Accidents of Providence (28 page)

When he made it to his house he sent White on his way before climbing gingerly out of his chair, hobbling for the stairs. He did not stop for a snack in the kitchen. He was too tired to eat. He could not even endure a biscuit. Upstairs, Mathilda was folding blankets.

“You made it,” she said. “How did you do?” She was wearing her scalloped nightcap.

Bartwain undressed, put on his nightclothes, and collapsed into bed. His lower back was tightening, his broken wrist throbbing. “I’m not getting paid enough,” he said to his pillow.

“I agree,” she replied.

He crashed into a dull and motionless sleep that lasted approximately three-quarters of an hour. Then Mathilda was patting him.

“Wake up,” she was saying, lively as ever.

“What is it?” He was furious. “What do you want? Can’t you see I’m spent? Can’t you see what this day has done to me?”

“Of course I can,” she assured him. “But that’s not my fault. Besides, it’s your secretary. He’s back. He’s at the door, asking for you.”

Bartwain fumbled for the ties on his robe and moved downstairs to the kitchen. Looming in the doorway was White, a specter of unrest, his eyes rheumy and yellow.

“What’s wrong?” Bartwain immediately said. “What happened?” A cold dread wrapped itself around his abdomen.

“It’s that woman.” The faintest hint of satisfaction flickered across White’s face. “That what’s-her-name, as you once called her.”

“Rachel Lockyer?”

“Yes.” White leaned in to say more, but when he saw Bartwain’s wife he drew back. Jerking his head at the wheeling chair, he motioned to the investigator. “You’d better come with me.”

Walwyn did not find out about it until hours after Bartwain did. Bartwain lived closer—he lived three streets away. When the doctors realized what was happening, they called for the investigator. They wanted his advice about the possible legal ramifications.

Bartwain and White reached the house where the doctors were working and found Elizabeth Lilburne waiting for them in the door; she pulled them inside with some impatience. The investigator dragged his failing body up from the chair, entered the front room, and turned to where Elizabeth was pointing. He saw Rachel’s unclothed body laid out on a long table, surrounded by trays of instruments, one basin on the left for organs, a second on the right for bloodletting. One of the anatomy doctors was poking and prodding her shoulder. Another was rubbing her feet, which had swelled with pooled blood; he was dictating notes to a clerk. A third doctor was circling the table, muttering.

Then Bartwain saw it. She was moving. More specifically, her chest was moving. Her lungs were taking air in and pushing air out. Her chest was rising and falling. There was no sign of life anywhere else, but those lungs were something. Bartwain staggered backward.

“This woman is not dead yet,” the circling doctor paused to tell him. “Either it is a miracle or the hangman failed to do his job.”

Elizabeth had heard the news an hour earlier. She’d learned about it from John, who had followed the doctors to the Westminster house—he wanted to see what they did with the body, in case he could write about it later. John became the first witness. When he saw Rachel’s chest rising, he shouted at the doctors not to cut into her. The doctors were more surprised than John was. One of them jumped, stabbing Rachel in the shoulder with his surgical blade. As the doctors rushed to stanch the bleeding, John found an errand runner to fetch his wife, who he knew would not want to miss this. Elizabeth, hearing the message, left her daughter with the neighbor, begging his pardon for the inconvenience as she raced to the river. Crossing the crowded London Bridge by foot would have taken over an hour, so she hailed a waterman, who rowed her in half the time. When she arrived at the house in Westminster she shoved past the doctors, took one look at the body draped over the table, and said, in an offended voice, “But she is not wearing any clothing.” The chief doctor replied no, she was not, because until very recently they had not thought the woman would mind one way or the other. He then explained to Elizabeth that while Rachel was not quite dead, she was not quite living either. She is in the balance, he said. “Well, what are you doing to change that?” Elizabeth shouted. She began pushing the doctors into place, herding them, moving them through their paces. She threw her cape over Rachel’s exposed skin as a covering.

Walwyn did not hear of these events until the following day. His friends forgot to tell him. Or maybe they did not want to tell him. Or maybe they were not his friends. Bartwain was the only one who thought of him. Bartwain, who never liked William Walwyn, remembered him in this moment.

The Leveler was home, chopping wood behind the house, silver hair falling into his face, not thinking anything, urgently thinking nothing at all, when up came old Bartwain, shuffling along the footpath, scowling.

