Laura Kinsale (31 page)

For he had lied to the young reporter. When Gryf had stepped out into the bright day he had realized it. He was afraid, in the last miserable corner of his soul. He knew too much about dying. He wished he had gone in a storm, or in the heat of some fight—no time to think, then. No time to imagine what might have been. He felt the pain in his heart stirring, like the twinges in his still-raw wounds.

A face rose before his eyes, Tess’s face, as bright and beautiful as the day. When the black silk went over his
head, blotting out sunlight for the last time, he kept the image there.

The fierce reaction of the crowd faded suddenly as the noose was placed on his neck. In the weird silence, the executioner said quietly to Gryf, “My rope’s well-oiled, son. You’ll not suffer. God rest you.”

Then the hangman left Gryf’s side and he was alone in the artificial dark.

The impressive, expectant hush was broken by a cat-call. Another followed. Gryf waited. A long time went by. Every one of his senses seemed to stretch to its limits to drink in the last of life: he could see the tiny pinpricks of light through the black silk and smell the sharp mustiness of the aniline dye; he could feel the weight of the slipknot resting on his back. The skin of his hands rubbed together with a peculiar sensation of swollen smoothness and his fingers prickled from the tightness of the bonds. At every sound near the platform, he expected it to happen.

He might have saved himself from this, he knew. He could have told his ten-guinea defense counsel who he was; what had really happened, instead of the crazy scenario the prosecution had conjured of a failed attempt to steal the sterling silver. A killing done in the course of a robbery was murder. It mattered not in the eyes of the law if a thief was ambushed and shot in the back. If that burglar killed to save himself, he committed murder by constructive malice.

Gryf hadn’t been trying to rob Stephen. But he was a murderer, all the same.

Tess’s murderer.

He had sent her away, and now she was gone, and Stephen was gone, and Grady—they were all dead, all passed beyond Gryf’s reach, and somehow he himself had gotten left behind. Like the first time, left behind,
when he should have perished along with the rest of his family in the sun-washed, clean, salt air.

The moments spun out longer, and still he stood waiting. A murmur of impatience rose from the crowd. He began to feel dizzy. His heart pumped too much blood, in momentary expectation of extinction. Hadn’t it been long enough? The black mask made it hard to breathe—a graphic example of how it would feel to strangle. Still nothing happened. In the incredible delay he felt his physical courage dissolving. It seemed to him that whole minutes had passed. Hours. He tried to count heartbeats, got as far as seventy and forgot what came next. He was afraid his knees were going to collapse. Please, he thought. Please. The crowd began to babble. Gryf heard the sound of footsteps on the scaffold.

Surely now…

A hand fell on his shoulder, and he staggered, too surprised and witless to maintain his balance. The noose tightened across his throat, but his feet were still under him. “Easy, son,” the executioner’s mild voice said softly. Strong fingers closed around Gryf’s arm. “You’ve been got off.”

It did not penetrate his mind at first. The crowd burst into fearful noise, an incoherent mob sound that rose up around the scaffold like a tangible fog, coming to a shrill crescendo as the hangman lifted the noose from Gryf’s neck. The black mask was removed. Gryf blinked. His legs were like jelly. The executioner grinned and jerked his head toward the howling crowd.

“Don’t pay no never mind to them,” he shouted. “Not a one could’ve stood up here as long as you have.”

He urged Gryf off the trapdoor and took him back to a place near the stairs. A man Gryf had not seen before went forward on the platform and faced the crowd, waiting for the noise to subside. When it did, the new-
comer announced in stentorious tones, “Her Majesty has exercised Her Royal Perogative of Mercy. The prisoner’s sentence is hereby commuted to penal servitude and imprisonment for life.”

The crowd exploded into a frenzy. The executioner and several warders moved forward, surrounding Gryf as he was hustled back into the gaol. He could hear the shouts behind him; he could still hear them when the door of his cell clanged shut. The executioner gave a cheerful farewell. They left Gryf alone.

He was alive.

He looked around at the dark stone walls.

A whole lifetime now, to look at those walls.

He sat down on the stool and put his face in his hands. If he’d had a knife, he would have cut his throat.

