The French Executioner (5 page)

‘Ask,’ Jean said softly.

‘You have heard the stories. Anne Boleyn, Witch, the Six-Fingered Hag. Well, there’s a truth hidden there, though not in the
way people fear, consigning all to the shadows where they keep their supposed sins. I am of both light and dark, of earth
and fire, air and water. My so-called witchery lies fully, and only, in them. Do you understand, Jean Rombaud?’

‘I understand.’

‘Very well.’

She smiled then, and looked away, and there was something terrible, beautiful, so sad in that smile. The wine was affecting
his vision, not making him drowsy but altering the light, making shapes of the shadows cast by the fireplace. He would have
liked to lean back and study those shapes. Yet when she raised her hand, her six-fingered hand, it pulsed, drawing in the
light of the reed torch, harnessing its flame. It commanded his eyes. He could look nowhere else, could only listen.

‘When you have struck my head from my shoulders, you must strike again, once and secretly. You must cut off this hand.’

He stumbled forward then, towards her. He had not expected this, of all the things she could ask.

Her eyes never lost his.

‘You must cut it off, then take it to the Loire, to our land.
There is a village called Pont St Just, near Tours. To the south of it lies a crossroads. There, at the next full moon, bury
my hand at the exact point where the four roads meet.’ She smiled. ‘That is all I ask of you. It is much, and it is dangerous
beyond your imaginings, for there are those who will hazard all to stop you. Will you do this for me?’

Jean was unable to speak, to breathe. The cell vanished, he was floating on smoke, nothing in his sight but six fingers and
two eyes, black pools of immeasurable depth. Something stirring within them, another pair, then another, an infinity of eyes
stretching back in an unbroken line to a time before, on and on, generations of women looking out at him, dark-eyed, six-fingered.
He was exposed, naked, waiting to be born. Needing a word for that, to come back into the world. One simple word.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘And will you swear it? On what could you swear such an oath?’

He did not know. He was not a religious man, the faith he’d been baptised in long since ripped away by the desecrations of
war and his terrible loss. He knew a lot about death, and maybe once, for a time, a little about love. Maybe enough.

‘I will swear it on love. On that love I had – have – for my Lysette and my little Ariel. On their blessed eyes I vow: I will
do what you ask of me.’

She stepped close and his knees wavered under him as, silently, she measured the depths that gave birth to such a promise.
Then suddenly she smiled, a smile of such joy, such radiance.

‘I did not fear my death except in this, the harm I could do after I passed over were this vow not spoken. And I could not
offer anything to buy this of you. But now it is freely pledged, there is something I can give.’

She reached up, touched him on either side of his head, held him with those strange, uneven hands – with her uneven eyes
the only reason he was still standing. She whispered, ‘Be ready. For your reward will come the moment your sword sets me free.’
And then she kissed him, a kiss which burnt onto his lips and through them to what he could only call his soul. A kiss that
turned all memory to mist, in a room drowsy with reed-torch smoke and wine heavy with secret herbs.

When he woke, the hand on his shoulder was a man’s, shaking him roughly awake. Anne was gone, light was in the sky and Tucknell
had returned to lead him back to his chambers. There was not much time to wait.

He saw her again not an hour later as she mounted the scaffold with a step that seemed to spring, a smile on the lips whose
kiss yet burnt him. Her serenity calmed a restless mob, and if she were not a beauty, she had a light that caused all to gasp.
A weeping maid took off her French hood, the hair under it prettily coiled into a white linen coif. Her robe was of grey damask
trimmed with fur with a low, square neck, as simple as the speech that followed. She blamed no one, admitted nothing, put
her faith in God and asked all present to pray for her.

Through the slits of his leather mask, Jean looked out at the small, eager crowd. King Henry was not going to risk a public
riot beyond the walls on Tower Hill. He needed this act, this state-sanctioned murder, to be hidden away, as so many had been
within this evil place. All those drawn from the inner court that were there had schemed, begged and bribed to be at this
most fashionable of occasions. Courtiers who had bent before her to kiss what they saw only as her deformity, gallants who
had flirted and composed odes to her beauty, ladies who had fawned while they seethed at her rise and rejoiced in her fall
– all had gathered now to share in the ritual of her destruction.

