Manda Scott's INTO THE FIRE reviewed by Elizabeth Fremantle

Manda Scott wrote a number of critically acclaimed crime novels before turning to historical fiction but with her latest release, INTO THE FIRE, she appears to have created a work that perfectly amalgamates both genres, with an impressive story that interweaves gritty contemporary crime and revelatory medieval history.

A Scott trope, across both genres, is ballsy women and who could be more ballsy than the figure who lies at the heart of INTO THE FIRE, Joan of Arc? Joan is depicted here as, rather than the somewhat whimsical saintly figure we learned about in school, a proper warrior woman. Scott hasn't plucked this idea from the ether – her Joan is based on groundbreaking historical research, a version of which becomes the focus of the modern day thriller that is threaded through the historical narrative.

The novel opens with modern day Orleans ablaze. A group called Jaish al Islam are setting buildings alight. But when a the charred remains of a scientist, who has hastily swallowed a memory chip, is found in the burnt out shell of a hotel, police detective Ines Picaut (another seriously ballsy woman) believes there is more to the conflagrations than meets the eye.

The narrative slips effortlessly back and forth between the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries, with each thread feeding into the other and both equally compelling. The potent symbol of the Maid, on the battlefields of medieval France and in the hearts and minds of the modern day French, is the link that ties the separate periods and stories together and the city of Orleans, both medieval and modern, provides the backdrop for the action.

In medieval France the English, more accurately a hotch-potch of mercenaries and Bergundians, are struggling to hang onto the territory won by Henry V. But with the old king dead and a child on the throne the French are gaining back Northern Franc battle by battle with alarming rapidity. It is The Maid who girds the men on with her singular courage, inspiring and leading the French army from the front and it is the supernatural belief invested in her by her own and the opposing army that makes her so powerful.

Modern day Orleans is in the throes of a different kind of power struggle. With mayoral elections imminent, the far right are gaining ground and capitalising on the fear that Jaish al Islam is spreading with its deadly fires and they are using the iconic figure of The Maid to promote their cause. Their flame haired female candidate is on billboards all around town. Picaut finds herself at the heart of this political conflict as the husband from whom she has recently separated, Luc Bressard, is running against the far-right for mayor and the Bressard family, a tight knit mafia style network, mean business.


Just as the Bressards have to use all their whiles to overcome their political opponents, so the medieval English must resort to drastic measures prevent their army from being entirely overwhelmed by the French. So seasoned fighter Tod Rustbeard is sent to infiltrate the French and assassinate The Maid. But nothing is as straightforward as it seems for Rustbeard or Picaut and so begins a gripping, twisting and turning, quest to uncover the truth, not only about Joan of Arc but also about Jaish al Islam.

Scott remains in complete control of her complex material throughout and this makes for a thoroughly absorbing and page-turning read as we follow the narrative through to its final series of revelations. But beyond that her impeccable research makes both periods spring vividly to life. The depiction of medieval France at war, with its brilliantly choreographed scenes of combat, feels as gritty and vibrant as the present day politics of Orleans. It is the attention to detail that achieves this with two entire and believable worlds separated by seven-hundred years emerging from the page, but also in the little quirks and tics of her characters – Scott invests them all with passion and originality and for that reason we care deeply about their fate.

INTO THE FIRE is a thrilling read that is both a fascinating exploration of an iconic historical woman and a masterclass in suspense. It is the kind of novel you will be compelled stay up all night to finish.

Elizabeth Fremantle's novel WATCH THE LADY, set in Elizabethan England, is published by Penguin.

Joan of Arc in 3D: a guest interview with Helen Castor

Photo credit: Chas Gibbions

We are very pleased to welcome our October guest, Helen Castor, well known to those interested in History for her book and TV series, She-Wolves. She is also famous on this blog for being the big sister of Harriet Castor, who has only just stopped being a History Girl.

