‘He does not die game!’ Carson shouts to reach those farthest away.
Laughter peels from those close to the scaffold.
‘Will you not speak?’ The Ordinary pleads.
Then Finn remembers what he is searching for. At the last hour he lost all hope for a reprieve, but he renews his hopes for it now. Clovis promised him it would come, but first he must draw out a speech to buy more time. He cannot.
In one swift motion the covering is placed over his head. The crowd yells its approval. His bowels loosen. The head-covering does little to erase this day; he can still see through the lightweight cotton.
‘ Hats off!’ Thousands of hats swish off to allow a clearer view.
From the front of the gallows the hush of the crowd concertinas to those farthest back.
Finn catches the scent of the rope and his mind flees to Limehouse, where he breathed the work of the ropemakers. When the rope goes around his neck a scream escapes him. The women jump back, as if his unexpected voice pushes them away.
The executioner pulls the bolt and the drop falls. Finn will not go so easily. Astonishingly, he draws himself up, and his feet find purchase on the side of the drop. The executioner pushes him off. Finn lodges his feet on the side again. The crowd emits a collective, ‘Ah!’
A third time he saves himself.
When he is pushed again, the rope breaks.
A yell bursts out from the viewers and echoes back through the swell of people. They laugh a strange, uncomfortable laugh. This man, this Finn Fowler, he fights to live and they are with him, by God.
Another rope is placed around his neck. The hangman is gruff this time, showing no mercy. The Ordinary shouts a prayer, only to be met with disapproving and mocking hisses. The knot in the rope slips around to the back of Finn’s neck. It will be a slow death.
The executioner turns him this way and that to disorient him. Finn’s feet cannot find the edge this time and he drops. He kicks at the Ordinary and the hangman. The head-covering falls off. His lips and nostrils ooze a frothy, bloody mucous. His face balloons. His eyes bulge and his lips and ears begin to swell. Signs of distress settle on the faces in the crowd. As if to mirror their turmoil, dark clouds dirty the sky.
Finn is clearly still sensible and knows he is hanging. His feet search for the platform. The executioner pushes him again. The people roar. Finn visibly soils his britches.
Just as is a pillow pressed on the face, hanging is suffocation. The longer Finn hangs, the more uncomfortable the crowd becomes and they direct their jeering to the hangman now.
Finn is completely unaware that his penis has become erect and an involuntary ejaculation further dampens his britches. There are a few who gesture, but none find it amusing. The people are turning.
At nine o’clock no movement is detected. A group of women have come forward. They have paid a large sum to test the miracles of the gallows. One woman bares her breasts. The hand of a hanged man is believed to cure tumours. She mounts the scaffold. She has no fear, no hesitation, as she takes Finn’s hand in hers. Just as she raises it to her breast, his head rolls and his eyes open and meet hers. The woman faints clean away.
His struggle to take air is too much for the onlookers and they begin to cry out.
‘Cut him down! Cut him down!’
The hangman who until now has been a model of control yells, ‘God almighty!’ and steps back from the gallows.
The Ordinary clasps his prayer book to his chest and recites a prayer, his eyes tightly shut.
Finn’s distorted features have played upon the people until they are wholly changed and awed by his agony. Their eyes flash back their tears. A different sort of passion overtakes them and leaves them soured.
Then the words Finn thought he would never hear are repeated over and over again.
‘Reprieve!’ The word creates a soothing blanket over the crowd. ‘Reprieve!’
The executioner is given a blade to cut him down.
When the rope is loosened the pain is so great that Finn wishes he were indeed dead. His ears ring with the explosive sound of people cheering. He scarcely knows where or who he is.
He should not be alive. Finn knows it, the hangman and the Ordinary are sure of it, and the onlookers will speak of nothing else for months.
Clovis Fowler leans against the wall of the cell in which she had bought the three of them a view of her husband’s execution. Willa and Jonesy have locked hands throughout the horrible, unfolding scene. Through the double row of bars, Clovis looks down upon the gaping faces of the crowd, people who still cannot believe what they have witnessed. As time passed and the reprieve did not come Finn did indeed appear as dead as a man could be. She had felt her own jaw clench, a knot of panic sticking in her throat, as he’d dangled like a blackened piece of fruit. Near the end of the hour when his lifeless body began to move again, Willa and Jonesy let out screams louder than any of the free people below. The blood drained from their faces, replaced by the haunted sheen of death masks.
‘It cannot be,’ Jonesy says to Willa.
It would seem I have three miracles on my hands, is Clovis’s first thought. But she does not believe in miracles. Surely Jonesy made a mistake and did not actually ingest poison, but some other substance. And as for Finn, cruel as it may be, hangings have been reported
