Accidents of Providence (26 page)

The investigator sat detached from the crowd along the western edge of Tyburn, where the fields had grown thick with burrs and the path was almost impassable. He had not accompanied the processional through the streets. Instead he had made White find him a driver and carriage, arriving only for the final moments. He could not stomach more. He could not stomach this much. He blamed his lack of fortitude on his bowels, which clutched and roiled at the slightest provocation. His secretary had refused to accompany him. Bartwain squinted through the smoke from his pipe and took in Kiffin’s performance. The clergyman was perched on the mule cart. He wore a stiff doublet, a fraying jerkin, and misshapen breeches. He was bowing and blushing up there like a bridegroom. He began to call out a prayer for the forgiveness of sins. A good nonconformist, Kiffin invented his prayers on the spot; he did not believe the Holy Spirit could be found inside the Elizabethan Prayer Book.

Bartwain glanced at the sky. It was high noon. The shadows had vanished from the bottom of the gallows, that colossal triangle, that Triple Tree, as they called it, whose beams could hang more than twenty felons at once. In June, the Council of State had strung up twenty-four condemned felons simultaneously, causing the gallows to resemble a row of hanging root vegetables, each man swaying and sagging in his prescribed place like so many sacks of wintertime onions and carrots. Next to the gallows now stood the anatomy doctors. They were waiting for Rachel. They were standing in a thin line, holding their black bags. They were waiting to take the body for dissection; they were here to open a woman up for the advancement of science. Judge Blakemore had tacked this final, clinical punishment onto Rachel’s sentence after the jury’s verdict. If a woman could not be rendered useful in life, he had written, then let her be rendered useful in death. Give the body to science.

Kiffin was praying: “Our merciful God, who is also a God of judgment, angry and jealous, yet abundant in mercy, we thank You for calling us to seek Your face, and we ask You to turn Your kindness toward us this day, as we undertake this most difficult and necessary of punishments.”

Bartwain was watching the hangman. He was an oily, seal-like fellow. Probably he should not have shared a ceremonial drink with the condemned woman. An hour with Rachel Lockyer would leave any man in a diminished state. The hangman’s mouth formed an
O
, and his liquored whiskers bristled. He sneezed; his eyes were drizzling. It would take the smiting hand of duty to make this man carry out his task without faltering.

The guards put down the cart rail to slide out the wooden coffin. It landed upright, tall as they were. They lowered the box to the ground. They climbed back into the cart. They were not waiting for Kiffin to finish his prayer—they knew how long a Baptist preacher took. They wrapped the rope around Rachel’s neck, although they did not tighten it. That was the hangman’s job. They called to the hangman. It was his turn now. He was going to have to hitch the other end of that rope over one of the horizontal beams and lash the noose tight, so it would not come loose. The beams stood twelve feet from the ground. They were nearly as high as the Sessions House balcony from which Bartwain had fallen. The hangman began slinking toward his target. This was his moment. This was what he did. The plan was this. As soon as the noose was tight and the prayer finished, the driver would whip the mule, and the beast would lurch forward to escape the lash, causing the cart to pull away from the condemned woman, leaving her dangling. The only thing between Rachel Lockyer and God’s green earth at that point would be a braided noose and seven feet. Bartwain coughed; his lungs were worsening; he wished his secretary had accompanied him. The hangman started his work. He began to tighten the rope around her neck, but the close quarters of the cart did not make his task easy. To get the noose cinched, he had to angle himself around Rachel’s green dress, reaching over and securing the rope to one of the beams without losing the free end and without brushing up against her by accident. The cart groaned. The crowd began murmuring. Rachel twisted her head away from the hangman. Painstakingly, he fumbled through his ministrations. He belched. He bumbled. He fumbled some more. He apologized. Rachel kept her eyes on the horizon.

Bartwain found himself fascinated by her neck. He could not keep his eyes off it. One rarely thinks to look at a neck for a neck’s sake. Rachel’s was narrow, and arched, with a hollow at the base where her dress fell open. Its curve was almost reptilian; it was primed for deflection or attack. Maybe that was how she finally did it, he considered abstractly, as was his wont; maybe that was how it happened. She had turned her head. Maybe it had been as simple and livid as that. One could survive any number of impossible things by looking away during the time of the undertaking.

