He counts the money slowly, so she can see each coin and know he isn’t playing a trick, not slipping one into his pocket or tucking two up his sleeve. When he has finished, he returns the money to the pouch, refastens the string, and pushes it toward her.

“My brothers? My mother?” Joan says. She tries to keep her voice steady, but her throat tightens.

“Working,” her father replies.

He stands. Briefly they look at each other. “Catherine will be missed,” he says. “You won’t.”

He leaves the room. The door swings shut behind him.

She takes the pouch, recounts the coins (in dealings with Jacques, it is better to be sure), and pockets the money.

A single road leads out of the village, and it is still early. She will miss Hauviette’s wedding, only a few days away. Her friend is marrying a widower from another village who has bad teeth but many acres of good land and two small children who need a mother to watch over them. But Joan was never one for weddings or wedding feasts.

She is walking through the story of her life, past the stream into which she pushed boys, the tormenters of songbirds. The walls she fixed, the roofs. The Faerie Tree and, in the distance, the Bois Chenu. She sees, too, what her life could have been. There, six years from now, in the meadow: a child running and Joan in pursuit while Catherine stands a little apart, watching them. Her arms catch the child, swinging the small body off the ground from behind. “Careful!” her sister calls. And she thinks there is a little dog—some stray they found shivering in a ditch, wrapped up, and saved. Another Salaud, though they won’t name it Salaud, because now there is a child in the house. She hears the dog bark, and the sound flies straight to her heart. She stops. It takes effort to hold back tears.

At her feet, something slides past. Fur brushes her ankle, and she nearly trips.

It is Matagot, slipped out of a tree and come to see her off. The cat, tail twitching, allows itself to be held one last time. As she strokes its fur, she hears Catherine’s voice: “Now go, Joan.”

She remembers how she picked up Saint Margaret’s fallen head from the ground and studied it, tracing her fingers over eyebrows, eyes, cheekbones, nose, and chin. The book of saints will tell you Margaret’s story. It will tell you where she came from, a place called Antioch, and what happened to her: that after being cast off by her father for her Christian faith, she watched sheep, received a marriage proposal from a Roman prefect, turned the proposal down, and was tortured. Among her many trials was being swallowed by Satan.

“How did she get out?” she had asked the priest.

“With a cross she kept close to her,” he replied.