She talked about her brother.
She did not mention Walwyn, not at first. She had no idea what to say about him; she suspected the child would judge her. But when she whispered Walwyn’s name, she thought she could hear the child burbling with laughter. And as she swept she listened to the tinkling sounds of distant bells coming in her direction, sounds that coursed up and down her spine, and the laughter of the child joined with the laughter of the bells and left her weak-kneed with joy. It was the first time since Walwyn had gone to the Tower that Rachel did not feel alone. And even when the sound of the bells became transformed into the ringing of the scavengers’ carts as they lurched down the street in her direction, still she felt no fear. She glanced up at the rusted sign hanging over Du Gard Gloves, a large glove with a gold-trimmed cuff, and she smiled; the child comforted her.
When thoughts of the future returned, she fought them off as best she could. She took up arms against the future. Her weapons were thread and needle. She began sewing baby clothes. They were so small—woolly hats and boots no larger than three fingers. She asked the child what color it wanted and the child said, Not green. So she sewed in yellow. She made a dress in yellow brocade from a row of fabric at the bottom of Mary’s window covering. She hoped Mary would not notice the missing piece. Again she asked the child its name; again it did not answer. But at night it would squeal with giggles that she could feel cascading up and down her body. She shook with its sound. She longed to write it down, to describe it, to send the sound to Walwyn in a letter. She found some old news pamphlets, and several times she tried to trace the alphabet from them. I can do this, she said to herself. This is not beyond me. But then Mary would come in to remind Rachel a customer was waiting.
During the same weeks, word reached London that the few Levelers still active in the Parliamentary army had managed to blunder another uprising. Cromwell had begun disbanding large sectors of his winning troops without troubling to pay their arrears, and a heavy-drinking corporal and Leveler sympathizer named Will Thompson grew enraged with this decision. Thompson organized several hundred soldiers to protest the policies of the general for whom they had fought. This sort of thing went on all the time now that England had no sovereign; this was what victory looked like. Thompson and his men marched forward, confident God was on the side of the poor; they were met, slaughtered, and left as carrion by another company in Cromwell’s army. Rachel heard the news from Elizabeth. Thompson and his ringleaders were executed in front of their men in a churchyard. The following night, Cromwell received an honorary degree from Oxford; two days later, he went bowling on the green at Magdalene College. Rachel wondered if Will Thompson had refused to wear a blindfold.
Several days after that, Mary mentioned in a brisk voice that she had seen Rachel making a dress out of a curtain. “Whose are those tiny clothes and why are you sewing them?” she demanded. Rachel said Mary should not be spying. Mary blushed but held her ground. Rachel listened, astonished, as a lie whistled out of her own mouth. She told Mary these were clothes for her expectant sister who lived in Essex. Rachel had no sister in Essex, but Mary did not know this. The two women did not divulge biographical details. They shared only the essentials. Rachel knew the precise dampness of air that caused Mary’s thumb joints to ache and what was required to ease them. Mary knew Rachel could not sleep when the moon was waxing. Rachel knew Mary attended the Church of the Refuge on Threadneedle Street, where the Huguenot pastor preached to his immigrant congregation that the higher powers of this world were being thrown down. Thrown where exactly, he never specified. He explained that Christ would be returning any day now, and the faithful must be careful lest they miss Him. And Rachel knew Mary was disappointed, for though she was very careful, Christ had not returned yet.
That night she began stuffing the corner of her shawl into the keyhole of her bedroom door so Mary could not peek through it. When she slept, she dreamed her brother called her a coward.
She tried to heed Elizabeth’s caution against contacting Walwyn. She understood it was not allowed; a woman in her position was not supposed to declare herself, to make public her situation. But she was growing angry. The future was continuing to intrude. It kept barging into her sleeping quarters at night, vexing her to no end; to make matters worse, dread had started sliding under the door with it. So, disregarding Elizabeth’s advice, she went ahead and tried to send Walwyn a message. Doing so required the help of Thom, the messenger boy who huddled in the alley behind Du Gard Gloves and who sometimes slept in the storeroom without Mary’s knowledge. Rachel did not disclose her condition to the boy; she suspected he would gossip. “Tell Mr. Walwyn I am in need of aid for myself and for Fifteen” was all she said. “And hurry.” She knew Walwyn’s wife referred to her children by numbers; she knew how many children the Walwyn household had. She prayed Walwyn would grasp what she meant; she prayed he would put fourteen and one together.
