Accidents of Providence

by Stacia M. Brown

  Chidley, nodding, glided to the stairs and descended them with a fat swish. From there she let herself out.

  Alone again, Rachel and Mary eyed each other. Mary said she was disappointed in Rachel.

  Rachel said she was disappointed in Mary. “You let that woman into my chambers. How could you?”

  “My husband’s good name is the only thing I have,” Mary declared. “It is all I possess now that he is gone. I will not have you under this roof if you bring shame to his name. Do you understand? I will not tolerate it! Any woman who gives birth to a bastard will find no safe harbor at Du Gard Gloves. Now go sweep the walk.”

  Rachel said she would do it right after breakfast.

  “Do it now!” her employer shouted, screwing up her thin face. “I cannot tolerate the sight of you.”

  Again Rachel had hunted down Thom. Again she asked the boy to deliver her message. “What message?” Thom had replied. Again she slapped him. Thom paled with unshed tears. “Tell Mr. Walwyn I am in need of aid,” she said, kissing his cheek roughly. “I’m sorry. I’m begging you. Quickly. Get past the moat this time.” Thom sped off, his legs churning; he did not like being slapped. He did not come back.

  During the same days London descended into a strange stew of smoke and heat and insidious humidity. The air swept in from the south. It invaded the city. Women on their way to market pushed their sleeves high past the elbows, their palms slippery as they balanced baskets of bread and apples on their shoulders. The heat wave made it harder for Rachel to sleep. Nights were the only time she could escape the prying eyes of others, so she would throw her robe open in the dark, her skin parched, her nipples cracked and aching. Long blue veins had begun to spin themselves around her swollen abdomen.

  When she was not staying awake brooding about the future, she was staying awake worrying about Elizabeth. For two days after the passing of her sons, Rachel’s best friend had lain unmoving, head to the wall, neither eating nor drinking nor rising to use the house of office. On the third morning she had hauled herself up with a single shuddering breath, wrapped herself in her husband’s dressing gown, the first thing her hand found in the dark, and crept downstairs to the kitchen, where she stood and boiled a pot of oats for her one remaining child, five-year-old Elizabeth, whose eyes were like free-blown glass, swollen and translucent.

  John had done what he could to help. For the remaining days of the summer he had stayed by his wife’s side, writing treatises on government at night while she slept and moistening her face with lemon in the daytime to lessen the scarring from the smallpox. But then Elizabeth grew well enough to remember she disliked it when he hovered, and a relieved John returned to his work, pouring everything he had, everything he knew, into his Leveler causes. In record time he had completed a scathing treatise that accused the new republican government of treason against the people of England. John titled it An Impeachment of High Treason against Oliver Cromwell and His Son-in-Law, and he dedicated it to his three friends still locked in the Tower. The treatise accomplished what John wanted. Like clocks with perfect weights, five officers arrived right on time at the Lilburnes’ door. They left without him, John putting on a show of resistance for the neighbors, but they returned later, as he knew they would. They dragged him, noble and remonstrating, before the attorney general. When John demanded to know the nature of the charges against him, the attorney general said seditious pamphleteering. When John denied that the new Parliament wielded any lawful authority over him, the attorney general recommitted him to the Tower. Rachel assumed this was what John wanted. In the midst his grief, Freeborn John had begun to fester. He missed Walwyn in the Tower. He missed the Tower. At this point he would have settled for a straw mat in Fleet Prison or the Clink, almost any form of imprisonment being preferable to time spent in his own house, where the very walls were weeping.

  When he returned to prison John left his wife and daughter behind. Rachel began making trips across the Thames to check on both Elizabeths. She fried eggs in Elizabeth’s pan, overcooking everything. It didn’t matter. Her friend would not eat. Rachel told her to make the most of this time without her husband. “He’ll be back soon enough,” she said. “Don’t spend your time wallowing. Before you know it he’ll be sitting at your table again, waiting for his rye loaf, telling you to fetch the kindling when the fire has gone out, and him in his stocking feet.” Several times Rachel came within a whisper of confessing her condition. But if it was hard to say anything earlier, it was twice as hard now. The pen where Tower used to sit and mash his cherries sat empty in the corner of the kitchen.

