The judge sent her into Bartwain’s chambers to await the jury’s verdict. Two guards stationed themselves outside the door as she paced within, studying the books on the investigator’s shelves, trying to sound out the titles. Someone knocked, and she assumed it was Elizabeth coming to berate her. The latch opened. Standing in the door was Walwyn. The guards stayed outside.
He moved swiftly, crushing her in his arms. He had bribed someone to get inside the investigator’s chambers. He kissed her; his mouth was everywhere. Her hair, then her neck, first tentative, paternal, then harder. He pulled her to him; he would not leave her alone. His ferocity surprised both of them. This was not the time; he had not come here with that kind of thing in mind. He had come here to tell her he was sorry; instead he gave her his mouth. He was worn; he had not slept. He was whispering nonsense to her. He spun plans so idealistic and lofty only a Leveler could have concocted them. He promised to steal her away under cover of night. He would break her out of prison; he would find her a horse. They would ride together. Or they would board a ship. They would sail all the way to the colonies. Or they would travel to Clovelly along the far coast and build a cottage, just the two of them. He spoke with the frantic optimism of a man who has tasted the limits of what his life is going to allow.
She pushed him away. “Your plans are ridiculous,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice. “Your plans are not going to work.” They proceeded to argue.
He said, “What would you have me do?”
“I would have you be truthful about what your life is and what it is not.”
“I would have you be truthful too,” he said. “I have neglected everything for you. Don’t you see what is happening to my life? I have become a miscreant.”
“Don’t you see what is happening to mine?” Rachel said.
She won that part of the argument.
They were still angry. But then she pressed her hot cheek against his and whispered: “Do you love me regardless?” And he, immediately, wrapping her in his arms: “Regardless is not the word.”
He wanted to know why she had not said more on the stand. “My God, why didn’t you speak? You are giving the jury permission to think the worst.”
Rachel tried to explain. She told him that back at the trial’s opening, she had planned to say she was guilty. But that was before Elizabeth saw in Rachel’s eyes what she was planning to say and had leaped up from the witness box to argue her out of it, to tell Rachel not to give up. That was also before the scaffolding collapsed and they had taken her back to Newgate, where she stewed and brooded seven more days. When Walwyn asked her what she had contemplated, what she had thought about, Rachel went quiet.
To allow herself to recall that night was the first insuperable obstacle. If she could overcome that, she would remember studying the cracks along her bedroom ceiling. She would hear sounds issuing from her own body, sounds she did not recognize and could not control. She remembered smelling the stench as she lost control of her bowels and bladder. She remembered hearing someone breathing. It was her own breathing she had heard and not someone else’s, although the sound seemed to have come from outside. She remembered reaching for something in the wainscot. She remembered hearing a voice. When her mind crept toward the sound of that voice, Rachel could go no farther.
She looked at Walwyn. “I think the things they are saying about me might be true,” she whispered.
“Don’t you do that. Don’t you say even one more word of that kind.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “The prosecution is lying. The prosecution is creating a picture of you that is not true, that is sensational. If you will not trust yourself, at least believe me.”
“Believe you?”
“Yes!”
She laughed. She could not believe what she was hearing. She felt old, older than he was, old behind the eyes, old inside the bones. “What is there to believe about you? You are you. There is no believing or disbelieving that. You are William Walwyn, the fool who loved me. That is all. That is all I can think when I think about you. Now stop hounding me!”
“You lost something. That’s all. Don’t make it worse. Don’t turn against yourself.”
“Did I? Did I lose it? Or did I push it away?”
He hesitated.
“What if the Lord gave me a gift and I refused it? What if I turned my back?”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
“But what if I did?” From next door, she could hear the clank of the jurors’ spoons scraping the bottoms of their soup bowls.
Walwyn was saying something, but his words meant nothing at this point; his words were just sounds. He was shaking her. “Never say such things,” he was crying. “Never say such things about yourself. You are wholly good.”
She pushed him back. “I abandoned her.”
“Why would you do that?”
She stayed quiet.
After a few seconds, he whispered, “I have ruined you then.”
“No, you did not. You freed me.”
“That is a lie and you know it. Any woman I know would beat me if I were to say that.”
“But it is true.”
By this Rachel meant: You loved me soul and eye and claw and wing, and everywhere I went, there you were. You saw and fed and watered me and now I no longer thirst. Now it does not hurt—now my life does not hurt, because I am known through and through. And you have not freed me on the outside but you did free me on the inside, and that is the side that matters; that is the one a person can do a bit about.
Walwyn asked if she remembered that night.
“Which one?”
“The night the child was conceived.”
She flinched. All those nights tended to run together in her mind.
“I do,” he told her. “I remember each of them separately.”
“I thought I had passed the childbearing years. I thought it was impossible.”
“Didn’t anyone ever read you the book of Sarah,” he whispered.
“You mean the book of Genesis.”
“They are the same,” he said, drawing her close, drawing her to him, with a smile that illumined his entire countenance.
Bartwain told White to be ready to wheel him out of the courtroom when the verdict came. He distrusted the crowd, which looked unruly.
