Martha’s movement, of course, her little half swing this way, her little half swing that, was not the merely technical bonus for Hardy that it would have been for me had one of those unfortunates from Belsen suddenly risen from the page and twitched. For movement, when a woman wore silks, meant sound, and it was the sound of a woman – being made to throb through the channel of the ear by her, as he himself contrived somewhere to put it – that Hardy loved best. What an extraordinary commotion they make, those heroines of his, in their rustling skirts and their trembling bodices! How they whistle and bristle and swish and whew! Who needs them naked when they go about in something more tactile and responsive than mere skin could ever be? Martha Brown uncovered, without her black silk dress on, without the creak and the squeak of her, would have been an event; but Martha Brown hung high and rustling, recalling the thrilling frou-frou of Julie Augusta Martin’s four grey silk flounces when she used to bend over him as a boy and dangle him on her knee – there was an occasion!

Hardy wasn’t the only person to turn out that morning to see Martha Brown hang. Three thousand others showed up as well. And they would all have had their separate reasons. Certainly Martha’s chestnut curls and firm outline were well worth arriving early to get a good view of, silhouetted against the sky. And a woman in her forties in whom life still kicks so furiously that she not only takes a husband young enough to be her son but takes to him with an axe the moment he takes a little something of his own, will always tickle the public fancy. Throughout her trial, Martha Brown’s composure had been remarkable. Even now she was placid and seemingly content, supported by some obscure but profound sense of right. The extravagance and grandeur of female justice – a life, both eyes, and anything else within hacking range, for a tooth – would not have been lost on someone who had it in him to write of the deadly and unceasing war between the sexes. What must a man initially inspire in a woman for his defection to be so devastating and her vengeance so without remorse? More especially, what had that young husband of twenty-six stirred up in a wife eighteen years his senior and the same age, just about exactly, as young Tommy’s mum? The same age, come to that, as Mrs Martin.