Accidents of Providence (16 page)

Back inside the courthouse, a word of good news—Bartwain’s back was not broken. He had sustained a fractured ulna, however, and the doctor who delivered this diagnosis placed the investigator’s left arm in a sling and told him not to use it. Perspiration irrigated the furrows in the doctor’s forehead. “The lower vertebrae in your spine have been injured,” he explained. “They have sustained a wrenching.” When Bartwain asked what this meant, the doctor said it depended. “But I would not walk for a while yet,” he added, as Bartwain stood and walked.

For the first ten minutes of his journey home he felt as giddy as any paralytic who stands and rolls up his mat after Jesus talks to him. After ten minutes, Bartwain understood what the doctor had meant. Taking a step caused radiating pain to course down his spine and buttocks. His fractured wrist was throbbing. He made it home, barely. He collapsed into his favorite chair and called for Mathilda. She was not home, but his secretary came by within the hour—White had heard about the courthouse accident. Bartwain asked him to go fetch one of those wheeled chairs, the kind used by the lame and crippled. White said he had no idea where to find one. Bartwain was unrelenting. “I need it right away. I have to practice rolling.”

It would take his secretary several days to locate one.

When at last White returned, he was pushing a wheeled chair with a passing resemblance to a wheelbarrow. Bartwain nodded his approval. “Now you will practice taking me around in it,” he said with some excitement; he had a fondness for contraptions. He lowered himself into the chair and instructed White to wheel him up and down the hallway. White rolled his eyes. From her vantage point in the kitchen, Mathilda chuckled.

As White strained to maneuver his employer’s substantial weight down the corridor, he pointed out that no one would think less of Bartwain if he did not attend any more of the proceedings, which were scheduled to resume as soon as the judge declared the courthouse fit for reentry. “You’re injured,” White said, gasping slightly. “You don’t have to go to the trial. You don’t have to go anywhere until you feel better.”

“I will feel better when this case is over,” Bartwain said. “Now push.”

T
HE LABOR PAINS
had made their first appearance a full month before Rachel thought they would. They dissipated during the day but resumed overnight, so she could not rest. In the morning the pains had vanished again, and she swept the walk as usual.

The week before, Rachel had awakened to the hawkish face of Katherine Chidley leaning over her, fumbling at her nightdress, trying to squeeze her breasts. “This woman is great with child,” Chidley trumpeted.

Rachel shoved her away and sat up, pulling the quilt around her. Mary was watching, her arms crossed, a sentinel at the top of the stairs. “Oh, Mary,” Rachel cried. “How could you let her into my room?”

“You didn’t lock it,” Mary said.

Chidley tugged Rachel’s hair. “Thick and shining. And skin fresh as a girl’s! You will bring shame on this house. Who will pay to maintain your bastard? Do you even know the father?” Again the haberdasher’s arm flew out and landed on her target. She groped and mauled Rachel’s nightdress. “Aha!”

“What?” Mary leaned in. “What is it? What have you found?”

Rachel pushed back, but Katherine Chidley was a large woman. Enveloping Rachel in a great molesting embrace, she proceeded to palpate and pinch her nipples, forcing her fingers under Rachel’s robe and digging into her breasts. “Aha!” she crowed again. “Swollen like a creek in springtime!”

“Let her be,” Mary cautioned. “That’s enough.”

I will be eaten alive, Rachel thought. These women, these matrons who tear chunks of flesh with their beaks, will devour me. “I’m not expecting,” she spat. It was a ridiculous lie, but once out of her mouth, she had to stay with it. “I come from a long line of hard-breasted women. My breasts take on extra denseness during my monthly time.”

When Chidley questioned her growing girth, Rachel attributed it to a digestive ailment.

When Chidley asked what kind of ailment, Rachel retorted it was none of her business and she did not want to discuss matters of physic in the morning.

When Chidley told Rachel she could discuss the matter with her now or later in front of a justice of the peace, Rachel said she doubted a justice of the peace would have time to interrogate the digestive ailments of a glovemaker’s apprentice. There was a war on, after all.

When Chidley reminded her that the war had ended, Rachel said, “Then someone ought to inform the army.”

The haberdasher threw up her hands and turned to Mary. “She is unrepentant.”

