Each of the condemned men was accompanied by a clergyman. The hangman appeared without warning behind one of the gallows and mounted the platform linking them. The crowd began to murmur morosely, but Lount held up his hand as if to say It’s not the hangman who’s to blame, and the murmuring ceased. The prayers of the clergymen were audible as Sheriff Jarvis, with tears streaming down his face, led the prisoners up to their respective gibbets and to the nooses swaying patiently in the breeze. Matthews and Lount knelt over the trap, praying, as the hangman slipped the rope about their necks.
Beth’s gloveless hand eased into Marc’s. Without taking his eyes off the scene before him, he gave it a welcoming squeeze. He felt her head wisp against his shoulder.
“You’re not in uniform,” she said.
“No, I am not.”
She curled his fingers lovingly in hers “It’s time to go,” she said. “We’ve had enough of sadness.”
Still holding hands, they turned sedately and began walking away from the despair of the Court House square. They walked slowly down Church Street, as the Lord’s Prayer drifted away behind them, growing fainter and fainter. They crossed Market Street, bereft of people, just as the communal groan and the snap of the trap and the plunging rope sickened the air and the innocent morning. A tiny shudder disturbed the linking of the lovers’ hands, but they carried on to Front Street, where the snows had blurred the borders of land and lake, so that they scarcely heard the second cry of bereavement, the anguish consequent upon the doing of what can never be undone. Still, the lovers walked westward along the shoreline, letting the slate-and-stone edifice of the city slide away unregretted. Past the bulwark of the provincial bank, past the contentious benches of Parliament, past the last outpost of civility.
Without forethought or premeditation their feet found the meandering path westward across the ice to the frozen spit of the island, the waters between it and the shore sculpted and flumed by an arctic wind that cared only for the law and beauty of its own instigation. They let the circle of the island and its echoing emptiness take them up, and paired in their circumambulation they spoke of many things that lay between them-matters past and matters future-and were content to have silence subsume the things that could not yet be uttered. They found themselves thus at the far edge of the island at the far edge of the land at the far edge of everything. For the time being, the only allegiance they owed was to the love they bore for each other.
EPILOGUE
April, 1838
Iowa Territory
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Edwards:
This is not my writing, but these are my words. Winn is copying them down as they come out. We got your letter, and we are glad you got married and bought a cottage in the city. Things out here are swell. Thomas and me are starting a big farm of our own. There’s hardly any trees to chop down (so don’t worry, Beth). The ground is black and easy to turn, I could do it with a spoon! Mr. Hatch is using the money you sent to start up a little mill. He’s gonna let me work the floodgate! Winn and Mary are having more babies this summer. The first boy baby will be named Aaron. Our Susie’s got herself a beau. Some Indians come down from the hills a while back and sold us ponies. Mine is called Silky. That’s all for now. I hope you’re feeling as happy and free as we are.
Your loving brother,
Aaron