Accidents of Providence (7 page)

When they reached the tavern where the Levelers held their meetings, Rachel had stopped to marvel at the massive jawbone of a sperm whale hanging over the entrance, then followed Robert into a narrow passageway that opened onto a lively eating and drinking area. The first thing she noticed was the display of turtles. They were everywhere, trapped in rectangular tanks stationed around the dining room. Some were swimming, others climbing up the glass and sliding down as patrons wandered by and decided which ones they wanted to eat. Once singled out by a diner, the designated reptile would be carried by its shell, head receding, into the kitchen, where the cook would plunge it in boiling water, then discard the head in the alley behind the tavern. He would serve the meat with butter or in a soup with leeks and parsnips.

“I’m going in,” Robert said. He was headed into a side room off the dining area that everyone knew was reserved for Levelers.

“Don’t you dare,” Rachel replied; of course this did no good. Furious, she went in after him.

Inside, five men were leaning in a collective scowl around the center table, surrounded by puddling candles, folio sheets, inkwells, half-empty bottles of wine, and the remains of two roasted capons. Two men, whom Rachel would later know as John Lilburne and Richard Overton, were arguing with a third, the newsman Gilbert Mabbott. It was wintertime; they were cold; the wine made them all angry. Robert introduced himself, extending his hand to whoever would take it. No one seemed impressed with him; John and Mabbott continued to argue. Nobody paid much attention to Robert at all. Rachel was glad. Nobody paid attention to Rachel either, until William Walwyn did. He was leaning over the table, his elbows resting on the parchment, his sleeves rolled up to his forearms, his silver hair falling low over his eyes, ink staining the pads of his fingers, and when he glanced up to think, to catch a word that eluded him, he discovered her instead. He set down his quill. As soon as he did, the other men around the table went silent. Something was afoot. Elizabeth Lilburne and Mary Overton, seated at a smaller table in the corner, looked up and went still, like two weasels when a lantern shines on their foraging in the night.

“What is it?” John said, reaching for the spectacles he had needed since he’d sustained a pike wound to his eye several years earlier. He did not know Walwyn had forgotten his own name. He did not know Walwyn had forgotten his past, his children, his wife, his friends, his faith, his house, even his legs on which he stood. Walwyn didn’t hear what John was saying. He was too busy making his way across the room to Rachel, who watched him walking toward her, who knew trouble when she saw it. There it comes, she thought as the Leveler approached. There is trouble if ever I saw it. She held her ground, sized him up. She thought: Magnificent. Before she could think anything else, Walwyn was standing so close she could study the lines of his neck as he spoke. He was saying hello, welcoming her. She said hello back. Only the word did not come out of her mouth the way it should have. It did not come out as a greeting, as the deferential murmur of a tradeswoman. It came out like a torch. She said hello and ignited him. She gave him her hand. In the instant it happened, she could not fathom why she did it. It was one of only two hands she had; it belonged to her. So she pulled back, but only in her mind; her hand stayed where it was. His fingers were sticky with drying ink. He was warm and taut, and in his wrist she could feel the architecture of ligaments and joints. He was holding her hand. Rachel glanced up. Just as she suspected, her brother was fuming—though not because of anything Rachel was doing. He was fuming because the Levelers were not paying him any attention. She returned her gaze to Walwyn. Her eyes were relieved to go back to him. It had been too long already. He was speaking to her. He was speaking only to her. “You are welcome here,” he was saying with a lopsided grin. He said some other things she could not remember even five seconds later. Then he leaned in and inhaled her. Everyone in the room saw him do it. Across the table, John’s head shot up from his papers. Overton rolled his eyes.

“An embarrassment,” John muttered.

“Too much wine,” Overton commented. The newsman Mabbott harbored more sympathy. Walwyn, he grasped, was finished from the first.

