Death in the Age of Steam (28 page)

“When did you last see or hear from her?”

Martin didn't answer.

“You had a letter from your sister, Crusher,” said the keeper, who was fitting irons around Martin's ankles. “It's in your Bible.”

“An old letter,” muttered the convict, but then he spoke directly to Harris. “Will you read it out?”

The Bible lay beside him from his session with the preacher. From between its pages, Harris shook out a scrap of brown wrapping paper, folded in four.

The letter was dated 8 July. There was no salutation, just one paragraph, pencilled in a primary-school hand. Harris read aloud:

I never thought to have a brother hanged, but for our family there is nothing but pain. It comes of our parents' sin. I will ask the master if he can get the sentence changed. I do not expect it. You should have looked to him sooner, for now he is ill and may not last the week. When he dies I shall come to you. I shall come also if he lives, for I know he will give me leave and perhaps travel money too. Fate has given him a good life. It is easy for him to be kind. Do not count on your preacher, but you and I are of the same flesh and blood. Alas. Sibyl.

Martin's wrists were manacled now. Chilled by the letter's desolation, Harris started with awkward fingers to put it back where he had got it.

“Keep it,” said Martin. “Take it back to her. She never came.”

“Her master died on July 12. She vanished the day after. Do you have any idea where she might have gone, or what might have happened to her?”

The convict raised his voice and his two chained hands. “She had nowhere to go. She had no one but me.”

“Steady there, Crusher.” The keeper's avuncular tone sounded forced. “Come along now. Let's go for a walk.”

Harris was making difficulties for everyone. He pressed on. “You don't think she had another position to go to?”

Martin's fists covered his eyes.

“Another situation,” Harris persisted, “when William Sheridan died?”

“I never heard . . . Mister? This day will I be with my Saviour in Paradise?”

“Yes, indeed,” said the young keeper, his hand at Martin's elbow, urging him up.

“You, mister.” Martin stood in front of Harris. “Will I?”

Harris felt his head starting to nod assent. “I don't know,” he said. “Have you had any other letters since this one?”

“They are only allowed one every three months,” said the keeper, tenser than before, but—considering the circumstances—still wondrously polite.

“None then?”

Martin stared at the floor. “There was a letter Saturday, from ‘a sincere friend.' No name. Said Sib was dead, that she would have come if she could. I'd like to think she would.”

“Do you have it?” said Harris. Saturday was two days ago, as recent as finding Nelson in Port Hope.

“He destroyed it.” Martin nodded his cropped head at the keeper. “Said he promised to.”

“I
have
to take him now, sir. The scaffold is outside the Penitentiary, you see, this being a place of reform only . . .”

“I don't ask to make trouble for you,” said Harris, “but where did you get this anonymous letter?”

“There was no letter like that. Up, Crusher.”

Martin rose without protest. The moustached keeper, all business now, and one of his burlier fellows walked on either side of the condemned man. Harris brought up the rear.

“Mr. Martin,” he said, remembering late a rather crucial point, “had your sister Sibyl any broken bones?”

Martin shuffled forward as if deaf. Through the stubble on the back of his head shone a curved scar. A broken bottle, Harris guessed. A tavern brawl. The scar was easier to look at than the
neck below it--a thick, strong neck, about to be broken.

Who besides her killer would know Sibyl was dead? A “sincere friend” of Martin's. Mention of a letter had Harris's brain buzzing with questions—and yet he knew he could put them to the keepers later, at a time more conducive to confidences. With Martin there was no possibility of delay.

He tried again. “Charles?”

“
You
think I'll burn in hell.”

“No, I don't. I don't believe so.”

They passed out of the cell range and through the rotunda.

“And I'm convinced your sister didn't let you down. Someone prevented her from coming.”

Outside the office, Postlethwaite and a frock-coated gentleman Harris took to be the warden fell into step at the head of the procession. The leg irons forced Martin to turn sideways on the steps down to the entrance court. His eye caught Harris's.

“Who prevented her?”

