But by midday her body feels cold, and when she touches her arm, the skin is damp. On the stump of a tree that her uncle has transformed into a table, he is showing her brothers a trick with three cups; a pebble is concealed beneath one of them. Her brothers keep their eyes on the cups: a mistake. She turns, sees Catherine in the distance walking in the direction of the Virgin’s shrine just outside of the village.

It is when she looks away from Catherine that she stumbles; her head spins. She had been tilling her mother’s garden, and the ground moves, actually tips, beneath her feet. She is never sick, but her cheeks are feverishly warm. Her legs give out just as her uncle and brothers notice her. Panic closes up her throat, like a strangling hand, so she can’t cry out.

Above her, church bells thunder, but the timing is wrong. It is too early for the bells to ring the hour of Nones. As she lies on the ground, she hears shouting. The shouting isn’t coming just from her uncle and brothers. It is the whole village in uproar. Why, she wonders. Why is everyone making so much noise because I have fallen?

Then she hears: beneath all the shouts, the beating of horses’ hooves. The sound is like a sudden storm, a torrent of summer rain pummeling the earth. She hears, from a distance, words she can’t understand. The language is foreign to her, the speakers of this language even harsher than her father. As her brothers lift her arms, she catches sight of torches. Torches in daylight? She shakes her head. This makes no sense. She must be dreaming. Yet she watches as a man mounted on a horse, a man she doesn’t recognize, tosses a torch as if it were a pebble into a pond, and the first cottage in the village goes up in flames. The people inside, a whole family, run out. She is aware that she is sweating. Her body, her very insides, shake.

The English are coming, she thinks. They have come to Domrémy at last. So, this is the fear the English inspire. She is ashamed that now the enemy is here, she is afraid.