The next four nights running, Robert insisted on returning to the tavern. “They will take me if I persist,” he said to his sister. He did not want to concede that the Levelers had not noticed him, had not caught his name. He did not know that in those days the Levelers saw one hundred Roberts a month, one hundred a week if they wanted. The whole world was filled with Roberts—guileless young men eager to give their lives for liberty’s sake, though few of them could have said what, besides a hero’s death, liberty was good for anymore. Rachel didn’t argue when he insisted on trying again. She went back to the tavern with him. She was the faithful elder sister; she joined him every night. True, she had an ulterior motive. Her brother did not need to know. He was too young to need to know. She said this to herself several times.

When the commanders of the Parliamentary New Model Army ordered Robert and a thousand other rank-and-files back to the battlefields outside London, baiting the starving soldiers with promises of warm bread, new boots, and functioning muskets, declaring that a king who levied unfair taxes must be stopped by force, Rachel continued going to the Whalebone. She went on her own. She walked alone, without a brother to elbow her. She swung her arms full and wide as she walked. She laughed out loud as the street sweepers watched her pass. It was ridiculous and fine and undignified and ordinary and wonderful. She felt young and old both. All her life she had assumed she was not subject to the normal laws of attraction; she had assumed this was not her road. It turned out it was.

Rachel’s closest friend became Elizabeth, whom she’d also met through the Whalebone. Initially the two women could not decide what to make of each other, but then Rachel had said something that made Elizabeth laugh, and they were off and running. At one point during their first meeting, Elizabeth had hooted so boisterously that her husband turned around in his seat at the men’s table and urged her to pipe down. Later, Walwyn overheard Rachel explaining to her new friend that she sewed gloves and pieced hides for a living, heard Elizabeth asking if this was her husband’s trade and heard Rachel replying no, for there was none. Elizabeth, sounding aggrieved, had asked, “Well, how does he earn his keep?” and Rachel replied, “No
husband
, I mean,” and both women had chuckled.

From time to time, she and Elizabeth would lean their heads close and share opinions about the war and politics. Rachel spent most of these conversations listening. From Elizabeth she learned that the Levelers were principally against snobbery. Beyond that, they believed in hard work, self-preservation, no standing army in peacetime, and the right to a fair trial. They believed in extending voting privileges to men who did not own property. They believed in talking things out. Sometimes they forgot that church was for the next life while government was for this and tried to reverse the equation, but they were not alone in this tendency. Everyone wanted to be a prophet—Elizabeth said this loudly, so her husband could hear her—everyone wanted to create the kingdom of God on earth during a time of civil war.

From Elizabeth, Rachel also learned that the Levelers were not the atheists their enemies made them out to be. Most were good congregational Independents and Baptists, with a few philosophical Seekers, such as Walwyn, thrown in. When Rachel wanted to know what that word meant, Elizabeth sniffed and said Seekers were people who found questions more satisfying than answers. “They are not practical,” she said.

Rachel liked to slip away from the meeting room to study the turtles. She used to make her way into the darkened dining area after the kitchen had closed and would stand over the largest of the tanks, peering down at the occupants. Once she scooped a turtle from the top of the pool, where he was swimming. He did just fine at first as she carried him in both hands around the silent tavern. She was giving him a tour; she was showing him things. He did fine, that is, until he poked his head out and glimpsed his tour guide, saw her strange and giant face. He retreated into his shell with an offended look. Rachel returned him to the tank.

Another time, one of the turtles got himself caught trying to squeeze through the rocks at the bottom of his tank. He had flipped sideways to angle through what to his eyes must have appeared as an opening, but his shell had grown; his shell had matured without his noticing. He kicked for a minute, stopped, kicked again, stopped again. Some minutes passed. He was running out of air; nature was taking its course. Watching him, Rachel became unable to breathe. She reached into the tank to dislodge one of the rocks, but her arm was not long enough; the rocks lay at the bottom. The other turtles swam in circles; they did not notice any crisis except the milky white hand intruding into their living quarters. Rachel dragged over a chair, stood on it, and plunged her hand into the tank from this higher position, soaking the bodice of her dress as she reached down to free him. She would dry off later. She pushed the rocks apart, and the turtle swam up. He popped to the surface, his tiny mouth parting, the upper half in the shape of a beak, the lower half soft and petulant. He shut his mouth, eyed her reproachfully, and rejoined his companions, who were still swimming in circles.

