Chapter Four
The time was come. The crowd was quiet and expectantly in place. By ancient custom, the road from Westminster was kept clear—not that a messenger was likely to come galloping over with a pardon for any of this lot. Standing together in one cart, all the prisoners were lined up under the front bar of the gallows. Each with a four foot rope about his neck, the long ride was over.
Bringing out a loud cry of “God Bless King William!” Ned Heeler was done with his account of how he’d robbed the Bristol mail coach. If only he’d not blown the coachman’s head off first, discovering that mass of Jacobite correspondence would surely have got him a pardon. As it was, he’d been given last place in the cart, and would be the first to go off it.
The clerk’s confession of how he’d poisoned his sweetheart was a dispiriting narrative. So too with the coiner, and with the man whose crime had been so obscure, even he had trouble asking absolution for it.
It was the young man’s turn.
“My son,” the clergyman intoned with a solemnity not entirely spoiled by his inability to speak while standing up, “you have been found guilty of a crime that is not to be mentioned among Christians. It is the crime that, of old, brought catastrophe upon the Cities of the Plain, and the righteous abomination of which is one of the marks that separates every Christian people from the Turks and other heathens.
“Will you surely not, at this last moment, confess your sin and seek the absolution of Holy Mother Church?”
The young man took his eyes off nothing in particular in the middle distance and held up his bound hands. He seemed to find them interesting.
Then he swallowed and looked defiantly round.
“Very well,” he said at last in a voice that was plainly not Irish, and that had more than a touch of the well-born about it—“very well, I did it.”
He smiled at the groan of horror that went up from the crowd, and made a fair attempt of bowing to the coiner beside him, who was trying to sidle away.
“I did it because I thought I knew him, and I still believe there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body.”
Because she was at the front of the crowd with the other helpers, Sarah didn’t see the main reaction. But the surgeon a few feet along the line of helpers left off his bargaining for one of the bodies, and put both hands over his ears. For the rest, the universal silence behind her was all she needed to hear.
No wonder the Irishman hadn’t wanted to do the job himself. It wouldn’t quite be Friend and Parkyns all over again. But no one liked an unrepentant sodomite. She’d be lucky if she got away without a good pelting.
The clergyman was first to recover from the shock. He pulled himself up and slapped the young man’s face twice, and spat at his feet.
“Then may God have mercy upon your soul,” he snarled, “for I can wish it none.”
And that was an end to his share in the proceedings. Clutching at his head to keep his wig steady, he was helped down from the cart, to stagger out of sight.
Sir John stepped forward. A scowl on his bleary face, he nodded to the hangmen high up on the gallows bar. He turned for a final look at the road from Westminster. No horseman. No cloud of dust. He turned and bowed to Sarah and the other helpers. He turned to the driver of the cart, and took out a very white handkerchief.
He paused for a long moment. As he dropped it, the driver whipped up his horses.
With a scared cry of “Jesus, have mercy upon my…” Ned Heeler was first for the two inch drop.