Accidents of Providence (8 page)

“Never do that,” he was telling her. “Never lower your face for anyone.”

“Sir” was all she could say.

“Don’t. Don’t call me that. I am not that. I am not anyone.”

She stiffened. “If
you
are not anyone, what does that make
me
?”

“That’s not what I meant,” he protested. Then he added, before he could reel himself in, “You are very fair.”

Rachel hesitated. She saw she had a fork in the road coming. She didn’t want a fork in the road just yet. In her experience they could be tiresome. Sometimes one got to the fork and the road closed. So she said, simply, “I am fair enough, I expect,” and then—briefly—rested her cheek against his hand. She didn’t leave it there long, but it was enough. Walwyn was discovering her; he was noticing her body. His eyes were dark and a wordless heaviness lingered in them. His palm against her cheek was searing. So this was where the heat was coming from, she thought. She should have known it would be the hand. She could hear the bell clock outside the meeting room chiming.

When a few minutes later John strolled in wanting to know what was going on, what he was missing, neither Rachel nor Walwyn could explain. Walwyn made up something, some cockamamie story, and this set them both smiling. They could not stop looking at each other even after they had returned to the meeting room. Rachel caught his eye across the table and tilted her chin ridiculously high, surveying the world like a propertied woman. She was making fun of him, of his little admonition. She gave it up a few seconds in, but while it lasted her pose allowed him to follow the line of her jaw to where it joined her neck, just below her earlobe. With that sight, every tissue and fiber in Walwyn’s body began to heave and flounder toward her, against a dogged current.

B
ARTWAIN WAS LEAVING
the home of his physician when he spied Walwyn across the street and heard him calling.

Bother, Bartwain thought. He ducked into an alley, but a maid was emptying a slop bucket from an upstairs window and a torrent of dirty water chased him back into the street. “What do you want?” he demanded as Walwyn approached. Wind was blowing the morning rain sideways, and water beaded under both men’s hats.

“I need to speak with you.”

“Let go of my arm. You’re wet and I’m unwell. I have no time to talk to you today.” He did not like to be pulled by the sleeve as the Leveler was doing.

“You must listen to me. I need your help.”

“If you needed my help, you should have asked for it during your deposition. I am no longer in as fine a mood.” Bartwain had not slept well the night before—or the two nights prior to that, if he thought about it. It was a complete coincidence that the three nights he had slept poorly were the same three nights Rachel Lockyer had been in Newgate awaiting trial. He blamed his lack of rest on the mice he had discovered in his kitchen cupboards. The mice were the reason, he assured himself. While searching for a midnight snack, for something to ease his muttering stomach, the investigator had spied four tails scampering for cover behind a sack of flour. Trembling, he had set out cheese and eggs in elaborate traps—he did not own a cat. He stayed up late, holding the lantern, listening for a snap. He gave up and went to bed, where he scarcely slept. At dawn he leaped from his coverlets and descended to the kitchen, where he had counted four piles of droppings but no mice in his handmade traps.

“I’m not asking your help for my sake. I’m asking for Miss Lockyer’s,” Walwyn said.

You look old, Bartwain thought. Old and frantic. “I’m off the case,” he said tersely. “All that’s left for me to do is write a summary and report once the trial is finished. Whatever you need now, I can’t help you.” He shivered and clutched his cloak tighter. He could see the abbey of Westminster from where they were standing. Bartwain’s tiny thatched-roof house lay just beyond. His house was so close he could almost smell his wife’s cranberry biscuits baking over the fire. His toes were hurting. His bed was calling his name—he was that tired.

“You don’t understand. I—”

“I do understand, and so do you. She is no longer my jurisdiction. You will have to find someone else to take pity on you.” Bartwain’s morning visit to his physician had supplied no good news. The doctor could do nothing to ease his gouty foot. Worse, he had been unable to ease Bartwain’s stomach, which was continuing to announce its displeasure with some of his more recent indulgences—stewed boysenberries, boiled crab, and an undercooked custard. Then there was the black, steady rain now pouring over the brim of his hat, silting the folds of his neck as he watched Walwyn shivering in his cloak; he suspected sleet would arrive later. Probably it would start just as the investigator was heading out again, and he would slip and fall and be trampled by a throng. Bartwain disliked both crowds and weather, and especially their convergence.

