The House Of Smoke by Sam Christer Page B

feel.’
    I stayed silent. That fragile ground beneath my clumsy feet crumbled a little more.
    ‘Just speak!’ she snapped in frustration. ‘Don’t censor yourself, just speak.’
    ‘I feel like you raise a storm within me. You make me want to be close to you, to protect and care for you—’
    ‘Oh dear.’ She cut me off with a small sigh. ‘I hope you do not have a crush on me. That would be awfully sweet but exceptionally awkward.’
    ‘I am sorry. I take it all back. I’m stupid. Forget what I—’
    ‘There is no taking back things like that. The professor predicted you might develop some affection for me but I thought him silly. Now I see I am the foolish one.’
    ‘Should I leave?’
    She nodded. ‘It is best you do.’
    I rose and felt a terrible shame. It was as though I had broken some priceless vase that even if repaired would never be the same again.
    ‘Simeon.’
    I turned. ‘Yes, my lady.’
    She smiled gently. ‘Thank you.’
    I was confused. ‘For what?’
    ‘For your courage. Many men go through their entire lives without saying what is in their heart. Many women never hear words as sweet as the ones you said to me today. So thank you.’
    Panic filled me. I had no reply. No mature response. I rushed for the door. Rushed outside. Kept on rushing, until I was far across the lawns and deep in the orchard, where I could roar at the clouds and be alone with my bursting joy, my sweet sadness and my intoxicating uncertainty.

Twelve Days to Execution
Newgate, 6 January 1900
    January the eighteenth. That infernal date with death was branded into my thoughts. No notion, no distraction, nor any precious memory could dislodge it; it was forever present and noisy in my troubled mind.
    Hanging day.
    I did not want to perish like that. Pinioned. Powerless. Impotent. Shitting my pants swinging from a rope. That wasn’t me. If I could not escape, then I wanted to go out fighting, grabbing at the throats and tearing at the eyes of my opponents.
    Hanged by the neck until dead.
    That’s what the old owl of a judge had hooted.
    But how long would it take?
    Ten, twenty seconds. Thirty? More? Was I destined to kick and spin for inglorious minute after minute? Or would my head pop clean off my body, as many wished it to?
    And what of the pain? How bad would it be? Worse than the most terrible beating I had ever endured? Than the bullet shot through the bone of my arm in Paris? Than the knife stabbed in my back in Dublin?
    I had broken someone’s neck once. Done it cleanly, quickly, just the way I had been taught. A perfect combination of speed and technique. ‘Twist and pull,’ I had been told. ‘Only hard and fast. Harder and faster than you’ve ever done in your life.’
    It had been good advice. The man I killed was much bigger than me, and it would have been a bloody battle had I not been so well instructed. But that was a lifetime ago.
    I looked at my hands and remembered all the flesh I had touched, both in anger and in passion. Fingers that gouged and choked had also stroked and soothed. Could these limbs have done better things? Could this brain have created rather than destroyed? I wished I had fashioned something of value. Nothing grand – perhaps just wood or bread. Good bread for good people. Fine furniture for fine families. Not for monsters like me, or those who made me this way.
    Or had I made myself what I was? Was it I and I alone who had sought out their instruments of evil and used them to shape myself?
    I picked up the long chain that was now permanently attached to the leg irons and manacles chafing my wrists. It stretched across the icy floor of the cell. Ran up through an iron ring sunk in the stone wall beneath the window, then back on itself into another ring set in the floor by the door. Its length enabled the turnkeys to pull me like a dog, to drag me back and forth across the cell whenever they wished to enter. It rendered me harmless. Or so they thought. I was confident I could