This was too much. “I do not mock the law,” he shouted, rising to his feet one stiff leg at a time, abandoning his mousetrap. “I follow every jot and tittle!”
“But that is your problem. You never bother to check the jots and tittles. You never ask if they still make sense.”
“And what do you know?” he growled, his nose reddening. “I’ll tell you, Mrs. Bartwain, if you get sidetracked into asking such questions, you will lose your bearings. Trust me; I have learned this from experience. The law protects us from the insidious and irrational aspects of human nature by asking us to determine only if the suspect in question committed the hideous deed. To ask why she did it, to wonder about her life, to circumvent the parameters of law by probing whatever secret and inward instincts lie beneath each human surface, is to show pity where none has been merited; it is to place a higher value on the perpetrator’s life than on the victim’s!”
“You’re frightened, aren’t you?” Mathilda said, not unkindly. “You’re frightened and you’re tired.”
Then she wheeled around and marched back up to her bedchamber, leaving Bartwain red-nosed and wordless.
Eight
RACHEL HAD DISCOVERED she was with child on the morning of her brother’s execution. She was standing in a sea green dress at the edge of a crowd when the revelation came. She was watching the soldiers circling, the way they breathed and blew like eager little gods, creating clouds that mingled with the mist and clung to the churchyard grounds, the tents of Captain Savage’s company snapping their colors in the distance. She was listening to six musketeers begging Robert Lockyer to wear a blindfold because they did not want to look their friend in the eye when they shot him. She was studying Robert, who looked even younger than he had the previous winter; she could see his shoulders shivering. She stood on the flattened grass, missing Walwyn, waiting; all these things were spinning around her, and suddenly, there it was. Rachel knew.
Conception is a strange word. One conceives in different ways. An idea can be conceived. So can a plan for a cathedral. A philosophy student conceives a way through a logic problem. A spider conceives a web. Conceiving is creation, but before it is creation it is mischief. And before it is mischief it is faith.
For Rachel the discovery had taken place in St. Paul’s churchyard, Elizabeth holding her up on one side, Mary bracing her on the other. It was late spring, nearly four weeks past Easter, and she had not seen her brother in months. Two days before, a mutiny had broken out among the lower ranks of Robert’s company, and a dozen soldiers, Robert among them, had snatched their captain’s flag and holed up in an abandoned church, refusing to return the colors until they received their past-due wages. Our families are starving, they had said; give us what we are owed. Their superiors replied: You will get what you are owed when you are dead. Robert lost his temper and started shouting. Then General Oliver Cromwell had shown up, “breathing forth nothing but death to them all,” as John Lilburne later wrote, and quelled the skirmish. He let most of the mutinying troops go with a warning, but he kept Robert back. He wanted to teach his men a lesson. This is the ringleader, he said; this one supports the Levelers’ Agreement of the Free People of England. Cromwell did not know that the Levelers had never paid any attention to Robert. Cromwell did not know that Robert never led anything in his life except his sister by the elbow, and even then he was not too successful.
As Rachel watched the musketeers forming a reluctant line in the churchyard, she happened to glance down at her abdomen, and the universe shifted. Either that, or her place in the universe shifted. It was nothing she saw or physically felt. It bore no relation to the senses. She simply knew. She talked to God. She said: God, is this what is happening now? And God said, Yes. So she asked what God wanted. She said: There is no place for this kind of gift, if that is what You are giving. And God said, Find one. It was her mother’s God talking to her.
She sagged and buckled.
“Rachel,” Elizabeth whispered urgently through the spitting mist, through the squall of the gathering throng. “Let us take you home.”
She pushed herself up. No. I will stay with my brother. She said it without saying it. She gripped Elizabeth’s hot hand and the words traveled that way instead, through their fingers. Elizabeth always said the real truths were the simple ones; the real truths consisted of deeds, not words. So Rachel pressed her friend’s hand and Elizabeth crushed hers back and they talked to each other that way. And when Mary, who did not speak their language, tried to pull them out of the crowd, back toward Warwick Lane and the safety of the glove shop, Elizabeth snarled, “Let her be; she does not want to go.” And Mary shook her head and was angry with both of them.
