“Oui, monseigneur. J’essayerai! I will try!”
That was Jeannette’s voice. Pierre and I peered into the d’Arcs’ garden and then at each other, astonished. We had just come up from Maxey, the village across the River Meuse from our village, Domremy. Pierre and I, along with some of our friends, had been fighting with the boys of Maxey. There had been real fighting there when I was very small, and now the people of Maxey were Burgundians, loyal to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. But in Domremy we did not think Philip was good at all, and in our battles we village children hurled names at each other along with stones and clods of earth. My mother did not entirely approve of my playing with boys, and some of the boys did not either, but she indulged me on the rare occasions when she did not need me. This morning had been such a time, and so, after I had helped drive the horses to pasture, I had gone with Pierre and the others to ambush the Burgundian children. But they had beaten us, because they had stouter sticks for lances and swords than we. Now Pierre, who was usually cheerful, was in a surly temper.
It was already after noon. The church bells all along the Meuse valley—from our village, and Maxey, and Greux up the river—had long since stopped ringing, and we were late. Pierre would be wanted in the fields, for it was the d’Arcs’ turn to watch the village cattle and goats, and I was to look after my younger sisters. Pierre’s father and my mother, we knew, would be cross.
Even so, when we reached the d’Arcs’ garden, we could not help but stop and stare at his sister Jeannette, who was a little older than we—thirteen, I suppose, although no one kept very careful account of ages. Her everyday dress, of the same coarse red wool as the dresses of all us village girls, was crumpled halfway down its long skirt, as if she had been kneeling. Her lovely straight black hair, which I envied, for mine had such curls that it often stood on end, had twigs in it. But it was not that so much which astonished us, although Jeannette was always neat, much neater than I. It was the look on her plain, honest face that made us stare. An inner light shone from her, despite her troubled—even frightened—eyes. And she was talking, though there was no one with her.
Pierre pulled me into the garden behind his family’s stone house, which was better than most others in our village, for Pierre’s father, Jacques d’Arc, was an important official. “Try what?” Pierre demanded of Jeannette. “You said you would try.” He put his hands on his hips and made great show of looking around. “And to whom did you say you would try?” he asked. “There is no one here!”
I do not think that Jeannette had ever told a lie until that day. She was so good and pious that she was as often in church as she was at home, spinning with her mother, the devout Isabelle Romée, who had made the grand pilgrimage to Rome. Jeannette loved to hear Isabelle tell about the lives of the saints, especially Saint Margaret and Saint Catherine. And so I did not doubt Jeannette when she told Pierre, “I said I would try to be good, but I addressed no one. It is nothing, Pierre; do not speak of it.”
I say I did not doubt her then, and I did not. I wondered, though, as I left Pierre and went home, why a person would make such a promise when no one was there to hear it, and why Jeannette would, when she was already good—better, certainly, than Pierre and I.
We were not bad children, he and I, but we were spirited and mischievous. Even though we were almost grown, we were reluctant to become adults. I did not want to spend my life spinning and cooking, and Pierre, who got no pleasure from tending crops and livestock, wanted to fight Burgundians in earnest, with sword and crossbow, not with sticks as we used in Maxey. I was the second oldest in a house full of girls, and Pierre was the d’Arcs’ youngest. Besides Jeannette, he had a lazy brother, Jean, who left much of his own work for Pierre to do, and another brother and sister, who were both married and did not live in Domremy. Pierre’s position was worse than mine, because I had special work to do, work that I enjoyed.
My mother was a midwife and healer, and since my older sister Catherine felt sick when she saw blood, it was I who accompanied Maman when she delivered babies. I also went with Maman when she climbed the flat-topped hills and walked into the woods and through the water meadows of our beautiful Meuse valley to gather herbs. She enjoyed this as much as I; she did not like ordinary woman’s work either, though she never complained. Breaking clods left by the plow every spring and harvesting at the end of summer were the only women’s tasks that I could stomach, for they were out of doors and active. Papa said that I must be a changeling, left by the fairies, for whenever I tried to spin, the thread ran wrong, and when I tended the stew pot, like as not it boiled or burned. But when I put a flaxseed poultice on Papa’s head when it ached, he said I had the touch of an angel. “How can she be a changeling,” Maman would say, “when she has my hands and your eyes and a gift for healing that surpasses my own?” My mother was always my friend, as Jeannette’s mother was hers.
A few days later, Pierre came running to my house at the hour of Compline, as the sky’s light faded along with the sweet echoing bells. I was weeding my mother’s vegetable plot when I heard him shout, “Gabrielle, Gabrielle! Come quickly; Jeannette is doing it again! Hurry! I think she must be going mad—mad, or else she is very holy. Come!”
