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It didn’t feel like my last day on earth.

I decided to be calm and reasonable, in the hope that everyone else would be calm and reasonable too. I didn’t want to spend the day wrapped up in tight knots. In truth, I was very tired, having lain awake all the night, contemplating the silence. As the sun rose so did the fear subside a little.

It was still several hours before the key turned in the lock.

‘Good morning!’ I didn’t stand, for fear they would assume that I was lunging at them, just sat with my legs and arms out straight, manacles to the fore.

It was the old cleric from St Andrew Hubbard that entered, a short, old man with white hair that stood up straight in untidy clumps. The same fellow that had attended to Joyce. He breathed into my face and I nearly died there and then — how much had this fellow had to drink?

‘Stand up,’ a dour-faced fellow ordered me. He wore a strange brown skullcap and a long, brown leather apron. Odd fish. His hand was as big as Dowling’s and he held me by the shirt with it while he looked into my eyes, as though he was searching for something. I looked at his eyebrows so he wouldn’t think that I was staring at him. Then he let me go, roughly, and marched out.

‘He is the executioner,’ the cleric slurred while fumbling with a large wooden cross tied to a piece of thick cord. ‘He is very good at his job. You are fortunate.’ He held out the cord around my neck and let the cross bounce gently upon my chest. So, I had been measured up. A day of reckoning, indeed.

There were four other strangers in the cell stood officiously, but I didn’t look at them. They were big and very ugly, ill-disposed towards me, I felt sure. The cleric drew out a Bible from his inside pocket and began to read out snatches from it. Either he had poor eyesight, else he had drunk enough to render him unable, for few of the words were intelligible. His two eyes worked as they would, rarely arriving in the same place at the same time. We all waited patiently for him to complete his task.

Then the time came to leave. They attached a chain to the manacles that bound my wrists and led me forward like a dog. We walked down the main corridor out towards the entrance. Men stood at the bars to the public cells staring out. Some watched seriously, perhaps contemplating their own demise. Others leered and shouted, a couple even spat at me, though thankfully they succeeded only in hitting the sleeves of my shirt. Someone else could wash that later.

It was a relief on climbing into the cart to find that I would not be making the journey alone that morning. Rain still fell, though not hard, and there sat on a rough cloth sack was my travelling companion. Younger than me, and very thin, he sat with his knees bent outwards and ankles together, leaning forward with his wrists against the cart floor in front of his feet. He looked up at me with dull eyes beneath oily, black hair.

‘Good morning!’ I greeted him, determined that we not sit morose. I calculated that we needed each other’s good cheer if we were to support ourselves through the abuse we would surely experience on the way to Tyburn.

‘Hardly that!’ he mumbled. ‘Why are you so happy this day?’

‘I think I might be released. Though they found me guilty, I asked for the King’s pardon.’

‘Many ask for the King’s pardon, friend. Not many receive it. None have received it that I know of while on the cart.’

‘Methinks it is necessary to look on the bright side.’ Which was true. Though it was but a silly notion, the longer I managed to stay calm then the shorter the time I would suffer.

‘Methinks it is the sign of a simpleton, the kind of nonsense spake by those that have not yet understood what fate beholds them. When you see the scaffold and the crowds that surround it, then ye will start moaning and crying.’ He shrugged, ‘I have seen it.’

‘Are you complete with what fate awaits you?’

‘I will not know that for sure until I find myself standing there with the rope round my neck. If I ask the Lord God for forgiveness before I drop, then I will know that I am complete. If I shit my trousers and start panting like a dog, then I will know otherwise.’ He looked at me. ‘You will shit your trousers and pant like a dog.’

‘I wager I will not,’ I assured him.

‘I accept,’ he grinned.

I liked this fellow. I wondered what he’d done. ‘First to Sepulchras. To partake of wine, I believe?’

‘Indeed, though it is not a great vintage.’

The crowd was thin outside Newgate and at Sepulchras. We drank as much wine as they would give us, while the clerk read the prayers. A pale-looking fellow, weedy and yellow, he looked ill to me. He had a habit of snorting phlegm up his throat upon pausing for breath between verses. An unpleasant custom that rather spoilt the effect of his words. The small crowd didn’t appear to be disappointed, for their attentions were fixed upon us, regarding us with a hungry leer, keenly anticipating that one or other of us would lose control and give way to a bout of frantic pleading. The soldiers that accompanied us would be wishing for a quiet day. The one that walked closest to me frowned unhappily; nose and mouth bunched up like someone had tied up his snout with twine. He kept flicking sideways glances at me as if concerned that I would laugh at him. A strange idea under the circumstances.

We took our winter flowers and pinned them to our shirts, like gentlemen. The cart made good time up the road towards Tyburn, with the rain giving way to a steady drizzle. The crowds that there were shouted and cursed, but the guard that walked with us almost outnumbered them. It was a quiet journey compared to some I’d witnessed, and by the time we arrived we had barely enough cabbages to open a shop. I’d seen men have to be carried to the scaffold barely conscious from the batterings they’d taken on the cart. We should have counted ourselves fortunate, I suppose, yet I felt a sudden wistful grief that somehow London was full of people that had woken up that morning, looked out of the window and said to themselves ‘Ah — Harry Lytle is to be executed this day. Ne’er mind — it’s raining — let’s to the Crowne instead.’ What would I have given to be in the Crowne that morning?

We talked all the way, a good way to take your mind off what was to come. His name was Roger North and he was condemned for robbing men on the road to Epsom. He was a tobyman, in other words, and I had never met a tobyman before. It wasn’t such a glamorous life he described, even without the unhappy ending. He had been betrayed by a colleague of his that had objected to his flowery tales of brave words and valiant deeds. They had contested a lady’s hand in a tavern one night, and North had won. Next morning he’d awoken with empty arms and a sword at his eye.

As we got closer to Tyburn, so the crowds began to swell and thicken. By the time we reached the foot of the hill they were five or six deep on either side of us. Now the guards had to earn their money, pushing and prodding with their long pikes to keep the road free. I found myself scanning the throng, seeking familiar faces, people that I knew. Not a fruitful way to pass the time, I knew; yet I could not help it. Quite suddenly the prospect of death felt real. It was at this time that Joyce’s companions had lost their composure, so I recalled Dowling relating. The drink was all drunk, and it was time for repose. Roger North watched me carefully for sign of panic, I knew. He himself remained composed, though the veins on his face now looked very green against his marble-white skin.

At the scaffold the crowds were thick, swarming and buzzing. Galleries had been erected on either side and not a seat was to be had. I looked around for just one familiar face but saw none. Ugly faces, drunk and lairy. I ducked to avoid an orange. North was hit on the back of the head by a hard, young apple. He gritted his teeth and looked angry. All the faces I looked into were bleary and hard, impatient for the show to begin. No respect for death, I felt, and it was my death — surely it deserved some respect? I felt more like a player on the stage than a man about to reconcile himself with the Lord, unhappily aware of an expectation to perform — or be damned.