“Here they come,” Cooper said.
In England, a beating drum would have announced the arrival of the condemned as they were marched up to the gallows. The hollow booms seemed to mark the footsteps of the men being led to their doom. But here, there was no drum, no crier. The crowd merely parted and five men came shuffling through the crowd with their hands bound behind their backs. The sixth would arrive later.
Stone took James’s arm, cast a glance at Cooper, then led him a few paces away. “Tell me, Master Bailey. Have you betrayed your trust?”
“How do you mean?”
“With Prudence. Did you form an understanding?”
A dull ache worked at James’s stomach. “We formed no understanding. I have betrayed nothing.”
“You were alone with her and wandering the wilderness, hiding from the savages and falsely claiming to be man and wife while you spent nights together in inns and country houses. I want to know if you respected her chastity.”
“Why are you asking me?” James pulled free and turned his attention to the five men trudging forward. “Put the question to Prudence if you’d like to know.”
“She refuses to answer, says the question is an insult.”
“Aye, and that it is.”
The five men reached the front of the gallows: John Johnson, Matthias Walker, Henry Edwins, Harold Kitely, and Joseph Nance. William Crispin was dead. Only Fitz-Simmons and Knapp were not present.
“But if you led her to believe something . . .” Stone continued. “Look at me, Bailey!”
“What?” He turned, annoyed.
“Prudence doesn’t understand the worldly ways of a man like you. She is a simple girl at heart.”
James scoffed at this. “She is a strong, sharp-witted woman. Confident and clever.”
“Aye, that she is, and I underestimated her all along. That isn’t what I meant. But if she is all of those things, Master Bailey—”
“If you’ll excuse me. I must attend to the king’s business.”
Cooper fell in next to James as he stepped up to the front. Leverett stood there, grim-faced, together with two armed men. Three of the condemned were trembling with fear. Another, this one the oldest of the conspirators and a former member of the General Court, stared at the ground with such a look of shame it was as if he wished a hole would open and carry him straight to hell rather than face the good people of Boston.
The final man was Henry Edwins, the man whose newborn baby had caused the delay of execution. Edwins stared straight ahead with tears filling his eyes. Never once had any of the men begged for mercy, and except for Knapp, who had remained defiant, all had confessed their guilt. Even so, James had wished someone would ask clemency on behalf of Henry Edwins.
According to the other men, Edwins had come into the conspiracy only after the war was over, and he had not been present during the attack that left Woory and Peter dead. He’d had no knowledge of these things, but he had been among the men who chased James, Prudence, and Cooper into the woods outside Winton. And he had attempted to hunt down Cooper on the road to Hartford. That made him a traitor.
“Tell your man to fire his musket,” James said to the governor.
“It is a hard thing you ask, Bailey.”
“It is a mercy compared to Samuel Knapp’s crimes. Fire the gun.”
The governor gave the order. A man lifted his musket and fired into the sky. The hollow shot rolled through the winter air.
For a long minute there was silence, then the sound of horse hooves came clumping from the direction of High Street. The crowd parted, and in trotted a horse without a rider, being driven by two men. One of them was Vandermeer. The horse dragged a naked man by his feet; the man groaned as the frozen ground battered him. When the horse stopped, they untied the man and hauled him to his feet. It was Samuel Knapp.
The drawing had torn the skin on Knapp’s back to ribbons, and blood streamed down his buttocks and legs. His shoulder hung crooked in its socket. He groaned when it shifted.
“Murderer!” someone shouted, and then dozens of voices were jeering and calling. People pelted the naked man with snowballs and rotten turnips.
“You have had your pleasure,” Leverett said. “Finish this business and send the people home.”
In truth, James gained no pleasure from seeing his enemy abused. These people had once hailed Knapp as a hero. Had Prudence failed, had Stone proven a coward, had Leverett believed Knapp, they would be cheering Knapp instead. James would be the one on the way to the gallows.
