by Sonia Velton
“Be at peace, Esther,” he said. “I am.”
I almost believed him. There was no rage, or even bitterness, in his voice.
“How can you say that? You are not guilty.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” He glanced down at the blood-streaked cloth and closed his hand around it, as if embarrassed by what it revealed.
“It does matter,” I insisted. “Why did you not tell them who cut the silk?”
Bisby sighed and shook his head. “You know that I am ill?”
“You have jail fever. You would recover if we could only get you out of this place. You need to rest and eat, that is all.”
“No, Esther. I’m dying. If I will die anyway, what purpose would it serve for another to be hanged in my place?”
“If they are guilty, they should hang,” I said, surprised at my own vehemence.
“And what if they are just a child?”
I stared at him for a moment, not understanding what he meant. Bisby started to cough, wiping at his mouth with his handkerchief. I looked away. The daylight was dipping below the circular window, making it glow as if the room had its own miniature sun. It was precisely the time of day that Bisby and I had so often spent together, snatched moments before the light faded.
“What I ask myself,” continued Bisby, when he had caught his breath, “is what my sister would have wanted. I know she would not want her son to die so that I could live out a few more weeks coughing into a cloth.” He balled up the handkerchief and threw it into the fireplace where it hung on the edge of the empty grate.
“She would have wanted you both to live. You should have told the court what happened. They would not hang a child.” Even as I said the words, I knew they were not true. Bisby lifted his eyes to mine, infinitely sad. “You must tell me what happened that night.”
“I could not leave him,” he said helplessly, “any more than I could have left you. Ives and Barnstaple went up the stairs to the garret and I followed them. I wanted to get Ives out of harm’s way, that’s all, I swear it. By the time I got to the attic, they were already standing by the loom and Ives had the cutlass in his hand. I went straight over to him to take the knife from him, but Barnstaple was too quick. I fought him for a while, but Barnstaple held me back. Then he said, ‘We’re making a man of Ives tonight, aren’t we, Ives?’ That was it. Ives sliced through the warp with the cutlass, then cut the silk on the roller, as if I might somehow try to tie each of the severed threads back together.”
Bisby gave a mirthless laugh, which set him off coughing again. He patted at his waistcoat, looking for another handkerchief. I handed him mine. He took it carefully, smiling slightly at its delicate lace, as if he thought it a strange object to have in a place like Newgate.
“But how could Ives have done that? He had worked on the silk himself. It was your silk.”
“He is a child wanting to be a man. He did what he thought the other weavers expected of him. He probably thought he was being brave, sacrificing his own work for a cause that Barnstaple had told him was noble and true.”
“We should have made Ives give evidence. He could have told them that Barnstaple made him do it.”
“Then they would have hanged us all. Esther, please, there’s no purpose to this.”
He was right. Nothing now could be changed. We could only say goodbye.
“You are going to die because I fell in love with you.” That one statement was both the joy and the tragedy of my life. And his. “I made you set up the loom. I pushed you to weave the silk with my selfish whims and demands. If I had left you alone you would have finished your master piece and become a master weaver. But I couldn’t leave you alone. I have brought you to this.” It was my voice that cracked then, broken in two by a sob that made me slip from my chair to his feet.
“No!” I was surprised by the strength in his ragged voice. “Don’t say that.” He moved to the edge of his seat and grasped my hand, pulling it up, forcing my eyes to follow. “Knowing you has been the best thing in my life. I helped you because I wanted to. I helped you because every moment I spent in that garret with you was worth a lifetime anywhere else. I helped you because you are the most courageous, talented, beautiful woman I have ever known.”
If I had tried to speak I would have wept, cried tears of love and grief at his feet, so I clasped my hands over his own and brought them to my lips, kissing his cracked skin.
“I don’t want to have regrets,” he said, resting his forehead on my hair. “I want to die thinking of what I had, not what is being taken from me.”
I lifted my face to his. For a moment we were as close as we had been that night in the garret. “You will be a master weaver, Bisby.”
“Oh, Esther, how could that possibly be?”
“The Weavers’ Company has seen Blackberry and Wild Rose. Mr. Arnaud took it to them. They said that they had rarely seen anything of such skill and complexity. They will admit you as a master.”
For a moment he almost smiled, but the expression twisted on his face into unfathomable grief. He gave my hands a final squeeze, then released them.
The door opened and the ordinary stepped inside, clothed all in black. I began to rise, but he smiled and shook his head as if I had no need to be ashamed of my sorrow.
He walked over to us and knelt next to Bisby. “We must spend some time in prayer,” he said.
I stood up, but Bisby’s hand caught at my skirts. “My nephew,” he said, his voice breathy with concern. “I know what he did was wrong, but he has no one now.”
“I understand,” I said. “I will do what I can to help him. For your sake.”
He nodded. “Goodbye, dearest Esther,” he said, looking up at me. The blue of his eyes had disappeared, swallowed into the unending darkness.
The ordinary took out his book of psalms and began to murmur:
“O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?”
