Paul Lawrence - The Sweet Smell of Decay

Until just before dusk.

‘You has a visitor.’ The gaoler opened the door and stood there unsteadily.

I don’t know who I was expecting, but it wasn’t the Attorney General. He walked in briskly, eyeing my cell as if it were too grand for the likes of me.

‘Good evening, Mr Lytle,’ he declared, pulling the door closed behind him. ‘Please stay seated, I will stand.’ Dark curls tickled his forehead and his head was bare, no periwig now, concerned, no doubt, that it did not become lice infested.

I stood anyway. ‘Have you brought the result of my appeal?’

‘Hah!’ he snapped. ‘The road to Whitehall is long and winding. If you harbour hopes that a man may ride that way and back before your execution, then you are a fool. Is it not already plain to you that you are to die tomorrow?’

It was like a stab to the heart. He looked at me with curling lip, and the hint of a sneer, the face of a man that believes he has done a job well and will brook no argument with any man that would argue otherwise.

‘Why, then, have you come?’

He smiled at me with his shining teeth and fixed me with a stare that willed me to see the world through the same eyes. ‘To tell you that your appeal will not succeed. I would not have you wasting your time indulging in idle fantasy that you will live more than another twelve hours. I am sure that you have many reparations to make with the Lord your God.’

‘That is very good of you. You must be very busy.’

He showed no signs of moving. ‘Indeed I am. It would make my journey worthwhile were you to show me the paper that you read from.’

So that was it. He wanted to know who had prompted me to appeal in the first place. He must be worried to come all the way here just to ask me it. Poor fellow. I fetched the paper from my pocket where it sat screwed up. Unfolding it, I read it once more, and held it out to this awful man. One arm snaked out, whereupon I placed the paper in my mouth and swallowed it whole.

His face froze, then relaxed. ‘No matter, Lytle. I will retrieve it from your guts tomorrow morning. Farewell.’ Turning on his heel, he was gone.

I really didn’t see why he had to be so mean-spirited. But that was his affair. I had my own affair to worry about.

Next morning it was raining and windy. I knew this to be so because it was a drop of rain that woke me, landing on my nose. It could not have made its way through the high barred window without some help from the wind. I was quite pleased, all things considered. A rainy day meant smaller crowds and that all concerned would want to hurry things along so that they may spend as little time possible outside getting wet.

It didn’t feel like my last day on earth.

I decided to be calm and reasonable, in the hope that everyone else would be calm and reasonable too. I didn’t want to spend the day wrapped up in tight knots. In truth, I was very tired, having lain awake all the night, contemplating the silence. As the sun rose so did the fear subside a little.

It was still several hours before the key turned in the lock.

‘Good morning!’ I didn’t stand, for fear they would assume that I was lunging at them, just sat with my legs and arms out straight, manacles to the fore.

It was the old cleric from St Andrew Hubbard that entered, a short, old man with white hair that stood up straight in untidy clumps. The same fellow that had attended to Joyce. He breathed into my face and I nearly died there and then — how much had this fellow had to drink?

‘Stand up,’ a dour-faced fellow ordered me. He wore a strange brown skullcap and a long, brown leather apron. Odd fish. His hand was as big as Dowling’s and he held me by the shirt with it while he looked into my eyes, as though he was searching for something. I looked at his eyebrows so he wouldn’t think that I was staring at him. Then he let me go, roughly, and marched out.

‘He is the executioner,’ the cleric slurred while fumbling with a large wooden cross tied to a piece of thick cord. ‘He is very good at his job. You are fortunate.’ He held out the cord around my neck and let the cross bounce gently upon my chest. So, I had been measured up. A day of reckoning, indeed.

There were four other strangers in the cell stood officiously, but I didn’t look at them. They were big and very ugly, ill-disposed towards me, I felt sure. The cleric drew out a Bible from his inside pocket and began to read out snatches from it. Either he had poor eyesight, else he had drunk enough to render him unable, for few of the words were intelligible. His two eyes worked as they would, rarely arriving in the same place at the same time. We all waited patiently for him to complete his task.

Then the time came to leave. They attached a chain to the manacles that bound my wrists and led me forward like a dog. We walked down the main corridor out towards the entrance. Men stood at the bars to the public cells staring out. Some watched seriously, perhaps contemplating their own demise. Others leered and shouted, a couple even spat at me, though thankfully they succeeded only in hitting the sleeves of my shirt. Someone else could wash that later.

It was a relief on climbing into the cart to find that I would not be making the journey alone that morning. Rain still fell, though not hard, and there sat on a rough cloth sack was my travelling companion. Younger than me, and very thin, he sat with his knees bent outwards and ankles together, leaning forward with his wrists against the cart floor in front of his feet. He looked up at me with dull eyes beneath oily, black hair.

‘Good morning!’ I greeted him, determined that we not sit morose. I calculated that we needed each other’s good cheer if we were to support ourselves through the abuse we would surely experience on the way to Tyburn.

‘Hardly that!’ he mumbled. ‘Why are you so happy this day?’

‘I think I might be released. Though they found me guilty, I asked for the King’s pardon.’

‘Many ask for the King’s pardon, friend. Not many receive it. None have received it that I know of while on the cart.’

‘Methinks it is necessary to look on the bright side.’ Which was true. Though it was but a silly notion, the longer I managed to stay calm then the shorter the time I would suffer.

‘Methinks it is the sign of a simpleton, the kind of nonsense spake by those that have not yet understood what fate beholds them. When you see the scaffold and the crowds that surround it, then ye will start moaning and crying.’ He shrugged, ‘I have seen it.’

‘Are you complete with what fate awaits you?’

‘I will not know that for sure until I find myself standing there with the rope round my neck. If I ask the Lord God for forgiveness before I drop, then I will know that I am complete. If I shit my trousers and start panting like a dog, then I will know otherwise.’ He looked at me. ‘You will shit your trousers and pant like a dog.’

‘I wager I will not,’ I assured him.

‘I accept,’ he grinned.

I liked this fellow. I wondered what he’d done. ‘First to Sepulchras. To partake of wine, I believe?’

‘Indeed, though it is not a great vintage.’

The crowd was thin outside Newgate and at Sepulchras. We drank as much wine as they would give us, while the clerk read the prayers. A pale-looking fellow, weedy and yellow, he looked ill to me. He had a habit of snorting phlegm up his throat upon pausing for breath between verses. An unpleasant custom that rather spoilt the effect of his words. The small crowd didn’t appear to be disappointed, for their attentions were fixed upon us, regarding us with a hungry leer, keenly anticipating that one or other of us would lose control and give way to a bout of frantic pleading. The soldiers that accompanied us would be wishing for a quiet day. The one that walked closest to me frowned unhappily; nose and mouth bunched up like someone had tied up his snout with twine. He kept flicking sideways glances at me as if concerned that I would laugh at him. A strange idea under the circumstances.