merciful breaking of the neck — just a slow steady hauling on the rope until the feet were off the floor, and an agonizing, interminable strangulation.
The crowd was growing impatient waiting for their entertainment to begin. They had not long to wait, for Lewis had only just pushed his way toward the front of the crowd when the sheriff appeared, drawing raucous cries and hoots of approval. As befitted such a solemn occasion, he was dressed in formal clothing and carried a sword. A minister followed, presumably, Lewis thought, one from the Church of England, as would be appropriate for Simms, having been raised in that church. Then came the hangman dressed in convict clothing, a mask over his face to protect his identity. He needn’t have bothered with this disguise. Everyone seemed to know who he was and several called out his name in greeting. The man checked the knot on the noose, and two constables escorted Simms to the platform, his arms tied behind his back, his head hanging, his face in shadow. The shouting from the crowd grew frenzied as he was marched over to stand beneath the rope.
The sheriff read the charges against him and noted that he had been found guilty and duly condemned to die “with no order of reprieve having been received by this office.” He turned to Simms. “Have you anything to say?”
“Yes,” Simms replied, and the roar from the crowd was deafening. This was what they had hoped for: words from the prisoner confessing his guilt, protesting his innocence, explaining his actions. This was why they had massed in the yard — to take note of the murderer’s last words — then to watch him die.
Lewis pushed forward another step and caught Simms’s eye. Isaac the peddler was there. He had returned to being the congenial companion of the trail, the traveller who heard everything, the man who was always welcomed for the news he brought and the goods he carried. It was not to the minister provided by the authorities that Simms looked now, but to Lewis, the entire time he spoke.
He cleared his throat a little. “I am ready to go to God,” he said, “although I am not sure that God wants me. I confess freely and fully to the crime for which I am about to be hanged.”
A cheer from the crowd.
“I confess freely to my other crimes as well, and they have been many.”
There was a sudden hush. This was more than anyone had expected, and Lewis could hear the murmurs behind him.
“Not only did I commit the murder for which I stood trial, and for which I will die today, but I also killed four other times, purely for my own gratification.”
There were screams now, and Lewis was aware that people were shoving at his back, trying to get closer so as to hear every heinous word. He stood his ground and held Simms’s eyes.
“I committed these other murders in other places, and was never found out nor brought to trial for them. I am truly sorry, and I can only hope that I will be forgiven for it.”
He choked a little as he said this, but he held Lewis’s gaze.
“I die on account of one sin, but I am punished for them all. Oh, Father, be with me now and forevermore …”
At this, his words became indistinct, and the hangman moved forward to cover his face and place the noose around his neck. He tied Simms’s legs together and checked the bonds that held his hands. Suddenly, the yard was silent, as if the crowd was collectively holding their breath in anticipation. The rope wound its way through a pulley at the top of the scaffold and there was a faint rasping sound as the wheel turned. Simms’s feet began to rise, kicking and bucking as his body fought against the constricting pull.
The crowd cheered and Lewis watched only long enough to make sure that the hangman had done his job well. He had; the noose held and Simms struggled for only a few minutes before his body became still and hung limp from the rope. It was done.
It took Lewis a long time to make his way out of the yard. Several of the women had fainted, and the knots of people around their fallen bodies obstructed the flow of traffic. No one seemed to be in any hurry to leave. They were prepared to make a day of it, and now baskets were being opened and cloths unfolded for picnic lunches. He finally made the gate and collected his horse, happy to leave the throng to their grisly holiday.
Spicer had not been able to get any closer than the gate, but had seen enough to make him sober and thoughtful as they rode along, neither speaking of what they had just witnessed. They had scheduled appointments that Lewis knew they should hasten to meet, but he felt a sudden reluctance to carry on, to spend the rest of the day with the petty and picayune transgressions that would be trotted out for him to exclaim over and chastise. At this moment they hardly seemed worth the effort.
What he wanted more than anything was to sit with Betsy for a time. He didn’t want to talk about the day’s events, or about Simms, although he knew that at some point he would share with her what he had learned about Sarah’s death. He wanted only a cup of tea and the comfort of his wife — to hear her sensible comments on everyday affairs. To hear Minta’s tinkling laugh and the steady beat of Seth’s hard-working hammer. To sit with his feet on a stool and watch Martha and Henry play in the yard.
He reined in his horse and turned to Spicer. “Why don’t you go ahead and take those meetings?” he said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
Spicer’s face lit up. “All by myself? Really?”
“Really. I think I’ll call it a day.”
And with that he turned his horse toward home.
Chapter One
Nathan Elliott had been missing for twenty-four hours and everyone had pretty well given up any hope of finding him, including Thaddeus Lewis, who knew that an injured man had little hope of surviving a second night in what had been a particularly frosty Canadian autumn.
When the call went out, Lewis had answered immediately. He joined the meeting at Murphy’s Tavern, where the local constable was laying out his plan to organize the men into a search party. There were plenty of volunteers. The lakeside village of Wellington lost more men to the water than anywhere else, and search parties were often formed to comb the shores for the bodies of sailors or fishermen who had been reported lost from a vessel wrecked in a storm.
But a person who had gone missing on land was a novelty, and the tavern was full, with not only local men, but a number who had arrived from the neighbouring villages of Bloomfield and Raynor’s Creek.
Constable Williams sorted them into pairs, and then Reuben Elliott led them all out to where he said he had left the wounded man — his brother Nathan. They had been cutting firewood from the woodlot at the back of their farm, he said, when he had attempted to fell a widow-maker, one of those trees that falls the wrong way and gets hung up in the surrounding branches. They were tricky, these trees, for there was no way to predict how they would come down. Reuben was an experienced woodsman, however, and knew what he was doing. But it had been a long time, he said, since his brother had engaged in heavy farm labour.
“I told Nate to stand well back. But the top branches wouldn’t budge at first. I cut away the trunk, but it just hung there. He ran forward to help just as it finally let go. A big branch landed right on his head.”
Nathan had been unconscious and bleeding, but still breathing apparently, when Reuben ran to get help, but when he returned with a neighbour they had been unable to locate the body. They’d searched for hours, but found nothing, and by the time the constable had been contacted,
