David Chase entered The Golden Straw, a tavern in Crossbridge Landing several leagues northwest of greater London. The air was ripe with ale and puke.
Seamen, merchant travelers, craftsmen, and laborers moved in and out during the remains of an uncommonly mild summer afternoon in the year of our Lord, 1856. A few women tended the tables, openly offering patrons a simple menu of sexual favors.
A dozen customers and the same number of tables, most in disrepair, occupied the unusually open space that had once been a small barn. Chase moved directly toward a table in the rear of The Golden Straw and sat down.
“It’s taken,” the man sitting opposite said.
“I’m David Chase.”
“Why should I give a damn who you are?” the man said, a canvas bag resting next to him.
“You should, and you will.”
“Fuck off, before I put my fist through your face.”
“There is twenty quid at stake, Martin Rutter, so you may want to think before you act or it will cost you dearly,” Chase said, keeping an eye on the entrance to The Golden Straw while overhearing Jimmy Clarke, known to him as the owner and barkeep, curse a customer and threaten to run him out of the tavern.
“How do you know my name?”
“The same way I know who owes you twenty quid, and maybe knows a way to get half of it back.”
“Half? Of my own money?”
“Half should be a fair enough split if another man does most of the work.”
“And that man is?”
While the question held without answer, it caused a third man sitting a table over from Rutter to shift his position.
“You even open your mouth or interfere, you will get what’s coming to this child,” Rutter warned him.
The third man had been at the tavern for most of the previous day and had returned early this day before the sun gave just cause. He twisted his head, facing both, exposing a small tattoo under his left ear. “I’ll run both you stinking scabs into the ground if it pleases me. Now if you have to talk, keep it so it don’t wake me again.”
Chase had seen this man before in his dreams, in his most inaccessible nightmares. He had seen the tattoo under the left ear, a common sign of the hangman’s noose.
“I can stay or leave,” Chase continued, to Rutter. “Either way I get ten quid or the full sum.”
“Be quick then, and don’t waste my time.”
“John Warren? That name mean anything to you?” Chase asked.
The barmaid brought Rutter another mug and he tossed her a coin.
Chase waved away her advances.
“The scum of scoundrels? Sure I know him,” Rutter answered.
“He travels alone not half a league from here. He is headed for Farmcliff Manor, and a deal he hopes to close with a deposit almost as certain as what’s owed you, and ripe for the picking.”
“And it’ll cost half what is already owed me to put in with a young scalawag like you?”
“Scalawags should not be so quickly dismissed, especially if they haven’t yet turned into cowards.”
“I don’t like you, David Chase, if that’s your real name,” Rutter said. “I don’t like you and I don’t fucking trust you, and if Warren has that sum and more on him, then you don’t need me to take him from his horse.”
“You of all people should know that one misturn of events, one slip or an accident, and Warren could easily get away from the most skilled highwayman. Two acting together pretty much guarantees success.”
“What’s guaranteed is you’re not welcome here,” Rutter said, knotting both hands into fists.
Chase slipped a shiv out from under his sleeve. “I’m very good with this. I can give you the names of several who first doubted my skill.”
Rutter laughed and slowly got up. “You threaten me with an infant’s swaddling pin?”
“I mean to have that money, with or without you.”
“You can keep your money and your toothpick and shove both up your arse for all I care,” he said, bending to Chase’s ear. “But if you cross my path again, all the shivs in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep you alive. Mark my word, David Chase, you’ve made an enemy this day,” he said, spat on the table in front of Chase, and left.
Chase sat motionless, staring at the tankard of ale and the canvas sack Rutter left behind.
The third man sitting by himself leaned over and took the mug and bent back half its contents. “My fee for being bothered by you two yacking assholes.”
Chase continued to stare at the canvas bag.
“You going to see what’s in it?”
“Go back to sleep, old man. This has nothing to do with you.”
“The man who just left warned you, and I will do a sum better for your insolence. I will strangle you right here in front of these stinking beggars and go back to sleep without a mark on my conscience.”
Chase reached out and lifted a corner of the canvas bag. Slowly, a thick, coiled rope slipped through the opening. Chase pulled the empty bag away and let it drop to the floor, then uncoiled two meters of heavy rope with a noose crafted at each end. He drew it straight, letting both connected nooses fall to the dirt floor on opposite sides of the table.
“A noose at each end of a line of rope?”
“The man who wrought that evil was as skilled as they come,” the tattooed man said.
“You know about this?” Chase asked, slightly shifting on his chair, which gave way, landing him into a sea of spit and sawdust.
“You ain’t even drinking and you can’t keep your seat.”
Chase swapped chairs from another table, picked up the leg that had torn itself lose from his old chair and set it on the table. “Don’t be too quick to judge what you can hardly know.”
“What I know is your friend will be back for that and consider you a thief for no reason at all.”
“What else do you know about me?”
“That, like your friend who left, you don’t deserve any more of any man’s time.”
A man ran past the entrance to The Golden Straw yelling, “Fire. Fire. Fire.”
