All of the village joined in: “Confess! Confess!”
Though the shrieking of the girls bounced off the room’s wooden walls, Elizabeth would not confess. Thornhart asked the jury of their verdict, and they returned a true bill.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ivory mouthed to her lover, the tears hot on her cheeks. Her nose stuffed up, causing a pressure in her head that throbbed with each fearful thought.
Ivory had been a fool to believe there was any hope. Elizabeth’s guilt had been determined by the very fact she’d been accused.
Thornhart declared Elizabeth’s execution to be carried out immediately. “Let the first witch hanged be an example.”
Anne grabbed Ivory by the arm. “I did this for you, Sarah. It could have been you both meeting an end, had I not accused her.”
Ivory didn’t believe one word. Her sister had always been jealous of Elizabeth, ever since Elizabeth’s family forced her to marry the man Anne loved.
Disgusted, Ivory clenched her fists and pulled away from her sister. “You will burn in hell, Anne, and no prayer will save you.”
Two men escorted Elizabeth to the gallows. The sun beat against the planks of the platform where the crowd huddled near. Some of the townspeople cupped hands by their mouths to holler and condemn her. Others held baskets of rotten vegetables, the scent overpowered only by the pine of the newly constructed gallows and the draft of horse manure from the wagon awaiting her corpse.
The rope binding Elizabeth’s frail wrists pinched and reddened her flesh. One of the men shoved her toward the platform’s steps, but the only sign of fear was the tension along her temples and the slight tremble of her lip.
Elizabeth’s gaze found Ivory’s, eyes soft and forgiving. A man looped the noose around Elizabeth’s neck, and Thornhart’s shoes thudded across the planks, somehow louder than the excited murmurs of the crowd.
Children climbed on barrels and the shoulders of their parents for a better view. Townsfolk spat at Elizabeth and tossed their rotten produce. A man to Ivory’s side lifted a stone from the ground, but as he cocked his arm back, Ivory jabbed her elbow hard into his ribs and ducked away as he keeled over.
“Confess,” Thornhard said, “should you save yourself from the rope.”
Elizabeth defiantly stuck out her chin, but her gaze was already dimming. “I have nothing to confess. I meet my fate with a pure heart.”
The crowd grew eerily silent. Tears lined Ivory’s eyes, but she rigidly held them back. She watched until just moments before they dropped the floor, then turned quickly to leave. She heard the snap of Elizabeth’s neck, the tug and creak of taut rope, the shuffle of fabric. An eruption of cheers followed.
Ivory wove through the crowd, trying to hold it together. Guilt dug like sharp nails into her heart. She should have done something more to save Elizabeth. But what? What could she have done, other than get herself killed, too?
Perhaps that is what a real lover would have done. Died alongside a loved one. Never again did Ivory want to hear her name spoken aloud. Sarah was the woman who would have saved Elizabeth from this town, and she had failed.
Ivory turned back, stealing one last glance at Elizabeth’s empty gaze. Thornhart signaled to the hangman, who sawed through the rope with a large hunting knife. The body thumped into the wagon below.
Ivory broke out of the crowd and stormed off to a quiet spot they’d kept in the woods.
“Speak to me now!” she cried out to the Universe. “Tell me what you want!”
Garnering no response, she fell to her knees and cried. Her fierce sobbing emptied her stomach of what little she’d managed to eat that morning. When her tears subsided, it was dark, but she knew what must be done. The town would kill Ivory if they caught her, but she refused to send Elizabeth from the world this way.
Elizabeth’s body still remained in the open wagon near the platform, crumpled over the loose hay of the wagon’s bed, her hazel eyes as empty as buttons that had lost their luster. Thornhart had left her there, a reminder to the townsfolk of what would become of anyone who dared perform witchcraft.
Ivory shook her head, vomit rising from her stomach in disgust at the people of her town. One day, Ivory hoped to see them suffer.
All the houses in the village were dark and the roads bare. Arms looped under Elizabeth’s shoulders, Ivory dragged her lover’s body into the woods behind a nearby store. She sagged beneath the weight in the same way the weathered roofs of the town drooped from the weight of snow in the winter. Elizabeth’s body was stiff and cold to the touch—not how Ivory wanted to remember her.