Accidents of Providence (4 page)

Before starting his final interview, Bartwain asked White to have the officers of the court fetch Rachel Lockyer from her temporary lodgings at the Lilburne residence in Southwark, where she had stayed since Mary banned her from the glove shop. “Bring her to me, if she is willing,” he said. “I want to interview her.”

“Why? You’re not obliged to question the suspect.” White’s houndish brow hung low, leaving his eyes in shadow.

“I want to speak with her. I want to make sure I have all the facts of the case. One can never be too careful.”

His last interview of the afternoon was William Kiffin, a man who was balding in earnest. Bartwain had not summoned him to the Sessions House; this witness had invited himself.

Kiffin settled into the investigator’s chambers as if preparing for a long and comfortable hibernation. “I am the pastor of the church at Devonshire Square,” he declared, crossing one stocking-clad leg over the other. “We are nonconformists; we dissent from the doctrines and polity of the English Church.”

“I know what a nonconformist is,” Bartwain snapped. He harbored no fondness for the myriad sects and independent groups that kept breaking away from the Church of England. He particularly disliked the Baptists, who refused to baptize their infants. In Bartwain’s opinion, baptizing an infant was about the only thing a clergyman was good for nowadays.

“Rachel Lockyer used to be my congregant,” Kiffin went on. “I have a wealth, a veritable storehouse, of information concerning her. I have taken the liberty of conducting research to aid your investigation. I have left no stone unturned. You will have all the information you need by the time I am finished. Here are my research notes.” He reached inside his vest and withdrew some papers.    “How do you know all this?”

“I told you. Research.”

“You mean gossip.”

“Never,” Kiffin protested.

“Just stay with the facts you observed.” Bartwain pressed his hand against his rumbling stomach.

“The day after Rachel Lockyer took the babe out to the woods and buried it, Widow du Gard returned to retrieve what was there. When she carried the child back to the glove shop she demanded an accounting. This caused her—Miss Lockyer—to fall into a mad grief, nearly to faint, and then to grab the infant to her bosom, clutching it and shrieking and saying, ‘It is my poor babe you have found; it is mine.’”

“Were you there?” Bartwain’s quill hovered over his paper.

“Everyone knows what happened. It is all over the neighborhood.”

“Tell me what
you
know, Preacher, or I will strike your testimony.”

Kiffin’s smile grew acerbic. “Well, some weeks earlier I had spoken with Widow du Gard about what to do if she should discover Rachel Lockyer in a state of childbirth, for it had occurred to some of us that she might be in a pickle.”

“A pickle?”

“Yes. With child. That’s how the matrons put it. Also, ‘the rising of the apron.’”

“I see.” You are a matron yourself, Bartwain thought. “And how did you come to hold this suspicion?”

“She wore her skirts too high on the waist.”

“Is that all?”

“Mrs. Chidley also inspected her breasts for hardness. I did not inspect her myself, of course.”

“Go on.”

“When our suspicions turned out to be correct, I traveled to Warwick Lane to assist. This was after the Widow du Gard returned from the woods. She sent for me along with the coroner.”

“Did Rachel Lockyer concede the child was hers?”

“She did not have to. It was so obvious. I sat her, Miss Lockyer, down at the sewing table. I had to yank that thing from her arms. She did not want to let go of it. I told her it was nothing to hold on to. I reminded her that souls do not inhabit the body once we die. ‘You are holding dust,’ I said. Still she would not give it up. She is stubborn and unreasonable.”

“Did you ask her what had happened?”

“I did. I asked her to make a confession.”

“Did she?”

“No. She cursed me. Twice, in fact.”

“What else?”

“We waited for the coroner. While we were waiting, Mrs. Chidley arrived and examined Rachel’s physical person to verify she had given birth.”

During Bartwain’s interview with Katherine Chidley, the haberdasher had reported squeezing milk from Rachel’s breasts and pulling up her skirts to find significant staining of the undergarments. Bartwain starred this note in his papers. It was as good a confirmation of pregnancy as he generally got in these cases. “Go on.”