Thom made his way to the Tower, where Walwyn had remained with John, Overton, and Prince since the publication of John’s Second Part of England’s New Chains Discovered, which criticized the new government for being too much like the old government. Walwyn continued to deny any involvement in the pamphlet’s production. I am not the author, he said over and over to anyone who would listen; I am out of the Leveling business. At the same time, Walwyn was the author because he was John’s teacher; John’s wardrobe of ideas consisted almost entirely of hand-me-downs from Walwyn.
When a week passed with no word from Thom, a line appeared between Rachel’s eyebrows that did not soften when she slept. I will be whipped, she thought. Once I have this child, I will be whipped and cast into prison if I refuse to name the father. And if I do name the father, Walwyn’s wife and fourteen children will be publicly disgraced and humiliated. Their shame will be even worse than mine, because they are not expecting it.
In the mornings, ravenous and nauseated, she would pace from the hearth to the cupboard as she hunted for something to eat. From the doorway Mary would watch this performance, unimpressed. “If you spent as much time stitching gloves as circling the kitchen, we would be caught up on our orders,” she said. Rachel told Mary to mind her own business, which was not entirely fair. But she felt herself to be falling into some kind of a well or shaft, stony and bottomless, without a rope.
Several times she tried to tell Elizabeth she was with child. Whenever she started to speak, however, her friend interrupted. It turned out Elizabeth had a good deal to say now that her husband was in the Tower. Rachel could not squeeze in a word, could not find the right moment to tell her. Also, she was nervous; she feared how Elizabeth might react. Though she displayed little interest in the moral shortcomings of others, Elizabeth never hesitated to pass judgment on people she viewed as careless. In Elizabeth’s opinion, there was only one real sin, and that was irresponsibility.
From Elizabeth, Rachel learned that several hundred matrons sympathetic to the Levelers had besieged Parliament with a petition for the four Levelers’ release from the Tower. The officers had turned them away, told them to go home and wash their dishes: the law took no notice of married women. “You are your husbands’ property,” they said, and pushed them off the premises. The Levelers remained imprisoned. This fact did not seem to discourage Elizabeth.
“We will organize another petition,” she said one evening to Rachel. “We will put one thousand women’s signatures to it this time. Here—would you take him?” After handing her infant son to Rachel, who was sitting at the table, she opened the front door to air out her smoke-filled kitchen. The Lilburnes rented a three-room, three-floor lodging in seamy Southwark, south of the Thames and close to the Bishop’s stews, those brothels the church used to regulate. “If there is one thing the Levelers still have,” Elizabeth went on, returning to the table and beginning to chop onions, “it is our loyalty to family and our reputation as honest householders. The Council of State will not be able to slander us. They will not be able to ignore an army of God-fearin
g wives and matrons.”
“Not all of us are wives and matrons,” Rachel reminded her.
Elizabeth leaned into her knife. “What’s the matter? Have you gone missing your good humor today?”
Rachel started to speak, started to confess her situation, but again faltered. Her eyes had to say it for her.
“Why, what in the world is the matter?” Elizabeth spoke over the glad squeals of her middle child, two-year-old Tower, named for all the times his father had spent in prison. The boy sang and warbled in his pen in the corner; he was macerating a bowl of cherries with his fists.
Rachel’s eyes said: I am in dire straits.
Elizabeth’s eyes grew large.
But then Tower knocked his bowl upside down, and pits and purple juice flew everywhere. He began bawling. Elizabeth’s newborn, a tiny boy as lumpy and downy as a ripe peach, added his opinion from Rachel’s lap. Elizabeth’s eyes pulled reluctantly from Rachel to her sons. As she went over to Tower’s pen, she called out distractedly, “Aren’t you the lucky one, not having all these suckling mouths to run around feeding!”
