving in pairs into the meeting chamber.

To simplify the complex story of what happened that germane afternoon only Navailles is mentioned by name amongst the Burgundy lords. On the French side all the lords would fall or diminish because of what would soon happen on the bridge. Just the same, a few must be mentioned.

When Navailles went through into the meeting-chamber he saw thirty yards off, against drapes of blue and gold, Tanguy Duchâtel with seven other Armagnac monsters.

Navailles saw, for example, Monsieur Brabazon, a real killer, who had once raped an abbess to death in Touraine. Just for the sake of saying he’d done it. He saw Pierre de Giac, Charles’s bedmate. Burgundian spies said he was a Satanist and used witchcraft and poison for results. But his face was sensitive, he sat through all the masses with which poor Charles tried to fortify his failing majesty.

Navailles thought, that pitiful little sod Charles. No mind of his own, and only murderers to talk to.

And Tanguy Duchâtel, the boy’s most darling mouthpiece.

Tanguy: Are you serious this time? Or still farting around?

Navailles: Does five o’clock suit the dauphin?

Tanguy: Five o’clock. You’ve had all bloody day.

Navailles: Five’s the best we can offer now. You’d better go and dress Charlie.

By this time the lords on both sides were catcalling and barracking each other. Burgundy’s Monsieur Antoine Vergy and Brabazon were enjoying themselves. They were comradely about it, both being genuine pirates.

Navailles mistrusted Monsieur Tanguy Duchâtel. Earlier in the year, when Jean’s troops entered Paris, Tanguy Duchâtel, Provost of the city, had woken young Charles the Dauphin at the Hotel Neuf des Tourelles, carried the whimpering boy in his arms out the Temple Gate to the Bastille where horses were gathered for flight south. Navailles knew how to deal with Tanguy’s power-lust and homicidal intent. It was his new vanity as saviour of a prince that made him uneasy. The Tanguy of earlier days could be expected to act inside the limits of his cool, hard purposes. But some crazy bond, some father-son thing burgeoning in Tanguy’s guts as he carried the sobbing boy across town and led his horse south – that was a thing whose consequences Navailles couldn’t predict.

Correctly, he thought it dangerous.

De Giac knew Charles’s soft frightened flesh. He kept pleading for everyone to be gentle with the boy.

De Giac: Remember the boy’s mother. If anyone hurts Charles she won’t ever let Jean back into bed. She prides herself on being a good mother. And none of this catcalling. He’s likely to bolt.

He and Tanguy were jealous of their status as men who knew what made Charles nervous.

Before they all left, Navailles pointed to the riverside houses by the Montereau wall and wanted to know did the French have archers there.

Tanguy: If I want to hurt the duke I’ll do it myself. I won’t get some peasant to do it from two hundred metres off. He’ll know it’s me, his friend Tanguy. That’s what chivalry’s about.

Strangely, Navailles was satisfied. He left the chamber and the bridge with other members of the delegation.

Duke Jean’s overt position towards the boy Charles would be this. The English have all of Normandy now. King Henry is living in Rouen and met your own sister at Meulan in May and eyed her up and wants her … it’s sad, but there you are. Your father is ill in the Louvre, your mother’s down in Troyes with her pets. It’s you and me now. Let’s forget the old, old issues, let’s call the Estates General, at any town you name, let’s raise a big levy, buy ourselves a big army, keep the English out of Paris. Come back to your mother. Come back to your poor father.

Duke Jean’s secret position was this: he had an under-the-table alliance with Henry. So secret was it that he’d let the people at Rouen hold out against Henry, let them think he’d send relief. By the end of the siege the townspeople were sitting in the ditches outside the city. No one would feed them. Not the garrison. Not besieging Hal or his little brother Clarence. An English soldier said he saw babies sucking at the teats of dead mothers in those ditches. Duke Jean was said to be coming.

Hal had known Duke Jean wasn’t coming. But didn’t pass the word on to the ditches. Or the garrison. That was politics.

What Duke Jean wanted from the boy Charles was: submission. Jean had the schizophrenic father in the Louvre. He could have the queen in bed whenever it was apt to politics or concupiscence. He wanted the boy for his pocket.

