The Medea Complex
Page 26
“Brutus, find Grover please, would you?” asks the Chaplain, as he passes the warden. He is old, and I weep at the sight of the wrinkles and grooves I will never get the chance to wear. He comes and sits on the edge of the bed, and lays a hand upon my cheek, turning my face towards his.
“Child, don't cry...”
“Has the reprieve come?” I say the words quietly, barely daring to ask them for fear of the answer that has come many times before.
The Chaplain remains silent, and rummages around in his robes.
“I have come to pray with you, my Child, and ask once again for your confession and repentance. I have also brought you some wine.” His hands shake, and a droplet of water appears on the back of one of them.
A tear.
I sit up, and grasp his leathery hands in mine.
“Father, the reprieve?”
He shakes his head, sadly. He has two tear-tracks down his face, and in that moment, I understand.
Nothing more can be done.
“Child, the transcript was inadmissible. Your wife was classed as insane when she made that ‘confession’. Anything said under hypnosis cannot be taken as fact. There is too much evidence against you, and nobody is willing to go up against an Earl. Especially when a sentence has been passed. I tried. I spoke with Dr Savage and he wholeheartedly believes you innocent. So much in fact, he resigned. He doesn’t feel himself worthy of the title of ‘doctor’ anymore. I believe he is outside, protesting in your name.”
I get out of bed, stand up shakily, and walk the ten steps towards the barred windows. The sky is clear, blue. How can they kill me on such a beautiful day? I turn to the Chaplain, and swallow. “Someone told me that one out of twenty men hanged are innocent. How many is that a year, Father?”
He stutters.
“I don’t know child, I don’t know. But perhaps its better you atone-“
“What for? For the crowd? For you? In a few hours, I shall pay the penalty for a crime I did not commit with that of my life. I do not need nor want to make a false confession to appease the conscience of those that will stand idly by and watch me executed.”
The Chaplain looks pale, and brings a hand to his mouth. Just as he is about to say something, we are interrupted by another knock on the door.
“Good Morning, Sir.” A large, blonde-haired man approaches me, and bows respectfully. He holds a long leather strap in his hands, and in that instant my legs fail me. Just as I am about to drop upon the floor, he reaches forward and grabs me under my arms, helping me over to the bed. “My name is Mr James Berry, and I have been appointed as your executioner.” Behind him stand a large group of men: Brutus, Grover and the prison Governor the only people I recognise amongst the fourteen or so men.
“I am innocent,” I whisper. “I am innocent, you must believe me. Oh God, oh god...”
This time, when he grabs hold of my arms it is not to help me, but to condemn me. He silently works the strap around my upper arms, securing them to the sides of my body.
Oh my god, it’s happening, they're going to kill me...
“I am innocent, I am innocent, I am innocent, oh God please, do not let them hang an innocent man...”
The Chaplain begins to recite some sort of sermon as hands gently lift me, and I recognise some words and phrases from the burial service yesterday. My mind shifts, and I am half-carried, half-dragged across the cell, surrounded by men whose names I do not know to a song of everlasting love, forgiveness, and repentance. Somewhere close by, a baby is crying. One of the warders pushes on the side of the wardrobe, and I barely have time to wonder at his action before the world goes white. There is something upon my face, and now I am blind, I can’t see, where are they taking me...
The sound underneath my feet becomes hollow, and I am stopped.
Someone wraps something around my legs, and a coarse, itchy ring lowers itself around my neck.
“Make sure you pinion him tight now, there’s a good lad.”
Hemp. The hangman’s rope is made of hemp.
Anne. My love, my heart. Wrapping her arms around me, passing over our son. Tears of joy upon an innocents face, a finger the length of my fingernail curling itself around my heart. Two blue eyes blinking at the wonder of a new world, the smell of soft skin. I will love you forever, my son, and I will always be there for you. Your mother and I together, we will watch you grow and fill your life with love until the day we die. For I have found peace and happiness in a place I never expected. My wife, a woman whom I set out to deceive, and yet never would have; a woman who found the words in all the wrong places and believed that I would take her son away from her, never seeing the true letter that is still left, unsent, telling my father the truth of the situation; a woman married to a coward who has signed his own death warrant by never revealing the truth to her. A crunching noise, and agonising pain shoots through my neck, and I can’t breathe, it hurts, my ears are ringing, and I can smell my child, I can breathe his essence.
You bitch.
I go to heaven with the scent of my son's hair on my breast and the curve of his smile in my eyes.
The Evening Post
THE EVENING POST
SATURDAY, MAY 23RD, 1896.
THE BABY FARMER
Many women, have, under the pressure of a hard fate, taken the life of one child; and others have passively let their lives ebb out through neglect and want of food. But to go on year by year murdering innocent babies in cold blood as a business, is too horrible to think about. Yet that is the record of Mrs. Dyer the fiend who was righteously sentenced to death yesterday at the Old Bailey. Nothing in the records of crime surpasses the story of her career. It is more ghastly even than the deed of the Chicago murderer, HOLMES, who had a scientifically constructed death trap into which he lured victims for the mere lust of killing. Since her incarceration, Mrs. Dyer has endeavoured to persuade the authorities that she was led on by the same kind of homicidal mania. She heard voices telling her to “Do it!”. We know that there are people affected with this form of mental hallucination, but the history of Mrs. dyer upsets any theory of insanity in that direction. She commenced as a baby-farmer years ago, she lived in many towns, and she secured victims by acts the most seductive. She did all this, there is no doubt, simply and solely because of the fees which parents paid her to dispose of their offspring. There are, unfortunately, many people in this Christian country who find it necessary to get rid of the fruits of their shame. We do not say that any of Mrs. Dyer's clients were inhuman enough to expect her to murder the children sent. But we do think that in many cases they were only too ready to accept her statement that for a substantial sum she would act the part of mother to them for the future. That seems to have been the game played by this woman. She did not want a monthly payment, for it was no part of her purpose to keep a baby-farm, and parents who were paying periodically would make enquires or occasional visits to assure themselves of their children’s safety. Mrs. Dyer set herself deliberately to cater for that class of customer which would make the least noise. She took their babies for a set fee, and they never saw them again. The woman sometimes strangled them before she got home. That carpet-bag played a dramatic part in her journeys, and hundreds of people must have seen her with it without suspecting the dreadful nature of its contents. Occasionally. Of course, there were too pertinent inquiries after Mrs. Dyer, and then she would change her place of abode, or even go into a lunatic asylum to evade pursuit – a clever method which obviates all idea of insanity. There is no clear record of how many helpless babes this fiend strangled, but during the trial “a vision was conjured up of perpetual successions of infants, perpetual wanderings from town to town, and perpetual disappearances of the infants by the way”. It only needs to be added that the convict cloaked her infamous traffic in “hypocritical phrases of affection and religion”. Everything shows that the theory of irresponsibility cannot be maintained in her case. She is a low type of the human brute, with intelligence to commit evil,
and a heart hard enough to withstand the assaults of her conscience. There surely can be no person foolish enough to petition against carrying out the extreme penalty of the law.
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