Her father heard what happened, not from Joan—she would not be so stupid as to tell him—but from a loudmouthed neighbor. When she stood in front of him to account for what she’d done, Jacques stared curiously at her. Had this child been sent solely to torment him? To unravel all his tricks so that no scheme of his could be realized again? Before he beat her, he told Joan she had ruined his plan. Didn’t she know he had wanted to cheat those farmers, his neighbors, for reasons of his own? No, she didn’t know, but what reasons did he have, she asked him, before the first slap landed and she saw stars.

The next day, the farmers found out where she was, which wasn’t, of course, at home. She was up a tree again, and they had to shout at her to come down so they could properly thank her. They each shook her hand, even the man who had called her a little lordling, and saw her arms were raw with welts, which made them pity her more. They had brought her a little reward, a few scraps of meat, to share with her dog.

This is only one story about Joan. Others in Domrémy have seen her sit in a field that doesn’t belong to her father, where she has settled and not moved for a whole hour, thinking or dreaming whatever it is a young girl dreams, until the owner of the field made his appearance and asked what she was doing on his property, staring like a simpleton at the clouds. She has pushed boys into a stream for capturing songbirds from bushes and torturing them and been heard talking to her dog, to the Faerie Tree, to a beetle on a leaf. Once, someone spotted her with her head in the water and shouted, “What, are you trying to drown yourself, Joan?” and she came bubbling up, a silver fish leaping and wriggling from her hands.