Tapestry

by Fiona McIntosh

  If his generosity in this regard was unexpected, his next words were perplexing.

  ‘For a man in Lord Nithsdale’s situation,’ King George continued in perfect, though halting, English, ‘it was the very best thing he could have done.’

  The King turned away, and with a quick nod from the secretary, Sir George was ushered hurriedly from the chamber.

  ‘I am afraid His Majesty does not extend quite the same munificence to Nithsdale’s daring wife,’ the secretary explained.

  ‘She did what any loyal and loving wife might wish to do, but most would lack the capacity and courage.’

  ‘Indeed,’ the secretary said, sounding indifferent as he led Moseley through the various corridors back to the side entrance through which he had arrived. ‘However, the Countess has injured His Majesty’s pride, and her behaviour has seriously compromised his reputation at court.’

  Moseley sighed. ‘I am sure she did not mean anything more than to win his attention.’

  ‘She certainly achieved that, and with it an immeasurable proportion of sympathy within the court, which has made itself felt as criticism of the Crown. If anything, Nithsdale’s escape has likely saved His Majesty a headache.’ A mirthless smile ghosted his face fleetingly. He cleared his throat. ‘In fact, the King has been heard to say that the Countess has done him more of a favour than any other woman in Christendom, for I suspect that executing the husband would have only worsened His Majesty’s position.’

  Moseley sighed again. In spite of the King’s anger, which he now realised was almost entirely directed at a small, beautiful woman who happened to love her husband enough to risk everything, it seemed the King and his secretary agreed, as did he, that Nithsdale’s flight was a solution to a problem.

  ‘I know you should wait for the official paperwork to be served, Sir George, but I should also inform you that Lords Widdrington, Nairn and Carnwarth will be spared the King’s justice. His Majesty has signed their reprieves.’

  Moseley could not be sure if his shoulders really sagged with the relief he felt at this news. ‘And Kenmure and Derwentwater?’ he asked, hope in his voice.

  The man shook his head. ‘I am afraid no reprieve for that pair, or for Nithsdale. I hope the border lord has the good sense to already be on the seas to his beloved France, for there will be a hefty price on his head.’

  The Tower’s constable was not concerned with Lord Nithsdale any more; the man was safe, he presumed, and if his wife was cunning enough to extract him from the country’s most lauded fortress under the noses of a host of yeoman warders, she was smart enough to keep him hidden wherever they were.

  No. His sorrows were now for the two remaining lords, who must confront the direst of fates. He knew Derwentwater had been feeling confident of a reprieve; he was English, after all, and so enormously wealthy and influential that he had been sure the King would pardon him and put his renewed loyalties to better use in the north.

  ‘I had better tell Lord Derwentwater to prepare his speech for the scaffold, then,’ he said, by way of taking his leave from the palace.

  The secretary gave a shrug. ‘They are to be executed as arranged.’

  Moseley nodded. Five hours.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Guards had been assembled for hours, milling around Tower Hill and joking with the gathering crowd, keeping people away from the main platform. Jane could see it would be visible from the specially erected, railed gallery, draped in black fabric to shroud the prisoners on their last and longest walk.

  Her gaze shifted to the block on the fateful platform, hulking beneath a pall of black serge while nervous tension and excitement escalated around it. It would be the focus of all attention soon enough.

  A fresh wave of nausea trembled through her. It was pointless asking William to spare her this. She could pretend to faint, feign despair, run from the turret room even, but his words haunted her. There was surely something important in solemnly bearing witness to the death of these men.

  ‘Derwentwater will be first,’ William said, his voice a choked version of what she knew. It dragged her from her misted thoughts to the horrible present, and her eyes searched the platform, finding the spot where the young English earl had just emerged from beneath the walkway to stand pale but outwardly calm.

  They watched him unroll a paper and read from it. In Jane’s reckoning, it took less than a minute for him to say what he wanted … whatever that was. She watched, helplessly mesmerised, as the shroud was lifted, the block was revealed and the young, handsome noble walked over to it. He bent and inspected it, rubbing his fingers across its surface.

