Accidents of Providence (17 page)

On October 25, Freeborn John had his day in court. Delivering an oratory at once deft and long-winded, he wore out his prosecutors; he pummeled them with words. He argued that the jurors should assess the merits of the law by which he was being tried, not limit themselves to the mere facts of the case. He argued that where treason was concerned, intentions mattered more than actions: what counted was the heart. Elizabeth did not attend her husband’s trial. When Rachel asked why not, she said she already knew everything he was going to say.

The jurors deliberated John’s case for three-quarters of an hour over a generous quart of sack. When they returned from their chambers, weaving on their feet, they acquitted the defendant on all charges. It was a victory for the people, John later said. With the jury’s pronouncement, the courthouse at Guildhall erupted, causing the judge and prosecutor to turn pale. The bailiff flung open the doors of the court. Hundreds of townspeople swarmed forward, roaring.

That night the city of London sang and crackled. Unemployed soldiers waved sea green flags and belted choruses as they emptied their bladders in the kennels. Tradesmen and apprentices waved banners and lit bonfires up and down the riverfront; from Elizabeth’s third-floor window in Southwark, the northern bank of the Thames seemed be on fire. At Bishopsgate, metalworkers struck a coin commemorating the victory. At Aldersgate, the owner of the Whalebone threw open his doors and sold ale for half the regular price. Everyone wanted to toast the name of Freeborn John, even those who had never heard of him. The Lilburnes’ landlord gave Elizabeth an extension on the rent.

Rachel did not hear about the real conclusion to John’s trial until several days later, when Elizabeth stopped by to complain that the judge had sent John back to the Tower, where he remained with his three companions. Elizabeth was of the opinion that Cromwell and his Council of State stood behind the delay in letting him go. Cromwell, she said, was bent on suppressing his former friends the Levelers.

“I thought the Levelers had already been suppressed,” Rachel said.

Elizabeth concurred. “But,” she added, “they have not asked our opinion about it.” She vowed to go to the Tower and demand their freedom in person. She was thinking about the extension on her rent, which would not last long.

At the end of this conversation Rachel revealed to her friend that she was having some beginning labor pains. Elizabeth’s mouth tightened. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, but it’s early yet. Come find me in a few days, when you will be having more of them.” That was all she said, though she embraced Rachel tightly as she left.

The next day, the first of November, the clawing hand of labor returned in earnest. Rachel was outside sweeping, wind drying the back of her throat; each time she pushed the waste out to the street, a snarling gust of premature winter scattered the refuse back, blowing it over the threshold. When the pain recommenced, she opened the door to call for Mary, who waved her off. “I’m balancing the accounts,” Mary said. So Rachel left the premises. She walked out without telling Mary. She headed south until she could walk no farther, and then she hired a hackney carriage to take her the remaining distance to the Thames. At the river steps, watermen bombarded her with offers. She went with the one who was cheapest, climbing into his rocking rowboat. They pushed off and the waterman began wheeling and dodging, shouting obscenities in a foreign tongue whenever another vessel crossed his path. She told him to take her to Southwark. To Elizabeth, she might have said.

When she made it to her friend’s residence, she pounded on the door—no one answered. She knocked again, calling Elizabeth’s name, asking to be let in. A neighbor was scraping his boots on the stoop next door. Rachel asked if he knew where Mrs. Lilburne was. “She went off this morning,” he said, “storming about something or other. She said she was going to retrieve her husband.” Rachel asked if he knew how long she would be gone. The neighbor kicked dried mud from his boots. “However long it takes to get her husband back to soap making,” he reported. Rachel nodded. That sounded like Elizabeth. And she had no idea how long her friend was going to be gone.

She returned to Warwick Lane alone.

As she walked, the pains intensified. She turned her back to the wind, breathed as slow and long as she could, wrapped her cloak tight around her midsection, and delivered her first maternal order. She told the child:
Wait.
“You’re too early,” she said. “It’s not time yet.”

With those words, the child in her womb chose to rouse itself from its long slumber. It stretched and yawned and bugled. It delivered a swift and deliberate kick: Here I am. Rachel doubled over. The child pounded with both feet: It is time when I say so.