This is what Helen says about herself: Helen Castor is a medieval historian and a Bye-Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Blood & Roses, her biography of the 15th-century Paston family, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005 and won the English Association's Beatrice White Prize in 2006. Her last book She-Wolves: the Women who Ruled England before Elizabeth was widely selected as one of the books of the year for 2010. She presents Radio 4’s Making History and documentaries for BBC television, including a three-part series based on She-Wolves and, most recently, Medieval Lives: Birth, Marriage, Death.

Harriet: Thank you so much, History Girls, for this opportunity to come back and visit you! Thank you, too, for giving me this chance to interview my sister, Helen Castor, about her new book Joan of Arc: A History (published in the UK by Faber this month, and in the US by HarperCollins next May). You might think we’d have talked about Joan many times already… but the reality of busy lives – plus the fact that we live in different parts of the country – means that we don’t get the chance to see each other as often as we’d like, and so to have this excuse to chat about Helen’s new project has been a pleasure, as well as very interesting. You might accuse me of family bias (I can’t do anything about that!) but I can say with complete honesty I absolutely loved reading Joan; it is gripping, moving, and explains with vivid clarity the immensely complex and constantly shifting political scenes of the time, both in England and France – a huge achievement in itself, and one that succeeds in setting Joan the woman in her proper historical context.


Harriet: Your last book, She-Wolves – The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth, was about four medieval queens. How did She-Wolves lead on to Joan of Arc?

Helen: In She-Wolves I was exploring the constraints on female power in a world that expected its rulers to be male – and one of the most significant of those constraints was that women couldn’t lead armies on the battlefield. As I talked about the book, I kept finding myself saying, ‘The only woman who did lead armies on the battlefield was Joan of Arc – and look what happened to her…’.

And eventually it dawned on me that I didn’t really know what had happened to her. I knew the outline of her story, as most people do; but I didn’t really understand how she’d come to do what she did, or what she thought she was doing, or how those around her – friends and enemies – had reacted. Once those questions had occurred to me, I wanted to know more.

Harriet: Many books have been written about Joan. What did you feel still needed to be explored?

Helen: There are countless books about Joan – as well as plays, films, music, art – which meant that sitting down to write was a fairly terrifying prospect. But what I felt was missing was a book that told her story forwards, not backwards.

By that I mean that most books about Joan start with her in the fields at Domrémy, hearing her voices for the first time. But all our evidence for that part of her life comes from the transcripts of her two trials – one that condemned her as a heretic, and the other, held twenty-five years after her death, to clear her name.

And that leaves us with a problem. The trials took place when it was already clear what Joan had achieved, so the evidence they present is deeply infused with hindsight of one kind or another. And if we start with Joan in the fields, that hindsight is built into the narrative: it’s obvious from the start that she has an extraordinary destiny in front of her, so we’re already telling the story of the icon and the saint.

What I wanted to do instead was put hindsight aside as much as possible; to understand the war in France, and then to experience the shock of a seventeen-year-old peasant girl appearing from nowhere, claiming to be sent by God. Then, we can start the story by asking why on earth anyone would listen to her…

Harriet: What were the particular challenges of the research for this book?

Helen: I knew the fifteenth century very well, but almost entirely from the English perspective. So it was a challenge – and a fascinating one – to find myself in fifteenth-century France, within a civil war every bit as complex and brutal as our Wars of the Roses a few decades later.

Beyond that, the transcripts of Joan’s trials are deeply testing sources to use. Utterly absorbing, but never straightforward – the process shaped by medieval canon law and theology, the testimonies full of inconsistencies and contradictions, and many of the witnesses’ stories growing in the telling. Every time I go back to them I see new things.

 By Clément de Fauquembergue

(The only surviving image of Joan made during her lifetime: a picture drawn in the margin of the records of the Paris parlement by its notary, Clément de Fauquembergue, on 10 May 1429, the day when news arrived of the liberation of Orléans. He had heard that the Armagnacs were accompanied by a maid carrying a banner, but he had never seen her, and so depicted her with long hair in female dress).

