Accidents of Providence (2 page)

The night before, the investigator’s wife had asked why this case vexed him so. She had seen him preparing his research notes and poring over the autopsy report. Start with the pregnancy and build the investigation from there, she had said. If only it were so simple, Bartwain had replied. In situations like these, identifying the mother could be a vexing challenge. Whether or not an unmarried woman had been pregnant remained difficult to prove after the fact. Some maids were sly and cunning and wore wide skirts to conceal their condition; Bartwain knew of a servant in Worcester who’d told her mistress her swelling belly was not pregnancy but colic. The mistress believed her tale until the servant showed up lean and weeping one Sunday with a dead babe in her arms, saying she’d found it in the alley. Other times women would plead they had not realized their condition until the pangs of labor started. Bartwain found this argument from ignorance persuasive only in exceptional instances, as in a case last year of a thirteen-year-old maid whose master had dallied with her as she moved past the point of her maturation; she had no way to recognize the signs that followed. The same plea would not suffice for a woman like Rachel Lockyer, a woman at the waning edge of the childbearing years.

At half past nine the Huguenot glover Mary du Gard entered the investigator’s chambers. She looked a weary thirty. She wore a gray dress and a kerchief knotted around her shoulders. Her dark eyebrows almost touched.

“Sit.” The investigator motioned from behind his desk. “Tell me your name for the record.”

She perched on the witness stool, visibly uncomfortable. “Mary du Gard, sir. I am a widow. I would rather not be on the record.”

“You would rather not be on the record? You were the one who brought this case to the coroner’s attention. Have you grown shy? Have you changed your opinion?”

She blinked. Bartwain’s cheeks rounded into what on another face might have passed for a smile.

“Now,” he said, leaning forward, leaning all the way across his desk, “if you are here to make my task harder, Widow du Gard, you may leave, and I shall send you back to whatever stinking village in France from which you came. But if you are here to obey the law, and to be a good Christian, then stay seated and tell me what you saw. I do not have all day.”

So Mary began, reluctantly, to talk. She had managed Du Gard Gloves since her husband had died in battle; a few months after that, she’d hired Rachel to help in the shop. Together the two women paid a fee to the leather sellers’ company to become licensed vendors, though the business remained in the name of Mary’s husband. They specialized in military gloves, but because of the war they spent most of their time dyeing gloves black for funerals. Mary’s fingers, Bartwain noticed, were stained from dipping the gloves in dye.

Throughout Mary’s deposition, which dragged on longer than most, the investigator kept growing distracted from the case; at one point he wandered off in the direction of theology. He found his witness’s manner dull and infuriating. She told him point by point about digging up a newborn in the woods behind the Smithfield slaughterhouse, but she took no initiative to explain what happened after. Bartwain wanted to know how Rachel had reacted when Mary returned to Warwick Lane and put the bundle into her arms. He wanted to know why Mary had banned Rachel from the glove shop that same day. Mary stared at him blankly and pretended not to understand. “My English is not good,” she said, in perfect English. So Bartwain, intuitively shifting tactics, devoted the next thirty minutes to engaging her in a discussion of ideas. He wanted to catch her off-guard so she would talk. Also, he harbored a hobbyist’s interest in the study of things religious. Although Mary was a Huguenot, or French Calvinist, her late husband had adopted the Particular Baptist faith when he moved to England, so Mary knew both factions. Bartwain asked her why the Particular Baptists believed Christ had died for some men only and not for the generality of them. She replied that Christ could not have died for all men because not all men were going to heaven. It made no sense for Him to die for someone if that person was going to spurn Him. Therefore, Christ must have died only for those He foreknew would respond positively. At this point Mary fell silent and eyed the floor.

“Can you confirm that what you unearthed was your assistant’s?” the investigator abruptly asked. “Are you quite certain the child belonged to her?” All he needed was one credible confirmation. The evidence required to indict a woman in such investigations was not stringent, not very stringent at all.

“Oh,” she said slowly, “I could never be
completely
certain. But I lived with her, so I saw things.”

