Bruce Holsinger - The Invention of Fire

To watch a man hang is like nothing else on this earth. For no other violation puts the body through such strange paroxysms, nor reminds us so starkly of what life is and what it is not. The quickness and quality of death on the noose depend in part on the relative talent or perversion of the hangman. Just as often, though, they are a matter of luck.

The horse thieves were fortunate that day, their necks snapping as soon as the rope tightened, their bodies swaying gently before us, disappointing the spectators.

Peter Norris’s death was of another order, and far worse than most on the gallows. The drop, a jerk of his head, a heave of his full frame, the silence lengthening, and I thought it was done. So did he, it seemed, until his expiring mind awoke to his predicament. His frame jerked. His tongue shot from his mouth. A river of drool slathered his chin. Above it all his widened eyes bulged outward from their sockets, as if his skull were a bagpipe bladder invisibly squeezed.

Worse was what happened below, as it will sometimes do. His bowels emptied in one loud and liquid rush, soiling his legs and feet and leaving him a dribbling mess. His member, a flaccid nothing amidst the thick bristles of his lower hair, became stiffened and engorged, jutting obscenely outward as his body endured its final convulsions. This last indignity inspired a round of delighted shouts and claps from the assemblage, which treated the rude spectacle of Norris’s passing as they might the performance of a shrewish Noah’s wife in a mystery play.

Finally Norris’s soul had had enough. It abandoned his ruined flesh without a whisper, leaving just this dangling thing, man no more but spiritless flesh. I closed my eyes, said a prayer. When I opened them again the crowd had already started to disperse, its attention seeking new diversions, and turned coldly from these three dark drops against the cloudless sky.

Only one other remained in the gathering silence as the crowd made its way back to the walls. He stood directly across the Tyburn green from my position, his face small, round, pale. It was Jack Norris, watching his father’s ruined body swing and twist in the gentle breeze. The boy-the witness-had lost his cap, leaving the stubs of his severed ears plainly visible beneath the strawlike thatches of his hair. His features were still, his eyes expressionless. What had those eyes seen, what knowledge lurked behind them in that cutpurse’s brain of his?

“Jack,” I said. He swiveled his head. His eyes widened when he saw me. I took a step toward him. “You remember me, Jack.” Another step. “We met in the yard, before Ludgate.” Two more. “I bought you pies.”

Speaking to children has never been one of my stronger skills. Feeling like a fool, I could only watch as he turned and sprinted off toward Holbourne, reaching the edges of the crowd before I had even left the Tyburn round. He looked back just once before being dissolved into the press of Londoners fresh from the killing of three of their own.

A clouded moon that night, though the dark hardly helped. In the smallest hours Hawisia, assaulted by the pounding kicks of her unborn child, rose to take turns around the upper rooms. She bent against walls, stretched her sore legs, and in the end descended to the larder for a little something to stave off the hunger. A wedge of cheese, some cider, a hunk of rough bread. The walking helped, though less than it had a few weeks before.

The climb back upstairs tired her further, moistened her face. She turned into the narrow cutout between the upper bedchambers and paused at the window, pushing open the shutter to get a bit of air. As she leaned out into a chill breeze her gaze wandered from the stars over the city rooftops and down into the foundry yard, cast in a darkness complete but for a narrow smear of light coming from the far side.

Well, that wasn’t as it should be.

She peered down across the darkened yard at the smithy, a half-roofed, squat structure that occupied one corner of the Stone complex. From beneath the eaves on the building’s west side shone the cone of lamplight she’d spied from the window. She listened, palm cupped at her ear, and caught the faintest sound of metal on metal, metal on wood.

Tap tap. Scrape.

Tap tap. Scrape.

Tap tap. Scrape.

Night work in the smithy, her own smithy! A practice strictly prohibited by the guild regulations, had been for an eternity, and there wasn’t one man in the whole Stone operation who didn’t know it, who hadn’t had that unbending principle of the craft ground into him in his first weeks under the foundry roof. Smithing at night produced inferior work, when you were more likely to slip weak metals onto the forge, make infernal sounds that would wake the parish, goad its fury like nothing else.

Hawisia stomped down the back stairs and through the house to the yard door, where she reached for the heavy wooden club kept leaning within. Mostly for shooing away slaughter beasts escaped from the shambles, or beating off hungry dogs, or going after the occasional thief on the prowl for copper or tin. But a reliable weapon, and it would do fine for the wayward apprentice or guildsman risking a large fine under Stone’s roof.

Once in the yard she silenced the door behind her and hefted the wooden club, feeling its weight, intent on delivering a well-deserved beating to whichever of the foundry’s workers might be violating the ordinances and risking her livelihood.

As she left the house behind she felt another stab of anger. Even from across the yard she could tell the forge was lit. An infernal glow came from the bed of coals, while smoke rose from the chimney to curl around the brighter stars. Hawisia could not tolerate such defiance in her shop. Fire or no, the night work would have to stop, and it was up to her to see that it did. She stopped some twenty feet from the near edge of the smithy and peered beneath the eaves.

Stephen Marsh. She could make out his broad form, shoulders bent over his work. He stood between the anvil and the finishing table against the tool wall. She shivered, furious at him for swatting away the house’s rules yet reluctant to interrupt him, intent as he was in that moment. The man had been sullen for days on end. Hawisia needed him working and working well. If the night was what it took to get his craftsman’s blood flowing its fastest, should she allow it?

Their difficult relations aside, it was always a thing of fascination for Hawisia, to watch Stephen Marsh at his rough magic. His hands gliding from wall to bench and back, taking one tool, then another, replacing each before lifting the next, all done with the deftness of a limner switching out his brushes. A file, an awl, pliers, a hammer, another file, the awl. Every now and again he would pause in his tinkering; lift the piece of metal before him in the lamplight; heat it on the coals; move his hands apart, then together, testing out the product of his subtle labor.

From her angle Hawisia could not make out what the object was, just that it seemed to be small, precise, crafty-and worth the skulking secrecy of the dark.

Ignoring the shooting pains down her legs she watched Marsh for an hour or more, her heavy middle brushing against a post, her weight shifting every little while to keep the blood running. The club was drooped at her side, forgotten as she kept this strange vigil.

At some point in the still night Stephen put a hand to his lower back, straightened, stretched, and yawned, then started to put away the tools and neaten the bench and wall. Before he extinguished the lamp Hawisia watched him reach up, rest a knee on the high bench, and place the object of his labor on the topmost shelf, a plain board otherwise bare running across the width of the bench. She turned quietly for the yard and bed, her limbs screaming for rest, her mind grasping at the riddle she’d witnessed.