Читать книгу The Hanging of Mary Ann - Angela Badger - Страница 4

They came for her mid-afternoon.

They should have come early in the morning but the gaoler’s wife had whispered, “We’re still waiting luvvy, still time,” and put the bowl of porridge down, then hurried away. What can you say to someone waiting to die?

Every day a reprieve had been expected. Each afternoon the Sydney coach rumbled into Goulburn and half the townsfolk turned out…. hoping.

Surely there would be word from the Governor? Tomorrow, the next day, maybe the day after. Time was running out.

Her hair had been cut off. Nothing must tangle with the hangman’s rope.

As the scissors snicked through her thick dark locks she thought of another whose hair had also been shorn. Another barely ten years older than she, whose hair had turned white with the terror and who listened for the grinding wheels of the tumbril with no possible hope of rescue.

There was still time for Mary Ann. Even if the coach had nothing in the mail, a horseman could yet come galloping down the highway with the papers in his saddlebag. Everyone in the town waited… waited and hoped.

But nothing came.

“We will kneel together.” The Rev Sowerby touched her on the shoulder. “We will pray together and give Him thanks.” even Samuel Sowerby felt a twinge of unease as he spoke those words.

Thanks… for what?

He had christened, married and buried Mary Ann’s family and all those other families around Lake George for three generations but had never had to watch anyone, let alone a young woman in her prime, take those last fatal steps.

For several days her ears had been filled with the sound of hammering; now, as they led her from the building, she saw the gallows waiting for her.

Spite, fury, screaming impotence filled the air as shrieking women prisoners crowded round the windows yelling down abuse at the prison guards.

She heard none of it as she halted for a moment at the first step. Instead she took a deep breath and then paused at the next one, and the next after that, savouring the memory of all that she would never know again. The cry of the plovers down by the dam, a baby’s warm breath on her cheek, the touch of a loving hand, the taste of fresh baked bread and honey, the sound of a fiddler tuning up for the dance, the bleat of a new born lamb, the early morning challenge of the rooster and the cawing of the crows as they circled high above the lake… the crows. She even managed a smile as she looked up at the sky and the wheeling birds; they were old friends. They had always been part of her life, everything about them was familiar. Not like the rough stuff of the hood they pulled over her head, nor the hard bite of the noose they put about her neck.

Panic snatched at her.

Fear gripped her throat, then her chest, her bowels, her bladder as she strained to hold back her water. That other woman must have struggled as her body betrayed her fear, certainly she had bled. For many days before she faced the guillotine her womb had shed itself. White-haired and bleeding, head held high, that woman had faced her end, had never faltered.

Now Mary Ann must follow in those footsteps. She shut her eyes, she squeezed them tightly shut till all that was left of her world were pinpoints of light in the darkness.

Try as she might, the fear surged inside her. Then soft hands took hold of her bound ones and a wise, sad voice whispered, “Fear not, I have trodden this path before you.”