Court of Foxes

by Christianna Brand

  And it came. The sodden figure raised its head, the dim eyes squinted in an effort of concentrated thought. ‘Not — true…’ And he leered over woozily, with blood-shot eyes to where Dio gazed back, imploring. ‘No — witnesses… Not — true…’ And at last, with a visible effort he raised his voice to instil into it the old note of absolute command. ‘No — witnesses!’

  Now when once again she came to herself, she was in the court no longer nor in the dark corridor outside, but in her own bed at home; and it was Catti who sat by her side and tenderly bathed her aching forehead and the bruises on her face and hands, and for the first time called her Madam Vixen and smiled at her, though she smiled with lips swollen from weeping. ‘Forgive me, Madam Vixen fach; all you could do for him you have done and it would have meant your life if you’d been believed.’

  ‘I didn’t know it, Catti, till I heard you speaking of it to Jenny. I never thought of it…’

  ‘You saved me also; for if I’d spoken, Dio would have killed me for it.’

  ‘But Catti, it was all in vain?’

  ‘In vain. The old man said that you lied to save your paramour, trusting to your womanhood and your condition to save your own life.’

  ‘So for what I did — he dies!’

  She shrugged miserably. ‘Ah, Madam Vixen, why do we deceive ourselves? He dies because he’s a highwayman: Tregaron or no Tregaron, now that they have him they’ll never let him go.’

  She went to see him only once again; with Catti, now her devoted friend, David himself protecting them, she braved a new and more terrible squalor leading to the dungeons where, as the Black Toby had warned her, he was now herded, as a convicted felon due for execution, with a dozen other wretches, like cattle into a single cell. No fashionable ladies now: and no wonder… He crept to the bars, lurched there sick and heavy, muttered only one word: ‘Laudanum.’

  They took counsel; for a day or two starved him of it, desperately hoping to bring back the old fire, the old wish to live. But he seemed beyond hope: he who had lived with high daring from day to day, now seemed from day to day, little by little, since he was to die — to die. They gave it up at last, conscious perhaps that it was less for him than for themselves that they tried to force him back to life and recognition; to cling to the old trust in him, the pride in him, the admiration — the love. ‘He is less than we thought him,’ said Gilda to Dio, privately. ‘Why should he suffer the terrors of death — since he himself chooses to stifle it in drugs — just so that we should think otherwise.’ And she sent him red roses, daily, with enough hidden in each bunch for another day’s bemusement. More they dared not give him, lest he use it to end things altogether. And even that… But she could not bring herself to it; a foolish hope still stirred in them all that the fox who had run through the moonlit valley and mountains so bold and free, must even yet summon up the old, bright courage and cheat the hounds once more.

  They would not let her go near him when the day came.

  She was now seven months gone with child and ill and hysterical with the horrors of the past weeks: lying sick and languid, a prey to nightmares, on her frilly white bed in the Bijou with no comfort but the arms of her beloved when he could come to her. They were not easy days for him either, poor David; torn between the railings of his mother, the tears of his sister, the stony resolution of Lady Blanche and her family, clinging to their rights in him. ‘But I’ll go there, Gilda, and if there be anything that can be done for him. I’ll do it.’ That it had been she who in fact had fired, the shot that had killed his brother, he refused to believe, or at any rate to seem to believe; her action in standing up in court to accuse herself, he regarded with deep admiration, despite the pain it brought him. With the gang, he remained on terms of a sort of friendship, all of them united in support of his half-brother, and their leader. ‘Only,’ he said to Gilda, ‘once all this is over — then it must be the end between you and them, as it will be the end between them and me.’

  ‘They’ll go back to the Cwrt. What am I to them that they should ever wish to see me again?’

  ‘You called yourself their leader once to me,’ he said. ‘They call you the Vixen.’

