Accidents of Providence

by Stacia M. Brown

  She was brought to Newgate on a bright and windless morning under a sky spilling with starlings and thrushes. A windmill was bolted to the roof, its revolving blades designed to pull air into the prison. Starlings soared over the blades as Rachel passed through the iron gates. Their wings flashed silver and white.

  Her first act as prisoner was to pay garnish—to bribe the warden for a blanket and a nettle-filled pallet. Then she paid two more farthings for the right not to be violated. An aide walked her to the third floor, which housed the women’s ward. The place was a shipwreck. Destitute women lay strewn and hulking across the soiled floors. The aide directed her to a dry patch along the southern wall, where she crouched gingerly, clutching the edge of her pallet as she laid it down.

  No one talked to her, so for a while she talked to herself—that is, she talked to her brother. Not for long, and not so anyone else could hear. Just long enough to distract herself. She explained she was sorry to be troubling him, but she had no one else.

  No one else for what, she imagined Robert replying.

  “To talk with.”

  Why don’t you talk with Walwyn? he sniped, peevish.

  So Rachel defended Walwyn to her deceased sibling, which meant, of course, that she defended Walwyn to herself.

  “He has a great deal to be doing now that he is out of the Tower,” she said. “He will come when he can.” This explanation failed to satisfy her brother. Robert began talking back to her, as any dream will when we have tried too hard to contain it. Several prisoners lying nearby glanced up, but the guards paid no attention. It was not unusual, a woman talking to herself in Newgate.

  In the afternoon, she had a flesh-and-blood visitor. Unable to find Rachel at Warwick Lane, Walwyn had traveled south to the Lilburnes’ lodgings in Southwark. She was not there either, so he’d wound up retracing his steps to the investigator’s chambers in Old Bailey, where he’d demanded to know Rachel’s whereabouts. “You’re late,” Bartwain had said, not without pleasure, when Walwyn barged in. “You should have looked after her sooner. They’ve taken her to Newgate.” At this point Walwyn threatened to beat him, but the investigator snorted and waved him off. “There is no love of violence in you,” Bartwain said, which was true. Walwyn left the courthouse, crossed Newgate Street, and made his way the short distance to the prison, where he bribed the warden to be allowed inside. Everything at Newgate cost something. Water cost the most. Halfway up the stairs he remembered he had forgotten to bring any. Delayed yet again, he ran downstairs, exited the gates, and hurried for the nearest public tap, which piped water from Tyburn Springs to Cheapside. He emptied his flask of wormwood, refilled it with water, and returned to the prison. He paid the same bribe a second time—in his absence the guards had changed posts—and retraced his steps to the third floor, where an inebriated aide gave him thirty supervised minutes on the women’s ward.

  When Walwyn saw Rachel he did not ask what had happened. The question did not occur to him. He was not concerned with her guilt. He was consumed with his own. “There you are,” she said, over and over. “You were gone so long.” She pushed him away when he tried to gather her close. “I cannot help myself,” he whispered, “I am so terribly glad to see you.” “You abandoned me,” she said. She spoke as if they were all alone, as if they were arguing in the bed of the travelers’ inn near Warwick Lane, the travelers’ inn having been their place. He could still see her there, how the light from the thick panes used to fall on her, used to catch in her hair. He used to try to persuade her to stay with him a little longer. She would say, briskly, as she yanked the blankets off his body, forcing him to rise, shivering, his white buttocks exposed: “You are the one who has to go; you are the one who has a household.” “But you are the one who keeps leaving,” he would point out as she reached for the door.

  Now she was grasping his wrists. “I think I have committed an awful sin.”

  “What sin is that?” Her nails were in his flesh.

  She was shaking her head. “It is the worst thing a person can do.”

  “Now, this is my entire—”

  “You don’t know what happened,” she said savagely, reading his thoughts. “How can you think this is your fault when you don’t know what happened?”

  “It’s the truth. I’m responsible. They had me locked up nine months in the Tower. I failed to help you.”

  “You had no hand in this,” she uttered so low he could hardly hear. “This one was mine. It belonged to me.”

  “So there was a child,” he said before he could think better of it.

  With those words she pulled away and smacked her head against the limestone wall. The first time it happened he was too stunned to react. The second time it happened he was angry. He grabbed her, wrestling her from the wall as she scratched and fought, the thin cords of her neck straining. A welt bloomed along her brow. He held her, hard and unrelenting. Even as she tried to pry his fingers away, she seemed to be waiting for him, expecting him to say something, so he whispered, “Losing something is no sin, Rachel. It is loss. Loss is not the same as sin.”

  “But what if it is,” she cried, and buried her face in his cloak. They were seated on the floor, under the burners, observed by women in the shadows, women nursing children, women standing and squatting and sleeping, the stronger ones rifling through the goods of those who had fallen.

  “How do you go to prison for six hours and already have flea stings,” Walwyn murmured, studying the bite marks on her exposed neck.

  “It’s been nine hours,” she said into his cloak, as if that settled it.

