Gallows Pole

by Eris Adderly

  His venom failed to produce the desired result. Not when he’d said that name.

  Now where have I…oh.

  “Is a man named Jonas Hollow any relation of yours?” she asked, careful to keep her dagger hand steady. There would never be answers if the ruts in the road cut her audience short.

  “He was my nephew,” the elder Hollow said, the sneer in his voice telling Emmat just how much he’d thought of this particular young man. “Why? Were you one of his whores?”

  In the growing darkness, Emmat saw through a fog of red. Within that fog were Vane’s exquisite, mismatched eyes. The haunting memory of flames curling over the side of his face, down his neck.

  Jonas Hollow happened. Or at least his family did.

  “You did this,” she said, wrath unfurling down the length of her limbs. “You’re responsible.”

  “What?” The man moved his throat as much as he dared with the force of his ignorance.

  “Did you think, Mister Hollow, that burning the hangman’s house to the ground would bring your nephew back?” Her interrogation continued at a hoarse whisper as her knee crushed forward with its lack of interest in excuses.

  He growled and shifted his hips in an attempt at avoiding the knee. “We brought that hooded dog ten times what my nephew’s miserable neck was worth. Jack Ketch needed to be taught a lesson. Hollows don’t hang.”

  You arrogant…!

  Her fury leapt like a bonfire into the night, terrible and consuming.

  “Maybe you need to be taught a lesson.” The point of the blade left his neck to rest in the delicate tissue at the base of his eye socket. An eye for an eye? Hardly unjust.

  The older man swore and Emmat wore a grim smile in the darkness. A single sharp pass at a throat was far more fatal than an injured eye. The sight of honed steel itself, however, was often the superior threat.

  “Fish out your purse, Mr Hollow. The right hand only, if you please. You wouldn’t want me to get nervous.” She jostled the tip of the dagger just enough to elicit that visceral cringe she sought.

  He did as she said, rooting inside a coat pocket before producing the original reason she’d been lurking on the side of the road.

  “Ruddy thieves,” he said as she pocketed the purse for herself. “I should have known.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You should have. But we’ve discussed the matter of foolishness already, haven’t we?”

  The vengeful heat inside her had condensed to such a fine pinpoint of brilliance that it left a still, empty space to surround it. Within that space…calm.

  “Do you know what it’s like, Mr Hollow? For a man to have to walk around hiding his face because he believes himself too dreadful for others to look at?”

  She traced the point of the dagger now over the lines of his cheekbone, his jaw, imagining the fiery path of his “lesson” as it appeared on the flesh of her hangman.

  “To be allowed no friends,” she went on, “no family, for year upon year, with no hope of reprieve?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” His demand came through a clenched jaw, incredulity trying to puff its chest through a blanket of fear.

  Perhaps don’t upset the madwoman, yes?

  Her voice remained an ominous song.

  “Do you know what it is to end men’s lives for the good of others,” she said, returning the blade to lie across his throat, “but never to be able to begin one for yourself?”

  A flick of the wrist, Emmat. That’s all it would take.

  She pressed the dagger forward, wishing Vane were here to see it. Hollow sucked in a gasp. Blood rushed at her temples. Knuckles tightened around the hilt as the fury reared, horrible and black.

  No.

  No, Emmat. You are not a murderer. You are many, many things, but you are not that.

  “Who are you?” he said, horror and wonder one in his voice.

  The answer broke her wide open, blinding like clear, blue dawn.

  “I’m the hangman’s wife.”

  Her knee drove between his legs, an awful hammer.

  He doubled, choking on pain.

  “Oi!” she called to the driver. “Stop! Stop the coach!”

  Emmat clambered over the groaning Hollow as he lay clutching himself on the floorboard. The door banged open at the demand of her boot and she swung out into the night, her grip pivoting on the edge of the quarter panel.

  “Stop the horses, will you!”

