Murder By Illusion

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Murder By Illusion - book excerpt

Prologue

France 1792

‘witches should die in agony, screaming out their torment to the Devil’

THE EXECUTION WAS NOT TO TAKE PLACE FOR MANY HOURS, but already the crowds were gathering in the old Market Square, pushing and shoving, jostling for position, striving to get as close as possible to the scaffold, laying claim to the best positions to revel and cheer as the condemned is broken on the wheel. For the execution was to be of a like few, if any, had ever seen before and perhaps would ever see again.

The scaffold has been erected in front of the courthouse, a shoulder height timber platform, shrouded in black cloth, surrounded by a low fence set back some 15 pied du roi [1] from the scaffold, to keep the avid spectators from getting too close.

All the upper rooms of the Hôtel de Ville, adjacent to the courthouse, had been let at many times the usual rate and eager watchers peered avidly from the windows, florid faced from wine and expectation, the women already in a state of heighted sexual tension whilst in the packed square below a frisson, an excitement grew tangibly as the dread hour approached, the air electric as if a summer storm approached. The taverns across the square from the Hôtel de Ville were equally busy, upper rooms let, packed with raucous revelers, food and drink flowing freely.

The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, hard and brutal, shimmering off the stone or stucco painted walls of the square in pulsing waves.

Many years ago, in the last century, or even the century prior, a stone cross had been erected in the centre of the square, mounted on a stone pedestal, three steps high. Three young boys had scrambled to the top of the cross, one straddling each of the arms, the other perched atop of the upright, other bystanders and townsfolk crowded onto the steps below, giving them an advantage in height over those around them. But the boys vantage point is soon lost as bigger boys led by Pierre Dubois, the blacksmith’s son and a known bully, drag them off, protesting wildly but to little avail.

The blacksmith’s boy kicks them aside and using the strength of his muscular arms easily pulls himself up and claims the prime spot, the apex of the stone cross post and then decides not to allow anyone else to join him, smashing a heavy fist onto the head or fingers of any of his comrades who try to climb. He takes an apple from his pocket, eats it and then throws the core at the back of an old woman’s head and laughs uproariously as she looks around for the offender. Dubois then shouts down to a crony to pass him a wine skin and after taking a drink, he then proceeds to spit wine onto the crush around him, filling his mouth to capacity with wine and squirting it out onto the heads of those below and around him, confident in his strength and reputation that no one would challenge him.

That is until a burly man, grizzled and battle scarred with the manner and bearing of an ex-soldier, annoyed with Dubois’ boorish antics and spattered with spat-out red wine, seizes him by the back of his leather tabard and pulls him unceremoniously down from the cross and pitches him down onto his knees. ‘Hey, you bastard,,’ exclaims Dubois, bunching his fists, ready to use his strength to bully his way back to top of the stone cross, he is big and strong, used to using his size to get his own way, but the soldier simply backhands him across the face, splitting his lip.

‘Keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak to me, boy. Now piss off!’ pointing a stubby black-nailed finger across the square. The boy bristles, but like all bullies, backs down when confronted and he slinks away to the jeers of the onlookers. From a safe distance he turns to make a defiant gesture but the soldier has already put him out of mind, lifting one of the original smaller boys up onto the cross.

From every window, balcony and rooftop of every building around the square; eager spectators crowded and pushed, straining for the best view of the scaffold, whilst in the square itself the mob packed together in a miasmic stench of unwashed bodies, sweat, garlic, urine and even excrement as, reluctant to give up positions, they relieved themselves as they stood, even the women, frequently unaware that they had done so in their rising excitement, the stench heightened by mounds of steaming dung from the horses hitched to a score of carriages and coaches drawn up in prominent positions, from the roof of which more fervent watchers swayed precariously, shouting to each other and raising glasses in salutation. One of the women, you’d hesitate to call them ladies, climbs down from the roof of one coach, lifts her skirts and squats beside the rear wheel of the carriage to the cheers and jeers of the crowds around her. She finishes, drops her skirts and is hauled back up onto the carriage roof again to take another swig from a bottle passed to her.

Slippery as eels, urchin pickpockets and cutpurses ease their way through the throng lifting kerchiefs and purses, pocketbooks and pouches. One of the urchins is caught trying to lift a purse and is savagely punched to the ground and stamped upon until he lies still, crushed like a cockroach beneath trampling feet, kicked aside and forgotten, the mass surging forwards again, pressed on by the crowds still arriving, anxious not to miss the execution. Small children perched on the shoulders of their parents so that they too would have a tale to tell their children and grandchildren in the years to come.

