Into The Fire by Manda Scott Page B

action in a way that won’t lose the respect he’s creating for himself among these people.
    ‘She’s not dead.’ He’s at the wall when word passes from Raoul to Ricard to Patrick Ogilvy, to him. ‘She’s not dead. Praise be to God, the Maid is not dead. She’s coming back to the fight. We shall take Jargeau in her name. Pass the news. The Maid is not dead.’
    ‘Thank God.’
    ‘Thank God.’
    ‘Thank God.’
    Tomas is not a godly man; he has killed too often in far too venal circumstances for that, but he thanks God aloud with the rest, and continues to make a fine acquittal of himself.
    The army breaks into Jargeau in the evening. The Maid has recovered from her fall and been back in the fray again. She comes into the main square at dusk, to supervise the securing of the town. Tomas, naturally, is nearby and so is witness yet again to the moment when she sweeps off her helm and runs ungloved fingers through her boy-short hair.
    She is not a boy, whatever the English say. He has never thought she was. Her eyes meet his. Her black eyes, sharp, hot, prideful. He can sustain this. He can. He is not a man to hide from his enemies.
    Her gaze passes on. He is one amongst thousands, no different from the rest. His loins ache and it doesn’t help to know he is not alone. A thousand men, five thousand, are with him. They have all turned to face her, waiting.
    ‘France!’ She raises her fist.
    The army echoes, five thousand throats as one. ‘France!’
    And then she lets them loose. This is war. If you resist a siege, you will suffer. Over the next forty-eight hours, the Maid’s army lays waste to Jargeau, to its wine, its women, its velvets and linens, its goldware and silverware and pewter. Nobody cares that the defenders were French, that the women they rape may be the cousins of their wives, that the men they rob were once their friends. They were allied with the enemy, and now every man in every town between here and Paris knows that if you resist, your women will suffer the fate worse than death, and you will be ruined.
    What Tomas Rustbeard knows is that he has missed his chance, and he is not – even now, lying in another man’s goosedown bed – sure quite why he did so.

CHAPTER FIVE
O RLÉANS,
Monday, 24 February 2014
07.35
    HER APARTMENT IS empty. Picaut knows this as she puts the key in the lock. Relief slips down her spine as she mounts the steep stone stairs from the door.
    The restaurant below is closed and quiet, although by the first turn of the first flight she would be unable to hear anything even if the occupants were in full party mode. Luc’s mother, who bought this place and furnished it for herself in the last year of the last millennium, had it soundproofed to industrial standards. A bomb could explode outside, and provided it was less than six kilograms of plastic explosive no sound would penetrate the living space above.
    It gives a strange, dead feel. When she lived here, Picaut made a habit of throwing the windows open to let life back in again. Now, standing at the top of the third and last flight of perfect grey-pink marble, the soundlessness is her guarantor of solitude, and she is grateful.
    She keys an eight-digit number into the pad on the right-hand side of the door and waits for two further hot-cold seconds to find out if Luc has been up here and changed the code.
    He hasn’t. On the third count, the door swings wide on buffered hinges.
    She steps inside. This is her home, and at each return she feels more alien. This is why she sleeps elsewhere. Whatever Garonne thinks, it’s not about sex or the comfort of intimacy, it’s about avoiding the pale marble Louis XIV floors, the eau de nil walls, the kitchen that looks like the flight deck of a 747, the dustless, soulless, silent judgement that weighs her as she walks through the door and finds her wanting.
    The apartment is a shrine to a France that does not exist: a post-revolutionary monarchy, where the rich rule and the