  Even as the coachman heeded her cries, Emmat leapt from the rig’s step to catch herself on its lantern. Her fingers ringed its pewter finial and her full body weight hung from it until the bracket snapped away from lacquered wood with a splintering crack.

  The wheels rolled to a stop just as her arm came around in a vicious swing, dashing lantern and oil and flame against the side of the coach. She heard Hollow cursing inside, but she was already rounding on the bewildered coachman.

  “Are your loyalties deeper than your pockets, friend?” she asked, already bending to the harness of the first horse, her fingers flying to the traces.

  “What?” His attention whipped from her to the flames already licking along the body of the coach.

  “Half his purse,” she said, trying to work faster than her wretched mark might recuperate. “Help me unhitch this pair and leave with me right now. I’ll give you half his purse.”

  Emmat didn’t look up from her fury of buckles and straps to wait for his decision. After a breath or two, she heard boots hit the ground. Coin always won out. Especially when the alternative was someone like Silas Hollow.

  “Where are we going?” She heard him attacking the fastenings on the second horse.

  “To trade these for a new pair,” she said, hauling herself up by the harness saddle onto the beast’s back as the last shaft fell loose. “Or did you want to be caught riding around on what’s now a stolen horse?”

  A volley of profanities spilled from the coach behind them and Emmat swivelled in place to see Hollow tumble out onto the road.

  You need to leave, Emmat. Now.

  She put her heels to the horse’s flanks.

  “Come on!”

  The coachman did the same with his. The pair had to run in tandem—they’d only managed to unhitch them from the coach, not from each other—but it was faster than the furious Hollow could chase after them on foot, and that was fast enough.

  “You’ll hang for this, Charity Burke! Or whatever your bloody name is!”

  The outrage receded behind them, and with it the greater portion of Emmat’s fears. For the first time since that grey morning on Gallows Hill, she knew where to go. Knew who she was.

  It was high time the hangman knew it, too.

  * * * *

  The family of the miserable wretch who’d swung that afternoon had already come to collect his body for burial. Summer hummed on the air, broad and golden, and shadows stretched lazy from the treeline. Aside from the angle of the gallows looming against the sky, one would never suspect there had just been a hanging.

  Bartholomew Vane stood unhooded, coiling a length of rope into the bed of his cart while the chaplain and the undersheriff continued a neighbourly debate on the merits of foreign beer. Foreign, of course, meant anything brewed outside the county. Somewhere like Tyburn or London, the two would have departed for more urgent tasks by now. Here, there was nowhere else any of them needed to be, and that included himself.

  The pinion straps came next. Vane folded them away, frowning at the glint of gold that reminded him of failure from the smallest finger of his left hand. It was a reminder he forced himself to accept.

  As if you needed this or an executioner’s hood to know you’re unwanted.

  Catherine Dew. She had been the first.

  Her sunny face had dimples that nearly came out the other side, and a smile meant only for him. Vane had smiled, too, that year. Somehow, she’d convinced her parents to accept the idea of a hangman for a son-in-law. As soon as he saved enough money, he could go t
o her father.

  Then there was Jonas Hollow.

  The black hood hung limp now over the side of the cart, and he took it up, rolling it into a tight bundle.

  The fire had taken more than his eye. He’d watched Catherine swallow down her horror the first time she’d seen his face. Then there was pity. Excuses for being away when he came to call. That last February morning where her mother stood in the doorway of their house, just shaking her head.

  Vane thrust the rolled hood down into a saddlebag. A man should know better than to entertain foolish hopes.

  But you didn’t. Did you.

  His wild idea to bargain with Emmat Bird for her brother’s life that day was a product of just such foolishness, piled together with lust, resentment, desperation, and any number of other things that should never fuel a decision.

  But she’d seen him. Despite his best attempts at avoiding it. Seen him and stayed. Her green eyes held nothing but a solemn understanding. Perhaps even a look of kinship, though he wasn’t sure in what way such a thing could be true.

  I’ll have you, husband. I’ll have you.