“Drawing was a courtesy,” James told the governor. “When the Vigilant arrives in London, Fitz-Simmons will be drawn to the gallows, then hanged until he is almost dead, then he will be disemboweled and emasculated. Only then will they kill him.”
“How is that justice?” Leverett demanded. “He was not even the leader of the conspiracy. Why should he suffer more than the others?”
“He was a high official, which makes his treason more severe. But what you should be asking is whether Knapp should receive leniency when your deputy governor will not.”
When Leverett didn’t answer, James told him to order the condemned men to the gallows. The governor gave the command.
Leverett’s militia led the men up and fit the icy nooses around their necks. Edwins fainted and had to be held up, and one of the other men cried out a woman’s name, presumably his wife’s. James stepped up to the gallows. His heart had sunk like lead to his bowels.
“Mercy!” one of the condemned cried when he saw him.
Knapp, still naked and bleeding, fixed James with pleading eyes. “For the love of God, mercy.”
At last, contrition. Fear.
“Like the mercy you showed Peter Church?” James asked in a quiet voice. “Or Sir Benjamin? Or the sachem’s wife, whom you violated in defiance of God and common decency? No, you will hang.”
James turned to face the crowd. People were shouting, many eager, or even angry. Others clenched each other; these, James counted as family members of the accused. There would be widows in Boston tonight. It was an ugly, terrible thing he was about to do.
He spotted Lucy and Alice Branch. Old John Porter. Men from the General Court or militia. Some of the men, he suspected, could as easily be up here on the gallows if not for a twinge of conscience at the right moment, the wise voice whispering that they stay away from the filthy bargain being offered them.
“People of Boston!” James cried. He had a loud voice, and it carried through the crowd, but he had to repeat it two more times until they quieted. “English subjects of His Majesty, Charles the Second, by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etcetera. These men are accused of high treason and shall be hanged by the neck until dead: Samuel Knapp, Matthias Walker, Joseph Nance, Harold Kitely, John Johnson, and Henry Edwins.”
A woman’s high wail came above the whispers and crying children. It came from a young woman standing near the front, a bundle in her arms that could only be a baby. Who was she, Edwins’s wife?
As James spoke, men had put hoods over the heads of all of the men except Knapp. Some of them were openly weeping or still begging for mercy. Now the militia tied sand-filled bags to the feet of all of the men except for Knapp. Reverend Stone came trudging slowly up onto the scaffolding.
The reverend was a portrait of dejection, his brow low, mouth down-turned, his gaze fixed on his boots. Every ponderous step was as if he, not the condemned, were the one with bags of sand dragging on his feet. When he reached the top, he recited a scripture and uttered a prayer to God, thanking Him for His mercy, honoring His righteous anger. But Stone’s voice was weak, desultory. Nothing like the man who had thundered his sermon in the Third Church meetinghouse.
This might be Reverend Stone’s last sermon and prayer. During recesses in the trial, James had heard from more than one person that the Third Church was moving to strip Stone of his position. Stone may not have been guilty of conspiracy, but
he had been spiritually blind, and for that he would pay.
When Stone was finished, he stood there, stunned, until James took his arm and nudged him toward the steps down from the gallows. The militia had descended as well, and now it was just James and the hangman, who came up the stairs when the reverend had descended. The man wore a scarf around his face, his head beneath a hooded cloak, but James had hired the hangman himself and knew his identity. He was a sailor and drunk who had been milling around The Windlass and Anchor, and who had been willing to do the killing in return for fifteen shillings and two bottles of Barbados rum.
James looked down at the expectant faces, the weeping women, and then back at the condemned men. Knapp looked gray. His hooded companions trembled as if they would fall before the platform was pulled away. The man on the end—Edwins—was still weeping.
And James’s resolve broke. Quickly, before he could reconsider, he made his way to Henry Edwins and cut the rope with his sword. He plucked off the hood, and the man stood gaping at him.
