The moment those wicked thoughts appeared, a superstitious fear made the sweat bead up on her forehead. She only wished Mother had done it less publicly.

At least yer mother had the satisfaction of seein’ him suffer in the end.Īnnabelle couldn’t pretend to have loved the man, nor even to wish Mother hadn’t killed him. If it weren’t for me-ĭon’t start blamin’ yerself. In the world’s eyes, Squire Ogden Taylor had merely been administering a proper punishment to his daughter when his wife had lost her wits and plunged a kitchen blade through his brawny chest. No one cared that Ogden Taylor had been beating her or that his poor wife could no longer endure such cruelties to her daughter. No, he was her stepfather, a fact she had only recently learned. The pitiful hope that Mother might beat death in the end was what had seen her through Mother’s short imprisonment, trial, and sentence of death by hanging for murdering Annabelle’s father. They’ll only let you take the body to the graveyard.ĭespair clogged her throat. Some runagate told the sheriff about yer plans, and now there’s soldiers at the surgeon’s house waiting to seize you and the body if you come near the place. He now lived healthy as a horse in London, or so she’d heard. Only last year, friends of a man in the next shire had secretly carried his hanged body off to a surgeon, who’d warmed and bled it until the man had revived. If the neck remained unbroken, a person could still live through it, fainting before actually dying. She’d read tales of men revived after a hanging. He swore he’d do what he could to revive her! What do you mean? I gave him all the gold I had. Only five years her senior, Charity was more like an older sister than a servant to her. With a sudden foreboding, she glanced at the buxom, fair-haired widow who’d come to stand at her side.

I have terrible news, a voice whispered at Annabelle’s elbow. The sheriff and his men would be taken so off guard when she claimed the body herself that it might not occur to them to prevent her and her servant Charity Woodfield from carrying Mother’s body away in the wagon Charity’s father was bringing. No one would expect her to watch her mother’s hanging. As she gained a spot near the gallows, the crowd that watched for the cart with sickening jubilation paid her little heed. No one must notice her.īut she needn’t have worried. Twenty-one-year-old Annabelle Taylor drew the hood of her woolen cloak forward to cover her hair and pushed through the crowd. To be we know not what, we know not where.'ĭark clouds, their bellies full of cold spring rain, hovered over Norwood’s square waiting to dump their burden, and dirty piles of winter slush lined the bleak patch of ground. 'Death, in itself, is nothing but we fear,

Silver Deceptions by Deborah Martin