  He wanted to kiss her. He didn’t think he should. He was wrong, of course. “Why haven’t you kissed me,” she plaintively said. But when he went to brush her lips, she said it was too late, said he was too late, and pushed his face away. He held her hands instead. He held them and he kissed each one of her fingers, each of the rough knuckles, and was finished too fast. He went in the reverse direction and kissed all ten knuckles again, though Rachel did not appear to be paying attention. Her thoughts were wandering; her thoughts had limped off somewhere, over his shoulder.

  Walwyn stayed beside her on the rancid floors and shared the flask of wormwood. When she discovered it held water, she called him a silly old man. He promised to bring her something stronger. He rubbed liniment into her ankles where the leg irons were tearing into them. He did not speak again about the child. When he massaged her wrists, she cried. “I have missed you,” she said.

  That night John Lilburne refused to draft a Leveler petition advocating for Rachel’s release. He said his conscience would not allow him to defend a murdering mother. Elizabeth Lilburne shouted obscenities at her husband’s back as he retreated to the privy.

  Elizabeth visited Rachel in the morning. She thought ahead before she made the trip; she came better equipped than Walwyn. She brought a handful of shillings, a rye loaf, a blanket, and wine. When she returned home to Southwark, her skin crawled with lice. Her daughter, five-year-old Elizabeth, whom they called Young Elizabeth to distinguish her from her mother, was awake and waiting for her, playing with two spoons in the kitchen. John was still sleeping.

  After Elizabeth left, Rachel tried to block out her surroundings by pulling the blanket over her head. The stench of the women’s ward was overpowering, the air stifling and warm. Finally she tossed aside the blanket and sat, her back against the wall. This was not the time to be thinking. This was not the time, not the place, to be reflecting on anything. Yet here she was.

  The investigator’s questions had come so fast, and harder than she’d anticipated. It was like the game Walwyn had described to her—tennis. Rachel had never seen that sport, but Walwyn had visited Hampton Court once and observed a match; this was before the Puritans condemned sports on the Sabbath. He told her the players hit the ball so fast they sometimes struck each other in the face with it. That was how Rachel had felt sitting across from Thomas Bartwain in his chambers trying to return his volley of questio
ns.

  She glanced up to find a prisoner crawling toward her, a cloth rag trailing between her legs. The woman gave her name as Nell. She was missing most of her teeth, which caused the lower half of her face to fold in around itself, like a weasel curling into a ball.

  Nell was kind to Rachel. She showed her the cleanest place to relieve herself—a slop bucket in the west corner of the ward—and she told her which women and guards to avoid. She offered water from her own supply. “They make you pay for it otherwise,” she explained.

  That afternoon the two women lay side by side on their mats and whispered to each other, trying not to attract attention. During the night, Nell warned, the ward would take on a bitter chill, and the guards would creep up and down looking for any woman grown too cold or weak to move. When they found such a woman, they would go through all her clothing. Then they would go through all her children, if she had brought them.

  “Did you bring yours?” Nell wondered.

  “My clothing or my children?”

  “Your children.”

  “No,” Rachel managed to say.

  Nell cocked her head. “You don’t have them, or you didn’t bring them?”

  “I don’t have them.”

  “Lucky.” She nodded vigorously. “Lucky you do not, for then what would you do with them?”

  In the evening the guards came for Nell and hauled her away. The whole thing went so fast it took a minute for Rachel to grasp what had happened.

  Later she realized the guards hadn’t gone about their task correctly. At midnight on the day of a prisoner’s execution, the bellman was supposed to stand outside the condemned’s cell and ring a hand bell. Then someone would read a sermon or recite Scripture, and in the morning the guards would escort the prisoner to a mule cart that would take the person to the colossal scaffold at Tyburn, stopping along the way for crowds to gawk and spit, and pausing to toll the bells of St. Sepulchre. No one had remembered to do these things for Nell. When the guards came for her, she was so startled she soiled herself. Rachel was lying beside her when it happened. She called out right away when she saw the helmets coming; she tried to warn her. But the guards dragged Nell out by her hair. “Filthy slut, it is time to meet your maker,” they said.

  How could they neglect the chimes and forget the final sermon? Just an hour earlier Nell was telling Rachel how much she wanted one. She wanted the deacon of Newgate to place his hands on her head, to say God would love her in the next life as long as she repented in this. But the guards swept her off before she could ask.

  Alone again, Rachel dragged her pallet to the warmest corner of the ward, under a spitting burner, away from the other women. She tried talking to her brother, but he was not paying attention. After a while she curled up on top of the lice and stopped talking altogether.

  She’d first met William Walwyn more than three years before, during an evening of pelting rain that turned to rime along the windowpanes before the night was through. She met him because she was in a fight with her brother. At the time, Robert was nineteen and a private in the Parliamentary army. Robert had ideas. When he announced he was going to the Whalebone tavern to join the Levelers and fight for the poor and the workingman, Rachel had gone along to argue him out of it. She was fifteen years his senior and worried about his safety. He elbowed her; he told her to stop acting like his mother. “I am your mother,” she had said. Brother and sister were inseparable.

  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 cou
ld 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.