Durand once said to her, “When you so much as stub your toe, Joan, you kick the table leg or the root that tripped you and bellow at it. God gave you such a pair of lungs. The whole world must be made aware of the table leg’s transgression. But Catherine is different. Do you think she suffers less because she doesn’t complain? And which, if I asked you, is the harder to do? To bear one’s anguish in silence or to shout?”

Catherine doesn’t accept the ring, so Joan takes her sister’s hand and slips it onto a finger. The ring is too large. The cart shudders, and the ring jumps back into Joan’s palm. Now it is Joan’s turn to look dismayed. But a smile flickers across Catherine’s face; she tells Joan she may wear it on a piece of string around her neck, or if not around her neck, then she will keep it somewhere safe, as the most precious thing she owns.

“I am only its keeper for the time,” Catherine says. “When you grow, the ring will fit you better.”

“How do you know?” Joan asks.

“I just know.” She lays a hand on her sister’s head, the movement like a blessing. What need do we have for holy women, Joan wonders, when we have sisters like Catherine?

The saint for whom Catherine is named was a virgin of exceptional beauty, a scholar who spent the duration of her short, martyred life in the city of Alexandria, in the land of Egypt. But, Joan thinks, my sister must be more beautiful than even this saint, and I would climb the highest pole to heaven to dress her in the jewels she deserves, though my hands should be rubbed raw, though every finger of mine should bleed.

VII

The circle turns. And the wheel spins back, three days after the fair, to the fists of Jacques d’Arc. This time, Joan is limping not in the direction of Hauviette’s cottage but toward the Bois Chenu. She cannot always seek sanctuary in the same places, and tonight she thinks her father’s mood is foul enough to pursue her. Salaud doesn’t follow at her heels; he is safe in her sister’s arms.

Her prize money, which she has sewn in secret into the hem of her dress, is enough to buy two strong cart horses. She couldn’t keep the goose in her skirts, too; otherwise she would have done. But her father has taken the bird to fatten it before it becomes his and her brothers’ supper.