24
The sun came up on the morning of Conn’s execution with as much warmth and honeyed light as if it had been the Jubilee celebrations of a much-loved monarch. At ten in the morning he was taken from his cell in the Swarthmore, then down to the West Gate and through the Parc Beaulieu to the place of execution on the Quai des Moulins. Five of his men, but not Vipond, or his wife, walked with him, bareheaded and unarmed. There he ate a piece of bread and drank a glass of wine in the Vetch Gallery. From before dawn a huge crowd had been gathering in order to get the best places from which to see the action.
Along with the usual excitement of a crowd who delighted in the hideous suffering of a fellow human being was added the hatred of citizens who held Conn Materazzi responsible not only for the defeat at Bex but for their justified fear that in the spring of next year the Redeemers would be doing very much the same to them as they were now about to do to him.
A brass band of sorts, sponsored by the city’s biggest pie-maker, belted out rough versions of popular songs and blaring versions of boastful martial anthems about Switzerlanders never being slaves. The crowd was a peculiar mixture of unequals: do-bads, thieves, tarts and lollygaggers, carpenters and shopkeepers, merchants and their wives and daughters and, of course, a specially erected terrace for those who really mattered. In all, it was such a crush of spiteful humanity that those not used to it suffered terribly, namely the wives and daughters of the gentility who fainted in the heat and had to be carried out with their plunging necklines all disordered, which got the drunk apprentices going (‘GET YOUR TITS OUT FOR THE LADS!’). As always, it was a bad day for cats: at least a dozen were thrown into the air to bellowing shouts around the great space in front of the place of execution.
In general, throughout the Four Quarters, judicial death came about through hanging, beheading with an axe or burning – sometimes all three, if you were particularly unfortunate. But in Spanish Leeds, commoner and aristocrat were both beheaded after a peculiar manner and by a most unusual executioner. Formally it was called the Leeds Gibbet but the polloi called it Topping Bob. It consisted of a frame of wood about sixteen foot high and four foot wide bolted into a large block. It was something like a French guillotine, although much bigger and much cruder. But unlike the guillotine there is no single executioner for the Leeds Gibbet: there are many. Once the block and axe is pulled to the top of the frame and held with a pin, the rope holding the pin in place is handed out to any of the people below who can get a grasp of it. Those who can’t stretch out their hands to show that they assent and agree to the execution. This, then, was the sight that waited for Conn as he stepped out onto the platform and his death.
His shirt of black silk had been cut around the collar without much skill to leave his neck visible. Black silk shirts, then the height of fashion, were unpopular for many years afterwards. The gibbet, of course, dominated the scene and if beauty is the shape that most conveys the purpose of an object then its ugliness was beautiful. It looked like what it was. It was a pity that none of Conn’s friends had been allowed out onto the platform with him: he deserved someone to witness his bravery in the face of that awful device. Perhaps there were some in the crowd, not many, who sensed the young man’s courage. It was true that he’d shown great courage in battle but that was courage shown where all around were to share a part in the same fate; where there was fear but also fellow feeling and the prospect of honour and purpose. Here it was all isolation among the taunts and the cruelty; giving people the pleasure of watching hideous suffering inflicted without risk to themselves. But there was at least one person there who admired him, who knew the injustice and unfairness, the wrongness of his death. Cale was in the bell tower of St Anne’s cathedral, which looked down on the square – a distance from the gibbet of about fifty yards and a hundred and thirty feet high. He was alone and smoking one of the fine Swiss cigars, a Diplomat No. 4, to which he had become addicted now that he could afford them every day. He couldn’t have told you how he felt – not sick to his stomach, as he’d been at the death of the Maid of Blackbird Leys, but a kind of dead tranquillity in which he seemed, paradoxically, alive to everything: the mocking obscenities, the whistles, the man smiling at Conn and holding two fingers to his forehead, delighting in the horror to come. But he also felt removed, as if the tower had taken him above the fog of malice and pleasure below. A small tribe of dogs chased each other, barking happily, in and out of the legs of the soldiers who faced the crowd from the platform, not armed but carrying drums.
Conn waited to be instructed what to do. A curate approached him. ‘It has been agreed that you may speak but I’m warning you not to say anything against the Crown or the people.’
Conn moved forward. The noise of the crowd diminished a little – a good speech could be dined out on.
Thirty yards away the bookies at their trestles were taking bets on how many spurts of blood there’d be.
‘I haven’t come here to talk,’ said Conn, startled by the firmness of his voice as his stomach surged. ‘I’ve come here to die.’
‘Speak up,’ shouted someone in the crowd.
‘I’d be heard little if I shouted myself to death. I’ll be brief – I’d prefer to say nothing if it weren’t that going to my death silently would make some men think I submitted to the guilt as well as to the punishment. I die innocent …’
Up in the tower Cale heard the word ‘innocent’ but nothing more as the curate signalled the drummers to drown out Conn’s accusation of injustice. Whether he cut it short because of the drums or he didn’t have much to say, Conn finished and walked towards, if not the executioner exactly, at least the man responsible for the workings of the gibbet.
‘I hope you sharpened the blade as duty obliges you. And I’ll have my head cut off at the neck and not topped like an egg as I hear you did with my Lord the Cavalier of Zurich. Botch it and there’ll be no tip. See it done properly and you’ll be glad you killed Conn Materazzi.’
‘Thank you, zir,’ said the almost-executioner, who depended on such tips for payment, ‘we have a new doings to prevent such han unfortunate thing happenin’ agayne.’
Conn walked to the gibbet, took a deep breath as if to swallow back his terror, and knelt down, his neck fitting into a clearly brand new semi-circle made in the wood. The new cross plank above was swiftly put in place with the matching half of the circle and locked into position. Above him, the flat blade in its heavy wooden block was held in place by two pins, each one attached to a separate rope. One of the pins was held in place by a clip and it was the rope leading from this one that the gibbet-master threw into the crowd. He waited until the scrabble for a handhold on the rope was finished then went up a ladder placed against the gibbet and put his right hand to the clip holding the pin in place, so that no one in the crowd could prematurely pull it out. He addressed the people.
‘I will count to three – any man’s hand now on the rope that stays on the rope after the count of three will be whipped.’ Satisfied that those holding the rope were in command of themselves he called out: ‘One!’
‘TWO!’ shouted back the crowd. ‘THREE!’
He whipped the clip free with a great flourish.
The rope and pin whipped loose, the block and blade rattled in the rail and struck with a dreadful bang. Conn’s head shot from the gibbet as if it’d been launched from a sling and flew over the platform and into the crowd, vanishing among the Sunday best of the men and women of fashion.