“Ah, don’t cry, little one,” he says, peering down at her. The dam has finally shattered. She is crying, in shameless heaves and hiccups, because she thinks she will never see her sister or her uncle or even, God help her, her father again. Because things are so bad she is actually holding hands with a Burgundian.

The man from Maxey is still placating her when she hears shouting. She looks up. It is Catherine.

He releases her so she can clasp her sister’s waist. Around Catherine’s thin arms, she catches sight of Durand, not far behind. He is loping up, flushed, his hair in disarrangement, a light sheen of sweat making his skin glitter.

Before they leave the fair, Joan offers the man from Maxey a lift in the cart as far as the edge of Domrémy. He declines. It seems he refuses everything. Cake. A cup of ale. A free ride.

She slips a finger into the pouch of coins and shakes one out, offering it to him. Surely you cannot refuse money? But when he sees the coin, he only laughs. He puts his immense bear paw over her hand and pushes the coin back to her.

“So, you are an heiress,” he says, smiling, “and that is why those rascals were following you like hunting dogs on the scent.”

“I will give you a coin for your chicken,” she says, not giving up.

Again he laughs. “You won’t be an heiress for long if that is what you would pay for a single chicken, sweetheart.”

She stands in the back of the cart as it rolls away, waving to the man from Maxey, who is still holding his hen, a good layer, he informed her. He still has hopes of selling it before the day is over. Her uncle pleads, “Will you sit down, Joan, before you suffer an accident? Before you roll off the cart and under it, your legs smashed to jelly? A cart is not a chariot. It’s happened to others. I have seen it.” But she doesn’t listen to him.

She is remembering a scene from two months ago, in late June: Saint John’s Eve. A great wheel was prepared, and every household in the village contributed an armful of straw. When the wheel was finished, it stood nearly as tall as her father. One of his friends even joked, “What, did the carpenter use your dimensions when he made it, Jacques?”