But to the boy, Jean was a figure from mythology. When Charles was four, Jean had had Charles’s Uncle Louis killed. In those days Jean and Louis had fought each other for control of the sick king. One night in November Uncle Louis had been at the Barbette, in Maman Isabeau’s apartments, drinking with her. A happy scene: all the animals were placid when Uncle Louis was about. Unexpectedly the king’s valet knocked at the queen’s door. Papa was supposed to be having a clear-headed phase and wanted to see Uncle Louis. Downstairs the valet had a donkey and a small escort of armed servants on foot. Louis sat the donkey. Just beyond the Barbette Gate, in rue Vieille-du-Temple, a legion of killers jumped out of the doorways. They strewed his brains, ran him through, pounded him to offal. They cut off an arm. The day after the funeral Jean admitted in the royal council that he had ordered the event. A necessary killing, he said, even if a bloody one.

Those mutilations recurred still, twelve years later, in the boy’s dreams. His waking eyes cringed from his cousin of Burgundy.

Before the meeting Jean was sick and felt better for it, but not well enough to dress in armour. It was arranged that a servant would carry his armour before him across the bridge and retain it in the ante-room. So he had his britches laced on and slung over his head an orange tunic with Golden Fleeces. He was a careless dresser.

At five o’clock Navailles and the others came for him. The duke’s secretary Père Sequinat went along too. As if the sanctions of canon law weren’t likely to save him, he wore a cuirass under his Augustinian habit. One of the lords rat-tat-tatted on the heavy serge of the monk’s chest. The sound was metallic.

Lord: Expecting trouble?

Twelve lords marched in front of Jean sans Peur to the ante-room on the bridge. There was little waiting. Very soon Tanguy opened the meeting-room door impassively, without any word or flourish.

Navailles went through first, and the others flanked him, on either side, like clerics peeling off either side of the sanctuary at the start of solemn high Mass. Tanguy remained holding the door. So that he was in their rear.

Sequinat stood back to let the duke through but when it was his time to step across the threshold, and there was only himself and Tanguy peering at each other through narrow eyes, a seizure of fear stopped him on the doorstep. Tanguy took him by the arm and pulled him through, feeling the metal under the sleeve of the habit of St Augustine.

Round the flank of the Burgundian lords, Tanguy moved back to his own side of the room.

Dauphin Charles stood close to the door there. He wore his white armour. It was splendid, a gift from his foster-mother Yolande, the Queen of Sicily. On most other sixteen-year-olds it would have been breathtaking.

Charles’s thin Valois head stuck up inappositely out of its nest of steel. The pendulous end of the nose hung close to the lips.

When Jean, earlier in the year, had presented Charles’s sister to the English King Hal Monmouth, it had been feared that the family nose (from which Jean himself also suffered through a common grandfather) would be the feature to disenchant the Englishman. Jean and the whore-queen Isabeau feared it. But Henry had been infatuated.

Charles had bulbous eyes too. Expectant of witchcraft and severing of limbs. He stood by the door on the Montereau side, and his lords stood V-ed in towards him. Because he couldn’t be expected to stand bareheaded to his cousin, he wore a blue turban. Either side of his nose, his face was greased with sweat.

Jean Sans Peur walked straight up to the boy and curtsied to him and kissed his hand. The boy felt reassured that the kiss was painless and not demonically cold. The large lips made a painful smile.

Charles Dauphin: Put your hat back on, Jean. It’s a hot day.

Tanguy was whispering to de Giac.

Tanguy: Even their pig’s-arse secretary has armour on.

De Giac looked at the priest’s habit and frowned.

Tanguy: Underneath! Underneath! If they make a movement, push Charlie out through the door.

They couldn’t afford the loss of Charles. Charles was their mandate for being what they were, executives in the Armagnac enclave, which was still a going business.

Jean: Your mother sends her best love.

Charles: Oh yes.

Jean: Don’t say it like that. She thinks of you a lot.

Charles: How are all her animals?

Jean: Have you ever seen a black and white bear from China?

Charles: She’s got one?

Jean: It’s devoted to her. One day it reached out and sliced the ham out of a servant’s leg. It wears pads now.

Charles: I see.

It wasn’t that he hated his mother. You could somehow tell, even in the tremulous way he carried his head when her name was mentioned, that he yearned to be himself her pet monkey. Her little bear.

Since Madeleine died, his de facto mother had been Yolande, Queen of Sicily, whose present of armour he was wearing. He was engaged to Yolande’s daughter and for the past two years Yolande minded daughter and son-in-law together.

