Читать книгу The Scent of Death - Andrew Taylor, Andrew Taylor - Страница 20

That night I did not hear the crying child. I turned this way and that on the overstuffed feather mattress, drifting in and out of a doze. I woke to full consciousness before five o’clock and could not settle to sleep again.

I am going to see a man hanged.

When I rose, I stayed in my chamber. I took a little tea but did not eat anything, feeling that for some obscure but powerful reason one should not attend the death of another man with a full belly. I tried to pray but found that would not answer. I read a chapter or two from the First Epistle to the Corinthians. That was no use either. Next I took up The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which Augusta had given me when we parted. She believed it did a man’s career no harm if he was known to spend his leisure hours engaged in serious reading of an uplifting nature. But the book irritated me so much and so quickly that I tossed the volume into the empty grate before I had read a couple of sentences.

I contemplated writing to Augusta. But I discovered that I had nothing to write that would be fit for her to read. I would much rather have written a line or two to Lizzie. But how could one say words like these to a beloved child?

In a moment I shall step out to watch a man be strangled on a string, and I wish to God I could do anything else in the world instead, even being seasick for eternity or having all my teeth pulled.

Why did this agitate me so much? It was almost as if I myself were the condemned man, as if I, not Virgil, had taken the life of another and deserved to die.

By seven o’clock I could no longer stand the confinement of my chamber. I left the house and walked down to the North River, where the air was somewhat cooler. By a quarter to eight, I was in front of the Upper Barracks.

Despite the short notice of the hanging, a crowd had gathered on the level ground outside the wall of the barracks. People of all conditions were talking, laughing, eating, drinking, buying, selling, shuffling to and fro or simply standing in silence. There was nothing sombre or discontented about them. They were merely waiting and they were perfectly good-humoured about it.

As I pushed my way through the throng I glimpsed a familiar face: the negro with the scars on his cheeks, the man whom I had seen in Canvas Town. He was wearing the faded red coat he had worn on Monday when the soldiers had carried Pickett’s body away. He was playing a jig on a penny whistle with his hat on the ground before him. Beside him was a boy with a tray of raw meat at his feet. Flies buzzed above the meat.

‘Mr Savill! This way, sir.’

Major Marryot was standing by the wicket set in the main gate of the barrack yard, waving his cane to attract my attention.

‘Cutlets and fricassees, chops and casseroles,’ shrieked the boy, his high voice cutting through the noise of the crowd. ‘Fresh goat, tender and sweet.’

I glanced in the lad’s direction. He was a mulatto with skin the colour of dark honey. The crowd shifted and the boy vanished.

‘We are pressed for time, Mr Savill,’ Marryot called, and he rapped the gate with his cane.

The sergeant of the guard ticked off my name on a list pinned to the guardroom door. Marryot took me through to a little parlour with a view of the gallows behind the barracks. The noise of the crowd was still audible.

‘They won’t see anything, you know,’ Marryot said testily as we were walking along, slapping his boot with his cane. It was as if he took the crowd as a personal insult. ‘This is a military hanging – an entirely private affair. But still those damnable jackals gather outside the gates.’

The Provost Marshal, a red-faced Irishman, was already standing at the open window and calling instructions to his subordinates. The scaffold had been built out from the main building, to which it was linked at first-floor level by a wooden bridge. He acknowledged us with the most cursory of bows.

‘He won’t need that long a drop,’ he shouted to the sergeant who was arranging matters on the scaffold.

No one spoke after that. The Provost Marshal stayed by the window. Even at this hour there was a sour tang of brandy about him. Marryot sucked his teeth and scowled at the floor. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall, pretending an ease I did not feel.

My fingers felt the outlines of something small and hard-edged in the right-hand pocket. It was the ivory die I had found on Pickett’s body. A gentleman’s die on a gentleman’s corpse. I took it out and rolled it on my palm. A three.

Townley entered, with Noak like a terrier at his heels. ‘Good day to you all, gentlemen – we are not come too late, I hope?’

‘Damned incompetent fools,’ the Provost Marshal said to the world at large. ‘They cannot even manage to hang a rogue without assistance.’

Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. Townley pulled out his watch and compared it with the clock on the wall.

‘They’re late,’ Marryot said. ‘Devilish unkind to the prisoner.’

The miserable, waiting silence embraced us once again. Noak consulted his pocketbook, turning the pages rapidly. Townley massaged his nose, applying pressure to the left side as if trying to push it so it would stand at a right angle to the rest of his face rather than a few degrees out of true.

I stared out of the window at the gallows. It consisted of a crossbeam supported by an upright post at either end. Three black chains hung from the crossbeam.

At last, at eight minutes past eight, the door re-opened. One by one, half a dozen men emerged on to the scaffold. First came the Provost Marshal’s sergeant, strutting like a cock in his own barnyard. He was followed by two soldiers with the condemned man shuffling between them. Next came a youthful parson, whose limbs seemed too long for his body and not entirely under their owner’s control. Another soldier brought up the rear with a canvas bag swinging from his hand.

Marryot removed his hat. The other gentlemen followed suit.

‘It is quite a military affair, as you see,’ Townley observed to me in a low voice, fanning himself with his hat. ‘The army usually handles this unpleasant necessity for us – the Commandant prefers it so. Of course, the Provost Marshal has everything to hand here, so it is convenient for everyone. He is unhappily obliged to oversee a great many executions – he is responsible for our rebel prisoners of war, you apprehend.’

Virgil’s arms were bound together in front of him and his ankles were shackled with a chain. Once they reached the scaffold, his escort pushed him directly under the crossbeam. The soldiers released his arms, though they stayed close to him.

The little slave looked about him, his head turning this way and that. His eyes found the window of the room where the gentlemen were waiting for him to die so that they might have their breakfast. His head became still. He flexed his wrists. His hands flapped and twitched. His lips moved but no sound came from them.

‘Come along, come along,’ the Provost Marshal cried. ‘We don’t have all day.’

Virgil stared at the window.

No one else spoke. I prayed silently, wordlessly and surely meaninglessly: for how could God be here?

The soldier with the bag came forward. The men in the room became still, watching the soldier take out a nightcap from his bag, which he placed on Virgil’s head. With surprising gentleness he drew it down over the negro’s face and patted him on his shoulder as a man touches a nervous horse to reassure him.

No one spoke, either on the scaffold or in the room that overlooked it. The nightcap had transformed Virgil from a person into something not quite human. It stripped the individuality from him. All that was left was a bundle of rags trembling like a shrivelled leaf in a breeze.

The soldier took the rope from the same bag and looped it through the end of the chain. He tied a knot to secure it. He lifted the noose at the other end of the rope, glanced at the Provost Marshal, and then placed the noose on the shoulders of the condemned man. He tightened it and stood to one side.

As if the touch of the noose had been a signal, Virgil cried out ‘God, God, God.’ His voice was muffled and not loud but it scraped against the surface of my mind like a rusty nail. He would not stop. ‘God, God, God.’

The sergeant stepped forward and checked the knots. The clergyman opened his prayer book and began to speak, though his voice was too low to hear what he was saying through the open window. But I knew what the words must be: I am the resurrection and the life.

The slave’s legs gave way. He would have collapsed if the soldiers had not seized him under the arms. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. The parson stood back.

All this time, Virgil was crying, ‘God, God, God.’

The sergeant turned towards the window. The Provost Marshal raised his arm and let it fall. The sergeant stamped twice. An assistant beneath the scaffold released the trap.

‘God, God, God—’

The planks on which Virgil was standing gave way. He vanished into the darkness under the scaffold with a violent clatter. There was an instant of silence, broken by the beat of an invisible drum.

Virgil dangled in the air, his feet kicking. His hands fluttered and then the fingers clenched into fists. He was dancing and twisting on the rope. He tried to raise his hands towards his neck but his arms were bound to his sides at the elbows.

The Provost Marshal leaned on the windowsill. ‘Goddamn it. I told you to make this quick. I have not had my breakfast yet.’

Two hands appeared from the darkness under the scaffold. They gripped the ankles of the hanging man and pulled sharply downwards. A spasm of movement rippled through Virgil’s body. And then at last he was still.