Accidents of Providence (25 page)

She found the bonnet behind the wardrobe and left the house wearing it. Her youngest, Fourteen, toddled along behind, his roly-poly legs straining to keep up. “It’s market day,” she told him and reached for his hand, though the boy had not asked her for an accounting. “We are going to buy vegetables.” She was not going to attend Rachel Lockyer’s execution. At least, that was what she told herself as she headed toward the stalls and shops along Newgate Street. When Fourteen grew tired she picked him up and carried him, the boy’s head bumping her shoulder.

Rounding the corner for the stalls, she came upon a teeming mass of people, three hundred strong. Anne stopped short. These people were not all here for the onions.

“Mama?” Fourteen said.

“It’s all right,” she replied automatically, as a mother will do. She tried to reverse her route, but it was too late. The crowd sucked them in. The press of bodies extended from the western part of Newgate Street all the way to the end of the market. This was a gallows processional.

“Mama!”

“Hold on,” she commanded. Now they were wedged between a pike-bearing soldier and two itinerant preachers. All around, people were bunching together and pulling apart, bunching together and separating, forming one long undulating line of human attraction and repulsion, and at the end, the irresistible draw of a hanging. Anne saw no Leveler green, but she did see locksmiths and hemp beaters and shoemakers and weavers and gilders and tallow chandlers and butchers and glass grinders and tailors and bakers, men and women whose curiosity or boredom had tempted them away from their daily tasks and whose intransigence was gaining strength in numbers. The members of this throng were going to drink continuously, beginning at the prison gates, where the cart bearing Rachel and her coffin were just departing; the crowd would crawl toward St. Giles in the Fields and Oxford Street, eventually arriving at the scaffold at Tyburn, a lengthy journey of not less than two hours.

Once caught, Anne did not fight the crowd. Resistance was not her doctrine. She kept her hand cupped against Fourteen’s head, pressing him close. She would ride the day out like the tide. She did not ask herself why her feet had turned in the direction of Newgate market rather than Smithfield or Britain’s Burse or any number of equally acceptable places where she might have purchased her goods without crossing paths with Rachel Lockyer’s processional. She would let the day take her.

Walwyn was waiting for the bells. He was in the courthouse, hiding. He stood as close as a man could get to St. Sepulchre’s without being witnessed. Once the coffin and mule cart arrived at the cathedral, someone would hand the prisoner a flower, and the priest would ring the massive bells that pulsed through the arteries of the city. Walwyn did not venture outside. He could not do it, could not bear to see how many spectators had gathered. He felt himself to be a coward. He knew himself to be a coward. His back, which was growing older, stiffened as he moved away from the window and returned to the clerk’s record of the trial, reading and rereading the same narrative, the same pack of lies, the same pack of truths, the same story without an author, the same witnesses who explained everything and nothing at once. He hunched over the pages; his joints creaked. His body had grown old without his permission. His wormwood flask slipped from his pocket. He threw the papers in a heap on the courthouse floor. He was seized with the craven, fantastically self-centered desire to see her, to enter her again, to wreck them both. Bartwain’s secretary, watching, retrieved the papers, handed them back, asked if he was all right; Walwyn, nodding blindly, gathered and stuffed the papers into their leather vellum, returned the lies to their shelving. He stumbled out into the daylight, which cut his eyes like glass. The day was more self-assured than it had a right to be. It had sprung up too redolent and fertile. It was a young day, and pleased with itself; it was a day no man with regrets could tolerate.

Outside, Walwyn walked far enough to see the tail end of the processional winding past the cathedral. His hand traced a splintered groove in the outer wall of the Sessions House. Far ahead was Rachel. She was seated on top of a coffin. The coffin was in the middle of a cart. The cart was pulled by a mule. The mule was flanked by guards. The guards were riding horses. Rachel was watching those horses. She had fixed her eyes on them. She was wearing her sea green dress. The color assaulted him. They had allowed her to wash and change her clothing. Her dress shone in the bald winter sun as if someone had sewn a jeweled collar onto it, or stitched a line of stars. He fixed his attention on her face. He read her into his memory; he imprinted her onto his mind’s eye. He became gripped with the fear that he too would die. He was not afraid of death for its own sake. He was afraid because if he died he would no longer be able to see her; she would disappear down the corridors of his time. It was a selfish fear, but truth was salted through it.