Harriet: There seems to be a push, in the non-fiction history market, towards adopting a fiction-like style of writing. In this context, how would you describe your approach to writing narrative history?

Helen: For me, the point of writing narrative history is that it allows the past to be immersive. I’m trying to look through the eyes of the people who were there, to understand what they thought and felt – and that, of course, means there are many points of comparison with what writers of historical fiction are seeking to do. It’s crucial to remember that the people I’m writing about don’t know what hasn’t yet happened, any more than we do in our own lives; so any mention of what’s still to come, or of what later historians have said about their experiences, jolts us out of their world – and I try very hard to avoid that. Instead, all that contextual and historiographical discussion goes into the notes, where it can stand on its own terms.

So I suppose I’m saying that historical imagination always has to be at work in attempting to recreate the past – but at the same time there are boundaries to what I’ll allow myself to do. I’ll try to summon up a scene from all the available details in contemporary sources, or put flesh on the bones of my protagonists using every scrap of information I can find; but I won’t, for example, put words into their mouths. Most of the transcript of Joan’s trial is in the third person (‘she said that…’). Very occasionally something is recorded in direct speech – and those are the only moments when Joan speaks directly in my text. There remains the question of the accuracy of the notaries who recorded her words and translated them into Latin; but at least I can be faithful to the transcript.

Harriet: As you explain in the book, Joan wasn’t the only holy ‘simple’ person to emerge at this time. Could you tell us a bit more about this?

Helen: It can be tempting for us to assume, I think, that Joan’s exceptional career came about because she was a completely exceptional figure in her own time. Though she was extraordinary in many ways, it’s important to realise that God was present everywhere in her world, and that she wasn’t the only person – or the only woman – in late medieval France to claim that she heard messages from heaven.

What was unique about Joan was her claim that she’d been sent to lead the king’s army, which of course could be regarded as a miracle for as long as she was winning battles, but rapidly became a liability once the victories stopped. And, once she’d been captured, her own side adopted another messenger from God who was almost an ‘anti-Joan’: a simple boy, known as William the Shepherd, who carried no weapons but rode side-saddle, with stigmata on his hands and feet. He didn’t last long either… But if we understand the landscape of belief in which she lived, we stand a better chance of seeing what was truly remarkable about Joan herself.

Joan of Arc depicted in a 1505 manuscript.

Harriet: I had always thought of Joan’s adoption of male dress principally in terms of its symbolic value, but you point out that there were very important practical issues involved – not simply connected to horse-riding, but to personal security too. How much detail were you able to find out about this?

Helen: Her male dress appears to have started as a practical thing. When she set off for Chinon from Vaucouleurs, near Domrémy, the townspeople gave her a horse and an outfit of men’s clothes – which made complete sense, given that she would be riding across dangerous country for many days in the company of a small band of soldiers. But by the time she reached the Dauphin’s court, her male dress seems, for her, to have become part of her mission – an outward manifestation of the work she had been sent to do.

It’s very hard, though, to get a clear sense of what the balance was between the two – perhaps because they became so completely intertwined. At her trial, Joan said many different things about her clothes; she always defended her male dress, but not in consistent or completely coherent terms. Certainly, she was physically less vulnerable dressed as a man, because the cords with which hose were knotted on to a doublet offered some practical protection against sexual assault – and some later witnesses suggested that, during the three days towards the very end of her trial when she was dressed in women’s clothes, she was raped in her cell. We can’t know for sure; but it’s an important reminder of quite how vulnerable she was as a lone female prisoner in a castle full of soldiers who hated and feared her.

Harriet: Did your view of Joan change during your work on this project?