He led me—dragged me is more truthful—around the edge of the last house in our row, into the road, and past the church to his house, which was next to it. “Shh,” he cautioned, pulling me behind some bushes. His hair, shaggy no matter when it was cut, flopped over his eyes as he ducked his head and whispered, “Look! Look at her!”
I peered out and saw Jeannette on her knees, her face transfixed and glowing again, and her eyes less frightened this time. “Oui, monseigneur,” she was saying. “Oui, mesdames; yes, my lord; yes, my ladies. I will try, but I am not worthy. I am only a poor peasant girl.” She paused then, as if listening. I felt a chill creep over me and did not want to be there, for whether it was madness or miracle, it seemed a private thing.
With Pierre, though, I tried to pretend it was nothing. “She is playing,” I told him scornfully. “That is all. She is playing at being a nun or a saint.”
“No,” Pierre said. “No, she is not.” He turned to me, his usually ruddy face pale. “She has been different since that day. She leaves her friends often now to pray, and when she is spinning with Hauviette and Mengette and the others, they talk and laugh and sing, but Jeannette just spins.”
“She never sang much with them or talked or laughed,” I said, annoyed. In fact, I had always thought Jeannette rather dull, but for love of Pierre I had never said so.
“This is different,” Pierre said, his eyes never leaving his sister’s face. “As you yourself said, Jeannette does not play much, and I am certain she is not playing now. But what is she doing?”
We watched, but she did not speak again. She nodded and remained kneeling, her head bowed, until the sun was all the way down and my legs ached from staying still and quiet. I left then, though Pierre did not.
That summer, Pierre often reported Jeannette’s strange actions to me, but I was too busy to spy with him. Many in our village were ill with a quinsy, and Maman had me gather wild columbine to ease their painful throats. Maman was with child also, and needed my help more as the weeks passed.
That July, summer heat lay thickly over our valley and the mist that covered the river at dawn seemed as stifling as the sheepskins we pulled around ourselves on winter nights. Early one morning I was spreading betony thinly on the ground, hoping the sun would burn through the mist soon and dry it, when a great outcry made me drop the stems I was holding. I ran to the street, and it seemed all the village was hastening toward the fields where the cattle and horses usually grazed. “They are gone!” I heard our neighbor Henri shout.
“Who is gone?” I asked, breathless with keeping step with him. Henri had the longest legs in the village and won every race that the boys held on feast days.
“The cattle—driven off in the night! Horses, too, and pigs. And the oxen. Everything.”
It was true; I saw no beasts at all. In the fields, the children who had been sent to herd that day clung to their fathers, sobbing. Other village men, including my father and Pierre’s, were hurrying people toward the maison forte, the stronghold on the island in the river where we kept the village livestock when raiders threatened. But it appeared that this time there had been no warning, and no time to drive the animals there.
Pierre broke away from his brother Jean, who was urging Jeannette and their mother to wade across to the island. “It was Burgundians,” he said, running up to me. “Burgundian brigands. They came in the night like common thieves and drove our animals off.”
I looked back, still amazed. The flat plains that edged the river were empty. The grasslands above the village were also empty, instead of dotted with the brown-and-white bodies of our gentle cows, without which we of Domremy would be poor indeed. None of the oxen we used for plowing were in sight, nor were the horses that helped us carry goods to Neufchâteau, the market town south of our village, and Vaucouleurs, the city to our north.
“Gabrielle,” Pierre cried urgently, “do not linger! The brigands may still be nearby!” He made me wade with him onto the island, where I huddled with our neighbors and wondered where my parents and sisters were.
Soon I felt a strong hand on my shoulder and turned to see Papa with my older sister, Catherine, and my just-younger-than-me sister, Paulette. But my little sisters, Marguerite and Cécile, were not with him, nor was Maman, and fear gripped me.
“Where is Maman?” I cried—but before Papa could answer, a shout went up from those nearest the shore. I gasped to see smoke mingling with the mist. “The fiends,” muttered Henri’s father to mine. “Some of them must have hidden in the hills after the others drove the animals away, and then moved silently back to burn the village while we fled here!”
Distant laughter came to us across the water, and then carts—many of them ours, pulled by our beasts—rumbled along the road, piled high with goods stolen from our houses. But by the time we reached the village, the marauders were gone—and then we saw smoke pouring from the church roof. Though the building was stone, its roof was not, nor were the furnishings inside. “Stay with Pierre while I look for Maman and your little sisters,” my father shouted to me, Catherine, and Paulette, as he ran toward our house at the far edge of the village.
“We must save the church!” someone cried, so Catherine, Paulette, Pierre, and I helped search for pails and cooking pots—anything that would hold water. The few that we found we took to the river and filled, as did our neighbors. Then we passed them in a human chain from river to church, thus saving the roof from all but a little charring.
