Accidents of Providence (13 page)

In the mornings, ravenous and nauseated, she would pace from the hearth to the cupboard as she hunted for something to eat. From the doorway Mary would watch this performance, unimpressed. “If you spent as much time stitching gloves as circling the kitchen, we would be caught up on our orders,” she said. Rachel told Mary to mind her own business, which was not entirely fair. But she felt herself to be falling into some kind of a well or shaft, stony and bottomless, without a rope.

Several times she tried to tell Elizabeth she was with child. Whenever she started to speak, however, her friend interrupted. It turned out Elizabeth had a good deal to say now that her husband was in the Tower. Rachel could not squeeze in a word, could not find the right moment to tell her. Also, she was nervous; she feared how Elizabeth might react. Though she displayed little interest in the moral shortcomings of others, Elizabeth never hesitated to pass judgment on people she viewed as careless. In Elizabeth’s opinion, there was only one real sin, and that was irresponsibility.

From Elizabeth, Rachel learned that several hundred matrons sympathetic to the Levelers had besieged Parliament with a petition for the four Levelers’ release from the Tower. The officers had turned them away, told them to go home and wash their dishes: the law took no notice of married women. “You are your husbands’ property,” they said, and pushed them off the premises. The Levelers remained imprisoned. This fact did not seem to discourage Elizabeth.

“We will organize another petition,” she said one evening to Rachel. “We will put one thousand women’s signatures to it this time. Here—would you take him?” After handing her infant son to Rachel, who was sitting at the table, she opened the front door to air out her smoke-filled kitchen. The Lilburnes rented a three-room, three-floor lodging in seamy Southwark, south of the Thames and close to the Bishop’s stews, those brothels the church used to regulate. “If there is one thing the Levelers still have,” Elizabeth went on, returning to the table and beginning to chop onions, “it is our loyalty to family and our reputation as honest householders. The Council of State will not be able to slander
us.
They will not be able to ignore an army of God-fearing wives and matrons.”

“Not all of us are wives and matrons,” Rachel reminded her.

Elizabeth leaned into her knife. “What’s the matter? Have you gone missing your good humor today?”

Rachel started to speak, started to confess her situation, but again faltered. Her eyes had to say it for her.

“Why, what in the world is the matter?” Elizabeth spoke over the glad squeals of her middle child, two-year-old Tower, named for all the times his father had spent in prison. The boy sang and warbled in his pen in the corner; he was macerating a bowl of cherries with his fists.

Rachel’s eyes said: I am in dire straits.

Elizabeth’s eyes grew large.

But then Tower knocked his bowl upside down, and pits and purple juice flew everywhere. He began bawling. Elizabeth’s newborn, a tiny boy as lumpy and downy as a ripe peach, added his opinion from Rachel’s lap. Elizabeth’s eyes pulled reluctantly from Rachel to her sons. As she went over to Tower’s pen, she called out distractedly, “Aren’t you the lucky one, not having all these suckling mouths to run around feeding!”

Rachel’s face burned as if the wind had cut her. Elizabeth had not understood what she was trying to tell her. She helped clean up the spilled cherries, and she rocked the youngest one until he quieted. Later she tried to return to the conversation, but the shadows under her friend’s eyes suggested the moment had passed. “I’m worn to the bone,” Elizabeth said.

T
HOMAS BARTWAIN WAS
paying a visit to Newgate.

Years had passed since his last time inside this prison. Normally his direct involvement with a suspect ended once he had written and signed the order of indictment. His business belonged in the early stages, he reminded himself; his business lay in determining if a case should go forward. Yet here he was, two nights before Rachel’s trial, rattling the gates of his least favorite place in London, announcing his credentials, demanding to be let in. The courtyard stank of gutted fish. “I will not go to the women’s ward,” he said to the warden, who came out to greet him. “Bring her down here, to meet me in the open. I will not set foot inside that building. It’s not safe.”

“It’s safer for you than for her,” the warden returned, though he did what Bartwain asked. A guard escorted Rachel downstairs into the courtyard.

When she saw who her visitor was, Rachel pulled her shawl around her shoulders.

“You’re sick,” Bartwain said gruffly. “Your eyes are weak and congested.” He shifted his weight—he was trying to stay off his gouty foot. He had no clear idea what he was doing there, he realized.

“What are you doing here?” Rachel asked.

