Accidents of Providence (23 page)

B
ARTWAIN WAS SUFFERING
from a case of conscience. It was a curious sensation, almost like a low-grade fever. If he didn’t dwell on it, he hardly noticed. But whenever he returned to his study to sit at his desk and finish his final report, to wrap things up, to wash his hands of Rachel, it returned.

“I’m quitting this job,” he told his wife the day after Christmas. “I’m retiring.” Mathilda was kneading dough in the kitchen, slapping it into submission, raising clouds of powder. Bartwain, unable to tolerate his study, had transferred his papers to the table in the kitchen. He was working on his final report. Every so often he would lift his head up and suggest ways his wife could improve her bread making. She ignored these comments.

“You can’t retire,” she said. “We will run out of money.”

“We’ll get by. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep going back to that cursed courthouse.”

“Why not?” She continued kneading the dough.

Bartwain never did catch any mice but the one, the baby mouse, the son of the son of a mouse. All the others had disappeared. Maybe the fate of the one was enough to frighten the rest off. Maybe deterrence worked. But at what cost?

“Stop pestering me,” he said; really, he was speaking to himself. “I have a report due. I always have a report due after a case is over.”

“If you’re trying to write, why haven’t you written anything?”

He did not know what to say to that.

“Is this about that poor spinster?” Mathilda began pounding the dough with a shaky fist.
Pound, pound, pound.
“I will tell you something. She’s the talk of the town.” Yesterday, Mathilda reported, passing through St. Martin’s she had heard a tallow chandler talking about the case with a salt-and-pepper grinder. “You’re famous,” she said.

“That’s not going to help me finish my report.”

“It’s not supposed to,” she pointed out.

The investigator had had a visit on Christmas Eve from William Walwyn, who showed up at the house without warning. Mathilda had peeked to see who it was before opening the door. The Bartwains were staunch celebrators of Advent, and they had filled their tiny house with feast-day treats and decorations of which the Puritans would not have approved—minced pies and plum porridge, rosemary, evergreen boughs, and mistletoe. There was even a small crèche upstairs. Bartwain had been in his study when Walwyn arrived. “It’s some young man,” Mathilda announced. Any man with fewer years than Bartwain qualified as young in her eyes.

When Walwyn entered the investigator’s study, Bartwain could not resist staring. Rachel’s lover was almost unrecognizable, with welts around the eyes and a broken nose from his tangle with the guards. “Now we are both falling apart,” Bartwain observed, glancing down at his own wheeling chair, which he still needed.

“Take me,” Walwyn said, without explanation or greeting. “Release her, Investigator, and take me.”

“Mr. Walwyn.” He had heard this kind of plea before.

“Let them hang me. My life for hers. Why won’t they do it? What difference is it to them so long as someone is punished?”

“Your life is worth more than hers. I would be careful what you offer.”

“My life is not worth one farthing more. If anything, it is worth far less!”

“Yes, yes, of course, I know about your Leveling principles. In God’s eyes the least are the greatest, the last shall be first, et cetera, et cetera. I have heard it. When I say your life is worth more, Mr. Walwyn, I mean that your life is worth more
to others.
You, sir, have a family. You have a wife and children who have earned your love and fidelity and support. You may not excuse yourself from your duties to them even if your heart has veered rashly off course. Life is not so simple, I’m afraid; Rachel Lockyer is not your only responsibility.”

Walwyn had not heard him. “If in men’s eyes my life is worth more, all the more reason they should trade for it. It is a fair bargain, my life for hers, in this wretched world, in this government of liars.” He spat the word
government.

“That is all very nice and blustery.”

“Don’t you see? I am the cause of all this. Had I never met her—”

“Do not enter the business of what-ifs, Mr. Walwyn,” Bartwain said roughly. “I must strongly advise against doing that. What-ifs are a guaranteed poor investment.”

