Calmly: 'Put it down.'
Tillie's mouth opened wide; she growled and stepped closer. 'Down middle o' your head, that'd look good! Part your hair right down the middle!' And the hatchet swung out in an arc, and down towards Danielle's forehead. Danielle stepped deftly to the side and the settee received the full force of the blow. Feathers flew. 'Damn it!' screamed the woman. She tugged the hatchet free and spun on Danielle again. Danielle backed into the kitchen. She would come back again, later. She'd been invited into the building so entering would be no trouble.
Suddenly there was panting on the steps, in the hall, outside the door, and she whipped about to see Alexandre standing there, clutching the door frame and panting. He looked past Danielle to the woman with the hatchet.
'You cow!' he cried. 'I could hear you wailin' from the street below! What you doin' now, gonna kill some woman who looks like she just got lost?'
'Alexandre,' whispered Danielle in amazement.
But the man brushed past her and flew at Tillie, snatching for the hatchet as he clutched her hair with his other hand. 'Pig! You can't be trusted with nothin' or nobody! Oughta stick you in the asylum, I oughta! Give me the damned hatchet or you'll find yourself up for murder!'
Tillie jumped away, stumbled against a straight-backed chair and fell to the floor. Alexandre — William — leaped again and grabbed for the weapon. She swung it at him and missed his face by a hair's-breadth.
Danielle stepped into the parlour. She could be cut, it wouldn't matter. But she would not let Alexandre be killed. Not again. She reached for the wavering hatchet just as the man snatched it from the woman on the floor.
'Get back!' he cried to Danielle.
Tillie was up on her feet in a second, and latched on to Alexandre's arm with her teeth. He screamed, and began to strike her shoulder with the blade. Again. Again.
Again.
'I'm sick of you, I'm sick of you, I'm sick of you!' he wailed.
Danielle watched in horror as the woman stumbled past her into the kitchen and fell through the door and down the stairs to the landing. Alexandre, enraged, followed, and planted a solid blow to her head. The woman on the landing stopped moving.
Every flat door seemed to open at the same moment. Screams and curses followed, with fingers pointing at Alexandre and Danielle. 'Murderer!' a man cried. 'Killer!' screamed a child.
Danielle, dumbfounded, retreated to the apartment and escaped through the window into the mist of the night.
William Kemmler confessed to the murder of his common-law wife, Matilda Ziegler, and was sentenced to death by the state of New York. He was transferred to the prison in Auburn, where in August of 1890 he awaited his execution.
But the execution was to be a civil and humane one, the first one in which electricity would be used to snuff out the life of the convicted. A chair had been built of oak and electrical circuits, and tested on animals to make sure the death would be humane. Though there had been arguments between the two leading moguls of electric power, Thomas Edison and George Westing-house, as to which of the currents — Edison's 'Direct Current' and Westinghouse's 'Alternating Current' — it came to be through some underhanded manipulation that Edison assured that AC current would be used for the electric chair. Although Westinghouse refused to sell his equipment to the prison for the death machine, Edison arranged for some used equipment to be purchased without his competitor's knowledge and made into the chair. This, Edison knew, would seal in the minds of Americans that AC was deadly, and so DC should be used in homes. Men at Auburn prison as well as reporters in their daily and weekly newspapers began joking that a man put to death in the electric chair would be said to have been 'Westinghoused', a term that horrified the developer of the alternating current.
None of this mattered to William Kemmler, however, nor to Danielle Boquet. With her charm and grace she had been able to gain welcome into the prison's main building, but had yet to be invited to enter the cold portion of the death house where her Alexandre awaited his execution. She had the power to kill the guards but did not have the power to force them to offer her entrance.
And so she waited. And she fretted. And Marie and Clarice tried to console her. She went back time and again to the tenement flat in hopes she might find a way to help her love escape yet another death by the great and humane society, but there was nothing. She took the black Bible and kept it close in her skirt's pocket, but reading it did nothing. Explained nothing.
Danielle clung to the exterior wall of the death chamber at night, and during the day slept in a closet of the prison's gasworks. Marie and Clarice stayed with her, assuring her that it was not Alexandre and once he was dead she would come to her senses.
Witnesses arrived at the prison the evening of 6 August, twenty-five men, fourteen of them doctors, anxious and excited to see this new death which would not cause undue suffering. The death chamber itself was in the cellar, and Danielle lay in the steamy, bug-infested grass at one of the windows, staring through the steel bars and glass at the horrific scene playing out below. The witnesses walked in, clutching top hats and gloves, and most of them settled themselves on seats that had been arranged to face the electric chair. Other men stood. And then the warden and several guards entered, with Alexandre between them. A priest, looking bored and disinterested, followed behind in his robe, holding his Scriptures to his chest.
Alexandre glanced about the damp, stark room. His eyes were red-rimmed with lack of sleep and the terror of the impending. The guards nodded at the chair. He walked to it, but could not seem to sit down. A guard said, 'You'll like this a lot better than the gallows, boy.'
'I must get in,' whispered Danielle to her Sisters behind her.
Marie and Clarice, standing a few yards back, said, 'You cannot.'
Alexandre turned and lowered himself into the chair. Then he sprang up again. 'I remember!' he shouted.
'Shut up and sit down,' said the warden. 'We'll break your arms to do it if we have to.'
'No, no, hear me, I remember!' Alexandre's face twisted with dreadful knowledge. 'Oh, God, I remember!'
