Accidents of Providence (5 page)

“You will do what you want whether I speak to you or not.” She tilted her head to the side as she spoke so that a vein in her forehead stood out.

Bartwain was having a hard time reading her expression. “I have brought you here as a courtesy,” he told her. “I am giving you the opportunity to tell me why I should
not
have you arrested and charged. The evidence does not fall in your favor.”

“By evidence you mean gossip and rumor.”

“You are the one to address that. Go ahead. Set the record straight.” Bartwain did not feel like matching wits with anyone that evening, let alone another woman, let alone an unmarried woman of a certain age with a vein in her forehead and a tilt of the head that confused him.

“I have been wrongly accused,” she told him.

“Of what? Of harming that poor infant?”

“I tell you I have been wrongly accused!”

“Was the child yours?”

“I had not been well in months.”

“Were you with child?”

Silence.

“Was that child yours?”

“God gave it to me.”

Was this an admission? “You know what I mean,” he said. “Were you in labor on November the first?”

“Sir, I have labored my whole life,” she said.

He frowned. “So you will not tell me what happened?”

“I cannot say what happened!”

“You cannot say, or you cannot remember?”

“I cannot say! I cannot make it out.” She looked ill, or at least ill at ease.

“Did you bury an infant outside the slaughterhouse, and if so, was it yours?”

“I found a child,” she told him, growing hoarse. “I buried the child that I found.”

“Whose was it?”

“It belonged to God.”

“Every child belongs to God,” Bartwain muttered.

“Do you think so, sir? I hope so.” She leaned toward him; she leaned so close Bartwain leaned backward. He hoped she was not about to begin weeping. He could not bear it when his suspects dissolved into tears.

“Was it of your womb?”

“My womb is old and decrepit.”

“You have some trimmer’s mouth,” he grumbled. “Your answers are slipperier than a rock at the bottom of the creek.”

She bowed her head. Bartwain did not trust the posture.

“You might be interested to learn I saw the Leveler William Walwyn this morning. He was certainly uneasy when I mentioned your name.”

Her back stiffened but she said nothing.

“I interviewed him,” Bartwain went on, trying to gauge her reaction. “Do you want to know what he said? You have not seen him in nine months, from what I gather. You must be desperate for a word from the magnificent William Walwyn, even though he has not been able to leave his house long enough to inquire after your welfare. Something about fourteen children to care for now that he is out of the Tower.”

“He lives his own life,” she said quietly.

“You know him well, then. And you would prefer to be in the middle of his life?”

“Sir, you are not kind!”

“And you, miss, are a liar. You have not said one word without its meaning something else.”

“Sir, take pity,” she pleaded. “I am only a woman.”

“Only?” he sputtered, before he could stop himself. “I have been talking to women all day long. I deserve more pity than you do. For God’s sake, tell me what happened!”

She sprang from the stool. “I cannot. Do you understand me? I cannot explain! I cannot explain what happened to her!”

“So you know the infant was a girl.”

She covered her face with her gloved hands.

“So she was yours, then,” he pressed.

Face still covered, she nodded.

“Good—now we are getting somewhere.” He eyed her over the candle. How long had it been since the birth? Twelve or thirteen days at most. She was pale and more drawn now than at the interview’s start. She looked as if she wanted to go home, pull off her boots, and climb into bed without another word. Or was that what Bartwain wanted? His toes had begun aching.

“Miss Lockyer,” he said, more gently, “these things are not very complicated. To indict you, all I need is proof you tried to hide the newborn’s death and some credible witness indicating the child was yours. Your acknowledgment just now together with the Widow du Gard’s testimony about your behavior in the woods and the haberdasher’s report that she examined your physical person for evidence of childbirth are sufficient to meet these criteria. If you do not intend to provide some correction or counter to what I have learned thus far, this meeting does not need to continue.”

She lowered her hands and met his look. “Have mercy on me,” she whispered.

“I cannot have mercy unless you tell me what happened.”

Silence.

“Have you lost your memory?”

“I don’t think so, sir.” She stood very still.