  ‘And so I was their leader.’ Sick, peevish, over-excited, she snatched up a mirror and looked into her own white face, pale and puffed now with child-bearing, with sleeplessness and unavailing tears. ‘So I was! — the Vixen, the Fox’s mate, running with them over the mountains, leading them all to success, never failing them; not a silly, spoilt vaporing woman, saying Yes, David! No, David! Yes, David, I’ll stay here as you order me! No, David, I’ll not go there if you bid me not…!’ And she struggled up off the bed. ‘I will go. I’ll stay with him, at least, to the end. Let him at least see me as he dies!’

  ‘Gilda, for God’s sake! — he’ll not see you.’

  ‘But if he should look for me…’

  ‘He’ll not look for you, Gilda.’

  ‘You don’t know that. He may — and if I were to be not there…’ And she stumbled across to her dressing-table and took out the small, crumpled piece of paper that he had sent to her that night with his bunch of red roses — the night he had offered his life to save her from a moment of humiliation — and stared down at it wildly and thrust it into the bosom of her dress, close to her heart.

  He got up slowly to his feet. He said: ‘I have known it for a long time. You love him.’

  ‘I love no one but you,’ she said. ‘But he…’ And she fumbled for the paper again and held it out to him blindly. ‘But he…’

  I will love you till I die.

  He persuaded her at last; or believed himself to have done so, believed her to have taken a calming drug and to be sleeping. She waited till he had gone with Dio y Diawl and the rest of them, then got up and dressed herself. ‘Come Jake, we must go and very quietly. Is my mother safe out of hearing?’ They crept out of the house and into the coach he had found for them while she dressed. ‘Drive to Tyburn Way — where it crosses the way with the street out from the square. We’ll wait there in the coach,’ she said to the boy, ‘and see how he passes. And if — if it seems as though he might need me…’

  ‘He promised to wave to me, Gilda, as he went by. I hope,’ said the little boy miserably, ‘I hope he does not.’

  ‘I have sent him red roses,’ said Gilda, forgetful of all griefs but her own. ‘If he carries them…’ If he carried them it should be a sign that he was enough aware at least to make it imperative for her to be close by the gallows when he died, lest he wish for a last sight of her.

  The highway was lined with people, more thinly to their right where the Oxford Road and ‘the heavy hill’ of Holborn led almost without curving from the church of St Sepulchre close by to Newgate, directly to the corner of Hyde Park where the gallows stood; the corner called in criminals’ slang The World’s End — more thickly to their left where, ringed round by open galleries for the sightseers, she could discern the tops of the three posts from whose cross-beams the hanging ropes were slung. ‘Where is David, Gilda? — and Dio and the rest?’

  ‘They’ll wait at St Sepulchre’s to speak to him when the cart stops there; and run by his side the rest of the way to be near him.’

  ‘Will the bellman preach to him across the wall of St Sepulchre’s?’

  ‘I dare say,’ said Gilda; (and much good that would do any of them! He at any rate was likely to benefit more by the drink at the Half Way House.)

  ‘They say that girls go all in white and strew flowers before the carts…’

  Nor would that be any more appropriate, she thought; half sardonic, half in bitter tears — praying only that he might at least be aware, not sunk in the unworthy slough of his laudanum dreams.

  ‘Why does he have no coach? Couldn’t we have paid for it for him? Why need he come in a cart with the ordinary malefactors?’

  ‘He would have it so,’ she said, laconically. The fact was that they hadn’t been able to get the idea through to him; he had simply sat s
tupidly, they had reported, or thrown maudlin arms around the necks of other prisoners and declared that he would die with his friends. David, tireless in generosity, had been to the Governor himself — such arrangements were easy enough, all prison servants paid for their appointments recouping themselves with money extracted from the prisoners and their friends. The Governor had accepted the bribe but made no promises except that the prisoner might take with him, in coach or cart according to how he finally elected to travel, his own coffin and a woollen shroud: by law, for the sake of the trade, wool was obligatory for all shrouds. Asked with an attempt at casualness whether friends might remove the body for private burial, he had replied, however (with evident regret for further chances of milched gold beyond his powers to grasp), that no such arrangement would be possible. The matter was in any event not in his hands but in those of the Sheriff; and in this case there would be no getting round the Sheriff. There had been too many cases of felons cut down only half hanged (by bribery of the hangman) and rushed round the corner for waiting surgeons to revive. Not that they often succeeded but it was setting the law at nought, which was apparently strangely painful to the feelings of the present Sheriff; and moreover he had himself had experience with the gentry of the road, and the Fox was a feather — or a brush, said the Governor, laughing heartily at this pleasantry in his cap. He had specially appointed an officer to satisfy himself that prisoners were dead before they were cut down; and they were to be handed over for interment in the common grave, or to the hospital—

  ‘Dear God!’ said David, ‘—not that!’

