Sparrow: The Story of Joan of Arc. Michael Morpurgo
“I saw him, Belami, I saw the Archangel Michael. I heard him. He was there, and then he wasn’t there. When he had gone and the bright light had gone, I just sat here quite unable to move at first. I was so scared I thought I’d gone mad, Belami. I thought the devil was in me. I got up and I ran. I ran and ran, to the chapel of Notre Dame at Beaumont, my favourite place in all the world, my sanctuary. I always feel safe there. To get there you have to go through Oaky Wood – there’s no other way. You know that, Belami, you’ve been there. There are wolves in that wood and wild boar. And there are supposed to be fairies in there too. I don’t believe in all that fairy nonsense, but it’s what people say. Anyway, I wasn’t frightened of wolves or wild boar or fairies, not that day. It was the devil in me that I was frightened of. I’ve never run so fast in all my life. Once I reached the chapel I threw myself down on the floor, and I prayed and I prayed and I prayed for the devil to come out of me. My voices answered me almost at once. ‘Joan, dear Joan,’ – a woman’s voice this time – ‘Your voices come from God, not from the devil. You must believe that. I am St Catherine and I will speak to you often, I will be with you whenever you need me. So do not fear your voices. There is no devil in you – that is why you have been chosen. Have no fear, have no fear.’
“Ever since then, Belami, ever since St Catherine spoke to me that first time in the chapel, I have had no fear of my voices, only of what they ask me to do.” She held out her finger to Belami and he hopped on. She brought him close to her face and looked into his eyes. “Why me? Why me, Belami? Why would He choose me to do this thing? I’m just Joan, plain Joan. I can sew and spin well enough, though not as well as my mother. I shepherd sheep, I fetch water, I herd cattle. But I am no soldier to go and defeat the English.” There were tears running down her cheeks. “How can I be expected to save France? I know now that I must, but how? How?”
Belami pecked at her tears, and she laughed at that. She set him back on her knee. “I ask them how, and they do not tell me. I ask them when, and they do not tell me. ‘Be patient, Joan,’ they say, ‘the time will come.’ And I do try to be patient, Belami, I do try. But I’m not good at being patient. They should know that, shouldn’t they? They should know everything. And meanwhile we hear news that the English and their Burgundian friends triumph everywhere. Their soldiers have only to bark and we French cringe in fear and run off to hide in our castles, our tails between our legs. Every day I am made to wait our enemies become stronger, and we become weaker. I know I shouldn’t, but I hate them, Belami, I hate the English. Why don’t they just go home and leave us in peace? I hate the Burgundians even more though. They’re of our blood, they’re French, and they ally themselves with the English, parcelling up the country, my country, as they see fit. English, Burgundians, they raid and rob wherever they want, and we have no power, nor any will, it seems, to stop them. There’s hardly a village left in France that’s truly French any more – that’s what Father says. Even here in Domrémy there are some who speak openly in support of the Burgundians. And Maxey, our next door village, just down the valley, is all Burgundian. You saw them, Belami, those boys from Maxey who set up on us in the fields only a couple of weeks ago. I longed then to stand and fight, but my brothers sent me and Hauviette off home so we wouldn’t get hurt. How many more times do I have to stand by and watch my brothers and my friends come home bloodied and beaten?” She was on fire with rage now. “And last year when those Burgundian soldiers came – there were only a few of them – did we band together to drive them off? No, we ran. We took our animals and ran for the safety of the Château d’Ile, and the soldiers came and pillaged and burnt the village just as they pleased. And my voices told me then to be patient. They tell me now to be patient.
“I asked Mother once: ‘Why do we always have to run?’ Do you know what she said, Belami? ‘We do as your father says, as the village council says. It is not for you to question his commands nor their decisions. It’s nothing to fret over. The soldiers have been before. They will come again. They are like the storms of winter. When they are gone, we rebuild, make good. There has been no war in this land for a hundred years. Why should it stop now? Life goes on. We just keep our heads down and keep out of the way – it’s all we can do. You think too much, Joan, you always have. Just stick to your spinning and your shepherding and your praying, and with a bit of luck you could make a good wife one day and devout mother. Girls these days,’ she tutted at me and shook her head, ‘I don’t know.’
“So you can see, Belami, even my own mother has long since given up the fight and will not listen to me. I cannot even persuade my own mother. And my voices say that I have to persuade all of France to rise up and drive the English out. But how will I make them believe it can be done, when I do not know myself how it can be done? Oh, Belami, I only wish you could talk. Do you believe I can do what my voices say? Do you? Do you? Oh, talk to me, Belami, talk to me.”
As time passed Joan went less often to the fields with the cattle. She might drive them out to graze with the other children, but would always find some excuse to go off. She told Hauviette she needed quiet, that she was going to pray. And it was true, she would spend every hour she could wandering the Oaky Wood alone, or praying in Notre Dame at Beaumont. She was never really alone, of course, for Belami was never far from her side. Sometimes, particularly when she was at her prayers, he would keep his distance, knowing how she liked to be on her own with her voices. He stayed close by though, always hoping for a glimpse of her saints – St Margaret or St Catherine perhaps – but to his great disappointment he never saw nor heard anything of them. He could see she was often deeply troubled and upset by what they told her, so much so that sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to speak of it, even to Belami.
She talked to him mostly of her family, and of Hauviette, about how odd they thought she had become recently, how quiet and distant. It was her father that worried about her, more than anyone else, it seemed. “You know the worst of all this, Belami?” she told him. “I am deceiving my own father. By not telling him of my voices, of what they say I will one day have to do, I am deceiving him. And he loves me so much, and he trusts me too. We’re so alike, him and me. He knows me so well, as I know him. Sometimes, Belami, I find him looking at me very strangely. It’s as if he knows something. You know what he said, only yesterday? Out of the blue it was. Father was talking of Robert de Beaudricourt, the captain of the castle at Vaucouleurs, and what a fine soldier he was. All I said was that given half a chance (and if I wasn’t a girl, of course) I’d go off and be a soldier, and I’d drive the English out of France once and for all. He looked at me hard and suddenly became very angry. ‘Don’t you ever speak of such a thing, Joan,’ he says. ‘I had a dream once, a dream that comes back and back to haunt me, a dream that you would one day run off with the soldiers.’ My brothers sniggered at this. Father banged the table and glared at them. ‘It is no joke,’ he stormed, ‘I tell you, if Joan ever went off with the soldiers I would drown her myself in the river, with my own hands. There could be no greater shame for all of us. Speak to me no more of soldiers, Joan. Be content that you are what God has made you, with what God wants you to be.’
“There are times, Belami, and that was one of them, that I so long to tell him what it is that God really wants me to do. But I cannot. My voices forbid it. To do what I have to do, what God tells me I must do, I must wrong my own father. I must hurt him. Yet he is the one man on this earth I will ever love, my voices have told me as much. How he will hate me, Belami, how they will all hate me.” She wept bitterly at the thought of it.
Belami had taken to waiting for her outside the chapel at Beaumont while she went in to pray. She was always a long time at her prayers; and besides, it was often warmer for him outside, and Belami loved to feel the sun on his feathers. She would often be overwhelmed by tears when she came out, but not this time. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “The moment has come, Belami. I feel like an arrow released at last from its bow. Just now, in the chapel, Belami, the blessed St Margaret came to me and said that I have to go to Vaucouleurs, as soon as possible. I have to see Robert de Beaudricourt himself. I am to tell him to send me to the Dauphin at Chinon. I am to go to fight the English. It is the beginning, Belami, it is the beginning.”
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