She will make my wounds all sound,
And with a healing draught make me full well...."
Jacques clenched his great fists. No, he wouldn't do it. Seniority entitled him to some consideration. If necessary, he'd put a call through to the Bureau. They'd understand. His record was good. He'd always performed faithfully, meeting death every session, dealing it out to young and old alike.
But not to a woman; certainly not to a woman who might have meant a great deal to him! During the long spartan years of his training, the isolated years of monastic living at a time when youth burned strongest in him, the image of woman had become a haunting dream, unreal as the moonlight streaming through his curtainless window, untouchable as the mist of a summer morning. A sense of that image and unreality still persisted, even after all the women who had come to him so willingly and had left with that undefinable look of unhappiness deep in their eyes.
Since that woman back in the Fifth District, he'd been lucky with his executions. Not too many women drew the death penalty, and the few times women had been on his docket he had learned of it sufficiently in advance to pretend illness or make up some plausible excuse for emergency leave. But today had taken him totally by surprise.
The squire shuffled up behind him, and begged,
"Please, your Lordship, shall we not don these garments now?"
Jacques shook his head so impatiently that the squire scurried back in fright.
And then the Bailiff's voice intoned sonorously from the doorway:
"His Highness, Chief Justice of the Seventh Judicial District!"