Rachel’s face burned as if the wind had cut her. Elizabeth had not understood what she was trying to tell her. She helped clean up the spilled cherries, and she rocked the youngest one until he quieted. Later she tried to return to the conversation, but the shadows under her friend’s eyes suggested the moment had passed. “I’m worn to the bone,” Elizabeth said.
Nine
THOMAS BARTWAIN WAS paying a visit to Newgate.
Years had passed since his last time inside this prison. Normally his direct involvement with a suspect ended once he had written and signed the order of indictment. His business belonged in the early stages, he reminded himself; his business lay in determining if a case should go forward. Yet here he was, two nights before Rachel’s trial, rattling the gates of his least favorite place in London, announcing his credentials, demanding to be let in. The courtyard stank of gutted fish. “I will not go to the women’s ward,” he said to the warden, who came out to greet him. “Bring her down here, to meet me in the open. I will not set foot inside that building. It’s not safe.”
“It’s safer for you than for her,” the warden returned, though he did what Bartwain asked. A guard escorted Rachel downstairs into the courtyard.
When she saw who her visitor was, Rachel pulled her shawl around her shoulders.
“You’re sick,” Bartwain said gruffly. “Your eyes are weak and congested.” He shifted his weight—he was trying to stay off his gouty foot. He had no clear idea what he was doing there, he realized.
“What are you doing here?” Rachel asked.
Maybe it was Griffin’s fault. The prosecutor had irritated Bartwain beyond measure, reminding him of all the officers of the court and civil servants Bartwain had known who treated the law as a public means to a private end. “The law is not the means,” Bartwain had grumbled to his wife the day before. “The law is itself the end. The law is beautiful; the law is order. If we have not law, we have nothing. We descend to anarchy and noise, and one man will kill another for a roasted hen.”
“I’m roasting a hen now,” his wife had commented.
“How are you bearing up?” Bartwain said now to Rachel.
She answered with silence, clutching her shawl tight.
She thinks I make this kind of visit for everyone, he fumed. She has no idea how unusual this is, how I am extending myself beyond the bounds of ordinary duty.
“My wife—” he started.
Last night Mathilda had questioned him yet again regarding his handling of the case. “You never gave her a chance,” she said. “You never listened to her side.”
“I listened for two hours,” he’d defended himself. “She would not tell me her side. I pulled her into my chambers and said, Talk; she refused to.”
Mathilda gave him the look she usually reserved for children. “Maybe you did not ask her the right questions,” she said, and poked him in the belly, which he hated because it tickled. “Make it right, Thomas. Make it right or you are not the man I married.”
“But the law does not want me to do anything else. In the law’s eyes I have completed my assignment.”
“So?” She poked him a second time. “Have you read your Scripture?”
Not this again, he had thought.
“Read the commandment,” she urged, her cheeks dimpling as she sought to make her point. “Go back and read the greatest commandment. Then tell me your law is not lacking something.”
“The greatest commandment has nothing to do with this case. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, et cetera.”
“I don’t mean that one. I mean the other one. The one that comes after.”
“That’s not the greatest commandment. That’s the second commandment,” he said churlishly.
“They cannot be separated,” Mathilda argued. Then she added, loud enough that the mice hiding in the cupboards could hear: “Thomas Bartwain, love thy neighbor.”
The investigator pulled himself back to the present as he realized Rachel was speaking to him. “Why are you here?” she asked again.
“My wife sent me,” he admitted. “She sent me to see how you are bearing up.”
“But you are the one who put me here.”
“Yes.”
“So now you are returning to see the results of your handiwork? Are you impressed with yourself? Do I look sufficiently beaten?”
“That’s not what I—”
“You would like for me to die, wouldn’t you?”
“I do not want anyone to die. I simply fulfill my duty.”