  Rachel did not find the courage to speak until the end of the summer, one afternoon when she had traveled to Southwark to help Elizabeth distribute another petition for the Levelers’ release. Elizabeth was rising to gather her daughter’s cloak when Rachel flung out an arm to stop her and said, quickly, before she could think better of it, “Elizabeth, please listen to me. I am going to have a child.”

  Elizabeth stared, then steered an uneven berth around the table to the door, which she yanked open, letting in the sound of gulls and the smell of rot from the river. She had been drinking wine earlier.

  “Did you hear me?” Rachel asked, glancing down at Young Elizabeth, who was seated at the table, studying her wooden doll.

  “Hear you?” Elizabeth turned. “How could I not? And did you think I failed to notice anything earlier? I am not an idiot. You are larger than a house.”

  “Then why didn’t—”

  “What is there to say? What could I possibly say to someone who has lost her mind? You have become the worst thing a woman can be. You have become . . . impractical!” The scars left by her fever were blazing. “How are you going to pay for its upkeep? You can hardly provide for yourself. Are you going to ask Walwyn to pay for it? He has fourteen already, and he is no grand landowner!”

  Young Elizabeth covered her doll’s ears.

  Rachel said, “Shhh, your daughter, she doesn’t—”

  Elizabeth exploded. “What do you know about children? Nothing! Do you know what it is like to have a howling babe feeding and flailing all over you day and night for months at a time? How are you going to manage it? And you sweeping out the store and stitching hides for that Huguenot every hour of day and night, what will you do? Will you strap the child to your shoulders? Will you lug it around like a flour sack? And what happens when they come after you and demand a public penance? They will come after you, you know. What happens when they pull Walwyn to the whipping post too? They will take down the other Levelers with him; they love to paint us all with the same brush and color. Will you carry your bastard on your back when you are sitting in Bridewell? Who will feed it then? How dare you be so reckless!”

  Rachel blanched.

  “Furthermore,” Elizabeth went on, “do you know what it is like to have a child and then lose it? Do you?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “No. That’s right. No, you do not! You would not be so quick to twine your legs around a man if you knew what happens once you become untangled. You would not find him so irresistible then. I tell you, children are a burden and a curse.” She glanced over at her daughter, who had laid her head down on the table, its surface scored and grooved from Tower’s eager stabbings when he was learning to use a fork. “They are a cross too heavy to bear,” she continued hoarsely. “They cough and they retch and they catch fevers. They cry and they cannot breathe and then they die. They fall prey to one hundred wretched fates the world has in store for them. Are you prepared to bury what you love if God decides it is time? How large is your heart?”

  “Please. Please, please, don’t do this,” Rachel begged. “I cannot do this alone.”

  “Pshaw!” Elizabeth spat, an odd sound that emptied into a sob. “I don’t want to hear it. You have been irredeemably careless.”

  Elizabeth’s daughter lifted her head and began to cry, great wretched whoops that turned into hiccups and then into ominous belches. Eli
zabeth went to the girl, scooped her up, and deposited her on the staircase. “Go upstairs. Go upstairs and stop crying or you will make yourself throw up.” Her voice held no sympathy. She turned back to Rachel. “You are in these straits by your own hand. You took something that was not yours. You are the vainest and most self-important person I have known.” Her eyes had begun filling. “And that includes my husband!” But as she returned to the table, she placed her hand over Rachel’s. Outside, two streetwalkers were arguing over something they had found in an alley.

  “How can I bring a child into this world?” Rachel, stricken, finally whispered.

  Elizabeth nodded, swiped angrily at her cheeks, nodded again, glanced at the place on the table where Tower used to bang his fists at the sight of beets. “How can you not?” was all she said.

  The grand jury did not arraign Elizabeth’s husband on charges of treason until the middle of October, finally giving John the date for his long-awaited trial. The same day John was arraigned, Elizabeth received notice that she was to be evicted for failure to pay the rent. She suffered an attack of nerves and retreated to her bed, where Rachel and Young Elizabeth tended her.

