mist but the top of its frame hard against the lingering light, pink now, like bloodied milk.
Grunts and mutters. The bottom of an orchard ladder could be seen propped against the stock of the gibbet, rising from the brown mist.
Carew stood a few yards away, in leather hat and jerkin, hands linked behind him, rocking back and forth, impatient, and when I ran to him he didn’t look at me, his voice a murmur.
‘God’s spleen, Dee, will I never get you from under my fucking boots?’
‘Sir Peter, I need you to listen to me.’
Was what I meant to say, but the smoke from the torches caught at my throat.
‘Damn mist,’ Carew said. ‘Would’ve had three of ’em brought up if I’d thought.’
‘I must needs tell you-’
‘Never been up for learning, Doctor. Not your kind anyway.’ He turned, a firelit flash of teeth in the beard. ‘If you have any magic to spare to give the poor bitch a swift death, she’d doubtless appreciate it.’ Sniffed the air. ‘Quite a beauty. Hadn’t realised.’
Nodding at the gibbet, a small group of men round it now, the vicar of St Benignus telling us we should not suffer a witch to live, as they brought her out, in her blue overdress, smirched and muddied, though her hair looked combed and drifted behind her shoulders.
‘Stop them… please… for Christ’s sake!’
I think she looked towards me as if she recognised a voice and then turned away as I threw at Carew the only words that might wake him from his mental slumber.
‘It’s part of a papist plot.’
He laughed.
‘You see any papists here?’
‘Yes!’
He looked at me, his curiosity at last alive, but it was too late then.
You forgot how quick it could be.
The torchlight had gone pale with vapour, and of a sudden she was there on the ladder, hands bound behind her, the vicar’s voice floating over her in the dusk.
‘May the death of this sinner bring atonement and cleanse this town forever of all filth and wickedness, idolatry and the worship of all false gods.’
‘That arsehole annoys me nearly as much as you,’ Carew said.
A movement on the ladder, a crisp slap.
‘I swear to God if you touch me there again, I’ll die cursing you to perdition.’
Laughter and coughing in the mist, and someone asked her if she had anything to say before sentence was carried out, and I heard her say with contempt, ‘To you?’
The bookman throwing his gasping, sorry self through flickering air as the short ladder was tipped to the ground and the group of men parted before him to reveal the body of Nel Borrow swaying slowly against the flesh- coloured sky.
The vicar, with his Bible and his back to the hanging woman, singing out.
‘The witch is gone to Satan. May the light of God come to us all.’
LVI
Brown Blanket
A half circle of men were around us, the two torch-carriers standing either side of the gibbet frame, and in the fuzzy light I saw Fyche and his son, Stephen, and Sir Peter Carew, pale-eyed in the thick air. A jabbering amongst them, and then Carew’s voice was lifted above it.
‘Hellfire, let him alone. If he wishes to pull her neck like a chicken, so be it, the end’s the same.’
Still I held her up, arms wrapped about her covered legs, my cheek against a thigh. Could feel the rope that bound her hands. Gripped one of the hands, and it was cold. Prayed, as I’d never prayed before, to God and all the angels, the noise in my head like the bells crashing in the tower from which all the bells were long gone.
‘In fact, give a hand, Simmons,’ Carew said.
The man with cracked teeth moving forward, pushing aside the vicar, who was still bent and retching from my blow to his throat…
…and then stopping.
‘Well, go on, man!’ Carew roared. ‘Before his feeble fucking spine snaps.’
I looked up and saw what the man with cracked teeth saw.
‘Angels!’ he screamed.
But what I saw was a white-gold bird rising from the fire of two torches meeting in the mist with a burst of gases.
Then the rope gave, and she felt into my arms, her body slumped against my head and shoulders. Dead weight but I would not let go, would never let go.
The mist gathering around us, wrapping us in its brown blanket.
‘Say it!’ Dudley snarled. ‘Say what you did.’
Stephen Fyche was backed up against a leg of the gibbet. He stumbled, swore. I had the impression he’d been drinking. His father turned and walked away.
‘You had a nail hammered under his fingernails,’ Dudley said. ‘Then, when he yielded nothing, you started to slit his gut.’
The pikemen’s hands were tensed around their weapons for they knew not this man who’d strode through the mist, his sword out to cut through the hangman’s rope.
‘No…’ Stephen glancing around, maybe looking for his father. He wore his monk’s robe and his new beard looked to have been cut fine and sharp for the occasion. ‘That’s horseshit. Who is this fucking bladder?’
I kept quiet, sitting in the mud under the still-swinging rope, my arms around Nel, listening to her breath coming in harsh snorts. Celestial music.
Fyche was back. Somebody must have told him who Dudley was, most likely Carew.
‘My Lord, before you accuse my son-’
‘Who took out his guts?’ Dudley said to Stephen Fyche. ‘Who took out his heart with the doctor’s tools?’
‘The fucking witch!’
‘Why not the doctor himself?’
A small sound came out of Nel’s half-strangled throat. Dudley edged closer to Stephen Fyche.
‘Tell us, boy.’
‘Aye,’ Carew said. ‘Maybe you better had.’
‘How…’ Stephen Fyche rose to his full height, swaying. Even I could smell the wine on his breath. ‘How dare you accuse a man of God, sirrah?’
And turned slightly, and I saw that he held a dagger close to his side and that Dudley saw it, too, and his hand was making a familiar short journey to his belt.
‘No trial needed here, then,’ Dudley said.
‘Uh… no.’ Carew gripping his wrist, twisting his sword out of his grasp. ‘Not your place.’
I’d seen something akin to this before.
Carew half turning this time, holding Dudley’s side-sword in both hands, and then the sword was a tongue of flame in the light of the torches and there was a look of faint puzzlement on the youthful face of Stephen Fyche as his body sagged below it.
Carew moved twice more, short hacks, and Stephen’s head seemed, for an instant, to be quite still in the air before it dropped to earth and rolled once into the grass where the body already lay, spouting its blood into the soil.
‘My place, I think,’ Carew said.
The silence on the tor seemed eternal. It was as if it were done by the hill itself. As if, deprived of one life, it had taken another.
