St. Joan's Architect

Whenever Catherine or Romèe conjured the ghost of Joan of Arc by mentioning her name on Mont Saint Michel, St. Joan wished she could answer all their questions about her stay on the Mont. “I knew I was in great peril when I failed to convince King Charles to follow up his coronation with a sweep of Paris.”

St. Joan moved the sleeping Catherine’s arm to retrace the first, fading traces of the Dome.

Brother Richard stood idly by, a witness to the haunting. “Contemplating flight to Scotland was what the dauphin had envisioned for himself before your initial visit.”

“My Voices were silent. They didn’t mention securing Mont Saint Michel with English guns, but I knew the Mont was supplied by Scottish blockade runners. They could have taken me to a safe exile in Scotland.”

St. Joan turned a page in the sketchbook to portray a side view of her Dome. “I wish being dead meant I never had to hear people defame me.”

“That Englishman, Shakespeare, lost a bit of his glory in my book,” Brother Richard said. St. Joan laughed. “Vitriolic name calling: ‘Drab from the ditches of Lorraine,’ ‘devil’s milkmaid’ ‘and ‘Armagnas whore,’ hardly endeared him to me, either.”

Brother Richard tried to comfort his charge, “Nevertheless, those old religious judges paid in the afterlife for calling you a trumpery imp.”

“At the time of the trial, my voices reminded me of my love for a good fracas. ‘Answer boldly and God will sustain you.’”

Lacking similar means of communication with the living while in the hereafter realms assigned to her, St. Joan had to make do with implanting ideas into the heads of her chosen.

Peeking through the hotel’s mullioned windows, hidden in the shadows of the Mont, St. Joan was not content to merely endow Catherine with courage. St. Joan’s plans included the mate chosen for Catherine, the florist with her mother’s name, Romèe. Romèe’s family finances and influence were necessary to fund the design approval and construction of the pink crystal Dome of St. Joan.

As Catherine nodded in her sleep, her haunted hand reworked the drawings. St. Joan hovered near her, wondering at the passive mass of curdling glands and restless nerves in her prone protégée. Reaching out a tender index finger, the saint touched the middle of Catherine’s forehead right above the bridge of the nose. The pituitary gland sent shivers of anticipation up St. Joan’s arm. The drive to mate with the other half of creation rocked the remnants of bones in St. Joan.

Detaching from the motionless shell of Catherine, St. Joan rested against the bedstead. “Is this what my father assumed I felt for the neighborhood boy he picked out for me?”

“What was his name?” Brother Richard asked.

St. Joan laughed. “I never deemed the sound of his name worthy of a moment’s thought. All my energy was focused on the English. How to push them out of France.” St. Joan laughed again. “Remember the letter I dictated to them, “’I came here to smite you body to body, out of the realm of France.’”

“Your affections were fixed in zealous pursuit of your visions.”

“Saint Michael was the most awesome,” St. Joan said. “His splendiferous, heavenly grandeur out-shone Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret.”

St. Joan tried singing to Catherine in the tune of the old Chanson of Roland, “I came here to inspire you, stone by stone, to build the Dome of St. Joan.”

St. Joan considered perhaps a short-circuit let the energy of youth drain away into the useless pursuit of bodily pleasure. A single adjustment in Catherine’s brain might realign her goals to be consistent with St. Joan’s plans for a fitting edifice. “I should repair Catherine’s brain.”

As St. Joan reached out to calm the central hormone factory in Catherine’s temple, a stronger force than Brother Richard stayed the action.