Wild’s men brought Jack to the Tree straightaway.
Thousands of common folk throng’d the streets to watch the execution-cart pass. The City Marshal attended the cart, mount’d on a fine steed of pied color with a high, shiny haunch just visible out of the corner of Jack’s eye under the hood. Some Histories will say it was a carnival that day.
But it was a Rebellion.
The people screamed bloody Murder for Jack’s release, and the Marshal on his steed was unmoved, though they threw rotted fruit at him and spat with all their might.
Jack begg’d in his heart that Aurie would rush the stage and steal his body back from the hangman once the deed was done, as they had discuss’d he would do in this eventuality over ales so many nights when they play’d Aurie’s favorite game (and in truth it was no game to him; it was the very meat of his worrying mind): What if.
Jack was on his knees and the hangman’s hand was on his whip.
And, Reader, he died.
Because he was of slight build, it took fifteen minutes, and in that time, he saw the Mob glisten and turn sap-thick underwater green as the breath left his body and he was seiz’d then with the surety of his Arc; he would not die of the supposed Plague, or of a slip and fall off an eave, or of throwing himself from the walls of the Tower, or of Drowning, or of the pain of Bess-less-ness, or even of the Pleasure of Bess’s muff making his heart skip beats. He would die of the executioner. Of the hand whipping the horse, of the horse yanking the cart.
For moments they all thought his Body would not be weighted enough to die. But die he did.
He died on the Tree like Bailey the Highwayman and Brooks the Shop-Lifter and Nayler the Preacher of Freedom and Equality. He died at the hands of the profiteers like all the rebels, and freedom fighters rotting under the water of the fens.
The mob rushed the stage so quickly that Aurie Blake was swallow’d up in a sea of clamoring ordinary Folk. He did not reach Jack. The mob got to him first.
And the mob carried Jack on their shoulders through the Town to keep him safe from the Dissectors and the Wardens and Wild and all who wished to profit from his Body. They took him down Chipping Street, misty with the grains of glass-dust from Walton’s Glass-Blowers. They took him down Wapping, high on their shoulders through the blighted moldy air of the Slaughterhouses. On to the Strand with the husky tailors hunch’d over their spinning machines, concoctin’ a strike for better wages. And the tailors stepp’d out into the street and whistled salutations and Love as he passed by. They took him to the Stone Castle Inn, where they propp’d him on couches and drank many toasts of good whiskey to his Honor. Then they carry’d him lovingly to St. Martin-in-the-Fields and dug a grave with small shovels and spoons and with their fingernails even, for those who lacked a tool. And they laid him there, and dusted themselves off, and they left him with a battalion of Commoners to guard him, and the rest went home and changed into their Leveller Green Dress clothes—their mutinous green colors in honor of Winstanley and the Family of Love, long-lost Dreamers of these common lands. Planters of seed, grazers of cows, feeders of the people.
And, dressed now all in green, they return’d.
And Aurie Blake was there, dressed in green, and Bess—and Bill Field’s son, too; Aurie’s love—Tommy—was holding Aurie’s hand. Holding him up. And they threw dirt on Jack’s head and chest and bury’d him that night with the red poppies just opened and the cherry plum came to Budding just that day.
But when the mob had dispers’d, singing together into the Night—their voices floated out acrid and hoarse on the salt-scratched air—Aurie Blake stepp’d from behind the big oak at the end of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The oak at the foot of which he had been sitting and breathing calm and steady ’til the sound of the mob was far and tiny down the lane, each of them tumbl’d off into a pub, or their bed, or settlin’ down for the night wedged against a cobbled wall. He stepped out and approach’d the grave and took his hands to the cold wet dirt. And he dug.
He didn’t have to dig for long. The mob hadn’t done the most fastidious burying job. To be fair, most of ’em were enormously soused. No matter. ’Twas easier for Aurie this way. He felt Jack’s arm before he saw it, and then he start’d brushing.
Jack lay shallow in the dirt, his skin enameled against the dark. His eyes half-opened, slitted in that deadlike way. A sliver of Tooth glinted in the moonlight.
