The French Executioner

by C. C. Humphreys

  The tale of the dungeon was told once, on the third night, and left everyone silent save for the tears that flowed again from Maria-Theresa. It was told by the Fugger, whose nervousness at the telling was dispelled by the steady pressure of the girl’s hand on his handless arm, her fingers returning from the wiping of tears to gently stroke his wrist.

  Beck spoke little, filling in such detail as was necessary but no more. She was unused to company, having only ever had one objective in her life and having decided that a solitary life was best to pursue it. Now that it had been achieved, and Abraham was beside her and beginning to show signs of recovery – Januc, who knew something of the matter, had undertaken to wean him off his craving for Cibo’s ‘medicine’ – she could not decide if she could or should remain a ‘he’. Something in her longed once again to be her father’s loving daughter, helping him with his work, providing him with the home and comfort he needed. But something else was working within her too. She likened herself to one of those feral cats that haunted the same alleys she had as a member of the street gang, the Sicarii, in Venice. She had been in the wild, fighting for survival, too long. She was not sure she could return to the domestic.

  And then there was Jean. Another reason she seldom spoke was that she was convinced he would know her secret if she did, and she was both thrilled and horrified at that idea. There was a quality to his watchfulness, a way he had of taking in all detail around him. She had the feeling he had not always been this way, that the mission he’d undertaken – which the Fugger had told her about, this vow made to a dead English queen – had changed him. He laughed sometimes and his face was transformed; Beck thought of a waterfall suddenly stumbled upon in a forest. Mostly he watched and listened. He seemed to be waiting for something, gathering strength with every breath of air.

  She knew what he was doing. He was waiting to leave.

  While she watched him, he watched the boy with the slingshot. His feelings were confused, because sometimes he thought of Beck as a comrade, sometimes as the son he’d never had, even though any son Lysette and he could have produced would have been more than half the age of the dark-haired youth opposite. But then those feelings would go and be replaced by something unsettling, as he studied the dark eyes beneath the curly hair, the sudden shy smile or laugh triggered by some interaction between Haakon and Januc. When Beck laughed, inevitably the boy would glance over to where he sat, their eyes would meet for a moment and then they would both look away. It happened more often than just by chance, and Jean found himself waiting for it, enjoying it, even the confusion of it.

  As if he did not have enough to be confused about. While he both needed and enjoyed the peace and the healing, the laughter, good food and wine, he was never fully able to rest because in his mind’s eye he still saw, wherever he looked, the shadow of a six-fingered hand. The tale from the dungeon had only increased his anxiety for now he knew that Cibo was planning nothing less than the conjuration of the dead, had even partly succeeded, for Anne had come in a vision to the Fugger. What had she said? ‘Their summons is strong’? Even without Abraham, his enemy was sure still to be attempting unspeakable acts. Jean knew that as soon as he was recovered he would have to return to Siena to fulfil his vow. That was never in question, and if he’d ever wavered, the story of Anne’s appearance in the midst of the Black Mass and her final words, which the Fugger had told him quietly in private, would have prompted him. His Queen did not doubt that he would come for her. He could not doubt it either.

  Yet he was also aware of the truth of what his enemy, Heinrich von Solingen, had said during the fight at the Palio. He might have all the lives of a cat, but he had used up five before he ever saw Anne Boleyn, and at least another three since.

  So Jean watched and waited and gathered his strength. News would be brought to him as soon as anything occurred – Lucrezia had promised her daughter’s rescuers that. But he also knew that if something didn’t happen soon, he would have to make it happen.

  It was on the fifth night that Haakon and Januc, praised for their storytelling, full of relived bravado and, in Haakon’s case, too much young wine, decided to go off to the modest brothel that Montepulciano possessed.

  ‘The girls are delightful, inexperienced really, not like those army sluts you’re used to.’ Mathias was enjoying old mercenary company. Then he added hastily, on seeing his wife enter with another tray of sweetmeats, ‘Or so I’ve been told.’

  ‘I just hope there are many.’ Januc’s dark eyes glowed. ‘I have been two years before the mast. And I had three wives before that. Three! All at the same time.’