For the execution was to be that of the Comtesse Marie Josephine de Blacam, a hated member of the aristocracy, of the Noblesse d’ėpėe, the highest rank of nobility and condemned to die for heresy, for witchcraft, sorcery, for association with the Devil and child sacrifice, the catalogue of crimes increasing with each telling, each horrified whisper, passed from mouth to mouth.

   ‘She bathed in the blood of virgins’ they said, ‘she sacrificed children to the Devil, danced naked under the full moon, was born of nightmare demons, fornicated with Satan, suckled a succubus, raised a demon and an imp, she is the Devil’s spawn, she cast spells and demonic conjurations so that enemies perished, tormented to death by demons, so that cattle died and crops failed, she flew at night on the wings of a giant bat, witchcraft, evil sorcery, vile black magic, necromancy, the raising of storms, participation in sacrilegious Black Mass the dark arts, devil worship, sacrifices to Beelzebub, every salacious detail, real or imagined told and re-told with prurient horror and evident glee.

The Comtesse Marie Josephine is sentenced to be broken on the wheel, to be spread-eagled across the spokes of a cart wheel and her limbs systematically smashed with a hammer or iron bar, commencing at the ’bottom end,’ at her feet and ankles, and working up along shins and knees and thighs, then hands and fingers, upper and lower arms and then the broken, marrow seeping, blood streaming broken torn limbs would be braided, twisted, about the spokes of the dread wheel. The wheel, with her screaming body entwined would then be hoisted up on a pole and she would be left to die in agony beneath the blazing sun. To linger for hours, maybe days, tormented by flies, her torn flesh to be pecked by birds, her eyes stabbed by the sharp beaks of crows and ravens, the soft flesh of her cheeks, breasts and stomach torn by talons and hooked bills. Once dead, her twisted broken corpse was to be burnt at the stake and her devil worshipping ashes scattered to the winds.

Some of the eager crowds had travelled for days from the outskirts of the town and surrounding district to get here, for who could wish to miss such glorious spectacle, such a famous show? The hour approaches, but a groundswell of unease ripples through the crowd. Where is the wheel, the cartwheel that should be set up on the scaffold, rotating about a spindle so that each limb in turn could be brought under the hammer to be broken but where was it, where was the hooded executioner, what is happening, who knows, had she been reprieved, escaped, already died from torture, had the Devil has spirited her away or killed her by sorcery to spare her agonies, a surge of anger and resentment coursing through the massed crowd.

All that could be seen on the scaffold was a shrouded structure, some 10 to 12 pied du roi high, a structure that had been delivered by cart the night before and set on the scaffold and then covered with the heavy tarpaulin as if ashamed to be seen in daylight.

Was this some new fiendish instrument of torture, perhaps, being a woman, she would be suspended from the frame and broken that way, was it a vertical rack to stretch her limbs to breaking point before the hammer did its fearful work?

Then an insidious whisper, a vicious rumour soughed around the square in an undulating groundswell, riffling the through the crowd like a summer breeze across a field of ripe corn, growing louder, a rumour spread from where, by whom, who knows? It was said that the hated King Louis XVI or maybe the Revolutionary National Assembly in distant Paris has banned the use of the breaking wheel and other gruesome, grisly and macabre methods of execution such as burning at the stake, boiling in oil, impalement on a stake, flaying alive, torn apart by horses or slow strangulation on the gallows and that all condemned to die, regardless of crime or class, were to be executed by a ‘decapitation device’; a guillotine, swift, humane, without pain.

Anger spread through the crowd, a swift humane execution, who wanted that, without pain, witches should die in agony, screaming out their torment to the Devil. They felt cheated, betrayed, angry and resentful, the promised spectacle a fraud, a deceit but the anger slowly subsides as the executioner is seen to mount the steps of the scaffold to finalise his preparations for the execution. He is hooded; a black hood with eyeholes, his identity hidden in case there is trouble from the crowd; he is accompanied by an assistant, also hooded.

He is Gaston Poitrenaud, brought from outside the town, a travelling executioner, already familiar with this new decapitation machine, a portable guillotine and will be his eighth decapitation using the new device. Before the introduction of the decapitation machine he had been an expert with the sword, agonisingly proficient on the breaking wheel and an accomplished torturer. He does not like the guillotine, where is the skill in that? He was a headsman, an artist with the sword, the double edged two handed executioners sword, skilled at taking a head with a single stroke, unlike the goddamn English executioners, butchers with their block and brutal axe; the sword is poetic, elegiac. Where was the skill, the art in a decapitation device when all that was required was to pull a rope and release the blade but his fee is a weighty purse so why turn down good money, the wages of death.

