How the Hangman Lost His Heart (18 page)

He did not stop rocking until Alice stopped sobbing, and then he found a grubby bit of handkerchief on which she could blow her nose. They sat in silence again. Alice looked at the top of the Bar, wondering how she had ever dared climb so high. “Will they put Uncle Frank up there tonight?” she whispered.

“No.” Dan shook his head. “He has to wait until…” His voice petered out.

Alice pinched his arm as hard as Mabel had pinched hers. “You'll not let Hew suffer, will you, Dan Skinslicer? Please don't let him suffer.”

“I promise on my mother's grave,” said Dan quietly. Hew would certainly not suffer, not for a moment. If Dan could make sure of anything, he could make sure of that.

As evening fell, he managed to ease Alice away from Temple Bar and back to Lady Widdrington's. She resisted, but Dan was firm. “The king's justices'll not come after you until after Captain Hew is … has gone,” he said. ‘But you must stay out of sight.”

Alice looked over her shoulder, fearful. “But I must be on Kennington Common on Thursday,” she said. “I can't just abandon Hew now.”

“I don't want you there, but I suppose I'd want to do the same,” he said doubtfully.

“Thank you for understanding.” Alice huddled next to him as he knocked on the door. It was opened by Ursula. First her wig, then her nose, then the rest of her peeked around. The sight of her aunt's silly affectations made Alice's heart shrink further. “Don't leave me here, Dan Skinslicer,” she whimpered, wrapping her arms as far as they would go around his rock-like frame. “I feel safer when I'm with you.”

Dan peeled her arms off with weary regret. “I can't take you where I have to go, missy. You know that.”

“Yes,” whispered Alice, “I know.”

Ursula darted between them and, before Alice could say anything else, she whipped Alice inside and slammed the door. At once Dan walked away and tried not to look back. But when, unable to resist, he did look, the shutters were being none too gently closed, telling him very firmly that he was not wanted there. Before the last of the light was blocked out, he thought he could hear Alice's heart breaking and very nearly ran to her again. But it was not the right thing to do. He resisted and walked on.

At the corner of the square he leaned against the railings. He leaned a long time, his head filled with emotions he could not control and some he could not understand. Once Captain Ffrench was dead, a calculating voice told him, it was not impossible that Alice might come to love him. A warmer voice, more familiar, scoffed. She'll never love you, Dan Skinslicer. And anyway, you are already married. No, no, the first voice continued. Your wife is divorcing you. You could be a free man. The second voice urged him not to dream.

Dan put his hands over his ears. “I am just an executioner with a job to do,” he muttered to himself, and, with a huge effort of will, began to concentrate
not on Alice but on that. He walked slowly for a while. Once he stopped and glared at some street urchins. They stuck out their tongues. But Dan did not even see them. He walked for a little longer before he suddenly changed direction and, with unusual speed and decision, headed for the city. He needed to start collecting the tools of his trade. He would need good ones. Maybe he could even find some of his old ones. But before he began looking, he would turn off and make a different kind of call. Dan Skinslicer had had an idea.

On Thursday morning, execution morning, the heat came with the dawn. Londoners prepared themselves for a roasting carnival day. Some highborn ladies organized hampers to take and filled them with pigeon pie, sliced mutton, and currant tarts. Servants groaned as they were presented with great baskets stashed with cider, ale, and wine, which they were expected to carry to where their master and mistress wished to sit. Children sulked when told by their mothers that they couldn't come, only to whoop and cheer when the order was rescinded by their fathers, who, although feeling queasy themselves, nevertheless felt honor-bound to say, as their fathers had before them, that a good execution never did anybody any harm. Those further down the social scale decorated their caps and hats and wrapped their bread and cheese in flannel cloths. Tradesmen polished their horses and loaded their carts. Pickpockets put on their baggiest trousers.

From early on, people began to pour over the bridge toward Kennington Common and to flock around the gibbet, pointing out the bloodstains left by previous miscreants and laughing at Uncle Frank's head, brought to “witness” the end of Captain Hew Ffrench. Some youths, anxious to impress, climbed up to the gibbet crossbar and sat swinging their legs. They were much admired by young ladies on the ground. One stripped off his shirt and gave a passable imitation of a condemned man, reveling in the horrified groans as he pretended to hang himself. Then he slipped and very nearly did hang himself. After that he slithered down, laughing too loudly, and contented himself with shouting at Dan, who was busy checking that everything was in order.

