Accidents of Providence (21 page)

Mary hurried over to Rachel and extended her hand. “Get up.”

As the soldiers exchanged words with the investigator, Mary guided her assistant to her feet and down the exterior steps until the two women were standing outside the Sessions House, under a misting sky. They regarded each other warily. They had not spoken since the day Mary found the infant.

“What are you doing?” Rachel asked, bewildered.

Before Mary could say anything the soldiers were surrounding them, trotting down the steps and resuming their hold on the prisoner. They swept Rachel into their arms, wrestling her from Mary, who still had hold of her assistant’s wrist irons; when Mary was forced to let go she found herself snatching Rachel’s sleeve instead, holding it until she could hold no longer without tearing something. They hauled Rachel into their mule cart, which would transport her the short distance to the prison. Mary squinted through the spitting rain and watched them leaving. She could see Elizabeth hurrying toward them, bellowing, searching for Rachel. Already the mule was moving, heading across the street for the prison, its head low. Elizabeth was not going to catch them. Once Rachel had passed through the entrance, the warden would pull those iron gates shut. Elizabeth was not going to get there fast enough.

But Mary could. Mary was fast. She began running. She hitched up her skirts, sliding past the scattering crowd. She sped forward, her shoes and stockings a blur. She ran as hard and futilely as she had the day the man who would become her husband had taken her into his house, taken her with his thick fingers and his thin switch, which he used.

By the time she reached the prison entrance, the gates were shutting. Mary pulled on the bars as they closed. Rachel was not coming back. She called her assistant’s name repeatedly, pounding the iron rails, apologizing for telling the truth, apologizing even though she would do it again if she had to.

Across the street, Anne Walwyn, wife of William Walwyn, waited for her husband to leave the courthouse.

She was accustomed to waiting. In her estimation it did not qualify as hardship. If anything troubled her, it was not her husband’s lateness but the economics of time itself. Time appeared in Anne’s thoughts as an hourglass. She would count the grains as they fell, by the hour or second, just as any woman counts something she holds dear but thinks she does not deserve. And she would fall silent when she witnessed her husband throwing time away in the manner of a profligate.

Probably she should not have attended Rachel’s trial. Certainly she should not be skulking around afterward to observe her husband brawling with the soldiers and tackling Reverend Kiffin in the street, as he was doing now—seizing the good clergyman from behind and boxing his ears until Gilbert Mabbott rushed in to stop the beating, to pull the Leveler off the preacher.

Mabbott pulled Walwyn to the courthouse steps and sat beside him as their friend Richard Overton approached. Mabbott proceeded to bandage Walwyn’s left knuckles while Overton bandaged his right knuckles. No one said anything. What the Levelers intended to do now, Anne had no way of knowing. She disliked both Overton and Mabbott. In her prayers she referred to one as the Seditious Leveler and the other as the Seditious Newsman; God would know whom she meant. These were the same men who over the last eight years had caused Walwyn to feel dissatisfied with his life, who had filled his mind with notions, leaving Anne with a husband who wrote page after page through the night and lit the furnace with his brilliance in the morning. Walwyn, it turned out, was her Sisyphus.

Now her husband was standing, hands wrapped in rags; Overton and Mabbott rose to stand loyally beside him. He began walking in the direction of the prison, his friends following. So did Anne, from a distance, tightening the chin strap that held her battered black hat in place. It was easier when he was in the Tower because then she did not have the option of following him. Then she knew where he was.

The men crossed over to Bailey Road, and Walwyn stopped before the gates encircling Newgate Prison. Rachel had disappeared inside. Overton placed a hand on Walwyn’s back. Anne came to a standstill also. She glanced up at the prison, noticing its stark line. A windmill sat atop the roof, its great blades cutting the sky in circles. Mabbott must have heard Anne’s footsteps because he turned and greeted her in a guarded tone while Overton kept his arm around Walwyn. “Wait just a minute, Mrs. Walwyn,” the newsman whispered. “Give him one more minute. He is trying to collect himself.” He gestured at her husband.

I understand
, she mouthed.

Did she?

