Sparrow: The Story of Joan of Arc

So Joan carried Belami into the house cupped in her hands. She scooted the cat out, and fed Belami for the first time. A few days later and he was flying free. As weeks passed and he grew stronger he was able to fend for himself more and more, but he never strayed far from her and liked to keep her always in his sight. It was on the day of his first exultant flight up towards the sun. he was gliding back to earth when he saw Joan so small, so alone on the ground below. It came to Belami then that he would not be as other birds were, that he would live his life with her, come what may. She had saved him, fed him, and cared for him. Best of all, she needed him. So he would be her friend for life. He would not leave her. He would never leave her.

It was a common enough sight around the village now, Joan with her white sparrow flying above her. Any catapult jokes met with a very frosty response. They were scarcely ever apart. Hauviette said to her once that she never knew she could be jealous of a sparrow, but she was. Wherever Joan went, Belami would follow, and more often than not it was to the spreading apple tree at the bottom of the garden. Here he would sit on her shoulder and listen to her, with half an eye on the aphids and grasshoppers in the long grass below him. When temptation got the better of him he would dart down and help himself; but he would try his best to be attentive because he knew how she loved to talk to him, how she had to unburden herself. He was there for that, there to listen.

Often she’d tell him the same story. It was so miraculous a story that Belami never tired of hearing it. “To tell you is to remind me it was true,” she told him, “that it really happened. It helps me to make sense of everything they’ve told me ever since.” She stroked his wings – she always seemed to do that whenever she wanted him to stay with her and listen. “It was here, Belami,” she began, “right here under this tree that I first heard them – over two years ago now. I should have been out guarding the sheep and the cattle with my brothers, Pierre and Jean, and Hauviette and the others, I know that. But, to be honest, any excuse not to be there and I always took it. You watch sheep long enough at their grazing, you watch cows long enough swishing their tails in the sunshine – I’m telling you, Belami, it’s enough to bore anyone half to death. Anything to pass the time, and races are best because I’m good at races. But that day it wasn’t even my idea. Down to the river and back, that’s what Pierre said – a long way, that is. I think they thought they could beat me over a longer distance. Hauviette hates running, it hurts her legs. So she stayed to mind the sheep and the cattle. Off we went, and I won – by a mile. They weren’t at all pleased, as you can imagine. I’m just a fast runner, Belami – you’ve seen me. I can’t help that, can I? And besides it was a race and I’ve always liked winning better than losing.

“Anyway, the race was over and I was lying there in the sun still trying to catch my breath when Pierre – my own brother! – came up and said that Mother wanted me back at the house. I didn’t think, I just went. He made it sound really urgent, the pig. When I got home I found Mother busy at her spinning, and of course she knew nothing about it. You should have heard her. ‘Why have you left the cattle?’ she said. ‘Do you think they look after themselves? Well, do you?’ And she boxed my ears and sent me back off to the fields.”

Belami flew down and perched on her knee. He knew Joan would be crying. She always cried when she got to this part of the story. “She was so angry with me, Belami, and it was so unfair. I sat down here, right here, and cried my heart out.” She brushed her tears away with the back of her hand. “I remember there was a sudden rush of wind through the leaves above me, and I remember thinking that was odd, because until then there had been no wind that day, no wind at all. Then there was a silence and strange stillness all around me, as if the whole world had stopped breathing. Over there, just by the well, I saw a white light amongst the trees, and bright like the sun is bright. Then I seemed to be surrounded by it – like being cocooned in a white mist, it was. And out of this mist came a voice calling me – not from inside my head, Belami, I promise you. It was a real voice, a man’s voice. He spoke very slowly, as if he wanted me to remember every word he said. I did remember, every word of it.

“‘Joan,’ it said, ‘Joan of Arc, of Domrémy. You have been chosen by God, by the King of Heaven, to drive the enemy from the soil of France for ever. You will set the rightful Prince of France, the Dauphin, on his throne and see him crowned at Reims. To do this you will have to become a soldier. You will lead the French army into battle, and you will be victorious – that you must never doubt. You will save France, Joan. These things you will accomplish by the grace of God, and in His name. I am the Archangel Michael, Joan. After me will come many voices, many visions, all sent by God to help you and to guide you. Listen to them, Joan, listen and always obey them. Speak to no man of me, and of your voices, until the time comes. Meanwhile be good, be strong, have courage. God bless you, Joan. God bless you.’

