Accidents of Providence (14 page)

When Rachel arrived at her uncle’s house, she asked her mother to consider moving back to London. “Come live with me,” she entreated. “You can stay in my room, over the glove shop. I will sleep in the workroom.” Martha Lockyer refused. London rained too much, she said.

Rachel asked if she could come live with her mother instead. “Will you take me in?” she begged. “I promise I would not be any trouble to you or to Uncle.” Again her mother refused, only this time she could not blame the weather.

Rachel made a pointed reference to her own state: “Mother, I have not experienced the normal course of women for some five months.”

With this news her mother’s eyes had hardened into beads, and she said she would not play nursemaid to a foundling.

“It would not be a foundling.”

“Then it will be a bastard,” Martha Lockyer replied, shaking her head. “Don’t you know what it will be? It will be a son of nobody. It will be
of spurious issue,
” which was a phrase used in the parish registers to indicate a child who had no father.

Rachel asked her mother to have mercy on her, please, in memory of Robert if for no other reason. “I cannot do this alone,” she pleaded.

“Do not say his name!” Martha Lockyer had shouted, the veins in her temples deepening and darkening. “I do not want
his
name coming out of
your
mouth.” She said that Robert was a martyr, God’s chosen, whom Rachel had stolen away, whereas Rachel was a—she snapped her lips shut. She seized her rosary under her tented sleeve and fingered the beads, looking the other way.

When Rachel’s uncle interrupted, calling for help plucking a goose, Martha Lockyer groaned up from her chair as if her limbs were about to splinter. She brushed past her daughter, commenting, “God forgive you, child, you never could do anything the way I asked.” Rachel returned to Warwick Lane alone.

Even before that failed journey north, she had begun dreading the child’s arrival. Rivers of sweat coursed between her breasts each night. She hardly slept, and when she did sleep, she turned into an accountant. Rachel’s dreams became bookkeeping sessions. She weighed and tallied the child’s cost. If the magistrates took notice of her situation, she knew, she would be forced into a public confession of the father’s name. Walwyn’s family would face scandal and embarrassment, and if he ever left the Tower, Walwyn himself would be flogged or, more likely, ordered to pay a monthly fine to the Church of England. If she refused to give the name, if she stayed silent, she would be whipped or sent to a house of correction or both. Who would care for the child then?

During the day, Rachel fanned out gloves on the showing table and let her mind wander to stories of women driven to restore their monthlies before it was too late. Her great-aunt, now long passed, used to frighten her with tales. Rachel remembered one account of a maidservant who went to a midwife for a bloodletting and emerged with her feet bound in red rags but her regular cycle restored. Then there was the mother of eleven who had tied her undergarments devilishly tight and pressed and flattened her stomach with a rolling pin. The next day her monthlies returned, though for weeks afterward her limbs spasmed and stiffened at inopportune moments, like a prisoner’s stretched on an invisible rack. Rachel remembered asking if it was a sin, what these women had done. Her great-aunt had waved this question off, her wooden spoon in her hand. She said women had neither the time nor the luxury to quibble over what was and was not a sin. “We are not casuists,” she said.

Rachel tried repeatedly to track down Thom the messenger. When she found him, he shamefacedly confessed he’d never delivered her message to Walwyn. “Never delivered!” she shouted and smacked him. Immediately she regretted her action and handed him a farthing, which the boy deigned to accept as payment for his pains. He proceeded to tell her what had happened. While preparing to charm his way into the Tower, Thom said, he had seen a horse-drawn cart crossing the moat. The cart carried a chained and starving lion wearing a ruby collar. Soldiers were wheeling it into the belly of the prison for the warden’s entertainment. Thom gaped and gawked. It was his first lion and so he had nothing with which to compare it, but in his eyes that cat stood equal to any apocalyptic vision in the book of Revelation, even though its tail was bald and its hipbones nearly punctured its mangy coat as it staggered the length of its movable prison. When the lion’s chain dragged along the cart’s boards, the two geldings pulling the cart flared their nostrils, their ears flicking back. They could not believe they were harnessed to this thing, to this predator; they could not fathom how they’d wound up bound to it. Thom stood for so long watching this spectacle pass, gnawing his fingernails with the zeal of the truly curious, that by the time the old cat vanished into the inner courtyard he had forgotten the task with which Rachel had charged him. He remembered only that he had a shiny coin in his pocket and it was nearly suppertime—and his poor stomach was growling. He made his way north to the Gray Swan tavern, bought a loaf, and bragged about what he’d seen to anyone who would listen. Rachel’s message to Walwyn went undelivered.