Five times that morning the musketeers asked Robert to wear a blindfold, and five times Robert declined. First he said he wanted to see his executioners with his own eyes. Then he declared his cause was just and he need not be ashamed. The third time they asked, he said he welcomed death and did not fear its face; the fourth, that he could not believe so small a thing as demanding an honest wage should give the army occasion to take his life. He was doing the Levelers proud. The last time they asked, he said nothing, only gave the sign to fire, raising two scrawny arms over his head and throwing his gaze skyward, so that the final sight to greet his eyes was the space where the cathedral used to have a spire before lightning had razed it. In the same moment Rachel lowered her head into Elizabeth’s neck, and six muskets sputtered and roared. She kept herself still and she counted backward from fifteen, which was how long Walwyn once told her it took God to welcome by name any innocent who had suffered. She remembered asking why it took fifteen seconds, why God could not name the soul immediately. And he had grazed her cheek with his finger and said, Because there is always a line of souls waiting.
The soldiers laid Robert’s body on the grass. Elizabeth and Mary let go of Rachel’s arms, and she pushed through the throng to say goodbye to him. She sank to her hands and knees in front of him. But that was not enough; that was not close enough. She laid herself on top of him. She blanketed Robert with her body. She rested her forehead against his forehead and stared into his open eyes; she whispered in his ear as the soil around his head went dark and wet. I told you not to do anything foolish, she cried. I told you. Look what has happened. You said you did not need a mother and now look. She begged him not to go. Do not leave me, she said; don’t you dare leave me alone with my life. Walwyn is locked up in the Tower. I cannot lose you and him both.
Then Elizabeth was grasping her, rocking and pulling her off Robert’s body. As the two women struggled to their feet they came upon a circle of soldiers sucking on long pipes, and Rachel looked for the man with the finest uniform. When she found him she told him she wanted her brother’s body. “Let me have it,” she pleaded, plucking at his felted sleeve, “so I may give him a good burial.” The colonel shook with suppressed laughter. He said he could not give her anything—the Levelers had commandeered the corpse. They are taking it away, he told her. It is theirs; they have bargained for it.
“For what?” Elizabeth interjected. “I know the Levelers. They would do no such thing.”
“They would,” the colonel replied. “It is useful to them. They specialize in the art of agitation. They are taking Robert for their symbol, their hero. They are going to turn his death into a martyrdom.”
Elizabeth, furious: “On whose orders?”
“John Lilburne’s,” another soldier said. “He sent a message from the Tower.”
Elizabeth turned a mottled red.
Rachel exploded. “How dare you use a young man’s death for political gain!” she shouted at the colonel, though she should have been shouting at John Lilburne.
The soldiers howled. They said some people were more valuable in death than in life, and Robert was one of them. “He mutinied against his captain,” one said. “He forgot his place. We have no use for him in a professionally trained force. But the Levelers will make him live forever. The Leveler
s would immortalize a half-wit if it suited their purpose. They would turn a bastard into the Christ child if they could.”
With those words Rachel remembered her discovery, and her knees buckled again.
Elizabeth intervened. “Please forgive her, sir, she is struck dumb with grief and has no husband to help her,” she implored, pulling Rachel back to her feet and in the same moment tugging loose the ties under her friend’s bonnet so she could breathe. The soldiers let them leave. As the women slipped out of the churchyard, Mary trailing behind, one of the soldiers noticed that the dark-haired one, the one with the brother, had green eyes that could clear right through a man; she had eyes, he said, that bruised.
The next morning Rachel rose before dawn to the sound of trees. A cold April wind was tearing through the poplars, and moonlight revealed a carriageway slick with fallen flowers. Some of the petals had escaped into the ditches and kennels that lined either side of Warwick Lane. There, swirling in circles, they joined the rainwater and detritus of the city on a slow southward journey that would end where it always did, in the waiting Thames.