Rachel stood shakily, wrapping the quilt around her shoulders. “These are still my sleeping quarters, and last time I checked I was still the owner of myself. I will not have you marching in here without my permission!”

“No, you are not the owner of yourself,” Mary called from the door in a sorrowful voice. “You belong to God, who will do with you as He wishes.”

Chidley, nodding, glided to the stairs and descended them with a fat swish. From there she let herself out.

Alone again, Rachel and Mary eyed each other. Mary said she was disappointed in Rachel.

Rachel said
she
was disappointed in Mary. “You let that woman into my chambers. How could you?”

“My husband’s good name is the only thing I have,” Mary declared. “It is all I possess now that he is gone. I will not have you under this roof if you bring shame to his name. Do you understand? I will not tolerate it! Any woman who gives birth to a bastard will find no safe harbor at Du Gard Gloves. Now go sweep the walk.”

Rachel said she would do it right after breakfast.

“Do it now!” her employer shouted, screwing up her thin face. “I cannot tolerate the sight of you.”

Again Rachel had hunted down Thom. Again she asked the boy to deliver her message. “What message?” Thom had replied. Again she slapped him. Thom paled with unshed tears. “Tell Mr. Walwyn I am in need of aid,” she said, kissing his cheek roughly. “I’m sorry. I’m begging you. Quickly. Get past the moat this time.” Thom sped off, his legs churning; he did not like being slapped. He did not come back.

During the same days London descended into a strange stew of smoke and heat and insidious humidity. The air swept in from the south. It invaded the city. Women on their way to market pushed their sleeves high past the elbows, their palms slippery as they balanced baskets of bread and apples on their shoulders. The heat wave made it harder for Rachel to sleep. Nights were the only time she could escape the prying eyes of others, so she would throw her robe open in the dark, her skin parched, her nipples cracked and aching. Long blue veins had begun to spin themselves around her swollen abdomen.

When she was not staying awake brooding about the future, she was staying awake worrying about Elizabeth. For two days after the passing of her sons, Rachel’s best friend had lain unmoving, head to the wall, neither eating nor drinking nor rising to use the house of office. On the third morning she had hauled herself up with a single shuddering breath, wrapped herself in her husband’s dressing gown, the first thing her hand found in the dark, and crept downstairs to the kitchen, where she stood and boiled a pot of oats for her one remaining child, five-year-old Elizabeth, whose eyes were like free-blown glass, swollen and translucent.

John had done what he could to help. For the remaining days of the summer he had stayed by his wife’s side, writing treatises on government at night while she slept and moistening her face with lemon in the daytime to lessen the scarring from the smallpox. But then Elizabeth grew well enough to remember she disliked it when he hovered, and a relieved John returned to his work, pouring everything he had, everything he knew, into his Leveler causes. In record time he had completed a scathing treatise that accused the new republican government of treason against the people of England. John titled it
An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and His Son-in-Law
, and he dedicated it to his three friends still locked in the Tower. The treatise accomplished what John wanted. Like clocks with perfect weights, five officers arrived right on time at the Lilburnes’ door. They left without him, John putting on a show of resistance for the neighbors, but they returned later, as he knew they would. They dragged him, noble and remonstrating, before the attorney general. When John demanded to know the nature of the charges against him, the attorney general said seditious pamphleteering. When John denied that the new Parliament wielded any lawful authority over him, the attorney general recommitted him to the Tower. Rachel assumed this was what John wanted. In the midst his grief, Freeborn John had begun to fester. He missed Walwyn in the Tower. He missed the Tower. At this point he would have settled for a straw mat in Fleet Prison or the Clink, almost any form of imprisonment being preferable to time spent in his own house, where the very walls were weeping.

When he returned to prison John left his wife and daughter behind. Rachel began making trips across the Thames to check on both Elizabeths. She fried eggs in Elizabeth’s pan, overcooking everything. It didn’t matter. Her friend would not eat. Rachel told her to make the most of this time without her husband. “He’ll be back soon enough,” she said. “Don’t spend your time wallowing. Before you know it he’ll be sitting at your table again, waiting for his rye loaf, telling you to fetch the kindling when the fire has gone out, and him in his stocking feet.” Several times Rachel came within a whisper of confessing her condition. But if it was hard to say anything earlier, it was twice as hard now. The pen where Tower used to sit and mash his cherries sat empty in the corner of the kitchen.