“I saw him, Belami, I saw the Archangel Michael. I heard him. He was there, and then he wasn’t there. When he had gone and the bright light had gone, I just sat here quite unable to move at first. I was so scared I thought I’d gone mad, Belami. I thought the devil was in me. I got up and I ran. I ran and ran, to the chapel of Notre Dame at Beaumont, my favourite place in all the world, my sanctuary. I always feel safe there. To get there you have to go through Oaky Wood – there’s no other way. You know that, Belami, you’ve been there. There are wolves in that wood and wild boar. And there are supposed to be fairies in there too. I don’t believe in all that fairy nonsense, but it’s what people say. Anyway, I wasn’t frightened of wolves or wild boar or fairies, not that day. It was the devil in me that I was frightened of. I’ve never run so fast in all my life. Once I reached the chapel I threw myself down on the floor, and I prayed and I prayed and I prayed for the devil to come out of me. My voices answered me almost at once. ‘Joan, dear Joan,’ – a woman’s voice this time – ‘Your voices come from God, not from the devil. You must believe that. I am St Catherine and I will speak to you often, I will be with you whenever you need me. So do not fear your voices. There is no devil in you – that is why you have been chosen. Have no fear, have no fear.’

“Ever since then, Belami, ever since St Catherine spoke to me that first time in the chapel, I have had no fear of my voices, only of what they ask me to do.” She held out her finger to Belami and he hopped on. She brought him close to her face and looked into his eyes. “Why me? Why me, Belami? Why would He choose me to do this thing? I’m just Joan, plain Joan. I can sew and spin well enough, though not as well as my mother. I shepherd sheep, I fetch water, I herd cattle. But I am no soldier to go and defeat the English.” There were tears running down her cheeks. “How can I be expected to save France? I know now that I must, but how? How?”

Belami pecked at her tears, and she laughed at that. She set him back on her knee. “I ask them how, and they do not tell me. I ask them when, and they do not tell me. ‘Be patient, Joan,’ they say, ‘the time will come.’ And I do try to be patient, Belami, I do try. But I’m not good at being patient. They should know that, shouldn’t they? They should know everything. And meanwhile we hear news that the English and their Burgundian friends triumph everywhere. Their soldiers have only to bark and we French cringe in fear and run off to hide in our castles, our tails between our legs. Every day I am made to wait our enemies become stronger, and we become weaker. I know I shouldn’t, but I hate them, Belami, I hate the English. Why don’t they just go home and leave us in peace? I hate the Burgundians even more though. They’re of our blood, they’re French, and they ally themselves with the English, parcelling up the country, my country, as they see fit. English, Burgundians, they raid and rob wherever they want, and we have no power, nor any will, it seems, to stop them. There’s hardly a village left in France that’s truly French any more – that’s what Father says. Even here in Domrémy there are some who speak openly in support of the Burgundians. And Maxey, our next door village, just down the valley, is all Burgundian. You saw them, Belami, those boys from Maxey who set up on us in the fields only a couple of weeks ago. I longed then to stand and fight, but my brothers sent me and Hauviette off home so we wouldn’t get hurt. How many more times do I have to stand by and watch my brothers and my friends come home bloodied and beaten?” She was on fire with rage now. “And last year when those Burgundian soldiers came – there were only a few of them – did we band together to drive them off? No, we ran. We took our animals and ran for the safety of the Château d’Ile, and the soldiers came and pillaged and burnt the village just as they pleased. And my voices told me then to be patient. They tell me now to be patient.

“I asked Mother once: ‘Why do we always have to run?’ Do you know what she said, Belami? ‘We do as your father says, as the village council says. It is not for you to question his commands nor their decisions. It’s nothing to fret over. The soldiers have been before. They will come again. They are like the storms of winter. When they are gone, we rebuild, make good. There has been no war in this land for a hundred years. Why should it stop now? Life goes on. We just keep our heads down and keep out of the way – it’s all we can do. You think too much, Joan, you always have. Just stick to your spinning and your shepherding and your praying, and with a bit of luck you could make a good wife one day and devout mother. Girls these days,’ she tutted at me and shook her head, ‘I don’t know.’

“So you can see, Belami, even my own mother has long since given up the fight and will not listen to me. I cannot even persuade my own mother. And my voices say that I have to persuade all of France to rise up and drive the English out. But how will I make them believe it can be done, when I do not know myself how it can be done? Oh, Belami, I only wish you could talk. Do you believe I can do what my voices say? Do you? Do you? Oh, talk to me, Belami, talk to me.”