“Go back and try again,” she ordered when he finished his story. “And if you see a lion, ignore it.”

Someone she knew, a seller of fruits and vegetables, had been in her situation not a year earlier. Rachel remembered hearing the matrons say that this woman had given birth to a “natural child,” meaning a child out of wedlock. Lacking the means to support it, the fruit seller had fallen on the charity of William Kiffin’s congregation, but Kiffin had declined to help until she named the father; he’d also threatened to send her to Bridewell or some other house of correction. The woman refused to give the name. Weeping hot tears, she had stood in silence before the congregation, her arms crossed over her breasts, which still sought the child, who had come out sickly. They never did force a confession out of her; she never did apologize. Rachel had no idea what happened afterward. She suspected the child had died. She had heard that its name was not added to the membership rolls.

That night, after she saw Thom, she began binding her breasts to minimize the appearance of swelling.

About a week later she learned that the Council of State had declared a day of celebration in honor of the Levelers’ recent defeat at Burford. Elizabeth said it would be a day for the wolves to celebrate slaughtering the sheep; the saints had defeated the poor. Rachel said she thought the poor and the saints were one and the same. Elizabeth shook her head, bouncing two-year-old Tower as he swatted at the strings of her white linen cap. “They used to be,” she replied, “but now it appears that to be one of the Elect one must have property.”

On June 7, the Council of State made good on its promise and held a day of thanksgiving in honor of the suppression of Leveler agitators. The same day, Rachel let out the waist on all her skirts. She could hear the child babbling as she ripped and stitched. The sound no longer comforted her.

On June 11, in a fit of despondency, Rachel traveled to the midwifery on Poultry Street and paid a week’s wages to procure the herb savin, which the midwife promised would restore the monthlies to a woman in her condition. This was the same day that a group of enraged landowners disguised as women attacked a homeless community called the Diggers for the crime of planting a vegetable garden on public land.

On June 18, John Lilburne published from prison
The Legal Fundamental Liberties of the People of England,
in which he inveighed against capricious government and offered an extended account of his own sufferings. Cheap copies started arriving in the booksellers’ stalls the next week. Elizabeth passed by those stalls, passed by those copies of her husband’s latest, on her way to the Newgate market. She was headed to buy her boys beets. While she and the vendor haggled, a Digger, an old homeless woman from Surrey, lurched toward the pyramid of root vegetables but missed her target, collapsing in Elizabeth’s arms, slack-jawed, diseased, and pox-ridden. Elizabeth gave her the beets.

On June 22, Parliament expanded Oliver Cromwell’s powers by appointing him governor-general and commander in chief of the army, now charged with invading Ireland. The same day, Rachel self-administered a dose of savin, a halfhearted attempt to restore her menstrual cycle. But she could not keep the herb down, and the attempt failed. She decided to visit her mother.

On July 5, Rachel returned from her travels to learn that Elizabeth had fallen ill with a rash and vicious fever. Her friend had contracted smallpox from the Digger woman and was close to death. Her two sons were also feverish. Rachel rushed to Southwark as soon as she heard the news. She returned a few days before John. The guards released him soon after, on compassionate grounds. They forced him out of the Tower over his protests; they told him to go home and care for his wife and children. The guards knew what smallpox was. They knew his children had no time. John did not want to know. He crossed the Thames in a rented wherry on a Sunday morning through a thick fog. He returned in time to bid his sons goodbye.

That night, Rachel sat on one side of the bed and John buried his head in his hands on the other as Tower and his tiny brother died in their mother’s arms. Elizabeth, her face a rash of blisters, could not weep, for her eyes had swelled shut. Rachel had to guide their downy heads to their mother’s mouth so she could kiss them. John rose and staggered alone up the stairs, blind for a different reason.

