The Death Of Joan Of Arc by Michael Scott Read Free Book Online

THE DEATH OF JOAN OF ARC
     
    I am convinced this physician is killing me.
    Certainly his treatments are much worse than what ails me. He comes each morning with his poultices and potions and pronounces me a little better every day. It gives my children comfort—except perhaps for my eldest son, Richard, who begrudges paying the physician to keep me alive. Richard imagines that when I leave this earth he will inherit everything, but he is wrong. My fortune will go to my youngest, William, who followed me into the army and fought valiantly for England in the wars against France.
    In truth, there is little wrong with me, except the seventy years which lie heavily upon my bones and some old wounds which trouble me in damp weather. And seventy—or it might be seventy-one, or seventy-two, my mother was always vague about the year—is a goodly age in this, the Year of Our Lord 1481.
    I have a few regrets. There was a girl I should have married, a war in which I should never have fought, a loaf of bread I should have shared, a lie to which I should never have listened. And there is a story I should have told.
    It is time to tell it while I still can.
    No doubt you will have been told the tale of the death of the Maid of Orléans. I have heard accounts told by people who were not there, who were either too young or too cowardly to have fought in that terrible war. I have listened to their boasts and their lies and never once have I been tempted to question them, to call them liars.
    Perhaps I should have.
    I know what happened on that day, the last day of May, in the Year of Our Lord 1431 in Rouen. I was there.
    —from the Last Will and Testament of William of York,
    This day, the 13th day of October 1481
        William of York heard the crowd moan behind him, then a huge indrawn breath, and knew that the prisoner must have been brought up from the cells. He didn’t turn to look. He had been fighting for most of his adult life and he had no wish to see another condemned prisoner—especially not this one.
    “Eyes front,” he snapped at the two guards on the gate. They glowered at him but obediently turned back to watch the long straight road that led into the French town of Rouen. “If there’s to be an attack, it will be now,” he added, “when the prisoner is in the open air.”
    “There will be no attack,” one of the guards, a sullen Dutchman, said in his accented English. “The French want rid of her almost as much as we do.”
    “Some, maybe,” William agreed, “but not all. I was there at Orléans, where she claimed her first great victory. I saw her fight at Jargeau and I was one of the few archers to escape from Patay. The French—the real French, the true French—worship her.” Pulling his heavy leather cloak tighter around his shoulders, William wandered out from beneath the shelter of the gate and stood in the center of the track. Despite his words, he doubted there would be any rescue attempt for the young woman the people were calling the Maid of Orléans. Any attack would be suicide. Rouen was a fortress. The guards had been doubled and then redoubled as the date of her execution grew nearer. English archers guarded the walls, alongside German and Austrian mercenaries, and roving bands of savage Scots patrolled the fields.
    Another rousing cheer went up inside the fortress and William turned to look back at the guards on the gate. The sound had distracted them and they were looking into the town square, where the huge pyre had been built.
    “Eyes front,” William bellowed again.
    “But they’re going to burn the witch,” Thomas, the younger guard, said excitedly.
    “She’s no witch, she’s a nineteen-year-old girl,” William snapped, and immediately regretted his words. He would be reported to his commanders and marked down as either a potential heretic or a French sympathizer. Or both. The English bowman turned back to the road. William’s sister, Anne, was nineteen years old, and every