Between them is the spilled pottage. Her head is still swimming in grief—Catherine dead, her uncle gone—but she thinks she hears him instruct her to eat what is on the ground, what she has spilled, so that it does not go to waste.

There was a time when she would have done this. That time, however, has passed.

In the middle of swearing, he falters. His words skip and trip over themselves. She watches his face twist into a grimace and his hands fly to his chest as if he feels a sudden pain. She recognizes the motion, and her own heart softens. It is the first time she wants to throw her arms around him—and not to wrestle, to squeeze, or to wound.

She watches him blink back tears. He sniffs, and her brothers and her mother look away.

He says, in a barely coherent mumble, “The wrong daughter died.”

She wants to say, I agree.

“See how I am left,” he continues.

She wants to say, See how we are all left.

But the moment is over. He straightens, and he is again Jacques d’Arc. Indomitable. Unrelenting. The finger returns to her shoulder. The jabbing doesn’t hurt. It’s just irritating, and she wants it to stop. She takes her father’s hand. She won’t pretend it doesn’t give her pleasure to hear him gasp. She shoves him away—gently.

It’s as she reaches for the cloth on the table to clean up the mess that the blow lands: a backhanded slap across the mouth. A pause. Then the front of her father’s tunic is in her hands, and he is wriggling like an eel. She hears her mother and brothers shouting, “Put him down, Joan, put him down!”

When she releases him, he staggers. His huge bulk does a drunken dance and trips into the opposite wall.

She throws the cloth onto the puddle on the floor. She doesn’t have to say, Clean it up yourself.

Her arms are shaking as she leaves. In her grip, her father’s feet dangled, and she didn’t even have to try. She is thinking of her own strength. She is thinking, There is nothing here for me anymore.

When she returns the next morning, she finds Jacques sitting at the table, tossing a pouch between his hands. On one side of his head is a small bump. Otherwise he appears himself: scowling and in bad temper. He has been waiting for her to come back.

They do not speak; they do not bid each other a halfhearted, embarrassed good morning. She watches as her father empties the pouch and coins drop out in a sharp, ringing clatter, the noise too loud in the silence between them. Ten in all.