  Those were the words that had broken him. Beyond a soft body surrendering to his in the light, beyond those kisses accepting him home, to hear such words had brought him to a dangerous place. A place where he could see things growing anew, covering old, charred ground.

  A place he had no business being.

  When he’d returned to an empty house, he shouldn’t have felt the grip of shock clutching his ribs. She’d been the most pragmatic woman he’d encountered in his life. Of course she’d come to her senses after a day or two when passions cooled along with her head.

  No, this was the life Providence had carved out for Bartholomew Vane. He’d stretch necks for the sheriff until he was no longer able, and then …

  Well. He would worry about that time when it came. Each time he planned for a future, Fate saw fit to laugh at him, and there was no longer sense in it.

  Vane squinted into the ripening sun as it headed west. If he left now, he might make it home by tomorrow afternoon.

  The sheriff and chaplain meandered in his direction while he gave the cinch on his borrowed horse a final tug of adjustment.

  “And how fares Mrs Vane?” the chaplain asked on their approach.

  Vane scowled. The cassocked old man only meant to be polite, but he’d jabbed a finger into the meat of Vane’s ugliest bruise.

  “You have a wife?” In typical fashion, the undersheriff compounded it. “How’d you come by one of those, Ketch? D’you put out both her eyes?” The man slapped a thigh with his palm, piggy eyes gleaming with rude mirth.

  “Bugger off, Reed.”

  “Ho ho!” He planted fists on his hips. “That bad, eh?”

  Vane ignored the undersheriff’s barbs and raised a level eye to the chaplain. “You know the state of things.” It was almost an accusation.

  “Oh?” the older man said, tipping silver brows. “I thought perhaps you’d resolved the matter.” The chaplain had been the only person to whom he’d confessed even the barest hint of his problems.

  “Now what would make you think that?” He couldn’t contain his irritation, and it lined his words in shadow.

  “Well…” The chaplain shrugged and his eyes had wandered some distant place past Vane’s right shoulder.

  The hangman swivelled his head to follow the clerical line of sight. Then the rest of him turned. He swallowed, and it was the only way to keep his heart down where it belonged.

  A white horse rounded the treeline, leading another piebald beast behind it. Vane was blind to all of it however, save the flash of red hair streaming from the head of the black-clad rider.

  No. It won’t be.

  But as horses and rider came on at a walk, he found it increasingly difficult to breathe. He felt his knuckles tighten as his fists clenched, trying to hold back something vast.

  It was.

  And she was smiling.

  He wanted to run to her. He wanted to run away. He wanted to be ill. Possibly all at once. Instead he stood paralysed, staring as though she’d stepped out of some impossible fever dream.

  She swung down from the horse and met the ruts of the road wearing, of all things, a shirt and breeches in solid black. It was as though, setting a torch to all convention, she’d found a smaller mirror to his own clothing and defied anyone to rebuke her for wearing it.

  As if she didn’t have you tied up in knots before.

  Green eyes had room for him alone as she closed the distance. Her grin threatened to split her face just before she opened her mouth to say—

  “Who’s this little dasher, eh?”

  Vane jerked from his stupor, rounding on the undersheriff.

  “That’s my wife, Reed.” Protection flared hot in the snarl he failed to contain. “You’ll watch your tongue.”

  * * * *

  His instant leap to her defence made a lump spring up in Emmat’s throat. She’d gambled everything returning this way. He could turn her in. Right now, and there wouldn’t be a single thing she could do about it. The conversation overheard at Finch’s alehouse guaranteed nothing and trepidation coiled in her veins.

  When he turned back to her, the undamaged side of his face shifted into something she couldn’t quite name. Concern? Confusion perhaps?

  It was all she could do not to fling herself into his arms, but she halted herself a long pace away, instead. His rejection of the other man’s taunts didn’t mean he was ready to embrace the woman who’d abandoned him.