Rachel washed her face and neck in the basin she and Mary shared. She returned the bowl to the shelf that sat between their upstairs sleeping quarters, tied her hat tight to keep the wind from snatching it, and slid downstairs, passing through the darkened shop and slipping out the door before Mary could call for her. She bent her body against the wind. She was in the dark, marching. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from noticing the cold. She tried not to look down at her abdomen, tried not to think about the previous day’s revelation. This did not work.
A few weeks before, armed officers in the service of the new Puritan government had dragged William Walwyn from his bed in Moorfields in the middle of the night. They pulled a screaming Richard out of his father’s arms and passed the boy over to Anne, who took him without a word, her eyes never leaving her husband. “What have you done this time?” was what she said to him. The soldiers hauled Walwyn off to the Tower to await charges of treasonous writing, though the pamphlet in question was John’s. Rachel learned of the arrest a few days later from Elizabeth, whose husband was also taken. Elizabeth’s left eyebrow rose very high as she delivered the news. “It is best if you do not try to contact any of them,” she told Rachel, by which she meant that only wives were supposed to visit.
The funeral procession had its starting point near the vacant stalls at the western end of the Smithfield market. Behind the stalls Rachel could see the slaughterhouse and, beyond that, a shadowy woods with elm and beech trees still thin and white from winter. For a moment she considered escaping the morning’s events by hiding in the quiet of those elms. She did not want a processional. But Robert had not died privately, so he was not going to be buried privately either. She guessed he would have been proud. It had taken three years, but the Levelers had finally adopted him.
First ten, then twenty, then thirty figures gathered in the semidarkness around a horse-drawn cart that carried Robert’s body. Rachel saw Katherine Chidley, the haberdasher. She saw Gilbert Mabbott, the newsman, who arrived as the processional was starting. Mabbott waved when he saw her coming; he joined her for the first half mile. She was grateful to him. She asked if he had any news from the Levelers in the Tower. She was referring to Walwyn, though she did not say his name. She was wondering how she was going tell Walwyn she was with child. “They are all right,” Mabbott said, “but angry.” He was referring to Walwyn too. The newsman stayed by Rachel’s side until someone told them women were supposed to be at the rear of the processional, and Rachel dropped back, disappearing before Mabbott could explain that she was the dead man’s sister. The leaders of the march did not recognize her. Robert belonged to them now.
She saw William Kiffin, her former pastor, scraping dung off his boots at the side of the carriageway. She hid her face in her scarf and waited for him to pass.
Overnight the wind had swept away all clouds. When the sun broke over the tops of the vendors’ stalls it peeled the shadows off the mourners’ faces. The processional began coiling, a long leviathan, heading south to Newgate Street, then east toward Cheapside, gathering momentum and onlookers as six trumpeters sounded the call up front. Many in the crowd wore ribbons and scarves of the same sea green color as Rachel’s dress. To make the color, they dipped a piece of cloth in blue dye taken from the woad plant, and then they dipped the same cloth in a solution of alum and urine, because it cost nothing. The onlookers might not know Robert, but they knew the Leveler color; they knew what the color represented. They emptied out of their flats and boarding-house rooms and thatched-roof houses and joined the funeral walk. They saw the coffin draped in the hue of the ocean and they understood.
