Gallows Thief (Extract)

Sir Henry wanted to sit in the shadows at the back of the pavilion, but Logan had already taken one of the front chairs and Sir Henry just sat. His head was ringing with the terrible noise that came from the street.  It was, he decided, just like being on a theatre’s stage.  He was overwhelmed and dazzled.  So many people!  Everywhere faces looking up at the black-draped platform that was seven feet high.  The scaffold proper, in front of the roofed pavilion, was thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide and topped by a great beam that ran from the pavilion’s roof to the platform’s end.  Black iron butchers’ hooks were screwed into the beam’s underside and a ladder was propped against it.

A second ironic cheer greeted the sheriffs in their fur-trimmed robes.  Sir Henry was sitting on a hard wooden chair that was slightly too small and desperately uncomfortable.  “It’ll be the girl first,” Logan said.

“Why?”

“She’s the one they’ve come to see,” Logan said.  He was evidently enjoying himself and Sir Henry was surprised by that.  How little we know our friends, he thought, then he again wished that Rider Sandman was here because he suspected that the soldier would not approve of death made this easy.  Or had Sandman been hardened to violence?

“I should let him marry her,” he said.

“What?”  Logan had to raise his voice because the crowd was shouting for the prisoners to be brought on.

“Nothing,” Sir Henry said.

“I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,” the Reverend Cotton’s voice grew louder as he climbed the stairs behind the girl, “while the ungodly is in my sight.”

A turnkey came first, then the girl, and she was awkward on the steps because her legs were still not used to being without irons and the turnkey had to steady her when she half tripped on the top stair.

Then the crowd saw her.   “Hats off!  Hats off!”  The shout began at the front and echoed back.  It was not respect that caused the cry, but rather because the taller hats of the folk in front obscured the view for those behind.  The roar of the crowd was massive, crushing, and then the people surged forward so that the City Marshal and his men who protected the scaffold raised their staves and spears.  Sir Henry felt besieged by noise and by the thousands of people with open mouths, shouting.  There were as many women as men in the crowd.  Sir Henry saw a respectable looking matron stooping to a telescope in a window of the Magpie and Stump. Beside her a man was eating bread and fried egg.  Another woman had opera glasses.  A pie-seller had set up his wares in a doorway.  Pigeons, red kites and sparrows circled the sky in panic because of the noise.  Sir Henry, his mind swimming, suddenly noticed the four open coffins that lay on the scaffold’s edge.  They were made of rough pine and were unplaned and resinous.  The girl’s mouth was open and her face, that had been pale, was now red and distorted.  Tears ran down her cheeks as Botting took her by a pinioned elbow and led her onto the planks at the platform’s centre.  That centre was a trapdoor and it creaked under their weight.  The girl was shaking and gasping as Botting positioned her under the beam at the platform’s far end.  Once she was in place Botting took a cotton bag from his pocket and pulled it over her hair so that it looked like a hat.  She screamed at his touch and tried to twist away from him, but the Reverend Cotton put a hand on her arm as the hangman took the rope from her shoulders and clambered up the ladder.  He was heavy and the rungs creaked alarmingly.  He slotted the small spliced eye over one of the big black butcher’s hooks, then climbed awkwardly back down, red-faced and breathing hard.  “I need an assistant, don’t I?” he grumbled.  “Ain’t fair. Man always has an assistant.  Don’t fidget, missy!  Go like a Christian!”  He looked the girl in the eyes as he pulled the noose down around her head. He tightened the slip knot under her left ear, then gave the rope a small jerk as if to satisfy himself that it would take her weight.  She gasped at the jerk, then screamed because Botting had his hands on her hair.  “Keep still, girl!” he snarled, then pulled down the white cotton bag so that it covered her face.

She screamed.  “I want to see!”

Sir Henry closed his eyes.

“For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday,” the Ordinary had raised his voice so he could be heard above the crowd’s seething din.  The second prisoner, the highwayman, was on the scaffold now and Botting stood him beside the girl, crammed the bag on his head and climbed the ladder to fix the rope. “O teach us to number our days,” the priest read in a singsong voice, “that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

“Amen,” Sir Henry said fervently, too fervently.

“Here,” Logan nudged Sir Henry whose eyes were still closed and held out a flask.  “Good brandy.  Smuggled.”

The highwayman had flowers in his buttonhole.  He bowed to the crowd that cheered him, but his bravado was forced for Sir Henry could see the man’s leg trembling and his bound hands twitching.  “Head up, darling,” he told the girl beside him.

