And so it’s Thursday night, late; and it was Thursday night then back in Ridingham and it was Thursday night all those years ago in the cell beneath the town hall in Hamburg. Ingar and Miri had the room ready, the curtains closed, the cushions on the floor, the little tea lamp in its red glass holder burning, waiting for us. In the cell the girl was all alone. So terribly alone; a solitude that I am not sure that I can imagine. The old woman had been long gone and it seemed an age since the guard had lain with her and she had felt him strong and hard within herself, and no matter how hard she had tried she hadn’t been able to sleep.
She tried everything; trying to remember his face and his feel. Trying to remember the summer sun on her face and the sound of Matins and the bells of the convent and the smiles of the novices in their line for Communion. She tried to remember so many things, but nothing would crowd out the thing she knew was coming. But she knew she had to sleep, she had to rest. So pointless a rest, when you have all eternity to rest, but so necessary to sleep and sleep true so that she could face the next day well. She remembered the words of the old woman and was determined to go calmly to whatever would come to her. She had no control over anything anymore, apart from herself. Her tears, her screams. She knew they would come, tears, cries of anguish. Screams that would pierce the grey Hamburg sky. She knew they would come; but not too soon. Not until she could control herself no more and they were ripped from her by the pain. But before then, she was determined, she would be calm, she would be the humble, honest girl she knew herself to be, not a terrified animal going to slaughter. She would hold herself upright and let the people of the city see her. She would, of course, be afraid of the pain, but not of the executioner. After all, he was just a man doing his job, probably a job he would prefer not to have. He had no malice for her, she knew this. So she would treat him as a friend, her last friend. A friend with a strange role in her life. His job was to put her through agony, to let the people see the majesty of the City and the awful retribution that comes to those who break its laws and God’s laws. To extract every moment of pain and to allow that pain to run its course; not to pity her or her cries, but to draw it out, to make her suffering visible to all, to protract it and make an art of her death. And she would be his accomplice in this, she decided, as far as her mind would allow. And after that, she could do no more.
And that is how Ingar began to tell us the story of her final night and she asked us if we would stay through her night and stay into the morning, when the first sun of the day would send bronze reflections from the weather vane with its emblem of a tower, when the first market sellers would be pulling their carts over the rutted icy lanes of the city and when the executioner would be waking and sitting down with his wife to his breakfast of small beer and herring and cheese and, having washed his face, would be pulling on his black doublet and his high-laced boots and would be choosing a pair of fine leather gloves. But that was not yet; there were the hours of darkness still to run, the hours when drunks stumbled to their beds or to the beds of the whores by the docks, the hours when careful merchants were putting out tall candles and pulling on bed-caps and lying quietly with their careful wives. The hours when no sound at all could be heard in the dark cell, illuminated only by the wayward flicker of the torch in the passageway beyond the door with the iron bars. And Ingar asked us to try, to try and imagine ourselves into the mind of that poor girl, so totally, utterly alone. And she asked us to lie down, next to each other but not touching; and she wrapped the length of chain around each of our ankles and covered each of us in a piece of thin grey cloth. And then she moved the candle to a shelf by the window, where its light could flutter, and she was still.
with a green Barbour jacket would see us from behind their Telegraph and tut a little and we would giggle. But it was always better to be in her bedroom or in mine. Sometimes just us two and our bodies and sometimes with a little piece of rope and sometimes with some beautiful little needles that I had bought. But maybe I will tell you about those later. I think I will. Because I think I should get back to Ingar’s story now. Shall I do that?