Rachel tried reasoning. She asked the child to stay where it was, for its sake if not for hers. Wait for Walwyn, she proposed. He will be released any hour now, I’m sure of it. They will let him go as soon as they release John. Elizabeth is taking care of things. She knows my situation. She will persuade the Council of State to release them, and then she will come to me, and she and Walwyn will both help me. Together we will come up with a plan.

I am tired of plans, the child said.

Rachel replied: Listen to me. I have not yet resolved how to protect you. If you come now, we will be on the street. Mary will not have me. My mother does not want me. We will wind up homeless or worse.

Tell them who my father is.

No, she said. If I name him, his family will learn of me and will be humiliated by the fact of your existence. His children will be dishonored. He could lose his ability to provide for them.

The child replied that Rachel could worry about some other family’s reputation and livelihood if she wanted, but
it
would go live with the Lilburnes.

That will work only so long as John is still in the Tower. John will not have an illegitimate in the house.

The child kicked again.

Rachel, coldly: Why are you in such a hurry? The world is not going to be anything like you expected.

The child, peeved, astonished: Why not?

Rachel stole a glance down at her hands, with their knotted veins and wrinkling knuckles, and could not answer.

Next she tried bargaining. If the child would hold off coming until after Hallowmas, she would have a plan in place, she promised. The child asked what that was. “I’m not sure,” she said out loud. “But Walwyn and I will come up with something together.”

I wasn’t asking about the plan. I was asking about Hallowmas.

Rachel, taken aback: It’s today. It’s All Saints’ Day. It’s a day of feasting to honor all the holy people who attained the beatific vision.

What is the beatific vision?

“You ask too many questions,” she cried. All Saints’ Day took place on November 1. All Souls’ Day followed, on November 2. Rachel’s father used to refuse to commemorate All Souls’ Day because it involved intercessory prayers for the dead in purgatory. Rachel’s mother observed both days quietly.

By the time Rachel returned to the glove shop, the child had gone quiet. Rachel did not go inside the shop to Mary. She stayed outside as long as she could. She sat on the stoop and scanned the street as if waiting for someone. No one was coming. She waited anyway. She had no place left to go. The entire afternoon the wind would not let up.

At six o’clock Rachel was still sitting when someone did come, a young match vendor, the poorest of the poor, wearing rags and with a red kerchief knotted into horns on top of her head. She was trying to make a sale, she said. She asked if Rachel wanted to buy something. Cupped in the vendor’s apron were matches—spills of wood coated with wax and tipped with sulfur for lighting. With her free hand, Rachel noticed, the young woman was pulling the arm of a child, a spindly boy of three or four who could not stand without his legs buckling. Something was wrong with his knees. He peeked out at Rachel from behind his mother, blowing bubbles of saliva at her, his legs crossing like a pair of opened scissors.

“I’ll buy a sheet,” Rachel said, not taking her eyes from the child. The young woman handed her a long card of matches. When Rachel went to pay her, she remembered she had given her last coin to the waterman. So she paid with gloves; she peeled off her own gloves and gave them to the young woman, who tried them eagerly. Rachel could not breathe for looking at that boy. As the pair turned to go, he swung around one more time. He smiled and blew bubbles until his mother dragged him forward. She yanked him upright and said something into his ear; she jerked him straight every time his useless legs crumpled. Up and down the little boy went, an unlucky jack-in-the-box, until they reached the corner of Warwick Lane and disappeared.

Then Rachel went inside.

She asked Mary if she could please go upstairs, but Mary said not yet. “Where have you been?” she added, though she did not wait for an answer. She reminded Rachel they still had twenty pairs of funeral gloves to dye; a general or lieutenant colonel, captain of something or other, had passed. So Rachel stayed in the workroom, dipping gloves into an iron bath until they blackened, hanging them from the ribbons crossing the ceiling so they would dry overnight. As she worked, she affixed her thoughts to Walwyn. Their first night together they had lain right there, right there where Mary was standing. He had asked the whereabouts of her employer, and Rachel had pointed up at the ceiling, and the gloves had pointed back at them.

After the last pair was hung, she stuffed the remaining ribbon in her pocket and faced her employer, who was seated in the corner, having returned to her accounts.

