She thinks he’s finished, but he isn’t. It is never enough for Jacques d’Arc to simply insult the dead and abase the bereaved. So, it’s weakness of boys, this much is established. But it’s also France. It’s weakness that drips, like rain from the eaves, above to below. The weakness of our rulers, the King and the Dauphin. Joan moves her mouth, mimicking his expressions, her head turned away as she pulls faces. Her mother and sister see what she is doing, but her mother looks down, while her sister looks up, as if aiming a prayer at their wood-beamed ceiling. Neither of them smile.

But Jacques d’Arc, it seems, cannot escape weakness. Here, too, is the very weakness he hates, at his own table.

As she tries to get her sister to look at her and laugh, Joan feels her hand slip and the bowl in front of her teeter on the edge of the table before fate intervenes, brushing ghostly fingers across the rim and coaxing it over. She watches the bowl, as if in a slow dream, wobble and fall with a crash.

An accident—only an accident. But she knows a miracle must be performed. And quickly.

In the time before her father reaches out and thrashes her, she must somehow make whole the bowl that has been ruined. The serving of pottage the bowl contained must be scooped back inside, as though it had never been touched or disturbed. And her father has already risen from his chair.

So, she is on all fours, her hands working frantically, lumping the clay pieces together in a small and, she hopes, neat little mound that will satisfy the high standards of Jacques d’Arc. She is using her palm to ladle as much stew as she can into her mouth, so that she can’t be accused of wasting food, not in such uncertain times as these, when there are consecutive bad harvests throughout the country. Also, she is eating from the floor because, in spite of her grief or owing to it, she is starving. In her haste, she has swallowed a bit of the bowl itself, a hard and tiny crumb, so the bowl will never be whole again, even if all of the pieces are carefully put back together. Fresh rushes are spread on the floor, and somehow she has chewed a bit of them, too. There’s the taste of grass in her mouth, along with everything else she has gulped down already.