  The Governor shrugged. What matter once a man was dead whether he came beneath the anatomizer’s knife or be thrown naked into a shallow grave, scraped out under the greasy cobbles of the highway. ‘There is no sum,’ said David, slowly, ‘that would not be paid for his body — still with breath in it.’

  ‘The Sheriff looks to be Lord Mayor one day; and anyway is already rich,’ said the Governor. ‘Put away your purse, my lord. No money will buy Y Cadno’s life.’

  By no means all of this had David told Gilda; by no means all of what she knew did she tell the little boy. ‘If he rides in a coach, the people won’t see him,’ she said. ‘It may be that he prefers to — to be seen. But he will have his coffin and decent burial…’

  ‘If a fox must die, he should die in the country,’ said the boy, ‘and lie under the heather and become a part of the hills he used to roam…’

  To their right, the long road by which he must come at last; to their left the open galleries ringing the Triple Tree, where the old women, ‘the Tyburn pew-openers’ would be collecting the half-crowns of those who could pay to see the fun from a comfortable vantage point. Today there were a round dozen to be hanged: four carts, three men to each, with the ‘hempen cravats’ all ready, about their throats, to be thrown up over the gallows bar and there fastened taut while the carts jerked away leaving the puppet bodies dancing in the air. She stood leaning out of the coach window to see above the heads of the crowd. Far, far to their right, an echo of the bell tolling at St Sepulchre’s; closer to, the first rumblings of the uproar that greeted the leading cart: a thin wave of sound rolling nearer and nearer, crashing about their ears at last as the cart came into sight. Pulled by a stout horse, the driver gaily cracking his whip and bowing left and right with mocking salutation to the mob who jogged alongside, they came — three men, faced backwards, perilously rocking as the wooden wheels lurched and clattered deafeningly over the cobbles, stooping to clutch for support at the low sides of the cart. One man hugged the coffin standing upright beside him, wearing already the shroud bought for him by his friends; the two others took with them to their deaths only what they stood up in — the dirty rags of old finery or humble frieze, good enough to be stolen later by Jack Ketch from their dead bodies, or so filthy and worthless as to go into the pit with them.

  The little boy shrank and trembled. ‘Oh, Gilda — is he there?’

  It gave her strength to have to be of comfort to him. She craned to look. She could not see their faces but there was no green coat among them nor one of russet; and one of these two he must wear, for he had no other. To think, she thought, that I must know him only by a piece of silk! — I who have… And she turned her mind from those memories of his lithe strong body in her arms, of the violence, the passion without tenderness, the terrible joy of his love-making. ‘He’s not there,’ she said to the child. ‘Not yet.’

  The cart passed them, passed on out of sight. And a roar went up around the gallows far to their left, that swelled into a howl of excitement, falling suddenly to a sort of moan and then silence; she sensed in the distance the shudder of the three tall posts as the cart pulled away. But the shrill uproar was coming again from her right and the second cart approached: no russet coat, no green — only a man dressed like a bridegroom all in white, who grinned and capered and waved his hat to the crowd so drunk that he hardly knew what he did; and another who declaimed as he rode that he repented his sins and hoped for mercy and begged them that saw him to take heed, from his fate, that the wages of sin was death: and one that knelt huddled, and wept or prayed — who knew? And they passed and the tall posts shuddered again; and the third cart came in sight…

  Still he was not there; and a sick hope rose in her heart that fought, however, with a hideous longing that she should see him, that it should all be over, that the unendurable tension should come to an end. ‘He’s famous,’ she said to Jake, huddled beside her, his arm around her waist to support himself, his head poked out of the window, craning to see. ‘Of course he’ll come last — we should have thought of that and spared ourselves this much wretchedness of expectation at least.’