“I'll try to find out. Had she ever had any bones broken?”

“Her arm snapped when we were little,” said Martin. “I snapped it.”

Under the sloping pediment of the north gate, the keeper turned Martin over to a blue-jacketed village constable and an un-uniformed deputy. Both waved truncheons and smelled of drink.

“You'll have to leave him to me now,” the preacher told Harris, “so we can say a last prayer together.”

“Which arm?” Harris insisted. “Where?”

Puzzlement rippled Martin's forehead. There was no time for explanations. He would have to take Harris's question on trust or leave it alone.

“Here.” With his left forefinger he tapped his right forearm, and away they led him through the middle of a puddle.

The warden had already gone back inside, to his garden perhaps. Before they disappeared too, Harris took the names of the keepers as witnesses to what Martin had said about the
fracture. Broke his sister's arm? It didn't surprise them. That fellow didn't know his own strength. In the more than twenty years the Penitentiary had been operating, poor Taggart was the first employee killed in the line of duty. It could have been any of them, though.

What
was
surprising, they agreed, was this hanging. It should have been in Kingston at the Frontenac County Gaol, but the old gaol had been pulled down to make way for the new Customs House, and the new gaol wasn't built yet. As Taggart had been a lifelong Portsmouth man, the village had asked that the scaffold be erected here, just around the corner. And yet no one from the Penitentiary was supposed to attend. How was that for strange?

Harris set off around the corner indicated. He had never witnessed an execution nor wanted to, but was still accompanying Postlethwaite. He didn't feel quite finished with Martin either. Having in his last moments pried him open, made him promises, confided and extracted confidences, Harris found that he could not avert his eyes from the convict's end and call it delicacy.

The scaffold stood on the village green, which spectators' boots were churning into mud. The rain had only just stopped. Men, women and children continued to congregate even as the thick, drab figure in the middle of the platform was being asked if he had any last words.

Martin moistened his lips. He had plainly never made a speech, and his voice was low and mumbling. From where he stood, Harris caught the drift only. There was something about deserving death, being afraid, the comfort of the Gospel. If his sister were alive, he said, he forgave her for not coming, was sorry he had shamed her. God have mercy.

After this muffled imprecation, Postlethwaite's ringing “Amen” came as such a contrast that the crowd tittered. The preacher glared down at them while the hooded hangman stepped forward to pull over Martin's head first a white sack and then the noose itself.

It was already well past the appointed hour of eleven. Without more ceremony, the hangman pulled the lever that drew the bolt from the trap—which he stamped on at the same time. A petulant gesture, it appeared. He may have been afraid that the rain had swollen the planks and made them bind. The trap swung smartly down on its hinges. Martin fell through. The rope tautened.

The rope broke. Harris heard a mild pop, then saw a frayed tassel swinging where a hanged man should have been. The executioner evidently knew his lumber better than his hemp.

Martin fell before the front rank of gasping spectators straight into the pine crate waiting to receive his remains. Kneeling in it, he found his voice.

“Hallelujah, Lord! I'm saved!” he bawled out, his words lifting and spreading through the moist air. “I'm saved! I'm saved!”

Whether he truly thought himself dead and in heaven or believed the accident entailed an earthly pardon was unclear. Pressing forward with the throng, Harris could see little of what was occurring at ground level. Postlethwaite descended the stairs with the help of the railing. His steps faltered, for the first time since leaving the coach, as he escorted Martin back up to the platform. They were raggedly reciting, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .”

The trap was soon set again. Repairing the rope took longer. There was nothing for Harris to do but wait. He could not hope to get close enough to Martin to speak to him again. Martin, besides, after the bungled execution, was in such a state of religious exaltation as to be quite incoherent. The white cloth had been pulled from his enraptured face. Exclamations burst from him like thunderclaps. Some segments of the restless crowd jeered and baited him, only to be hushed by others.

Amid these exchanges, one figure's stillness caught Harris's eye. The young keeper had taken off his uniform tunic and cap, which had left a red stripe across his forehead. His oak-brown moustache looked humid and heavier than ever. Harris worked around behind him.