  Jane felt the fear building inside her and making her light-headed. Breath was, in fact, hard to find … it was trapped somewhere in the cage of Winifred’s chest, so that it vaguely hurt Jane to inhale.

  She watched with dread fascination as Derwentwater handed his parchment to a man who, William explained, was the Sheriff of London. Then the condemned lord exchanged a few words with the executioner as he pointed to the six-inch-high block.

  William Marvell had hanged a number of men since the day he had been recruited from John Robbins’s smithy. All of them had been villains, and he had become familiar with, and to some degree hardened to, the struggles of men desperately clinging to the last breath of life. But until this third week of February in the year of 1716 he had not been called upon to smite a man’s head from his shoulders.

  Now the true test was upon him.

  He had never been squeamish. Animals lived and died, so did people. Today he was required only to behead the condemned rather than take them through the brutal, agonising process of being hanged, drawn and quartered. The relief at the news was evident in the breath he blew out when the Constable of the Tower had reconfirmed earlier in the morning that it was to be swift deaths for all.

  ‘You will execute them cleanly,’ Moseley had ordered, grim-faced, when they had met an hour previous. ‘These are good men, men loyal to their cause. But they have defied the Crown of England and must now pay the price demanded for that treachery. One blow, Marvell. The crowd requires no entertainment.’

  Marvell nodded wordlessly.

  I presume, Marvell, if you swing a hammer as well as your employer asserts, that you can also swing an axe? The words haunted him. He could now swing an axe with reliable accuracy. But the neck of a man was different from a marrow or a log, which he’d found more useful for testing his skills than a pumpkin.

  He watched the young lord, not even close to completing his third decade, take him in with a dazzling smile. Marvell wondered how this good-looking man, whose golden life was about to be snuffed out, found the wherewithal to smile at his executioner. He could not answer his own question, and instead watched the handsome, finely attired fellow pass his hand over the block.

  The haunted look the young lord had arrived with had been chased away when he took his chance to read the speech he had prepared. He claimed that friends had persuaded him to act for the Jacobites and that he was now sorry, although he also claimed to die for his king — without mentioning which one, Marvell noted.

  Now the doomed man approached him.

  ‘What is your name, headsman?’ Derwentwater asked, fixing him with a blue gaze. His eyes, Marvell noticed, were understandably widened in a state of shock.

  He told him.

  ‘And when you’re not killing people, Marvell, what do you do?’

  ‘I am a blacksmith, My Lord.’

  ‘An honest profession.’

  Marvell said nothing. He had learned that doomed men liked to speak, to make friends with their executioner. The jauntiness was usually forced and underpinned with terror, but for someone like the noble before him, it was also driven by a need to save face for his family, to have the rumour-mongers admit he looked death in the eye with courage.

  ‘Do you have a family?’

  ‘No, My Lord, but with today’s —’ He hesitated, deeply conscious of what was about to occur.
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br />   ‘With the price of my head?’ Derwentwater prompted, as though curious to hear more.

  ‘Yes, My Lord. With the fee I shall make sufficient to return to my village, put a ring on the finger of my sweetheart and start my own smithy.’

  ‘Good, very good, William Marvell. It pleases me to think the chopping off of my head has a purpose,’ he murmured. ‘Hold your new wife close … and your children closer when they arrive. They are precious. Little else matters.’

  ‘I shall, My Lord,’ he promised.

  ‘Now, headsman, if you don’t mind, would you smooth off that protuberance on the block, lest it offend my neck?’

  Marvell moved to the block and felt for the roughness, which Lord Derwentwater carefully pointed out. He obliged, chipping it away to smoothness.