“What is it, then? Don’t you know what happened?”

“I cannot say. Can’t you understand? I cannot say what happened! I have not yet resolved what took place.”

“Haven’t
resolved
? What, do the events require interpretation?”

Swiftly she turned away from him.

Bartwain, frustrated, changed tactics. “Do you believe in free will, Rachel Lockyer?”

All the Levelers professed it. John Lilburne, William Walwyn, the others—all swore on their mothers’ graves that human actions remained voluntary, freely chosen. But when something happened for which they did not want to take responsibility or for which they feared reprisal, they attributed the event to providence. Bartwain detested such double-mindedness.

“Yes.” Rachel was studying his bookshelves. “Yes, Investigator, I believe in free will.”

The air in the chamber refused to stir. Even his two candles would not flicker. Bartwain cleared his chest, fumbling in the gloom for his pipe. “Do you also believe in self-preservation?”

“Yes.” She moved to face him, stepping closer, her skirt brushing the side of his desk. She was slighter than he had anticipated, and without adornment, like a tree that has cast off its leaves for want of rain. “Yes. What is there to believe? It is a law of nature.”

Bartwain did not want to find this woman arresting. She had said little that was useful. He did not find her beautiful. Her pale coloring did not go well with her eyes or dark hair, and her mouth was so wide it drowned out her other features. But she captured the attention.

“If you believe in self-preservation, then perhaps you also think it is acceptable to take a life in self-defense?” He knew he was wandering away from the material evidence.

Her emerald eyes passed through him. “No,” she returned. “Self-defense is no sin, but taking a life is wrong in the eyes of God.”

“You cannot have it both ways.” He stood, swaying, planting his hands on his desk. “Do you think you can have it both ways? Did you harm your child? Did you conceal that poor bastard’s death?”

“No,” she said again, delivering a look the investigator had not seen before. But Bartwain could not tell which question she was answering.

He could not fall asleep that night. Each time he started to drift off, something his suspect had said would spring into his mind, snapping him back to consciousness. Bartwain resented Rachel Lockyer’s impingement on his rest. He possessed neither the youthful idealism nor the digestion to lie awake at night reflecting. Yet here he was.

His suspect had not answered his questions, he complained to his wife, Mathilda, who had rolled on her side in their narrow bed, facing away.

“What did you expect her to say?” she mumbled. “Let me sleep.”

“I expected her to deny any wrongdoing. Or to confess and beg for leniency.” Bartwain sighed and punched his pillow into a more accommodating position. To bury a child in secret was to conceal its death, which according to the statute was a crime equivalent to murder. But what was the difference between a burial no one attended and a burial conducted in secret? That is, what if someone buried a bastard and no one attended because no one
wanted
to attend? Did that, too, count as concealment? “Bother,” he exclaimed, loud enough that his wife jumped.

“Probably she knew you were going to pounce on her no matter what she told you,” Mathilda said through the covers. “So why should she say anything?”

“I’m a murder investigator.” He was sitting up now, his back against the wall; he was talking to himself more than to his wife. “I’m impartial. I listen to my witnesses. I don’t ask why. Neither does the law. I only ask what. That’s all the law requires! I follow the law.”

“Maybe you
should
ask why, for once,” she replied. “You’re old and tired, that’s what you are. Old, tired, and never got a promotion.”

Four hours passed. Bartwain’s eyes stayed maddeningly open. He wondered if he should take a cup of cream to induce drowsiness. He tried—it accomplished nothing. Maybe he would be able to sleep if he went ahead and wrote the indictment. Yes, that was it. That was the key. He just needed to finish things up, wash his hands, and be done with it. This strategy had worked well enough in the past. Then he could rest. Yes, yes, he would do it right now. Do it and be done with it. Do what was right. He rose in the dark and patted around for a candle.

“What are you doing?” Mathilda wanted to know. But Bartwain was already tiptoeing down the stairs to his study.

