From a distant place, her uncle’s voice travels to her, like whispers through a crack in the wall. “It was about noon,” he begins. “There was no one in the house but your sister and myself. Your father and brothers had gone to the market. Your mother was visiting Jehanne. She told me you had left for the Bois Chenu hours ago and had failed to return. She asked me to go and search for you; she was afraid you had met with some accident. So I left, and your sister was then alone in the house. When I returned, I found her at the bottom of the stairs. Where were you, Joan?”

She raises a hand without looking at him. Stop. Please.

She is too shocked, too tired to cry. She kneels, takes Catherine’s hand, and presses it flat to the space over her heart.

If you die, she thinks, all of my goodness dies with you, and this, here, this heart will become as hard as stone. I am afraid of what I will become. You hold my heart in your hand.

She waits for a response: a stir of the palm, a twitch of the finger. For hours, she keeps her eyes on Catherine, whose face is restored by candlelight to an amber-shaded, flickering beauty. But soon the pull of sleep is too strong for her to resist. She has walked over twenty-four miles, more than eight hours in a single day. She has cleaned a month’s worth of tablecloths. And she has still failed.

In the morning, the bells ring and she stirs. She looks down. Her sister’s hand is clutched in hers, but it is already cold.

In daylight, Joan steps out of the house. She heads for the burnt fields, ruined by Englishmen’s fire.

This morning is only deceptively warm; the ravaged furrows are lit by a shining, white-colored sun that gives off no heat.

She thinks of Catherine’s bed. After the first few hours, she had fallen asleep. But she thought—or was it her imagination?—she felt movement in her hand, and when she woke, that her sister’s head was turned toward her. The shadows of the room, the flames of the candles made Catherine’s eyes two points of light against a watery darkness, like twin stars. But when morning came, the position of the body was the same as when she had first entered the room. Her uncle said Catherine had never stirred, not once, before her breath gave out and she died. So, she thinks, it must have been a dream, and the memory of her own making.