He is the only person Joan knows who can hold a conversation entirely with himself. No sooner does a thought enter his head than it travels to his lightning-quick tongue, and it is not always curses that come out. He is sometimes perceptive, occasionally eloquent. We have suffered, he says now, no raids from the companies of mercenaries that have ravaged the French countryside for longer than I have been alive. Heaven has looked kindly on our small village. Our cottages have not been burned. We’ve had no need to seek refuge within the fortified walls of cities. We’ve not had our livestock taken, our women defiled, our children killed, the corpses of grandmothers and godparents set alight before our eyes, if we could not give over our life’s savings for the right to bury them. These things, he continues, have happened to others, and there is no reason to believe that Domrémy, though we take our name from the blessed Saint Remigius, is better or worse than any other place in France that has suffered. You hear stories like this all the time: cloisters broken into, silver chalices pissed in, altar cloth used to wipe the stinking sweat of an Englishman’s brow. But this, what happened today, is to our shame. We cannot justify it, for it was no army, no company of Burgundian or English or even disgruntled French soldiers come to wreak havoc upon us. He pauses, and the silence holds the full weight of his displeasure. It is weakness, he concludes. Weakness.

For a moment, her father simply lets the word hang heavy in the air. Then he wets his lips, takes a drink, continues: It is the coddling of mothers that brings about such frailty in boys, for all women are weak and soft. They were born to be such. His eyes dart quickly to his wife and two daughters. Women, mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, they cannot help it. That boy, Guillaume—he spreads his hands flat against the table, on either side of the bowl containing his supper, for this is his final judgment—well, we shouldn’t be surprised he was felled. This is what happens when you don’t put a child to use as soon as he can pick up a stick or bend his back in the field. His father was always petting him, like that cat he carried around. An unnatural boy. Christ in heaven, he says. He carried the cat, and his father and mother carried him. They threw their arms around him every time he so much as scratched his nose because it itched.