We stand in the warm May sunshine as if we were waiting for the starting trumpet of a joust. The crowd is noisy and cheerful all around us. A very few people are silent, some women hold a crucifix, one or two have their hands on a cross at their necks; but most people are enjoying the day out, cracking nuts and swigging from flasks, a merry outing on a sunny day in May and the cheering spectacle of a public burning at the end of it.

Then the door opens, and the men of the guard march out and push back the crowd who whisper and hiss and boo at the opening inner door, craning their necks to be the first to see her.

She does not look like my friend Joan – that is my first thought when they bring her out of the little sallyport of the castle. She is wearing her boy’s boots once more, but she is not striding out in her loose-limbed, confident walk. I guess that they have tortured her and perhaps the bones of her feet are broken, her toes crushed on the rack. They half-drag her and she makes little paddling steps, as if she is trying to find her footing on uncertain ground.

She is not wearing her boy’s bonnet on her brown cropped hair, for they have shaved her head, and she is as bald as a shamed whore. On her bare cold scalp, stained here and there with dried blood where the razor has nicked her pale skin, they have crammed a tall hat of paper like a bishop’s mitre, and on it are written her sins, in clumsy block letters for everyone to see: Heretic. Witch. Traitor. She wears a shapeless white robe, knotted with a cheap piece of cord at her waist. It is too long for her and the hem drags around her stumbling feet. She looks ridiculous, a figure of fun, and the people start to catcall and laugh, and someone throws a handful of mud.

She looks around, as if she is desperate for something, her eyes dart everywhere, and I am terrified that she will see me, and know that I have failed to save her, that even now I am doing nothing, and I will do nothing to save her. I am terrified that she will call my name and everyone will know that this broken clown was my friend and that I will be shamed by her. But she is not looking at the faces crowding around her, alight with excitement, she is asking for something. I can see her urgently pleading; and then a soldier, a common English soldier, thrusts a wooden cross into her hands, and she clutches it as they lift her and push her upwards to the bonfire.

They have built it so high it is hard to get her up. Her feet scrabble on the ladder and her hands cannot grip. But they push her roughly, cheerfully, from behind, hands on her back, her buttocks, her thighs, and then a big soldier goes up the ladder with her and takes a handful of the coarse material of her robe and hauls her up beside him like a sack, turns her round, and puts her back to the stake that runs through the pyre. They throw up a length of chain to him and he loops it around and around her and then fastens it with a bolt behind. He tugs at it, workmanlike, and tucks the wooden cross in the front of her gown, and in the crowd below a friar pushes to the front and holds up a crucifix. She stares at it unblinkingly, and I know, to my shame, that I am glad she has fixed her eyes on the cross so that she will not look at me, in my best gown and my new velvet cap, among the nobility who are talking and laughing all around me.