Accidents of Providence (11 page)

“I know all this.”

“Hold on. I’m getting there.” Why were the young such imbeciles? “‘Except such Mother can make proof by one Witness at the least, that the Child (whose death by her so intended to be concealed) was born dead.’ There. Now you see what I am getting at?”

Griffin scratched his head.

“The defendant needs one witness, one
credible
witness, to come forward and persuade the jury that she—Rachel Lockyer—gave birth in the presence of another person. She needs someone to swear that the child came out of the womb stillborn.”

“I see no cause for concern.”

“I do,” Bartwain told him. “I would not put it past Elizabeth Lilburne.”

“If Mrs. Lilburne didn’t say anything of that nature in her interview with you, what makes you think she would try it in a court of law?”

“Mrs. Lilburne was too busy dodging my questions to be sufficiently cunning in her interview. By the time the trial starts she might be thinking more clearly.”

“Then I won’t call her to the stand.”

“You don’t have to call her to the stand,” Bartwain said with grim satisfaction. “She can call herself to the stand. Witnesses with relevant information can volunteer their testimony.”

Griffin shrugged. “She’ll be intimidated up there. She’ll faint in front of all those spectators.”

“You have not met Elizabeth Lilburne.”

“I tell you I’m not concerned. Whatever that woman tries to do, whatever
either
woman tries to do, will be without a counselor’s help.” The prosecutor reminded Bartwain that the Council of State did not permit defendants to bring legal representation into the courtroom. Rachel was going to have to defend herself.

You have never eaten too much boiled crab or undercooked custard in your life, Bartwain thought. You have never been outwitted in your kitchen by a mouse. You have no idea about the world. “Don’t underestimate your opponent,” he said. “You recall Freeborn John Lilburne’s recent achievement in the courtroom at Guildhall?”

“Yes. He defended himself against charges of treason and won a full acquittal.”

“Exactly. And his wife doesn’t gripe and carry on like he does. If I were you I would be careful.” It was the first time Thomas Bartwain had spoken highly of any woman besides his wife.

Griffin stepped into the sunlit street. “I appreciate your help, Investigator,” he called over his shoulder. “I mean, think of it: you’re more than twice my age but still taking on cases. You’re an inspiration.”

Bartwain delivered a black cloud of a look.

The investigator returned home to a wife who had remembered her earlier interest in Rachel’s case—or, more precisely, her earlier interest in her husband’s
handling
of the case. He did not feel like answering her latest questions, so he told her to go ahead and read his transcript notes if she was that interested. She surprised him by doing so. Afterward, padding into the kitchen, her white hair frizzing out of her nightcap, Mathilda proceeded to stand and wave the court papers over him as Bartwain sat on the kitchen floor and repaired one of his mousetraps.

“You have no idea what to do with this woman,” she declared.

“I have ideas aplenty,” he retorted. “But what I think doesn’t count anymore. My part is over, except for my final report. The rest is up to the jury.”

She folded her arms and fixed him with a glare.

“What?” He could not stand it when she stared him down that way.

“You are making a mockery of the law.”

This was too much. “I do not mock the law,” he shouted, rising to his feet one stiff leg at a time, abandoning his mousetrap. “I follow every jot and tittle!”

“But that is your problem. You never bother to check the jots and tittles. You never ask if they still make sense.”

“And what do
you
know?” he growled, his nose reddening. “I’ll tell you, Mrs. Bartwain, if you get sidetracked into asking such questions, you will lose your bearings. Trust me; I have learned this from experience. The law protects us from the insidious and irrational aspects of human nature by asking us to determine only
if
the suspect in question committed the hideous deed. To ask
why
she did it, to wonder about her life, to circumvent the parameters of law by probing whatever secret and inward instincts lie beneath each human surface, is to show pity where none has been merited; it is to place a higher value on the perpetrator’s life than on the victim’s!”

“You’re frightened, aren’t you?” Mathilda said, not unkindly. “You’re frightened and you’re tired.”

Then she wheeled around and marched back up to her bedchamber, leaving Bartwain red-nosed and wordless.