I knew that rough soldiers and brigands roamed the countryside, and that they as well as honest folk traveled on the road. I dimly remembered the real fighting in Maxey when I was little, and I knew that some families, including Pierre’s, had lost relatives in battle. Lately we had driven our animals to the island more often than before, and sometimes at night when there was a sudden noise, my mother would cling to my father in alarm, and Catherine would grow pale. But never before in my lifetime, though war raged around us and several nearby villages had been sacked and burned, had Domremy itself been attacked, and I had felt that the war and the raids would never touch us.
But on that day, I knew they could. When Catherine and Paulette and I returned to our house, it was to find my father comforting my mother and Marguerite and Cécile. They had been in the hills when the raiders swept down on Domremy, and had hidden, cowering in terror, till the raid was over.
We soon found that most of our hay had been taken, and our house stripped of its few furnishings. The board and trestles for our table, and the benches worn smooth by many generations of my mother’s family, were gone, as was the big chest with all our clothes and bedding. The bunches of herbs and baskets of vegetables, both fresh and dried, had been ripped from the rafters. Gone, too, were our parents’ big bed and the cradle my father had made for Catherine long ago. But the straw pallets on which we children slept remained, as if they were not good enough for the thieves. Our packed dirt floor was scuffed and pitted, and the very ashes on the hearth were disturbed; perhaps the thieves had sought valuables there. But of those we had none, save a charm against illness my father kept around his neck, and a knife with a carved bone handle which my mother had from her own mother, and used for spearing meat, cleaning fish, chopping herbs—even for trimming the ragged edges of a wound too rough to grow together. She kept it at her waist, and so it, like Papa’s charm, was safe. But the lace-edged linen shawl from my mother’s wedding day was nowhere to be found, nor were my father’s scythe and his spade and hoe and sharpening stone, and the large pewter dish a grateful gentlewoman had given Maman when she had delivered her of twins.
My father put his arms around my mother, and she sobbed onto his chest while my sisters and I stood helplessly by. Papa wiped my mother’s eyes with a corner of her long apron. “Do not fret, chérie—dear one,” he said gently. “Let us thank the good God that they did not harm us. We have four walls and each other, as do our neighbors. And I see that the church has been saved.”
“But we have no beasts!” Maman cried. “We cannot live if we have no cattle, and we can go nowhere if we have no horses. We will all be ruined.”
“Hush,” said Papa. “We lived despite last summer’s locusts, and last winter’s wolves, and despite the war. We have wheat and rye in our fields and good grapes in our vineyards, and cabbages and carrots and beans in our gardens, and more vegetables besides.” He eased Maman—who was now near her time—onto the floor and settled himself beside her.
“Papa,” said Catherine, who like me was still standing, though Marguerite and Cécile had drawn closer to Maman and Papa, cuddling against them for comfort. “Papa, why did they take our cattle?”
“To feed themselves, I suppose,” he said, “and the horses to replenish their own. It is the way of armies to take what food and goods they find from whomever they can.”
“Since they came to Domremy,” I asked, troubled, “does that mean the fighting is getting closer?”
“I do not know, my changeling,” he said wearily. “Perhaps.”
“What is the fighting, Papa?” Marguerite, who was always curious, asked.
“It is complex, ma petite—my little one.” He smoothed Marguerite’s flaxen hair; not only was she curious, but she was also the most fragile of us all and had nearly died the year before of a fever. “The English, who are from across the sea, want their king, Henry VI, who is but a child no older than Cécile, to be our king as well. Philip, Duke of Burgundy, which many think is rightly part of France, wants this also. There is a treaty, called the Treaty of Troyes, that says this must be, but many loyal French think it is an evil treaty, and want a French king.”
“What do you want, Papa?” Marguerite asked.
“A French king, of course. The dauphin, Charles.”
“Is he a child no older than me, too?” Cécile asked.
Papa smiled. “No, ma petite, he is a grown man. And he is our king, for he is the old king’s son, and his father and older brothers are dead. But many will not consider him king until he has been properly crowned in the great cathedral in Reims. Here we are all true French men and women,” he said, easing my mother aside and standing up, brushing off his loosely flowing shirt, “except in Maxey across the river, where”—he glanced at me severely—“our young changeling often plays at war against the Burgundian boys.”
I gasped, for I did not know he knew. Perhaps, though, he said it to distract Maman, for she came to my aid, as always, saying, “She does it only when her work is done, and the exercise makes her strong.”
“And the boys make her willful, but”—he sighed, and kissed Maman—“she is indeed strong, and as we have no son …”
This was the wrong thing to say, for Maman grew morose again, and hung her head. “Perhaps this one,” she said softly, dabbing at her eyes with her apron and resting one hand on her large belly, “will be a son.”
But it was not. My youngest sister, Brigitte, was born two days later. At least she waited until Jacques d’Arc and the other village officials had appealed for help to one of the ladies whose family, the Bourlémonts, ruled over our region. By the time Brigette came, the lady’s cousin had brought back our animals and most of our goods, and Domremy was normal again.