James lifted his hands until the crowd quieted. “These men have been condemned to death. But His Majesty is a merciful sovereign. This man’s punishment shall be commuted to a lesser sentence.”
“Bless you!” Edwins gasped as James cut the rope binding his hands.
But he couldn’t simply pardon the man and send him on his way. “Henry Edwins, your life is spared, but you will lose your freedom.” He spoke as loudly as he could over the sudden tumult of the crowd. “You will sell yourself into indenturehood for three years, the sum to be donated to the care of widows and orphans from the war. You may continue to live in your own house with your wife and child.”
Edwins fell to his knees, kissing James’s boots. “You are merciful, good sir. Bless you!”
It still wasn’t enough. The king’s peace must be maintained. Let no one leave this hanging thinking that royal power was weak. That would embolden His Majesty’s enemies, both here and in foreign courts.
James took his sword, grabbed Edwins’s left ear and hacked off a big chunk. The man screamed and fell on his face. James lifted up the bloody chunk of ear for the jostling, craning crowd to see. Then he threw it down, where it landed at the feet of Governor Leverett.
“That your crime will be marked forever.”
“Mercy!” the other condemned men cried from beneath their hoods. “Pardon me too, for the love of God.”
“And me!”
“Please, good sir.”
Only Knapp, who had seen James sever Edwins’s ear, didn’t take up the cry. He met James’s gaze and then clenched his eyes shut. He must surely have seen the hard look in James’s eyes. He knew.
James turned to the hangman. “Now.”
The hangman kicked at the peg and the trapdoor fell open, even while the hooded men were still begging to be pardoned. The sandbags fell first, jerking down on the men’s feet as they kicked suddenly at the air. Their words died with a squeak, and they twisted silently as their necks snapped in the fall.
All except Samuel Knapp. On James’s instructions, the hangman had grabbed the man around the waist as he kicked the lever. Instead of plummeting through the trapdoor, he sagged slowly. The noose tightened, but not so suddenly that it would break his neck. Instead, he gurgled, his eyes bulging, his mouth opening and closing like a fish tossed onto the bank. His feet kicked.
The crowd was silent but for a few crying babies. The rope creaked as Knapp swung back and forth, bumping into the dead men on either side of him. All the while his face contorted in pain and fear.
James forced himself to watch. He couldn’t show weakness. Not now.
At last Knapp stopped kicking. His bound hands kept twitching behind his back for a long moment, and his lips, now turning blue, moved as if still begging for mercy, or maybe praying for his own wretched soul. At last, this, too, stopped. Knapp stared ahead through unblinking, glassy eyes.
James stepped over Edwins, who was still on his knees, clutching his bloody, half-severed ear and looking down at the pool of blood in front of his face instead of up at the dead men. James nearly stumbled coming down the stairs from the gallows. Cooper and Vandermeer came to his side, but he pushed them away.
Two women came rushing up onto the gallows. One wrapped her arms around one of the dead men, burying her face into his chest and sobbing. The other, also crying, but with joy, came to kneel next to Edwins. She was a plain but gentle-faced young woman, a swaddled baby in her arms. She shuffled the child so she could press a handkerchief to Edwins’s ear. She kissed him repeatedly on top of the head.
James looked down at his hand, still bloody from the man’s ear, then bent and wiped his hand on the ground. A stain remained in the snow, which he kicked over with his boot until it was hidden.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Prudence waited at home in front of the fire, reading to Mary from a book of Aesop’s Fables. When feet stomped outside the door to kick snow from their shoes, Prudence sprang to her feet. The Stone children came running. They had not been allowed to attend the hangings. The front door swung open.
It was Anne and the reverend. “What cheer,” they said, but there was, in fact, no cheer in their greetings.
The two parents put off the eager questions of their children and sent them back to their lessons and chores. The reverend went up to his room while Anne set about preparing supper.