  ‘And what about you, young David-with-a-slingshot?’ Haakon bent down. ‘Got something other than stones in your pouch?’

  Januc and Mathias laughed while Beck blushed furiously and tried to cover it up with a deeper than normal voice.

  ‘Please, gentlemen, my father!’ She smiled slyly and winked. ‘Maybe when he falls asleep later I’ll sneak out. Save some for me, eh?’

  ‘Can’t guarantee that, but as you wish, young master. Ah Jean,’ Haakon called as the Frenchman came back into the courtyard, ‘we’re off to see the ladies of the night. Will you accompany us?’

  Jean stopped in the doorway. His first thought was of safety, but Franchetto’s soldiers, who had scoured the town, had departed the day before. It was probably fine to venture out. It had also been a long time. Jean had had his share of every aspect of life while campaigning and he was as much a man as any other. But since the plague had taken his wife, he had known only two women, brief moments to relieve his loneliness more than anything.

  It was then he saw Beck looking at him intently. There was something in the look, the same mystery he’d seen before, some question being asked. He also felt a surge in his groin when he looked at the boy, and that disturbed him still more. He was a soldier and he’d lived most of his life with men, but his inclination was, and always had been, towards women. He didn’t know what this feeling was, and to dispel it he said, his voice suddenly thick, ‘Sure. Why not?’

  There was a great roar from Haakon and Januc who slapped him on his back and immediately started gathering some food and wine to take as presents.

  ‘Well, that’s nice, isn’t it?’ The voice, suddenly gruff with native Yorkshire vowels, was also full of venom. ‘Taking yourself off to a brothel? No wonder a queen entrusted you with her hand. So noble a knight! So …’

  Beck turned and stormed out of the courtyard.

  ‘Well, Jean!’ Januc’s grey eyes were alive with mirth. ‘Can you recognise jealousy when you see it?’

  The Frenchman shifted uncomfortably. ‘Jealousy?’

  ‘Of course. And you know what the Greeks say: “A woman for love, but a boy for pleasure.” ’ He gave a lascivious wink. ‘An all-too-willing boy from the way he looks at you.’

  ‘You are mistaken, janissary.’ There was a harder edge to Jean’s voice now. ‘There’s something ailing him, that’s all.’

  ‘There is.’ The Fugger rose from one of the sheepskins, carefully removing his arm from under the sleeping head of Maria-Theresa. ‘A word, Jean?’

  Later, having watched Januc and Haakon noisily depart, Jean went to find Beck, who was crouched over a sleeping, fevered Abraham, bathing his temples with cool water. Beck rose at Jean’s signal and preceded him outside, leading him away from the house and down to a crumbled part of the outer wall. A gibbous half moon hung over the fields, etching the vines and olive trees in silver. Below them, Haakon and Januc could be heard noisily shooshing each other as they marched towards town.

  ‘You’d better hurry if you’re going to catch them up.’ Beck’s stance was closed off and hostile.

  Jean came up to the unforgiving back. ‘I changed my mind,’ he murmured, then added as he put his arms around Beck, ‘besides, my tastes have always run another way.’

  Beck elbowed Jean hard in the stomach and slipped forward, instantly filled with contradictory thoughts and emotions. He
wants me, he loves me, he thinks I’m a boy, oh God, he’s a lover of boys were just a few she went through before she turned and dropped into a fighting stance. It was then the laugh came, the one she heard so rarely and liked so well when she did. He was standing just a few feet away, clutching his belly in both pain and mirth.

  ‘Oh, I deserved that. But I just couldn’t resist.’

  He took a step towards her and she took one back.

  ‘The Fugger. He told me. He saw you, after you came out of the water. Just for a moment. Long enough to … to know you.’

  He broke off and the laughter left him. He took another step towards her, then another, and this time she stayed where she was. When he was before her, he placed his hands on her shoulders and turned her until the moon was reflected in the darkness of her eyes.

  ‘No one knows me. No one ever has.’ She looked away, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘I will,’ he said, and bent to kiss her.

