The French Executioner (4 page)

Sometimes, rarely, this happened – a client wanting more
from him, almost befriending him. He had often noticed, in the time just before or just after death, how words would flow.
As if those about to die could anchor their place in this world with the tale of their life. Or the bereaved, how they would
talk, as Jean had talked after he laid his wife and child in the ground. Waves of words, weeks of them, seeking to hold them
in his life with his recollections. And when he realised he couldn’t, when he knew nothing he had done or said or prayed had
saved them, he had stopped talking, and the great silence had fallen on him. He’d barely had a conversation in the five years
since.

But he was to have one now. Anne Boleyn dismissed her ladies and her confessor, only the moon-faced Tucknell and one maid
trailing at a discreet distance. Around and around the green she led Jean, showing her delight when the ravens swooped down
on them if they passed too near hidden caches of food, telling him the history of the Tower as if he were some gawping visitor
and not the man who had come to take her life. She talked of her childhood in France, of the times spent in happiness in those
same vine-clad valleys that had been his childhood home.

They fell into an even pace. She talked, he listened and asked no questions, for there was no need, his task was clear before
him. He had seen the lords who spoke so bravely only to blubber and sway so much on his scaffold he had to have them bound
and blindfolded. Or the drunk ones who couldn’t keep upright. But he looked at Anne Boleyn and knew she would kneel as calm
and erect on his scaffold as ever she had before the thrones of France and England.

They had taken a dozen turns about the small green when she stopped and said, ‘And you? What of you, Jean Rom-baud? Tell me
of the roads you have taken from the Loire to bring you to this place.’

It was rare that clients asked anything of him, so concerned were they with their own mortality. Yet Anne Boleyn was unlike
any client he had met, for the curiosity in her offset
eyes was genuine, and after his blunder he was prepared to do anything to please her. So he talked, his voice at first hesitant
from disuse, growing stronger in the quality of her attention. She listened, prompting occasionally, her strange hand now
and again drifting to press his arm in a six-fingered grasp, lingering there and then moving just before he could grow uncomfortable.

The chapel bell sounded ten and to his surprise Jean realised two hours had passed in this exchange of histories, an exchange
that had become curiously one-sided. She went once more to her prayers, but not without extracting his word, gladly given,
that they would meet again at sunset.

His quarters were warm enough, and there was food and wine laid out. He ate and drank sparingly, then slept surprisingly long
and well. When he awoke, there was only a little he could do while he waited, but he could do that little. He took the sword,
the whetstone and the oil from his bag. Settling in a patch of sunlight at the entrance to his tower, he drew his treasure
out, for treasure it was to him, his fortune and the maker of such reputation as he had.

Longer, just, than the length of his arm, thus shorter than most swords then in fashion, its blade doubled their width and
weight. A craftsman in Toledo had folded the metal over and over Jean could not tell how many times, such was its weight,
while its counter-balance was perfection, residing within the double-handed grip Jean re-tied in green leather each time,
and within the apple-sized pommel. A handspan from its square tip, and no more than a handspan in length, lay the killing
zone. Though its entire length on both sides was of an equal and extraordinary sharpness, it was this neck-wide section that
divided life from death, became the focus of his swing and timing. The rest was a reminder of battle, where a back edge and
a sudden cut could, and had, saved him more than once.

He swung it above his head and around his body, letting
the weight of it pull and stretch his shoulders. It was their sudden uncoiling which produced the single killing stroke that
was his speciality, that had spread his fame. The condemned would pay well for that skill rather than submit to the crudeness
of axe and block, trussed and bent over, rump in air, neck a scrunched target for an often drunk butcher to hack away at.
There was no such indignity on his scaffold. His clients knelt upright, hands and eyes free if they so chose.

Henry of England obviously still cares enough for his soon-to-be former wife to give her this farewell,
Jean thought. Yet remembering the woman he’d met that morning, the thought did not make him smile.