Walwyn fell silent. After a few seconds Bartwain began to grow uncomfortable, so he called for Mathilda; Walwyn took the hint, saying he would impinge no more on the investigator’s time. He offered to show himself out. Before he could leave, however, Mathilda appeared in the study and grasped Walwyn by the arm. No guest of the Bartwains would be permitted to show himself out; she would walk with him. Also, he was not allowed to leave without sitting down and trying her plum porridge. “It’s Christmas Eve,” she cheerily said, as her husband, sitting in his chair behind Walwyn, made frantic gestures in an attempt to discourage her hospitality.

“What are you making?” he asked her now.

“Biscuits.” A spot of flour dusted her chin as she finished kneading. She was dear to him—she was his Mathilda. Married thirty-five years, they had no surviving children. They had outlived all of them. Now they were sixtyish and gray and almost as wide as they were tall, and so accustomed to each other’s habits that whenever he sneezed, she blew her nose.

“
Cranberry
biscuits?” Bartwain ventured.

“Of course. They’re your favorite.”

He looked at her and softened. “I can’t finish my report because I don’t know why she did it,” he admitted.

“Is that what’s bothering you?” She dropped halved cranberries into the dough, sprinkling them across the surface.

“It’s a problem,” he said. “I can’t stop asking why. And I have never asked that question before in these cases.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think you haven’t even gotten to
why
yet. I think you’re still stuck on
what.
You still can’t say exactly what happened to that poor little creature the night it died, can you?”

Bartwain grunted. It was a half admission.

“So you see, you have two problems, one on top of the other. You still don’t know the what. And you can’t stop thinking about the why. That’s all right. The good Lord made us to be curious.” She began cutting the dough into circles. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out. And if you don’t, you’ll learn to live with it.” She chuckled as she placed the biscuits in a pan over the fire.

“The law doesn’t leave room for curiosity,” Bartwain told her. “The law doesn’t allow us to ask why in cases where the loss of a child is concerned. According to the law, the fact that she concealed the child’s death is enough. According to the law, her conviction is justified.”

“You don’t agree with that any more than I do.” Mathilda cackled, wiping her hands on her apron. “If you did, you’d be sleeping nights. And last time I checked, the only one snoring in this house is me!”

When the biscuits were ready, she plucked two from the pan and awarded them to him; she also poured him a cup of buttermilk. The biscuits were not good for Bartwain’s digestion, but he didn’t care. He downed the milk and shoved the biscuits into his mouth, one after the other, gratefully. Mathilda planted a brusque kiss on top of his head. “Chin up, Thomas,” she said. Rarely did she use his Christian name. “It will be over before you know it.”

***

On the thirtieth of December, an unlicensed printer from Westminster successfully finished inking and printing two hundred copies of
The People’s Martyr.
The copies went to John Lilburne.

The same day, Walwyn made it back inside the prison. He thought ahead this time. He was an exceedingly well-behaved visitor. He brought blankets and bread and wormwood and wine—too much for one person, too much for the time that remained, so he and Rachel shared their feast with the other prisoner, squeezing side by side on the bench as the white-haired man planted himself to Walwyn’s right, his hipbone jabbing into Walwyn’s. He pawed through their sacks and swigged their wormwood; he tore eager chunks from the rye loaf. While he feasted, Rachel and Walwyn talked to each other in quiet voices. They spoke only of ordinary things, such as the best way to stuff a goose, what kind of leather makes the hardiest gloves, and why the Puritans had outlawed Christmas. Walwyn left when the guards threw him out. When the old man looked up to find his new benefactor gone, he wept.

That same night, Bartwain tried again to write his final report. He was able to summarize his research, his depositions, and his reasons for ordering the indictment. Briefly he noted the outcome of the trial. When he came to the conclusion, however, the summation of law as pertaining to the case, his hand stopped. His hand set down the quill. He told his fingers to resume working, but they disregarded him. His fingers staged a revolt.

I cannot do this, he thought. I cannot say justice was served when it was not. One cannot ask
why
in a case of treason, which is the betrayal and abandonment of a country, and not permit the same question in cases of bastard murder, which is the betrayal and abandonment of a child. The law is wrong, he thought.

This realization was a kind of death for Bartwain. He stood up from his desk slowly, his breathing tight and labored.