  When their mouths came together, there was a release in both of them, and later, on a bed of pine boughs he swiftly made, there was another, and a third when her tears came, springing from a source so deep inside her that it had never been tapped in the long age since her father was taken away. He held her while she cried, soothing her with his hands, his kisses, his murmured words. Soon, he felt the tears change from sadness to something else, to a kind of fierce joy: feeling it, he wrapped her even tighter in his arms, felt hers return the pressure. They held each other until they both slept, and long after into the night.

  ‘You are a crow, a barking dog, three times a fool!’

  The blows fell on the helpless servant, twice as hard because Franchetto wanted to direct them at the other man present but didn’t dare. He hated not being able to hit whom he pleased, whenever he wanted, but in the week since the Palio, the German bodyguard’s eyes had developed a fanatic’s gleam, a fire that shone from the ruin of his face and made him the very stuff of nightmares. He was certainly not a man to strike, however insolent his monosyllabic replies, his endless silences.

  So Franchetto repeatedly struck the messenger bringing the latest tidings of gloom. It was not new news. It was no news at all. The Viper might fight with the Bear, the Broadsword loathe the Panther, but every contrada hated authority. The riot the Scorpions had begun had become general and had taken a day and a night to quell. The Cibo brothers had been manhandled by the mob, peasant hands actually laid on noble flesh. In the aftermath, a few too drunk or too infirm to run away had been hanged before the Palazzo Pubblico. But the real culprits, the Scorpions, had vanished under the rocks whence they’d come, spiriting the fugitives with them. And the law of omertà, silence, seemed to bind the town together despite the lure of fortunes and the threats of death. Spies went everywhere and returned with the same story – nothing.

  So while Franchetto Cibo vented his temper on the latest of them, kicking him around the room, Giancarlo Cibo drew Heinrich aside.

  ‘My brother is ensuring that the only information we receive will be happy and thus useless. We will achieve nothing here.’

  ‘I am beginning to think the same.’

  The Archbishop moved over to the window and looked down into the Campo, where five bodies swayed on the scaffold.

  ‘You hunt, do you not?’

  ‘Anything and everything, my Lord.’

  ‘Like me. And there are different tactics for different game, haven’t you found?’

  His bodyguard nodded.

  ‘If you cannot run something down you draw it to you. You bait a trap, do you not? And we still have the bait our quarry most desires. I have seen the look in that Frenchman’s eyes. He will not give up.’

  ‘He will when I pull his guts through his mouth.’

  ‘Indeed. But you have failed, on several occasions, to do so. I think I have to make it easier for you somehow.’

  Franchetto had finished his beating and was now noisily drinking some wine. His brother regarded him with ill-disguised disdain. Then he snapped his fingers.

  ‘We will not draw him here, to a fortress. But we know how he favours the open road, the ambush on the way. So let him stalk us while we stalk him. Franchetto,’ he called, ‘is the Pope still beseeching us to join the Emperor to deal with Luther’s schism?’

  The bigger brother spat on the floor. ‘That stinking Farnese dog! Trying more of his tricks.’

  ‘He wants us out of Italy for a while so he can work his intrigues, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Yes. And we will not fall for that.’

  ‘Oh, but we will.’ Giancarlo smiled. ‘We will go to Germany immediately, for three reasons. One, we will have the ear of the Emperor, which has been listening too long to the demands of our Farnese enemies. Two, we will draw out the scum who escaped us and deal with them appropriately. And three …’ He paused. ‘Three, I have forgotten.’

  But he hadn’t, and both the other men knew he hadn’t. The Archbishop forgot nothing. He just didn’t think they needed to know, for the moment, the strongest reason for going north. Apollonius. The Emperor’s own alchemist and one of the greatest of the age. Greater even, some said, than Abraham the Hebrew and Paracelsus at Basle. If Cibo couldn’t lure his Jew back – and there seemed to be a risk of that – he would consult Apollonius. The German sage would be more than excited by the sight of the six-fingered hand. He would recognise it for what it was as Cibo had: the key to the door of immortality.

  ‘Yes, to Germany, I think. And let our preparations be secret. That should ensure everyone knows our destination before the week is out.’

  Lucrezia arrived with the news the next night.