  ‘Thank you.’ The young lord smiled, but his eyes had lost their glassiness now and were dull with the fearful certainty of his mortality. His voice sounded higher, nervous. He stepped closer to his executioner. ‘Make it swift, please, Marvell,’ he said, only for William’s hearing. ‘You will find a pair of guineas in this pocket. My payment to you.’ He turned away to remove his coat and waistcoat, both fashioned from velvet as black as soot. ‘If you would not mind …’ he said to Marvell, removing his yellow-gold wig and handing it to him. ‘By all means keep it. I am sure I shall have no further use for it.’

  Marvell now realised that during this small drama unfolding on the platform, he had been acutely unaware of the crowd, and that was mainly because a hush had overtaken what would normally have been a noisy mob. He glanced around, too embarrassed to watch as the young lord kneeled down and began to position himself for a clean end. He took in the tense faces of the people assembled to witness the death of a man he understood to be popular with the masses. The women below the scaffolding looked sad, a few already dabbing at their eyes, while the men seemed appropriately solemn. This only made him feel more anxious. It would have been different if he were to have botched his first beheading on someone the crowd was jeering at; it would only have heightened the experience for them.

  Marvell hefted the axe into his hands from where it had been resting. Derwentwater had taken his time arranging himself on his belly and placing his neck over the indented curve in the block so that he would not see the blow coming. He had also begun to murmur a prayer.

  It was time.

  Marvell took a final steadying moment to glance at the blade, and the way it glinted as the watery sunlight of winter caught its edge. Once again he was assured it was keen.

  The blow required speed, but not too much power. His main jobs were to remain accurate and keep his weight steady to ensure a smooth swing. He could see the spot on the man’s slim neck that he needed to hit and he must not be distracted by the crowd’s gasp as the axe was raised. He would keep his promise to dispatch the generous lord without mess.

  Marvell took a deep breath and held it as he stepped forward and raised the axe high over his own head at a perfect distance from Derwentwater.

  He heard the last few words uttered: ‘… receive my soul!’ He saw the man stretch out his arms, which was the signal he’d been given, and allowed the axe to fall.

  The closest Jane had come to watching death was when their dear family dog, aged fourteen and filled with arthritic pain, was ‘given his wings’, as her father had described it to his teenage daughters. ‘It’s because we love Pirate that we can do this,’ he explained, while Juliette sobbed noisily and Jane wept silently. ‘He understands. He wants the release from pain, girls. He’s only putting up with it for us … because we won’t let him go. But now we have to.’ Juliette had bawled louder, but Jane had dried her tears and nodded.

  ‘I don’t want him to suffer any more,’ she’d whispered, and her father had given her a soft, sad smile.

  ‘That’s my girl. I know I can count on you to be brave.’

  She had not averted Winifred’s gaze when she saw Derwentwater put his hands out, presumably the signal for the executioner to deliver the fatal blow. And she had not shrieked when the circular motion of the headsman’s arms brought the axe high above his head, so that it came down at great velocity, gathering strength to cleave in a single chop the boyish-looking Jacobite lord’s head from his shoulders.

  She knew it must have been lopped off, but didn’t see it roll or drop. Jane had wondered whether she would gag when the headsman lifted it before the crowd. She’d read somewhere that, contrary to popular notion, this wasn’t to earn the crowd’s approval, or even as part of the entertainment. No, the head was displayed because people believed, during this style of execution, that the brain took nine seconds or so to make the right connections as to what had occurred. And in those seconds, the Crown wanted the victim’s remaining consciousness to suffer the final horror of what had taken place.

  Jane watched the executioner — a huge man with arms like a weightlifter’s, hair tied back in a black queue and a rough beard to match — bend to lift the head from wherever it had landed. She saw him raise it by its straggly blond hair, first facing outward to show Derwentwater’s dying gaze to the awed crowd, and then turned to face its own headless body.

  It was then, as the head was turned, that Jane’s gaze took in the crumpled features of the formerly cheerful, wide-eyed young man, and the full horror overcame her. She gagged and sent Winifred’s body running toward the latrine.

