“Never mind that, what about Joan?”

“I am telling about her. But you have to understand that they had no chance of winning. Wiser and better men than she knew they were lost. They lost every battle.”

“But she?” I whispered.

“She claimed she heard voices, angels talking to her. They told her to go to the French prince-a simpleton, a nothing-to go to him and make him take his throne as king and then drive us from our lands in France. She found her way to the king and told him he must take up his throne and let her lead his army. He thought she might have the gift of prophecy, he didn’t know-but he had nothing to lose. Men believed in her. She was just a country girl, but she dressed as a man-at-arms, she had a banner embroidered with lilies and angels. She sent a messenger to a church, and there they found an old crusader sword exactly where she said it would be-it had been hidden for years.”

“She did?”

He laughed and then coughed and spat phlegm. “Who knows? Perhaps there was some truth in it. My dox … my woman friend thought that Joan was a holy maid, called by God to save France from us English. Thought she couldn’t be touched by a sword. Thought she was a little angel.”

“And what was she like?”

“A girl, just a girl like you. Small, bright-eyed, full of herself.”

My heart swelled. “Like me?”

“Very like you.”

“Did people tell her what to do all the time? Tell her she knew nothing?”

He shook his head. “No, no, she was the commander. She followed her own vision of herself. She led an army of more than four thousand and fell on us when we were camped outside Orléans. Our lords couldn’t get our men forwards to fight her; we were terrified of the very sight of her. Nobody would raise a sword against her. We all thought she was unbeatable. We went on to Jargeau and she chased after us, on the attack, always on the attack. We were all terrified of her. We swore she was a witch.”

“A witch or guided by angels?” I demanded.

He smiled. “I saw her at Paris. There was nothing evil about her. She looked like God Himself was holding her up on that big horse. My lord called her a flower of chivalry. Really.”

“Beautiful?” I whispered. I am not a pretty girl myself, which is a disappointment to my mother, but not to me, for I rise above vanity.

He shook his head and said exactly what I wanted to hear. “No, not pretty, not a pretty little thing, not girlish; but the light shone from her.”

I nodded. I felt that at that very moment, I understood … everything. “Is she fighting still?”

“God bless you for a little fool, no: she’s dead. Dead, what-about twenty years ago.”

“Dead?”

“The tide turned for her after Paris; we threw her back from the very walls of the city, but it was a close thing-think of it! She nearly took Paris! And then in the end a Burgundy soldier pulled her off her white horse in a battle,” the beggar said matter-of-factly. “Ransomed her to us, and we executed her. We burned her for heresy.”

I was horrified. “But you said she was guided by the angels!”

“She followed her voices to her death,” he said flatly. “But they examined her and said she was a virgin indeed. She was Joan the Maid in truth. And she saw true when she thought we would be defeated in France. I think we are lost now. She made a man of their king, and she made an army out of their soldiers. She was no ordinary girl. I don’t expect to see such a one again. She was burning up long before we put her on the pyre. She was ablaze with the Holy Spirit.”

I took a breath. “I am such a one as her,” I whispered to him.

He looked down at my rapt face and laughed. “No, these are old stories,” he said. “Nothing to a girl like you. She is dead and will be soon forgotten. They scattered her ashes so no one could make her a shrine.”

“But God spoke to her, a girl,” I whispered. “He did not speak to the king, nor to a boy. He spoke to a girl.”

The old soldier nodded. “I don’t doubt she was sure of it,” he said. “I don’t doubt she heard the voices of angels. She must have done. Otherwise, she couldn’t have done what she did.”

I heard my governess’s shrill call from the front door of the house, and I turned my head for a moment as the soldier picked up his pack and swung it round on his back.

“But is this true?” I demanded with sudden urgency as he started to walk in a long, loping stride towards the stable yard and the gate to the road.

“Soldiers’ tales,” he said indifferently. “You can forget them, and forget her, and God knows, nobody will remember me.”

I let him go, but I did not forget Joan, and I will never forget Joan. I pray to her by name for guidance, and I close my eyes and try to see her. Ever since that day, every soldier who comes to the door of Bletsoe begging for food is told to wait, for little Lady Margaret will want to see him. I always ask them if they were at Les Augustins, at Les Tourelles, at Orléans, at Jargeau, at Beaugency, at Patay, at Paris? I know her victories as well as I know the names of our neighboring villages in Bedfordshire. Some of the soldiers were at these battles; some of them even saw her. They all speak of a slight girl on a big horse, a banner over her head, glimpsed where the fighting was the fiercest, a girl like a prince, sworn to bring peace and victory to her country, giving herself to the service of God, nothing more than a girl, nothing more than a girl like me: but a heroine.

Next morning, at breakfast, I learn why I was banned from praying through the night. My mother tells me to prepare for a journey, a long journey. “We are going to London,” she says calmly. “To court.”

