The Lady of the Rivers Read Online Free PDF

her greatest protector, he sends the judge Pierre Cauchon, with a troop of men behind him, to negotiate for her ransom. She is summoned by a Church court on charges of heresy. Enormous sums of money change hands: twenty thousand livres for the man who pulled her off her horse, ten thousand francs to be paid to my uncle with the good wishes of the King of England. My uncle does not listen to his wife, who pleads that Joan shall be left with us. I am too unimportant to even have a voice, and so I have to watch in silence as my uncle makes an agreement that Joan shall be released to the Church for questioning. ‘I am not handing her over to the English,’ he says to his wife. ‘As the Demoiselle asked me, and I have not forgotten, I have not handed her over to the English. I have only released her to the Church. This allows her to clear her name of all the charges against her. She will be judged by men of God, if she is innocent they will say so, and she will be released.’
    She looks at him as blankly as if he were Death himself, and I wonder if he believes this nonsense, or if he thinks that we, being women, are such fools as to think that a church dependent on the English, with bishops appointed by the English, are going to tell their rulers and paymasters that the girl who raised all of France against them is just an ordinary girl, perhaps a little noisy, perhaps a little naughty, and she should be given three Hail Marys and sent back to her farm, to her mother and her father and her cows.
    ‘My lord, who is going to tell Joan?’ is all I dare to ask.
    ‘Oh, she knows already,’ he says over his shoulder as he goes out of the hall, to bid farewell to Pierre Cauchon at the great gate. ‘I sent a page to tell her to get ready. She is to leave with them now.’
    As soon as I hear the words I am filled with a sudden terror, a gale of premonition, and I start running, running as if for my own life. I don’t even go to the women’s apartments, where the pageboy will have found Joan to tell her that the English are to have her. I don’t run towards her old cell, thinking she has gone there to fetch her little knapsack of things: her wooden spoon, her sharp dagger, the prayer-book that my great-aunt gave her. Instead I race up the winding stair to the first floor above the great hall, and then dash across the gallery, through the tiny doorway where the archway knocks my headdress off, tearing at the pins in my hair, and then I hammer up the circular stone stair, my feet pounding on the steps, my breath coming shorter and shorter, my gown clutched in my hands, so that I can burst out onto the flat roof at the very top of the tower and see Joan, poised like a bird ready to fly, balanced on the wall of the turret. As she hears the door bang open she looks over her shoulder at me and hears me scream, ‘Joan! No!’ and she steps out into the void below her./diight="0">
    The worst thing of all, the very worst thing, is that she does not leap into nothing, like a frightened deer. I was dreading that she would jump, but she does something far worse than that. She dives. She goes headfirst over the battlement, and as I fling myself to the edge I can see that she goes down like a dancer, an acrobat, her hands clasped behind her, one leg extended like a dancer, the other bent, the toe pointed to her knee, and I see that, for that heart-stopping moment as she falls, she is in the pose of le Pendu , the Hanged Man, and she is going headfirst to her death with his calm smile on her serene face.
    The thud when she hits the ground at the base of the tower is terrible. It echoes in my ears as if it is my own head that has struck the mud. I want to run down to lift her body, Joan, the Maid, crumpled like a bag of old clothes; but I cannot move. My knees have given way beneath me, I am clinging to the stone battlements, they are as cold as my scraped hands. I am not crying for her, though my breath is still coming in gulping sobs; I am