Prudence sent Mary off with the other children, then rose to help her sister. Lucy and Alice Branch were no longer living with the Stones. The reverend had sold Alice’s indenturehood, and he had freed Lucy as promised. Lucy had moved to Cambridge to live with a cousin and his wife. The reverend had sold Alice for practical reasons. He was shortly to lose his position and salary at the Third Church; they could no longer afford anyone but Old John Porter.
The sisters worked in silence for a few minutes, mixing the corn meal, peeling turnips, plucking a chicken, chopping its innards to make a broth.
“You don’t have to leave,” Anne said at last. “There is always room in our home for you and Mary.”
And Prudence’s labor, as well. It would be difficult for Anne to manage without the Branch sisters. Prudence felt guilty, but she could not stay.
“Nay, I’ve cowered for too long.”
“People will talk. You know what they say about a woman who lives alone.”
“Let them.”
Anne looked disappointed at this but said nothing.
“Has the reverend secured another position?” Prudence asked when the silence grew uncomfortable.
“No responses yet to his letters, but we have hopes. There is a small congregation in Warwick, Rhode Island, that is anxious to secure a minister. The sum is modest, but they are theologically sound.”
“You’ll move to Rhode Island?” Prudence managed a smile. “The cesspool of New England? Times are indeed desperate.”
“Please, Prudie. Come with us.”
“I already said—”
“I know what you said, and I know what you’re hoping for.”
“Do you?” Prudence asked, surprised. “Am I a window that you can see through me so easily?”
“You were on your feet when we entered, but you were hoping for someone else. Do you deny it?”
“I was hoping,” she admitted, “but with little expectation. He is probably gone already.” To distract herself, she changed course. “Were there many people at the hangings?”
“Most of the town,” Anne said. “Knapp died badly. Drawn across the Common by a horse, left unhooded during the hanging. The hangman held him up as the trapdoor sprang, so he wouldn’t fall and break his neck. He writhed in torment.”
The image did not give Prudence pleasure. She had chosen to stay away, not wishing to feed her hunger for vengeance. Now she understood that she needn’t have worried. Knapp was responsible for the death of her husband and many other murders besides, yet she felt only sickened at the thought of more killing.
“It was no more t
han he deserved,” Anne added. “And only a taste of what awaits him in the eternal torment of hell.”
“Only God can make that judgment.”
“Pray pardon me, I spoke in error.”
Prudence put a corn meal–dusted hand over her sister’s wrist. Anne gave her a tired smile.
“The others died quickly enough,” Anne continued. “There was some pleading, some cries from family members, but they knew it was just. They all knew. Except James pardoned one man.”
“Pray tell. Which one?”
“Henry Edwins. Docked his ear and sold him into servitude for three years, with the sum to be donated for the care of those who lost husbands and fathers in the war.”
“My heart is glad,” Prudence said. “There has been enough killing. I only wish there had been another way.”
“It isn’t Master Bailey’s fault. The guilt lies here, in the sins of New England. Men fell to greed and avarice. The Lord has scourged us. First, by the hand of the savages, then by the Crown.”
Just then, Mary came running through with one of her cousins, who was carrying a rag doll with broken buttons for eyes and a mouth. Mary still wasn’t talking very much, but she seemed to be absorbing every word out of the chattering older girl’s mouth, understanding it all. It brought a smile to Prudence’s lips.
“You could follow him to England,” Anne said, unexpectedly.
“He hasn’t asked me.”
Anne picked up a turnip and trimmed away the wilted greens. “Have you given him an opportunity?”
“He had plenty.”
“When his mind was engaged elsewhere,” Anne said. “It isn’t now.”
Prudence carried the corn pudding to the hearth. When she returned, Anne studied her with a serious expression.
“Go to the Vigilant,” Anne said. “Find him. Ask him to stay. I’ll accompany you to give you courage.”
Prudence stifled a laugh at the earnest look on her sister’s face. “You are serious?”
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