After a long time—hours, days, he had little notion—they came and took him from the tiny dark cell that had the moss in the corner and put him in a larger one, long and narrow, with a small barred window at one end and a crank box on a pedestal at the other. There was a plain wooden table, a copy of Sturm’s
Reflections on the Works of God,
a chamber pot and a standing gas pipe. That was all. He was told that he would spend his time turning the iron drum of the crank box at twelve hundred revolutions an hour for nine hours a day, six days a week. When he was taken from the cell to the chapel, he would wear a mask with tiny eye slits and a short jacket with a number on the back. He would not see anyone. He would not speak. He would meditate on the magnitude of his crimes. For the rest of his life.

That, they said, was the Queen’s Mercy.

His food was changed: no longer greasy broth alone, but occasional meals of meat and vegetables brought by a stark-faced representative of the Evangelical Visiting
Society, the only exception to the rule of solitude. She talked to him about repentance and would not leave until he ate what she had brought. She knelt down by the table and prayed aloud for the soul of God’s most base and miserable sinner and left a religious tract as she went out the door. He kept them neatly in a stack, and between the cold that crept through the barred window and the growing pile of blessed pamphlets and the slow healing of his wounds, his days passed into months. Winter came, and gave onto early spring. He avoided all thought of things future or past. He avoided all thought of anything. There was only the squeak of the crank as it turned: mechanical and even. Like breathing.

One morning before dawn, when Gryf was lying awake staring into the dark with his back against the ungiving wall, a warder came rattling down the corridor. With a muffled curse for the recalcitrant lock, he forced open the iron door of Gryf’s cell. A youth with a pail of water and a razor shuffled in after.

“Hup wi’ you,” the warder said, and prodded Gryf’s outstretched leg. “The boy’s to shave yer for yer trial.”

Gryf rose to his feet. At first he thought it was a mistake. By the time he was shackled and taken out into the bitter, early-morning dark, where a jostling crowd stared and hissed at him as he was pushed into the police wagon, he had another theory. He imagined that he had already died, and this was Hell. Like Sisyphus, he was doomed to penance, but instead of a boulder to push to the top of a hill he was required to stand trial for Eliot’s murder, over and over, and instead of the boulder rolling down at the top, he would have to endure forever that climb onto the scaffold and the endless wait with the rope around his neck, and then the cell and the crank and the woman with her prayers.

Two warders accompanied him, but when the dark wagon creaked to a halt, they were not at the site of the Winchester Court of Assizes where he had been tried before. They were at the railway station. Another crowd met them there, a larger one, for it was nearly light and all the work traffic had already begun. The hoots of spectators mingled with the rasping huff of the waiting trains. He tripped mounting the steps to the car and the warders lifted him bodily, roughly, shouting over the crowd as if chastening him for stumbling in some effort to get away. Once inside they shoved him down onto a bench so that the shackles tore into his wrists and his back, and then a moment later the train began to pull away from the station.

For a long time he just listened to the sound of the wheels and watched the sun come up over the countryside. The slow awakening of thought in his brain was like the bright morning light in his weakened eyes: painful. They were traveling in an empty car, and the two warders talked between themselves as if Gryf were not there. After some twenty minutes the train began to brake, and he heard a distant voice call “Basingstoke!” over the sound of the wheels.

“Where am I going?” he asked, and his voice was hoarse from long disuse.

The warders broke off their conversation abruptly. After a minute’s disconcerted silence, one of them said, “Up to London, then. So mind you watch your manners.”

Gryf shifted a little, to ease the bite of the cuffs into his hands. He didn’t bother to ask further. He’d learned that it was better not to know. The gray fields and trees touched with pale-green flew past. Suburbs of raw new houses began to appear, row upon row of stuccoed villas, and then those gave way to the gray and black sky
line of London: sharp, Gothic spires and smoke from a hundred thousand chimneys. The view was obscured by embankments, and then, like a dark hand, closed over by the city itself.

