The Scent of Death (8 page)

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 o
r 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 cross-beam. 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 th
e res
urrection 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.

‘The air is a little cooler, I find,’ Mrs Arabella said. ‘But we rarely sit here in the evening because Mrs Wintour finds it fatiguing to walk so far.’

‘I distinctly felt a draught on my cheek, madam,’ I said. ‘Indeed, it is very pleasant with all the windows open.’

I could hardly believe the banality of my own conversation. For a moment my remark seemed to have stunned the others into silence. Mrs Arabella must have thought me the most pompous fool in creation.

We were sitting in the summerhouse at the bottom of the Wintours’ garden. Mrs Wintour had been too tired to come down for supper. Afterwards, the Judge had suggested that the three of us take our tea in the belvedere.

‘There is a charming westerly prospect of Vauxhall Garden and the grounds of King’s College,’ Mr Wintour had said. ‘One can glimpse the North River beyond. Though of course it will be almost dark by the time we are settled. Still, it will be agreeable to know that the prospect is there, will it not?’

The twilight was already far advanced, though we had not had the candles lit because of the flying insects their flames would attract. The air smelled faintly of lemon juice and vinegar, an agreeable contrast to the stink that pervaded so much of the city.

I turned towards Mr Wintour. ‘I had meant to enquire sooner, sir: is there any news of the goat?’

‘No. I fear the worst. But I have placed an advertisement in the
Gazette
.
Nil desperandum
must be our motto in this matter, as well as in our larger concerns.’

I wondered whether to mention the boy who had been selling goat meat outside the barracks before the hanging. It was impossible to be sure, but he might have been the boy whom I had seen with a living goat and the scar-faced negro on the day we had inspected Roger Pickett’s body. But even if it had been—

‘Her milk is much missed, sir,’ Mrs Arabella said, picking up the teapot and breaking my train of thought. ‘If we have lost her, I fear it will be nigh impossible to find another milch goat.’

She was wearing a pale gown that in the fading light made her almost luminous. She refilled my cup. I rose to take it and, in doing so, I felt the warmth radiating from her body and smelled the perfume I remembered from that first evening: otto of roses, mingled with her own peculiar fragrance. As I took the cup and saucer, her finger brushed my hand.

‘No more tea for me, my dear,’ Mr Wintour said, struggling to his feet. ‘I must see how Mrs Wintour does and then I shall retire for the night.’

For a moment we watched the old man picking his way down the path towards the garden door of the house.

Mrs Arabella stirred in her chair, and the wicker creaked beneath her body. ‘Miriam tells me you went to see that man hanged this morning.’

‘Yes, ma’am, I did. A melancholy duty.’

‘Did he confess to the murder in the end?’

‘I believe not.’

‘You would think a man would speak the truth if he knew he was to go before his maker in a few moments.’

‘He may have desired to confess, ma’am. But he was not given an opportunity as far as I know. But forgive me – the subject must be painful to you.’

The wicker creaked again. ‘Yes, of course. Though I barely knew Mr Pickett – but his murder is a terrible thing. Tell me, sir – was it – was it a hard death?’

I stared at her in the gathering dusk. ‘Mr Pickett’s?’

‘No, no – I mean the man who was hanged for the murder.’

‘How can it not have been?’ I said, more sharply than I intended.

‘I spoke without thinking.’ She sounded upset, though there was not enough light for me to read her expression. ‘But – but there must be degrees in these matters, must there not?’

‘It cannot have been easy.’ I remembered Virgil’s clenched fists, the kicking feet and, most vividly of all, the hands that had risen from beneath the scaffold to give the sharp, fatal tug at the slave’s ankles. ‘But it did not take long.’

She sighed. ‘I am glad of that, at least. Of course they do not have feelings as we do.’

‘Who do not?’

‘Negros. They are made of coarser clay. Indeed, many of them are little better than beasts of the field. Most negros have no more idea of true religion or morality than the man in the moon.’

‘I cannot believe that to be true, madam,’ I said. ‘Their situation may be inferior to ours, their education neglected, but one cannot blame them for that. Indeed, if we blame anyone, surely we must blame ourselves for their shortcomings.’