Gallows Pole

by Eris Adderly

  Gallows Pole

  By

  Eris Adderly

  ©2016 by Blushing Books® and Eris Adderly

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Eris Adderly

  Gallows Pole

  Cover Design by ABCD Graphics

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68259-727-9

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

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  Table of Contents:

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  Eris Adderly

  EBook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  Part 1

  Hangman, Turn Your Head Awhile

  Buckinghamshire, England, 1716

  The stolen horse snorted and lathered with sweat as its rider leaned in, pushing it in a fury of flying hooves and mud towards Gallows Hill. The voices of Emmat Bird’s parents still rang in her ears as she drove the poor beast on: Come home with your brother or not at all.

  Branches of alder and maple whipped past, low and leafy. She ducked them, rounding another bend in the road and swearing under her breath as the land began to rise towards the terrible gamble she knew was coming.

  The grey April morning ahead yielded a new black spot from the place where the road disappeared into the mist. The spot grew, contorted as Emmat flew in its direction. It was another rider, and as the distance began to close between them, she saw the man was flagging her with an adamant arm.

  Come home with your brother or not at all.

  She didn’t have time. She didn’t have time!

  “Oi!”

  Now she could see it was a younger man. And one she recognized. Emmat sneered as she reined in the heaving mount.

  “Oi!” the man called again, trotting up to meet her. “You’re Bird’s sister, ain’t you?”

  “You know me, Thomas Lobb, don’t play daft.” She had less than no patience for suffering Peter’s shiftless friends this day. “Speak quickly or move,” she said, “or haven’t you heard there’s trouble?”

  “That’s just it,” he said, eyes bulging with dismay. “Between Fiddick and I, we must ’ave brought five times as much as Old Ketch’ll have from the sheriff for stretching your brother’s neck.”

  “You silly bastard, you tried to bribe him?” The gelding shifted, restless below as her turbulent irritation seeped into the animal. “In front of the sheriff?”

  Lobb shook his head in vehement denial. “Sheriff weren’t there. Nor the chaplain. Don’t know where they are. But the hangman won’t be bought, I can tell you that.”

  Incompetent arse.

  “Well it’s a good thing I haven’t come to bribe him now, isn’t it? Now move!” Emmat kneed the horse and jerked the reins around, crowding the stammering Lobb out of her path and urging the beast into a full gallop again as fast as she could manage.

  Those idiots with their bribes. How long do they think he’d stay appointed hangman if every desperate fool could buy him off?

  Emmat had something besides coin in her pocket, however. A folded bit of parchment bearing a stay of execution from Judge Couch. It was a forgery, of course, but no one needed to know that.

  Come home with your brother or not at all.

  She seethed as the gelding put more and more muddy road at their backs, its great head hammering up and down as the incline of the hill grew and tried its endurance.

  Peter, her worthless brother. Never mind that it was Emmat who brought home money to their family’s house. Who kept the fireplace lit and the roof in good repair through her own contributions, and at great risk to herself. It was Poor, Dear Peter who was the Golden Son. Poor Dear Peter who made stupid mistakes and irritated dangerous people, and then expected everyone else to save his neck when he found himself climbing a ladder to bed. And her mother and father expected it, as well—to what advantage, she didn’t know.

  Ought to be shipped off to the Colonies. Then we’d have an end to this nonsense.

  The flanking trees gave way as the crest of Gallows Hill emerged from the mist, a great grey knell of finality the light of the sun refused to touch.

  She allowed the horse to slow down to a trot as she approached, working to master the lines of her face so they might show calm authority. The wild flames of her hair, a match to her brother’s and blasted in every direction by h
er reckless tear through the countryside, would do little to help, though she smoothed them back with a palm, all the same.

  There was Peter, already up on the back of the cart looking small and afraid, while the hangman’s horse stood ready to lurch forward at a word. The deadly nevergreen loomed overhead, eternity’s witness and instrument both, its dangling noose a snare laid by mortality.

