P. Chisholm: A Murder of Crows

The hunchback rose and held out his hand to shake friendliwise. The poet took it and found his fingers were gripped with surprising strength.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Shakespeare,” said the hunchback. “It seems we will do well together.”

“I hope so, sir,” said the poet.

“Keep me informed.” The hunchback stood. “I will be back in London by tomorrow.” He turned his bent shoulders and walked quickly towards the rows of hazel trees that shielded a raised lawn full of sculptures of minotaurs and fauns and mermaids and other fantastical creatures. The bees browsed on frantically in the late flowers and Shakespeare headed back to the stables and London town.

“Nothing like an execution, eh Sergeant?” Sir Robert Carey was lounging elegantly against the fence that kept the groundlings in their places, one kid-gloved hand tipped on the pommel of his sword, the other playing with the beginnings of a new Court goatee.

Dodd looked at him gravely for a moment and then turned his attention back to the bloody mess on the Tyburn scaffold. On the other side of the scaffold he noticed a man with a badly pock-marked face who was staring transfixed at the priest. Suddenly, the man turned aside and vomited on the ground. The goings-on didn’t upset Dodd’s stomach as much-for all the smell of roast meat-since there had been no screaming. They had actually burnt the priest’s balls in front of him, a detail Dodd had not expected, though at least they’d done it after cutting them off and before they slit the priest’s belly to pull out his guts.

The priest hadn’t been screaming because the hangman had given him a good drop off the ladder and had let him hang until his face was purple, eyes set and popping and his tongue cramming his gag in the ludicrous mask of a judicial death. Evidently a kind or well-paid hangman. In fact, the man had been unconscious on the hurdle as he was dragged along the Oxford Road, grey-faced and hollow-eyed. He had seemed only half aware of what was happening when the hangman had put the noose over his neck, though there had been something like a smile around the corners of his exhausted eyes. Impossible to tell with the gag forcing his lips into a grimace, but he had looked confidently up at the sky before stepping off the ladder. The hangman hadn’t needed to push him.

Now they were quartering him efficiently with cleavers, working like the butchers at the Shambles. Quartering a man was not so very different from butchering a pig and Dodd had killed and colloped his own pig every November since he’d been a married man and knew something about it.

No sausage-making here, though. Nobody had caught the blood in buckets to make black pudding nor pulled out and washed the bladder to be a bouncy toy for children.

That thought did make his stomach turn so he was glad that Carey was speaking again.

“Eh?” said Dodd.

“I said, he’d been one of Heneage’s guests at Chelsea,” Carey nodded at the man’s wrist which was flopping from the nearly severed arm not far from them. It had a thick swollen bracelet of flesh around it and the fingers were tight-skinned and swollen as well.

Dodd saw that Carey was rubbing his gloved left hand where two of his fingers were still slightly bent. The rings for those fingers were still at the jeweller’s to be resized since they no longer fit, and Carey was wearing kid gloves all the time not only because it was fashionable and they were extremely fine embroidered ones, but also to hide his very ugly bare nailbeds while he waited for the fingernails to regrow. All in all he had recovered well from the mysterious damage that had been done to him at the Scottish court. As to body, at least. As to mind and spirit…Only time would tell. He was being irritatingly breezy now.

“Priest was he not?” Dodd squinted slightly as one of the men working on the scaffold held up the peaceful head.

“So perish all traitors to Her Majesty!” shouted the hangman.

“Allegedly,” murmured Carey. “Hoorah!” he added at a bellow, and clapped. The crowd cheered and clapped as well, with some wit about the priest’s equipment.

“Ay,” Dodd had tired of fencing games. “So why did ye bring me here, sir? Ah’ve seen men hang afore now. Hanged a couple mesen under Lowther’s orders while he was Deputy Warden…”

Carey’s eyebrows went up and he made a little courtier-like shrug with his shoulders. “Thought you might be interested to see a real hanging, drawing, and quartering, they don’t happen so often.”

“Ay. Nae ither reason?”

Dodd knew his face was dark with suspicion and ill-humour and didn’t care. Why shouldn’t he be miserable? He was still stuck in this hellhole of London, still wearing uncomfortable hot tight clothes loaned him by Carey so he could look the part of his natural station in life. He knew what and who he was and he didn’t care whether the bloody southerners knew or not so long as they left him alone, so he didn’t see the point of the play.

Today, for the first time in his life, he had been to a London barber and had had his hair trimmed, washed, oiled, combed, and his beard trimmed back to a neat pawky thing on the end of his chin. One of the things that was making him bad-tempered was the fact that he had caught himself enjoying it. If he wasn’t careful he’d go back to Janet and his tower in Gilsland as soft and wet as any southerner and Janet’s geese would eat him alive, never mind Janet herself.

Dodd glanced again at the scaffold where they were sweeping sawdust into clumps and bringing up mops and buckets. The bits of human meat were slung into a cart to be taken to the gates of London for display and the head to London Bridge to join the priest’s colleagues.

Carey was already heading off through the crowd and Dodd followed him until he found a little house with red lattices and reasonably clean tables on the Oxford Road near to Tyburn. By some magic known only to him, Carey immediately snared a potboy to take his order and quickly settled down to a quart of double beer and a small cup of brandy. Dodd took mild ale, mindful of what the Portuguese physician had advised about his bruised kidneys.

“Obviously I want you to know what manner of man you’re dealing with,” Carey said in a random way, blinking into his cup of brandy before swallowing all of it.

“Thank ye, sir,” said Dodd in a careful tone of voice. “But Ah ken verra fine what manner o’man he is, seeing he laid about mah tripes wi’ a cosh and me wi’ ma hands chained and ye had at him yersen, sir, an hour later and he never drew blade nor struck ye back nor sent his man to arrange a time and a place.”

Dodd would never forget what had happened on that Sunday, particularly Carey finding him still curled up and half-conscious on the floor of Heneage’s thrice-bedamned foreign coach after a thorough beating from Heneage and his henchmen. Those lumps had been intended only as a preliminary to further interrogation and one of the henchmen had just come back with thumbscrews to help. Dodd had not personally seen but had heard from several witnesses that Carey had then gone straight for Heneage with his bare fists, being without his sword at the time, until unfortunately restrained by his father. It hadn’t been very gentlemanly of Sir Robert, but it had given Dodd some pleasure to see Heneage with a swollen nose, two black eyes, and a doublet and gown ruined by blood a little later.

And Heneage hadn’t even called Carey out over it, which just showed what a strilpit wee nyaff he was. Well, lawsuits to be sure would be multiplying like rats, but that was a different matter. Dodd had never heard of a gentleman hitting another gentlemen right in the nose with his fist and not having to at least talk about a duel afterwards. For form’s sake. Dodd himself didn’t plan to take Heneage’s demeaning beating of him as if he was some poor peasant with no surname to back him. He planned revenge.