As time passed Joan went less often to the fields with the cattle. She might drive them out to graze with the other children, but would always find some excuse to go off. She told Hauviette she needed quiet, that she was going to pray. And it was true, she would spend every hour she could wandering the Oaky Wood alone, or praying in Notre Dame at Beaumont. She was never really alone, of course, for Belami was never far from her side. Sometimes, particularly when she was at her prayers, he would keep his distance, knowing how she liked to be on her own with her voices. He stayed close by though, always hoping for a glimpse of her saints – St Margaret or St Catherine perhaps – but to his great disappointment he never saw nor heard anything of them. He could see she was often deeply troubled and upset by what they told her, so much so that sometimes she couldn’t bring herself to speak of it, even to Belami.

She talked to him mostly of her family, and of Hauviette, about how odd they thought she had become recently, how quiet and distant. It was her father that worried about her, more than anyone else, it seemed. “You know the worst of all this, Belami?” she told him. “I am deceiving my own father. By not telling him of my voices, of what they say I will one day have to do, I am deceiving him. And he loves me so much, and he trusts me too. We’re so alike, him and me. He knows me so well, as I know him. Sometimes, Belami, I find him looking at me very strangely. It’s as if he knows something. You know what he said, only yesterday? Out of the blue it was. Father was talking of Robert de Beaudricourt, the captain of the castle at Vaucouleurs, and what a fine soldier he was. All I said was that given half a chance (and if I wasn’t a girl, of course) I’d go off and be a soldier, and I’d drive the English out of France once and for all. He looked at me hard and suddenly became very angry. ‘Don’t you ever speak of such a thing, Joan,’ he says. ‘I had a dream once, a dream that comes back and back to haunt me, a dream that you would one day run off with the soldiers.’ My brothers sniggered at this. Father banged the table and glared at them. ‘It is no joke,’ he stormed, ‘I tell you, if Joan ever went off with the soldiers I would drown her myself in the river, with my own hands. There could be no greater shame for all of us. Speak to me no more of soldiers, Joan. Be content that you are what God has made you, with what God wants you to be.’

“There are times, Belami, and that was one of them, that I so long to tell him what it is that God really wants me to do. But I cannot. My voices forbid it. To do what I have to do, what God tells me I must do, I must wrong my own father. I must hurt him. Yet he is the one man on this earth I will ever love, my voices have told me as much. How he will hate me, Belami, how they will all hate me.” She wept bitterly at the thought of it.

Belami had taken to waiting for her outside the chapel at Beaumont while she went in to pray. She was always a long time at her prayers; and besides, it was often warmer for him outside, and Belami loved to feel the sun on his feathers. She would often be overwhelmed by tears when she came out, but not this time. Her eyes were bright with excitement. “The moment has come, Belami. I feel like an arrow released at last from its bow. Just now, in the chapel, Belami, the blessed St Margaret came to me and said that I have to go to Vaucouleurs, as soon as possible. I have to see Robert de Beaudricourt himself. I am to tell him to send me to the Dauphin at Chinon. I am to go to fight the English. It is the beginning, Belami, it is the beginning.”

It was several weeks before Joan could arrange things. Vaucouleurs was a dozen miles away through the forest. She would need an escort, somewhere to stay, and most important, a reason for going. Otherwise her parents would become suspicious and would never allow her to leave at all. In the end luck lent a helping hand, or fate perhaps. Joan’s favourite uncle, Uncle Durand – he was a cousin really, but Joan had always called him Uncle – paid the family a visit. He just happened to say to her that she must come over and stay one day soon, that her Aunt Joan hadn’t seen her in a long time.

“She could come now, when I leave,” he said. “Why not?”

“She’s work to do here,” her mother replied, rather tartly.

“We can do without her for a few days,” said Joan’s father. “It’ll be good for her to get away for a while. She’s not been looking herself lately. Let her go.”

And so it was arranged there and then. When Uncle Durand went the next day, Joan would go with him.

Sitting under her tree with Belami the evening before she left, Joan was beside herself with excitement. “Can you believe it, Belami?” she said. “Do you know where Uncle Durand lives? Not two miles from Vaucouleurs! And he knows Robert de Beaudricourt. He knows him! My uncle, he’s a kind man, and godly too. He will listen to me. He will believe me, I know he will.”