I am thrilled at the thought of a trip to London, but I take care not to exult like a vain, proud girl. I bow my head and whisper: “As you wish, Lady Mother.” This is the best thing that could happen. My home at Bletsoe, in the heart of the county of Bedfordshire, is so quiet and dull that there is no chance for me to resist the perils of the world. There are no temptations to overcome, and no one sees me but servants and my older half brothers and half sisters, and they all think of me as a little girl, of no importance. I try to think of Joan, herding her father’s sheep at Domrémy, who was buried like me, among miles of muddy fields. She did not complain of being bored in the country; she waited and listened for the voices to summon her to greatness. I must do the same.

I wonder if this command to go to London is the voice I have been waiting for, calling me to greatness now. We will be at the court of the good King Henry VI. He must welcome me as his nearest kin, I am all but his cousin, after all. His grandfather and my grandfather were half brothers, which is a very close connection when one of you is king and the other is not, and he himself passed a law to recognize my family, the Beauforts, as legitimate though not royal. Surely, he will see in me the light of holiness that everyone says is in him. He must claim me as both kin and kindred spirit. What if he decides I shall stay at court with him? Why not? What if he wants to take me as his advisor, as the Dauphin took Joan of Arc? I am his second cousin, and I can almost see visions of the saints. I am only nine years old, but I hear the voices of angels and I pray all night when they let me. If I had been born a boy, I would be all but the Prince of Wales now. Sometimes I wonder if they wish I had been born a boy and that is why they are blind to the light that shines within me. Could it be that they are so filled with the sin of pride in our place that they wish I was a boy, and ignore the greatness that is me, as a holy girl?

“Yes, Lady Mother,” I say obediently.

“You don’t sound very excited,” she says. “Don’t you want to know why we are going?”

Desperately. “Yes, if you please.”

“I am sorry to say that your betrothal to John de la Pole must be ended. It was a good match when it was made when you were six, but now you are to dissent from it. You will face a panel of judges who will ask you if you wish your betrothal to be ended, and you will say yes. Do you understand?”

This sounds very alarming. “But I won’t know what to say.”

“You will just consent to the end of your betrothal. You will just say yes.”

“What if they ask me if I think it is the will of God? What if they ask me if this is the answer to my prayers?”

She sighs as if I am tiresome. “They won’t ask you that.”

“And then what will happen?”

“His Grace, the king, will appoint a new guardian, and, in turn, he will give you in marriage to the man of his choice.”

“Another betrothal?”

“Yes.”

“Can I not go to an abbey?” I ask very quietly, though I know what her answer will be. Nobody regards my spiritual gifts. “Now I am released from this betrothal can I not go?”

“Of course you can’t go to an abbey, Margaret. Don’t be stupid. Your duty is to bear a son and heir, a boy for our family, the Beauforts, a young kinsman to the King of England, a boy for the House of Lancaster. God knows, the House of York has boys enough. We have to have one of our own. You will give us one of our own.”

“But I think I have a calling-”

“You are called to be mother of the next heir of Lancaster,” she says briskly. “That is an ambition great enough for any girl. Now go and get ready to leave. Your women will have packed your clothes; you just have to fetch your doll for the journey.”

I fetch my doll and my own carefully copied book of prayers too. I can read French, of course, and also English, but I cannot understand Latin or Greek, and my mother will not allow me a tutor. A girl is not worth educating, she says. I wish that I could read the gospels and prayers in Latin, but I cannot, and the handwritten copies in English are rare and precious. Boys are taught Latin and Greek and other subjects too; but girls need only be able to read and write, to sew, to keep the household accounts, to make music and enjoy poetry. If I were an abbess, I would have access to a great library, and I could set clerks to copy all the texts that I wanted to read. I would make the novices read to me all day. I would be a woman of learning instead of an untaught girl, as stupid as any ordinary girl.

If my father had lived, perhaps he would have taught me Latin. He was a great reader and writer; at least I know that much about him. He spent years in captivity in France when he studied every day. But he died just days before my first birthday. My birth was so unimportant to him that he was in France on campaign, trying to restore his fortune, when my mother was brought to bed, and he did not come home again until just before my first birthday, and then he died; so he never knew me and my gifts.

It will take us three days to get to London. My mother will ride her own horse, but I am to ride pillion behind one of the grooms. He is called Wat, and he thinks himself a great charmer in the stables and kitchen. He winks at me, as if I would be friendly to a man such as him, and I frown to remind him that I am a Beaufort and he is a nobody. I sit behind him, and I have to take tight hold of his leather belt, and when he says to me, “Right and tight? Righty tighty?” I nod coldly, so as to warn him that I don’t want him talking to me all the way to Ampthill.

He sings instead, which is just as bad. He sings love songs and haymaking songs in a bright tenor voice, and the men who ride with us, to protect us from the armed bands who are everywhere in England these days, join in with him and sing too. I wish my mother would order them to be silent, or at least command them to sing psalms; but she is happy, riding out in the warm spring sunshine, and when she comes alongside me, she smiles and says, “Not far now, Margaret. We will spend tonight at Abbots Langley and go on to London tomorrow. Are you not too tired?”