The sword was a tool, practical, deadly, and Jean rarely considered it beyond that. But today, with the spring sun glittering
off its facets, it seemed to him again like a doorway, a swift conduit to another world. Jean had long since lost track of
the numbers because so many had gone under the blade during the wars. Yet the sword seemed to him to carry a memory of all
it had done, of every person it had moved on, connecting their last look at this world with their first glimpse of the next,
retaining in its planes something of their fevered prayers, their shouted curses.

He had been dipping the whetstone in water and moving it with angled, sharp strokes down the length of both sides for some
time when a shadow took the sunlight away.

‘Do you have everything you need?’ Tucknell was staring at the sword on the Frenchman’s lap.

‘Everything I could wish for,’ Jean replied and slipped the weapon back into its soft leather sheath. ‘Is it time?’

‘Time?’ Tucknell looked startled.

‘For my second meeting with the Queen.’ Jean spoke gently. ‘She asked for me near sunset.’

‘Yes. It is. You are to follow me.’ The officer made no move to leave, just kept gazing at the sword. Jean waited. There was
always someone who needed to talk to him about
what he was to do. More often than not a relative, sometimes a servant or friend. ‘But I told you, she’s no longer a queen.
The King stripped her of the title yesterday.’ The voice’s attempt to be calm betrayed the opposite.

‘It is often the way,’ Jean said. ‘Reducing an enemy to a commoner makes them—’

‘She is no commoner,’ Tucknell burst out. ‘She is noble beyond estimation, beautiful beyond all reckoning, and he …’ He turned
away, struggling to pull back the anger and the pain that distorted his face. In a voice like a little boy’s, he said, ‘I
would give my life for hers, gladly.’

‘I don’t think the exchange would be accepted.’ Jean gently laid his hand on Tucknell’s arm. It was immediately pulled away.
Pity was the quickest way to harden most men, Jean had always found.

‘Do your job well, Frenchman,’ Tucknell growled. He turned and, once Jean had put the sword away, led him back to the green.

She was waiting there with two of her ladies. They broke off their conversation as soon as she saw him.

‘Monsieur Rombaud, I hope my gallant Tucknell is treating you well.’

‘Excellently, Majesty,’ he replied, at which she raised a six-fingered hand.

‘I am not to be addressed as such. The King has ordained it so and he is not a man to anger, or disappoint.’ She glanced around
at the embarrassed, averted faces. ‘Why are you all so glum? Do you not know the relief it is to be a woman again after a
thousand days of woe as Queen? My head is lighter for the loss of a crown and soon my shoulders will be lighter—’ She broke
off. ‘I am sorry, Monsieur Jean, dear Doctor, my Englishness shows most in my terrible habit of joking in the face of all
adversity, which may do for me but not for those who care about me. Forgive me,’ she said to them all. ‘Yet we still have
this problem of titles. If I am not a queen I am still perhaps a lady? Lady Anne – sounds now like the heroine of
some terrible ballad, which I have been, of course. What about plain old Anne Bullen? They call me that in my native Norfolk,
where they don’t hold with airs and graces. No? Well, what did you call your love, Jean Rombaud, your childhood sweetheart
from the Loire valley? Maybe I could steal her name, since I am to steal a last caress from her love.’

She laughed at that, even if the others didn’t, and in the laugh Jean heard something that reminded him of Lysette, of the
first time he’d seen her chasing chickens in her father’s yard, aged ten. Or again at fourteen when he’d kissed her on the
riverbank, or at sixteen with the betrothal wreath in her hair, or at twenty-five when he’d been gone to war so long and she’d
waited, though many considered her an old maid by then. And their last five wondrous years together.

He’d closed his eyes momentarily, and when he opened them again he was plunged straight into the depths of hers, for she had
stepped close. She spoke, but her lips seemed not to move, the words instead sounding directly inside his head.

‘Lysette? It is a beautiful name. Yet too precious to borrow, I think.’

Once more he felt himself unsteady, for he was sure he had not spoken aloud; yet this woman had read his mind as easily as
he could tell the approach of rain. She had plucked the thought from him. Him, the faceless, the masked man, exposed.

‘Walk with me,’ Anne Boleyn said. ‘We will discuss names and titles later, I think.’

