Accidents of Providence (22 page)

“What is this,” she remembered saying to Walwyn once. “What is this we are doing? Who are we? What have we become?”

“You are the one who saved me,” he said.

“I never saved anybody.”

“You saved me,” he said again. “You are wholly good.” But he stiffened when he bent down to say goodbye to her, and he moved with a sick heaviness, with a kind of sick heavy twist. She had not replied.

The guards outside the hold were quiet now. After a while she forgot where she was, and she descended into a hard and merciless sleep. The sleep was merciless because it was joyful. She waded from one green dream to another. She saw a verdant grove, a cottage sheltered under silver birches. She saw sea grass blanketing a child. Not until dawn began peeking through the narrow ventilation shaft high overhead did she open her eyes and realize how long she had been sleeping. She could hear the clatter of boots outside. The winter rain had stopped. Her stomach was growling.

Across the hold, the old white-haired man, the other prisoner, was awake and sitting on a bench of his own, the pile of cloaks strewn around him. He was barefoot, and his thin white shins poked out from the bottom of his robe. He bared his nearly toothless gums at her. “Best be waking, miss, for they take away the food if you do not set to it right away.”

“Who are you?” Rachel breathed.

“No one. Just an old thief they put in the wrong place and forgot.”

“They put you here by mistake?”

He nodded affably. “Don’t worry,” he said, reading her thoughts. “You are not the kind they forget.”

Two guards stepped into the hold and delivered bowls of gruel. The young one told Rachel to stop scratching herself. “You’ll take the skin right off,” he worried, studying the fleabites on her arms and neck. “The more you scratch the worse it gets. You’ll scratch to death.”

“God does not forgive self-murderers,” the other guard added as he tossed a bowl to the bench with a clatter. Reaching, the old man accidentally flipped the bowl over, splattering the floor with gruel. He used his long fingernails to scrape the spill back into his bowl. He put his fingers to his mouth and licked them. Then he returned his fingers to the grimed floors, feeling for more, his back bent over like the second half of a rainbow.

Rachel lifted her chin and looked straight at the guards. “The fleas are biting,” she said. “If that is self-murder, then there is a remedy.”

The young guard laughed, a hard grating gate that would not open. His teeth were black in the backs.

T
HE MORNING AFTER
the trial, Walwyn rose from his bed, raced downstairs, and got as far as the sun-filled garden behind the apothecary before Anne called him back, summoning him to her kitchen. She was disemboweling a pheasant. Fourteen was not well, she announced, her hands spotted with feathers; he seemed to be running a fever. “You can conduct your business in the city later,” she said. “Right now your children need their father. You want to be a physician? Here is your chance.”

So he stayed. He checked Richard every hour as his youngest tugged on his father’s ears. He found no rising temperature.

The next day he tried again. This time he made it as far as the crumbling stones of Moorgate before Anne came floating behind, calling for him. Fourteen’s fever was down but his cough was up, she declared. Again Walwyn returned home and sat with the boy, who was thrilled to have his father’s attention. Richard did not cough; he giggled.

Mabbott stopped by with a delivery from John. Walwyn glanced at the scrawled pages the younger Leveler had sent. John wanted him to review the draft of his latest treatise, Mabbott said. He was writing it in honor of Rachel and her pending execution. He intended the pamphlet to bolster support for the Levelers.

“Why does he want me to read it?”

“He wants you to advise him as to the ending. He doesn’t know if it’s right.”

“Tell John I am not in the business of good endings.” Walwyn handed the pages back.

“He’ll be disappointed.”

“A little disappointment will be good for him,” Walwyn said. “It will prepare him for when he is older.”

Not until the end of the week did Richard’s “fever” break. Anne had retired to her quarters. Walwyn sat on a pile of blankets in the next room, rereading Brooke’s
Conservatory of Health
until he was certain Richard was soundly sleeping in the small bed beside him. He set down the book, crept downstairs, and escaped, passing the flower garden and heading for the street that led to Moorgate. Anne stood at her second-floor window and watched him leaving—she was not actually sleeping.

