They will not believe it, Brianna thought through the haze that surrounded her. Surely good people could not believe the things of which he accused her. Matthews continued to talk, his voice rising and falling, and with each word Brianna realized that he longed for her death with a passion. She opened her mouth to deny him, but blackness descended on her and she swayed to the floor. Someone held her up, and for a moment she could not even remember her name, or where she was.
Then it was over. She was condemned, sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.
She was taken to an empty cell to await her execution. It was then, pitifully, that she came to full consciousness again. Her merciful world of mist and gray left her. She was doomed to die totally aware—when she had not been so to fight for her defense.
In that little room she sank to her knees and folded her hands. She asked God’s forgiveness for those sins she had committed, but she could not, even in her prayers, accept defeat with true Christian fortitude. Over and over again she asked in silent supplication how God could allow Matthews to live.
She prayed for her family and for Sloan. She begged God not to allow Matthews to take Sloan. That he should die for having rescued her seemed entirely too great an injustice.
Time passed too quickly. Men came for her again, despite her protests, and dragged her along an arched hallway that led to a street on the common, where the townspeople were milling. They stared at her; some with curiosity, some in horror, some with indignation.
It was like the day her aunt had been killed. There were many who would have protested, but they feared for their own lives as this insanity surrounded them.
“I am not a witch!” she screamed. “This man is the creature of the devil! He is not a man of God. God does not condemn without trial! God does not torture innocents—”
Her arm was twisted so viciously that she broke off her speech with a cry. The assembled crowd began to murmur and shuffle about uneasily, but despite this she was dragged up the steps to the gallows. She noticed that the sky was a brilliant blue and that the air was crisp and cool and beautifully clean.
Her executioner jerked her hands behind her back and tied them despite her struggles. “Good people, don’t let them do this to me! You will be next! You—”
“In the name of His Royal Majesty, James II of England, Scotland, and Ireland, you are condemned to die for the ungodly crimes of witchcraft and murder!”
Matthews’s voice rose above hers. The noose was slipped over her neck and she felt the rough fiber of the rope against her throat.
She was about to die and all she could think of was the beauty that had been so briefly hers with Lord Sloan Treveryan. Life. It was so very, very wonderful. And she had only seen it so clearly when it was about to be taken.…
“Recant to the people, witch! Confess before them your sins and die in the grace of God!”
“I am not guilty! You are guilty, Matthews, of the murder of countless innocents! Cold-blooded murder—”
“Executioner!” Matthews ordered. “Pull the lever!”
“No!’
Fragments of her life flashed through her mind, but above it all desperation shrieked within her. No! This could not be the end. Not for her. She could not be about to die.
Not now! her soul cried out in terror. Not now, not when she had just learned what love was! Sloan! Tears stung her eyes. She had left him not knowing life was to be so short. If she had but an hour now…but the moment of death was at hand.
Her mind registered the sounds around her. She heard the crank of wood as the lever for the trap door was pulled, and vaguely heard a peculiar whistling through the air. Strange, but, she knew that whistling sound.
“Die, witch! To the devil goes your soul!”
Matthews’s voice rose high over the crowd, a chant that compelled and jerked at the emotions, calling on fear, on the terror that lurked within the souls of all men.
What did a whistling sound matter? she asked herself. Matthews had not heard it; his voice had risen above it. Perhaps she was only imagining she’d heard something.
“The trap!” he raged.
She thought she saw an object fly through the air.
The trap door beneath Brianna’s feet snapped open beneath her and gave way to the void of death. She was falling. She felt the coarse rasp of the rope against her neck and tensed instinctively with final, desperate horror, awaiting the merciless jerk of the noose.
But miraculously, the rope tightened for barely a second—then hardly at all. She did not choke, nor did she stop breathing. The rope broke—cleanly, completely. She kept falling and falling, until she lay sprawled on the dusty ground, stunned and incredulous.
A voice rang out from the crowd, loud, strong, and scornful, riddling the air with its familiar, forceful timbre.
Sloan’s voice!
“I chargeyouMatthews with crimes against God and humanity! And I promiseyou, sir, that this will be your day to die!”