Belami was there the next morning as Uncle Durand and Joan set off into the mists of the forest. She waited until the village was well behind them before she told him. She first made him promise faithfully he would never tell anyone what she was about to tell him. She didn’t tell him everything, only as much as she thought he needed to know. Uncle Durand sat in stunned silence on his horse as she told him, his eyes never leaving her face. “So you see, Uncle, if you do not take me to Robert de Beaudricourt at Vaucouleurs, where my voices tell me I must go, then he will not send me to the Dauphin at Chinon, and I will not be able to drive them out of France, nor to have the Dauphin crowned King of France, King of all the French. Without you, none of this can happen, Uncle.”

Uncle Durand rode on for some time before replying. “I should take you straight home, Joan, and tell your father. That’s what I should do. But I cannot, can I? I promised you I would say nothing and I will keep my promise. But what am I to do, Joan? What am I to make of you? You could be lying to me, making the whole thing up for all I know; or perhaps you are deluded and mad in the head. But if not, then you must be truly blessed. I shall help you, Joan, because I have always known you to be a good and honest and God-fearing girl, and because there’s a light in your eyes that makes me want to believe in you, want to help you.

“But there’s another reason, too, why I’m going to help you, Joan. I once heard a story, a legend if you like, about a young girl from these parts who would one day drive the English out for good and save France. Maybe the story is a true one, a prophecy, and not a legend at all. Maybe you are the one, Joan. I hope to God you are. I may live to regret it, but I will follow my hope and help you all I can, all I can, dear Joan. But we’ll have to tell your aunt, we cannot keep it from her.”

Joan reached out and took his hand in hers. “I knew you would,” she said. “Thank you, Uncle, thank you.”

But her Aunt Joan was not nearly so easy to persuade. She believed her – that wasn’t the problem – but she had other serious objections. “You shouldn’t go anywhere near that Robert de Beaudricourt,” she said. “He’s a soldier, and all soldiers are the same – rough, coarse creatures. That castle’s no place for a girl your age. I’d never forgive myself.”

“Nothing’s going to happen, Aunt,” Joan replied. “I’ll have Uncle with me, and besides I can look after myself.”

“And he drinks too much,” her aunt went on. “Everyone knows it. He won’t listen, Joan. He won’t believe you. Your uncle and I, we believe you because we love you, we know you.”

“If you believe me, Aunt,” said Joan, “then you must believe my voices too. It’s my voices that tell me I must go to the Dauphin. Robert de Beaudricourt can get me to the Dauphin. He’s the only person who can. I must go, Aunt, can’t you see?” Her aunt still looked doubtful. “I’ll be all right. I’ll have Belami with me too, as well as Uncle Durand!”

“That sparrow,” tutted Aunt Joan. “What is it you see in him? He goes everywhere with you. I don’t mind outside, but I don’t like him in the house – I’ve told you.”

“He loves it here,” Joan replied. “You’ve got no cats, and he loves you too because he knows you’ll help me, because you believe in me. So tomorrow, Aunt, when we go to Vaucouleurs, I will go with your blessing, won’t I?”

“Of course,” said her aunt, her eyes filling with tears. “It’s just that I fear for you, I fear for what will become of you.”

“But how can you fear for me when I have God on my side?” Joan exclaimed.

They set off early the next morning. Belami flew up and perched himself high on the castle wall as Joan and Uncle Durand rode into the courtyard below. They had to sit there and wait all morning, and all the while Joan had to endure the coarse banter of the soldiers. Several times she had to restrain Uncle Durand from boxing their ears. Then, at long last, two men came striding out of the castle. Both were in armour, swords at their side. “That’s him,” Uncle Durand whispered, “and that’s Bertrand de Poulengy with him.” Uncle Durand stepped forward. “My lord, we sent word we wanted to see you. It’s important, important for France.” Robert de Beaudricourt tried to ignore him, but Uncle Durand blocked his path determinedly. “My lord, I have brought my cousin to see you. She is from Domrémy. What she has to say to you may save us all, may save France.”

“What do you mean? What are you saying?” He was looking down at Joan, towering over her.

“I come to you in my Lord’s name, Robert,” Joan said, her eyes looking back into his, unflinching. “I come to tell you that you must send a message at once to the Dauphin. You must tell him not to engage in any battles with the English until I am there at his side. Tell him that I shall lead his army into battle and give the English such a beating that they will all go running back home where they belong. Once this is done I shall be there to lead him to his coronation in the cathedral at Reims. Tell him, Robert. Do it for me, do it for France, do it for my Lord.”