Despite being unable to wrest a confession under torture from the sorceress, Poitrenaud is in good spirits, he had breakfasted well on a roast capon, a thick trencher of oven fresh bread, butter and slices of locally butchered ham, all washed down with a flagon of rough claret. He pats his ample paunch and belches, his hood redolent with the smell of garlic and wine, belches again and then he and his assistant, Henri Chassagne, strip away the tarpaulin covering the device and the crowds press closer to catch a first glimpse of the machine, the ‘guillotine! Two stout posts with a cross beam from which suspends a weighted triangular blade; the bascule, a tilting table along which the condemned will lie face down, the lunette, two semicircular wooden yokes to enclose and hold the head steady as the blade descends with a wicker coffin to one side and a basket to receive the severed head.

The crowds strain forward to get a clearer view of the new ‘decapitation machine.’ A drunk, viewing from a balcony of a wealthy merchants house across the square, possibly the merchant himself, leans forward too far and with scream topples over and crashes to the ground, where he lies still and unmoving for several minutes, nobody giving him any mind, not even his friends and family, unwilling to give up their vantage points to attend to him. Nobody that is, apart from a pipe smoking, foul reeking, scrofulous, toothless beggar-woman who, hiding her actions behind her skirts, swiftly cuts his purse free and scuttles into a scabrous side alley to count her booty, almost tasting on her tongue the brandy that she will buy. Groggily, the faller gets to his knees, blood streaming from his nose and a cut on his head, his arm broken and useless hanging by his side, so drunk he barely notices his injuries and staggers into the doorway of the house to try and make his way back up to the balcony above.

The tension in the square is now electric, pulsing in waves as a single dreadbell tolls from the tower of the church across the corner of the square. The door of the courthouse opens and the execution party emerges, led by the court officials, the magistrat who passed sentence in his red robes, the procureur who prosecuted the Comtesse in black, and other functionaries including the town mayor. Then the condemned is brought up from the cells below the courthouse, escorted by a guard of eight soldiers in blue jackets and gleaming polished helmets which mirror and echo the shimmering brilliant rays of the noonday sun. Another file of blue coated soldiers take up station inside the fence line, much to the annoyance of people whose view is now blocked by broad backs and plumed helmets.

They mount the steps to the scaffold, the Comtesse Marie-Josephine is bare-footed and her hands are tied behind her but she climbs the steps without difficulty, her head held high, showing no sign of the torture, the extensive racking and burning with red hot irons to the soft flesh of her inner thighs inflicted by Poitrenaud in a vain attempt to secure a confession. Never before has Poitrenaud failed to secure a confession from a witch or sorcerer. He prided himself on his skills to bring a living body to such torments of unbearable agony whilst maintaining a sliver of life, but the Comtesse had barely raised a scream as he wrought his torturing skills upon her pale flesh and now she walks serenely to the scaffold as though she had not been racked and burnt almost to the point of death, by rights she should have had to be carried or dragged to the scaffold. The only explanation, thinks Poitrenaud, is that the Devil had spared her torments and that this foul creature, this witch, this spawn of Satan should burn at the stake in a slow fire and not receive a quick death by guillotine but that is what he is paid to do and that is what he will do, whatever his thoughts to the contrary. As is commanded in the Holy Bible, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’

There is no accompanying priest or confessor for the condemned sorceress, none to give her absolution, to shrive her sins, no prayers to be given to absolve her immortal soul. She had spat and cursed when Father Sanson visited her in her cell and offered her absolution, going so far as to hurl her toilet bucket at him and he had fled in terror, clutching his rosary and crossing himself.

As she comes into view of the crowd there a cascade of shouts and jeers of hatred, ‘die screaming witch, break her, break her, burn in hell, to the Devil foul sorceress,’ amongst many other calls. The Comtesse Marie-Josephine de Blacam takes no notice, almost as if she has not heard the screams of hate and bile, a rotten cabbage is hurled from the crowd to bounce at her feet, again she takes no heed. She is tall and regal, dressed in a simple white linen shift which clings to her body like second skin, her raven-black hair tied high above her head, adding to her height. She looks neither right nor left as she walks steadily towards the hooded executioners before she turns and faces the screaming crowds as they strain forward to see if she has cloven hoofs rather than feet, a sure sign of the mark of the Devil. She gazes down at them, her eyes blaze and a sneer of contempt flashes across her face, was that a whispered curse, and then she turns back as Gaston Poitrenaud takes her arm and pulls her towards the guillotine. She does not resist and with the aid of the assistant climbs onto the bascule and lies upon it face down; Poitrenaud locks the lunette in place about her slender neck and then releases the blade which hisses down almost too swiftly for the eye to see. There is a roar from the crowd as blood is seen to spurt from the severed neck and the executioner moves around to the front of the guillotine to lift her head from the basket to show the baying crowd. He reaches down and then lurches back, a gasp of strangled horror, before leaping from the scaffold and fleeing the scene.