Rachel did not find the courage to speak until the end of the summer, one afternoon when she had traveled to Southwark to help Elizabeth distribute another petition for the Levelers’ release. Elizabeth was rising to gather her daughter’s cloak when Rachel flung out an arm to stop her and said, quickly, before she could think better of it, “Elizabeth, please listen to me. I am going to have a child.”

Elizabeth stared, then steered an uneven berth around the table to the door, which she yanked open, letting in the sound of gulls and the smell of rot from the river. She had been drinking wine earlier.

“Did you hear me?” Rachel asked, glancing down at Young Elizabeth, who was seated at the table, studying her wooden doll.

“Hear you?” Elizabeth turned. “How could I not? And did you think I failed to notice anything earlier? I am not an idiot. You are larger than a house.”

“Then why didn’t—”

“What is there to say? What could I possibly say to someone who has lost her mind? You have become the worst thing a woman can be. You have become . . .
impractical
!” The scars left by her fever were blazing. “How are you going to pay for its upkeep? You can hardly provide for yourself. Are you going to ask Walwyn to pay for it? He has fourteen already, and he is no grand landowner!”

Young Elizabeth covered her doll’s ears.

Rachel said, “Shhh, your daughter, she doesn’t—”

Elizabeth exploded. “What do you know about children? Nothing! Do you know what it is like to have a howling babe feeding and flailing all over you day and night for months at a time? How are you going to manage it? And you sweeping out the store and stitching hides for that Huguenot every hour of day and night, what will you do? Will you strap the child to your shoulders? Will you lug it around like a flour sack? And what happens when they come after you and demand a public penance? They will come after you, you know. What happens when they pull Walwyn to the whipping post too? They will take down the other Levelers with him; they love to paint us all with the same brush and color. Will you carry your bastard on your back when you are sitting in Bridewell? Who will feed it then? How dare you be so reckless!”

Rachel blanched.

“Furthermore,” Elizabeth went on, “do you know what it is like to have a child and then lose it? Do you?”

“No,” she whispered.

“No. That’s right. No, you do not! You would not be so quick to twine your legs around a man if you knew what happens once you become untangled. You would not find him so irresistible then. I tell you, children are a burden and a curse.” She glanced over at her daughter, who had laid her head down on the table, its surface scored and grooved from Tower’s eager stabbings when he was learning to use a fork. “They are a cross too heavy to bear,” she continued hoarsely. “They cough and they retch and they catch fevers. They cry and they cannot breathe and then they die. They fall prey to one hundred wretched fates the world has in store for them. Are you prepared to bury what you love if God decides it is time? How large is your heart?”

“Please. Please, please, don’t do this,” Rachel begged. “I cannot do this alone.”

“Pshaw!” Elizabeth spat, an odd sound that emptied into a sob. “I don’t want to hear it. You have been irredeemably careless.”

Elizabeth’s daughter lifted her head and began to cry, great wretched whoops that turned into hiccups and then into ominous belches. Elizabeth went to the girl, scooped her up, and deposited her on the staircase. “Go upstairs. Go upstairs and stop crying or you will make yourself throw up.” Her voice held no sympathy. She turned back to Rachel. “You are in these straits by your own hand. You took something that was not yours. You are the vainest and most self-important person I have known.” Her eyes had begun filling. “And that includes my husband!” But as she returned to the table, she placed her hand over Rachel’s. Outside, two streetwalkers were arguing over something they had found in an alley.

“How can I bring a child into this world?” Rachel, stricken, finally whispered.

Elizabeth nodded, swiped angrily at her cheeks, nodded again, glanced at the place on the table where Tower used to bang his fists at the sight of beets. “How can you not?” was all she said.

The grand jury did not arraign Elizabeth’s husband on charges of treason until the middle of October, finally giving John the date for his long-awaited trial. The same day John was arraigned, Elizabeth received notice that she was to be evicted for failure to pay the rent. She suffered an attack of nerves and retreated to her bed, where Rachel and Young Elizabeth tended her.