It took thirty minutes for the jury members to finish their roast chicken and arrive at a decision. It would have taken fifteen but for juror-with-the-patch, whose opinion needed to be won over. The twelve sworn men of the neighborhood then filed back into the courtroom in a single line and announced they’d found Rachel Lockyer guilty of murder. They said she had committed a malicious assault and should die for her crime. The foreman went on to state that Elizabeth Lilburne’s testimony was not credible and qualified as perjury. As she was a grieving mother, however, with two sons recently lost, they would not assign her a punishment; they advised her husband to discipline her at home. The foreman read Rachel’s sentence: death by hanging. The execution would take place in a week. Then juror-with-the-patch spoke up and reminded the foreman it was Advent season. They had forgotten about that. They did not want to be responsible for hanging a woman on Christmas, or Christ-tide, as the Puritans preferred it called. The jurors huddled for another discussion. They returned to their places, their cheeks flushed from the effort of thinking on their feet. The foreman announced that the execution would take place in January, just after Twelfth Night, to avoid any conflict with the day three kings once carried gifts across a desert for a child. In the interim, Rachel would be returned to Newgate. This time she would not go to the women’s ward. She would be sent to the hold for condemned prisoners, a stand-alone shack where ringbolts lined the walls like settings on a bracelet.
Standing before the court, his muscular legs planted wide, as if he were spanning the width of a rocking rowboat, Prosecutor Griffin urged Rachel Lockyer to thank the jurors for their mercifulness. They were doing her a favor, he said, letting her live through Christmas
.
A cascading cry welled up and over the rafters. At first Bartwain could not place the sound. He guessed the cry belonged to Elizabeth or some other disconsolate woman. Then he realized it was coming from above. It was coming from the beams. It was the owl, the same barred owl that had sounded off on what was coming. As soon as one shriek ended, another took its place. The owl silenced the prosecutor.
Bartwain ordered White to wheel him outside. His secretary began to rock and pitch the old chair, then pushed it up the aisle, forcing a path through the pack of soldiers that now entered the courthouse, soldiers buzzing and swarming around the condemned woman like flies over a deer that has fallen.
“Get me out of here,” the investigator roared over the din. He was profoundly disappointed. “Get me out before the mob starts forming. I am through with bastard cases.”
Fifteen
THEN EVERYTHING STARTED unraveling.
Spectators were fleeing the fetid air, stumbling and shoving as they exited the courthouse, some abandoning food baskets in their haste. At the same time, the soldiers were dragging Rachel toward the courthouse steps, and John Lilburne was herding some of his dwindling followers forward, calling whom he could, gathering stragglers. A group was congregating at the west corner of the courthouse. John was going to practice his ideas on them, survey their reactions. Having opposed any support for Rachel while her fate remained undecided, he was now changing sides. He had no interest in providing aid to a lewd woman, but he remained more than willing to capitalize on the upcoming death of a condemned woman. The Levelers needed a good martyrdom. Rachel’s trial had been a farce, a travesty of justice, he shouted. She had no legal defender. No one had allowed her to make a plea. Her conviction represented a violation of the rights of all Englishmen. As John put on his eyeglasses to take in his audience, his supporters stole sideways glances at one another in silence.
From the other side of the Sessions House, Mary du Gard looked on as John delivered his speech. She could not hear what he was saying, but she could read his countenance, which told her enough.
Mary did not consider herself a Leveler, and the members of that ragtag organization had never invited her to join their company. In her view, radicals were all alike, whether English or French, Puritan or Leveler or Huguenot. They all thought meetings and conventicles, illegal printing presses and secret societies, served a purpose. They all assumed that the busier they were, the more worthwhile their causes. And in their zeal, they invariably mistook fervency of conviction for effectiveness of tactics.
A ragged howl rose from the eastern end of the courthouse. Mary turned. The sound was coming from Walwyn. He was calling Rachel’s name, straining to reach her. His countenance was unbearable. He was spitting and lunging against six Parliamentary soldiers, rank-and-files who did not know that they were beating their hero, that they were striking a man who had advocated for their own fair wage. Walwyn fought them off—he was not so old as they thought—and shouted for John to come help, but John was otherwise occupied; John was constitutionally incapable of breaking off a speech once he had started it. The soldiers rode Walwyn into the floor until he was spitting splinters. They picked him up and threw him out the side door, shouting good riddance.
Mary’s eyes found her assistant near the entrance. Rachel’s hair, once smooth and shining, now hung snarled and limp. A grayish pallor clung to her skin. The deterioration was not simply physical. Mary could not have pointed to one part of Rachel’s anatomy and declared, “Here is the problem.” It was more of an intuition, a dull uneasiness. And whatever it was, this thing gone wrong, it seemed to have taken up residence. As the soldiers led Rachel toward the courthouse steps, the hem of her dress snagged on something and she tripped, pitching into her captors, who began groping at her. Mary rushed forward, her hand clapped on top of her steep hat. “That is my apprentice,” she cried out. “Do not lay a hand on her.” The soldiers ignored her. One of them shoved the tip of his pike into Rachel’s mouth until he threatened to puncture the windpipe. He withdrew as Rachel gagged. They did not stop harassing their charge until Thomas Bartwain burst back into the courtroom in a rattletrap conveyance that Mary took to be a wheelbarrow, his skeletal secretary flying behind him. Bartwain’s fat body, unbalanced by the sudden speed, swayed back and forth in his chair; furious, the investigator ordered the guards to stop.