She supposed she did. She understood she had a husband whose thoughts had traveled far from hers. Perhaps he was imagining a sea voyage. Perhaps those blades were sails. When he had such dreams at home, Anne would wake him. She knew when he had them because she knew what the dream sounded like. She, too, had once believed the world held open longer than it does.

She would wait no longer this day.

Without another word, Anne left the men to their vigil and began the winding walk back to Moorfields. She walked by herself. She didn’t mind. She was relieved, almost. She would not look back. She would not be Lot’s wife.

T
WO GUARDS TOOK
Rachel into the hold for condemned prisoners, a small structure of limestone adjacent to the main prison. Inside, she slipped on a carpet of excrement. One of the guards lit a torch and hooked it into the wall. The other attached her leg irons to one of six rings bolted into the stone. The first guard, a young fellow whose helmet seemed too large for his head, advised Rachel to bribe the warden to move up her execution date. “To escape the stench,” he explained, gesturing apologetically at the floor as he left.

Rachel tried curling up on the end of a low wooden bench. She could hear rain against the roof. For a while she pretended to talk to her brother, but she could not hear him, could not imagine what he would say.

She did not pretend to talk to the child.

She would not even think the word
child.
She would push around it, leaving a wide berth; she would sweep all such thoughts in the corner. She would step over anything, avoid any obstacle, before she would think that word. Yet there it was. Every time she tried to dodge it, misery would whisper the word for her, and a clean whistling breath rushed through her. The emptiness hiccupped and gabbled at her, slid her crosswise. She wondered what her mother would say to her now. Probably Martha Lockyer would tell her daughter to confess, which made sense if one had a list of things to repent. But what if a person did not know for certain? She shifted around on the bench. She would force her brother to talk to her. She would conjure him up to calm herself.

She succeeded—too well. As soon as Robert appeared, he was chastising her; he showed up midreprimand. He was saying: That’s not the point. Whether you think you are guilty or not isn’t the point.

It is, she replied.

No. The point is what kind of God do you have.

I don’t have God, Rachel said. God has me. God has me in His cooking pot. I am being carried into the kitchen as we speak.

It was her father’s God to whom she was referring.

Robert was not having any of this. He never did permit his sister an ounce of self-pity, never showed her any sympathy. When Rachel’s arms used to ache from cutting hides, he would tell her to count her blessings she had arms in the first place—he had seen dying men without limbs in the army. When her head used to pound from the fumes of freshly dyed gloves, he would urge her to pray. Pray for God to ease my headache? she would say. No, Sister, he would reply. Pray for God to help you stop complaining. A woman who feels sorry for herself is a dead woman. Don’t you give up. He’d delivered that last line on the morning of his execution, when Rachel had ducked into his tent a few minutes before Captain Savage and his men took him into the churchyard. Robert was too thin for the cloak they had thrown over his shoulders. He grinned when he saw his sister, kept grinning even as she threw her arms around him, even as the tent flap opened again and the light streamed in, and, following the light, the soldiers. “Don’t you blame God for this,” he had shouted to her as they pulled him away. “God hasn’t got time to be the busybody most people make Him out to be. Don’t you blame Him.”

Rachel lay on her back on the bench and wrapped her shawl close. When she looked up she could see sparks from the dying torch the guards had hooked into the wall. The cold was severe that night. The cold was so sharp it threaded down her spine like a wire.

She missed Walwyn. She missed him so much she was beginning to have trouble swallowing. She rubbed her neck, the base of her chin, the same place he used to touch her. With her tongue, she tested the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat. There was nothing the matter, except she appeared to be choking on his absence.

Almost a year before, Walwyn had told her he wanted no more involvement with the Levelers. His time with them was done, he had said. When she asked why, he replied that the Levelers were becoming too much like John Lilburne. But John’s cause is the People, she suggested. They were in the rented room of the travelers’ inn and she was lying on top of him, her bare stomach pressed into his, her chin in her hands as she gazed soberly down at him. Walwyn shook his head. “John Lilburne’s cause is John Lilburne,” he said.