“Hallo, Vaillancourt. Don't be alarmed.”

The keeper started, relaxing when he saw Harris was alone.

“For Paul Taggart,” he confided. “Someone had to come, with leave or no.”

“Employers are fallible,” said Harris. “A man has to think for himself.”

“I thought I should only be off my watch ten minutes. Who could have expected this?”

“Who gave you the anonymous letter?”

“I wasn't supposed to tell Martin.”

“You can tell me,” said Harris in a tone that left no room for doubt. “Was it a man or a woman?”

It was, said Vaillancourt, the angel Providence had brought to Paul Taggart's bedside when he had no one to tend him but his shipwright father, a gouty grandmother and the charitable women of the village. The stranger was soon doing more than the rest put together.

Vaillancourt knew. He often called by before his watch, be it morning or night. He found her, Ruth Nagle, unflagging in her attentions to a patient never at rest or more than semiconscious. Her quiet resolve radiated beyond the sickroom to steady a community chafed raw by the length and horror of Taggart's struggle—to steady most particularly the keepers, men like Vaillancourt who had to go back among violent convicts day by day.

Last Saturday he had arrived at breakfast time. His friend's struggle had ended the night before, as Vaillancourt had known sometime it must. And yet the nurse, after fifteen days of exemplary composure, was beside herself with grief and groundless self-reproach. Apprised of his access to Martin, she begged Vaillancourt to read the condemned man a letter she pressed into his hand. That night she vanished from the house and Portsmouth.

The thought that Saturday night was less than two days ago so consumed Harris that he barely saw the second noose slip at last over Martin's re-bagged head. Theresa's middle name was
Ruth. Her mother had been a Nagle. Ruth Nagle had by the keeper's account arrived July 17, the very day Theresa's coach would have passed through Portsmouth. Why had she nursed Taggart? Harris couldn't say, but he knew for a certainty that fewer than forty hours now lay between him and her.

Theresa had written on Sibyl's behalf—done it for her.

“I know this woman,” Harris whispered urgently. “Where's the letter? I must see the handwriting.”

The hangman's hand went to the release lever. He raised his foot.

“Burned it,” said Vaillancourt. “I had to.”

“I've got it!” Martin bellowed across the green. “Brothers, I've got—”

The trap dropped. Three or four powerful spasms shook Martin's frame. After that he was merely a fourteen-stone weight swinging at the end of a mended rope.

Harris stared. He had seen a human being die for the first time. There was the body. There had not been one to see after Oscar jumped, so
that
death didn't feel quite genuine. This didn't feel genuine either. Harris felt he had missed it. Other concerns had so absorbed him that he almost had. Shame tinged his sense of wonder.

Some of the villagers were cheering, while others turned queasily away. Vaillancourt crossed himself. Nearby, a shop woman said it was a pity Martin's death could not have been drawn out six weeks like Taggart's.

“No,” said the keeper, not to her, perhaps not even to Harris. “He died in chains, in public. Twice! He paid all we can ask.”

Some moments later, a gentleman in black climbed up on a stool, ripped open Martin's mud-stained shirt, put his ear to Martin's grey chest, and pronounced the heart still.

“It doesn't bring Paul back,” said Vaillancourt, “but it is just.”

Harris swallowed hard. He could imagine being anything sooner than a cold-blooded executioner. If only the guilty would destroy themselves.

“If you see Miss Nagle, thank her.” With these words the
keeper slipped back to the Penitentiary in his shirt sleeves and suspenders to face the consequences of his truancy.

The girlish Mrs. Postlethwaite meanwhile arrived with friends to take charge of her husband. The preacher was wheezing now and peevish at having had to assist at one more hanging than he had bargained for. Harris helped him promptly to the waiting carriage, then had himself directed to Taggart's house.

Whether his haste was callous or an impulse in the presence of mortality to “seize the day,” Harris could not have said. The clatter of a pine crate being nailed shut lashed the air behind him.