45
Sara
I stood in front of the bed I’d given birth on, then bent to smooth the sheets one final time. When I had finished, I placed Madam’s favorite cushion on top. It was covered with our embroidery. Endless hours of sitting and sewing, the tiny stitches we had made joining our lives together. And now they were to be picked apart.
Madam sat humming at her dressing table, quietly defiant about what the day would bring. Her little melody was a bright thread through a somber moment. The grandfather clock struck ten, each chime bringing us closer to the appointed hour of Bisby Lambert’s death. Madam’s humming stopped when the clock did.
“It’s almost time,” she said. Her voice was fragile, wavering. When she tried to pick up her brush, she fumbled and it clattered to the floor.
I bent down next to her and picked it up. “Here, let me.”
I uncoiled her hair, as I had a hundred times before, and drew the brush down its length over and over. Each strand was a different shade, from flaxen to copper. The color of autumn.
I picked up the lavender pomade, the glass bottom of the pot visible through the last of the cream. “We shall have to get you some more of this,” I said, with forced brightness, even though I knew that my part in her life was over.
In the mirror, I saw her nod at me and smile. I scooped out the waxy ointment with my finger and gently rubbed it into her hair. She closed her eyes and at first I thought I gave her comfort. Then I saw her tears, even though her eyes were closed so tightly they wrinkled her smooth pale skin. A tear tracked down her cheek, leaving a shiny path through her face powder.
“Don’t cry, madam,” I said, my voice pitched high by distress. I had seen every side to her. Her petulance and vanity, her willfulness and anger. The sheer beauty of her nakedness and the coarse reality of her bodily functions. I had fought against her for so long that her weakness was the one thing I could not bear to
see. “You have never cried, madam, not in all the time I have known you.”
She opened her eyes and smiled. “You are wrong,” she said. “I cried the morning your daughter was born.” And I remembered her then: arms bloody up to her lace sleeves, hair plastered to her glistening forehead, wiping away tears cried for me and my child.
I pressed her damp cheeks with powder and pinned her hair in the style that flattered her most. Then I went to her wooden chest and opened it. Under the dried sprigs of lavender were her summer gowns. I lifted up layers of damask and linen until I found the gown I was looking for. When I held up the flowered cream silk tabby, she smiled and nodded.
* * *
The scent of lavender. It is enough even now to take me back to her. The slip of her heavy hair through my fingers and the marble whiteness of her skin as I bathed her. Her lingering presence in a room, long after she had gone.
Esther
“Just threepence to you, my sweet.”
The old woman gave Moll a crinkled smile and held the pamphlet out to her. Moll dropped the coins into her hand and plucked at the paper.
His “last dying words,” yet he was not even dead.
“How can you buy that nonsense?” I snapped at her. “You must have money to burn.”
She flashed me a look from under her feathery lashes, something between shame and defiance. A look I had seen before, many times.
More people were beginning to arrive, the crowd thickening around the makeshift scaffold. Tutting and perspiring in the spring sunshine, a man hammered nails into wooden struts while the sheriff looked on, giving directions with a flick of his wrist. A woman ambled through the spectators with a large tray hung around her neck, inviting them to buy her freshly baked buns, her singsong voice a playful contrast to the somber ring of the hammer blows.
When the gallows were finished, there was something about its jutting corners and vast wooden frame that reminded me of a loom. The sheriff draped the platform with a black cloth, then pulled out his pocket watch and checked it against the clock hanging outside the Salmon and Ball. A quarter to eleven.
Only fifteen minutes until the appointed hour of Bisby’s death. So many people had arrived to see him hang that we were being pushed ever closer to the scaffold. A front-row seat to a show I could not bear to see. This was not how the story was supposed to end. It was the Idle Apprentice who ended at Tyburn, not the Industrious one.
“There you are,” said Elias, pushing through the crowd toward us. Finet followed him, his arms full of the hawker’s cakes, handing them out as if we were at a cock fight. I refused one. How could I eat when this whole spectacle disgusted me? Finet offered my cake to Moll who took it greedily, saying, “’Tis a shame Miss Kemp was too ill to come and see this.” Indeed, it seemed that all of Spitalfields was out in carnival mood that day. No one was expected to work, not Moll or Monsieur Finet, or any other servant or journeyman in our parish or the next. Every so often some notable man in the community would come over to shake my husband’s hand, congratulating him with a smile and a clap on the back, as though he had begun the movement to abolish slavery, not condemned an innocent man to die. I stood beside him like a marionette, a nodding Judy to Elias’ Punch.
In the distance, there was the rumble of wheels over cobblestones, becoming louder. The ordinary of Newgate sat at the front of the cart, an enormous black crow obscuring Bisby from the eager crowd, who craned their necks and jostled for the best view. The constable rode alongside them on horseback, a large pike held aloft in one of his hands. In a moment, the cart drew up alongside the gallows, inexpertly at first, the driver overshooting where he was meant to stop, then backing up, amid shouts from the sheriff and men scattering around them.
Many journeymen weavers had been following the cart and clustered around it when it stopped, offering Bisby a pot of ale or an apple. Those men might have been there that night, carrying cutlasses and pistols into Spital Square, intent on looting and troublemaking. Yet here they were, paying homage to Bisby’s tragedy with a measure of gin offered to the condemned, before they bought themselves a bag of gingerbread nuts and went on their way.