Not long ago the investigator had seen a strange woman balding and begging along Bailey Road. He was making his way to the courthouse when he spotted her—a featherless old bird clutching her knees and rocking along the side of the carriageway. She sat on the stoop of a lodging house that charged so little only the very poor could not afford it. This woman was very poor. Bartwain, frowning, stopped to ask her why she was doing it, why she was rocking. It was a ridiculous question, and unseemly for a man of his standing to ask, but he could not turn away; Rachel’s case had rattled him. The old woman said nothing. Her eyes glinted up at him distrustfully. She was still sitting there three hours later when he checked from the window of the Sessions House. The next morning she was gone.

Kiffin was concluding his prayer: “Therefore we ask for Your mercy upon this woman, on her behalf; we ask for her repentance, even as she passes from us; we ask You, who know all things in Your infinite wisdom; You who knit her in her mother’s womb and knew her fully before she was born, and determined this as her course. May it redound to Your glory, now and forevermore. Amen.”

The hangman had removed the noose to adjust it for a better fit. Having encountered Rachel Lockyer’s neck, he now appeared to be faltering. She reached up and caught his wrist and said something in his ear, Bartwain could not hear what. Then she helped him put on the noose, lifting up her hair like a woman being given a necklace by a suitor. When it was cinched properly, when all was ready, she turned to the crowd, searching the faces; she did not appear to find the one she was seeking. She sagged and sank against the side of the cart. Her legs betrayed her. The crowd grunted its satisfaction. If she was not going to give them a good sobbing repentance, then she would do well to grant them something else, like fainting, or madness, or a gibbering vomiting exodus. The hangman reached out to steady her. He was devoted to her now. He would not let her buckle a second time. He checked the noose; she nodded.

When Kiffin had finished his prayer and stepped down from the cart, the clergyman signaled to the hangman, who signaled to the driver, who cracked the whip, which signaled the mule. But the creature remained unpersuaded. It was not in on their little agreement. It was an old mule. It had traveled to Tyburn more times than it wished to remember. It had registered marked dissatisfaction with this morning’s oats. It disliked crowds; it disliked carts; it particularly disliked broken-axled carts. The mule dug in and farted. The crowd rocked and pealed. Rachel’s eyes were closed, her chest rising and falling so rapidly Bartwain wondered if she was having a seizure of the heart and might go that way, quickly. Let her go, he whispered, clenching the sides of his chair. Let God have her first. The driver cracked the whip again, cursing. The mule’s flanks welted pink. Still the animal would not move; still it balked; it was possessed. It swiveled its ornery eyes, shook its head, and gave a kick. The crowd applauded. It was a sign. Everyone became transfixed with the prospect. If they could not have a good hanging, then they would have a good miracle. They were Protestants, this crowd, but beneath their Calvinist words and judgments lay a hysterical substratum of Catholic symptoms. They longed for signs and wonders.

A third time the driver flicked the whip, leaving a trail of blood speckling the mule’s coat. Some blood spattered back on the driver’s face. He wiped at it, smearing red across his upper lip. He struck again. At last the old recusant surrendered. The mule leaned forward, wheezing, dragging the cart behind. The wheels rolled two feet, then two and a half, then three. For a short while Rachel still clutched the rails, still kept her feet planted. But not for long: the mule was finding the pace of faith. Now she was off the cart. She dangled in the air by her neck. She hung there, suspended; she was neither of the heavens nor of the earth. She swung between worlds. The mule turned its hoary head to see what its progress had wrought. Bartwain watched also. She was kicking, spinning, rotating in circles, her arms scrabbling at the noose, trying to get a breath. She bit through her tongue; blood sauced out.

Was she thinking? He doubted it. This was the body’s hour. Probably it hadn’t felt anything at all since that poor bastard died, and now everything was returning; all life’s sensations were being compressed into this one moment. Her body was rising up, he thought, rising up and reviving, demanding its place in the order of things.

Her hand fell open; the nosegay drifted to the earth. Bartwain lowered his head.

Mary was peering through the crowd at the scaffold. Fifteen minutes in, and her assistant was still kicking. Something was not right. The noose was not tied sufficiently tight. Mary did not blame such a mistake on God. She blamed it on the hangman, who had become the worst thing any hangman can be—ambivalent.

At the foot of the gallows, Kiffin strode back and forth, waiting for Rachel to stop breathing. Mary pushed toward the clearing. She could hear Kiffin muttering from the Beatitudes. He was not listening to the sounds above him. He was not hearing Rachel’s sliding guttural spasms. But Mary heard them. Mary closed her eyes.

Her late husband used to tell her that when one became a Christian, the way in which one inhabited the world changed. For Mary, becoming a believer had meant becoming an observer. She scanned her world as a sailor surveys the shoreline—from a distance. She looked for signs of trouble; she watched for leaks. Over time this discipline had had the ancillary effect of eradicating Mary’s joy altogether. The world receded each time she interrogated it.

