The next morning is market day and Little Brampton’s town square fills with vendors and shoppers. Ingrid prepares the fire pits for witch roasting and the hangmen test their nooses. From her cell in the clock tower Dorothy Brown watched with morbid interest. Though she will be beheaded instead of hanged she was pretty sure the spectacle surrounding her execution would be much the same. She watched the first witch brought to the gallows. The young woman was led out through the leering crowd in irons that are removed and replaced with a coarse rope binding her wrists painfully behind her back and the noose is fitted around her neck.
This time of year the sun rises early and sets late. The poor woman accused of being a witch begs for her life but as soon as the bell in tower above Dorothy finishes tolling eight times the first witch of the day is hoisted from the gallows’ deck and she is hanged! After the crowds cheer fades even as far from gallows Dorothy could hear the woman’s squawks and gasps as the noose has yet to close and crush her throat.
Since this is first round of hangings there will be three more witches hanged every quarter hour.
The first witch is still fighting for her life as they come to take the second witch’s irons off and place her in the second noose! The first hanged and the three following her will be done soon enough that they can be served as the lunch break on market day (well-done, medium-well, medium-rare, and rare you see) but from 9 AM on it will only be one witch every hour on the hour.
It would not be until early evening the ‘stars’ of the witch-hangings are brought to the gallows. The first is a young woman named Barbara Moore- not our
Crux Forums Barb Moore but a student at a very famous and storied English university. She was intrigued when she found a story about the medieval horrors of Little Brampton. Researching the records she found that another woman named ‘Barbara Moore’ had been hanged and cooked as witch-meat in medieval times (
that was our Barb Moore time traveling)!
Fond of fiction she wrote an essay about how she is the reincarnation of the witch Barbara Moore and how she too should be hanged and sent it to a fantasy magazine hoping to be published. Unbeknownst to her the editor was part of a secret society of witch-hunters and he considered her story a complete confession! The young Miss Moore was arrested, stripped, and collared in front of her classmates…
She led from the university shamed, afraid, and shackled.
Now she stands bound and noosed on the Little Brampton gallows as wealthy bidders vie to win her ‘long-pig’ body after she is hanged!
She put up a good but losing fight with the noose.
She brought in good money in the auction of her witch-meat…
Only one more left to hang this market day… Till later…
Tree