They circled the green again and again, long after the sun had set and a chill reclaimed the Tower. He did not seem to feel
the cold, it was outside them, for they spoke again of a warmer place removed in time and distance, of days of endless summer
beside a river, of the taste of the young wine made in the Loire as nowhere else, of festivals and frolics and the adventures
of being young. Hers had been a very different world. She was of the court that often stayed there, he of the fields and the
village even if his father had grown from mere
peasant to landowner, innkeeper, army supplier. The memory of the land though, that they could share – the quality of its
light, the colour of its earth.

He found himself telling her things he had never spoken of before, of his wife and daughter, their sudden deaths of the plague.
In turn, he was at first disconcerted, then fascinated by tales of her life at the French and English courts he only, rarely,
came into contact with. She was funny, indiscreet, occasionally shockingly coarse. And when she gave that deep belly laugh,
bent over in her glee, he’d laugh too, then look at her and remember she was to die the next day. He had come to take her
life. To spare her pain and give her some dignity, undoubtedly, but to kill her nonetheless. And remembering, he was confused.
He’d had noble clients who seemed to want to befriend him before the end, who had revealed more intimate things than are often
heard in the confessional. Yet this was different; Anne Boleyn sought to achieve an intimacy and succeeded. There had to be
a reason, but he could not think of it.

Some hours passed before Tucknell came to lead her away, and in that time Jean had learnt precisely why a king had overthrown
his beloved Church for this woman, for she deserved no less than the uproar of heaven and earth. It was not a beauty of face
or body. What he felt was not desire as such, though she was seductive beyond the price of paradise. It was something he’d
never known before, something of the spirit and holier than anything he’d ever met in a church.

Back in his quarters, good food and delicious wine were again laid out but Jean had an appetite for neither. He was disturbed,
angry with himself. Clients were not meant to evoke feelings. He did not think it would make his job harder, he knew his duty
and the only kindness he could show lay in the precise performance of his duties. Usually, though, his thoughts on an execution’s
eve were his own, easy ones that
allowed him to sleep. He felt he would get none of that relief tonight.

He was wrong. He did sleep, but fitfully, spirits his companions, dying clients, dead lovers and a six-fingered woman lingering
there long after his eyes were open to dismiss them. It took him several moments to realise the hand shaking his shoulder
was real, that Tucknell was bidding him rise. It was long before his time – no hint of dawn in the sky – but he threw a cloak
over his shoulders and followed the impatient Englishman down the stairs and then along unfamiliar grey stone corridors.

Suddenly they plunged into a dead-end passage where Tucknell disappeared into the rock. Jean stood, shocked, till a gauntlet
materialised and pulled him into the niche and on into the darkness of a narrow stairwell, boots splashing through fetid puddles.
Half blind, he slammed into the officer’s back as Tucknell cursed and fumbled at something ahead of them. There was a chink
of light, a doorway, and then he was standing in a sparse bedroom with Anne Boleyn before him. Alone, for Tucknell had vanished
again.

She simply looked at him for some moments while he stood, off balance once again, as if she were the executioner, he the client.
At last, she spoke.

‘Jean Rombaud, when I heard Henry had granted me the last favour of a French swordsman’s death, it was the first good news
I had received in many a day. It was not that you were coming to spare me pain, though I do not doubt your skill. No, my tiny
hope was that you would be the man you are, a man of honour. That you also come from the Loire is beyond anything I could
have hoped or prayed for. Because it was there, in the land we share, that I learnt to be who I am. Not a queen. No, not even
the daughter of a noble house.’

She poured some wine into a goblet, brought it across to him. It was similar to the wine from his chamber: hot, redolent of
herbs, honey-sweet, heady. He drank, then passed the cup back to her.

She drank too, spoke again.

‘For it was there, in your groves, in your fields, by your river, that I learnt to believe in something older even than this.’
She gestured to a crucifix on the wall behind her. ‘And something just as holy.’

She refilled the one goblet with the honeyed wine and each drank before she continued.

‘I tell you this because I need your help and, if you will give it, a vow sworn on whatever you believe to be sacred that
you will do as I bid you. There will be gold enough, but gold will not buy what I ask of you now.’