The ordinary rose, slightly unsteady in the cart, and began to sing. His low, resonant voice quietened the crowd as he chanted the verses of a psalm. Bisby sat at the back of the cart, wearing a white linen shirt over his clothes. He hung his head and touched a white lace handkerchief to his lips as the ordinary sang. Despite the horrified enjoyment of the crowd and the suffocating crush of the voyeurs of death, I felt connected to him. There was a part of me that was with him.
The last prayers. There was time for one more prayer, even as the ordinary helped him to stand and the rope was tied around him, thrown up and over the gibbet. Bisby spoke for a few moments but I barely heard his last words. They scattered around me, like leaves in the wind. But Moll started to cry, great noisy sobs and sniffs, which earned her a kindly glance from the sheriff standing on the platform. I hadn’t thought the girl could do anything else to shock me, but her hypocrisy took the breath from my lungs. Next to me, Elias’ face was still as a painting. I never saw so much as a crack in that expressionless veneer the whole time he watched Bisby die.
Bisby seemed bold, defiant even, as they pulled the cap down over his head. It was like snuffing out a candle, one moment burning brightly, then nothing. I closed my eyes tightly—without his face there was nothing left to see in the world. Elias’ fingers dug into my arm, harder and harder, trying to force up my lids to look upon the life that my foolish vanity had destroyed. I would not open them. Silently I prayed.
The crack of the whip. I heard the startled horses lurch forward to pull the cart from underneath him. Then there was no sound at all, save the creak of rope on wood and the dull chimes of the clock outside the tavern. My own heart seemed to slow with his. Grief devours time: I could not measure seconds or minutes, or know when to open my eyes. The crowd grew restless, persuading me it must be over. I didn’t realize that even dying becomes tiresome, that there is an eternity of dangling, kicking, and pedaling. A desperate search for purchase in the empty air.
When I thought I could not resist the urge to run to him any longer, a boy broke free of the crowd, wrenching his arm away from the constable when he tried to stop him. About twelve years old, hair a sandy brown mop. He jumped at Bisby and clung to him as if he were drowning and only Bisby could save him. The gibbet bowed under their joint weight and, for a few moments, Bisby and Ives hung there together.
“A blessing,” said someone behind me. “Quicker that way.”
* * *
Even as my own world seemed to stop dead, the relentless minutes still passed. Elias retired to a coffeehouse with some other master weavers, and Moll and Finet went back to Spital Square, but I stayed, unable to leave him. The crowd dispersed, and the hawkers packed up their wares. The sounds of the street rose up to fill the unnatural quiet. The surgeons came for the body and the last of the onlookers squabbled over who should keep the contents of his pockets. After a while, there was nothing left of what had gone before, save a sandy-haired boy sitting alone on the edge of a platform swathed in black.
46
Sara
It was like going back in time. Retracing steps that I had taken years ago. I sat in a cart trundling along the Old London Road, being sucked back toward my beginning. The baby sat on my knee staring at hills and houses and roads she had never seen before, but which were as familiar to me as the swirls of hair on the back of her head.
I was between worlds, neither leaving nor arriving. Stuck in transition, as my daughter had been on the night she was born. Madam’s house had been my place of safety, but even the sanctuary of the womb does not last forever. It had not been easy to leave. I sat in Madam’s room long after they had all left. I had never been in that house completely alone. The silence was an unfamiliar companion, usually chased from kitchen to garret an
d back again by the clanking boom of the loom, the scrape and clatter of pots and pans. I almost expected to hear Madam’s shrill voice calling from the parlor below for a boiled egg or an extra log for the fire. I had stayed sitting there until the grandfather clock rang its eleven low chimes, reminding me that time runs out for us all.
Now I raised my hand and called for the cart to stop. The steady plod of the horse’s hooves slowed and we drew up alongside the end of a long drive that stretched toward a fine house sitting on the crest of a hill. The man opposite me looked from me to the house and back again, perhaps wondering what business I might have at such a grand place. I climbed down, watching my step, pressing the baby to my shoulder with one hand and holding my bag with the other. I stood at the side of the road for a moment, watching the cart disappear into the woods at the edge of the fields, then began to walk up the drive toward the house.
As I got closer, memories started to build in my head, like the blocks children play with. One on top of another, piecing my childhood back together. I walked round to the kitchens at the back of the house and stood in the sunlight for a moment, watching from some yards away. My baby’s patience with the journey was wearing thin and she rooted at my chest and muttered small complaints into my shawl.
I had such a short distance left to go. Only a few steps to the kitchen door, but it was as if I stood on the edge of a cliff. While I contemplated the jump, the door opened and a woman walked out into the little kitchen garden. She had a basket hung over one arm, which swung as she walked along the flowerbed, inspecting the rows of lavender and herbs. She was singing and the sound of her voice was like a familiar cloak wrapped around my shoulders. She bent to cut rosemary and sage and put the clippings into her basket. Once she had sung the first verse of the song, she paused and made do with humming the rest.