Past Moorgate, Walwyn hailed a hackney coach and told the driver to take him to Newgate. The driver balked and said it was too dangerous this time of night. “I insist,” Walwyn said, and opened his purse.

By the time they arrived at the entrance, the driver was feeling responsible for him. “Don’t stand too close to the gates. They’ll rob you through the bars. I’ve seen them do it.” He was not referring to the prisoners.

Walwyn brushed off this advice, saying he would be fine. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew no one of sound mind visited Newgate after midnight, but he was not paying attention to those parts of his mind that were sound. Nor was he thinking of Anne, awake in her bedroom in Moorfields, listening to the sounds of a silent house. He reached the wrought-iron gates and pounded on them. Three guards were flipping cards in the courtyard. They waved him off; they said no one was allowed at this hour. Walwyn pounded again, bellowing Rachel’s name, demanding to see her, reaching his hands through the bars to grab the closest guard by the doublet. That did it. The guards pulled the gates open, not to let Walwyn in but to let themselves out. They proceeded to beat him, to teach the wretch a lesson. They pounded his face to a wet pulp. They punched his skin to a sticky mess like a woman punches her yeast dough, so that by the time Walwyn returned to Moorfields, past three o’clock and Anne at the second-floor window waiting, all she had to do was take one downward look at his bruised and bluish face to know what she already knew: he was not yet through with Rachel.

T
HERE ARE SEVERAL
ways to make a martyr, and all of them require a printing press.

A few days before Christmas, John Lilburne shooed a blinking Elizabeth out of the bed at half past four; he needed the upstairs to himself. She stumbled down to the kitchen, too bleary to quarrel.

John crowned himself with his stocking cap and sat at his desk, which overlooked an alley. Cracking his knuckles prepared him to do his best work. He dipped his quill in the well, blotted the tip, and poised the instrument over a blank sheet of parchment, waiting for inspiration to drip.

Fifteen minutes passed. Beneath the window, a scavenger was scratching through a pile of onion peels and eggshells. The sound resembled a rat behind a wall. John reached under his desk and cracked his toes, one by one. He dipped the quill a second time and prepared to compose his concluding sentences.

John had resolved to set aside his personal opinions in the matter of Rachel Lockyer. What he thought of the woman was one thing. What he wrote about her was something else. He planned to turn her death into something edifying, to transform her into a martyr of the people, as he had done for her brother, Robert. Doing so required a clever piece of writing, given the circumstances. No one wanted to be caught defending a murdering mother. So John had focused instead on how Rachel’s trial had fallen short of justice, neatly sidestepping any references to the child. Rachel Lockyer had been permitted no legal counsel, he argued. The bailiff had neglected to ask for her plea when the trial reopened. She had received no support for cross-examining witnesses or questioning the prosecution’s argument. She was uneducated; she could not read; she could hardly be expected to speak in her own defense. John did not believe his treatise would change the outcome or reverse the verdict. He had no intention of pulling the woman off the scaffold. He simply hoped to put her death to good use. He would persuade his readers to forget her crime and remember the injustice. He would turn her death into something useful—into a platform. He contemplated calling the piece
The Martyred Mother
, but to refer to her as
mother
might suggest she deserved that appellation. So he eliminated the word from his heading and went with
The People’s Martyr
instead.

Cracking his knuckles a second time, he returned to the final section. He scribbled along, completely engrossed, for three hours, until Elizabeth came upstairs to tell him their daughter had lost a tooth and could use comforting. From the kitchen came the singsong noises of Young Elizabeth talking to her doll, which John had whittled for her a year ago Christmas. He had put up evergreen branches and holly last year, too, in the front room. In principle, he had broken the law by doing so. Wary of the unrestrained behaviors and excesses of the Advent season, Parliament had declared Christmas a day for fasting and penance—though ordinary people still found ways to make merry. When he had given the doll to his daughter, Young Elizabeth had accepted his offering with a regal inclination of her head and said, “You forgot to give her a nose.” She was exactly like her mother. This year, the Lilburnes had not put up any evergreens or holly.

“Children lose teeth all the time,” John said miserably, for his wife had broken his concentration. “What do you want me to do?”

“I would like your daughter to spend some time with her father.”