He sat in his ancient velvet chair. He read his interview notes again, all the way through. Then he opened his statute book and read the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children. He read it through three times, even though he could have recited it by heart. Nothing new announced itself to him. His eyelids were drooping. His eyelids were begging to fall. His mouth was hanging slack, and he was breathing through it—that was how tired he was.

“Enough,” he said out loud. He rose and padded over to his water basin, washed his face, and dried himself with a mildewing towel. He moved to the kitchen, where he drank the hot buttered ale he took each evening purely for medicinal purposes. There, seated at the table in his stocking feet, he wrote and signed an official order of indictment in the case of Rachel Lockyer. The entire process took less than an hour, not counting the five hours of tossing and turning that had gone before.

“Well, that’s over with,” he said to himself as he signed and stamped the order.

He went back to his bed, relieved. After the trial he would have to submit a final report to the Council of State, but that was nothing—he could do that in his sleep. He chuckled, burrowing under his quilt, delighting in his little wordplay. He closed his eyes and rested.

Possibly an hour later, he awoke to Mathilda shaking his shoulder.

“Morning!” his wife chirped. “It’s past sunrise! What were you fussing about all night long?” Mathilda Bartwain adored mornings.

The investigator groaned and pulled himself out of the bed. Had he slept at all?

Within an hour he was heading back to the courthouse, the sun so bright it offended him. When he arrived at the Sessions House in Old Bailey, he handed White the order of indictment and instructed him to deliver it to the Council of State.

A gloom descended on his secretary. “This is not right,” White said. In nearly three decades of working together on criminal investigations, Bartwain and his secretary had overseen no fewer than twenty-five bastard cases. Each time an indictment came through, White delivered this same declaration; each time, he wore the same mournful expression.

“My good Friend,” Bartwain entreated. “Give me leave to do what the law requires.”

Three hours later, Rachel Lockyer was arrested for the murder of her newborn child. Her trial was scheduled to begin the first week of December, the opening day of the winter assizes. Until then, the indictment read, the defendant would wait it out in Newgate, in the third-floor ward for female felons.

S
HE WAS AN
ordinary woman.

She grew up thinking her life would be one thing, and when it turned out to be something else, for a while the difference between the two, between the life she’d imagined and the life she lived, needled her. When she grew older she realized these things were not anyone’s fault. She learned to stop antagonizing her life, stop picking at it. Some nights were still difficult. But in the mornings Rachel Lockyer would rise before dawn suffused with a weary yet vital radiance. She was relieved. She accepted things.

She made gloves and swept floors for a living. Every morning the inside and outside of Mary’s shop had to be swept clean to ward off pests, and the piles placed out for the gunge farmers. Rachel always tried to be back inside by the time those men arrived. They would careen onto Warwick Lane around the noon hour, the bells of their carts jangling. If she missed the bells, or if she heard them and promptly forgot—which she was likely to do, because the sound was so regular, because it took them so long to make their way down the street—then before she knew it their carts would be on top of her, pushed by bent men with eyes that rolled red and white, with mange where hair should have been, men who had tongues but no teeth, jowls without shape, sounds without words, mouths without sounds. These were the scavengers, paid to remove the waste that others created.

Rachel accepted her life but did not resign herself to it. She leaned into her life like she leaned into her broom. She pushed. She watched the mist curl over the streets while she swept. In winter she would wrap her head in a woolen scarf as she worked, her view framed by threads that came from creatures who climbed peaks so staggeringly high she could not fathom what they saw before they started descending. She loved scarves and she hated heights. She loved gloves also. She loved what the gloves were made of—goatskin and sheepskin, the finest around. The hides smelled of salt and wind and sky.

Most people who met Rachel Lockyer made up their minds about her quickly. They constructed their images of her the same way a jeweler uses intaglio to carve a gem, cutting below the surface of the stone so the resulting design is not a raised relief or cameo but a recessed portrait, a negative space. This was how most people incised their portraits of her, from the surface down; they knew her less for who she was than for who and what she was not. She was not a matron. She was not a mother. She was not well educated. She was not much of a Christian. Sometimes a well-meaning matron would point these things out to her. But Rachel already knew who and what she was not. She did not need a reminder.