“When Mrs. Chidley finished her examination, I tried one more time to get Miss Lockyer to say the truth.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Nothing. Mr. Bartwain, it is so obvious what happened I cannot comprehend why you have waited ten days to issue an indictment. Clearly the woman murdered it. Else why would she be so secretive?”

Bartwain, pondering, chewed the inside of his cheek. “That is for me to determine. I will interview her myself this evening.”

“If you speak with her, she will try to seduce you. She is cunning. You do not need to interview her to know she is guilty. Look at the facts. The case is open and shut.”

“Nothing is ever open and shut.” The investigator lumbered to his feet. “You might be called to speak again if there is a trial, Preacher. Be sure you give
your
testimony and not anyone else’s.”

After Kiffin left, Bartwain picked up his papers, opened a bottle of brandy cordial, and settled in to wait for the woman herself, the lady of the hour, the cause of his present indigestion.

W
ILLIAM WALWYN STUMBLED
around the corner of the Sessions House, dropped to his knees, and vomited into a ditch.

Rachel Lockyer’s child. His mind spun like a top around those words.

He stayed on his knees, palms in the gravel. When he regained control of his stomach, he reached for his fallen hat, dragged himself to his feet, retrieved a flask from his cloak, and swigged. The wormwood burned the roof of his mouth. He began walking. As he walked he counted backward—he counted the months on his hands. How could he not have known? How could she not have told him? She must have been with child the last time he saw her. She had tried to visit him in prison, in the Tower, attempting to pass herself off as the wife of Leveler Richard Overton, a fine ruse, since no one ever seemed to remember what Mrs. Overton looked like and only wives were allowed to visit. She made it part of the way, past the drawbridge and the first set of guards. She continued unchallenged into the courtyard, and then a warden’s aide observed her striding toward the Bell Tower, checked his list, turned to the warden, and said, “That is not Mrs. Overton.” Her walk did her in. The real Mrs. Overton did not move with such confidence. The guards hauled Rachel out. They sent her back over the bridge.

Now Walwyn could hear footsteps behind him. He turned. It was his wife, Anne, following him. She must have waited outside the courthouse in Old Bailey, waited the entire time while he was swatting at the investigator’s questions. She would not meet his eye, even as he approached.

“You’re going home,” she said—it was not a question.

“Yes,” he replied.

Anne Walwyn adjusted the deep-brimmed black hat she wore every day. She wore this hat despite the dozen ribbon-trimmed bonnets and high-crowned hats her husband had given her over twenty years of matrimony. The ones Walwyn had bought remained stacked at the top of their wardrobe, as if in waiting.

“You had business in the city?” Her tiny face was pinched. Her fingers hooked protectively around the handle of her basket.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I’m nearly done. I’ll be back at the house soon.” The Walwyns’ home in Moorfields lay just north of the city wall that had shielded villagers from invasion during Roman times.

“Fourteen needs his shoes picked up from the cobbler,” she told him.

When their youngest child, Richard, was born, Anne had taken to calling him Fourteen, replacing his Christian name with a numerical one as she had done with the rest of her children. Walwyn used to tease her about this, about her excessive fondness for numbers, but Anne told him numbers were more manageable than names. Number One was her firstborn, for example, and had married Humphrey Brooke, a physician who would have the world view him as an independent man. Walwyn would have liked to view him as an independent man, but this was Brooke’s second year as an unpaying lodger in his father-in-law’s house. Number Two, their second-born, was nineteen and a linen draper.

“I’ll get the shoes,” he promised.

“I don’t want you running into anyone from the Whalebone while you’re out. I don’t want you getting sidetracked by those men.” She delivered a scowl especially reserved for John Lilburne, Richard Overton, Thomas Prince, Gilbert Mabbott, and all the other longhaired Levelers whose names she knew from the pamphlets, petitions, treatises, declarations, and Agreements of the People Walwyn had helped to write.

“I have no plan to visit the Whalebone,” he said. “I’ve told you. My time with them is—”

“All that bloodshed and a king’s head besides,” Anne went on, not listening. “And now you want to run an apothecary? You, the philosopher?”

He tried to touch her shoulder. “Dear heart—”

Anne reached for the ratty chin band that held her old hat in place, as if his proximity were going to wreck something. “Don’t.” She turned and left him standing in the middle of the carriageway near the waste kennel.