Clarke ordered everyone out to help. Any fire, even the smallest blaze, could take out a village and destroy lives more certainly than the black plague had exactly five centuries earlier.
The Golden Straw quickly emptied, except for the two men.
“A man who does little else but drink, sleep, and threaten must have had the least interesting past? Wouldn’t you agree?”
The tattooed man was more awake now than he had been in well too long. What cursed his days and poisoned his nights and damned his future was a stain on his past he couldn’t escape, and he had given up trying. “I used to be a hangman. In another life, I had a job that no man wanted and every family despised.”
“Then you know about nooses?”
“I know my trade all too well. I can tell the weight of any man from a distance and how to set the trapdoor so it snaps his neck clean through without any shaking or screaming.”
“I know it not at all.”
“Eight loops are normal when using natural rope. One coil makes a simple running knot. The number thirteen is thought to be unlucky, so thirteen coils are found in a hangman’s noose, a foreboding sign for those convicted to be hanged. The knot of the rope is placed under or just behind the left ear, just like my tattoo.”
“How long were you at it?”
“That’s none of your business, sonny, though I should have been done with it long ago.”
“How sad for you, a hangman no more?”
“You say that in jest again and I will rap a loop around your throat and hoist you over the crossbeams.”
Chase glanced up and counted the crossbeams, five in all, and looking as sturdy as when they were first purposed. “I’ve meant no harm and yet I’ve been threatened twice in as many minutes.”
“By my judgement, both threats should not come as a surprise. Any scoundrel that plots such as you gets what he deserves.”
“Yes, well, now let me tell you what I know.”
The man smiled. It was the first time since he took his last life, and the curse that plagued him was the certainty of that man’s innocence.
He knew of that innocence because he had seen the man at a pub the night he was supposed to have taken the life of the local mayor’s young daughter. The man, somewhat less than his own years, was quickly judged guilty, convicted, and hung. The man with the tattoo who had witnessed that grave miscarriage of justice left London shortly afterwards and had been wandering the northern fringe of that great city for most of the summer.
“What you know is of no interest to me,” he said, now visibly stricken with the recall of his past.
“There may be reason to think otherwise.”
“I doubt it,” he said, unable to stare at the strange rope snake that had struck at his conscience with venom enough to kill many more honorable men.
“What I know, and what might be of interest to you, is that my father was innocent,” Chase said, raising the broken wooden leg that rested at hand and slamming it down sharply on the crest of the tattooed man’s right shoulder. “And I know that you knew of his innocence,” he added and brought the wooden leg down on the man’s other shoulder. “I know who you are and what you did and what you didn’t do, and my father is dead because of your rank cowardice,” Chase added, calmly getting to his feet and slashing the wooden leg across the stunned man’s face.
The tattooed man’s eyes exploded wide as his voice crumbled into a gurgle of astonishment and terrible pain. His tongue, half severed, flapped around a broken mouth and a jaw so shattered that breathing quickly became an impossible effort.
He tried to defend himself but his arms, which dangled helplessly at his sides, couldn’t avoid the next blow which shattered his rib cage.
Outside, the blaze was easily contained, though not before consuming a small cottage and a pile of hay that was steaming in the summer sun. The village fathers were proud of their success. They had set out a simple plan that depended on every able-bodied man responding at once when a fire was found.
Jimmy Clarke had organized the local businessmen to this singular task. He was also quickest to return to his business, suspecting that some stinking beggar might have taken more than advantage of his stock of ale, or found his secreted stash of coins. Soaked in dirt, straw, and sweat, he called, “Ale all around for all my brave brothers.”
Clarke was especially thankful for being alerted so early in the blaze by the man who had left a full mug and canvas bag standing on one of his tables.
A dozen men followed the barkeep into the tavern. Upon entering they stood in shock and silence, recognizing a man some had seen these past few days wander the town and take up comfort in The Golden Straw. He generally sat alone, talked to no one, and bothered no one. He drank, paid his sum, napped off when necessary, and left the girls to their business.
One end of a noose was looped over a crossbeam and drawn down and through the opening of the other noose and finally wrapped around the dead man’s neck. His feet dangled no more than a foot from the twisted floor of The Golden Straw.
His eyes blazed open, as if he was still reliving the death he saw coming, and couldn’t avoid. His mouth was a gaping hollow of blood, tissue, and teeth. Blood covered both shoulders while his arms hung dead at his sides.
By nightfall, the body remained unclaimed. Clarke and a few of his customers dragged it out back of The Golden Straw.
Clarke strung the double noose back over the crossbeam from which it was taken. Several months later he renamed The Golden Straw, The Double Noose.
His business increased overnight.
# # #
Arthur Davis is a management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and Crain’s New York Business, taught at The New School and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. Over eighty tales of original fiction, and several dozen as reprints, have been published. He was featured in a quarterly, single author anthology, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and, twice nominated, received Honorable Mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. Read more here.
Photo: Greg Willson