“I would like to read what he writes,” she had replied. “I would like to see if the way he sounds in his writing is the same way he sounds in his speaking.”

“And how does he sound in his speaking?”

“Puffed up.”

“Then they are the same. We are all puffed up. All of us who write with him, I mean.”

She frowned. “I don’t like it when you disparage your gift.”

“You are my gift,” he said.

They used to wage battles over this. He would offer to help her learn to read and to write. “I want to learn,” Rachel always said. “I want to try.” And she did try, but the letters did not cooperate; the letters on the page never looked or acted the way she thought they ought. Walwyn would show her a word and say, “That is
aardvark
” or “That is
melancholy
,” and she would copy it for herself, only to look up and feel betrayed; the words on her page did not resemble the words on his. She told him she was too old. “Read to me,” she urged him. “It is enough if someone reads to me. That is how most people get by.” No, he would reply, his face darkening; no, that is not good enough; you can do better. He did not want to be her reader, he said; she needed to work out the words for herself. He did not want to foster a dependence. This made her laugh, howl, even. They were comfortable arguing with each other; they fought thoughtfully and with vigor. To spar and joust was not a waste of time for them. They bit each day down to the gristle. At the end of these skirmishes Walwyn would produce the dreaded grammar book and slide it slyly back on her lap. Look, he would say with his slow grin. Here is a word, and another, and another, and it is easy; and here is the alphabet. See what you make of it. And she, scowling: Your alphabet does not look right. When he insisted, she would cut him off. I am too old, she would say again, pushing away his grammar book until the next time, when she would declare anew, as if they had never spoken, as if this were her first time proposing the idea: I want to read; help me to read; it is all I can think about each evening. They went round and round on this.

She missed his hands. When she thought of Walwyn’s hands, Rachel covered her face with her own. She used to tell him that the Levelers liked to share all things in common, particularly womankind. He failed to see the humor in this observation. She would elbow him, saying, “Of course you have to admit it is funny.” He would grow angry, blustery, say she should not disparage herself. “I wasn’t,” she pointed out. Once she asked him why the Levelers advocated the abolition of distinctions between classes of men. “You would have us all stand together, all on the same rung of the ladder,” she marveled.

“That’s right,” he replied. “That’s the only way it is fair.”

“But there is not enough room,” she argued.

He listened to her. He not only listened; he absorbed. He changed his mind because of her, because of the things she said. To Rachel this was astonishing. She had never had this effect on another person, not even Robert. Sometimes, when Walwyn was working on something, he would read a sentence or two out loud, and she could hear where her thoughts streaked across the horizon of his words, like old stars that light up the night sky as they are falling. When John and Overton read the same passages later, over foaming ale, they bemoaned Walwyn’s latest pamphleteering efforts; Walwyn, they said, had stopped thinking clearly. “He is writing about love,” John complained.

She missed his hands; she also missed his face. She used to grab hold of it, pulling his cheeks. She would mash and squash him this way and that, creating animal faces. He let her do it. She poked and prodded. He endured countless humiliations in the name of love. He understood she was learning to trust. He was learning to trust too, but this was hard for him as a man to admit, so he concentrated on her first. He tolerated her tortures. She plucked rogue hairs from his eyebrows. She became an eyebrow zealot. He would slap his hand to his eye and tell her she was heartless, and she would laugh until the tears streamed. Then she would slide onto his stomach, slipping her hand between his spine and the mattress; she would wander up and down, counting his vertebrae. She counted the minutes also. This was not as good a habit. She tried not to count them, but once she started it became hard to stop. She would tick them off in her head, one by one, until one of the minutes turned inexplicably heavier than the others and she would pull back, leaving Walwyn saddled with her silence, forcing him to rise and pull on whatever clothing he could remember having come in wearing two hours earlier. I do not want to go, he would tell her. Yet still you leave me, she would say.

Rachel pulled her shawl high over her neck and ears. She had discovered another prisoner, an elderly man, slumbering under a pile of discarded cloaks in a corner of the hold. Covering his mouth and nose was the hem of a cloak that levitated each time he exhaled.