"Your prerogative...?"
"My prerogative is to temper justice with mercy."
"And you were unable?"
"He murdered his father. He strangled him, he smothered him with a pillow, he stabbed him in the heart, he poisoned him, he shot him with a pistol; he killed his mother."
"Are you sure?" asked the clerk, puffing out the cheeks of his mask.
"There were witnesses, there was circumstantial evidence, he confessed. He clubbed his mother to death, he cut her throat, he held her under water till she died."
"Ah," sighed the clerk. "Ah.... Then no reprieve was possible?"
"No reprieve was possible," replied the Governor firmly.
"So be it," said the clerk.
Two pale men leapt from their hiding-place and bound Lampley's hands behind him. They led him through an archway into a courtyard. A masked executioner came forward and knelt at his feet. "I ask your forgiveness, noble sir, for what I am about. The deed is not mine, I am but a servitor."