The Second Summons

Years later, long enough that he had relocated to Lille, taken a wife, buried a brother, and told himself, more often than the telling entirely convinced him, that Béthune belonged to a younger and less careful version of himself, a masked man arrived at his door after dark with a proposal that struck him, from the first sentence, as an echo of something he had spent a long time trying not to remember clearly.

A woman had been condemned, the masked man explained, by a tribunal with no legal standing whatsoever: four men and a hooded stranger, judging a fifth party on charges that would never see a proper courtroom, for crimes that included, among other things, a branding the masked man claimed to have personal knowledge of, having seen the mark himself. The executioner listened to the full account with an attention that surprised his visitors, who had evidently expected either refusal or the kind of mercenary interest a man in his trade might reasonably be assumed to bring to any commission, regardless of its legality.

What he was listening for, though he could not have named it to the men in front of him, was whether this woman's case bore any resemblance to Anne's, whether he was being asked, once again, to lend the appearance of legal weight to a judgment that had already been decided by people with more standing than evidence. He asked more questions than the masked man's companions seemed to expect from a hired instrument, and it was only when one of them, a nobleman he would later learn was called Athos, described in flat, exhausted detail the woman's own long history of manufactured identities and real harm done under each of them, that the executioner understood the case in front of him was, in one crucial respect, the precise inverse of the one that had haunted him for years.

Anne had been punished for a crime the evidence barely supported, by men whose certainty exceeded anything the facts could justify. This woman, whatever name she currently answered to, had apparently spent decades manufacturing exactly that gap between appearance and evidence in her own favor, using precisely the kind of confident, unexaminable certainty that had condemned Anne to condemn others instead: a poisoning here, a forged identity there, an executioner's own brand concealed and then, when it served her, revealed as false accusation against whoever threatened to expose it.

He agreed to serve as executioner a second time, and he told himself, standing on the riverbank at Armentières with the same particular silence falling over the assembled witnesses that he remembered from Béthune, that this occasion was different in every way that mattered, that he was not, this time, lending his office to men whose certainty outran their evidence, but correcting, in some private and inadequate way, an old account that had never been settled to his satisfaction.

He was aware, even as he told himself this, that it was a story convenient to his own peace of mind, and that a honest accounting would have to reckon with how little difference there actually was, procedurally speaking, between the tribunal that had condemned Anne and the tribunal he now stood ready to serve: five men, none of them a proper magistrate, agreeing among themselves that a woman's guilt was sufficiently established to warrant her death. The difference, if there was one, lay entirely in whether the accusations happened, this time, to be true, and he understood, with the same uncomfortable clarity that had first troubled him eleven weeks into his post so many years before, that he had no more capacity to verify the truth of these accusations independently than he'd had to verify or refute the ones against Anne.

What had changed, he decided, watching the condemned woman's face across the width of the riverbank clearing, a face that showed him none of Anne's curious, searching quality, only a cold and calculating assessment of every man present as a potential angle of escape, was not the structure of the judgment but his own willingness to trust it. He had been young and uncertain at Béthune, dependent on a post he could not afford to question. He was neither of those things now, and if he had chosen, this time, to lend his old office to a private tribunal's private justice, it was because something in this particular woman's bearing, this particular accumulation of testimony from men who had each independently suffered at her hands, met a bar of conviction he had never felt at Béthune, whatever the court records there had claimed on his behalf.

Whether that private conviction was itself reliable, or only the comfortable feeling of a man finally getting to make a choice on his own authority after years of making them on someone else's, he did not resolve to his own satisfaction, that night or afterward. He performed the sentence, and he did not sleep the night through afterward, any more than he had the night after Anne, though for reasons he understood, this time, to be truly different: not the ache of a doubt he could not silence, but the older, more familiar weight of an act no man's conscience fully absorbs, however certain he has managed to make himself of its justice beforehand.

He thought of Anne again, walking home in the dark. He thought of her more often, in fact, in the years following Armentières than he had in the years immediately after Béthune, not because the two women had anything in common beyond the accident of both having died by his hand, but because he had come, by then, to understand that every sentence he carried out added its own weight to a private ledger no court would ever see, and that the only honest accounting available to a man in his trade was not whether each individual judgment had been correct, which he would never fully know, but whether he had done what he reasonably could, each time, to make sure it was made as carefully as a fallible man in an impossible position was capable of making it.

It was not, he understood, an answer that would have satisfied Anne, had she lived to hear it. It was the only one he had.