Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [33]
For a penny each, she and Doll squeezed into the top bench of Mother Proctor's Pews; it was worth splashing out on such an occasion. The hangman's men had wheeled up the huge black triangle of the Tree already. 'It used to stand there all year round, you know,' shouted Doll in Mary's ear, 'but it blocked the traffic something awful.' There stood Thomas Turlis, masked and orderly, directing the men to hammer the scaffolding into place. 'A vastly educated fellow, so they say,' remarked Doll, 'though he's been known to squabble over tips.'
The minister was saying a psalm now, but it was quite drowned out by the chants of the crowd. Mary joined in: 'Let them swing! Let them swing!'
At last Turlis had checked that every rope was knotted to the Tree and every criminal sitting on the cart was bagged. The Metyard mother was stretched out in fits; he had a struggle getting the white bag over her head. Mary could feel her own stomach tighten like a sheet. It wasn't sympathy she felt, or not for the Metyards, at least. It was more like the feeling she got sometimes when a cully moved back and forth inside her for a long time, till she wanted to spit in his face.
The hangman laid his whip to the horses then, and the cart began to trundle off. The ropes stood out like skeletal sails; bodies began to slide. And suddenly there was a disturbance: the younger Metyard woman had leapt off the side of the cart and broken her neck. Her body swung as heavy as a sack of potatoes.
Turlis roared at his men, and the crowd growled. 'Damn her,' screamed Mary in Doll's ear, close to tears. 'That was much too easy!'
Doll slung an arm around Mary's waist. The Metyard mother and all the others were dying now according to the slower, traditional method. As Turlis hauled on each rope in turn and fastened it tight, it seemed to Mary like a peculiar mummers' dance: the heads masked in sacks, the jigging legs, the sudden stink of shit, the friends and relatives and hired 'hangers-on' hauling on the feet to hurry death—but no one was let near the Metyard mother—and the carrion crows wheeling overhead. Mary fixed her gaze on the jerking limbs of Mrs. Metyard for as long as it took, till her eyes watered.
As the bodies had to stay up for an hour, now was the time for the bringing out of picnics. Doll produced a sweetbread pie, and Mary ate her half with a good enough appetite, though she kept glancing over her shoulder at where the Metyards hung, over the stained sawdust.
When Turlis's men cut the corpses down smoothly—one man to support each around the hips, another to saw through the rope—there was the usual squabble. Bodies sprawled on the dusty ground, with ruby necklace-prints around their throats. The surgeons' boys, being entitled by law to all Tyburn cadavers, ran in while Turlis and his men beat the families off with sticks. Those in the crowd afflicted by warts snatched at the still-warm hands to rub them on their faces.
Mary didn't want Collar Day to be over. She pushed through to where the Metyards had been cut down, and on a joyful impulse paid sixpence for an inch of the mother's rope.
'Half a fuck, that cost,' said Doll with mild reproach.
'As if you don't drink twice that every day of your life, and piss it out the next!' But Mary did stare at the coarse fibres in her hand. Which half had paid for the rope, she wondered—the pushing in or the pulling out?
On the way home she realised she'd no money left for supper, and Doll was skint again. So Mary looked out till she found a country fellow with hay in his seams. She brushed against him in the crowd. 'Looking for a sweetheart?' she said, smiling like an angel.
His eyes bulged; he was too embarrassed to say yes or no. So Mary led him behind some railings on Oxford Street, and convinced the poor blockhead afterwards that the going rate in London was three shillings. She got rust marks all down her pink sack