The Seventh Bullet

by Daniel D Victor

  Kulakov’s usual craving for strong drink seemed to have deserted him. He stared past the reaching arms and what they offered, and ignored the excited faces; but his two fellow prisoners did their best, even with their arms bound, to take advantage of the gift. The executioners, with a practical eye to making their own job easier, assisted the pair to drink, now and again fortifying themselves from the same jug or bottle.

  One of the Russian captain’s former shipmates was well-nigh insensible with drink before the ride was over.

  It was the other of the two English prisoners who, in that age when death was so often a social function, had a small handful of relatives present; these—weeping, expostulating, or stony-faced according to their several temperaments—tagged after the cart, and were jostled to the rear by the sheriff’s men.

  The authorities had long practice with such processions from Newgate; and this enabled them to time the arrival of the cart at Execution Dock to coincide almost precisely with the hour of low water in the tidal Thames, this being the only time when the gallows was readily accessible.

  For hundreds of years, pirates and mutineers had been executed on this spot, while for occasional variety a captain or mate would be dispatched for murderous brutality directed at his own crew. On this morning, several of the fruits of last week’s executions were still to be seen, each hanging in chains on its own post. Gulls and weather had already reduced the dead faces to eyeless, discolored leather and protruding bone, raking the passing ships with empty stares. Their continued presence was intended to impress the thousands of seamen on those ships as examples of the Admiralty’s long arm and exact justice.

  The posts displaying these veteran corpses had been erected along the riverbank at various distances from the now ominously empty gallows. The latter was no more than two posts and a crossbeam, the horizontal member being not much more than ten feet above the strip of muddy ground and gravel exposed now at low tide.

  Somewhat closer to the gallows itself than last week’s bodies, another set of three stakes, also ominously empty, waited for today’s victims.

  Crowding nearby land and water were spectators even more numerous than those along the route. Folk of high station and low were out this morning, their numbers not much diminished by the weather, which so far had not improved. Every comfortable vantage point, and some perches fit only for the stoic, even the acrobatic, had been occupied. The windows and terraces of taverns and other riverside buildings, as well as docks and jetties, were thick with onlookers. scores of small boats passed to and fro, or had cast anchor in the river. The current was very slow just now, with the tide about to turn. A barge moored no more than forty yards offshore afforded rows of seats for those willing and able to pay. At a somewhat greater distance over the broad face of the Thames, the crews and passengers of a couple of anchored ships presented on decks and rigging rows of pale faces. Well beyond these larger craft, the shadowy shapes of docks and buildings on the south shore loomed out of cold mist and drizzle.

  One of the watchers, ensconced in a high-priced seat in the window of a tavern built upon a nearby promontory, was a dark-haired, smooth-skinned woman of somewhat exotic dress and remarkable appearance. Despite the sunless pallor of her skin, her countenance was undoubtedly Asiatic. Today she was keeping to a position where she herself remained inconspicuous, her pallid face shaded from even this clouded daylight. she was sharing a table— though she was not eating or drinking—with a well-dressed, well-fed, stoutish man of middle age, named Ambrose Altamont, a commoner very recently come into startling wealth. The weathered condition of Altamont’s face suggested that he was no stranger to the sea and tropic suns.

  The table was bare before the woman—she had assured her new patron that she was not hungry—but the man had dishes and bottles aplenty in front of him. He was dining early today, by way of celebration, on lamprey pie—then considered a rare treat—and sampling good wine.

  As nearly as I can discover, Altamont at this point did not, strictly speaking, know that the woman with him was a vampire. That fact and all its implications still lay over his horizon. He certainly understood that she was strange—for several nights now he had reveled in excitement over her exotic antics in his bed. Whatever the limits of her strangeness, whatever disadvantages were yet to be discovered, here was an attractive female who gave delight and satisfaction, beyond anything that he had ever previously encountered in almost fifty years of a thoroughly unsheltered life. Altamont might well have betrayed a business partner for her favors alone—even had there been no jewels.