  And there was the hangman. Jack Ketch himself—or so every unnamed master of the drop was known—the size of a small frigate, hooded and clad in black, jerking the cords pinioning her brother’s arms into place. His head came up at the sound of hoofbeats.

  Emmat swung down from the saddle, indifferent to the flash of stocking and leg she might show. They were the only three on the hill, and her brows came down as she strode towards the cart.

  Arms like tree limbs folded over the hangman’s chest as she approached, but his stance belied only mild interest. A man accustomed to interruptions while he made to carry out his grisly work, clearly.

  “Is the undersheriff not attending hangings these days?” she said, watching Peter’s eyes widen with hope at her advance.

  “Does it matter?” The hangman’s voice was an iron bar dragged through a bed of hot ash and gravel.

  Emmat came to a halt, affronted hands on her hips. “It bloody well does!”

  It’s probably better he’s not here, considering.

  “He’s abed with a fever, last I heard,” the hooded man drawled.

  “And the chaplain? A fever as well, I suppose?” Considering most hangmen were former criminals themselves, snapping at the man might not have been the best idea. But it didn’t stop her.

  “Haven’t had a whiff of clergy all morn,” he said, sounding bored beneath the hood. “And if you’ve come with a bit of golden grease on your palms like the last two, you might as well get back on that horse.”

  For once in his life, her brother was wise and kept his mouth shut, but she could see his gaze darting between her and the hangman, wild with expectation.

  God damned Golden Boy.

  “What I’ve come with,” she said, producing her brother’s last chance with a flourish, “is a writ of stay from the judge. Here.”

  She thrust the parchment at the man between two fingers, as though levelling a pistol. He reached and took it, unfolding the leaf and bending his head to read. Peter’s bound hands wrung together as he squinted in the letter’s direction.

  There were any number of possible outcomes Emmat had planned for on her furious ride up the hill, but the hangman’s dark chuckle as he crumpled the writ was not among them.

  “If that’s Couch’s hand,” he said, compacting Peter’s salvation with a gloved fist, “then I’m the ruddy King of France.”

  Bollocks.

  Her eyes jumped from Peter to the hangman. Back to Peter again.

  Come home with your brother or not at all.

  “Run.”

  It was one word, one syllable.

  It was a trigger.

  Everything happened at once.

  Emmat drew the dagger she’d hoped not to draw. Peter leapt from the cart but, witless sod that he was, lost his balance with his arms pinioned and fell to the ground with a yell. The hangman lunged to put a boot on Peter’s back, but Emmat was on him with the dagger.

  And then she wasn’t.

  The man seemed to twist like a falling cat in mid-air, his body everywhere at the same time. A fist was in her hair while other fingers dug into her wrist and sent the blade spinning. Her brother shouted at the jolt of another well-placed boot in his ribs.

  “So that’s the way of it,” the hangman said, latching into the laces of her stays at her back for a better grip while Peter groaned and curled tighter on the ground. A brisk, rough search cost her the second dagger in the side of her boot, as the hooded man transferred it from her person to his.

  “Peter, get up!” she pled, not knowing how unhinged the executioner might become. Her brother struggled to rise, slipping and kicking like a grasshopper missing a leg. The clutching hand at her stays gave a yank and Emmat bounced backwards against the hangman. She blinked into the mist at the impact, and then down at her squirming sibling.

  “Forged a letter from a judge. Interfered with a lawful execution. Stole a horse—oh yes, I can tell.” The rasp of the voice came low at her ear, scruffing her where she stood. The threat was there, even unspoken. As if Emmat needed more capital crimes added to her tally.

  “Emmat.” Peter managed to sit upright, coughing.

  “I’ve changed my mind about bargains today,” the hangman said, ignoring her brother’s whimpering. “It’s so godawful important to you this one don’t swing, I’ll make you a trade.”

  Silence on the hill. One of the horses snorted and stamped a hoof, she couldn’t see which. Emmat knew what was coming.

  “You for him. I’ll only ask once.”

  It was a bargain the man had no authority to make, though it seemed a poor time to remind him of it.

  Peter stared at her, unmoving as a petrified deer, his mouth hanging slack, copper hair sticking out in muddy disarray.