Children were in the crowd.  One girl, she could not have been a day over six years of age, sat on her father’s shoulders and sucked her thumb.  The crowd cheered each arriving prisoner.  A group of sailors with long tarred pigtails shouted at Botting to pull down the girl’s dress.  “Show us her bubbies, Jemmy!  Go on, flop ‘em out!”

“Be over soon,” the highwayman told the girl, “you and I’ll be with the angels, girl.”

“I didn’t steal anything!” the girl wailed.

“Admit your guilt!  Confess your sins!”  The Reverend Cotton urged the four prisoners who were all now lined on the trapdoor.  The girl was furthest from Sir Henry and she was shaking.  All four had cotton bags over their faces and all had nooses about their necks.  “Go to God with a clean breast!” the Ordinary urged them.  “Cleanse your conscience, abase yourselves before God!”

“Go on, Jemmy!” a sailor called, “strip the frow’s frock off!”

The crowd shouted for silence, hoping there would be some final words.

“I did nothing!” the girl screamed.

“Go to hell, you fat bastard,”  one of the murderers snarled at the Ordinary.

“See you in hell, Cotton!” the highwayman called to the priest.

“Now, Botting!”  The Sheriff wanted it done quickly and Botting scuttled to the back of the scaffold where he stooped and hauled a wooden bolt the size of a rolling pin from a plank.  Sir Henry tensed himself, but nothing happened.

“The bolt,” Logan explained softly, “is merely a locking device.  He has to go below to release the trap.”

Sir Henry said nothing.  He shrank aside as Botting brushed past him to go down the stairs at the back of the pavilion.  Only the four condemned and the Ordinary were now out in the sunlight.  Doctor Cotton stood between the coffins, well clear of the trapdoor.  “For when thou art angry all our days are gone,” he chanted, “we bring our years to an end, as it were a tale that is told.”

“Fat bastard, Cotton!”  The highwayman shouted.  The girl was swaying and under the thin cotton that hid her face Sir Henry could see her mouth was opening and closing.  The hangman had vanished under the platform and was clambering through the beams that supported the scaffold to reach a rope that pulled out the baulk of timber that supported the trapdoor.

“Turn thee again, O Lord!”  The Reverend Cotton had raised one hand to the heavens and his voice to the skies, “at the last and be gracious unto thy servants.”

Botting jerked the rope and the timber shifted, but did not slide all the way.  Sir Henry, unaware that he was holding his breath, saw the trapdoor twitch.  The girl sobbed and her legs gave way so that she collapsed on the still closed trapdoor.  The crowd uttered a collective yelp that died away when they realised the bodies had not dropped, then Botting gave the rope an almighty heave and the timber shifted and the trapdoor swung down to let the four bodies fall.  It was a short drop, only five or six feet, and it killed none of them.  “It was quicker when they used the cart at Tyburn,” Logan said, leaning forward, “but we get more Morris this way.”

Sir Henry did not need to ask what Logan meant.  The four were twitching, jerking and twisting.  They were doing the Morris dance of the scaffold, the hempen measure, the dying capers that came from the stifling, killing, throttling struggles of the doomed.  Botting, hidden down in the scaffold’s well, leaped aside as the girl’s bowels released themselves.  Sir Henry saw none of it for his eyes were closed, and he did not even open his eyes when the crowd cheered itself hoarse because Botting, using the highwayman’s pinioned elbows as a stirrup, climbed up to squat like a black toad on the man’s shoulders to hasten his dying.  The highwayman had paid Botting so he would die more quickly and Botting was keeping faith with the bribe.

“Behold, I show you a mystery,” the Ordinary ignored the grinning Botting who clung like a monstrous hump on the dying man’s back.  “We shall not all sleep,” the Reverend Cotton intoned, “but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.”

“There’s the first one gone,” Logan said as Botting clambered down from the corpse’s back,  “and I’ve got a mortal appetite now, by God, I have an appetite!”

Three of the four still danced, but ever more feebly.  The dead highwayman swung with canted head as Botting hauled on the girl’s ankles.  Sir Henry smelt dung, human dung, and he could suddenly take no more of the spectacle and so he stumbled down the scaffold steps into the cool, dark stone shelter of the Lodge.  He vomited there, then gasped for breath and waited, listening to the crowd and to the creak of the scaffold’s timbers, until it was time to go for breakfast.

For devilled kidneys.  It was a tradition.