Alice had arrived early and alone, leaving her grandmother singing nursery rhymes in the drawing room. Ursula, to Alice's relief, was purposefully still in bed. Alice's preoccupation with executions was, in her aunt's opinion, unhealthy and possibly catching. It was hard for Alice to know where to stand, but in the end she chose a place at the front, between two fishwives.

By the time Hew appeared, kneeling in a cart and guarded by a squadron of his former fellow soldiers, the noose already around his neck, the crowd was very merry. Up on the scaffold, Dan set out his
instruments as the law dictated. The sun was well up now, but neither Dan nor Hew really noticed. Of the two, Hew was the more relaxed. There is something about going to your death, he found, that had, mercifully, a slightly unreal quality. The noise of the merrymaking rang in his ears but did not pierce the innermost recesses of his brain. In there, right at the kernel, he was reunited with Marron and riding in line at the beginning of the battle of Culloden, his sword held steady in its half-basket grip. On that day, in the face of enemy fire, he had remained true to his men and himself. He could do it again. Unconsciously, he knelt a little taller.

As they watched the sorry procession, many women in the crowd who had come to jeer found themselves praying instead. Hew's youth and the frank expression on his face reminded them that this boy was somebody's son. If luck had been different, maybe he could have been theirs. Some dropped their eyes. Others allowed their grubby children to throw rotten potatoes but were glad when they missed the target.

In keeping with the tradition of condemned men, Hew had spent the previous evening composing letters to his mother and to Alice and now turned his mind to the letters again. They had not been easy to write, but he had felt it very important that his mother should
know that he did not hold Alice in any way responsible for his death. “I chose my own path,” he had written. “I'm only sorry that I never had a chance to explain. But then I know I don't need to, especially not to you. Be comforted that I did the right thing and that is what counts in the end.” He had finished the letter with regrets at not having been a more helpful son and regretted too, more than his own life, the trouble that the manner of his passing would undoubtedly cause to hers.

To Alice, he had written only this:

My dear Miss Alice Towneley, we have had an extraordinary acquaintance, you and I. I cannot be sorry that I met you and I hope, whatever your future brings, that you will never forget that you once filled the heart of

Hew Elliot Ffrench
lately a Captain, Kingston's Light Horse

As he drew nearer the scaffold, however, Hew could no longer keep what was about to happen to him at a safe distance and he found himself unexpectedly glad of the merrymakers. Their presence and their shouting added grit to his determination to make a good death. If he quailed inside, he would not let them see. He clenched his fists. Occasionally, when
the cart bumped over a stone and he was thrown sideways, he found himself staring directly into people's faces. It was the sympathetic rather than the hostile eyes that caused him the most trouble. He could not afford to acknowledge pity. If he did, he would be lost. As soon as he was able, he looked only ahead.

The crowd was at its thickest where a barrier had been erected both to give Dan a little breathing space in which to perform his duties and to prevent any friend of Hew's from running forward to swing on his legs once he was strung up. The whole point was that Hew should be alive when the disemboweling began.

Dan was sweating. He was pleased with the tools he had managed to procure and, although he always kept his implements meticulously honed, he tested them constantly, for it was particularly important that they should be keen today. Shielding his eyes, he scanned the crowd, unsure where Alice would be standing. At last he saw her on his left, a small figure almost crushed between the two slab-faced wifeys. He nodded at her but she could not nod back.

Drums rolled as Hew's escort approached the barrier leaving Hew to pass through alone. Major Slavering clicked his tongue, annoyed. He wanted the escort to go right up to the scaffold. But it was too late now. He barked at his men to stay in line and turn
their horses to witness the punishment of their former officer. The cornet had already shut his eyes.

Dan came down to help Hew out of the cart and found his victim's hands steadier than his own. Hew tried to joke that Dan had better take some deep breaths or he would cut the kind of jaggedy line that he complained of in others. Dan didn't respond.

As they climbed up onto the platform, Hew was assailed by waves of clammy panic. He tried hard to remove himself once again from the present and he searched his mind for that picture of himself on Marron. Where was it, now that he really needed it? Why would it not flood his brain, soothing as brandy, and get him through the worst? But all Hew could see was the glint of Dan's knives and the dull edge of the ax and all he could hear was Dan repeatedly muttering, “Forgive me for what I am going to do, forgive me.”

