My Cousin Rachel
1
They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days.
Not anymore, though.
Now, when a murderer pays the penalty for his crime, he does so up at Bodmin, after fair trial at the Assizes.
That is, if the law convicts him, before his own conscience kills him.
It is better so.
Like a surgical operation.
And the body has decent burial, though a nameless grave.
When I was a child it was otherwise.
I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet.
His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation.
He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him.
He swung between earth and sky upon his gibbet, or, as my cousin Ambrose told me, betwixt heaven and hell.
Heaven he would never achieve, and the hell that he had known was lost to him.
Ambrose prodded at the body with his stick.
I can see it now, moving with the wind like a weather vane on a rusty pivot, a poor scarecrow of what had been a man.
The rain had rotted his breeches, if not his body, and strips of worsted drooped from his swollen limbs like pulpy paper.
It was winter, and some passing joker had placed a sprig of holly in the torn vest for celebration.
Somehow, at seven years old, that seemed to me the final outrage, but I said nothing.
Ambrose must have taken me there for a purpose, perhaps to test my nerve, to see if I would run away, or laugh, or cry.
As my guardian, father, brother, counselor, as in fact my whole world, he was forever testing me.
We walked around the gibbet, I remember, with Ambrose prodding and poking with his stick; and then he paused and lit his pipe, and laid his hand upon my shoulder.
“There you are, Philip,” he said, “it’s what we all come to in the end.
Some upon a battlefield, some in bed, others according to their destiny.
There’s no escape.
You can’t learn the lesson too young.
But this is how a felon dies.
A warning to you and me to lead the sober life.”
We stood there side by side, watching the body swing, as though we were on a jaunt to Bodmin fair, and the corpse was old Sally to be hit for coconuts.
“See what a moment of passion can bring upon a fellow,” said Ambrose.
“Here is Tom Jenkyn, honest and dull, except when he drank too much.
It’s true his wife was a scold, but that was no excuse to kill her.
If we killed women for their tongues all men would be murderers.”
I wished he had not named the man.
Up to that moment the body had been a dead thing, without identity.
It would come into my dreams, lifeless and horrible, I knew that very well from the first instant I had set my eyes upon the gibbet.
Now it would have connection with reality, and with the man with watery eyes who sold lobsters on the town quay.
He used to stand by the steps in the summer months, his basket beside him, and he would set his live lobsters to crawl along the quay in a fantastic race, to make the children laugh.
It was not so long ago that I had seen him.
“Well,” said Ambrose, watching my face, “what do you make of him?”
I shrugged my shoulders, and kicked the base of the gibbet with my foot.
Ambrose must never know I cared, that I felt sick at heart, and terrified.
He would despise me.
Ambrose at twenty-seven was god of all creation, certainly god of my own narrow world, and the whole object of my life was to resemble him.
“Tom had a brighter face when I saw him last,” I answered.
“Now he isn’t fresh enough to become bait for his own lobsters.”
Ambrose laughed, and pulled my ears.
“That’s my boy,” he said.
“Spoken like a true philosopher.”