R
ACHEL HAD DISCOVERED
she was with child on the morning of her brother’s execution. She was standing in a sea green dress at the edge of a crowd when the revelation came. She was watching the soldiers circling, the way they breathed and blew like eager little gods, creating clouds that mingled with the mist and clung to the churchyard grounds, the tents of Captain Savage’s company snapping their colors in the distance. She was listening to six musketeers begging Robert Lockyer to wear a blindfold because they did not want to look their friend in the eye when they shot him. She was studying Robert, who looked even younger than he had the previous winter; she could see his shoulders shivering. She stood on the flattened grass, missing Walwyn, waiting; all these things were spinning around her, and suddenly, there it was. Rachel knew.

Conception
is a strange word. One conceives in different ways. An idea can be conceived. So can a plan for a cathedral. A philosophy student conceives a way through a logic problem. A spider conceives a web. Conceiving is creation, but before it is creation it is mischief. And before it is mischief it is faith.

For Rachel the discovery had taken place in St. Paul’s churchyard, Elizabeth holding her up on one side, Mary bracing her on the other. It was late spring, nearly four weeks past Easter, and she had not seen her brother in months. Two days before, a mutiny had broken out among the lower ranks of Robert’s company, and a dozen soldiers, Robert among them, had snatched their captain’s flag and holed up in an abandoned church, refusing to return the colors until they received their past-due wages. Our families are starving, they had said; give us what we are owed. Their superiors replied: You will get what you are owed when you are dead. Robert lost his temper and started shouting. Then General Oliver Cromwell had shown up, “breathing forth nothing but death to them all,” as John Lilburne later wrote, and quelled the skirmish. He let most of the mutinying troops go with a warning, but he kept Robert back. He wanted to teach his men a lesson. This is the ringleader, he said; this one supports the Levelers’ Agreement of the Free People of England. Cromwell did not know that the Levelers had never paid any attention to Robert. Cromwell did not know that Robert never led anything in his life except his sister by the elbow, and even then he was not too successful.

As Rachel watched the musketeers forming a reluctant line in the churchyard, she happened to glance down at her abdomen, and the universe shifted. Either that, or her place in the universe shifted. It was nothing she saw or physically felt. It bore no relation to the senses. She simply knew. She talked to God. She said: God, is this what is happening now? And God said,
Yes.
So she asked what God wanted. She said: There is no place for this kind of gift, if that is what You are giving. And God said,
Find one.
It was her mother’s God talking to her.

She sagged and buckled.

“Rachel,” Elizabeth whispered urgently through the spitting mist, through the squall of the gathering throng. “Let us take you home.”

She pushed herself up. No. I will stay with my brother. She said it without saying it. She gripped Elizabeth’s hot hand and the words traveled that way instead, through their fingers. Elizabeth always said the real truths were the simple ones; the real truths consisted of deeds, not words. So Rachel pressed her friend’s hand and Elizabeth crushed hers back and they talked to each other that way. And when Mary, who did not speak their language, tried to pull them out of the crowd, back toward Warwick Lane and the safety of the glove shop, Elizabeth snarled, “Let her be; she does not want to go.” And Mary shook her head and was angry with both of them.

Five times that morning the musketeers asked Robert to wear a blindfold, and five times Robert declined. First he said he wanted to see his executioners with his own eyes. Then he declared his cause was just and he need not be ashamed. The third time they asked, he said he welcomed death and did not fear its face; the fourth, that he could not believe so small a thing as demanding an honest wage should give the army occasion to take his life. He was doing the Levelers proud. The last time they asked, he said nothing, only gave the sign to fire, raising two scrawny arms over his head and throwing his gaze skyward, so that the final sight to greet his eyes was the space where the cathedral used to have a spire before lightning had razed it. In the same moment Rachel lowered her head into Elizabeth’s neck, and six muskets sputtered and roared. She kept herself still and she counted backward from fifteen, which was how long Walwyn once told her it took God to welcome by name any innocent who had suffered. She remembered asking why it took fifteen seconds, why God could not name the soul immediately. And he had grazed her cheek with his finger and said, Because there is always a line of souls waiting.