  Come home with your brother…

  At her back, she felt the hangman’s chest expand with his waiting breath. Her jaw flexed. Eyes bored through her wretched brother’s to a vision of her parents’ faces when she told them Peter was dead. She exhaled.

  “Done.”

  … or not at all.

  “Very well.”

  A drop from the noose could not have been more final.

  In the space of a breath, he was hustling her towards the black mountain that passed for a mare, not a second left for doubt. When she balked at the last moment, he drew her up short.

  “You can ride in the saddle or over it. It’s all the same to me.”

  Bastard.

  She opted for ‘in’ and he vaulted up behind her as soon as she’d righted herself. It was happening too fast.

  The hangman clicked his tongue at the horse and gave it a sharp kick. The cart jerked into a roll and Emmat twisted her upper body to steal a frantic look back at her brother, who knelt now in the mud.

  “Emmat!”

  A strange man’s arm circled her waist, a seal to a costly bargain.

  “Don’t make this be for nothing, Peter!” she called back to him, craning her neck. “Get up! Go!”

  The man at her back pushed on, ignoring the parted siblings’ last desperate exchange. He’d tossed her other dagger aside and it was still out there, somewhere among the damp stubble of grass atop Gallows Hill where Peter remained, wounded and bound. Emmat hoped he could find it and free himself.

  That would at least make one of them.

  * * * *

  The mare picked her way along the road, in the opposite direction from which Emmat had approached the hill, for what felt like days, though the gradual darkening of the sky told her it could only have been hours.

  The hangman spoke not a word to Emmat as they rode, nor she to him. What was there to say? Even if she didn’t know what he wanted with her—unlikely—she’d find out soon enough.

  They stopped exactly once, to water the horse. A narrow stream cutting through a stand of trees quenched their thirst, but the rushing sound of water gave rise to a different need in its place.

  “And you’re going where?” he said, again in that bored tone as she stepped towards the trees. They were the first words he’d said to her since they’d left her brother to fend for himself on the hill.

  She felt her lip curl. “A bit of privacy, if you please?”

  There was no reading his face for the hood he still inexplicably wore, but the shift in his stance told her he’d been about to give one reply and then changed his mind.

  “You’ve a forty count,” he said at last, adjusting the cinch on the saddle. The rest rang clear as funeral bells. She would not enjoy the consequences of making him wait.

  There were fleeting notions of running as she attended to her necessaries, but
they went nowhere. Which was just about where Emmat had left to go. He could run her down on the horse without breaking a sweat, and there was no telling what sort of mood he’d be in then. Stolid and silent were preferable to a great many others.

  Mounted again, the cart trundling along behind, Emmat continued to do her best to angle her upper body away from the hangman’s chest at her back. A pointless protest—and beginning to make her muscles ache—but she intended to manage as little bodily contact as possible. Backed into his groin astride a saddle was not the ideal way to do this, of course, but anything less felt like a tacit approval of the situation.

  She could only assume he was taking her to his home, and who knew how much farther that could be? Country hangmen travelled in circuits, and this one could have been anywhere on his, this morning.

  Between their abrupt departure from the hill and however far they’d come, day had matured into afternoon and then faded to evening. As much as she tried to avoid it, between the rhythmic plod of the horse, their mutual silence, and the ever-present warmth of the arm he insisted on keeping ’round her waist, Emmat found herself nodding to sleep.

  Jolting awake to find him yanking her upright in the saddle again was one thing, and it happened twice. Better than falling off, certainly. But another matter altogether was rocking to groggy wakefulness with her head tucked beneath the hangman’s chin, her back curled into the warmth of his chest.

  The first time Emmat floated up out of sleep this way, her heartbeat spiralled from a dreamy lull to a deafening tattoo in moments. It was all she could do to maintain a semblance of calm and not spring forward like a hare. Some instinct told her sudden movements would be more trouble than they were worth. Emmat didn’t know anyone faster than her with a dagger, and the man had knocked the blade clean out of her hand. While subduing her brother.