November 1455
I was asleep when the knock came at the door of my hut on the edge of the convent’s walled garden. It was Sister Marie Antoine, who was the same age as I when I had set off on my adventure.
“Pardon, madame,” she said, “but there is a man asking for you. He says he knew you in your village, and during the war, and he insists that you see him even though the hour is late. He says he is called—”
Before she could finish, my door was flung open and Pierre d’Arc—Jeanne d’Arc’s brother and my dearest childhood friend—burst into the room.
“Gabrielle!” he exclaimed. While Sister Marie Antoine stared, he put out his hands to meet mine and kissed me first on one cheek and then on the other, and then on both again. “So you are still here, still the nuns’ healer.”
He was heavier than when I had last seen him, more than two decades earlier. I had heard that he had bought his freedom from the prison in which he had spent so many years, and that he and his wife, Jeanne, had had a son—but that was all, and I was hungry, seeing him, for news.
“Sit, please sit,” I said as soon as Sister Marie Antoine had scurried out.
He did, then glanced at the bunches of dried herbs suspended from the beams of my hut, and the jars and bottles which I tried to keep neatly ordered on my thick oak shelves. “The nuns must be a sickly band to require so much medicine,” he said.
“The villagers consult me as well,” I told him. “The women bring their children to me, and come themselves, and farmers come, too, with cuts and broken bones.”
“But no soldiers anymore, eh, Gabrielle? No sword cuts or caltrop punctures, no crossbow bolts to probe for, or English longbow arrows to wrench out, no cannon-shattered limbs to mend. Do you miss it?”
“No,” I said emphatically. “Do you?”
He sighed and went to the window that looked beyond the fields and woods toward the great city of Paris. “Some,” he said. “But I am well content in Orléans with my wife and son, near where you and I were companions in arms so long ago. The good Charles, Duke of Orléans, gave me l’Isle-aux-Boeufs, where there is fertile land, and I have other land now also, and a pension.” He smiled proudly. “I am king’s chamberlain, and knight. My mother lives nearby. And my son, Jean, has turned out better than his namesake.”
“Good,” I said wryly, “although it would not be difficult to be better than your brother, who was never to be found when he was needed.”
Pierre faced me once more. “Yes,” he said, “how well you do remember!” He sighed again. “It is enough, I suppose, my life as it is now. I have grown too old for fighting. And besides …” He bent close to me, his eyes burning with fervor. “We are not finished with that time, Gabrielle, and that is the reason I have come to you. The officials are going to study the trial; we may be able to bring honor to Jeannette’s name at last, to let her be remembered as the holy heroine she truly was, as the savior of France and a martyr instead of as an evil heretic.”
I felt my heart skip. Pierre and I had followed his sister Jeannette—Jeanne la Pucelle, or the Maid, as she came to be called—when she led us French against the English oppressors and Burgundian traitors, and when she had the Dauphin Charles crowned King Charles VII of France. I had seen both Jeannette and Pierre captured at Compiègne, and I had seen Jeannette cruelly burned at the stake despite her brave deeds and her piety. Bring honor to her name? War itself may be wrong; I have wrestled with that thought for many years. But Jeannette joined a war that was already raging, to stop it. I knew I would willingly leave my comfortable convent life if I could help win her the respect she deserved!
But Pierre was still talking, explaining to me that it was the Pope himself who had allowed him and Jeannette’s mother, Isabelle Romée, to ask for an investigation into Jeannette’s trial. Isabelle had gone to Paris, he said as we settled at my small table and I poured him wine, “and pleaded for Jeannette before many learned men in long robes; she was frightened, but no one save I knew that. I could see Jeannette in her, when Jeannette argued with Dunois and the others—remember, Gabrielle?”
I nodded, and soon we were both remembering the days when we had marched behind Jeannette’s white standard. Long after I had agreed to go with Pierre to plead for Jeannette myself, and he had left, I sat remembering still. It had started in, I think, 1425, when I was perhaps eleven, and Pierre a year older …