“Things? What kind of things?”

“To recount them would be too tedious.”

“I’m a criminal investigator. I specialize in the tedious.”

“Well,” she said, warming slightly, “I thought I heard Rachel the night before, in her room. She was in the throes of what sounded to me like a painful indigestion or labor. She would not let me in.”

“Did you knock?”

Mary hesitated. “I called her name.”

“Did she hear you?”

“I am sure she did. I asked what she was doing. She had stuffed a cloth in the keyhole so I could not peek inside. She did not answer the door, so I went back to my room.”

“This was the night of November second?”

“No, sir. It was the night before. I told you. It was late; it was around one o’clock. And I did not see anything for certain. I only heard the sounds.”

“Did you see her the next morning?”

“Yes, sir, she came down to breakfast, but she was later than usual.”

“Did you see signs of a delivery?”

“Not then. But I went into her room later, while she was outside sweeping.”

“She swept the walk the morning after she gave birth?”

“She swept it the morning after I heard those sounds, yes, sir.”

Bartwain considered this. “What did you see while she was outside?”

“Her bedclothes all in a heap on the floor, and blood staining them, though it looked as if she had attempted to clean them.”

“Did you confront her?”

“I tried.”

“What did she say?”

“Only that she was in her monthly time, and that was where the stains came from. She said she was feeling faint.”

“And what was her appearance?”

“Unseemly and pale. And leaner than she had been the previous weeks.”

I guess she would be, Bartwain thought.

“She didn’t eat all day,” Mary went on with some feeling, “even though we were having her favorite, ham and apple bake.”

I’d like some of that now, he said to himself. Where was White with his breakfast? “Why did you decide to go to the slaughterhouse?”

“I was following her.”

“The same night you heard the sounds?”

“No, sir, the next night. I heard her moving around in her chambers again, and I was curious. So I followed her out the door. She crept out in the middle of the night.”

“What did you see?”

“She was carrying something small and close to her chest. She walked fast all the way to the Smithfield market. She buried the bundle by moonlight near the trees, and then I suppose she ran away.”   

“So you stayed behind to uncover what she had buried?”

“No, sir. I went home. Rachel returned home too, later that night, very ill and in a fit, it seemed, so I helped her to bed. She would not speak a word. I returned to the market the next morning.”

“Why did you wait until the next day to go back?”

“Because those woods are not safe at night.”

“Ah. You think those woods are haunted.”

Mary reddened.

“I wonder what your late husband would think of your superstitions.”

“That isn’t fair,” she told him.

“Nothing is fair.” Bartwain’s lungs were threatening to spasm. He coughed into his handkerchief, discreetly checked the contents.

From research he had learned that Mary’s Huguenot parents had died by fire for their faith when their daughter was ten; a man named Johannes du Gard had taken Mary under his care in the days following. The same man married her three years later, for her protection, he said, and then went off to war against the Holy Roman Empire. He was gone off and on for twelve years, from what Bartwain could gather. When he returned, he found both his business and his place of worship destroyed, so he crossed the British Sea, wife in tow, to open a glove shop and die for Oliver Cromwell, who believed in the same God he did. Mary never had any children.

White knocked on the door. “Your next witness is here.”

“You may go,” Bartwain said to Mary. “But be prepared to testify if there is a trial. And I think there will be.” She excused herself and left, and he rose from his desk, wheezing, to find his pipe.

The investigator appreciated, at least in theory, why a woman might not want to come forward if she’d given birth to a
living
bastard. But why would a woman stay silent if she’d given birth to a child that died? Where dead illegitimates were concerned, the law turned on concealment. Bartwain lit his pipe, pondering. The reasonable thing for a woman to do in such situations was to come forward and confess she had delivered an illegitimate, explain it had died while she was in labor or shortly thereafter, and present it to the authorities for inspection. But time and again he’d seen women who acted contrary to common sense, women who insisted on disposing of the infants in their own secret way and who then tried to deny any wrongdoing when they were discovered. They failed to grasp that the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children declined to distinguish between murder and concealment. The law did not care about such details any more than it cared about the identity of the father. It kept things simple. Any unmarried woman who concealed her child’s death could be declared guilty of its murder—why else would she need to hide it? If the death was hidden and the woman unmarried, she could be charged, tried, and executed. Accordingly, all Bartwain needed to indict Rachel Lockyer for the crime of infant murder was proof she’d tried to hide a bastard’s death and a reasonable assumption the child was hers. Whether or not she meant to harm it was not important; at least, not in the eyes of the law.

