I made a frustrated, derisive noise. She made a frustrated, angry noise. I went on, “you ask me to imagine Mme. Graveau is free. Mme. Graveau is not free. Imagining that she is free renders your hypothetical meaningless. Susan, if they can jail her for advocating her position, your position, my position – for you seem to suffer under the illusion that we all want three different things – they can jail anyone for any position. Any argument they disagree with they can win not with persuasion, but rather by force.
“You once compared execution to slavery. I thought it was an exceptionally weak device at the time, but I was too smitten to say so. But you like it, so: How is jailing and possibly killing someone for the things they think and say, which harm no-one, not worse than slavery?”
Her lips made an O and her eyebrows arched – Mme. Graveau made that face when she hurt me; Susan made it when I hurt her. She turned and left me.
#
The bell next door is tolling, I am running out of space, my eyes hurt, and my fingers! Stiff as iron bars, and the skin on the sides is shredded, maybe gone for good.
My three Adjoints wrote the next hanging day’s Accounts, and published them under my name. By then, not all of literate London was demanding the Bloody Code be repealed, but many were newly conscious of the evil it could be put to, and open minded. Enough that the Aldermen pledged reform. A pledge from an Alderman to change things is like a bottle of gin offering to pay for itself – but in the end, we had shook loose the tethers from public morality, held lawmaking down and tied it up