During the trial, Walwyn had sat behind the spectators, wearing a low hat and a high collar, and he had listened as people whispered that the defendant was “already gone.” They were right, those who made that claim, but not in the way they thought. She was not trapped, or mad, or in search of Bedlam and its ship of fools. She was being released. From what, he did not ask. He did not have to ask. Though Walwyn recognized his role, he struggled to accept it.

The cart driver whipped the mule into motion. Walwyn ground his teeth and looked away, looked in another direction. He would not bless this day by bearing witness to it. He would not participate in the order of things, no, not this day. The monster of human bodies lurched forward. The bells of the old church were ringing. The bells were late. The priest was pulling the ropes hard and long to compensate. They rang like it was Epiphany; they rang like the Day of Annunciation. Walwyn sank to his knees, clapped his hands to his ears, and bowed his head against that slattern of a courthouse. He prayed.

Outside St. Sepulchre, the priest ordered the people to pray for the soul of the condemned. From where she stood in the crowd, Anne saw no evidence of their intercession. No one crossed himself, even furtively; no sermons issued from the lips of the homeless preachers. The next way station along the processional route was an alehouse, and the members of this mob looked far more eager to gather around the table at a tavern than to bow before a higher authority. Anne let herself be swept along.

It took ten minutes for the Newgate mule to trundle to a stop outside the Bird in Hand on Oxford Street. Bystanders crammed the walk. Some tried to follow the prisoner inside. Others kept their carousing on the streets, having brought their spirits with them. The gray mule was doing its best to ignore its surroundings. It nosed through its feedbag for stray oats as the guards pushed Rachel off her coffin, off the back of the cart. They were taking her under a low awning into the Bird in Hand. Once inside, the prisoner would share a ceremonial drink with her hangman. No one remembered how this tradition had come about or what it was supposed to accomplish. To Anne the plan sounded reasonable. If she were facing the gallows, she would want her executioner to come with a name and a face. She would want to meet him, to find out if he had an aunt or an uncle from Salisbury, a favorite Scripture passage, a preferred way of flavoring his mincemeat. Such knowledge could not prevent what was to happen, but it might soften the fear. And if a stop at an alehouse could not comfort the prisoner, it might offer something to the hangman instead—absolution. Anne stood high on her toes. The guards had barred the tavern entrance. Around her, the mob was swilling wine. A boy darted past the guards and entered the tavern unopposed. Seconds later he reappeared, waving his hat in circles. “They’re drinking,” he cried, “and more than one!” The crowd howled its pleasure. Everyone loved the camaraderie of an alehouse; everyone loved a good hanging day. The itinerant preachers prodded and jostled each other. Anne slipped on a pulpy rind and had to claw at the preachers to keep her balance, Fourteen clinging to her neck. The preachers moved in close, their rank thighs pressing, their breath stinking of gum rot. One of them gestured crudely. Anne shook her head, her hand still protecting Fourteen’s head. Her arms screamed with his weight. She felt his cheek; it was flushed. He stirred; he was all fists and yawns. He asked his mother to set him down; she said not yet. But her arms would not listen; her arms set him down regardless.

The prisoner emerged from the tavern steadier on her feet than when she had entered. She almost sauntered. If she was intoxicated, it suited. The guards boosted her into the cart. One of them grazed her hips as she stepped up and clutched the cart rail. He was a showman, this guard. He had thick spider fingers. The crowd applauded. He slapped her buttocks, twice, and the cart lurched into motion though the mule had not been struck. Slowly the processional snaked through the clotted thoroughfares toward the gallows at the edge of the city. At one point Anne came so close to the cart that when it graveled to a halt past the goldsmith’s, closing in on Tyburn Lane, she could see Rachel’s knuckles gnawing the coffin’s edge for balance. Anne glanced down at her son. Then everything stopped. The cart driver climbed from his seat and walked to the left rear wheel, going down on his hands and knees to inspect the underside. Six hundred eyes followed him. When he rose, he scanned the members of the crowd imperiously, as if they had come out solely for him, as if their one purpose in gathering was to hear a cart man make a pronouncement. “It’s the axle,” he announced. He could have been communicating news of a firestorm or the onset of hostilities between nations. “A stone’s been lodged in it. Can’t move till it’s out.”