  On October 25, Freeborn John had his day in court. Delivering an oratory at once deft and long-winded, he wore out his prosecutors; he pummeled them with words. He argued that the jurors should assess the merits of the law by which he was being tried, not limit themselves to the mere facts of the case. He argued that where treason was concerned, intentions mattered more than actions: what counted was the heart. Elizabeth did not attend her husband’s trial. When Rachel asked why not, she said she already knew everything he was going to say.

  The jurors deliberated John’s case for three-quarters of an hour over a generous quart of sack. When they returned from their chambers, weaving on their feet, they acquitted the defendant on all charges. It was a victory for the people, John later said. With the jury’s pronouncement, the courthouse at Guildhall erupted, causing the judge and prosecutor to turn pale. The bailiff flung open the doors of the court. Hundreds of townspeople swarmed forward, roaring.

  That night the city of London sang and crackled. Unemployed soldiers waved sea green flags and belted choruses as they emptied their bladders in the kennels. Tradesmen and apprentices waved banners and lit bonfires up and down the riverfront; from Elizabeth’s third-floor window in Southwark, the northern bank of the Thames seemed be on fire. At Bishopsgate, metalworkers struck a coin commemorating the victory. At Aldersgate, the owner of the Whalebone threw open his doors and sold ale for half the regular price. Everyone wanted to toast the name of Freeborn John, even those who had never heard of him. The Lilburnes’ landlord gave Elizabeth an extension on the rent.

  Rachel did not hear about the real conclusion to John’s trial until several days later, when Elizabeth stopped by to complain that the judge had sent John back to the Tower, where he remained with his three companions. Elizabeth was of the opinion that Cromwell and his Council of State stood behind the delay in letting him go. Cromwell, she said, was bent on suppressing his former friends the Levelers.

  “I thought the Levelers had already been suppressed,” Rachel said.

  Elizabeth concurred. “But,” she added, “they have not asked our opinion about it.” She vowed to go to the Tower and demand their freedom in person. She was thinking about the extension on her rent, which would not last long.

  At the end of this conversation Rachel revealed to her friend that she was having some beginning labor pains. Elizabeth’s mouth tightened. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, but it’s early yet. Come find me in a few days, when you will be having more of them.” That was all she said, though she embraced Rachel tightly as she left.

  The next day, the first of November, the clawing hand of labor returned in earnest. Rachel was outside sweeping, wind drying the back of her throat; each time she pushed the waste out to the street, a snarling gust of premature winter scattered the refuse back, blowing it over the threshold. When the pain recommenced, she opened the door to call for Mary, who waved her off. “I’m balancing the accounts,” Mary said. So Rachel left the premises. She walked out without telling Mary. She headed south until she could walk no farther, and then she hired a hackney carriage to take her the remaining distance to the Thames. At the river steps, watermen bombarded her with offers. She went with the one who was cheapest, climbing into his rocking rowboat. They pushed off and the waterman began wheeling and dodging, shouting obscenities in a foreign tongue whenever another vessel crossed his path. She told him to take her to Southwark. To Elizabeth, she might have said.

  When she made it to her friend’s residence, she pounded on the door—no one answered. She knocked again, calling Elizabeth’s name, asking to be let in. A neighbor was scraping his boots on the stoop next door. Rachel asked if he knew where Mrs. Lilburne was. “She went off this morning,” he said, “storming about something or other. She said she was going to retrieve her husband.” Rachel asked if he knew how long she would be gone. The neighbor kicked dried mud from his boots. “However long it takes to get her husband back to soap making,” he reported. Rachel nodded. That sounded like Elizabeth. And she had no idea how long her friend was going to be gone.

  She returned to Warwick Lane alone.

  As she walked, the pains intensified. She turned her back to the wind, breathed as slow and long as she could, wrapped her cloak tight around her midsection, and delivered her first maternal order. She told the child: Wait. “You’re too early,” she said. “It’s not time yet.”

  With those words, the child in her womb chose to rouse itself from its long slumber. It stretched and yawned and bugled. It delivered a swift and deliberate kick: Here I am. Rachel doubled over. The child pounded with both feet: It is time when I say so.

