“There is a light above my head.”

Executioner, Jean Rombauda, didn’t realize Anne Boleyn had requested him by name, nor did the French swordsman recall meeting her in the past.  Still, while everyone knew about Henry VIII’s infamous second wife, Jean couldn’t shake the feeling that Anne Boleyn’s execution on May 19, 1536, was more personal than routine.  The experience was uncomfortably familiar, like he knew the Queen and, worse yet, had beheaded her before.

Seconds before being blindfolded, Anne Boleyn locked gazes with Jean Rombauda.  When she noticed her reflection starring back, she smiled and whispered something.  While no one other than Jean knew what she had said, it was evident the executioner was visibly shaken, uncharacteristically sympathetic to England’s condemned Queen.  Out of kindness, he committed to slicing off her head with one forceful blow to the back of her neck.  And as he swung, as if to grant Anne Boleyn the perception of living a few seconds more, Jean Rombauda shouted, “Where is my sword?”

Jean Rombauda never repeated what Anne Boleyn had whispered to him.  Spooked by the experience, he distanced himself from any notoriety that came with being the Queen’s executioner.  He eventually stopped performing executions altogether and moved to the french countryside, where alone he lived to be a very old man.

…

Years later, on the moonlit night of an old man’s death…

Ill with a fever, Jean Rombauda counted along with a distant church bell.  Upon hearing an unexpected thirteenth toll, he opened his eyes one last time.

Beside his bed, paying her respects was a hooded woman covered in white lace and ivory silk.  By candlelight, the regal woman’s diamonds sparkled like a constellation in the sky.  She seemed more celestial than human, so Jean asked, “Are you an angel, here to escort me to heaven?”

The woman chuckled and lower her hood.  “Who are the angels,” she asked? “Surely, not me.”

After removing a glove, the woman leaned in and caressed her exposed hand along Jean’s cheek. “We have never met, dear heart,” she explained. “But you knew my mother, you knew her well.”

Jean squinted at the visitor through his fever.  The woman’s frosted skin glowed iridescently like the moonlight, yet her insanely red hair burned like a torch.

When Jean realized who the woman was at his bedside, he shed a tear and asked, “Are you here to avenge your mother, Your Grace? Have you come to collect my soul?”

“No, Executioner,” the woman replied, while tucking wisps of grey hair behind his ear. “I am here to set you free.”

…

Bedridden in a stone cottage on the French countryside, alone with the Virgin Queen in a sliver of time that proceeds the midnight hour, an old man named Jean Rombauda exhaled a final time.

As he did, Queen Elizabeth I waded deep into the eyes of her mother’s executioner.  After a spell, she smiled at Anne Boleyn’s reflection starring back at her.  Together, the two witches then recited the words Jean Rombauda, the executioner, had refused to ever speak…

“My life goes on but not the same. Into your eyes, my face remains.”