Mary hurried over to Rachel and extended her hand. “Get up.”
As the soldiers exchanged words with the investigator, Mary guided her assistant to her feet and down the exterior steps until the two women were standing outside the Sessions House, under a misting sky. They regarded each other warily. They had not spoken since the day Mary found the infant.
“What are you doing?” Rachel asked, bewildered.
Before Mary could say anything the soldiers were surrounding them, trotting down the steps and resuming their hold on the prisoner. They swept Rachel into their arms, wrestling her from Mary, who still had hold of her assistant’s wrist irons; when Mary was forced to let go she found herself snatching Rachel’s sleeve instead, holding it until she could hold no longer without tearing something. They hauled Rachel into their mule cart, which would transport her the short distance to the prison. Mary squinted through the spitting rain and watched them leaving. She could see Elizabeth hurrying toward them, bellowing, searching for Rachel. Already the mule was moving, heading across the street for the prison, its head low. Elizabeth was not going to catch them. Once Rachel had passed through the entrance, the warden would pull those iron gates shut. Elizabeth was not going to get there fast enough.
But Mary could. Mary was fast. She began running. She hitched up her skirts, sliding past the scattering crowd. She sped forward, her shoes and stockings a blur. She ran as hard and futilely as she had the day the man who would become her husband had taken her into his house, taken her with his thick fingers and his thin switch, which he used.
By the time she reached the prison entrance, the gates were shutting. Mary pulled on the bars as they closed. Rachel was not coming back. She called her assistant’s name repeatedly, pounding the iron rails, apologizing for telling the truth, apologizing even though she would do it again if she had to.
Across the street, Anne Walwyn, wife of William Walwyn, waited for her husband to leave the courthouse.
She was accustomed to waiting. In her estimation it did not qualify as hardship. If anything troubled her, it was not her husband’s lateness but the economics of time itself. Time appeared in Anne’s thoughts as an hourglass. She would count the grains as they fell, by the hour or second, just as any woman counts something she holds dear but thinks she does not deserve. And she would fall silent when she witnessed her husband throwing time away in the manner of a profligate.
Probably she should not have attended Rachel’s trial. Certainly she should not be skulking around afterward to observe her husband brawling with the soldiers and tackling Reverend Kiffin in the street, as he was doing now—seizing the good clergyman from behind and boxing his ears until Gilbert Mabbott rushed in to stop the beating, to pull the Leveler off the preacher.
Mabbott pulled Walwyn to the courthouse steps and sat beside him as their friend Richard Overton approached. Mabbott proceeded to bandage Walwyn’s left knuckles while Overton bandaged his right knuckles. No one said anything. What the Levelers intended to do now, Anne had no way of knowing. She disliked both Overton and Mabbott. In her prayers she referred to one as the Seditious Leveler and the other as the Seditious Newsman; God would know whom she meant. These were the same men who over the last eight years had caused Walwyn to feel dissatisfied with his life, who had filled his mind with notions, leaving Anne with a husband who wrote page after page through the night and lit the furnace with his brilliance in the morning. Walwyn, it turned out, was her Sisyphus.
Now her husband was standing, hands wrapped in rags; Overton and Mabbott rose to stand loyally beside him. He began walking in the direction of the prison, his friends f
ollowing. So did Anne, from a distance, tightening the chin strap that held her battered black hat in place. It was easier when he was in the Tower because then she did not have the option of following him. Then she knew where he was.
The men crossed over to Bailey Road, and Walwyn stopped before the gates encircling Newgate Prison. Rachel had disappeared inside. Overton placed a hand on Walwyn’s back. Anne came to a standstill also. She glanced up at the prison, noticing its stark line. A windmill sat atop the roof, its great blades cutting the sky in circles. Mabbott must have heard Anne’s footsteps because he turned and greeted her in a guarded tone while Overton kept his arm around Walwyn. “Wait just a minute, Mrs. Walwyn,” the newsman whispered. “Give him one more minute. He is trying to collect himself.” He gestured at her husband.
I understand, she mouthed.
Did she?
She supposed she did. She understood she had a husband whose thoughts had traveled far from hers. Perhaps he was imagining a sea voyage. Perhaps those blades were sails. When he had such dreams at home, Anne would wake him. She knew when he had them because she knew what the dream sounded like. She, too, had once believed the world held open longer than it does.
She would wait no longer this day.
Without another word, Anne left the men to their vigil and began the winding walk back to Moorfields. She walked by herself. She didn’t mind. She was relieved, almost. She would not look back. She would not be Lot’s wife.
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