The Executioner of Béthune

Long before he stood in judgment over a condemned woman on a riverbank near Armentières, the man the novel calls only "the executioner of Lille" was a young man newly appointed to his post in the city of Béthune, tasked with carrying out a sentence against a young woman convicted of theft and, more quietly, of something the court records declined to name outright. This two-chapter story imagines what that earlier sentence cost him, and why, years later, a masked man's request for one final judgment found him more ready to answer than anyone, least of all himself, expected.