The dark-haired woman did not seem to care. Indeed her fascination with the beauty of the ornament was as apparent as her lack of interest in its origins. “Then the other things must be just as rich as this?”
The man almost sneered, in his pride and his amusement. “Richer, by God! Half a dozen pieces in all, rings and necklaces, in the same style, but even more extravagant–a king’s ransom. I am surprised you had no chance to see them on the voyage. You must have shared the Russian’s cabin, sailing back to London.”
The woman let her long sleeve drop, concealing jewels and precious metal. “Cap-tain Kulakov kept all well hidden.”
“No doubt. I think he meant to keep such great treasure all to himself, and maybe to some of his men who knew of it. but to cheat his English partner–”* Altamont smiled and shook his head. “Well, greed, like pride, goeth before a fall. And now the Russian hath lost all; his treasure, his woman, life itself. Almost I could feel sorry for him–why are they taking so long about his stepping off?” He squinted through his glass again.
A prosperous man, Mr. Altamont, even before his recent dramatic accession of new wealth. He felt himself capable of handling even greater prosperity without undue difficulty. At the moment his countenance was alternating between frowns at the delay and a faint expression of abstract pleasure as he shifted from wine to hot buttered rum, while watching from his comfortable chair.
The pallid woman remained patiently seated with him. Though the air on this June morning had turned quite mild, she was glad to shelter here indoors; in her case it was in fact not chill nor damp, but the mild English sun that threatened.
On shore the experienced Thomas Turlis, and his assistant who was hardly less qualified, were proceeding about their business with deliberate speed. The junior member of the official team had already climbed to straddle the crossbeam, where he sat waiting until Turlis had guided his first victim halfway up the ladder, Kulakov’s feet on the rungs awkward with the weight of chains and terror. Then, receiving from his senior’s hand the loose end of the short rope already snug around the victim’s neck, the assistant quickly and efficiently secured it tightly to the heavy crossbeam.
The red-haired man cried out, loudly and articulately, in the last moments while he waited for the noose to choke off his breath.
“Al-ta-mont!” There followed a string of violent un-English words, sounds carrying well across the water, between the two points on the curving shore.
“I understand very little Russian, really,” the man at the table remarked comfortably. “Which no doubt is just as well.”
“I un-der-stand a little, as with Ain-glish,” the watching woman remarked abstractedly. “I spoke to him last night,” she added after a pause. “He think he have give the jewels to you only for safe-keeping, not?”
“You saw him last night?” briefly her companion turned a puzzled but fascinated frown in her direction. “Really, I think that you did not, for you were pretty steadily with me. As I have good cause to remember, having got but little sleep.” Lecherously Altamont displayed bad teeth. “but you know, I would wager my new fortune that it would not be beyond you to gain entry to a condemned cell–not when the guards are men.”
“I spoke to him,” the woman repeated. Not with an air of insistence, but as if she had not heard her companion’s denial. “but he would not believe that I was real. I think thees Russian must be very–what is word?–su-per-sti-tious.” Pulling her dreamy gaze back from the shore, she fastened it upon the man beside her. “Will you believe me, Al-tamont, when I try to tell you what I am?”
He made a small noise compounded of amusement and satisfaction. “I think I understand well enough what you are. So, you visited the condemned cell, did you, and had a chat? And what do you want me to think that you told dear Alexei? That we have both betrayed him? That the jewels are all mine now, while he is come to dine today on hearty-choke and caper sauce?”
The woman very slightly shook her head. “He did not need me to tell him that you keep the jewels.” Perhaps she intended to offer some explanation about her activities last night, or drop more teasing hints; but at the moment her full attention, like that of all other watchers, had become focused on the shore.
For the space of a held breath the raucous cries of even the least reverent onlookers were silent. Turlis, the older and paunchier of the hangman pair, with his feet planted solidly in mud–the planks had been disarranged in Kulakov’s last awkward stumbling–took hold of the ladder and, with a strong twisting wrench, deprived the bound man of all physical support. Except for that now afforded him by taut hemp, the smoothly clasping noose.
The drop was a short one, no more than three feet at the most, in this case not nearly enough to break the neck-bones, to tear and quickly crush out life and consciousness from the vulnerable soft tissue of the spine and brain stem. There was only the steady, brutal pressure of the rope to squeeze the windpipe, veins and arteries. Kulakov’s powerful frame convulsed. His bound arms strained, his legs and feet moved in a spasmodic aerial ballet.
Hearty-choke and caper sauce.
The fact that Kulakov had been first to be hanged meant that comparatively few among the audience were paying his prolonged death struggle as much attention as it must otherwise have received; rather the fascinated scrutiny of the mob now rested in turn upon each of his colleagues.
Altamont commented knowingly to his companion that the knot of the rope had very likely slipped from the favored location behind the Russian’s ear to behind his neck–but how could Altamont have known that, at the distance, unless he had made some private arrangement to have the knot deliberately adjusted in that wise? Trying to get the better of Altamont, as the man himself would have assured you, was likely to result in truly frightful punishment.
As for Kulakov, he had been denied his broken neck. So that he hung for a quarter of an hour, intermittently twitching and tensing in agony, all breathing not quite cut off.
“Are they not going to finish him?” Altamont’s comment, coming after five minutes or so, was dryly lacking in surprise. “It would seem not.”
It was common in such cases for one or both hangmen, when not entirely lacking in pity, to seize their client by the legs, and drag down with their full weight upon the poor wretch’s body to assist his soul on its way out of it. but at the moment the executioners were busy. If any friends or relatives of the condemned were in attendance, that office might fall to them. but in Kulakov’s case no one had come forward with any such merciful intention.
One after the other, the two remaining pirates followed their captain to the scaffold. The executioners gave no thought to taking down the body of the first man to be hanged, until the third was dangling, and they had paused to fortify themselves with rum. The two Englishmen went quickly, so there was no need for relatives to intervene.
When, in the chief executioner’s professional judgment, the third man had been well and truly hanged, he gave curt directions to his assistant. between them the two men loosened the knot holding the first body to the crossbar–there would be no wasteful cutting of the rope–and lowered their grim burden to the muddy shore. Already the feet of the hangmen splashed in water; at this hour the lower Thames was entering that part of its unending tidal cycle in which the rising weight of ocean a few miles distant forced the river swiftly back toward its source, as if it would convey the brackish tide up into the middle of the great island.