Helen: She moved from two dimensions to three. I felt I’d found the real person, standing squarely within her own world, rather than the icon who somehow escapes from history altogether. What I found particularly moving was coming to an understanding of her voices and visions that made sense to me in human terms. On the last morning of her life, some of her judges visited her in her cell in a last attempt, as they saw it, to save her soul. Some historians have completely rejected this part of the transcript as a fabrication after the event, but for a whole number of reasons that doesn’t convince me historically; and what Joan says during that meeting about her voices and visions – when she knows she’s about to die, and all her grandiose stories of angels and saints have gone – seems to me to have a real psychological truth. I’ve tried to leave room throughout the book for anyone who reads it to come to their own conclusions, but that, for me, was the moment when I felt I understood.

Harriet: She-Wolves became not only a book but also a series of BBC TV documentaries, which I know many readers of this blog thoroughly enjoyed (me included!). Can we hope for the same with Joan?

Helen: I’m working with the same director and producer and most of the same team – all of them brilliant – on a one-hour programme for BBC Two, to be shown sometime next year. We’ve just finished filming in France, following in Joan’s footsteps from Domrémy to Rouen – and one of the things we’re hoping to do, as well as going to all those glorious places, is bring the transcript of her trial to life as much as we can. It’s an exciting process.

Joan of Arc: A History is published in the UK by Faber & Faber, and will be published in the US by HarperCollins in May 2015.

Did Joan of Arc hear the voice of God? – Katherine Roberts

When Mary Hoffman asked us to pick a favourite historical character for the History Girls’ birthday month, two famous characters immediately charged out of time on their warhorses yelling “ME, PICK ME!” (They both rode horses, of course - that's one of the things I love about history.)

My first candidate was Alexander the Great. Six years ago I wrote my most historical novel so far, telling his story through the eyes of his famous black stallion Bucephalas in I am the Great Horse. The other was Joan of Arc, who has not yet appeared in a novel of mine, but who has a surprising amount in common with the young heroine of my new children’s series… and since this is a History Girls blog, and I’m writing about a sword-wielding maiden at the moment, Joan's hired. (Sorry, Alexander... you're fired. Always wanted to say that!)

So, without further ado, let’s meet Joan… or Jeanne, to use her native French name. And lest you think I am being horribly unpatriotic in this Jubilee year, I happen to believe Joan/Jeanne’s nationality is not really important to her story. Yes, I know she fought to defend her homeland against the English invaders... that’s historical fact and it casts us in the UK as the baddies, and I suppose if you're just looking at the historical plot then that's true. But to me history is all about the characters. So my chosen heroine being French and fighting the English doesn’t really matter to her story, since the war between the French and the English is just a dramatic backdrop that helped make her who she was.


Joan of Arc was born in the small French town of Domremy in 1412. Believing she heard the voice of God calling her to help her king in his war against the English, she left her childhood home to meet Charles VII, who was afraid to take up his crown. She persuaded him to give her a horse and armour, and then led his army of 5,000 men to a famous victory against the English at Orleans. In battle, Jeanne carried an ancient sword she found in the tomb of a saint and a white banner embroidered with lilies, which she used to give courage to the soldiers and the besieged townspeople. Following several more victories over the English, she attended King Charles’ coronation at Rheims, after which she wanted to return home. But the king, eager for France to be entirely free of the English, persuaded Jeanne to fight one last battle against the Duke of Burgundy, who took her prisoner and sold her to the English. Because she refused to deny her “voices” (which they claimed came from the devil, not God) she stood trial for witchcraft, and was eventually burned at the stake in Rouen. Taking pity on her, a solider lifted a crucifix through the flames to her lips, and so she died a martyr. In 1920, Joan of Arc was made a saint.

All brilliant material for the historical novelist, of course, and my unicorn tells me at least one History Girl is writing a book about Joan of Arc even as I write this blog (now that’s got you all guessing, hasn't it...?!) I'm eagerly awaiting that book. But in the meantime, for today only on this blog, she's all mine and so I'd like to tell you why Jeanne's story resonates with me on a spiritual level.