Maybe it was Griffin’s fault. The prosecutor had irritated Bartwain beyond measure, reminding him of all the officers of the court and civil servants Bartwain had known who treated the law as a public means to a private end. “The law is not the means,” Bartwain had grumbled to his wife the day before. “The law is itself the end. The law is beautiful; the law is order. If we have not law, we have nothing. We descend to anarchy and noise, and one man will kill another for a roasted hen.”

“I’m roasting a hen now,” his wife had commented.

“How are you bearing up?” Bartwain said now to Rachel.

She answered with silence, clutching her shawl tight.

She thinks I make this kind of visit for everyone, he fumed. She has no idea how unusual this is, how I am extending myself beyond the bounds of ordinary duty.

“My wife—” he started.

Last night Mathilda had questioned him yet again regarding his handling of the case. “You never gave her a chance,” she said. “You never listened to her side.”

“I listened for two hours,” he’d defended himself. “She would not tell me her side. I pulled her into my chambers and said, Talk; she refused to.”

Mathilda gave him the look she usually reserved for children. “Maybe you did not ask her the right questions,” she said, and poked him in the belly, which he hated because it tickled. “Make it right, Thomas. Make it right or you are not the man I married.”

“But the law does not want me to do anything else. In the law’s eyes I have completed my assignment.”

“So?” She poked him a second time. “Have you read your Scripture?”

Not this again, he had thought.

“Read the commandment,” she urged, her cheeks dimpling as she sought to make her point. “Go back and read the greatest commandment. Then tell me your law is not lacking something.”

“The greatest commandment has nothing to do with this case. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, et cetera.”

“I don’t mean that one. I mean the
other
one. The one that comes after.”

“That’s not the greatest commandment. That’s the second commandment,” he said churlishly.

“They cannot be separated,” Mathilda argued. Then she added, loud enough that the mice hiding in the cupboards could hear: “Thomas Bartwain, love thy neighbor.”

The investigator pulled himself back to the present as he realized Rachel was speaking to him. “Why are you here?” she asked again.

“My wife sent me,” he admitted. “She sent me to see how you are bearing up.”

“But you are the one who put me here.”

“Yes.”

“So now you are returning to see the results of your handiwork? Are you impressed with yourself? Do I look sufficiently beaten?”

“That’s not what I—”

“You would like for me to die, wouldn’t you?”

“I do not want anyone to die. I simply fulfill my duty.”

“And what is that?” she burst out. “What is that word,
duty
, Investigator? Tell me that. Tell me how you do it. Maybe you learn it in books. For myself, I have had so many hands and fingers clawing at me my whole life long, telling me this and that and the other is my duty, telling me fifteen duties in a row and then reminding me nothing I do matters because God has already made up His mind about me, because God has already decided one way or another, that I can hardly see what I am obliged to do or not do in this life; I can hardly lay all my duties on the table!” It was her longest speech to him.

“Are you ready for your trial?” he said quietly. “You know you will have no counselor to help you.”

“No, sir!” she shouted. “No, sir, I am not.”

“You are better than this, Rachel Lockyer,” he said, surprised by his own words. Since when had his wife started talking through him?

“I was once,” Rachel replied tersely. Then she called for the warden and told him she wanted to go back to the women’s ward. She left Bartwain standing by himself in the courtyard, listening to the groan of the windmill.

By ten o’clock that night the third floor of the prison was quiet except for the shuddering sobs of one young woman who had arrived a few hours earlier. The other inmates had been talking about her. This was a country girl, they said, who went mad after losing her infant, one her stepfather had sired. She stabbed the man with a knife, after which she tried to steal his silver. Her stepfather survived the assault and recovered his silver, for his wife’s daughter had poor aim and had opened up his shinbone rather than his stomach. He sent for the authorities and washed his hands of her, thereby ruining the same girl twice.

When an hour had passed and the girl was still hiccupping, Rachel left her pallet and crept over to her. She could hear the guards playing a drinking game outside in the corridor. The newcomer was lying thin and flat under a dirty shawl. There was little Rachel could do. Should she say something? She had no words of comfort. So she sat beside her. She thought about that story in the book of Daniel, about the den of lions and how God shut the lions’ mouths. She supposed God did that so Daniel would not be harmed. But Rachel was less concerned about Daniel than she was about the lions. Daniel made his way out and became a famous prophet. Of course he did. But what about the lions? What was it like for them, running headlong into God like that? He sewed their mouths shut, so their roar had no sound.