“Please!” Walwyn shouted. A gust of wind robbed him of sound; Bartwain had to strain to hear him. “I must speak with you frankly. You see, I am responsible. I cannot leave her.”

“You are responsible, yes. But she is not your only duty. Even if I wanted to intervene, which I do not, I have no power. I told you. My involvement ended three days ago. The law says I am to step back and write my final report. If you wanted to speak with me, you should have done so during your interview. Excuse me, please—my wife is waiting.”

“You don’t—”

“I understand well enough, Mr. Walwyn,” Bartwain interrupted, his patience fraying. “For all the blithering denials you issued during your deposition, it is quite clear what your relationship has been with that woman. Your time for helping her is over. If you wanted to help her, you should not have allowed her to fall into this situation; you should have known better. You should not have compromised her virtue.”

“For God’s sake, do you think a woman’s virtue lives or dies by what a man—”

“I do not care to discuss philosophy in the rain with a Leveler.”

“It’s not philosophy. It’s a woman’s life. It’s a woman’s life you are tampering with!”

“Forgive me, but last time I checked I was not the one doing the tampering.” Bartwain hated the wind; he hated the rain; he hated this man making him stand in the rain; he hated the day, period. “Do you know how fortunate you are, Mr. Walwyn? You are exceptionally fortunate. God must be watching over you.”

Walwyn eyed him warily.

“If that child had lived, you could have been dragged to the whipping post alongside its mother. And if all this were happening several months in the future, I predict you would not even be so
fortunate
as to receive a whipping. In a few months’ time, our self-proclaimed saints in the House of Commons are going to make good on one of their threats—they’re going to make adultery an offense punishable by death. You’re aware of that likelihood, aren’t you, now that the Puritans have seized the reins of government?” The investigator cleared his throat; he missed the days of King Charles. “So don’t forget to say your evening prayers, Mr. Walwyn, because if all this were happening at some other time, you would not be getting off the hook so quickly. They could drag
you
to the scaffold too, if they wanted.” One advantage to reaching the age of sixty-one, the investigator had learned, was the insight—or hindsight—that life consisted of a limited number of stories. These stories circled around and around and repeated themselves. There was nothing new, nothing at all new under the sun; even the sun was bored. “You should have known better,” he repeated.

Walwyn proceeded to offer Bartwain sixty-five pounds, payable immediately, if the investigator would take the legal action of formally withdrawing his murder indictment. It was a large enough sum that Bartwain actually had to think about it. He could tell his wife he had received his long-postponed promotion. No, she would never believe that. Rain spattered his chin. He brushed it away impatiently. “Mr. Walwyn,” he said, blinking and blinking to keep his vision clear. The more he blinked, the faster the rain fell on him. “I might be just an old shoe in this courthouse, but this is one shoe who doesn’t track mud where he walks. You cannot bribe me.”

“It’s not a bribe. An innocent woman is going to be put on trial. You know it and I know it. Whatever happened to her that night was unintentional.”

“Happened
to
her? It is impossible to assign intentionality, or the lack thereof, to an act that happened
to
someone, sir, in case your logic is weakening out there in the countryside. Or were you referring to the child as opposed to its mother?”

“Don’t play your word games with me. Rachel is innocent.”

“Innocent people are put on trial all the time. That’s why there is such a thing as a jury.”

“You know as well as I do that any jury is going to convict her. You know as well as I what kind of system of justice we suffer.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Bartwain said slyly. “It’s not as bad as all that, is it? Things can turn out all right. They do for some people. They did for you.” He studied the Leveler. “It’s odd, isn’t it? You’re getting out of prison just as she is going in. You’re changing places.”