Bartwain told Walwyn that though he did not half believe it himself, there was news, it seemed; there was news from the autopsy house. She appears not to have expired, he told him. Or, if she did expire, she appears to have returned. She is fighting for breath as we speak. The doctors have put aside their dissection and are tending to her. As the investigator spoke, he saw out of the corner of his eye a woman in the back window of Walwyn’s house, a woman concentrating as though pushing something, as though rolling a boulder up a slope, a woman with watery eyes and a bun pulled so tight it looked like punishment.

“It could well be that she does not survive the—” But Bartwain could not get any of his cautions and caveats out. Walwyn dropped the log he was not chopping. He dropped the ax. He dropped his unallowed thoughts. He dropped his duty, his principle, and his religion, such as it was. He walked down the path, in full view of his wife, who was watching. He neither saw nor heard a thing save a lone jaybird mocking him from the poplars. It was a gray and dreary January morning and the mist clung so thick that to walk outside was to be pricked by a thousand needles of rain. Over his shoulder he thanked Bartwain for his kindness. I am off to the city, he said. His voice held joy. He ran. He sprinted. He passed Moorgate, passed the dog skinner’s house in the distance, did not stop, did not listen, did not hear anything from that direction. Not today. Today was not for sorrow. Today was for Rachel.

He passed into the northern edge of the city. A crowd slowed him down outside the courthouse, as around the Sessions House milled a hundred shivering souls, huddled under heavy cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, gossiping, whispering. Already news was spreading. News from the next life, they were saying, marveling, asking each other if what they had heard was possible, if God still interceded in the lives of humans. For a few seconds Walwyn hung back, listening. He saw several faces he recognized but none he knew well, and when two apprentices from the Whalebone began pointing through the fog in his direction, calling his name, he left and began jogging south. He headed toward Westminster, toward the house where the anatomy doctors worked. His jog became a run. He encountered more delays, including one that held him more than thirty minutes—it was a carriage accident. An old man had stepped into a busy thoroughfare without looking. A passing coach had rattled too close and its driver swerved too late, landing half of his vehicle in the ditch and the other half on the old man, pinning him beneath. Now the driver was off the front seat, cursing, and the elderly fellow was under the carriage; they needed help pulling him out. Walwyn was not going to stop, but then he saw who it was. It was an old man, a very old man with hair so white as to be translucent, a man with two twigs for shins that poked out from his prison garb. He brightened with recognition as Walwyn bent down in the road to him; he looked up at Walwyn and said, spitting bits of tooth, that he had forgotten how fast the world moved; he had forgotten how fast horses and their riders traveled. The world goes by so fast, he said, marveling; the world goes by so fast. So Walwyn stayed. He slogged through the mud alongside three burly Scots to haul the carriage off the man, to heave the wheel high enough to slide the fellow out, one limb at a time and most of them broken, the freed prisoner beaming wildly the whole time, not minding the pain, not begrudging this final bodily insult. Through failing eyes he gazed up at the sky as it mixed with the smoke from the tallow chandler’s and with the steam coming off the horses as they stood to one side, pawing and whinnying and waiting and looking longingly at the vendors trundling by with their shiny apples on carts; and he declared old London beautiful. You are my angel, he said to Walwyn. All this took some time. When it was over and the carriage righted and the old man off to the side of the road with someone tending him, Walwyn resumed his race, his legs shaking from the effort to heave aside the coach, his boots sopping with mud and manure. He did not notice. He splashed past a Parliamentary carriage built so high whoever rode in it must have thought he belonged to God. As he ran, his mind lurched back and forth, skittering across the surface of his thoughts; his thoughts that morning were intolerable. He rounded the cathedral, the clapboard frames of the doctors’ house appearing through the mist, until an unexpected sight brought him up short. He clattered to a halt so fast he fell. He tripped over his own life.

Gliding toward Walwyn, an apparition in the rain, was his wife of more than twenty years, and seven of his children walking in lockstep behind her. They were coming to retrieve their wandering mongrel. Anne had overheard Bartwain’s words while Walwyn was outside woodchopping. Fast as she could, she had borrowed the neighbor’s carriage. She had gathered all the offspring she could find to come with her, to head her husband off. If she did not head him off here, at the pass, at the very start of the pass, he would be gone. She knew it; he knew it. His eyes told her. Her eyes told him. His eyes said: Let me go; I must do this. Her eyes said: You will come home to Moorfields.