  The creaking high wheels of the tall cart fell silent as the vehicle eased to a halt on Execution Dock. While the massed guards cleared a space of spectators, the prisoners—their bodies stiff with confinement, two of them reeling with drink, all three chain-laden— were helped down. The severely drunken man had to be lifted bodily. Then, one at a time, the sober Kulakov first, the three men were led—or carried—down through mud and gravel to the rude platform, which consisted of only a few boards laid in mud beneath the gallows.

  Waiting for them at that threshold of eternity was the chaplain, Mr. Ford, Ordinary of Newgate, ready to lead repentant sinners in prayer or persuade them that they should seek divine forgiveness. No one today had thought to provide a Russian Orthodox clergyman; but if any had been there the Russian doubtless would only have snarled at him, as he did at Mr. Ford.

  Under the circumstances whatever prayers were possible for Kulakov, the first victim, were soon said. Then a ready noose was placed around his neck and he was blindfolded.

  Meanwhile, at the tavern table, the pale and sheltered but vivacious lady had allowed herself to be distracted from the show by a sudden impulse to admire yet again a gift she had very recently received. This was a wonderful bracelet, fine gold and silver filigree sparkling with red rubies and clear diamonds. This masterpiece of the jeweler’s art came into view upon her white and slender left wrist when she deliberately drew back her full sleeve to reveal it.

  “It fits you loosely,” her companion commented, his voice rich with wine and satisfaction.

  “I’ll not lose it. Where are the other things?” she inquired softly. “Your brother has them, perhaps?” Her voice was small but determined, her English sounding with a strong accent, hard to define, but certainly as Eastern as her face.

  Altamont winked at her, and smiled. “They’re where they’ll be safe for the time being—and you may lay to that.” Turning away again, he squinted, in the practiced manner of a ship’s captain, through his sailor’s brass-tubed glass at the proceedings on shore.

  Confident as Altamont was that no one could overhear their talk, he lowered his voice when he added: “My own suspicion—I’ve no proof of it, mind—is that they were meant as a gift for the Empress Catherine of Muscovy, from one of those nabobs in the East. Or they might have belonged to the Russian church, some of their clergy smuggling them abroad to keep them out of Her Imperial Majesty’s hands. I hear Catherine’s developed a taste for churchly property, as did our own dear Henry long ago.” He shot his companion a sharp glance. “The Russian might have given you a better answer than I can give, as to who the first owner of your bangle was. Not that it much matters now.”

  The dark-haired woman did not seem to care. Indeed her fascination with the beauty of the ornament was as apparent as her lack of interest in its origins. “Then the other things must be just as rich as this?”

  The man almost sneered, in his pride and his amusement. “Richer, by God! Half a dozen pieces in all, rings and necklaces, in the same style, but even more extravagant—a king’s ransom. I am surprised you had no chance to see them on the voyage. You must have shared the Russian’s cabin, sailing back to London.”

  The woman let her long sleeve drop, concealing jewels and precious metal. “Cap-tain Kulakov kept all well hidden.”

  “No doubt. I think he meant to keep such great treasure all to himself, and maybe to some of his men who knew of it. But
to cheat his English partner–”* Altamont smiled and shook his head. “Well, greed, like pride, goeth before a fall. And now the Russian hath lost all; his treasure, his woman, life itself. Almost I could feel sorry for him—why are they taking so long about his stepping off?” He squinted through his glass again.

  A prosperous man, Mr. Altamont, even before his recent dramatic accession of new wealth. He felt himself capable of handling even greater prosperity without undue difficulty. At the moment his countenance was alternating between frowns at the delay and a faint expression of abstract pleasure as he shifted from wine to hot buttered rum, while watching from his comfortable chair.