His problem lay there, in those hundreds of ecstatic eyes, for they would follow his every gesture. However distracting the
sight of her head separating from her shoulders, however
swift his stroke, someone would note the second rise and fall of the blade that took the hand.

Before Anne now knelt the confessor, urging her to join him on her knees, to make one last atonement. Yet she was more concerned
with feeling the breeze on her face, standing there, eyes shut, palms spread wide. Jean watched the man raise his own clasped
hands to his face … and saw, in that instant, what must be done.

He stepped before her, his shadow falling on the priest who started, crossed himself and moved away. Taking his place, Jean
knelt and publicly began the penultimate stage of the ritual.

‘Forgive me for what I must do.’

Anne’s eyes opened at his voice and a smile came into them.

‘I forgive you all, Master, and I thank you.’

The weeping maid handed her the fee and she held it out to him. He grasped but did not take it, and they were joined across
that velvet purse while the promise and the memory coalesced in her eyes.

He whispered, ‘At the last, raise your hands to pray.’

‘But why?’

‘Raise them, my lady. And when I say “now” leave just the one there, the thumb resting upon your chin. Do you understand?’

‘Ah, yes. Yes, I do.’

‘And so … goodbye.’

He made to take the purse, but now she held it, held his eyes.

‘Not goodbye, Jean Rombaud. Au revoir. For if there is one thing certain in this world, it is that we two shall meet again.’

She let go of the purse, and the shock of her words, of no longer being joined to her, left him breathless. He stood, she
knelt, looking up into the sky for a last time before accepting the blindfold. Then she raised her hands to her face, her
lips moving in prayer.

Jean reached for his sword, hidden behind him under his cloak. He swung it back, feeling its beautiful weight, its perfect
balance. He bent at the knees, inhaled and, as he coiled his arms still further, said, ‘Now.’

One hand dropped away as he released his shoulders, the blade gliding perfectly flat towards that perfect neck, gliding through
with not a second’s pause to mark the border crossed between life and death. Through to the other side and through the hand,
though it seemed to all there as if he had touched neither.

All was frozen – faces on the scaffold, faces in the crowd, caught in joy or horror – and in that frozen moment the sun broke
from its cloud prison, dazzling everyone, shimmering off the sword resting at the end of its swing. To Jean it was a weapon
no more but a key, unlocking the door between this sphere and the next. And in its glittering planes he saw two figures.

A shard of exquisite pain, a tremor of indescribable happiness, surged through him. For there, lit by celestial light, were
his Lysette and his little Ariel. Jean saw faces so calm, so at peace, that he felt a near irresistible urge to join them
in their bliss. It seemed they saw him too, for they smiled and then, hand in hand, they turned away.

He had the reward she had promised. But he only had time to say thank you before the door closed gently upon them. A thin
red line had appeared at Anne Boleyn’s throat and wrist and the voice of the crowd, suspended for those seemingly eternal
moments, returned now in full roar.

It seemed that a world starved of air suddenly breathed as Tucknell stepped forward and pulled Anne’s head from her shoulders
by the hair. All eyes looked to its rising, the blood spurting at last in a high arc out over the crowd. The body fell sideways,
the severed hand dropped at Jean’s feet and Tucknell, tears flowing into his beard, in a voice thick with grief, cried, ‘Behold
the head of a traitor! God save the King!’

The crowd surged forward then, shrieking, and as they did
Jean bent down and scooped up hand and purse together, slipping the one into the other, bending over the body to wrap it swiftly
in his cloak, binding it tightly. He thrust the purse under his executioner’s apron, sheathed his sword and pushed his way
off the back of the scaffold, away from the civilised courtiers and decorous ladies transformed into snarling animals in their
struggle to soak their handkerchiefs in a dead queen’s blood. His departure was unimpeded.

And nearly unnoticed. For one pair of eyes must not have been drawn by the head’s bloody rise as Jean, wedged in the gibbet
cage, now knew. One pair of eyes had followed the progress of the hand from scaffold to purse to apron, then followed it all
the way to a crossroads in the Loire. There the possessor of such keen sight had left Jean hanging from a gibbet to die, his
only hope of salvation the tale he’d just told to a madman by the light of a waning full moon.