  The storm of his gaze bore down and everything she’d planned to say fled her. He took a step in her direction, looming but not aggressive. As if he were the one trembling on the edge.

  “What happened to you?” He pitched the question low, for the two of them alone and not the pairs of raised eyebrows on the other side of the cart.

  Emmat came the last of the way, closing the gap with a step so the fabric of their clothing brushed together.

  He either will or he won’t, Emmat.

  She trained her gaze on his chest. Looking him in the eyes now was sure to tie her tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought what I wanted was somewhere else. It wasn’t.”

  Her gut tightened for the response, but what came was no tirade or curse. A knuckle lifted her chin, gentle as morning.

  Her husband’s face so close had her blinking back scalding emotion.

  “Then where is it?” he said

  “Here.” Emmat’s vision blurred. “With you.”

  The kiss became the sum of her world.

  It stole the gasp from her lungs and the earth from beneath her feet. The flare of the slanting sun, the murmurs of the other men, all receded. Vane drew her up into their union, arms circling, solid and right, his mouth calling her home. The last of her defences fell to the nurturing of that unconfinable wellspring which made such disparate beasts as fear and longing, as a thief and a lonely hangman, grow together into one rough-hewn, inseparable whole.

  To love.

  Emmat fell, at last, to love.

  The trouble with falling, however, is always the abrupt stop at the end.

  Reality yanked her out of the lucent haze of belonging with the sound of a male voice.

  “No,” it said, jarring her eyes open, “look at her.”

  Emmat blinked into the afternoon sun, and Vane turned his upper body back to the man he’d rebuked at her arrival.

  The other two had been brewing an argument in the blurry background of Emmat and Vane’s kiss, and now it came to a head.

  “I know you,” he said, meeting her eye now that he had their attention. “You’re that Bird woman. Red Bird, that’s the one. There’s ten pounds on your head.”

  A shadow flickered over the second man’s face at this, and Emmat started, only now seeing him for the same chaplain who’d come to Vane’s house. He knew. Knew her name. Everything. And if they’d just finished a hanging, and this was the chaplain
, the other man must be …

  Undersheriff.

  The arms around her waist circled tighter along with the unseen fist clutching her lungs. It seemed a cruel joke that the first time in her life Emmat knew the warmth of a man poised to protect her, it had to be chased by the chill of fear.

  “First you insult my wife, then you accuse, Reed?” Somehow Vane managed to loom and threaten even without letting her out of his grip. The rumble of his voice put an unhelpful flutter in her pulse.

  But if they take you now, Emmat…if they take you now…

  She was conscious now more than ever of her belly pressed against Vane’s hip.

  Reed snorted. “If this land-rover’s your wife, Ketch, then I’m the bloody Archbishop of—”

  “Stop,” the chaplain said, red-faced at having to curtail the blasphemy. Flustered clerical hands moved to straighten a cassock. “It’s as they say. I married them myself.” Reed squinted at the older man, who added, “Or are you saying you believe I would join a lawfully appointed executioner in Our Lord’s holy matrimony to a criminal?” Silver brows rose in a challenge.

  Vane’s fingers were making a fist in the back of her shirt, and she could all but hear the undersheriff’s teeth grind. But he had done it. By some unhoped-for mercy, the chaplain had lied for her. For them.

  “It’s all a bit coincidental, if you take my meaning.” Some of the aggression waned from Reed’s eye contact, though he was loathe to surrender his point. “An unescorted young woman shows up dressed like a man, with a head of flaming red hair? Well?”

  Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth, but Vane uncurled an arm to gesture at the man.

  “As though there were no other women in the whole of England with red hair.” He wheeled them to face the unassuaged Reed as a pair, one hand holding her close at the waist. “Be serious,” he went on, “why would she come riding straight for the hangman and the undersheriff, if it’s as you say?”

  Why indeed.

  The same man who’d threatened to find her and turn her over to the law if she dared to run was now doing his utmost to lead the baying hounds in the opposite direction.