Gallows Thief. Bernard Cornwell
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dark hollow underside of the scaffold and he thought how it was like being behind and underneath a stage supported by raw wooden beams. Black baize shrouded the planks at the front and side of the stage which meant that the only light came from the chinks between the timbers that formed the scaffold’s elevated platform. Wooden stairs climbed to Sir Henry’s right, going up into the shadows before turning sharply left to emerge in a roofed pavilion that stood at the scaffold’s rear. The stairs and the platform all looked very substantial and it was hard to remember that the scaffold was only erected the day before an execution and dismantled immediately after. The roofed pavilion was there to keep the honoured guests dry in inclement weather, but today the morning sun shone on Old Bailey and was bright enough to make Sir Henry blink as he turned the corner of the stairs and emerged into the pavilion.
A huge cheer greeted the guests’ arrival. No one cared who they were, but their appearance presaged the coming of the prisoners. Old Bailey was crowded. Every window that overlooked the street was crammed and there were even folk on the rooftops.
‘Ten shillings,’ Logan said.
‘Ten shillings?’ Sir Henry was bemused again.
‘To rent a window,’ Logan explained, ‘unless it’s a celebrated crime being punished in which case the price goes up to two or even three guineas.’ He pointed at a tavern that stood directly opposite the scaffold. ‘The Magpie and Stump has the most expensive windows because you can see right down into the pit where they drop.’ He chuckled. ‘You can rent a telescope from the landlord and watch ’em die. But we, of course, get the best view.’
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. 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 butcher’s 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 step.
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 one of the windows 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, which 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 Reverend Cotton 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 up 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,