Work in Progress

As many of you know, I’ve been planning a novel on ‘the real Jeanne d’Arc’ for many years and have finally reached the point in the publishing cycle where I could write it.  The last (for now) Pantera novel has just come out in paperback and it’s time to move away from ancient Rome.  The shift to fifteenth century France is probably a one-of, but it was an exhilarating ride.

This is a dual time line novel, so there are two primary characters, one for each thread.  In the contemporary thriller, let me introduce to you (fanfare of trumpets) Capaitaine Inès Picaut of the Orléans police department.  We open with her driving to a fire – the fourth to be lit in as many weeks in residencies in and around Orléans.  Always, a single group claims responsibility and this is no different: except that it is – where the three previous fires have all claimed property alone, there is a body in this fire, and finding who it is, and why this individual has been killed – because it is definitely murder – is the first of her motivating drives.  The second, threading through, is the following of her late father’s obsession: he thought he knew the true identity of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orléans. It cost him his job, and perhaps his life and she would be happy never to think of it again, but life isn’t like that…

And so in the historical thread, we have Tod Rustbeard, known to the French as Tomas Rustbeard, also Tomas de Segrave.  He’s a captain in the English assault – and then defence – at Orléans in May 1429, but he’s also an English agent with the capacity to enter the French side and when it is obvious that the newly emboldened French are about to retake Les Tourelles at Orléans, and so annihilate the English assaulting force, he is ordered to re-enter the French side with a remit to find out the true identity of the woman – if it is a woman, which seems immensely unlikely – who is leading the French.  Tod is driven by a visceral loathing of the French king, and a genuine belief that English rule of France would be considerably better, but his life, too, isn’t like that…

And of course, the core of the narratives, past and present, is the woman we know of as the Maid of Orléans, Jeanne d’Arc, who claimed to be an illiterate peasant girl from Lorraine, sent by the christian god to save France from English rule.  Except she can’t have been: on Ascension Day in 1429 (to take one example), she sneaked out of Orléans against the express orders of the king’s cousin, the Duke of the city, and, with a knight called La Hire, assaulted and dismantled one of the gun emplacements that would have prevented the French from taking back the strategically vital tower that guarded the bridge over the Loire – Les Tourelles.  They spiked the guns and then, as their men were loading the powder and shot onto the barges, the English  – who had been at prayer, as she should have been (and her chaplain later claimed she was) – sallied out of the fortified monastery that they had made their base.  the Maid and La Hire *couched their lances* and rode down the English, killing some, capturing others.  Two knights against a large company of English men at arms.

I don’t care how much Disney you’ve watched, how many times you believe National Velvet could have happened, what kind of magical thinking you engage in: go and talk to someone who rides Grand Prix dressage horses, or anyone who fights battle re-enactment in full armour.  It is *not possible* even to sit on a fully trained horse without training (I know, I tried, and the horse wasn’t Grand Prix and I was allegedly a semi-competent rider – and I wasn’t wearing armour, trying to handle 14 feet of man-killing lance or using it to kill people with while they were trying to kill me.) – just avoiding the caltrops would have been an exercise in advanced horsemanship.  And no, she didn’t learn ‘on the way from Domremy to Chinon’  – they rode for 11 days, at night, in foul February weather through country where they’d have been killed if caught.  You don’t ‘learn to ride’ under those circumstances: you already can.

So Jeanne was already a knight when she came to Chinon and identified the king in a room full of courtiers while he pretended to be someone else. She was already a knight when she went back into Orléans after the victory on the river and threatened to have the Duke’s head struck from his shoulders if he stopped her again. She was already a knight when her banner caught fire while riding through the streets of Orléans and she spun her horse in the crowded street, grabbed the flag from the page boy and doused it in a horse trough (and everyone was awed by her riding skills: but nobody asked how she got them).  She was already a knight when she led the French army out of Orléans two days later – against all the orders of the Duke and his men – to take back Les Tourelles – and the army followed her because they had seen what she could do: men do not lay down their lives for fancy ideas of a girl who follows their god, they do it because they’ve seen someone who can give them victory.

Of course the two time lines gain their momentum together, and together, they bring us the extraordinary story of an extraordinary young woman who changed the course of her country’s history, and put her mark on history forever – but the mark that survived was the necessary lie she had to live – and die -by, and I dearly want to correct the mis-information that has lasted 600 years.  Into the Fire will do that.