Though what has Guillaume done to deserve this? The priest of Domrémy claims even love can be a sin. If you love something too much, if you feel you can never part with it—say, money, or jewels, or your cat—this is also wrong. Everything in the world is merely temporal. Only God endures. Your greatest passion must be for Him alone.

She has been instructed by the priest, by Catherine and her mother, that the prayers of the living can alleviate the suffering of those whose souls must dwell for a time in Purgatory. So, she decides she will pray for Guillaume. She will pray for him at least once every day. And she will do more than pray. She will sneak a bowl of milk and a piece of cheese from the cupboard for the cat who has lost his master and friend.

Soon, the dead boy’s body will be rolled into a white shroud. It will be placed on a bier of wood, the only covering a black pall. His final resting place is a plot in a churchyard. But death is not the end. There is the matter of reparation, of costing out the total price of his family’s loss against his value, both real and projected: the man Guillaume would have become, the labor he would have performed, the wife he would have married, the children he would have had, the litter of cats he would have raised. She imagines each limb of the boy being measured, each hand and foot weighed, his naked body, now washed and clean, searched for disfigurements or scars. She sees, with her mind’s eye, numbers being scratched across a vellum scroll, then added, several calculations checked and cross-checked. The result may be something like this: for each ankle, two chickens; each thigh, a pig; for his arms, which when grown would have worked his family’s land, an ox; for his head and his heart, a horse of good age and a shiny new plow.