“Mary,” Rachel whispered.

“No” was all Mary said. “Not now. Not tonight.” Her cheeks were gray and papery and she was biting her lip. She would not look up from her ledgers.

Rachel ascended the stairs with excruciating slowness. She felt a clawing and scratching at the base of her abdomen, from the inside out. When she reached the landing she turned one last time, but Mary was still in the workroom. There the good Huguenot proceeded to tear into her hides an hour or more, separating the sheep from the calves.

That night, Rachel locked her door.

S
AVE FOR A FEW
scattered piles of straw where the scaffolding had stood, the rear of the courthouse was empty the day Rachel’s trial resumed. The straw covered the places where injured spectators had bled into the floorboards. Then the doors opened and the crowds returned; the front rows filled, and people began to stand and sit wherever they could, tossing down their doublets and cloaks and lowering themselves to the floor. Some had brought baskets of bread to eat and beer to drink while they watched the proceedings.

“Come to order,” the bailiff called.

Here we go, Bartwain thought from the safety of his wheeling chair, which White had pushed near the front. This time White was with him.

In bed the night before, Bartwain’s wife had wanted to know why he had not done more to help the defendant. “It’s not my job to help her,” he had said. “The law comes first. Rachel Lockyer has failed to uphold the law. That much is incontrovertible.”

“But what if others failed to uphold her? What about grace?”

“The law
is
grace,” Bartwain said irritably. “It gives form and pattern and order.”

Mathilda shook her head. “You know I had a stillborn once.”

He remembered. He did not like to think about that time. “Yes,” he said, more quietly, “but the law does not concern itself with a situation such as yours. The law does not worry about a married woman.”

“Why?” she pressed. “Is the married woman incapable of wrongdoing? I’d like to meet the matron who never dreamed of running over her husband with a scavenger cart. I’d like to meet that woman.”

He begged her to let him sleep.

“You will sleep when my questions are answered,” Mathilda had said.

The clerk was calling Mary du Gard to the witness stand.

Wait a minute, Bartwain thought. Hold on. You are not picking up where we left off last week. Where we left off before that damned scaffolding fell was the plea. The defendant is supposed to plead something. She is supposed to say “Guilty” or “Not guilty.” The investigator swiveled in his chair to regard his secretary. White returned his aggrieved look; he, too, had noticed the omission. Bartwain darted a glance at Griffin. This is not where we left off, you half-wit, he thought. Get the defendant back up front and tell her to plead something. If you do not follow procedure you make a mockery of the law. But no one in charge seemed to notice.

Bartwain ordered White to go inform the prosecutor. “I cannot maneuver in this goddamn chair,” he fumed. “Go tell him for me.”

White slunk up to Griffin, who was reading his notes. The prosecutor listened to the secretary’s whispered statement and said something into his ear, then delivered a sophomoric smile in the direction of the investigator. White retraced his steps, kicking the ends of the spectators’ benches along the way.

“What did he say?” Bartwain demanded.

“He said for you not to worry; justice will still be served.”

“No, it will not,” Bartwain raged, fumbling to his feet. He could stand if he must. Keeping one hand on White’s shoulder, he declared in his most authoritative voice that the prosecution must stop its proceedings. “Justice cannot be served when the procedure is trampled,” he shouted. But no one was paying any attention. If anyone noticed him it was with amusement, Bartwain later thought; probably they saw a fat old man with his arm in a sling wearing a too-tight wig and weaving on his feet. Probably they thought he was a drunkard. The bailiff called for silence.

Bartwain tried to step forward but stumbled over an uneven floorboard, and before he could right himself, White pulled him back into the chair. “Stay still, or you’ll hurt yourself.”

“I am not an invalid,” Bartwain roared, but his defiance went nowhere. The courtroom was becoming a carnival. Someone was selling candied flowers at the Sessions House entrance. Someone else was passing bottles of wine up and down the men’s rows. Two women were dispensing wrapped parcels from a basket in the back, and the smell of raw eel wafted forward. This was the state of London under the new republican government, Bartwain thought. We have decapitated our king and disbanded our House of Lords, and now there is no one left who knows the rules; now there is no one left to restore reason and line and order.