THE SECOND FEE

The turnips came in on Tuesday the way they always did, and the eels came in after them, and by nine the square smelled of wet rope and cold fish and the kind of coal smoke that gets into wool and stays there. I was up on the scaffold with my coat off and my bag open. The scaffold is stone and built into the ground like a well. Three steps up, a platform, a beam across, and a trap under it that drops into the dark. There is a man who comes afterward with a bucket and a lime sack. He does not talk and I do not talk to him. We have an arrangement. The constable brought Coyle up at a quarter past nine. Horse thief. Twenty-six years old, red hands, a broken nose he had not had a week ago. He came up the three steps without being pushed, which is rarer than people think. “Any words?” I asked him, quiet, so the square would not hear. “Will it be quick?” “Yes.” “You're sure.” “I'm sure.” That is the last thing most men want to know and the only thing I can honestly give them. I checked the knot twice. Six turns, the eye snug, the tail down and to the left, because the tail tells you at a glance whether it has slipped. I had weighed him at the cells that morning. Nine stone eleven. The table in my coat said fourteen inches and I had marked the beam in chalk and the chalk was still there. “One thing,” Coyle said. “Say it.” “They told me it would be transportation.” My hand was already on the lever. I took it off. “What?” “The clerk. The one at the court. He said if I pleaded guilty I'd get the colonies. Seven years. He said it would be on the docket and I'd be on the next ship and my wife could come after.” He swallowed. “So I pleaded. And then the docket said what it said.” The square had gone quiet in the way a crowd goes quiet when it can see something is being said that it cannot hear. “Which clerk?” “I don't know his name. Thin. Grey coat. He had the paper written out before I came in the room.” I looked down at the square. Three hundred people. Half of them looking at their feet, half looking at me. The constable stood at the bottom of the steps with his hands folded and his eyes on the middle distance. “Did you steal the horse?” I asked. “No.” “Say that again and mean it.” “I didn't steal the horse. I was found with it. That's not the same thing and the clerk said it didn't matter, and he said if I was going to hang anyway I might as well hang for the plea and get the ship.” I checked the knot a third time. There was no reason for it. I did it anyway. I pulled the lever. Fourteen inches. The sound it makes is not the sound people think it makes, and then it was over, and the crowd let out the breath it had been holding and went back to the eels. I stood there a while with my hands on the rail. Then I went down the steps and got my coat and went to see about the body. --- The cart goes over the bridge at half past ten. The bridge is four arches of stone with a checkpoint at each end and a guard in a booth who writes down what crosses, and the guard that morning was a boy of nineteen who did not want to look at the sheet, so he looked at his book instead. I walked behind the cart. The surgeons' man drove it. His name was Hesk and he had a tally book and a pencil on a string and he had been doing the job since before I had it. “Morning,” he said. “Morning.” “Nine stone eleven, was it?” “Fourteen inches.” “Good.” He wrote something. “They like the small ones for the hands. Easier to get the wrists clean.” I did not answer him. We went over the bridge and up past the guild halls and turned left at the assize court, which is a long grey building with a green dome gone black, and the surgeons' yard is behind it, and the dead-house is a low stone building in the corner of the yard with one door and no windows worth the name. There was a new lock on the door. I stopped in front of it. It was not a Halm lock. Halm locks are iron and old and the keys are the length of your finger. This one was brass, new, with a plate screwed into the wood and the screws bright. There was a man standing beside the door. Thin. Grey coat. He had the look of a man who has been told to stand somewhere and is afraid to move from it, and he had one hand in his pocket and the other on the doorframe. “Morning,” I said. “Morning.” “I've brought the body.” “Leave it with the cart.” “The cart goes on to the tanners at eleven. The body goes inside.” “Leave it with the cart,” he said again. He did not move his hand off the doorframe. Hesk had stopped unloading. He was holding a sheet by two corners and looking at me, and I could see he had decided that whatever was happening was not his business and he was going to stand very still until it stopped. “Whose order is the lock?” I asked. The thin man looked at the lock, then at me. “The magistrate's.” “Which magistrate?” “There's one magistrate in this city.” “And what does the magistrate want with a lock on a dead-house?” He did not answer that. He took his hand off the doorframe and put it in his other pocket. “Leave it with the cart,” he said, for the third time, and then he turned his face away from me as if the conversation had finished in a way that both of us had agreed to. I looked at the lock again. I looked at the yard. There was nothing else new in it. The drain was where the drain had always been, and the cobbles were wet, and a black bird was standing on the wall doing nothing. I could have taken the man by the front of his grey coat and put him against the door and asked him again. I have done that kind of thing before, in another life, and I am not proud of it, and I am also not above it. But there is a rule about the dead-house and it is an old rule and it says that the hangman delivers, and the hangman hands over, and the hangman does not go inside and look at what the surgeons do in there, because the law has decided that the hanging is one thing and the anatomy is another and the man who does both should keep his hands where he can see them. “All right,” I said. Hesk laid the sheet down on the cart. The thin man unlocked the door with a key he had in his left pocket, and it was not a small key, and the lock opened easily, which meant it had been oiled. Somebody had oiled it recently. I walked out of the yard. At the gate I stopped and looked back. The thin man had gone inside and pulled the door to, and the door did not shut all the way, and through the gap I could see the light of a lamp in a room that should not have had a lamp burning at eleven in the morning. I went home and took my coat off and hung it on the hook and stood in the kitchen with the folded table in my hand. Nine stone eleven. Fourteen inches. I had got it right. That is the thing I keep, and it is the only thing I keep, and it had been right that morning and the man had still said what he said on the trap. I put the table in the drawer and shut the drawer. Then I opened it again and took the table out and put it back in my coat, because a man who leaves his tools at home is a man who has decided not to work. --- I went back to the yard at dusk. The lock was still on the door. The lamp was no longer burning. I stood in the corner of the yard where the drain was and put my hand flat against the stone of the dead-house wall and felt nothing except that it was cold, and then I walked home along the river with the tide going out and the mud beginning to stink. At my gate I stopped. Somebody had been to the door while I was out. There was a mark in the wet where a boot had turned, and the boot had been a good one, and whoever it was had not knocked. I checked the door. It was locked. I checked it twice, which is a thing I do. Then I went in and lit the lamp and sat down at the kitchen table with the folded table in front of me and looked at it for a long while. Eight shillings for the hanging. Two pounds for the body. Eleven years of it, and a man on the trap that morning telling me a clerk in a grey coat had sold him a ship that did not exist, and a brass lock on a dead-house door, and somebody standing in my gate in good boots not knocking. I poured a drink and did not drink it. Then I drank it.