Walwyn tried to stand. The rain was in his face. He looked down and mud was everywhere; mud was spackling him. He rose to his feet and raised a hand to shield his eyes—the mist was coming in at an angle. Anne mistook his movement for a wave of greeting and she turned and said something to her children, who began fanning out and trotting toward their father all at once, the doctors’ house thirty yards behind them. He could see his children, and behind his children he could see the house. He could not look at one without taking in the other. Anne kept her gaze on him over the heads of her children, who cornered him, braying and barking; they plied Walwyn with tickles. Richard flung both arms around his father’s knees. “Come home!” he demanded. Anne stood back, appraising. Only when Walwyn was thoroughly treed did she approach, flanked by the twin sentries of caution and deliberation, which on another day he might have mistaken for patience.

“Papa!” declared Richard again. He rapped on Walwyn’s knees. Walwyn picked him up and the boy threw his arms around his father. Walwyn buried his face in his son’s neck.

“We came to bring you home,” Anne said. “I thought you had errands in the city, and since the rain is so heavy I wondered if you might want a ride.” The clouds over her head were starting to part.

“You are so dear” was all he could say. “How dear it is of you to come fetch your old Walwyn.” He could see and feel the doctors’ house, a living breathing thing, behind her. He could see silhouetted men pacing back and forth in the window, doctors with their black bags, conferring, doctors with their instruments.

“Where were you heading in such a hurry? I hope we are not interrupting.” She glanced at his muddy boots. Richard pulled on his father’s ears.

“No, of course not,” Walwyn whispered. “I was just so eager to finish up these errands and get home.”

“Well, we will be there soon enough.”

“Let me down!” Richard wailed. Walwyn set him down, though the boy kept a tight grip on his father’s fingers.

“I’m sure there is something we’ve forgotten,” Anne went on over her shoulder. “Did you find potatoes for tomorrow’s roast?” She was halfway in the carriage before she turned around. “Aren’t you coming?”

“Yes,” he said. But his boots would not move. He checked to see if they were mired in mud; they were not. The black house was straight ahead, yawning, howling at him.

“Aren’t you at all glad to see us?” Anne asked, her voice wobbling for a brief second.

“Terribly,” he replied. And he was. How could he not be? He loved them. He loved them and it was necessary.

Wordlessly he lifted young Richard high, swinging him up against the slowly lightening sky, enthroning the boy on his shoulder. From this vantage point Richard could tug Walwyn’s beard, which had not seen a blade in days. “You need to groom,” the boy commanded. Together father and son followed Anne and the rest of her brood into a carriage drawn by two gray geldings. Walwyn was last to step inside.

Report of the Investigation, Trial, Execution, and Miraculous Recovery of Rachel Lockyer, who being executed at Tyburn Tree, did after revive, and is now recovering.

Submitted to the Council of State in completion of the chief investigator’s requirements by Thomas Bartwain, Criminal Investigator.

There has happened in the City of London a remarkable event, which has caused so much talk that false accounts are already being printed. To show what has happened, and for the correction of errors, the facts of the case are here collected and presented to the reader, that he might know the course of events as they unfolded, and determine for himself how it has come to pass that a woman who was condemned and executed has been returned to the company of the living.

There lived of late on Warwick Lane a tradeswoman named Rachel Lockyer, a glover’s apprentice. Having laid eyes on a certain man, she refused to be parted from him, though she was not his wife. At length she found herself with child. She hid her condition from those who knew her and delivered the infant, independent of aid, in her sleeping quarters. A newborn child was found two days later buried in the Smithfield market, an event that did cause the matrons and preacher to report to the coroner, who commenced an inquiry to see if it could be murder; for the suspicion was that she being the mother had murdered it, and buried both it and her shame in secret. Shortly thereafter the Council of State did take me on as Investigator. The facts did not lean in this woman’s favor. Upon completion of interviews with witnesses I composed and signed an order of indictment for the crime of murder as defined according to the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children. The woman’s trial was set for one week following. Though the testimonies heard on that day were many and varied, almost all who spoke conceded in some manner that this woman was guilty, if not of the murder, than at least of the child’s concealment, which the law takes to be the same; the jurymen agreed with this opinion. When the day arrived for her execution she went to Tyburn gallows and they hung her from it straightaway. She hung on the rope some twenty minutes, until the hangman sawed her down, thinking her dispatched to the next life, she being clearly observed by all present, including myself, to have stopped breathing. The body being lowered to the ground, the hangman covered it with his cloak.