He should have grown used to the ogling crowds, but the one that met them as the train hissed to a stop at Waterloo Station was almost more than he could face. Before the locomotive had fully halted, there was a rush on the platform, with uniformed bobbies trying to beat the public to the door of Gryf’s car. The police won the race, and formed up quickly into a cordon to hold back the surging push. Gryf’s escorts looked out the window, and nervously at each other. They pulled Gryf to his feet with unnecessary force: he was already halfway up when they started swearing at him to move. The combined noise of the train and crowd seemed to beat on his ears, and when he stepped to the door, the sound rose to a tremendous roar within the arched vault of the station. He stopped on the stairs, scared out of his wits by the mob that greeted him. It seemed nothing but a roiling blur of color and sound that stretched into obscurity in both directions, with one thin hard-fought alley between the cordons of police.

The warders urged him on; they wanted to run, but something made Gryf set his feet. He was not going to show his fear. He made himself step down from the car slowly; made himself look in the eyes of the screaming crowd behind the police. His escorts’ fingers dug viciously into his arms, and suddenly it gave him a cynical pleasure to know that they were as frightened as he was. He looked sideways at one, and grinned.

At that the mob broke into a frenzy, and straining hands reached out between the official lines. He felt them touch him, expected blows, and then realized with a start that they were cheering. The distorted faces be
hind the police were not screaming curses, but acclamation. He stopped, and turned an astounded look on them.

The warders pushed him on. A windowless carriage pulled by two agitated grays lay ahead, the Black Maria that carried prisoners from the prison to the court. He was shoved into it, and the warders scrambled up behind, pulling the door shut with a bang that could barely be heard over the thunder of the crowd.

The wagon rocked forward.

By fits and starts, they proceeded. He thought several times that the wagon would be overturned. By the time the vigorous thump of the coachman above signaled that they had arrived at wherever they were going, a kind of camaraderie had sprang up between Gryf and his two escorts. To sit in the dimness and hear the noise and feel the carriage shake brought them all near to the breaking point of nerves. The warder who moved to the door at the signal hesitated before drawing the bolt. His fellow gave him a nod, and they both looked at Gryf.

He pasted the fierce grin back on his face. Above the din, he shouted, “Open it,” and the warder threw back the inside bolt. Someone had already opened the outer one, and the door swept wide. Gryf crouched down and went first, into the puddle of open space that the bobbies held tenaciously.

He looked around in bewilderment. Above him, instead of the grim wall of the Old Bailey, towered the ornate stone steeples of the new Houses of Parliament. He had no time to stop or ponder; he was hustled the short distance inside by an extra phalanx of police, with his Winchester warders trailing ignominiously. Once within the building, the tumult ceased but he was still given no moment to ask why he was there. The two warders fell behind and were lost as other officers handed him along
the halls of state. He wound up finally in a small room, where the police removed his shackles.

A tall, broad-shouldered man with silver hair and a buoyant gait strode in as the bobbies went out. He glanced over Gryf with a critical eye.

“So,” he said. “The prisoner.”

It might have been a title, so portentously did he utter the word. He appeared to like what he saw, for his handsome face broke into a smile as he held out a huge lion’s paw of a hand. “Ruxton Wood,” he said. “Your counsel.”

The name was ringingly familiar. David Ruxton Wood, Serjeant-at-Law. The Great Defender. Gryf began to understand. He was going to be made into some kind of crusade; another hopeless case, another opportunity for the brilliant barrister to pour out golden oratory in a lost cause.

Gryf looked at the offered hand and set his jaw. “I don’t want your counsel.”

“Ah.” Serjeant Wood changed the offer to a smooth, slight bow. He said, in a perfectly unconcerned voice, “Perhaps you don’t. But don’t think anyone gives a damn about that, my boy. Here’s your valet. Twenty minutes.” He reached out and ran a finger along Gryf’s jaw. “Make it thirty, and tidy up that shave.”

With that, Serjeant Wood left, calling for hot water. Gryf was stripped of the numbered prison garb, with a mutter of disgust from the servant, who pushed Gryf down into the tin tub of lukewarm water that a char-woman had hauled in. Shaving and bathing done, the man took after Gryf’s hair with the razor, and then produced a set of morning clothes that Gryf recognized with a shock as his own. Serjeant Wood, now in the black silk robe of a Queen’s counsel, returned just as the valet was tying Gryf’s neckcloth.