She does not wait for an answer to her prayers. God is always silent. And she will not shirk her responsibility. At Patay, two thousand English died. But at Paris, she has lost half of her entire army. She does not blame God. Nor does she believe, like some, that this is divine retribution for fighting on a feast day. This is not God’s doing. This is not God’s work. It is hers.

V

CHINON, OCTOBER 1429

Her rooms are bare, the tapestries of hunting scenes gone, the statuette of the angel flown away, and the window purposefully left open to let in a cold wind. There is no trace of her clerks’ desks and chairs, nor the table where she had formerly dined with her household. Someone has defaced the artwork on the walls and taken a brush of black paint to the giant castles, the plump clouds, the woodland in shades of light and dark green, and the smiling face in the sun. On the stone floor, there are traces of a fire; they have burned the wax tablet where she practiced her letters; they have snapped her stylus in thirds and torched her clerks’ quills so there are the remnants of feathers. Her letters, her lists and expenses, her communications to armories and foundries, the draft of her proposal to hire the experts in gunpowder and cannonry—all of these things have been confiscated. Who knows where they are now?

Le Maçon walks in as she is standing in the center of her bedchamber, empty save for a single feather bed. It was the King’s own men, he informs her. They carried in sacks and nets and empty trunks, as if they had been tasked with catching feral cats. They took away anything of value, burning or tearing up the rest. He had watched them pour black ink from the clerks’ desks into the fire, so that the flames hissed and sputtered. And an unpleasant boy went through all the rooms to gather up the cushions, as if he were sweeping out the rushes after a feast. It was all le Maçon could do to persuade him to leave the pillow on her bed, though even this turned into an argument. Did a pillow count as a cushion? The boy had express instructions from his masters. In the end, he’d had to be bribed.

“Children these days,” le Maçon says, his lip curling.

Part of her baggage has gone missing. Most of her tunics, the smooth silks and satins in pale yellow, green, and purple; the doublets with silver and jeweled buttons; the parti-colored hose in red and white have not followed her back from Paris. She can’t find the swan brooch or the silver case that held the claw of Saint Jerome’s lion. The only rings she has left are the ones on her fingers.