The gold piece had changed hands; the man, however, had not stirred from his place. At Viterbo, Giovanni Vagnarelli had just watched a traveller break a coin. He knew now that she carried enough to pay her way. She was bound for Rome, on foot, as a pilgrim. He offered her the very protection he had already resolved to strip away.
Charles Dickens records this approach in his Italian recollections. The traveller was a Bavarian countess; scholarly work devoted to her correspondence identifies her as Anna Cotten. She had, it was said, accomplished the pilgrimage on several occasions. A familiar road can inspire confidence, and the company of a helpful stranger seems to promise less fatigue or less peril. But this man did not walk beside her to shield her from chance encounters: he was merely biding his time until they were sufficiently far from all succour.
According to Dickens, Vagnarelli marched with her for upwards of forty miles. There was nothing in the design of a sudden impulse bred of an abrupt dispute. He had to sustain the journey, match his stride to the woman’s, remain within arm’s reach, and maintain for days the semblance of a fellow pilgrim. The distance the woman gained towards her destination worked equally for her murderer. Rome drew nearer; the snare closed about her in the very measure that she believed herself approaching the sanctuary.
In the open country, near the monument then commonly known as the Tomb of Nero, Vagnarelli fell upon her. He plundered her person and dispatched her with her own pilgrim’s staff. That instrument, fashioned to sustain her progress, had passed into the assailant’s hands. From the coin glimpsed at Viterbo to the corpse abandoned near Rome, he had carried his purpose to its ultimate end.
He was newly wed. Upon his return, he bestowed certain garments belonging to the dead woman upon his wife, alleging he had bought them at a fair. The falsehood might have seemed sufficient: worldly goods change hands, and a husband brings home a gift. But his wife had seen the pilgrim pass through their town. Among the articles set before her, she detected a detail that could belong only to that wayfarer.
Then Vagnarelli spoke. In the account gathered by Dickens, he confessed the murder to his wife, who subsequently disclosed it to a priest in the confessional. To this chain of revelations the novelist attributes the arrest effected four days after the deed. The attire intended to introduce the spoils into the conjugal home had brought the victim herself across the threshold. What the murderer imagined he could bestow as a purchased trinket retained still enough singular identity to denounce him.
Months passed in prison. The trial concluded in a capital sentence; Dickens’s narrative passes over the hearings to rejoin the prisoner at the hour when the authorities came to announce that the waiting was over. It was a Friday. Vagnarelli was dining with the other prisoners when he was led away, having been told that he was to be beheaded on the morrow. There remained for him no indefinite term of endurance, but a single night to survive.
It was Lent. Dickens explains that the execution, an unusual event during that sacred season, was intended to serve as a terrible example at a time when pilgrims were flocking to Rome for Holy Week. The outrage committed against a pious traveller was thus converted into an admonition delivered at the very moment when others were setting out upon the roads. Placards affixed to church doors invited the faithful to pray for the soul of the condemned. Dickens read them on Friday evening and resolved to witness what should transpire in the morning.
On the 8th of March, 1845, he arrived with two companions at half past seven. Near San Giovanni Decollato, the scaffold was erected before a white house. The blade waited within its timber frame; around it, dragoons and foot soldiers kept the inquisitive at a distance. The three observers secured a place in a kind of scullery or wash-house. Perched upon an old carriage and a pile of wheels, they looked out through a grated window. The novelist, too, had arranged his vantage point.
Nine struck. Then ten. Officers conversed and smoked; dogs wandered between the soldiers’ legs. A hawker cried cigars, another sold pastries. Children clambered up the walls to obtain a better view. The common trivialities of the street filled the vacant interval left by the condemned man. The crowd could still eat, bargain, and jostle for a better view; the man for whom all this apparatus stood ready remained invisible.
At eleven o’clock, he had not yet appeared. A rumour ran that he was refusing to confess. Dickens had learned that the priests might prolong their exhortations until dusk, so as not to wrest prematurely from the culprit his final chance of receiving the consolations of religion. This delay, dedicated to the salvation of a soul, appeared to the spectators chiefly to compromise the remainder of their morning. Some began to disperse. The soldiers thrust back the carriages where onlookers were perched, and the officers evidently had no notion when this motionless waiting would end. The machine, contrived to strike in an instant, held suspended around it a petty throng, chafing at the delay.
The cause of the impediment subsequently reached Dickens: Vagnarelli had demanded that his wife be brought to him before his confession. An escort had been dispatched to fetch her. This woman, upon whom he had bestowed the dead woman’s garments and into whose ear he had poured his guilt, became once more, at the supreme moment, the one presence he desired. The witness records nothing of their interview. The street perceived only its consequence: the hours went on tolling before an empty scaffold.
At last, the trumpets sounded. The soldiers drew in, the curious pressed forward, the hawkers abandoned their trade. Priests advanced bearing a crucifix veiled in black, so held as to remain perpetually before the eyes of the condemned. Vagnarelli appeared barefoot, his hands pinioned, the collar of his shirt cut wide away. Dickens saw a robust young man, pale, wearing a slight, dark moustache. He was twenty-six years of age.
The decapitation followed almost instantly. The executioner exhibited the head to the multitude; men then set about the body and the cleansing of the timber. After the prolonged suspense, the end had been so swift that the eye could scarcely follow the stroke. Dickens quitted his post and drew near. Around him, he discerned none of that wholesome terror which the authorities had sought to inspire. He felt, on the contrary, several hands exploring his pockets.
The following year, in a letter to the Daily News against capital punishment, he recurred to these thefts attempted at the very foot of the scaffold. Vagnarelli had slain a traveller to strip her of her purse; upon the spot where he had just been put to death for that crime, others were still searching for what they might take. The blade had ceased to fall. The hands, amidst the press, continued their work.