Free The Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor

was a sour tang of brandy about him. Marryot sucked his teeth and scowled at the floor. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall, pretending an ease I did not feel.
    My fingers felt the outlines of something small and hard-edged in the right-hand pocket. It was the ivory die I had found on Pickett’s body. A gentleman’s die on a gentleman’s corpse. I took it out and rolled it on my palm. A three.
    Townley entered, with Noak like a terrier at his heels. ‘Good day to you all, gentlemen – we are not come too late, I hope?’
    ‘Damned incompetent fools,’ the Provost Marshal said to the world at large. ‘They cannot even manage to hang a rogue without assistance.’
    Somewhere a bell chimed the hour. Townley pulled out his watch and compared it with the clock on the wall.
    ‘They’re late,’ Marryot said. ‘Devilish unkind to the prisoner.’
    The miserable, waiting silence embraced us once again. Noak consulted his pocketbook, turning the pages rapidly. Townley massaged his nose, applying pressure to the left side as if trying to push it so it would stand at a right angle to the rest of his face rather than a few degrees out of true.
    I stared out of the window at the gallows. It consisted of a crossbeam supported by an upright post at either end. Three black chains hung from the crossbeam.
    At last, at eight minutes past eight, the door re-opened. One by one, half a dozen men emerged on to the scaffold. First came the Provost Marshal’s sergeant, strutting like a cock in his own barnyard. He was followed by two soldiers with the condemned man shuffling between them. Next came a youthful parson, whose limbs seemed too long for his body and not entirely under their owner’s control. Another soldier brought up the rear with a canvas bag swinging from his hand.
    Marryot removed his hat. The other gentlemen followed suit.
    ‘It is quite a military affair, as you see,’ Townley observed to me in a low voice, fanning himself with his hat. ‘The army usually handles this unpleasant necessity for us – the Commandant prefers it so. Of course, the Provost Marshal has everything to hand here, so it is convenient for everyone. He is unhappily obliged to oversee a great many executions – he is responsible for our rebel prisoners of war, you apprehend.’
    Virgil’s arms were bound together in front of him and his ankles were shackled with a chain. Once they reached the scaffold, his escort pushed him directly under the cross-beam. The soldiers released his arms, though they stayed close to him.
    The little slave looked about him, his head turning this way and that. His eyes found the window of the room where the gentlemen were waiting for him to die so that they might have their breakfast. His head became still. He flexed his wrists. His hands flapped and twitched. His lips moved but no sound came from them.
    ‘Come along, come along,’ the Provost Marshal cried. ‘We don’t have all day.’
    Virgil stared at the window.
    No one else spoke. I prayed silently, wordlessly and surely meaninglessly: for how could God be here?
    The soldier with the bag came forward. The men in the room became still, watching the soldier take out a nightcap from his bag, which he placed on Virgil’s head. With surprising gentleness he drew it down over the negro’s face and patted him on his shoulder as a man touches a nervous horse to reassure him.
    No one spoke, either on the scaffold or in the room that overlooked it. The nightcap had transformed Virgil from a person into something not quite human. It stripped the individuality from him. All that was left was a bundle of rags trembling like a shrivelled leaf in a breeze.
    The soldier took the rope from the same bag and looped it through the end of the chain. He tied a knot to secure it. He lifted the noose at the other end of the rope, glanced at the Provost Marshal, and then placed the noose on the shoulders of the condemned man. He tightened it and stood to one