  Rachel tried reasoning. She asked the child to stay where it was, for its sake if not for hers. Wait for Walwyn, she proposed. He will be released any hour now, I’m sure of it. They will let him go as soon as they release John. Elizabeth is taking care of things. She knows my situation. She will persuade the Council of State to release them, and then she will come to me, and she and Walwyn will both help me. Together we will come up with a plan.

  I am tired of plans, the child said.

  Rachel replied: Listen to me. I have not yet resolved how to protect you. If you come now, we will be on the street. Mary will not have me. My mother does not want me. We will wind up homeless or worse.

  Tell them who my father is.

  No, she said. If I name him, his family will learn of me and will be humiliated by the fact of your existence. His children will be dishonored. He could lose his ability to provide for them.

  The child replied that Rachel could worry about some other family’s reputation and livelihood if she wanted, but it would go live with the Lilburnes.

  That will work only so long as John is still in the Tower. John will not have an illegitimate in the house.

  The child kicked again.

  Rachel, coldly: Why are you in such a hurry? The world is not going to be anything like you expected.

  The child, peeved, astonished: Why not?

  Rachel stole a glance down at her hands, with their knotted veins and wrinkling knuckles, and could not answer.

  Next she tried bargaining. If the child would hold off coming until after Hallowmas, she would have a plan in place, she promised. The child asked what that was. “I’m not sure,” she said out loud. “But Walwyn and I will come up with something together.”

  I wasn’t asking about the plan. I was asking about Hallowmas.

  Rachel, taken aback: It’s today. It’s All Saints’ Day. It’s a day of feasting to honor all the holy people who attained the beatific vision.

  What is the beatific vision?

  “You ask too many questions,” she cried. All Saints’ Day took place on November 1. All Souls’ Day followed, on November 2. Rachel’s father used to refuse to commemorate All Souls’ Day because it involved intercessory prayers
for the dead in purgatory. Rachel’s mother observed both days quietly.

  By the time Rachel returned to the glove shop, the child had gone quiet. Rachel did not go inside the shop to Mary. She stayed outside as long as she could. She sat on the stoop and scanned the street as if waiting for someone. No one was coming. She waited anyway. She had no place left to go. The entire afternoon the wind would not let up.

  At six o’clock Rachel was still sitting when someone did come, a young match vendor, the poorest of the poor, wearing rags and with a red kerchief knotted into horns on top of her head. She was trying to make a sale, she said. She asked if Rachel wanted to buy something. Cupped in the vendor’s apron were matches—spills of wood coated with wax and tipped with sulfur for lighting. With her free hand, Rachel noticed, the young woman was pulling the arm of a child, a spindly boy of three or four who could not stand without his legs buckling. Something was wrong with his knees. He peeked out at Rachel from behind his mother, blowing bubbles of saliva at her, his legs crossing like a pair of opened scissors.

  “I’ll buy a sheet,” Rachel said, not taking her eyes from the child. The young woman handed her a long card of matches. When Rachel went to pay her, she remembered she had given her last coin to the waterman. So she paid with gloves; she peeled off her own gloves and gave them to the young woman, who tried them eagerly. Rachel could not breathe for looking at that boy. As the pair turned to go, he swung around one more time. He smiled and blew bubbles until his mother dragged him forward. She yanked him upright and said something into his ear; she jerked him straight every time his useless legs crumpled. Up and down the little boy went, an unlucky jack-in-the-box, until they reached the corner of Warwick Lane and disappeared.

  Then Rachel went inside.

  She asked Mary if she could please go upstairs, but Mary said not yet. “Where have you been?” she added, though she did not wait for an answer. She reminded Rachel they still had twenty pairs of funeral gloves to dye; a general or lieutenant colonel, captain of something or other, had passed. So Rachel stayed in the workroom, dipping gloves into an iron bath until they blackened, hanging them from the ribbons crossing the ceiling so they would dry overnight. As she worked, she affixed her thoughts to Walwyn. Their first night together they had lain right there, right there where Mary was standing. He had asked the whereabouts of her employer, and Rachel had pointed up at the ceiling, and the gloves had pointed back at them.