The examination by the women followed soon after. Yolande had appointed these women, and they asked her to lie down on a bed and part her legs. The oldest among them touched her knees and peered between them, squinting, until something she saw there at last seemed to content her. A young woman replaced her, also staring, and then a third, a solemn-faced matron, who audibly sighed with relief between Joan’s legs, which made her squirm. By the time they were finished, she had begun to miss the bishops; she stared at a spot on the ceiling and drummed her flat stomach with her fingers. With a restless nail, she picked at a scab on her left wrist. The faces of the women appeared over her head. They peered down at her and nodded. “You are chaste,” the oldest announced gravely. “A true virgin.”

Really? she almost said. I didn’t know.

After each session in Poitiers, she went straight to the stables and the training yard. The knights kept well away, but the pages, the young boys between seven and twelve years old, couldn’t hide their curiosity as they watched her stuff straw back inside the targets she’d impaled. At first, they pretended not to notice her. They whistled and kicked the hay at their feet while stealing glances in her direction. Then they crept closer, huddling together in a group. They blinked at her, and she looked back at them: the future of the realm, the young sons of the nobility, though they didn’t seem to her all that different from the kitchen boys who had watched her pare vegetables in Neufchâteau. She smiled at them, and they smiled back.

From then on they watched her shoot, faces peering between the gateposts. They watched her mount her horse and ride and took turns touching and lifting her sword. They shaved and trimmed her hair to the bowl-shaped cut and washed it, many small hands on her head, as if to collectively baptize her. In the way of children, they each kept a lock of her hair for good luck and because they believed it would give them strength.