‘Peter, how horrible!’

‘If there is a God or a judgement-what next? What have we done?’

‘I don’t know. But I don’t suppose anything we could do would prejudice the defence.’

‘I suppose not. I wish we knew more about it.’

Five o’clock. He got up and looked out into the darkness, which as yet showed no sign of day’s coming. ‘Three hours more… They give them something to make them sleep… It’s a merciful death compared with most natural ones… It’s only the waiting and knowing beforehand… And the ugliness… Old Johnson was right; the procession to Tyburn was kinder… “The hangman with his gardener’s gloves comes through the padded door.”… I got permission to see a hanging once… I thought I’d better know… but it hasn’t cured me of meddling.’

‘If you hadn’t meddled, it might have been Joe Sellon or Aggie Twitterton.’

‘I know that. I keep telling myself that.’

‘If you hadn’t meddled six years ago, it would almost certainly have been me.’

That stopped him in his caged pacing to and fro. ‘If you had had to live through that night, Harriet, knowing what was coming to you, I would have lived it through in the same knowledge. Death would have been nothing, though you were little to me then compared with what you are now… What the devil am I doing, to remind you of that horror?’

‘If it hadn’t been for that, we shouldn’t be here-we should never have seen one another. If Philip hadn’t been murdered, we shouldn’t be here. If I’d never lived with Philip, I shouldn’t be married to you. Everything wrong and wretched-and out of it all I’ve somehow got you. What can one make of that?’

‘Nothing. There seems to be no sense in it at all.’

He flung the problem away from him and began his restless walk again.

Presently he said: ‘My gracious silence-who called his wife that?’

‘Coriolanus.’

‘Another tormented devil… I’m grateful, Harriet-No, that’s not right; you’re not being kind, you’re being yourself. Aren’t you horribly tired?’

‘Not the least bit.’

She found it difficult to think of Crutchley, baring his teeth at death like a trapped rat. She could see his agony only at second-hand through the mind that it dominated. And through that mind’s distress and her own there broke uncontrollably the assurance that was like the distant note of a trumpet.

‘They hate executions, you know. It upsets the other prisoners. They bang on the doors and make nuisances of themselves. Everybody’s nervous… Caged like beasts, separately… That’s the hell of it… we’re all in separate cells… I can’t get out, said the starling… If one could only get out for one moment, or go to sleep, or stop thinking… Oh, damn that cursed clock!… Harriet, for God’s sake, hold on to me… get me out of this… break down the door…’

‘Hush, dearest. I’m here. We’ll see it out together.’

Through the eastern side of the casement, the sky grew pale with the forerunners of the dawn. ‘Don’t let me go.’

The light grew stronger as they waited.

Quite suddenly, he said, ‘Oh, damn!’ and began to cry in an awkward, unpractised way at first, and then more easily. So she held him, crouched at her knees, against her breast, huddling his head in her arms that he might not hear eight o’clock strike.

– John Donne: Eclogue for the Marriage of Earl of Somerset

British author Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) is widely recognized as a master of the detective story genre. Her fourteen novels that feature aristocrat, scholar, and sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey were well received in their first publication, and have become bestselling classics.

Sayers was one of the first women ever to receive a degree from Oxford, in the field of medieval linguistics. Her other works include plays, critical essays on medieval literature, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.