  The pallid woman remained patiently seated with him. Though the air on this June morning had turned quite mild, she was glad to shelter here indoors; in her case it was in fact not chill nor damp, but the mild English sun that threatened.

  On shore the experienced Thomas Turlis, and his assistant who was hardly less qualified, were proceeding about their business with deliberate speed. The junior member of the official team had already climbed to straddle the crossbeam, where he sat waiting until Turlis had guided his first victim halfway up the ladder, Kulakov’s feet on the rungs awkward with the weight of chains and terror. Then, receiving from his senior’s hand the loose end of the short rope already snug around the victim’s neck, the assistant quickly and efficiently secured it tightly to the heavy crossbeam.

  The red-haired man cried out, loudly and articulately, in the last moments while he waited for the noose to choke off his breath.

  “Al-ta-mont!” There followed a string of violent un-English words, sounds carrying well across the water, between the two points on the curving shore.

  “I understand very little Russian, really,” the man at the table remarked comfortably. “Which no doubt is just as well.”

  “I un-der-stand a little, as with Ain-glish,” the watching woman remarked abstractedly. “I spoke to him last night,” she added after a pause. “He think he have give the jewels to you only for safe keeping, not?”

  “You saw him last night?” Briefly her companion turned a puzzled but fascinated frown in her direction. “Really, I think that you did not, for you were pretty steadily with me. As I have good cause to remember, having got but little sleep.” Lecherously Altamont displayed bad teeth. “But you know, I would wager my new fortune that it would not be beyond you to gain entry to a condemned cell— not when the guards are men.”

  “I spoke to him,” the woman repeated. Not with an air of insistence, but as if she had not heard her companion’s denial. “But he would not believe that I was real. I think thees Russian must be very—what is word?—su-per-sti-tious.” Pulling her dreamy gaze back from the shore, she fastened it upon the man beside her. “Will you believe me, Al-tamont, when I try to tell you what I am?”

  He made a small noise compounded of amusement and satisfaction. “I think I understand well enough what you are. So, you visited the condemned cell, did you, and had a chat? And what do you want me to think that you told dear Alexei? That we have both betrayed him? That the jewels are all mine now, while he is come to dine today on hearty-choke and caper sauce?”

  The woman very slightly shook her head. “He did not need me to tell him that you keep the jewels.” Perhaps she intended to offer some explanation about her activities last night, or drop more teasing hints; but at the moment her full attention, like that of all other watchers, had become focused on the shore.

  For the space of a held breath the raucous cries of even the least reverent onlookers were silent. Turlis, the older and paunchier of the hangman pair, with his feet planted solidly in mud—the planks had been disarranged in Kulakov’s last awkward stumbling—took hold of the ladder and, with a strong twisting wrench, deprived the bound man of all physical support. Except for that now afforded him by taut hemp, the smoothly clasping noose.

  The drop was a short one, no more than three feet at the most, in this case not nearly enough to break the neck-bones, to tear and quickly crush out life and consciousness from the vulnerable soft tissue of the spine and brain stem. There was only the steady, brutal pressure of the rope to squeeze the windpipe, veins and arteries. Kulakov’s powerful frame convulsed. His bound arms strained, his legs and feet moved in a spasmodic aerial ballet.

  Hearty-choke and caper sauce.

  The fact that Kulakov had been first to be hanged meant that comparatively few among the audience were paying his prolonged death struggle as much attention as it must otherwise have received; rather the fascinated scrutiny of the mob now rested in turn upon each of his colleagues.

  Altamont commented knowingly to his companion that the knot of the rope had very likely slipped from the favored location behind the Russian’s ear to behind his neck—but how could Altamont have known that, at the distance, unless he had made some private arrangement to have the knot deliberately adjusted in that wise? Trying to get the better of Altamont, as the man himself would have assured you, was likely to result in truly frightful punishment.

  As for Kulakov, he had been denied his broken neck. So that he hung for a quarter of an hour, intermittently twitching and tensing in agony, all breathing not quite cut off.

