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| ISBN-13: | 9781504046626 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 237 |
| Lexile: | 1140L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 12 - 18 Years |
CHAPTER 1
"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."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dove And Sword"
by .
Copyright © 1995 Nancy Garden.
Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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