Joan of Arc was born in a backwater, an innocent, believing she could change the course of history - and she was brave enough to do it. Did she hear the voice of God, as she claimed? Or was it simply her own voice, telling her to do this thing in the way voices speak sometimes on the edge of dreams? Whatever voice Jeanne heard, she obviously believed in it deeply enough to put herself in personal danger - and, more importantly, she believed that voice was urging her to do good. Therefore, in Jeanne's eyes, it must be the voice of God, because that was what she had been brought up to believe.

I see this kind of blind faith as being more important than any fact, historical or otherwise. Without it, no author would ever embark on the long and perilous journey of writing a book. No publisher would ever publish an author’s words in the hope someone out there might want to buy them. No bank would ever make a loan… oh, wait a minute, they're not at the moment are they?! But so often in life it’s faith and belief – the things you cannot measure – that win wars, whether they're obvious battles of the kind fought by Joan of Arc and Alexander the Great, profits in a bank, or smaller battles fought on more personal ground.

The King of France could count his soldiers. He probably had spies in the enemy camp so he knew the odds against him and could plan his tactics, maybe even estimate how many men would die in the coming battle. But he could not measure the effect of a single maid on a white horse carrying a lily-flower banner... the effect she had on men’s minds, both on the French army at her back, and on the invading English who watched her approach with bemusement. Jeanne was undoubtedly brave, but bravery alone would not have been enough to do what she did. Would an equally brave young man riding a horse with a sword in his hand have had the same effect, without the same innocence and faith and vulnerability? Jeanne had the magic ingredient that everyone claims to be looking for, but actually I think most people are scared of - precisely because it cannot be controlled or measured.

I may never write my novel about Joan of Arc - after I am the Great Horse's rocky road to publication, I have been rather put off writing another historical novel for a children's publisher. Anyway, there have been children's books written about Jeanne already (if you have a young reader in the family, they might like to try Michael Morpurgo's recently reissued Sparrow.) But because Jeanne's story speaks to me, and she's all mine for today, here’s a little poem I wrote about her with the help of my unicorn muse:

A voice whispers my name on the wind
I hear you, Lord, I hear!
My home is invaded by men who have sinned
I am here, my lord, I am here!
Orleans is under enemy attack
I hear you, Lord, I hear!
Our soldiers have courage, it’s faith they lack
I am here, my lord, I am here!
Where a maid does lead, the enemy will yield
I hear you, Lord, I hear!
With saintly sword and a lily-flower shield
I am here, my lord, I am here!
After the battle our king will be crowned
I hear you, Lord, I hear!
And victory carried to every town.
I am here, my lord, I am here!

The Duke of Burgundy knocks at our gate
I can't hear, Lord, I can't hear!
To please my king I must ride to my fate.
You're not here, my lord, you're not here!
Why do my people betray me for gold?
I can’t hear, Lord, I can’t hear!
And deliver me into the enemy hold?
You're not here, my lord, you're not here!
Accused of witchcraft and bound on a pyre
I can’t hear, Lord, I can’t hear!
They will burn me in their hottest fire.
You're not here, my lord, You're not here!

A soldier offers me his crucifix
I hear you, Lord, I hear!
I will die with Jesus’ name on my lips.
I am here, oh Lord, I am HERE!


For me, Joan of Arc is so much more than a character from history. She’s a symbol of what it is to be a woman carrying a banner of faith and self-belief through a man's world. I  hope the History Girls (and Joan herself) will forgive me for borrowing a little bit of her story for my current heroine Rhianna Pendragon. Because no matter which army stands at the gate, a warrior maid on a white horse with a sword shining in her hand will always seek to find a way through...

Katherine Roberts is a children’s author.

Sword of Light, the first book in her Pendragon Legacy quartet about King Arthur’s daughter Rhianna Pendragon on a quest to bring her father back from the dead, has been chosen for this year’s Summer Reading Challenge in UK libraries.

Book 2 Lance of Truth publishes in October.

Meanwhile, you can find out much more about the series and Katherine's other books at www.katherineroberts.co.uk