Walwyn had been gone less than an hour when the guard with the apologetic face took pity on Rachel and released her from the leg irons. “She’s not going anywhere,” he said to his companion, who agreed.

When they left, Rachel rose and crept to the other side of the hold—the cloaks in the corner looked like a comfortable resting place. She asked the white-haired prisoner whose they were. He told her condemned men sometimes went to their deaths on days too warm for a cloak.

Squatting, Rachel studied the garments. She examined their thick wool, their strong seams and soft linings. She forgot about resting. An idea was presenting itself to her.

She pounded on the door of the hold until the young guard came running. When he poked his head in, she said she needed a needle and thread and some shears.

The guard refused. If she thought he was foolish enough to bring a murderer shears, he said, she had better think again. But he blushed as he looked at her, and when Rachel lowered her eyes and told him he was a good man, an excellent man, a man to make any mother or sister proud, his cheeks bloomed furiously, great splotches of self-consciousness that spread all the way down his neck.

“Why do you need them?” he asked.

“I’m going to make something,” she told him.

“What will you make?”

“Gloves!”

“Gloves?”

“Yes. Wool.”

“What for?”

When Rachel told him her plan, his eyes moistened. When she gave him the name of the shop where she used to work, his eyes gleamed. “Du Gard Gloves! They make the finest in town.” He ducked out of the hold to hunt down a needle; he foraged through the warden’s quarters and found a spool of thread. He borrowed some shears from the intake officer. Returning, he gave Rachel his hand. “Make the first pair mine,” he coaxed. “Measure me first. My fingers always go numb in winter.”

“I need a measuring ribbon.”

“I know about you and your ribbons. I will give you none this evening. Use a chalk mark instead.”

Rachel thought of her measuring ribbon, wrapped for years around her waist for ease of reach, then wrapped for a brief moment around another, more helpless circumference. She remembered counting backward from fifteen.

She swallowed and forged ahead. She marked the length of the guard’s hand by chalking it on her forearm and told him to come back at first light.

When he left she got to work. She worked without a desk. She worked by candlelight. She threw herself into her mission as the white-haired prisoner cheered and clapped. She tossed the cloaks around the hold until she found two she could tolerate. Dropping to her hands and knees, she proceeded to cut and sew the cloaks into twenty pairs of woolen gloves, the warmest and fastest she’d ever made. She sewed as if her life depended on it. She made gloves for the guard who had helped her and for the old man warbling in the corner. Then she gloved the entire third-floor ward.

In the morning, a belated Christmas delivery was made to the floor for female felons. It turned out to be the wrong day for it. The temperature soared, and rain left the air sour and warm. Wool was the last thing they needed. But the women of Newgate did not notice. For the remainder of that day and well into the night, every creature and child in the place waved raven hands at one another across the smoking link light, like passengers pulling away from shore.

M
ARY ENTERED THE
hold on the last day of December. She did not remove her cloak. She refused to come far enough inside to sit. To Rachel, Mary’s face bore the look of an unkept promise.

“I cannot stay,” she told Rachel, and in the next breath she added, “You never knew what it means to be a mother. If you did, you would not have been able to abandon that child behind the market.”

Rachel bristled. “
You
never knew what it means to be a mother.”

They proceeded to quarrel. What counted as a mother was the subject.

Rachel spoke first. “Are you a mother if you pluck a snail from the gutters and set it high so the rains will not drown it?”

Mary scowled. “No, of course not. Don’t mock me.”

“Are you a mother if you raise a brother?”

“No, you are not.”

“Are you a mother if you wish you were?”

“No, no! That is not enough either.”

“Are you a mother if you are a daughter?”

“Now you are being ridiculous,” Mary complained.

Rachel, more softly: “Are you a mother if you conceive a child?”

“Not even then,” said Mary.

Rachel replied: “When, then, are you a mother?”

Mary: “You are a mother when you have lost something. When you have felt the change and cannot hold it.”

Rachel, covering her face: “Then I am a mother because I, too, lost something.”

Mary stepped inside the hold. “No, you did not. You cast it out.”