  ‘My sister, that sweet young whore, God preserve the instrument of her good fortune, had it from the Archbishop’s manservant himself. They go to join the Emperor in Germany, and in haste, for they set out tomorrow. They are talking of it like a crusade. The Cibo brothers will end the Protestant heresy single-handed. No offence, Fugger.’ She had been eyeing the closeness of her daughter and the German since her arrival with mixed feelings.

  ‘Offence to my heresy or to my single hand?’ said the Fugger. ‘Either way, none taken. And where is the Emperor now?’

  ‘Wittenberg, they say.’

  ‘Wittenberg?’ It was Abraham who spoke now. His fever had broken the night before, and though he was still weak, the worst of his cravings seemed to have passed. He’d allowed his daughter, whom he’d agreed, on her urging, to regard for the moment as his son, to feed him vegetable soup at the meeting. Now he pushed the spoon aside and with some excitement said, ‘Wittenberg is where Apollonius makes his experiments. It is the centre of alchemy in the world. Cibo will not care about any crusade other than that one, his own. He goes to consult the master, to get him to do what I could not.’ He began to cough, recovered, and his eyes shone. ‘He never realised that by dulling my resistance with that drug he also dulled my abilities. But he is right in one thing. That hand could hold the very destiny of life.’

  Jean, crouching on the far side of the courtyard, carefully put down the wine he was drinking. ‘That hand’s destiny,’ he said quietly, ‘is in the fulfilment of a vow, nothing more.’

  He rose and went to stand by the cooking fire, newly prepared for the night and already fierce, and stared into its searing red depths, the miniature worlds existing in the heart of the flame – here a cave of white intensity collapsing in on itself, there a channel of powdered ash stirred by that collapse. He was lost for a moment in that movement, its heavenly beauty, its hellish depths. A familiar hand on his arm drew him back to thoughts he was trying to avoid. He spoke softly for only Beck to hear.

  ‘And my destiny lies there. Consigned to the fires, waiting for hell to suck me down. Because I will fail in my vow. Who am I to fulfil a quest for a queen? The knight in some ancient lay? The hero of one of Haakon’s sagas? No. I am a peasant, a soldier, a headsman. Nothing more. Who am I to challenge archbishops, princes and dukes?’

 
; Beck drew him around. ‘A peasant who has taken heads off all of them,’ she said. ‘A headsman whom a queen of England saw fit to trust with all she had left. And as for the Devil … if he wanted you, he’s had plenty of chances to claim you before now.’

  Jean looked at her again, and marvelled at her again, as he had in the moonlight the night before. The way she said his name made him feel whole, in a way he hadn’t felt in a long age, and he suddenly, desperately wanted to stop there, just stay with his good friend Mathias, make wine, hunt in the fields, have children with the woman who made him feel like that.

  ‘And what if I choose to … turn away? To stay here with you?’

  For a moment she looked, as he had done, into the flames. ‘And begin our life together in a betrayal? I would always think I had stolen you. She would always be between us and her hand would pull us apart.’

  He knew she was right, even as he wanted her to be wrong more than he’d ever wanted anything; knew that all would turn to ash, that he would keep no promise, to Beck or anyone, and fulfil no dreams unless and until he fulfilled his vow.

  He was suddenly aware that all were looking at them, waiting for his words before giving their own. He so wanted to be the man he’d always been, not a leader, just one free to do as he chose. And because he wanted that, he had to offer it to those who followed him. He stepped back into the middle of the courtyard.

  ‘I made a vow that I can’t break. Until I have found what I lost, there is no peace for me in this world. So I have to go to Germany.’ He looked at them each in turn. ‘But you – Fugger, Haakon, Januc, Beck – you have come with me this far and I have led you into terrible danger. I go towards more of it. You made no binding vows to me or anyone else. As a friend, I would give you some advice: do not follow a madman on a mad quest.’

  Haakon rose up immediately, putting down a haunch of meat to say, most seriously, ‘Where you go, so do I. The runes have told me that much. Besides in my country, my mother used to say: “If you are mad as a springtime stoat you are still sane for the sowing.” ’