“And what is that?” she burst out. “What is that word, duty, Investigator? Tell me that. Tell me how you do it. Maybe you learn it in books. For myself, I have had so many hands and fingers clawing at me my whole life long, telling me this and that and the other is my duty, telling me fifteen duties in a row and then reminding me nothing I do matters because God has already made up His mind about me, because God has already decided one way or another, that I can hardly see what I am obliged to do or not do in this life; I can hardly lay all my duties on the table!” It was her longest speech to him.
“Are you ready for your trial?” he said quietly. “You know you will have no counselor to help you.”
“No, sir!” she shouted. “No, sir, I am not.”
“You are better than this, Rachel Lockyer,” he said, surprised by his own words. Since when had his wife started talking through him?
“I was once,” Rachel replied tersely. Then she called for the warden and told him she wanted to go back to the women’s ward. She left Bartwain standing by himself in the courtyard, listening to the groan of the windmill.
By ten o’clock that night the third floor of the prison was quiet except for the shuddering sobs of one young woman who had arrived a few hours earlier. The other inmates had been talking about her. This was a country girl, they said, who went mad after losing her infant, one her stepfather had sired. She stabbed the man with a knife, after which she tried to steal his silver. Her stepfather survived the assault and recovered his silver, for his wife’s daughter had poor aim and had opened up his shinbone rather than his stomach. He sent for the authorities and washed his hands of her, thereby ruining the same girl twice.
When an hour had passed and the girl was still hiccupping, Rachel left her pallet and crept over to her. She could hear the guards playing a drinking game outside in the corridor. The newcomer was lying thin and flat under a dirty shawl. There was little Rachel could do. Should she say something? She had no words of comfort. So she sat beside her. She thought about that story in the book of Daniel, about the den of lions and how God shut the lions’ mouths. She supposed God did that so Daniel would not be harmed. But Rachel was less concerned about Daniel than she was about the lions. Daniel made his way out and became a famous prophet. Of course he did. But what about the lions? What was it like for them, running hea
dlong into God like that? He sewed their mouths shut, so their roar had no sound.
The girl poked her head out. “What’s your name?” Her thinning hair revealed a patchy scalp. She was possibly thirteen.
“Rachel.”
“Mine’s Eve.” She sat up, cross-legged. The two of them looked at each other in the shadows from the wall burners. Each could barely make the other out.
Eve told Rachel she came from farms where they bred horses for a living.
“Where do you get the horses?” Rachel asked.
“We take them from the moors; we take them wild and we break them.” Then she asked if Rachel had ever seen a Wiltshire mare caught and brought to the farms for breeding. When Rachel said no, the girl’s eyes seemed to darken. She said once a man had ridden a mare long enough, the mare would accept things as they were during the day.
Rachel looked up to see two night watchmen patrolling, clicking their sticks.
But at night, Eve went on, when the other horses were sleeping, the mare would rise up on two legs and scream. She had heard the sound, she said. It would scream for an hour.
Then Eve buried her face in her shawl, which was crusty with dried stains, and Rachel guessed this was the covering in which she had wrapped her newborn before she lost it. Swiftly she drew the girl to her. “You will tear me from myself, then,” Eve cried out, to no one, to the walls. But her words came too loud, and the next minute the watchmen came. They took Eve away; they pulled her from Rachel’s arms. They took her to ease their boredom. They were not well paid, these guards; they were not in line for raises. So they cut their losses with girls. Being young and of the rural sort, Eve did not have money to fend them off. Snarling, Rachel tore into them, using her teeth and the rusted hinges of her wrist irons; she fought to drive them off. When that did not work she lifted her own skirts and offered herself as a distraction. Through it all Eve kept squalling. The guards muzzled her with a rag another woman had used to stanch the monthlies. They spat on her balding head and shoved her to the floor. Then they dragged her by the arms and hair outside the ward and into the passageway, behind the black storage barrels. When they finished with Eve they came back for Rachel, who by that time had found a wooden torch with a jagged three-inch splinter on the end of it; she lit it and shook it at them, shaking uncontrollably. They laughed and let her be; they tossed Eve in a heap at her feet.
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