A Place Called Freedom - Ken Follett [76]
Mack held Cora’s hand and pushed through the crowd. He had no desire to watch people getting killed but Cora had insisted on going. Mack just wanted to spend all his free time with Cora. He liked holding her hand, kissing her lips whenever he wanted to, and touching her body in odd moments. He liked just to look at her. He enjoyed her devil-may-care attitude and her rough language and the wicked look in her eye. So he went with her to the hanging.
A friend of hers was going to be hanged. Her name was Dolly Macaroni, and she was a brothel keeper, but her crime was forgery. “What did she forge, anyway?” Mack said as they approached the gallows.
“A bank draft. She changed the amount from eleven pounds to eighty pounds.”
“Where did she get a draft for eleven pounds?”
“From Lord Massey, She says he owed her more.”
“She ought to have been transported, not hanged.”
“They nearly always hang forgers.”
They were as close as they could get, about twenty yards away. The gallows was a crude wooden structure, just three posts with crossbeams. Five ropes hung from the beams, their ends tied in nooses ready for the condemned. A chaplain stood nearby, with a handful of official-looking men who were presumably law officers. Soldiers with muskets kept the crowd at a distance.
Gradually Mack became aware of a roaring sound from farther down Tyburn Street. “What’s that noise?” he asked Cora.
“They’re coming.”
First there was a squad of peace officers on horseback, led by a personage who was presumably the city marshal. Next were the constables, on foot and armed with clubs. Then came the tumbril, a high four-wheeled cart drawn by two plow horses. A company of javelin men brought up the rear, holding their pointed spears rigidly upright.
In the cart, sitting on what appeared to be coffins, their hands and arms bound with ropes, were five people: three men, a boy of about fifteen and a woman. “That’s Dolly,” Cora said, and she began to cry.
Mack stared in horrid fascination at the five who were to die. One of the men was drunk. The other two looked defiant. Dolly was praying aloud and the boy was crying.
The cart was driven under the scaffold. The drunk man waved to some friends, villainous-looking types, who stood at the front of the crowd. They shouted jokes and ribald comments: “Kind of the sheriff to invite you along!” and “I hope you’ve learned to dance!” and “Try that necklace on for size!” Dolly asked God’s forgiveness in a loud, clear voice. The boy cried: “Save me, Mama, save me, please!”
The two sober men were greeted by a group at the front of the crowd. After a moment Mack distinguished their accents as Irish. One of the condemned men shouted: “Don’t let the surgeons have me, boys!” There was a roar of assent from his friends.
“What are they talking about?” Mack asked Cora.
“He must be a murderer. The bodies of murderers belong to the Company of Surgeons. They cut them up to see what’s inside.”
Mack shuddered.
The hangman climbed on the cart. One by one he placed the nooses around their necks and drew them tight. None of them struggled or protested or tried to escape. It would have been useless, surrounded as they were by guards, but Mack thought he would have tried anyway.
The priest, a bald man in stained robes, got up on the cart and spoke to each of them in turn: just for a few moments to the drunk, four or five minutes with the other two men, and longer with Dolly and the boy.
Mack had heard that sometimes executions went wrong, and he began to hope it would happen this time. Ropes could break; the crowd had been known to swarm the scaffold and release the prisoners; the hangman might cut people down before they were dead. It was too awful to think these five living human beings would in a few moments be dead.
The priest finished