I patted his arm. “I know. We must try to ease her suffering all we can.”
I stood back while John Boone unlocked the door to the prisoner’s cell. “Visitor for you, Frankie!” he called out. “I’ll be downstairs,” he told me, and as he walked past me, I saw his eyes glisten with unshed tears in the dim light.
I clutched the bundle to my chest and stepped inside the little room. “Mrs. Silver? It’s Burgess Gaither here.”
She was sitting on her camp bed, swollen-eyed from weeping, but calm now. When she saw me, she shrank back against the wall and whispered, “Is it time?”
“No. It is early yet. The sheriff will come for you in a few hours, not I. I only wanted to bring you a gift from the ladies of the Erwin family. They send their regards, and they asked me to tell you that you will be remembered in their prayers.”
“They won’t be coming to see me, then, sir?”
“They thought it best not to, in case their tears upset you. They are grieving. They sent you this.” Again I held out the bundle, and this time she took it, walking the length of her chain and stretching her hands out to me like a toddling child. Her face brightened as she accepted the offering, and I thought what sad creatures we mortals are, to delight in gifts even as we are dying. I watched as she set the package down on the camp bed and carefully untied the twine that bound it. She unfolded the fabric and held it up to look at it in the sunlight from the window of her cell.
“Oh, sir,” she whispered, pressing the white linen against her body.
Miss Mary had sent the prisoner the dress of white lace and linen that she had worn last summer when the Erwin sisters first visited the jail. “Take her this,” my sister-in-law had said, thrusting the bundle into my hands and turning away with the first tears that I had ever seen upon her face. “It’s little enough that we can do for her.”
I remembered that little Mrs. Silver had admired the garment, touching it reverently as though it were the robe of a queen instead of the ordinary morning dress of a country gentlewoman. It pained me to think that her only hope of ever wearing such a garment was to come to town under a sentence of death.
“It’s a handsome dress,” said Mrs. Silver, fingering the delicate cloth. “Better than I ever had. She means me to have it?”
I nodded. Miss Mary had spent the evening sewing hour altering the dress to fit Frankie Silver’s tiny frame.
“They visited me, and read me stories to pass the time. I thank them for that.”
I nodded. “We all wish we could have done more.”
She turned her gaze to the window, and I think she was on the verge of weeping again, but after a moment she said, “I wish they’d tell me a story now. The time is heavy on my hands, and I am afraid.”
I wanted nothing more than to flee the narrow cell and take refuge in the July sunshine of the Presnells’ garden, but I could not leave that poor lost creature to contemplate her death alone. “Has the preacher been to see you?”
She nodded. “I wouldn’t see him. Last time he came, I wanted him to tell me about heaven, but he would not. He kept saying that unless I named all my sins I would burn forever. He asked me who set me free that night. I wouldn’t tell him, though. Do you think I will go to hell for that, sir?”
“No. I cannot think so.”
She sighed. “I’m weary of praying. Reckon the Lord and I will be talking it over face-to-face soon enough. I asked the preacher to tell me a story once, and he told me about the good thief who was crucified with Jesus but went with him to paradise.”
I had promised the ladies that I would do what I could to comfort Mrs. Silver, and there seemed no other way that I could help her. “I’m not much use as a storyteller,” I said, “but if it will ease your mind, I will do my best.”
I searched my memory for some tale that would distract the poor lost girl from the thought of her death, and perhaps it was her maiden name of Stewart as much as her present circumstances that suggested the only one that came to me. “It isn’t a happy story,” I warned her, “but it is about a queen, and it is true.”
She nodded. “Happy stories mostly ain’t true.” She hugged the dress to her and sat down upon her bed to listen.
“Long ago in Scotland there lived a beautiful young queen whose name was Stuart…”
“Same as mine.”
“Yes. She was called Mary, Queen of Scots, and her father had been the king, but he died and left the throne to her. She was said to be very beautiful, but she had a sad life. She married a handsome young man called Darnley, but he was blown to pieces in an explosion at a place called Kirk o’ Field, and afterward people said that Mary had killed him.”
“What happened to her? Did they hang her?”
“Well, she was put in prison at first.” I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts, and then I told her, as simply as I could, the long tale of the intrigue between Mary, Queen of Scots, and her cousin Elizabeth of England.
Frankie Silver sat listening to me, rubbing the sore on her ankle where the chain had rubbed, but her eyes were wide and she seemed transported by my clumsy attempt at telling the tale of two great queens. Perhaps for a moment or two she even forgot her own unhappy circumstances, but as I neared the end of the story, she was reminded all too clearly.
I came to the account of Queen Elizabeth signing the death warrant of her beautiful cousin, after being convinced that Mary was plotting to seize the throne of England. “And so, because she was charged with committing treason by planning to overthrow the rightful queen of England, she was condemned to die.”
Frankie Silver nodded.
“She was to be beheaded.” I began to wish that I had not embarked upon this particular tale to divert the prisoner, but as there was no turning back, I thought that perhaps Mary Stuart could inspire her fellow prisoner to courage on the scaffold. “They say that she went to her death very bravely. She spent the night in prayer with her ladies, and in the wee hours before dawn she walked to the block with the courage of a martyr.”
“She didn’t scream or cry when she saw the knife?”
“The ax. No. It does no good to weep at such a time. It only gladdens your enemies. Mary believed that she would shortly be in heaven.”
“Did she wear white?”
I remembered the histories I had read, and I recalled seeing an illustration in a book once that showed the Queen of Scots going to the block in a wimpled headdress and a deep black dress in the Tudor fashion. “Yes,” I said, “I believe she wore white.”
She considered this for a few moments. “She died then?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think she killed her husband?”
I took a deep breath. “If she did, I’m sure that she was very sorry, and I think she made her peace with God before the end. She died bravely.”
“Why wasn’t she afraid? I am. I have prayed and prayed, but I’m still afraid. So afraid.”
“Three years ago I watched my brother Alfred die,” I said. “He was a young man-not as young as you, but still in the bloom of his youth. He sickened, and when the doctor knew that all hope was lost, the family gathered at his bedside. Alfred had been in great pain, I think, from his illness, for he thrashed in his delirium and he soaked the sheets with the sweat of his fever, but in the end… in the last moment before his soul took flight, he grew calm and still, and a great peace settled over his face, almost as if someone had shone a light upon him, and he smiled at us-or, rather, beyond us-and then he was gone. I had never seen him happier.”
She nodded. “But it will hurt.”
“Only for a little while. And then it is finished, and you have come out on the other side. You are free.”