Brigitte came easily and quickly, which was lucky, for Catherine, as usual, felt squeamish and stayed outside with Papa. Maman told me when to cut the cord and reminded me that my work and hers was not over till the afterbirth had come and Brigitte was well swaddled, and till Catherine had taken her to the church to be baptized. Papa smiled when he saw her, kissed Maman, and said cheerfully, “We will never get them all married, for we will never have enough for their dowries, but neither will we fret in our old age, with so many loving daughters to tend us.”
That fall and winter passed calmly, with enough food for feast days, though it was not plentiful. On the first spring day, Maman, Catherine, and I, dressed only in our shifts, took all the family’s clothes outdoors in buckets, covered them with ashes, and poured boiling water over them. The next day, we beat them and soaked them more—and the third day, as luck would have it, it rained. But on the fourth, the sun shone, so we spread the clothes to dry. They were ready in time for Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent. We called it Sunday of the Springs, for on that day we always visited the Ladies’ Tree, a low-branched beech that grew near two springs above the village vineyards near the Bois Chenu—the oak forest.
The buds had swollen early that year, and the grass was unusually green and tender, fed by early warm rains and sheltered by mist from the River Meuse. I woke on Springs Sunday morning long before Prime and went out to a chorus of birds; already the mist was rising and the day was warming. By the time the bells rang, I had finished my morning chores, and with Catherine was readying the little loaves we would eat when dancing at the Ladies’ Tree had made us hungry, and the eggs, and the wine—though we would also drink clear spring water. Maman was smiling and happy that morning; it seemed the whole world was, as we hurried up the long hill behind the village with the other families. Catherine went to join the others of her age, and I walked with Pierre and Henri. Maman had the cloth we would spread under the tree, where she would sit and gossip with the women while Papa and the men played at seeing who could throw a nut most perfectly into a distant basket.
From the hills to the south, near the castle of the Bourlémonts, we could see horses drawing a large cart. Up and down, up and down it went over the hills, now appearing, now disappearing. “Even the great ones must think the sun today is especially bright and warm,” Henri observed—for usually the Bourlémont ladies did not come to eat under the Ladies’ Tree with us until May.
Marguerite, who was almost over the cough she had suffered from all winter, danced up to me and tugged at my hand. “Maman says you will make me a garland,” she told me, “and I may put it in my hair before you put it on the tree.”
Pierre, who liked children, picked her up. “If you are very good,” he said, “Gabrielle will let you keep the garland in your hair instead of putting it on the tree.”
Marguerite pursed her lips as if weighing this carefully. “How good must I be?” she asked at last.
Pierre laughed and put her down, giving her a gentle spank. “As good as my sister Jeannette.”
Marguerite pouted. “Then I shall never have a garland, for Maman says that no one has ever been as good as Jeannette.”
I laughed then, too, and told her, “You will not have to be quite as good.”
All that day we danced and sang and played at ball and leapfrog and blindman’s buff, and the boys had races, which Henri always won. The Bourlémont ladies sat a short distance from us. They gave Marguerite, who did earn her garland, a little king’s cake. Messire Guillaume, our curate, blessed the Ladies’ Tree when we had hung it with flowers. Some said the great beech had once been evil, the home of fairies, and was perhaps still. But Maman said Messire Guillaume’s blessing would chase away any that remained.
All that day Jeannette sat apart, quietly, though in the past she had danced and sung with the rest of us. And later, on May Day, when we went again to the Ladies’ Tree to cut branches to decorate the village, she did not come with us. On the day before Ascension Day, though, she joined the procession when Messire Guillaume took the cross around the village boundaries, ringing the bells and blessing the crops. When he said the Gospel under the Ladies’ Tree, and by the springs and in the fields, she had the same glowing look on her face that Pierre and I had seen before.
Pierre had not spied on her much for a while, but he began to again that summer of 1426. When people who had been burned out of their homes by the soldier-brigands stopped in Domremy, Jeannette was always the first, he said, to give up her bed to them and sleep by the hearth. Each time the bells rang for Mass she would leave whatever she was doing and attend; each time the bells rang for any of the day’s offices, from dawn to dusk, Prime to Compline, she would stop and pray. She made garlands for the statue of Our Lady in our village church, and went every Saturday to Notre-Dame-de-Bermont in Greux, and lit candles. Sometimes, Pierre told me, she went there even when she was supposed to be in the fields—so the good Jeannette, although good in one way, was less so in another. She grew more solemn daily, but of course she was growing older, toward the time when most girls wed. Indeed, my own sister Catherine was betrothed to Henri’s older brother, and my father, though he grumbled at her dowry, was secretly pleased, I think.
It was two years later, in the summer of 1428, that Jeannette changed even more.