Jean, who had kept his eyes closed while he concentrated on his story, opened them now and struggled to turn in the cage to
see his audience below.

‘The wretched creature is asleep!’ he cried, the sound choking in his throat. To have told that tale, to have relived it again,
all for nothing? Such little hope had burnt within him, and even that was now extinguished.
I will die here. My vow to Anne Boleyn is broken.

He eyed the Fugger in despair.

Then the Fugger stirred beneath him. A flick of the right arm knocked Felix’s skull down the midden’s slopes. Shaking spread
through his body until all was a-twitch – arms, legs, head. With a leap, the Fugger was on his feet and whirling. All the
while sounds poured from his mouth, words in a multitude of tongues, shrieks, moans and gibbers.

With a mighty croak, the raven rose to circle above, adding its harsh voice to the cacophony. Slowly, slowly, the din died,
the caws of man and bird became muted, the caperings eased. When it had come down to a mere shuddering, the Fugger suddenly
leapt up to the cage, thrust his left hand through the bars and, swinging there, fixed Jean with a maddened stare.

‘Who told you?’ he shrieked. ‘Heh? Come on, come on, someone has sent you to torment me, told you my life, given you this
weapon to use against me.’

‘I do not know—’ Jean began, but the Fugger began swinging the cage hard.

‘Then you saw!’ he yelled. ‘You saw, then fashioned your story, so clever. Admit it and it will go easier for you, I will
give you a swift end. Your story was all lies! Lies, lies!’

‘Monsieur,’ Jean said as calmly as he could, ‘I know nothing of your life. I have told you the truth of mine. That is all.’

The Fugger swayed there, staring at Jean for a moment longer. Then he cried out, ‘Tell me you didn’t know about this!’ And
he thrust his right arm into Jean’s face. It ended in a stump.

A moment of choice for the caged man. The Fugger in reach of his cramped arms. Grab, twist, hurt, force him to swing the cage
over to the crossbar, force him to grab the key. Decisive actions, and the seizing of a chance, any chance, had meant survival
on a score of battlefields.

Come,
thought Jean,
seize another now.

And yet, in that moment’s hesitation he remembered another savaged wrist, transforming the one before him now; and seeing
it somehow made him recognise, deep within the maddened, moon-bright eyes of the Fugger, the same pain, the same appeal he
had seen just a week before in the Tower of London.

Slowly, Jean closed his fingers on the tortured flesh before him, held it gently for a moment. It was the nearest thing to
a caress he could manage. The Fugger fell back as if struck and lay again on the midden. There was no movement save for the
tears cascading down his face.

In the long silence that followed, broken only by the Fugger’s crying, Jean wondered if he’d just let his one chance of freedom
fall from the cage. To put his trust in the humanity of a madman? What had he been thinking? And he was not reassured when
the sounds below him changed from muffled weeping to a rasping, crackling sound that he came to realise could only be laughter.

‘Oh Daemon, dear,’ laughed the Fugger. ‘It really is such a good story. And so unbelievable that it could only be true.’

As suddenly as the laughter had begun, it stopped. The Fugger sat up, wiped a grimy sleeve across his face and said, ‘These
men who put you here. They have taken the hand of the Queen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I do not know. It is said there is power in relics. If so, there must be a great power in this one.’

‘And who has stolen it?’

‘You said before one was called “the Archbishop”. She warned me there would be those who sought to use her after death for
their own ends.’

‘He was called “Archbishop” by the other. It made him very angry. Such illustrious visitors, I thought. That’s when I knew
you were special.’

‘An archbishop makes sense. Do you know where from?’

‘No. But I heard him talk of Siena.’

‘And this other, the soldier?’ asked Jean.

‘I didn’t see him. But from his voice I could tell he was a countryman of mine. German. But from the south. One of those accursed
Bavarians, for certain.’

‘Well.’ Jean stared through the slats along the road the horsemen had taken. ‘I begin to know my enemy.’