  “Are they not going to finish him?” Altamont’s comment, coming after five minutes or so, was dryly lacking in surprise. “It would seem not.”

  It was common in such cases for one or both hangmen, when not entirely lacking in pity, to seize their client by the legs, and drag down with their full weight upon the poor wretch’s body to assist his soul on its way out of it. But at the moment the executioners were busy. If any friends or relatives of the condemned were in attendance, that office might fall to them. But in Kulakov’s case no one had come forward with any such merciful intention.

  One after the other, the two remaining pirates followed their captain to the scaffold. The executioners gave no thought to taking down the body of the first man to be hanged, until the third was dangling, and they had paused to fortify themselves with rum. The two Englishmen went quickly, so there was no need for relatives to intervene.

  When, in the chief executioner’s professional judgment, the third man had been well and truly hanged, he gave curt directions to his assistant. Between them the two men loosened the knot holding the first body to the crossbar—there would be no wasteful cutting of the rope—and lowered their grim burden to the muddy shore. Already the feet of the hangmen splashed in water; at this hour the lower Thames was entering that part of its unending tidal cycle in which the rising weight of ocean a few miles distant forced the river swiftly back toward its source, as if it would convey the brackish tide up into the middle of the great island.

  Now Kulakov’s body, hands still chained behind its back, had been dragged some twenty-five or thirty yards from the gallows, to its next temporary resting place. There with some difficulty it was being chained upright, feet at ground level, to one of the three tall, empty stakes that had been driven deep into the muddy sands. By tradition, the freshly hanged at Execution Dock remained so mounted until their already lifeless lungs had been drowned thrice by the high tides.

  One after the other, the Russian’s now-unbreathing comrades joined him, were fastened to the trees which stood one on either side of his, forming a ghastly Golgotha. Surely, in some of the onlookers’ minds, the tableau evoked thoughts of a certain antique and much more famous triple execution. But no one commented aloud upon the fact.

  By the time the dead body of the third pirate was thus displayed, and the day’s task of the hangmen essentially concluded, many of those watching had gone on about their business.

  But perhaps they had missed something of importance. Did a murmur of morbid excitement pass through the remaining crowd when the central one of the newly chained corpses was seen to move? Could it be that the captain and ringleader of this pirate band was still not dead after having been hanged for a quarter of an hour?

  Such an event would not have been without precedent.


  We will assume that Altamont, in his dry way, even commented to his companion upon the most famous such case, which some of those watching Kulakov might have seen with their own eyes—that of William Duell, executed at Tyburn a quarter of a century earlier, in 1740. Duell, though only sixteen years of age when hanged, had been widely noted for his sadism. Convicted of rape as well as murder, his body was turned over to medical anatomists... but when finally placed on the dissecting table it displayed certain faint signs of life. The surgeons, ready to try a different experiment than that originally scheduled, applied their skills at healing and soon had the patient sitting up, drawing deep breaths and drinking warm wine.

  Duell had cheated the hangman after all. Returned to Newgate, he was eventually ordered to be transported to America.

  Hangings here at Execution Dock, with tide-drowning added as a flourish under Admiralty auspices, were somewhat more thorough. No one put up on one of these stakes for show had ever tasted wine again. Certainly the sharp-eyed Altamont did not find the signs of life so stubbornly displayed by today’s first hanged man at all perturbing; rather amusing.

  Altamont, alternately smirking and frowning over his latest glass of hot buttered rum, made a few remarks on the case of young Duell to his fair companion, who took a somewhat different view of such phenomena.

  The woman said in her abstracted way: “I think we will not have to worry about Kulakov—he will die today. I spent but little time with him last night.”

  “Oh, he’ll die today, and no mistake.” The man stared at her for the space of several rummy breaths before adding: “Up to your mystification, are you, Doll? I’ve noticed you have a taste for riddles. But do go on with it—I like it well.”