Jean: Don’t believe that Spanish lady when it comes to forming an opinion of your own mother.

Charles: Very well.

Jean: It’s time you were all together again.

He spoke with authentic pity.

Jean: You and your father and mother. I mean, your father can’t be moved. Have you thought how it would look if the English took Paris off me? Your father with it?

Charles: What about my sister? Does the English king want her?

Jean: I think it’s going to be a good thing for everyone.

The dauphin began trembling. There was a little anger in it, but largely loss.

Charles: If they have a baby boy it’ll be a good thing for the baby boy. He’ll be made king of both countries, won’t he? That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? To make a baby in place of me?

Jean: Please! You’re not made for any of this. Let me look after things for you. You call the Estates-General and I’ll levy an army for you, thirty or forty companies. We’ll hit the Commons for half a million.

The boy raised both thin hands and vibrated them in front of his face. The numbers Jean conjured up did that to him.

Charles: Nothing can happen unless you do public penance for killing Uncle Louis.

Tanguy: Hear, hear!

Jean: Listen Tanguy, it’s between my cousin and me.

Charles: I want you to do public penance at the Cathedral of Bourges now and at Uncle Louis’s grave in Paris at a time I’ll nominate.

Jean: I won’t do penance. Charles, it was a service to this country.

Charles: Don’t say it, don’t say it.

Jean: Come with me to your father. If he says do penance I’ll do penance.

Charles: No, no, no. I know what you did. You bought Uncle Louis’s servants and my father’s valet. You cut his dear left hand off and poured out his brains in the mud.

The duke sighed and gestured a little with his left hand.

Jean: It’s always like that when people get killed, it’s sad but true. Did they tell you, Charles, that he was persecuting your mother that night?

Charles: Persecuting?

Jean: Charles, the poor woman had just had a child still-born? A brother of yours! I don’t want to hurt you with these things. But your uncle was insatiable.…

Tanguy: Listen, the boy knows his mother’s a whore. Let’s begin on that basis.

Jean: If you call the Commons, and come to your father with me, I’ll beg public pardon at the man’s grave. Not in Bourges though. At the man’s grave. If you come with me.

Tanguy: You can’t make counter-demands. First do your penance at Bourges. That’s an absolute condition. Then we talk about other things.

Jean: Charles, I can’t damn well do any penance at Bourges. Bourges is a sort of joke. The very name.

Charles: Is it?

Jean: Well in Paris they call you the King of Bourges. It’s a nickname. The word Bourges has overtones.… I’ve got nothing against the town, but I won’t do penance there. I’ll do penance in Paris. If you come with me back to your father.

Charles: You can’t tell me when to go to my father.

Jean: Perhaps I have that much power.

The boy began squealing.

Charles: Under God have you? Under God’s mandate?

Jean: Power in fact. It’s from God too. And it works well enough.

Charles: The authority has to come from God.

Don’t tell me God is changing (the boy was trying to say). Don’t tell me God is giving you some special power underhand, contrary to contract.

The boy knew he had a chance only if God kept to the accepted forms.

Jean: Listen Charles, don’t let’s get theological. You’re sixteen and you know what’s happening in this country and who has the power.

Jean saw his poor cousin had closed his eyes again.

Charles: I have scholars to tell me the power is mine. That you’re sinning …

Jean: Oh Christ. I have the faculty of Paris in my pocket. I can get them to tell me anything I like.

Charles: I have the chancellor of the University of Paris. You threw him out. He says …

Jean: And you believe him Charles?

Charles: Yes.

Jean: He’s a liar.

You were never meant to tell a dauphin that sort of thing. When a number of lords on both sides of the room spoke at once, Jean silenced his.

Jean: I’m giving you the lie, Charles. I intend to. Because what you have to see if you want to have a sane life is that I can make you come with me in the end.

Tanguy, Brabazon, de Giac were screaming in the dauphin’s ear as if it was the poor boy who had said the scandalous thing.

Navailles came up to Charles, reaching for his elbow in an avuncular, child-fetching way. His face had a sort of self-conscious good intent in it. Benevolence for the boy.

Tanguy rammed him. Steel hip against steel hip, a dissonant impact. The blood of all those twenty-six men leapt and squirmed. That’s the sound, the blood told its owners.