The girl poked her head out. “What’s your name?” Her thinning hair revealed a patchy scalp. She was possibly thirteen.

“Rachel.”

“Mine’s Eve.” She sat up, cross-legged. The two of them looked at each other in the shadows from the wall burners. Each could barely make the other out.

Eve told Rachel she came from farms where they bred horses for a living.

“Where do you get the horses?” Rachel asked.

“We take them from the moors; we take them wild and we break them.” Then she asked if Rachel had ever seen a Wiltshire mare caught and brought to the farms for breeding. When Rachel said no, the girl’s eyes seemed to darken. She said once a man had ridden a mare long enough, the mare would accept things as they were during the day.

Rachel looked up to see two night watchmen patrolling, clicking their sticks.

But at night, Eve went on, when the other horses were sleeping, the mare would rise up on two legs and scream. She had heard the sound, she said. It would scream for an hour.

Then Eve buried her face in her shawl, which was crusty with dried stains, and Rachel guessed this was the covering in which she had wrapped her newborn before she lost it. Swiftly she drew the girl to her. “You will tear me from myself, then,” Eve cried out, to no one, to the walls. But her words came too loud, and the next minute the watchmen came. They took Eve away; they pulled her from Rachel’s arms. They took her to ease their boredom. They were not well paid, these guards; they were not in line for raises. So they cut their losses with girls. Being young and of the rural sort, Eve did not have money to fend them off. Snarling, Rachel tore into them, using her teeth and the rusted hinges of her wrist irons; she fought to drive them off. When that did not work she lifted her own skirts and offered herself as a distraction. Through it all Eve kept squalling. The guards muzzled her with a rag another woman had used to stanch the monthlies. They spat on her balding head and shoved her to the floor. Then they dragged her by the arms and hair outside the ward and into the passageway, behind the black storage barrels. When they finished with Eve they came back for Rachel, who by that time had found a wooden torch with a jagged three-inch splinter on the end of it; she lit it and shook it at them, shaking uncontrollably. They laughed and let her be; they tossed Eve in a heap at her feet.

Rachel did what she could. She dabbed the swellings and cuts and swaddled the girl in her shawl. She talked about everything; she talked nonsense. She counted to fifteen and back. She stroked the girl’s hair. And when Eve started hemorrhaging, she tried to stanch the bleeding. But Eve was not even a week out of childbirth. Her body was not well healed. Her womb gushed, angry and sobbing; her womb emptied itself all over the floor. She bled continuously, for an hour. There was nothing Rachel could do.

She lay beside the girl’s body until dawn.

Rachel’s mother was the first person Elizabeth Lilburne had written to when she learned of her friend’s arrest. In the letter, she asked Martha Lockyer to come to London and testify before the jury on behalf of Rachel’s good character. Martha Lockyer had not responded. Her silence enraged Elizabeth but did not surprise Rachel, who understood her mother did not like London.

The last time she had seen her mother, Rachel was five months pregnant and frantic. The visit did not go well. Half a week’s wages had allowed Rachel to board a coach and travel two days north to a tumbledown farm where Martha Lockyer resided with her brother, Rachel’s uncle, whom Rachel had never met.

For her mother to reside
anywhere
came as something of a surprise to Rachel. For years following the death of her husband, Martha Lockyer had roamed from village to village. She would tell people she was searching for work, but really she was searching for other Roman Catholics. For a while Rachel and Robert traveled with her, but when they grew older Rachel declared her intention to return to London. “I am tired of wandering,” she had said to her mother, who replied that the true Christian had no earthly home and should expect continual uprooting. This observation did not stop Rachel, who packed her brother’s bag and took Robert to the city with her. He was so small then, with riotous curls that tumbled down his back and tangled in the strap over his shoulder. Their mother let them go. With no more children to impede her, Martha Lockyer had roamed still farther north, until she arrived at a farm that turned out to be the home of her long-lost brother and his nine children, none of whom was Protestant. She did not move again. After a while she became like a servant in her brother’s house. She retained a bulldog’s grip on her faith, practicing with great fervor and secrecy, although her brother and his wife reminded her she did not need to hide anything from them. Where the sacraments were concerned, Rachel’s mother seemed to prefer a whiff of illegality.