made me mad, or hollowed me out, somehow. Granted, I had been at it for twelve years, four to eight hanging days a year, average of six men and women dispatched each time, carry the one, that was... a lot of hanged men and women. But I was not mad, and I was not hollow. I had a license – a press license, from the government – not a mandate. If I got too hollow, or too anything else, I could go back to writing out sermons, or, worse come to worse, writing for newspapers.
I bent over paper with a pen I hadn’t inked, and looked busy.
My cup returned, full of gin again. Mme. Graveau smiled, and retreated. Paying for my gin stunted my creativity, you see. I ran a tab until my published Accounts hit the streets. Then, I was flush with cash. By the next hanging day, I was usually whatever the opposite of flush is. Blanched?
I had not gone mad, as I say, but it may sound like it when I confess: For the first ten, eleven years, I enjoyed the stories I was telling. The Popish Plot, the regicides, Grandees, Fifth Monarchists, Millenarianists, Jesuits… There was always a good story to tell about a swinging Jesuit, dreary as you might think them. Educated relentlessly, better read and better spoken than any five Aldermen put together. I was born in the chaotic middle of the seventeenth century of our Saviour’s reign on Earth, so unfortunately, I was in school when Charlie was cleaning the place up after his Restoration. But he and his still gave me plenty to do.
To go with good stories, there was a setting out of a writer’s dream. Nothing was more sensational than the execution of a traitor. No troupe could ever re-create it. Crowds so thick the people in them would leave covered in other people’s sweat, not just their own. Vendors, more in number and more enthusiastic the graver the crime, hawking meats and cheeses on skewers,