The Darling Strumpet. Gillian Bagwell

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      IN OCTOBER THE EXECUTIONS OF THREE OF THE MEN WHO HAD instigated the execution of the king’s father, King Charles I, were to take place at Charing Cross. The king had spared the lives of dozens, but the few who had been directly responsible for his father’s murder would die the terrible death reserved for traitors. A blood thirst seized London, and Nell listened to some lads in the street describing what would happen.

      “They’ll hang them first,” one said. “But not until they’re dead—only insensible, like. Then they’ll cut them down, still breathing, and carve out their guts and hearts. And then they’ll hack their carcasses into quarters, coat them in tar to make them keep, and post them on pikes at all the gates of the City.”

      THE DAY OF DEATH ARRIVED, AND NELL AND ROSE JOSTLED FOR standing space around the scaffold. The crowds reminded Nell of the throngs that had welcomed the king only a few months earlier, but the mood was savage and sour. Packs of drunken lads roved, as they had on that spring day, but today they seemed like feral dogs.

      Surrounded by tall strangers, Nell could not see anything but a patch of sky above, and suddenly she began to feel that she couldn’t breathe. She clutched Rose’s hand, fearful of losing her in the crush, and to her shame, she began to shake and cry.

      “Let’s go,” she pleaded. They threaded their way out of the seething mob. Nell fought down a rising sense of panic, and by the time they reached the edge of the crowd, her breath was coming in ragged gulps and her heart was pounding.

      She sank to the ground and hugged her knees to her chest, trying to stop her shivering. Rose squatted and peered at her.

      “What is it?”

      “I don’t know,” Nell gasped. “I don’t want to see it. I’m afraid. Do you mind?”

      “No,” Rose shrugged. “I’ve no great desire to watch anyone being butchered.”

      There was a roar from the crowd. The condemned men must be arriving. It would begin soon. Nell struggled to her feet.

      “Let’s get away now.”

      MADAM ROSS’S ESTABLISHMENT WAS FULL TO BURSTING THAT evening, and Nell had her first taste of the phenomenon of men who have felt the brush of violent death wanting to deaden the resultant chill by immersing themselves in warm flesh. The men she took to her bed that night were sodden with drink and un usually sombre, brutal, or even tearful. All wanted to erase the sights and sounds of the day and to remind themselves that they still lived and breathed.

      Jimmy Cade and some of his officer friends came late in the evening, and after he had spent he lay with Nell, stroking her hair and face with unwonted tenderness.

      “It had to be done,” he said. “There must be severe punishment for a crime as foul as the murder of a king. But it’s not a spectacle I’d want to see again. You can’t help but feel the blade in your own gut as you watch it going into the poor bastards, imagine your own innards being wound out before your eyes, seeing your own blood sluicing over the scaffold.”

      “Horrible.” Nell shuddered.

      “And somehow it seemed to me that even worse than the pain was the loneliness.”

      “How do you mean?” she asked.

      “Well, it was the look in Harrison’s eyes.” Cade paused, remembering. “In the middle of a crowd that stretched as far as you could see. But not a friendly face among them. Voices shouting for his death, the slower the better. And he knew what he was in for. It seemed he tried not to cry out, not to give them the satisfaction.”

      “But did he cry out?” Nell asked.

      “Oh, yes,” Cade said. “The fires of hell would have been a mercy after that death.”

      Two more regicides were put to death a day or two later, and another ten within the next few days. The savagery of the executions seemed to have unleashed a wild mood in London.

      “Death to all traitors,” Nell heard Jack snarl to one of his cronies. “Too bad they didn’t keep them another fortnight and do them on the Fifth of November.” The other man cackled his agreement.

      The next afternoon Nell sat with Ned the barman and Harry Killigrew. It was too early for much business, and though it was freezing cold outside, the taproom was cosy, the flames in the fireplace chasing away the shadows in the corners and reflecting in the dark panes of the windows.

      “What’s the Fifth of November?” Nell asked Ned.

      “Why, it’s Guy Fawkes Day,” he said. “Sure you’ve heard of him? A Papist. Tried to blow up King James and all the lords in the House of Parliament, he СКАЧАТЬ