She had something leafy green in her teeth. “You and he both advocate for capital punishment reform, correct? Stop! Please. I’ve no doubt your friend would tell me James and Jennie Morneau’s boys were shoeless. I’m not naïve.”
Susan looked at me warily. “Naturally, Jennie Morneau would keep shoes off her boys, today, in the shadow of the gallows. She would want London to see, ehrm, the need, the noble motivation behind James’ crime. Right?” She had relaxed, noticeably.
“I am not suggesting poor Jennie would deceive for the sake of sympathy,” I continued more kindly, “just that, the Morneau boys being barefoot, today at Tyburn Square, would say nothing about the state of their feet on other days.”
I drained my cup, and with it mimed a to the King! at Susan’s friend, who then looked confused at me instead. I caught Mme. Graveau’s eye, and she came to collect my empty cup to re-fill it again.
Assuaging Susan when she was agitated had put me in a satisfied mood. She scotched that soon, with relentless discourse on James Morneau’s crime and punishment. Anecdotes about a happier Morneau family, some possibly even true, soon gave way to more abstract expressions of distress. The evil of the Bloody Code: the popular name for England’s relentlessly growing list of hanging offenses for property crimes, together with its application in fact, by the rich, against the poor – the poor having no property the rich would be interested in stealing or damaging.
The power to kill, exercised not with utmost gravity, but rather will-ye-nill-he. Lawmaking, a shield protecting the rights and liberties of all Englishmen, instead misused by those who