Edith Layton by Gypsy Lover

hands. But still: at least nine of them to his one. He decided on tact, and luck, and a swift silent prayer.
    “The girl,” he said calmly. “I was just asking after her. I’m her fiancé. I’ve been tracking her from her home, all the way down the Brighton Road. She ran away the night before our wedding day. I wish I did know where she was. I’m trying to find her myself.”
    This was met with a silence so stony that Daffyd’s heart began to race.
    “Aye,” the first man said with a sick caricature of a smile. “You was engaged to a six-year-old, was you? And one you never seen afore you came here? Well, maybe a filthy gypsy would’ve thought a little mite’s laughter was fetching. And maybe you dirty dogs think nothing of stealing a child—we all know that. But bedding one? Fah.” He spat. “You’re among decent men now. You won’t be doing that no more.” Hesnorted. “Ah—let’s string him right up,” he told the others. “We’ll get his story out afore we cut him down.”
    Daffyd’s eyes widened and he moved. But it was much too late. They seized him, smothering him in their onslaught. One man took his arm and grabbed hard before Daffyd could grasp the hilt of his pistol inside his jacket. Someone else grabbed his other arm before he could get to the knife in his boot. He couldn’t kick because there was no room to raise a knee or foot. Worst of all, someone seized his neck from behind and held it in the crook of an elbow, cutting off his last and best weapon: his voice.
    “Now then!” one of them said, triumphant, “The old oak, in front. It were good enough for traitors in good King Charles’s day, it’ll do for him. Let’s take him there.”
    “But we got to find out about the little girl,” another protested.
    “We will. When we hang him up and let him down often enough, he’ll cough it out. We just got to take care we don’t haul him up too long afore he does, but we can after, that’s certain.”
    They tried to frog march him out the door, but he had fury enough to resist. So they picked him up and held him fast, and carried him, head first, as though he was a battering ram and they were going to charge an enemy’s gates with him.
    The blood throbbed in Daffyd’s ears, his breathing became difficult. He became aware that for all the certain deaths he’d managed to elude, this time,incredibly enough, he would die. But this time, for someone else’s sin. He’d survived beatings and prisons, been sentenced to death, and been sent halfway around the world instead of being hanged so he could die more slowly but just as surely now. He’d been left for dead many times and come back to health each time, too.
    He was a fighter, a street rat, sly and slick and quick to take advantage, otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten to the age he was now. He’d cheated death at every turn.
    Now, here in his homeland, in England, rich at last and free from prison, it seemed his luck had at last run out. He’d die without judge or jury at the hands of angry men, merely because of what he looked like. He thought of the irony, the injustice of it. But that was the way of his life, after all. So it would be the way of his ending.
    A tilted world passed under his gaze, and then he saw darkness and felt night air on his face. He could only hope he died bravely, without pleading, without kicking too long or strangling too slow, as so many brave lads had, dangling on the ropes on Tyburn Hill.
    He was roughly turned. Now the starry night sky was all he could see. That, and the bulky bodies of his captors and their angry faces above him. But he could hear.
    “Wait!” a woman’s voice cried.
    The men paused.
    “What are you doing with my man?” the shrill female voice shouted. “Oh, my love, my dear, what are you doing to him?”
    The men all turned to the sound of that frantic voice.
    “Let him go!” it cried.
    “Lissen, ma’am,” one of the men holding him said, “See, he’s…”
    “Let