Page 29 of Deja Who
THIRTEEN
Clinic notes:Leah Nazir, Chart #3262
Date:9/17/1999
INS:Chloe Hammen, ID# 14932
My name is Jean Rombaud.
Jean Rombaud was the French swordsman ordered by Henry VIII to behead Anne Boleyn. Wasn’t that thoughtful of the fat tyrannical son of a bitch? He could have had his queen burned, or tortured, or both. When it came down to it, he could havenotblamed her for miscarriages likely caused by his fat tyrannical sperm (he was as wide as he was tall when he died, for God’s sake).
No and no and no. Instead he decided the woman he had pursued for a decade should be buried in pieces. But no messy crude axe for Anne Boleyn; Henry Tudor wanted only the best.
So Jean Rombaud, expert swordsman, blitzed into town, killed the queen, and blitzed back out. And he was troubled byhis duty, which was the reaction of a sane man. He had never been hired to cut off a queen’s head before. And because of the King of England’s Great Matter, he of course knew not just who she was but where she had started and how she had come to the scaffold.
Here was a woman who literally changed the world, here was a man tripping on autocracy, and Europe could not wait to see how it played out (can you imagine the Internet uproar if it had existed back then? Henry Haterz! Anne Rulz!). But Jean, who had a front-row seat to how it would end, did not feel especially fortunate. The opposite, in fact—though not so unfortunate as the queen.
But he wasn’t there to debate the politics of legal murder. He wasn’t there to make friends or enemies; he was an independent contractor with a job to do. With misgivings, he did it, and he did it well—Anne Boleyn Tudor likely never felt a thing.
And when it was done, Rombaud was, too. “Thank you for the recommendation, here is your legally murdered wife’s head, a pleasure doing business with you, I may use you as a reference, good luck with the Reformation.”
Then he got the hell out of England, a place that always afterward gave him the creeps. He watched with the rest of Europe as the morbidly obese sociopath went through four more wives, again indulging in the legal murder of wife number five: Katherine Howard, Anne Boleyn’s cousin. Rombaud felt bad for the beheaded teenager, but was glad to be away from it all.
The end. Except not really.