Twenty minutes in, and Rachel stopped moving. Her head slumped to the side, arms slack, mouth open; she was no longer breathing. From the middle of the crowd, Elizabeth Lilburne began wailing, screaming Rachel’s name, her round face screwing up as she pitched toward the scaffold. The soldiers formed a barricade around Rachel. This did not stop Elizabeth. She hurled herself against them, pounding their chests with her fists; she bellowed the name of her friend. In the same moment John Lilburne began making his rounds, distributing copies of his pamphlet. He was handing out his martyrology to people who could not read, who could not write, to men and women who would not know what a martyr was if one rose up from the dead and mauled them. Mary folded her arms when he offered her one.

Just then a dry wind gusted up and began plucking the loose pages out of the spectators’ hands.
The People’s Martyr
had been bound in haste. Its binding was not well pasted. Its pages felt no obligation to remain in order. They began blowing around of their own accord, catching an upswing of air, raining mischievously down on the old mule’s head, so that it snatched a bite of parchment. The pages swirled around the scaffold. John raced in a spiraling circle, trying to collect his escaping words. The faster he ran, the more they scattered. The air was thick with sentences.

The hangman began sawing at the rope. The guards surrounded the scaffold to protect him as he worked. He pulled back as Rachel’s body slid into his arms. For a minute they were face-to-face. Mary stayed on her toes to watch. Her assistant’s neck was black where the rope had circled it. Her dress, soaked with sweat and urine and the blood of the shoat, gave off an acrid stench as the hangman laid her down.

Mary’s hand found its way up to her own neck. She felt the veins, tendons, vocal cords. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to love life so much one could not bear to leave it. The thought of such selfishness took her breath away. She removed her hand. She reminded herself it was not Christ who had loved the world. It was God who loved the world, and Christ who died for it. The two had split the task between them. Nowhere in the Scriptures was it ever said, Christ loved the world.

The hangman was covering Rachel’s body with a blanket. Mary made her way over to the anatomy doctors and asked what they would do with the body once they had finished dissecting it. The doctors said they would not be finished for some days, and she nodded stiffly and moved away. She straightened her shoulders as her pace increased. She felt around under her chin, making sure her bonnet was fast. She was going home to the glove shop on Warwick Lane. Behind her, she could hear the doctors starting. Clicking their pincers, they circled the corpse, revolving under a cloud of pamphlets. They were black beetles hauling a carcass back to their lair.

A
T MIDNIGHT ON
November 1, 1649, between the last stroke of All Saints’ and the first stroke of All Souls’, Rachel Lockyer gave birth to a girl, the fifteenth child of William Walwyn, whom she loved too much. She delivered the child by herself. Mary paused outside the door on her way to bed and muttered something—Rachel could not hear exactly what, but it sounded like
What is going on in there; what are you doing this time.
And she remembered Mary telling her that a woman who gave birth to a bastard would find no safe harbor at Du Gard Gloves. So Rachel did not open the door. She kept it locked. She did not want the first face her daughter saw in this world to be someone who condemned her.

She had a long labor. It is sometimes said bastards do not take as long to deliver and that the women in question do not have the regular pains signifying impending motherhood. Rachel had pains. The delivery did not go well. The child would not drop for two hours. Rachel was on the floor, her back against the side of the bed. When the infant finally did drop, it became caught partway; it stopped in the middle of the birth canal and would go no farther. Its head was free, but nothing else. This lasted for the longest time, until Rachel looked for something to guide the child out. She reached in the pocket of her dress for her measuring ribbon, which a glovemaker always keeps close. She bent down and tried to tie the ribbon around the child’s neck, which was barely showing; its head and neck were out of the birth canal now; its shoulders were not. Its shoulders were caught. Rachel bit down on her own arm to control the shaking, and she prayed to God to help her pull out the rest. Her legs and arms were spasming like a convulsive’s. She planted her right hand under her buttocks for leverage, but she slipped in her own fluids, so that her back struck the floor; in the same second her hand pulled the ribbon tight. She could not see what was happening. She did not let go of the ribbon. When she regained her balance, she tugged and pulled some more. She pulled hard on the ribbon for several seconds. Then the child did come out, all at once, with a kind of coughing sound, a kind of sick coughing twist. Rachel moved to her hands and knees and knelt before it. What she saw frightened her. Quickly she tried to unwrap the ribbon. But there was too much blood and the ribbon was too tight and the child’s face was going blue.