From Walwyn Rachel had learned that the sea green of the Levelers stood for all those places in Scripture where the poor, the meek, the hungry, and the desolate are said to be wider and vaster than all the waters in the ocean. He had explained this to her amid a crushing din of apprentices and agitators who had gathered, stamping and singing, around John’s table at the Whalebone, cups of wine and ale lifted high and spilling as John and Overton shouted out their latest victories, called for freemen to be given the vote, demanded just wages for soldiers, denounced passive obedience, and ridiculed the divine right of kings. This was back when the Levelers still thought they were winning. As the men sang and whooped, Walwyn leaned over to her table and murmured nonsensical things; her ears burned, and she studied his mouth as he delivered the words. Sometimes she could not even hear what he said, but she watched his lips in earnest. The others around them cheered and chattered. All the while Rachel waited for the wry grin that would creep up on him unnoticed, and the red curve of his lips, almost like a girl’s; she waited for the those lips to touch the rim of his cup; she wanted to watch him swallow. Her ears would sizzle; her ears would suggest she sat too close to the fire. Near the end of that evening she asked him if Scripture ever said that the poor being so vast in number was something to be corrected. She wanted to know if Scripture said the poor should be made rich. Walwyn looked at her and his brown eyes softened. He said he supposed the writers of Scripture didn’t always know what they meant. They wanted the poor to be raised high, to defend themselves; but they also thought only the meek would inherit the earth. So there is a problem, Rachel had said. Yes, Walwyn had replied, his smile broadening; yes, there is a problem. And though the other Levelers roared and drank and crashed all over them, she and Walwyn did not notice.
After the funeral marchers passed Newgate Street, they began the long climb north toward Moorfields. The processional would finish up in New Churchyard with a hastily dug grave, a reading of Scripture, and impassioned political speeches. By the end of the day, Freeborn John would be writing a martyrdom pamphlet in Robert’s honor from the Tower. As Rachel walked, she could see flung out before her a great expanse of humankind, two thousand now or more, a tide of green streaming through the carriageway, causing more doors and shutters to open. Onlookers pointed and waved from their second- and third-floor windows. These were candle makers and butchers and salt-and-pepper grinders and tanners and tailors and match vendors, men and women who toiled and labored for their living, all marching. Children thrust their heads out of boarding-house doors to marvel at the sea of people and to test their elders with questions. Who is it? Who is the man that has died? And the answer, thrown up from the swell of bodies, again and again, with a different voice each time, A martyr of the people. And though Rachel did not want her brother’s death used for political gain, her heart could not help but pound harder and faster as they neared the end of the march. When they passed the Roman wall and crossed into the rolling farms of Moorfields, the mourners had grown to three thousand strong, their scarves and ribbons flapping against the fields, flashing like iridescent scales on a sea snake as it passes through shallow water. In that moment she felt herself to be almost a new woman, and London almost a new city.
In the days that had followed,
Rachel began talking to the child.
First silently, cautiously, in her head, while she was sewing a glove. She would loop a stitch and drop it, her hand falling slack. Then Mary would stare crossly at her until she returned to her task. She wondered how long it would take Mary to cast her out once she learned what her assistant was hiding.
Next she started speaking to the child out loud. She wanted to see how she sounded as a mother, even though at the time she was only a few months along. She experimented while sweeping the walk. She was trying not to worry about the future. Whenever the future invaded her thoughts, she despaired. Staying in the day was not too encouraging either, but at least it did not send her into the abyss; at least it did not pitch her into the pit like the future did. She asked the child its name; of course it didn’t answer. She asked again, pushing her broom harder. If she listened hard enough, she could pretend she heard it gabbling. She told the child who she was. “I am Rachel Lockyer, glovemaker,” she announced, then glanced around, expecting Mary to laugh at her. But Mary was not outside.
She told the child about the world. She talked about the turtles. She talked about owls. Recently Rachel had noticed a pair of screech owls nesting near the Smithfield market. They called one way when they were mating and another way when they were hunting moles. She mimicked their sounds for the child’s benefit. She explained the difference between calfskin and sheepskin in the design and manufacture of gloves. She told the child she was too old to be a mother. She did not give her exact age, but that was because she had lost count. She said she was born and reared in London and was sick to death of war and all it had wreaked on those she loved. She explained the war to the child. She said the reason no one understood the war was that it had two parts. The first part had been between the king and the army, and the army had won. The second part was between the army and the people, and the people were losing. Between parts one and two, the Levelers had changed sides. So while they’d been on the winning side in the war against the king, they were now on the losing side in the war against the army.
Accidents of Providence Page 9