Tottering Navailles was drawing his sword. Some thought he had the thing by the handle as he tripped about and it was slipping out, not being drawn with intent.

Monk Sequinat was already dancing sideways for the door and so was the dauphin for his door, on his side of the peace-chamber.

The Burgundy lords saw that the Armagnac lords had their swords drawn. It won’t happen, they thought. It’s such bad politics. Even Tanguy can see what bad politics it would be.

Already Navailles had been gashed beneath the jawline and knelt streaming blood on to his hat, which had fallen from his head on to the stonework.

The Burgundy lords saw Jean, who was himself watching Navailles detachedly, hit on the head with a small axe. One of the Armagnacs, against law and reason, must have been carrying it in his belt, under his huke.

The boy knew that his Uncle Louis, twelve years ago, had been killed with an axe. The sense of awful re-enactment moved through him and he shambled out the door and performed the crooked action that passed for running in that knock-kneed family.

The watchers on the walls of Montereau saw the running prince. Terror made his gait uneven, he dragged one leg. His confessor met him at the gate and held him, comforting him through the white armour in which he was sweating.

He was no fool, that boy.

Charles: They’ll blame me for this.

Confessor: For what, Dauphin?

Charles: They’re killing Cousin Jean.

Jean stood on his knees, split to the nose. His brains fell out of his forehead. Brabazon was kneeling by Navailles unbuckling his cuirass.

Navailles: Oh Saviour Jesus.

Brabazon: How does this damn thing come undone?

Tanguy, who remembered Uncle Louis’s mutilations in 1407, cut off the duke’s left arm. Louis’s assassins had understood that many of these royal people had made pacts with Satan, contracting a limb to Beelzebub in return for political influence. For Satan was strong in the lobbies and potent in council-rooms. But a man could not see God’s face in paradise unless the limb was in fact paid.

Louis’s assassins had done it for Louis, now Tanguy did it for the duke, cutting cleanly at the elbow.

Brabazon killed Navailles terribly, running a sword upwards under the waistline. Navailles’s last scream was heard at the Provins Gate of Montereau. Sobs creaked out of the boy.

Charles: Won’t they ever stop this sort of thing?

Two of the French lords left the peace-chamber and went, crazily leisured, to join the dauphin.

All the rest hacked at the duke’s body. All they cared about for the moment was the electric resistance of his muscles and organs.

Once he was dead no message came to them along the blades. They sobered. Their ears began to prickle. They’d committed the crime of the age. They knew it was a fountain of murders they’d uncovered with their delving swords. It would take long wars in Champagne and Anjou and the south to settle what they’d done.

Already the axe lay dropped on the carriageway. Anonymous.

De Giac and Brabazon began to fight about who’d dropped it there.

De Giac: I could see it in your belt when you walked in.

Brabazon: Who’d believe a fucking wife-murderer.

De Giac was said to have given his wife poison at dinner and then rode with her all night in the forest of Issoudin. Given that she was pregnant, it was a wonder she lasted so long in the saddle with a stomachful of toxin.

Now Giac wanted to kill Brabazon: the inhuman meat of a duke and a general on the stonework slipped their minds. Except that they were sheepish about going back to town and facing the boy. They would rather keep their tempers up than do that.

Tanguy lifted the axe. He threw the thing two-handed right across the room, where it resounded against the partition and tore a hole in one of the Burgundian draperies.

Coming back across the bridge they tried to look bored. They carried their bloodied tunics folded on their arms or crumpled up in one hand. They did not hurry. They didn’t fear the boy, the boy feared them. But they knew the sight of him would awaken them to the subtleties of what they had done to Duke Jean.

Many of Charles’s officers, down from the walls, ran out to ask them what had happened. Tanguy had a story.

Tanguy: Navailles tried to kill Charles.

Brabazon: They had an axe with them.

They felt better now that they had articulated what must become the Armagnac version; and it seemed robust enough by the afternoon light.

But the boy, with his priest, overheard.

Charles: Everyone will blame me. Maman Isabeau, Maman Yolande. What about my sister Catherine? What about Philip?

Philip was Jean’s son, capable, full-grown, not backward at taking moral advantage.

Charles: Phillip will make war on me. Maman Yolande will want to know why I didn’t control you.

Tanguy: We acted from as much love as Maman Yolande.

Charles: Monsieur Duchâtel, you are never to touch me again.