“Brother,” Aurie whisper’d. And that would be the only word he spoke for the next long while, as he unearth’d Jack and—as delicately as Aurie could—placed him over his shoulder and proceeded down Charing Cross to meet Tommy, who was waiting outside the Pig and Thistle and simply nodded at Aurie and fell in beside him, and they walked together to Hampstead Heath.
The chirurgeon was a sour man. A thin, wasted rind dressed in a white jumper and surrounded by rusty tools. He cough’d a “C’min” from his stool when Aurie and Tommy knocked, and they open’d the door into the rank basement office.
“Here’s yer 50p,” scoffed Tommy, who felt that anyone with any sympathy at all would do this for free. He tossed some grubby coin on the metal table.
The chirurgeon swiped the coin off the operating table and gestured for Aurie to lay Jack down.
“Wipe it first,” Aurie said, holding Jack tight against his shoulder. He strok’d Jack’s stockinged leg, something he’d not ordinarily allow himself. Now that they were in the light, Tommy saw the dried chalky tear-streams down Aurie’s face and pool’d in his beard scruff.
The chirurgeon grumblingly rubbed a Rag over the surface, which left a gummy film on top of the metal. Aurie laid Jack down, arranging his arms and legs in a jaunty akimbo posture—nothing like the knotted ball Jack actually slept in, but a Pantomime of something like the dreamy gaolbreaker Aurie always saw him as. Supernatural and Free. He stepped back.
“So you’ll bring ’im around again?” query’d Tommy. Aurie was too choked up to talk. The few sentences he’d said that night had already practically done him in—Tommy could see that. Saw Aurie’s throat bobbing up and down while he was looking at Jack. So Tommy would be the one to secure the Transaction.
“You’ll bring ’im ’round? That’s what we’re here for.”
“I’ll bring ’im ’round. To the best of my Capacity I will bring ’im ’round. I’ll need some Privacy for it, all right. It’s a bit of a procedure and I do need my concentration.”
Aurie didn’t like the sound of that, but the room was small and dense and smelled sharply of chemicals and death. And he couldn’t bear looking at Jack like that for much longer. Holding him was better. Looking was causing a chasm to widen in his brain, hollowing the space between the real world and the wished-for one, the Maybe-gone one. He stepped backwards out and up the stairs and Tommy follow’d, promising that they would be back shortly to meet up with a revived Jack and be on their way.
Aurie and Tommy headed to the Pig and Thistle. They didn’t talk. They ran their hands over their faces and quaff’d ale and didn’t even look at the other mollies as they might normally do, flirting and bantering. They drank several each and headed back out. The night was pinkening into morning and the sun stung their eyes.
When Tommy and Aurie returned to the chirurgeon, the Office was empty. There was Blood and mess everywhere. They knocked and bang’d on the walls and howl’d for the doctor. Aurie was frantic, throwing bloodied tools about the room and stamping, slipping on Offal.
Finally, a light came on behind a dirty glass Pane, and an interior door slipp’d open. The chirurgeon’s head pok’d out, his paltry black hairs greased to his shining pate.
“Where is he?!” Aurie was screaming.
“Calm, mate,” said the chirurgeon. “ ’E’s in the back.”
Aurie crash’d through the operating Paraphernalia, throwing aside clamps, scissors, some frightening, bloodied black cord, and a small wooden stool. He lung’d for the door to the back room.
“He was near gone for good,” the chirurgeon squeak’d.
“Thank you,” muttered Tommy.
There was dust kicked up against the chirurgeon’s basement windows by a horsecart. An ochre tide of dust with the sun burning bright behind it, spinning in the wake of a cart that was rolling now at a monstrous clip from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, where Wild had found Nothing but an empty grave.
In the back room, Jack was lying on a filthy slab, blinking.
“Suppose we needed all those games of what-if after all.” He smiled. “Had this in me throat.” He held up the sopping curl of parchment papers and the rod, soaked in phlegm and blood. “Protection from the rope.”
Aurie crunch’d his forehead, looking at the sputum and gore.
And there was something Wet bubbling up at the corner of his eye, which was the first time Jack had ever seen anything of that nature there.
“Well done, mate,” croak’d Aurie. “Now,” he said, slinging Jack’s arm around his shoulder and helping him up. “Tommy’s arrang’d a coach.”