“The Tower is nothing like Newgate. John Lilburne spent nine months in the Tower and he was fatter when he left than when he entered. Whereas Rachel—do you know what they call that place? Hell on earth.”

Bartwain nodded; he had visited Newgate once. He did not care to go back. “Why don’t you call on some of your Leveling friends to petition on her behalf? Surely they can write something, get a movement going. They used to wield a powerful influence.”

“They are refusing to get involved.”

“Ah. Well, that’s too bad. But you see, Mr. Walwyn, I do not feel quite so upset as you about these things. My sympathies lie with the child.”

“And you think mine do not?” The Leveler’s face was blotchy, almost curdled.

“You will excuse me, please,” the investigator said primly. “I have nothing more to say.” But his stomach twisted with worry.

When he arrived home, he discovered his wife had made no cranberry biscuits and had no plans to do so in the near future. Opening the cabinet to make his own snack, he discovered that the mice had paid a return visit. They had devoured the bait, leaving the traps empty.

Walwyn spent the evening working alone in his makeshift apothecary behind the house. He labored six hours and produced nothing.

He had not picked up a physician’s manual until the age of forty, had not seriously studied the subject until he left his post with the Merchant Adventurers over a dispute concerning monopolies and came away with time on his hands. He did not like to talk about his newfound love of physic. What was there to say? How was he to explain such a late-arriving passion? Any serious attempt to justify it would make him look ridiculous. Had he always loved medicine yet lacked the courage to pursue it? Or was he a perpetual malcontent? He did not go inside for supper.

He had no words to explain to Anne why he loved the apothecary, why he spent hours in this dingy shed with its shining instruments and stacks of books that contained anatomic etchings pointing the way to a seamless interior world, a universe of vessels and joints, one in which the rules for health were as simple and symmetrical as the rules for love laid out by Saint Paul.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

In 1641, shortly before the civil war started, Walwyn had moved his family from London to Moorfields, with its sprawling green fields and fens drained for men’s leisure and women’s labor. He could no longer bear the stench of the city. In London, a butcher’s shop had been crammed against one side of the Walwyns’ narrow house and a tallow chandler’s had boxed them in on the other, so that the odor of animal flesh would drift in from the east and animal fat used for candles would choke them from the west. In Moorfields, Walwyn had promised, there would be no vile odors, no more distractions. Anne had warned against this reasoning. Moving north of the city wall was asking trouble to pay a visit, she told him. Sure enough, once they moved, things grew complicated, and Walwyn remained unsettled. Some days he swore he could hear sounds coming all the way from Bedlam—Bethlehem Hospital in Bishopsgate—and would not be able to do his work. Other days his ears picked up the cries coming from the dog skinner’s house a quarter of a mile away; these sounds were even worse. He began taking frequent trips by himself into the city.

On the way home after his encounter with the investigator, Walwyn had reached the Roman wall separating London from Moorfields and instinctively increased his pace. The wall stood a few hundred yards from the dog skinner’s house. He glanced up at the clearing sky. It was almost noon. His feet moved faster. From the north came a high-pitched yelp, followed by a burst of braying and barking. The dog skinner’s work was starting. Walwyn’s walk became a run. But the sound overtook him, as it always did.

To Walwyn the sound of those dogs was the sound of every creature that ever saw its end coming and fought back, that knew it would not win, would not survive, that understood it would fall, but that fought on, held on. To Walwyn that sound was the war, which he hated, which he mourned before it began, while his friends maintained with remarkable certainty that armed conflict for the sake of the people was necessary once in a while; armed conflict, they said, was propitious. He nodded when they said these things but he did not write any of their words down; he began to spit on their words in his sleep. To him their arguments marked some elemental failure, some corrosion of nature and imagination against which only love could possibly prevail, against which only love could be thrown, like a sparrow flings itself up against the sooty sky on its first flight, panicked and weightless, yet beating. Walwyn no longer trusted the ends to which the word
necessary
was applied. This was another reason he had stopped writing pamphlets.