The Executioner’s Lad won the West Midlands Prize in the Birmingham Book Festival Short Story Competition 2010.

The Executioner’s Lad by Claire Bennett

  

Sleep at night? How do I sleep at night?

What do you think? Who’d be able to sleep?

So.

So I have it still. It’s here and safe beneath my pillow. And some mornings, awakening, I check for it and find her hair tangling in my own. As if it shared my own head, the one still full of her until even this day. Just a lock, no more, a paltry lock taken before the madness subsided and before anyone could see. Cut with a blade that I keep still for spreading my butter. The Lord knows why I had that blade about me.

The Lord knows.

Now I don’t know so well as to take an oath on it but they tell me she was forty-four. She should have had her own hair still then shouldn’t she? I should have thought it to be so. High born – to majesty, she should have had her own hair. My sisters, both long since buried and neither hearing their first-born cry, they had meagre tresses but they lived a different life to Mary.

They tell me that the rage and hope and fear that swam about inside her skull showed itself to the outside with the falling of her hair. I don’t know what science that is. I never claimed that I could ken these big ideas but I wonder that unease would leave her bald.

I’m glad I had my knife.

They brought me down with him that was given the job. “Master Axeman” they called him. In the inn the night before it was all,

“Ale for Master Axeman”. The cry and toast around the halls, “Ale for Master Axeman and his charge”. There was excitement there that I could not understand and did not want to be part of. My wishes never count for much.

We’d lodged many days in Peterborough and I’d been most content there except for the good humour of the others that seemed so ill placed to me.

What did I know of any of it? Not that many thoughts were wasted on me, being lowly, being the executioner’s lad. So when they went to survey the place I was left unsupervised and not watched over. I had never been in a castle before nor harbour the hope to be in one again. I saw her first that day and twice more thereafter. Each time I was in tow to him.

He needed to measure the block.

I saw her in the courtyard.

He needed to gauge his swing.

I saw her in the garden.

He needed to be sure the floor was smooth and level.

I saw her seated at a table, in prayer, her head inclined and her red hair twisted and curled about it. The sun struck through the window and the blaze of her hair… better than any crown. I wage she never saw me. She was taller than the Axeman. Half as tall again as either my dead sisters.

Some joke I think it was that a Scots lad be there to witness. Some joke. My charge was “to be of use throughout the cleaning up”. They found this task to hide their humour. Queen of Scots? What did I know about letters and caskets and plots? I saw only her beauty. I saw only her hair; I never saw more life and colour. But not her hair at all.

I’m glad I had my knife.

After all his checking, tests and trials, after he made me kneel in her stead and swung his blade to practice and roared with mirth when I, in fear, pisses me, after all that the bastard was no good.

“Ale for Master Axeman” and still more “Ale for Master Axeman” until I think it’s him that won’t be able to control himself and his dinner comes back up to revisit us and only then does the inn keeper’s wife send us away to our beds and threatens him with his own axe.

Cold it was. At that hour the sun was so low as our eyes were flinching shut against it on the road to Fortheringhay. The wealth of glass throughout the halls shone in the sun but the shine it made was nothing to her hair that I stared at later. She came in tall and full of grace in black with a plain white head covering that could do nothing to hide the beauty of her woven, jewelled hair. So red. And when she had her cloak taken from her there was a gasp, as she stood revealed in a gown so crimson it looked as though she had bled already.

And she knelt.

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the stone I’d picked up on the road that very morning, round and smooth and along with it my knife. I still keep that knife. I have it here; I use it to spread my butter. The stone was lost years since.

And she prayed.

I ran my finger along the blade, hardly a blade at all, only suited to spreading but sharper now, this day, than his blade then.

And she waited.

I could smell the useless, great, fat, beer-swilling oaf. Oozing ale fumes and farting as he lifted the axe.

And she mouthed something.

I don’t know what – and his first stroke was true enough only to split the skin and show the white of the bone.

And she moved her lips still more.

And in my head I heard again the shouts of “Ale for Master Axeman”, and across from me the heaving guts of one of the Lords and his gloved hand to his mouth to catch his breakfast and the second stroke and through the bone but not right through even then. And my butter knife bites into my thumb sharper now than that pisspoor excuse for a man who went about as “expert”.

And air moved out of her. Not from her mouth but from the pipe that would have let her voice out when she lived. And the third stoke and her head was still not on the floor. And my knife, though blunt, to the bone in my thumb and I’m the only one with any sense it seems to me and I snatch the axe and make the final cut that frees her from this world.

And her head rolls to the feet of our expert Master Axeman. Bending, farting, already shouting there has been no incompetence, he grabs her by the hair all red and mixed with more and he swings her up but only the hair comes with his fist. Then he throws her hair to me as if it were some filth that had tried to attach itself to him.

He’s the filth.

The world was red.

And with my knife I cut this lock. Stole some would say. My knife, this knife, seemed suddenly as sharp as if it had been wrought to bite by the devil himself.

Uproar. For her body begins to move and there are cries,

“Satan’s whore!” and “God save us!” and then from the wetted folds of her gown came her puppy. Tiny, blinking and confused. Sniffing for his mistress, finding wet, whimpering, sad. Thank the Lord her eyes had shut themselves.

I sleep, when I do, when I’m drunk, with this of her beneath my own head. Not her hair I know, but the hair she wore. And I am the only one with the least small thing of her from that day.

They had me burn her head. And her clothes and all the other pieces from the event. They had me build the bonfire. I smashed the block for kindling but not with that bastard’s axe that he clutched to his sweat drenched self and kisses with stringy spit and made a prayer over as “tool of my trade”. All that burning was done in the courtyard where I’d first seen her. Mary, my Queen of Scots.

Such a good joke – to send this Scots lad.

I’m glad I had my knife.

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