Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

a foot on the bottom step up to the gallows and looked at the crossbeam where the rope would have been secured. We could hear rain on the roof.

— Once Tapner dropped through the trap, Barbet said, the Queen’s man, the chaplain, and the judge all left quickly. We waited an hour before we cut him down. After keeping back a bit of the rope for a remembrance, I put it on the fire. It is a thing that has always been done.

FROM THE GIBBET we three walked down Market Street to that maze of brick courts and dark passageways nigh the cattlepens behind which we came to Potter’s Field, as forsaken and cheerless a place as you will find on the island. A stubborn bramble choked the corners of its low wall, and its meadow grass, matted now and dank with rain, needed a thorough coursing of sickle and rake.

— Over there, Barbet nodded toward a red roof showing above an orchard, is the Frenchman Béasse’s house. Come and look over the wall. Like as not we’ll see Tommy Didder.

— And who is he? Monsieur Hugo said from the lappets of his greatcoat.

— His gardner, as was. And his hangman.

— Béasse, I explained, goes back twenty year or so, an officer in the campaigns in the Peninsula.

— With my father, Monsieur Hugo said. You say that he was hanged? Here?

— Well, Barbet said, he killed his own child, a bastard he had by his cook, and tried to hide the little body over there in that orchard. The state of the cook had been noticed, and its change, and with no tyke in evidence, our suspicions were aroused. The gardner Didder found it himself. They’d run a stick right through it, from mouth to fundament, a sight so pitiful the crowner shouted at the jury that their duty was to get Béasse into an eternity of hell fire as fast as they could return a verdict of Guilty. He was taken through the streets, and the soldiers made way for people to spit on him.

— The times have changed, I said. The feeling was never so fierce among the people when Miss Saujon’s body was found with her throat cut from ear to ear, and all the evidence showed that Tapner had doubtless done it.

— Doubtless?

— O, no doubt, Mister Hugo, Barbet said. They were seeing each other in a sinful way. Moral degeneracy in one respect leads to any other. Tapner had the Devil in him. God knows what caused him to cut the poor woman’s throat. But cut it he did. They found his shirt as bloody as a butcher’s.

We’d reached the wall, and looked over. The garden was all mulched and under beds of hay. Didder was nowhere in sight.

— He has his memories, Barbet said. He had to accuse, and to hang the man he was gardner to. If ever a man felt the sharpness of a judgment, it was Béasse. The bailly, you see, was his best friend. They were like brothers here on the island. His ears took the sentence of hanging from the mouth of the man he loved most. Their eyes never once met in the courtroom. And Didder, his gardner, hanged him. I can show you his trap, as well as Tapner’s. We make a new one every time. I have them in a shed at the jail.

— No, Monsieur Hugo said, but I’ll see Tapner’s grave, if you’ll show it to me.

Stones no bigger than bricks marked the plots in that dreary, wet ground, and they were smothered in grass all a gnarl. We got the sexton, who had been opening a grave for a pauper, to help us with the finding.

— He was buried in his own clothes, Barbet said, which by our law are his. In London, you know, all the effects of the condemned belong to the hangman. But he has to provide a shroud. You wouldn’t put even the damned indecent into their graves.

The day was thickening with fog. Tapner’s stone was shiny with mist when we found it. The sexton pushed down the grass with his boot so that we could read the begrudging JCT 1854 cut on it with a degree of neatness.

— Did you bury Tapner? Monsieur Hugo asked the sexton.

— Beg pardon, Sir?

The brogue had raddled him. I put the question myself.

— This booger here? Yiss. Him what was a fornicator and never did a stroke of work in his life. Sat on a stool in a room with a stove. Two given to falling in fits, the stable lad and a girl from the Eldridge farm, came to touch the corpse. If it’s took off their affliction nobody has thought to tell me.

Monsieur stooped and broke off a blade of grass from Tapner’s grave and put it in the pages of a tablet he had in his pocket. Barbet looked at him as if he were a prize fool if ever one set foot on Guernsey.

— Are you satisfied, then, Mister Hugo? he asked. This damp is getting into my bones and my feet are starting to perish.

A silence. I had my thoughts, confused as they were, but I would remember that moment later, when there was a sort of fellowship among us there at Tapner’s grave, little as any of us understood anything of each other. I remembered it when he wrote yet more letters, this time to America, to demand of those stout and troubled people that they not hang the man John Brown. I remembered it when his daughter followed the English soldier to Newfoundland and sent back the lie that she was his wife.

— And now, Mister Hugo, Barbet said as a pleasantry that did not sound like one, are you quite satisfied?

— I am told, he said, that your minister Monsieur Palmerston wears all the time white gloves.

He held his hands, as freckled and wrinkled as his face, out in the raw air, for