When she returned to Warwick Lane, Rachel burned the rest of the savin.

J
OHN AND ELIZABETH
fell asleep early on the night before Rachel’s trial, by eight o’clock. John had planned to work on the ending of his latest antigovernment pamphlet. But he slept through the night and wrote nothing.

Anne and William Walwyn also turned in early, though not quite so early as the Lilburnes—she to her bed at nine, he to a blanket with Fourteen at half past the hour. Neither slept.

Over the glove shop on Warwick Lane, Mary du Gard tossed fitfully. She could hear the shop sign hitting the outside wall when the wind gusted.

Tucked inside their thatched-roof house, Thomas and Mathilda Bartwain rested quietly for three hours, until a noise downstairs roused the investigator. The sound was coming from the kitchen.

Bartwain sat up straight, clutching his nightcap. He had heard a rustling, a kind of exhilarated scuttle. There had followed a single crack, like a twig snapping. The hairs on the back of his neck rose. His wife heard nothing; his wife was snoring. He lit a candle on the bedside table. As he lumbered to his feet, pulling his night robe around his sloping abdomen, he happened to catch his reflection in the water basin on the floor. His chest resembled the teats of an old sow. Bartwain tried to remember when his body had begun its long downhill shuffle. No one had alerted him. No one had said:
This
is the day you will stop being the young one, the one on the rise, the one everyone watches. No one had warned him that the next generation of investigators would be waiting for him to go away, would be lining up to see the day, not to bid him farewell or thank him for his service but to take his place, to leap onto his desk, empty his shelves, claim his chair, cast aside his life’s work, and build over whatever had gone before, planting their shiny boots in the face of the old days, of the old giants who had fallen.

He should not be looking at himself in the washbasin, he decided.

He descended the narrow stairs to the kitchen. He kept an eye on his stocking-clad feet. He did not want to fall. He could not bear the thought of falling. When he made it to the kitchen he placed his candle on the table, but it did not throw off enough light to see, so he lit a second one. His hand was trembling. He put the candle down and regarded his hand. Odd, he thought. He picked the candle back up. Work with me, he said to his hand. We are not done yet.

Bartwain pulled open the cupboard. He saw shadows; he saw flour spilling out of its sack. Grainy powder was everywhere. He thrust his head halfway into the cupboard and peered inside. He wielded the candle high, by his nose, singeing his nostril hairs.

Then the investigator saw it. It was in the very far back, under his handmade trap, its neck broken. It was not a rat. It was not a mouse. It was too tiny to be a mouse. Yet there it was. It was the son of the son of a mouse. Bartwain had never seen a mouse so small. It was no larger than an ear. He stared. Each fine whisker was dusted with flour.

He recalled the hours he had spent preparing for this moment.

Suddenly Bartwain felt weak in the chest. He pulled his head out and shut the cupboard door. He blew out the candle in his hand, which was still trembling. Then he used his fingers to snuff out the one on the table, though the wick kept smoking.

T
HE SESSIONS HOUSE
in Old Bailey opened its doors early that first week of December for the convening of the winter assizes. By eight o’clock the benches closest to the front had filled, and dozens of spectators were crowding and jamming the balcony.

Bartwain arrived at a quarter past the hour and made his way to the top riser. From this height he could gaze down on the proceedings like a bird of prey. Years had passed since his last time attending a trial of this nature—he no longer had the stomach for it. But he loved this ramshackle courtroom. During the months between sessions, activity around the Old Bailey would groan to a halt, except in the rafters, which provided seasonal accommodations to bats, barred owls, pine martens, and mice. When the sessions resumed, a gaggle of cleaning maids would preen and fluff the courtroom to life, evicting the squatters and throwing open the doors to that species which prides itself on its capacity for distributive justice.

Bartwain scrutinized the scene below him. The last time London had seen a courthouse this crowded, John Lilburne was the defendant. This time, Freeborn John would have to remain a spectator. The jurors were filing onto their benches, and the court clerks followed, wearing red caps over their shaggy hair. The bailiff entered from a side door and announced the judge’s arrival.