But the knowledge that she was innocent clamped itself painfully around my mind that night as I struggled through the darkness to John Hurst. With it was the memory of Mr Glaister and the Home Office gentleman, on that bleak morning, talking about an Act of God intervening in the execution.
As I reached the end of the carriage path, the old church clock at St Bertelin’s sounded the half-hour chime. Thirty minutes to midnight. I redoubled my efforts, and saw, with gratitude, the gates of Willow Bank Farm ahead of me.
I had not expected to see any lights burning, but there was an oblong of amber warmth in a downstairs room. When I hammered on the door he opened it almost at once, and I all but fell across the threshold.
I will say one thing for him – profligate and reprobate he may be, but he grasped the situation almost immediately, and was reaching for his jacket and a shotgun almost before I finished speaking. Then we were going back along the lanes, along the way I had come. He rapped out a few questions as we went; I answered them as best I could, but between fear and being out of breath, I was almost incoherent. But John Hurst nodded, and in the darkness I saw his jaw set firmly and angrily. As we reached the carriage road, the nearby church clock of St Berlin’s began to chime midnight. Like a death knell ringing out in the lonely night.
Midnight. The Silent Minute.
‘We’re going to be too late,’ I said, and he shook his head, although whether in anger or in refute of my words, I could not tell.
The chimes had died away by the time we reached the Hall. John Hurst was ahead of me, running up the stone steps. He swore when he realized the doors were locked, but I was already fumbling for the keys. We lost precious seconds, but finally the door swung open and Hurst bounded across the hall and up the stairs. I followed him, going as fast as I could, but I had to pause twice to regain my breath. I was not far behind him, though.
But long before either of us reached the attic floor we heard the sounds. Terrible sounds. A gasping wet choking. And a drumming, tapping sound. I struggled the rest of the way, and finally reached the top floor.
The inner door, the door to the prisoner’s room, was open, and the heavy padlock lay on the ground. The flickering light from the candles lit by the children leapt and danced on the walls.
Esther Breadspear was hanging from a roof beam, a thick rope around her neck. The children had tried to do to her what the hangman had not managed. They had tried to hang this woman whom they believed was a killer of children. They must have wound the rope around her neck, looped it over the beam, then simply pulled on it to hoist her aloft.
And she was still alive. In those sickening, horror-filled minutes my conversation with Mr Glaister flashed back into my mind. The long drop, he had said, was used these days. Carefully calculated to bring about a quick, merciful snapping of the neck. So much kinder than the old ‘short drop’, which was little better than slow strangulation.
What was happening in the attic room was no merciful long drop. This was the old method, the ugly, protracted strangulation, with the victim struggling and writhing, gasping for air, and kicking frenziedly. Esther was fighting for air, her heels banging against the wall behind her, over and over again, as desperately as if she could kick her way back into life. One of the children had scraped back her hair, so that her face was exposed, and it was a terrible sight – suffused with crimson, the eyes bulging. Froth appeared on her lips and ran down her chin. Her shadow behind her, grossly magnified and grotesque, twisted and writhed along with her.
John Hurst pushed the children aside and reached up to the rope – there was a horrid echo of the scene I had witnessed in the execution shed.
Behind me, one of the children – a younger one – said in a scared voice, ‘We thought she’d die at once.’
‘In the Silent Minute,’ said another.
‘And so long as she died then, we couldn’t be punished for killing her,’ added Douglas.