  And the outcry came again, rolling down the cobbled highway towards them like a tidal wave, louder this time, on a strange note that rose to exultation and fell away into a sort of groan… Because he fails them, she thought. Because he doesn’t bow to right and left and bandy jokes with them as befits a famous highwayman. She had sent him the drug herself, but, torn between love and un-love as she had ever been, it was horrible to find him at the last unworthy of such admiration as at least had never failed her. For a moment she wondered whether somewhere, hidden away beneath all this, there could not be still some plot for a last-minute escape; but she knew the gang too well, she knew that they could not have concealed it from her if there had been any hope; she knew that they too were heart-broken at the discovery of those feet of clay.

  And the cart rumbled into sight and was passing them; and she saw…

  She saw not the green coat nor the russet: but a blur, a blaze of red, a blaze of red roses that he carried crushed close against his body as though his heart had broken and its red blood stained all his breast. ‘Dear God!’ she said to the little boy. ‘Yes — he’s there!’

  He wore the green coat — the green coat that he had worn that night when first he came to the playhouse and had sent her red roses with that message so oft repeated: Till I die…! And now he was to die — with her red roses clasped to his heart. ‘We must be there! Drive on, drive closer!’ she cried to the coachman, reaching out of the window to call above the uproar, up to the box. ‘I must be near.’ And she pulled Jake in with her, falling back with a jerk as the vehicle jolted into action, the man cursing as he fought his way round the edge of the crowd, fanned out now about the execution place. ‘Jake, don’t look, don’t witness it, you mustn’t have this to remember all your life. But I must be near him, I must be there!’

  He was wretched, bewildered, huddled in the seat beside her. ‘Why wasn’t he bowing, Gilda, and looking about him and making jokes? He — he stood there as though he were — as though he were already half dead. He never lifted his head…’

  ‘He isn’t a fool, dearest, who would spend his last moments in silly bravado — whatever he might say to cheer you when your heart broke for him. He — he is at his prayers.’ She improvised: ‘He told me in the prison that when the time came to sta
nd before his Maker, he would repent of his sins and pray. He said he had much to answer for; and that was true, Jake.’ And she leaned out to call to the man, for the coach had stopped: ‘Can you get no closer?’

  ‘No closer, she says! Have I not mown down half the populace already and the horses frightened out of their wits? Besides,’ said the driver, ‘while we’ve fought our way here, the cart has gone unimpeded. They are already beneath the Tree.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ she prayed, ‘Oh, God! Let me have courage — give me this last moment of courage and I’ll ask no more of you! Give me courage — to see: and to be seen!’ And she forced the child back, blocking the window with her body, standing up, lifting her white face, throwing back her veil to let him know her by that flame which in the dark playhouse of those other days, had caught his eye and all eyes by its ambience. The coach had drawn up behind a group of spectators standing in an entrance to the galleries; over their heads he could see her if he would but look up: would see at least the brightness of her hair and know that she was there. ‘Gareth! Gareth y Cadno! I’m here, I’m with you! Raise your head, look at me!’ Across the space where the three posts stood, she could see Catti and the other women, huddled, piteously weeping; posted somewhere near the Chit, she knew, would be the men, ready to run forward and swing upon the dancing legs, as he slowly strangled in the jerking noose. A plot, she prayed, a rescue! — even at this last hour. But as she had known that the lolling figure in the dock was truly less than half-conscious from the effects of the laudanum, so she knew it also now. Well, then — even half-conscious: might there not be a sudden assault, a scattering of the few attendants at this grisly scene, might they not bear him away and out of the crowd to safety? But she saw how densely the people were packed about the small ring kept free for the carts to come and go, and knew also that there could be no escape through that roaring, screaming, gin-soaked mob, howling only for blood. He must die. Would he but die like a man she knew!