Riotous Assembly

'Thank you for what?'

'For a heart.'

'For a what?'

'A heart.'

The Bishop looked at him incredulously. 'A heart?' he said finally. 'What the hell are you talking about?'

Kommandant van Heerden hesitated before continuing. 'I need a new heart,' he said finally.

'It hasn't escaped my notice,' said the Bishop, 'that a change of heart would do you a power of good, but to be frank I think you're too far gone for any prayers of mine to help you. In any case I am afraid that I have lost faith in the power of prayer.'

'I've tried prayer already,' said the Kommandant, 'but it hasn't done any good. I still get palpitations.'

'Perhaps if you truly repented,' the Bishop said.

'It's no good. I'm a doomed man,' said the Kommandant.

'Metaphorically I suppose we all are,' said the Bishop. 'It happens to be part of the condition of man, but if you don't mind my saying so I'm a damned sight more doomed than you are, and it's thanks to you that I'm going to be hanged next Friday.'

There was a long silence in the chapel while the two men considered their futures. It was broken by the Kommandant.

'I don't suppose you'd do something for me,' he said at last. 'A last bequest.'

'A last bequest?'

'A small thing really and nothing you'll have much use for.'

'You've got a nerve coming here and asking to be included in my will,' the Bishop said irritably.

'It's not in your will,' the Kommandant said desperately.

'No? Well where the hell is it?'

'In your chest.'

'What is?'

'Your heart.'

'You keep going on about my heart,' said the Bishop. 'I wish you would stop it. It's bad enough knowing you're going to die without having someone harp on about your heart. Anyone would think you wanted the thing.'

'I do,' said the Kommandant simply.

'What?' screamed the Bishop, struggling to his feet with a clanking of chains. 'You want what?'

'Only your heart,' said the Kommandant. 'I need it for a transplant.'

'I'm going insane,' shouted the Bishop. 'I must be. It isn't possible. Do you mean to tell me that you've gone to all this trouble just so you could have my heart for a transplant operation?'

'It was no trouble,' said the Kommandant. 'I hadn't got anything to do this afternoon.'

'I'm not talking about this afternoon,' the Bishop screamed. 'I'm talking about the murders and the trial and having me condemned to death for crimes you knew I couldn't have committed. You did all that just so that you could hoik my heart out of my body to stick it in your own? It's incredible. You're a ghoul. You're…' The Bishop couldn't find words to express his horror.

Kommandant van Heerden was horrified too. He had never been accused of anything so disgraceful in his life.

'Good God,' he shouted back. 'What do you take me for?'

He could see it was the wrong thing to ask. It was perfectly obvious what the Bishop took him for. For one terrible moment it looked as if the manacled and chained prisoner was going to hurl himself on him. Then quite suddenly the Bishop's fury evaporated and the Kommandant saw that he was staring up at one of the stained-glass windows. Following the Bishop's gaze he found himself looking at the particularly grisly portrayal of a martyr in the process of being hanged, drawn and quartered. To Kommandant van Heerden the change in the prisoner's demeanour could only be explained by miraculous intervention. In some strange way the stained-glass window had communicated a sense of peace and tranquillity to his soul.

And this in its own way was true, for Jonathan Hazelstone had suddenly realized that the second verse of 'The Forerunners' needed revising. It wasn't his brain they wanted. It was his heart.

'Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,

Ev'n all my heart, and what is lodged there.'

Turning back to the Kommandant, the Bishop was a picture of truly Christian generosity.

'Yes,' he said quietly. 'If you want my heart, of course you can have it,' and without another word he turned from the altar rail and clanked down the aisle towards the door. And as he went he composed the lines afresh.

'Bad men ye be, to pilfer my best room

Ev'n all my heart…'

The Bishop smiled happily to himself. It was extraordinarily appropriate, he thought, and he was still smiling beatifically when Kommandant van Heerden caught up with him and overcome with emotion grabbed his manacled hand and shook it as vigorously as the handcuffs would allow.

'You're a real gentleman.' he gasped, 'a real English gentleman.'

_'Noblesse oblige,'_ murmured the Bishop, whose heart had been chronically weak since he had suffered from rheumatic fever as a child.

Chapter 18

The Bishop was still in a cheerful frame of mind when Hangman Els visited him to weigh him for the drop.

'You can smile,' Els said as he dragged him out of the cell and shoved him on to the weighing machine. 'It's all right for you. You don't have to do anything. I'm the one who has to do all the work.'

'Each of us has his little part to play,' said the Bishop.

'Play?' said Els. 'I don't call what I'm doing playing. I'm having to work my guts out.'

'Just so long as you don't achieve the same result in my case,' said the Bishop uneasily. 'By the way, how are you getting on with those sacks?'

'I've practised with them till I'm fit to drop,' Els said, 'and I still don't seem to get it right. It's got to do with the weight how far you have to fall.' He tried to read the scales. 'I can't make these things out at all,' he said finally. 'What do you make your weight out to be?'

The Bishop came to his assistance.

'Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds,' he said.

Els consulted a little black book entitled, _The Hangman's Handbook,_ which he had borrowed from the old warder.

'You're too heavy,' he said at last. 'It only goes up to three hundred pounds. Are you sure that's what the weighing machine said?'

The Bishop checked. 'Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds exactly.'

'Well I don't know what I'm going to do. It doesn't look as if you need any drop at all.'

'That's a nice thought,' Jonathan said, adding hopefully. 'Perhaps fat men don't commit murders.'

'Well, if they do, nobody seems to hang them,' said Els. 'Perhaps they shoot them.' On the whole he much preferred shooting. It was quicker and involved a lot less effort on his part.

'No, no,' said the Bishop hurriedly. 'They definitely have to be hanged.' He thought for a moment. 'What does it say is the drop for a man weighing two hundred pounds?' he asked.

Els consulted his little compendium. 'Six feet,' he said at last.

'Then three feet should be just about right,' said the Bishop.

'Why?' Els didn't like the sound of a shortened drop at all. It smacked too much of an attempt to avoid death.

'Double the weight and halve the drop,' the Bishop explained.

Els wasn't fool enough to fall into that trap. 'Double the weight and double the drop, you mean.'

The Bishop tried to explain. 'The heavier someone is the shorter the fall needed to break his neck. The light man needs a much longer drop to achieve the necessary momentum.'

Els tried to work it out. He found it very difficult.

'Why is a momentum necessary?' he asked. 'Nobody told me to get one.'

'Momentum is the product of a moving body's mass by its velocity.'

'I thought death was,' said Els.

'Yes, but you won't get death without momentum. It's not possible.'

'Oh, isn't it?' said Els. 'Well, I'll have a bloody good shot at it, don't you worry.'

Alarmed by the constant reference to shots, the Bishop tried again.

'When a man is hanged, how does he die?' he asked.

Els thought about it. 'By hanging,' he said finally.

'And hanging means doing what to him?'

'Dropping him down a hole with a rope round his neck.'

'And what happens then?'

'He dies.'

'Yes,' said the Bishop patiently, 'but what does the rope do?'