She considered rescuing all of the turtles and setting them free at the creek, but this impulse did not seem sensible. The tavern owner was trying to earn a living. Everywhere people were hungry. She supposed it was a case of competing goods. She had heard the Levelers say they were on the side of the poor and hard-working Englishman, and the tavern owner fairly fit that description. Still, she could not eat when the turtles seemed to be watching her. She especially avoided the soup.

One night she wandered into the darkened dining room to press her nose against one of the glass tanks, steaming the view, when a hand came to rest on her shoulder. She knew whose it was before she turned. She had not forgotten that hand. Walwyn was smiling into her eyes. He had left the others in the back room quarreling about property and taxation. They were alone.

Rachel had no idea what to do with him, so she turned back to the turtles, of which she counted five.

“They’re something, aren’t they?” Walwyn said.

She was not sure how to talk to him, so she said whatever came to mind. It was the strangest thing. It was easy. Once she started talking, it became impossible to stop. She tried to stop, to speak less directly, but that cat was out of the bag. “I don’t understand how they can swim and swim like that.” She pointed to the tank. “They go around and around in circles.”

“They do have that tendency.” He was looking at her, not the turtles.

“They never seem to notice. But they have to notice. Don’t you think? Don’t you think they’re going around and around all the time thinking, ‘This is the same thing I just saw’?”

He confessed he didn’t know, had never thought about it.

She glanced at him, aggrieved. He had failed to wonder the same thing she did. “Would
you
keep swimming around and around if you knew there would never be anything else? They don’t have to do it. Here is a dry spot of ground—here, on these rocks. Why aren’t they resting?”

“I can’t think why,” he admitted.

“I can think of two reasons.”

“Tell me.”

His lopsided smile had returned and was threatening to distract her. She did her best to ignore it. She had a point to make. “One, the turtle doesn’t know he is living in the tank. So each revolution he makes, he thinks he has traveled to a new place. He never notices.”

“And two?”

“Two, he knows. He knows but he still swims.”

“Why would he do that?”

She scrutinized the turtles. Walwyn leaned in and regarded them with her, and together they studied the intricate patterning of each shell. The creatures propelled their ungainly bodies through gray water that had not been cleaned. Each pushed against an invisible current, neck ugly and straining as it thrust itself forward.

“You’ve studied them for some time, I think,” Walwyn observed. “I see you wandering in here. You must be an expert in the lives of turtles.”

She reddened. “The other room was too warm.”

“It’s just as warm in this room.”

“Well, it wasn’t earlier.”

“Well, indeed.”

His skin seemed to be throwing off heat—she could not tell the precise source.

“I am afraid I will be of no help to you in your contemplations,” he went on, “for I’ve never examined these creatures myself, at least no longer than it takes for the cook to bring them to me in a soup pot.”

Why was his skin so warm? She could not concentrate. Why was he talking so much? “You are some jester,” she murmured.

“I suppose I am . . . ” He trailed off. “Some silly old fellow.”

She was curious about him then. She began to interview him. “Where did you come from?”

He said he came from Moorfields.

“No, not where you live now, but where you lived before.”

“Before what?”

A good question, she thought. She had heard of his large household. She changed the subject. “Did you write all those pamphlets and Agreements of the People that the other Levelers are always talking about?”

“Some of them. But not lately. Lately I have not written much.”

“Why not?”

“I’m tired.”

“Of what? Writing?”

He nodded.

Rachel could not imagine tiring from something that could be done while seated. For a second time that evening she detested him. “How can you be tired of such a thing?” It was too intimate a question, and she apologized.

“Don’t be sorry,” he replied. “I suppose writing the same things over and over again becomes disheartening when nothing changes.”

She considered this. Then she said, “Maybe you know more about the lives of turtles than you think.” To hide her smile, she dipped her head. It was the wrong move, or maybe it was the right one, because he reached over and cupped her face in his hand, raising her chin to meet him, his thumb against the underside of her jaw, pressing up on that soft place surrounded by bone.