The soldiers laid Robert’s body on the grass. Elizabeth and Mary let go of Rachel’s arms, and she pushed through the throng to say goodbye to him. She sank to her hands and knees in front of him. But that was not enough; that was not close enough. She laid herself on top of him. She blanketed Robert with her body. She rested her forehead against his forehead and stared into his open eyes; she whispered in his ear as the soil around his head went dark and wet. I told you not to do anything foolish, she cried. I told you. Look what has happened. You said you did not need a mother and now look. She begged him not to go. Do not leave me, she said; don’t you dare leave me alone with my life. Walwyn is locked up in the Tower. I cannot lose you and him both.

Then Elizabeth was grasping her, rocking and pulling her off Robert’s body. As the two women struggled to their feet they came upon a circle of soldiers sucking on long pipes, and Rachel looked for the man with the finest uniform. When she found him she told him she wanted her brother’s body. “Let me have it,” she pleaded, plucking at his felted sleeve, “so I may give him a good burial.” The colonel shook with suppressed laughter. He said he could not give her anything—the Levelers had commandeered the corpse. They are taking it away, he told her. It is theirs; they have bargained for it.

“For what?” Elizabeth interjected. “I know the Levelers. They would do no such thing.”

“They would,” the colonel replied. “It is useful to them. They specialize in the art of agitation. They are taking Robert for their symbol, their hero. They are going to turn his death into a martyrdom.”

Elizabeth, furious: “On whose orders?”

“John Lilburne’s,” another soldier said. “He sent a message from the Tower.”

Elizabeth turned a mottled red.

Rachel exploded. “How dare you use a young man’s death for political gain!” she shouted at the colonel, though she should have been shouting at John Lilburne.

The soldiers howled. They said some people were more valuable in death than in life, and Robert was one of them. “He mutinied against his captain,” one said. “He forgot his place. We have no use for him in a professionally trained force. But the Levelers will make him live forever. The Levelers would immortalize a half-wit if it suited their purpose. They would turn a bastard into the Christ child if they could.”

With those words Rachel remembered her discovery, and her knees buckled again.

Elizabeth intervened. “Please forgive her, sir, she is struck dumb with grief and has no husband to help her,” she implored, pulling Rachel back to her feet and in the same moment tugging loose the ties under her friend’s bonnet so she could breathe. The soldiers let them leave. As the women slipped out of the churchyard, Mary trailing behind, one of the soldiers noticed that the dark-haired one, the one with the brother, had green eyes that could clear right through a man; she had eyes, he said, that bruised.

The next morning Rachel rose before dawn to the sound of trees. A cold April wind was tearing through the poplars, and moonlight revealed a carriageway slick with fallen flowers. Some of the petals had escaped into the ditches and kennels that lined either side of Warwick Lane. There, swirling in circles, they joined the rainwater and detritus of the city on a slow southward journey that would end where it always did, in the waiting Thames.

Rachel washed her face and neck in the basin she and Mary shared. She returned the bowl to the shelf that sat between their upstairs sleeping quarters, tied her hat tight to keep the wind from snatching it, and slid downstairs, passing through the darkened shop and slipping out the door before Mary could call for her. She bent her body against the wind. She was in the dark, marching. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from noticing the cold. She tried not to look down at her abdomen, tried not to think about the previous day’s revelation. This did not work.

A few weeks before, armed officers in the service of the new Puritan government had dragged William Walwyn from his bed in Moorfields in the middle of the night. They pulled a screaming Richard out of his father’s arms and passed the boy over to Anne, who took him without a word, her eyes never leaving her husband. “What have you done this time?” was what she said to him. The soldiers hauled Walwyn off to the Tower to await charges of treasonous writing, though the pamphlet in question was John’s. Rachel learned of the arrest a few days later from Elizabeth, whose husband was also taken. Elizabeth’s left eyebrow rose very high as she delivered the news. “It is best if you do not try to contact any of them,” she told Rachel, by which she meant that only wives were supposed to visit.