  ‘It is done,’ she heard William murmur, his voice choked. ‘I hope he was never told that I escaped.’

  Jane knew Winifred wanted to be by her husband’s side, and took a deep breath before returning to take his hand. She arrived in time to see mourners — likely Derwentwater’s own retinue — mounting the scaffold, kicking up sawdust as they moved slowly and deliberately to wrap up his head. She noticed the executioner handle the head with care and obvious respect as he placed it in the white linen they held out. She wondered about the life of an executioner. Did this man suffer nightmares because of his work? Did he enjoy it? Was it a means to an end? She couldn’t make out the detail of his features, but the fact that he hadn’t glorified the process or made any sensation of his own role suggested to her that he possessed some degree of dignity.

  Someone has to do it, she heard, as her thoughts cannoned around. She absently let her gaze fall on the people who were gently moving around their lord’s body, positioning it in a black shroud that from this distance looked to be fur — a sable, perhaps. She wondered about the executioner’s home life. Did he love someone? Did he tell them the truth of his work? Did he go home to bounce gurgling infants on his knees? Did he take care to change and wash so the blood of the victims never entered his home?

  This will send you mad, Jane, she heard herself warn. She raised Winifred’s shoulders and let them drop deliberately as she exhaled, hoping to push out the tension that had built up.

  ‘He was so brave,’ she said, squeezing William’s arm, knowing he needed her to say something to comfort him.

  ‘I hope I would have gone to my death just as James did. He was impressive to the end.’ She watched his jaw clench.

  ‘The punishment was commuted to a swift death, and for this we should be grateful. Imagine if the King had kept his promise to follow through on hanging, drawing and quartering!’

  But William was not paying her sympathetic words any attention. ‘Such a pitiful waste!’

  ‘It is a waste, which is why talk of whether you should have faced the block is pointless. Look at them, William,’ she said, pointing to the crowd. ‘They have already forgotten your friend Derwentwater. They are ready to watch Kenmure’s end. There was never anything to be gained by facing the King’s justice. The death of these two men is simply to satisfy an angry man and ease his embarrassment that the Jacobites achieved what they did. He is using this scaffold to make an entirely different statement from what he claims. This is surely about a German impressing upon the British that he is here to stay and does not care even to speak the language of the country h
e rules. And that he will crush any rebel who moves against him.’

  ‘Then surely my escape is a further humiliation. He will hunt me down until he kills me anyway.’

  She tipped Winifred’s head one way and then the other as she considered this. ‘Does he really care? He has shocked the people by beheading two of the most popular Jacobite lords. The fact that a third got away is irrelevant. And I suspect we might have done him a curious favour. From what I gather, my behaviour at St James’s Palace won sympathy with the courtiers, while his own conduct alienated him. He’ll probably be relieved not to have to execute the man whose wife has become a folk hero to London society. And the ordinary people love it when a rogue gets away with it.’

  It was William’s turn to sigh. ‘But will he forgive you?’

  She shrugged. ‘Now, that I doubt, which is why we must leave.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘They will already be looking for us. However, I do believe there is some validity to the notion of permitting the blood of the Jacobites spilled on Tower Hill to dry and allowing the sting of your escape to dissipate, and the wound of my behaviour to scab over. The King wants this episode to be gone from the public consciousness. In a few days, they will stop keeping a keen eye on the docks, or on the roads north, and we can make our move then.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Well, I suspect that they will be looking for the Nithsdales to head to Scotland or France, for even we know that to remain in Britain is to oblige the Crown to recapture you.’

  ‘We should make for neither, then.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve already been discussing this with Mrs Mills. I shall ask her to book us passage to Italy.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  It was Mrs Mills, not Cecilia, who slipped into William and Winifred’s frigidly cold room late that night. They had decided it might draw attention if anyone recognised Cecilia from her previous visit.

  Winifred was sickening again, gently pushing away William’s concerned hands, when a knock sounded at the door.