She knew, of course.

Walwyn did not travel directly home. He went to the cobbler and picked up his son’s shoes, and then he went to the river. He had no reason for walking there except it was not far from the cobbler’s and his thoughts were refusing to cooperate with him. For three hours he sat, feet dangling, on a fishing dock called Broken Wharf, a rattly embankment whose pier was no longer reliable save for tempting old men to totter out on its uneven boards and, from there, to observe that the river was darker than they remembered it, or the waterway more throttled by commerce. To the east lay Salt Wharf and Three Cranes Wharf. Above, hundreds of gulls were flying. The gulls avoided Broken Wharf. They preferred the barnacled posts and fishermen’s buckets studding the water’s edge at Salt Wharf. The gulls were wise, he decided. He sat and watched them skim the water’s surface, his son’s shoes in his lap. Not until the afternoon sun began ceding ground to a slinking fog did he remember the time and begin making his way north. He hailed a carriage. When the driver asked where to, he said Moorfields. The driver said he didn’t go north of the city wall at night.

“It’s not night yet,” Walwyn said.

“It is. The sun is setting.”

“Not yet. I can still see it.”

“It will be down in a quarter-hour.”

The two men bickered until Walwyn offered to pay above the usual fare, and then the driver became accommodating. Walwyn climbed into the back of the carriage, facing away from the horses; a minute later they were off, crawling for home, Walwyn watching the empty street and, behind it, the muddy line of the Thames receding. He pulled his steep-crowned hat low over his forehead. The sun reddened and sank below the horizon. His thoughts returned to Rachel. He remembered squinting through a narrow slit in his Tower cell, transfixed, as she had pleaded her case with the warden below. He had willed her to remain still, not to move, to remain in his sight; but his field of vision was too narrow, and when the guards pulled her arms, she vanished. When she did not come back, he had pressed his fingers against his eyelids, imprinting her reflection on the back of them. Later that night, while his three friends were sleeping, he had retrieved it. He saw the outline of Rachel’s hip curving against her skirt where the wind had gusseted it. He traced the line of her jaw when she yielded her face to the light.

Then William Walwyn had become like a fox that will gnaw off its leg to escape a trap. He missed her. He missed the sound of her. He stormed the walls; he threw himself at the door, rousing his companions. He cursed the guards; he bribed the guards; when that failed he swung his fist at them. The guards swung back. He drank himself into a stupor with Overton’s wine, became sick, went to sleep, became sick again; his stomach churned for hours. He sensed Rachel was in trouble but did not know what kind. He felt the trouble in his body; his bones told him. The next morning he had called his three companions around. He said they must work together to get themselves out of the Tower, preferably right away. “I am rotting in here,” he cried. When Thomas Prince pointed out that the rest of them were rotting in there too, Walwyn said they must try harder. He cursed their lackadaisicalness. Richard overton whispered to Prince that Walwyn was developing a habit of too much wine. John Lilburne suggested Walwyn was developing a fear of confined spaces.

Four months had passed since then. Walwyn had not seen Rachel.

W
ITHIN AN HOUR
of Bartwain’s order, two officers of the court had retrieved Rachel Lockyer from her temporary lodgings in Southwark and delivered her to the Sessions House. She accompanied them freely. Bartwain let them in and showed her to his chambers.

His suspect was no more remarkable in feature than any of a thousand other women he had seen, though if pressed he would have conceded she was attractive enough for her age. Her green eyes compelled him forward. She stood taller than he preferred in a member of the feminine sex—of course, that was not her fault. A fringe of dark ringlets escaped her head covering. She wore a tradeswoman’s gloves, the fingers of them cut off for sewing.

He ushered her inside and closed the door. Two candles provided the only light. Motioning toward the stool, he invited her to sit. “I assume you know why I have asked you here.”

“Yes.” She tucked her skirt and sat. “Elizabeth Lilburne told me about you.” She did not seem to know what to do with her hands. Bartwain looked on as she fidgeted and plucked at her sleeves, pulling the material over her wrists until her hands nearly disappeared.

“I would like you to tell me what you did on the nights of November first and second. If you do not, and I think you know this, the law compels me to charge you under the Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children.”