He could hear someone banging around in the hallway. “White!” he called out. “Where’s my breakfast?”

His secretary appeared with a platter of duck eggs. Bartwain reached for two and shook them to test for doneness; they were hard-boiled, which made him unhappy, as he preferred his yolks runny. But he was ravenous, so he ate them all anyway, not troubling to remove the shells, stuffing the eggs one after the other into his mouth. “Bring my next interview in,” he said between bites. “I will get to the bottom of this case today or I am not Thomas Bartwain.” White inclined his head, though his subservience was unconvincing; he went into the corridor to fetch the next witness.

Preparing for his depositions had led Bartwain to investigate the background of each of his interview subjects. Concerning the next woman on his list, however, he knew more about the husband. Everyone knew about Elizabeth Lilburne’s husband. They called him Freeborn John, and when he was not earning a meager living as a soap maker, he was working alongside William Walwyn—that W.W. whose full name appeared farther down on Bartwain’s list—to organize a group of fiery apprentices, soldiers, and agitators in and around London and the Parliamentary army. Their enemies had given this group its name, accusing John and his friends of trying to “level” men’s estates and share all things in common. The Levelers had supported the Good Old Cause, the dream of a free republic, when civil war first broke out in 1642, and they had continued to support it in succeeding years as Parliament’s army warred against the king, or against royal tyranny, as some men—never Bartwain—described it. When Charles I was beheaded in January of 1649, some people blamed the Levelers and called them regicides. But Bartwain knew they did not have it in them to do anything so decisive or matter-of-fact. Since the Parliamentarians’ victory, the Leveler crusade had begun to lose momentum—no one could quite tell which side the group was on, Bartwain thought.

He glanced down at his notes. Several years ago, when John Lilburne had spent time in Newgate Prison for harassing the Speaker of the House of Commons, his wife, Elizabeth, had joined him there. As a prisoner of the state, John had received the royal treatment. Elizabeth had received a toothless midwife, ordered down from the women’s ward, to assist her as she birthed their daughter on the sticking straw. Bartwain shook his head; that was the sort of thing Leveler women did, stay with their husbands in prison. This past summer, he read on, Elizabeth had lost her two sons to smallpox.

He was picking the last of the eggshells from his teeth when his witness burst into the chambers, her yellow curls angry and springing. Before he could say a word, Elizabeth Lilburne supplied her name, place of birth, and current residence, then sat down on the witness stool. He barely had time to wipe his mouth, pick up his quill, and dunk it in the inkwell before she started attacking.

“You are in bed with the devil,” she told him. “You report to the Council of State, which is an illegitimate government. You find women who are poor and vulnerable and accuse them of this and that, and then once you have convicted them you wash your hands and accept your payment. You are the devil’s handyman.”

“Good morning to you as well,” he answered.

She delivered a blistering stare. From the pockmarks pitting her cheek, Bartwain guessed she had contracted the same illness that had taken her young sons. Apart from the scars, she was a handsome woman, he thought.

“You support the work of men who fear the truth. You—”

“I am not here to suppress the truth,” he said wearily. “I am here to solicit it. I would be grateful if you would do me the courtesy of allowing me to carry out the work I have been commissioned to do. I am not here to listen to speeches.”

“You are a hired dog.”

“Please be careful what you say.”

“Why, what would you have me say? The justices of the peace have already made up their minds about this case. I know how the courts of London work. They place the burden of proof on the defendant. I am the wife of John Lilburne. I know things.”