   “Bring her up here then. Let her sit up here with me. We will look out the window together.”

“You mean she will sit on the floor while you go on writing.”

“She likes the floor,” John protested.

A few days before, they had argued about Rachel, and John had asked what Elizabeth was thinking when she’d defended her in front of that crowded courtroom. “You looked like a fool,” he told her. “You damaged your reputation.” Elizabeth pointed out that John was not worried about her reputation; he was worried about his own. “They are the same,” he shot back. “I want you to stay home on the day she goes to the scaffold. I don’t want you traipsing around after her. I trust your performance at the Old Bailey was the end of it.”

“The end of it for whom?”

“For us. The whole matter will be over before you know it. Things will turn out all right.”

“Turn out all right for whom?”

“For us. For us and for the People.”

“But not for Rachel?”

“For Rachel is not the point.”

“Not the point for whom?”

“Not the point for us.”

“But she is the People too, no less than us,” Elizabeth had argued as John reached for the iron cooking pot over the hearth. It was filled with pea soup, and heavy, but he managed to ladle himself a cup.

He leaned back and crossed his legs insolently. “Your involvement with that woman is nothing more than a willful association with scandal. You lacked experience in the courtroom. You lacked the education and learning to hold your ground on the witness stand. The prosecution slaughtered you.”

“This is the first time I’ve heard you venerate what comes out of universities. I thought you believed truth was plain and simple, John, not filled with fancy rhetoric.”

“I do!” He set down his cup and grabbed her hands. “But you did not go into that courtroom the other day to be plain and simple. To tell the truth is easy. To tell a lie requires an education.”

“I received my education from you,” she said.

Now she was leaning over and resting her chin on her husband’s shoulder, taking in the papers strewn across his desk. Dawn would arrive in two hours. John stretched forward and tried to cover what notes he could—Elizabeth would not want him to be writing about Rachel. “Just let me finish this paragraph,” he implored. “Can’t our daughter wait for her father to finish his paragraph?”

Elizabeth gave up and left the bedroom. John glanced down to find that he had smeared ink across the last page of his essay. “Damnation,” he muttered. He would have to rewrite that last part.

It was the concluding paragraph of the martyrology, the scene of execution, brought to life for the education and edification of the reader—a remarkable feat, considering Rachel had not yet been hanged. But John retained a capacity for invention. He planned to have his pamphlet printed in advance of the actual event, so he could distribute it on site at the scaffold. A timely martyrology was more important than an accurate one when the Levelers were losing momentum.

He rewrote the last section, quickly and with a flourish. He gave Rachel a courageous final speech in which she called for the right of all Englishmen to a fair trial and a competent defense. He dressed her in gauzy silk and let her hair tumble around her shoulders. He made her a redhead. He had her toss her fiery hair as she was speaking, to convey her spirited nature to readers. Had she tossed her mane any more, she might have been a horse. She resembled no woman John had seen on the streets of London or would find there in the future. His eyes were filling by the time he took her down from the scaffold. When the ink was dry, he curled his papers into a scroll, tied it with a string, and raced downstairs and through the kitchen, passing his gap-toothed daughter, who wept as he flew by, and his wife, who threw a loaf of bread out the door after him. He fled the rents at Southwark and hailed the first waterman he found, who took him across the river to Westminster. There John deposited his manuscript in the hands of his favorite unlicensed printer, who operated a movable-type press in an abandoned arsenal along the Thames. He ordered two hundred copies with a pickup date in the first week of January. “They must be ready then,” he said, “or I cannot use them.” The printer said he would do his best.

After John left the arsenal, the printer and his apprentice began setting the type for the first page, which they would ink and press in painstaking fashion, rolling off two hundred copies before peeling off the blackened letters and laying out page two. They would repeat this process for five single-spaced pages, which was how long it had taken John Lilburne to turn Rachel Lockyer, murdering mother, into Rachel Lockyer, the people’s martyr. And as the pages set they would string them up on long wires that they pinned between empty kegs of gunpowder, so the words of Rachel’s last speech, which were the words of John’s own furious and unmet hopes, would swing there in the drafty air until they dried to the consistency of history.