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Scene 28




Tyburn Square, midday. Walking back from Will’s, Kit chances upon an execution. The gibbet is mounted midplaza. Official-looking buildings—their stone facades imposing, hem in a varied crowd of Londoners. Vendors and sightseers circulate. On the gibbet, a man stands between two executioners.


Kit stopped, staring at the gibbet.

He knew the man upon it, the condemned man.

His mind, searching, brought forth a name.

John Penry.

Kit reeled. John Penry had been arrested, of course and Kit knew he would be put to the question. But—condemned?

Around Kit, the crowd milled and swirled. A few souls watched the gibbet attentively, but most were there to see and be seen, for a meeting point, for a break in routine.

“An orange, ducks, fresh off the ship from Spain,” a woman in dark garments said. She thrust a golden fruit in front of Kit’s eyes. “A penny, no more.”

Kit sidestepped the proffered orange.

His eyes upon Penry, Kit neared the gibbet. The executioners were demanding a last speech of the prisoner, last words, a token of repentance.

Kit stared, fascinated.

But for him, Penry wouldn’t be here. But for him, Penry might be well, walking the streets, minding his own business.

How he looked, too, how much thinner than he had in his Cambridge days. And his arms hung in an odd way, within their long black sleeves.

Had Penry been broken on the wheel?

Something like remorse tore at Kit’s conscience, something like empathy knocked and hit upon his mind, with no more effect than a moth flying at a glass window.

He felt sorry for John Penry, well enough. Yet Imp must be saved.

With that thought he looked up, and chanced to meet Penry’s eyes, and in Penry’s eyes he saw a hint of recognition, a hint of gratitude.

Gratitude that, of all their Cambridge fellows, Kit had come to see Perry’s end? Did Perry think Kit had come to lend him comfort? Oh, Kit wished he could.

Something almost like a smile twisted Penry’s pale lips up, and he nodded toward Kit as he said, “God have mercy on us all. I have no more to say. God have mercy on us.”

On those words, the executioner kicked Penry’s feet out from under him.

Penry fell from the platform that supported the gibbet, and the noose tightened.

A spasm, a gasp, and a body was carrion.

A nearby church bell tolled dolefully.

Kit felt something—breath? life?—fly by. It felt like warm wind, like a sigh.

Old women rushed to the gibbet to collect pieces of hair and bits of nail, to conjure upon.

That pious Penry should be used for black magic beggared the mind.

Disgusted, heartsick, not knowing why he felt so hollow, Kit turned and walked away.

He had been forced to turn Penry in. He had been forced to save himself and Imp, and Penry was their only salvation.

But no matter how many times Kit repeated these words to himself as he walked amid the festive crowd, he kept hearing Penry’s earnest words, God have mercy on us all.

Kit shivered and wished he still believed in a God of whom to ask forgiveness for what he’d had to do.

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Framed