“Of course I forgive you!” Hew was surprised and alarmed that Dan, who had executed hundreds of men, should lose his professional detachment at this crucial moment. “Just do it properly, Dan Skinslicer. That's all I ask.”

A trumpet sounded. It was time. Hew faced the crowd with Dan behind him. He could feel Dan pick up the long end of the rope down his back, releasing a little of the pressure on his neck, for the rope was
heavy. The disemboweling table waited, like a bed without a mattress. As a gesture, Dan had draped it in red cloth so that Hew's blood would not show so badly, but the red simply drew attention to Dan's cold implements. Hew could already feel them, freshly minted, each waiting to tweak at his flesh in its own particular deadly way. Over the top of the crowd, the jurymen who had condemned him were eating roast grouse and chatting to their wives. Hew searched for Lord Chief Justice Peckersniff, but he was missing.
He probably had something more important to do
, thought Hew bitterly. In the field behind the carriages, every blade of grass appeared a different green and Hew wondered why he had never before seen that grass is speckled. He should have been a painter, not a soldier! Everything seemed so clear, clearer than it had ever been, as if layers of gauze had been stripped from his eyes. No man could have devised such a torture as this. Just when he wished to see nothing, he could see everything, and there was nobody in the world with whom to share it. The loneliness was indescribable.

It was not until Dan tightened the noose that Hew caught sight of Alice. Her pinched face nearly killed him. He could feel his knees buckle as their eyes met for a second.
Help me, Alice
, he silently begged, all his courage finally deserting him.

And she did. She could not see his eyes as clearly as he could see hers, but she knew, instinctively, what was wanted. Throwing back the hood of her cloak, she stood in full view. She could not smile any encouragement, but she could look, and in her look Hew found his strength. Forgetting Marron and Culloden, it was Alice's steadfast face that he kept before him as he stepped up on to the stool and waited for the awful jerk.

Contrary to what she was expecting to do, Alice did not scrunch her eyes shut when the final moment came. She saw Dan secure the rope and knock away the stool. She saw Hew's head snap back. She watched him flail. It was dreadful to her, but she carried on watching just in case, up there against the vaulting darkness, his breath fighting a heaving, hopeless battle and his legs kicking and kicking to find some miraculous purchase in the air, Hew could still see her. She knew this was well nigh impossible, but she would watch just in case, just in case. Mourning, weeping, and the vale of tears would come later. This was what she could do for him now.

The hanging was over in a moment and Dan cut Hew down with a swing and a vehemence that Alice found disturbing. She supposed it was because Dan wanted Hew dead as quickly as possible, but walloping his body so that it hurtled to the ground behind the
table and had to be manhandled back up again was not what Hew deserved. The crowd booed and Dan had to slow down. He showed them his knife and they began to cheer up. At the first cut, Hew seemed to twitch and shiver, then suddenly, ignoring the crowd, Dan worked with speedy efficiency, his knives soon tarnished and his hands red. The “drawing” was quickly over and the fire began to crackle with its fleshy fuel, but Alice still looked, for she had temporarily lost all control over herself.
Look away, look away
, her head cried, but it was as if she had been hypnotized. Only when Dan raised his great ax did the muscles in her legs dissolve, and by the time the ax crashed down and Dan held Hew's head aloft, dangling from its dark hair, Alice toppled over and passed out.

Three things happened at once. Dan did not quarter Hew's body but flung it into a coffin and nailed down the lid with a dozen determined bangs. As he did so, Mrs. Ffrench, who had been standing on the right, her face covered to make sure Hew did not recognize her, approached, leaning heavily on Mabel. They would take the body away. Then, the crowd parted to allow a messenger through. The king, who wanted no more trouble with heads, had changed his mind. Hew's head should not be displayed on Temple Bar, nor Uncle Frank's, nor anyone else's ever again. Alice's escapade had ended that tradition. It was a pity, but there it was.
From now on, traitors would be buried with all their bits together. Under this new dispensation, the head of Colonel Frank Towneley should be put back in its hatbox and given to Miss Alice Towneley to take home with her and good riddance to both. Hew Ffrench's head, which the justice tried not to look at as it sat on the planks at Dan's feet, dripping unmentionable matter slowly through the chinks, should be put in the coffin with the body. The justice was commissioned to see that this was done.