Why Kill the Innocent (Sebastian St. Cyr #13)(53)
She turned to face him. “No.”
“The crowds can get rough.”
“Alexi warned me. Tom offered to come with us, but I didn’t think that would be fair.” Tom’s brother, Huey, had been just thirteen when he was hanged as a thief.
Devlin said, “If I didn’t have this damned inquest—”
She brushed his lips with hers. “I know.”
His gaze met hers, and she saw the worry he was trying to hide. He said, “Why do this? Why force yourself to watch that poor young woman hang?”
“Because she has no family in London, and someone should be there for her.” She reached for her gloves and drew them on with swift jerking motions. “What kind of society steals a man away from his pregnant young wife to send him off to war and then hangs her when she steals to try to keep herself and her child alive?”
“One with its values in serious need of realignment.”
“Will it ever change, do you think?”
“Perhaps.”
She gave a faint smile. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“Armies will always need cannon fodder. And shopkeepers and merchants will always have more clout than starving women and children.”
“I keep trying to imagine what she must be going through, but it seems unbearable.”
“I suspect it is.”
The day dawned clear but bitterly cold despite the golden sunlight that spilled across the awakening city.
Hero thought the frigid temperatures might reduce the number of spectators at the hanging, but she was wrong. She and Alexi arrived at the Old Bailey—the street before Newgate Prison where hangings were held—to find a surging, raucous, malodorous crowd of thousands: men, women, and children, their shouts and laughter joining into a roar. The atmosphere was that of a fair, with pie sellers and broadside hawkers and a flotilla of dirty, ragged urchins who darted through the milling throng to pick the pockets of the unwary.
“It’s probably because they’re hanging a woman,” said Alexi, her face tight with suppressed emotion as they pushed their way through the crush of onlookers toward the ramshackle old house from which they had arranged to watch the hanging. “The crowds are always larger for women, especially when they’re young. Women and highwaymen and notorious murderers.”
The house they’d selected lay almost directly opposite the scaffold and, like most of the other buildings overlooking the street, rented out its windows for hangings. As they reached the door, the slow, mournful tolling of a bell began somewhere deep inside Newgate. The bell would continue tolling until the last of the day’s condemned prisoners was cut down, dead. Hero thought it must be hideous, living within the sound of that bell.
“Hear that?” said the portly house owner, pocketing their money. He jerked his balding head toward a steep, narrow staircase behind him. “That means the condemned’ve already been brought into the yard to have their irons struck off. Best hurry.”
“How many hangings have you attended?” Hero asked Alexi as they climbed the worn ancient steps.
“Just one. A friend of mine was hanged not long after I arrived in London. I promised I’d be there for him, and I was.”
Hero suspected there was more to the story than that, but she had no intention of asking for details. There was much about this Frenchwoman that remained a mystery to them all.
The wide casement window of their chosen chamber looked down on the scaffold across the street. Essentially a large wooden platform draped with black cloth, it reminded Hero of a stage—which she supposed in a sense it was. The scaffold was always erected just outside the prison’s lodge, directly in front of what was known as the Debtors’ Door, so that the condemned would not be seen by the crowd until they mounted the steps to the platform itself. A small roofed shelter with chairs stood at the rear of the scaffold for important officials, and soldiers with pikes were stationed around the perimeter, guarding it. It struck Hero, watching the nervous way the men clutched their pikes, that beneath the crowd’s typical air of excitement and anticipation lay something else, something hostile and angry.
“Who else is being hanged today? Do you know?”
“Three men. Poachers, I think,” said Alexi.
It did much to explain the mood of the crowd. Murderers and their like were usually greeted with jeers and catcalls, and often pelted with rotten food or even stones. But most of the people in the street were desperately poor themselves; their sympathies would lie with those about to die.
The bell of the nearby church of St. Sepulchre joined the Newgate bell and began to toll, sounding the death knell. Alexi thrust open the old-fashioned windows and cold air rushed in, bringing them the roar of the crowd and a chorus of more distant shouts that rose up from within Newgate: The prisoners in the cells fronting the yard were calling farewells and encouragement to the condemned on their way to the lodge.
Alexi said, “They’re coming.”
There was a noticeable stirring in the crowd below. The sheriff and undersheriff of the City of London emerged from the covered stairway first, their eyes narrowing as they came into the strengthening daylight. Clothed in long, fur-trimmed robes with the heavy chains of their offices around their shoulders, both held ceremonial silver-tipped staves and solemnly took their seats along with a scattering of other officials.