A hackney man stepped forward and volunteered to help. The crowd applauded. The hackney man began his work. The crowd grew restless. It takes more time to repair a broken axle than to cause one, and the wine was running out. Someone threw a handful of gravel at the prisoner. Someone else, a tyrant, Anne thought, heaved a bleating, bleeding shoat into the bottom of the mule cart. The terrified creature scrabbled for balance, slipping in its own fluids, and ducked under Rachel’s skirts, where it proceeded to die all over her, its slit throat opening and closing with its pulse. Rachel knelt down, tried to tend to it; she was visibly agitated.

That was when Anne’s son declared his independence.

It took just one forceful tug for Fourteen to wriggle out of his mother’s grip. He pulled her arm so hard she thought she might be caught on something. “Let me go!” he demanded. His force of will threw her off balance and propelled the boy backward; he was stronger than she had imagined. His first experience of freedom was landing hard, and bottom-first, in the carriageway. This failed to discourage him. Righting himself, he bounded away before Anne could stop him. He pushed through the forest of legs and tottered to the edge of the street, where he bent his fat little body toward the ground, Anne watching in disbelief. All God’s children crossed this bridge if they were fortunate, but this little one with the weak heart had arrived early. Here he was, rebellious already, stomping his way into personhood. His black curls dusted the roadway; he was plucking something from the dirt. When he bounced up, his cheeks were blooming scarlet. His fat fingers clutched a drooping white nosegay. “Mama!” he cried, brimming with accomplishment. Without waiting for her reply, he tottered through the crowd, which parted for him. He approached the mule cart. Far ahead, in the distance, the gallows waited. He bobbled up to the cart, single-minded, bypassing the kneeling driver and the hackney man. He crawled up the back of the rail, the guards oblivious to his presence. He perched there, leaning against the outer edge of the cart, his shoes and socks catching the runoff from the shoat. His face was luminous; he really did have a fever. Rachel did not see her miniature intruder until he had leaned so far into the cart that his legs left the ground; he balanced on the cart railing with his round fulcrum of a belly and tugged at her dress with solemn insistence, confident in his own omnipotence. Richard Walwyn was one of those well-loved boys, one who takes for granted his youthful powers, who believes he will always hold this kind of sway over others.

“For beautiful lady,” he burbled, and thrust the nosegay into Rachel’s hand. Then William and Anne’s youngest leaped off the cart and swam back to his mother, the people parting again to let him pass. Anne took his hand and she held it. She said not a word.

Someday, she thought, bold and enlightened women would laugh and cover their mouths when they read about matrons such as Anne Walwyn, when they studied the lives of the wives and mothers of the Commonwealth. These women would probably declare that their predecessors had lacked self-possession. To these accusations Anne would not have much to say, save to ask what it was love required. Love did not promise pleasures. One could hope for them, but there was no surety of attainment. She did not serve dumbly, or turn a blind eye. She served. That was enough. It had to be.

The axle repairs completed, the processional groaned back into motion, passing the stream of Mary-le-bone as the mule approached the scaffold. Anne followed a few paces behind. She kept her hand around her son’s wrist. In the back of her mind dwelled the thought that she should begin using her children’s Christian names.

At the scaffold they asked if Rachel had a final speech. She shook her head: no final speech. The crowd twined and hissed. William Kiffin, erstwhile officiate, arrived to join Rachel in the mule cart. He clambered up nimbly, his task being to remain beside her until the end in case she confessed or sought spiritual guidance.

Again they asked if she had any final words; she shook her head a second time: no final words. Kiffin asked if she would like him to pray. No, she said. No, I would not like you to pray. But what Rachel said no longer mattered. Kiffin would intercede for her. He would apologize to God on her behalf; he would apologize to God for a woman’s shortcomings. Thomas Bartwain, observing these rituals from his wheelbarrow chair, chewed his pipe and waited; Bartwain, who was not a praying man, prayed for it to be over.