Sixteen
TWO GUARDS TOOK Rachel into the hold for condemned prisoners, a small structure of limestone adjacent to the main prison. Inside, she slipped on a carpet of excrement. One of the guards lit a torch and hooked it into the wall. The other attached her leg irons to one of six rings bolted into the stone. The first guard, a young fellow whose helmet seemed too large for his head, advised Rachel to bribe the warden to move up her execution date. “To escape the stench,” he explained, gesturing apologetically at the floor as he left.
Rachel tried curling up on the end of a low wooden bench. She could hear rain against the roof. For a while she pretended to talk to her brother, but she could not hear him, could not imagine what he would say.
She did not pretend to talk to the child.
She would not even think the word child. She would push around it, leaving a wide berth; she would sweep all such thoughts in the corner. She would step over anything, avoid any obstacle, before she would think that word. Yet there it was. Every time she tried to dodge it, misery would whisper the word for her, and a clean whistling breath rushed through her. The emptiness hiccupped and gabbled at her, slid her crosswise. She wondered what her mother would say to her now. Probably Martha Lockyer would tell her daughter to confess, which made sense if one had a list of things to repent. But what if a person did not know for certain? She shifted around on the bench. She would force her brother to talk to her. She would conjure him up to calm herself.
She succeeded—too well. As soon as Robert appeared, he was chastising her; he showed up midreprimand. He was saying: That’s not the point. Whether you think you are guilty or not isn’t the point.
It is, she replied.
No. The point is what kind of God do you have.
I don’t have God, Rachel said. God has me. God has me in His cooking pot. I am being carried into the kitchen as we speak.
It was her father’s God to whom she was referring.
Robert was not having any of this. He never did permit his sister an ounce of self-pity, never showed her any sympathy. When Rachel’s arms used to ache from cutting hides, he would tell her to count her blessings she had arms in the first place—he had seen dying men without limbs in the army. When her head used to pound from the fumes of freshly dyed gloves, he would urge her to pray. Pray for God to ease my headache? she would say. No, Sister, he would reply. Pray for God to help you stop complaining. A woman who feels sorry for herself is a dead woman. Don’t you give up. He’d delivered that last line on the morning of his execution, when Rachel had ducked into his tent a few minutes before Captain Savage and his men took him into the churchyard. Robert was too thin for the cloak they had thrown over his shoulders. He grinned when he saw his sister, kept grinning even as she threw her arms around him, even as the tent flap opened again and the light streamed in, and, following the light, the soldiers. “Don’t you blame God for this,” he had shouted to her as they pulled him away. “God hasn’t got time to be the busybody most people make Him out to be. Don’t you blame Him.”
Rachel lay on her back on the bench and wrapped her shawl close. When she looked up she could see sparks from the dying torch the guards had hooked into the wall. The cold was severe that night. The cold was so sharp it threaded down her spine like a wire.
She missed Walwyn. She missed him so much she was beginning to have trouble swallowing. She rubbed her neck, the base of her chin, the same place he used to touch her. With her tongue, she tested the roof of her mouth, the back of her throat. There was nothing the matter, except she appeared to be choking on his absence.
Almost a year before, Walwyn had told her he wanted no more involvement with the Levelers. His time with them was done, he had said. When she asked why, he replied that the Levelers were becoming too much like John Lilburne. But John’s cause is the People, she suggested. They were in the rented room of the travelers’ inn and she was lying on top of him, her bare stomach pressed into his, her chin in her hands as she gazed soberly down at him. Walwyn shook his head. “John Lilburne’s cause is John Lilburne,” he said.
“I would like to read what he writes,” she had replied. “I would like to see if the way he sounds in his writing is the same way he sounds in his speaking.”
“And how does he sound in his speaking?”
“Puffed up.”
“Then they are the same. We are all puffed up. All of us who write with him, I mean.”
She frowned. “I don’t like it when you disparage your gift.”
“You are my gift,” he said.
They used to wage battles over this. He would offer to help her learn to read and to write. “I want to learn,” Rachel always said. “I want to try.” And she did try, but the letters did not cooperate; the letters on the page never looked or acted the way she thought they ought. Walwyn would show her a word and say, “That is aardvark” or “That is melancholy,” and she would copy it for herself, only to look up and feel betrayed; the words on her page did not resemble the words on his. She told him she was too old. “Read to me,” she urged him. “It is enough if someone reads to me. That is how most people get by.” No, he would reply, his face darkening; no, that is not good enough; you can do better. He did not want to be her reader, he said; she needed to work out the words for herself. He did not want to foster a dependence. This made her laugh, howl, even. They were comfortable arguing with each other; they fought thoughtfully and with vigor. To spar and joust was not a waste of time for them. They bit each day down to the gristle. At the end of these skirmishes Walwyn would produce the dreaded grammar book and slide it slyly back on her lap. Look, he would say with his slow grin. Here is a word, and another, and another, and it is easy; and here is the alphabet. See what you make of it. And she, scowling: Your alphabet does not look right. When he insisted, she would cut him off. I am too old, she would say again, pushing away his grammar book until the next time, when she would declare anew, as if they had never spoken, as if this were her first time proposing the idea: I want to read; help me to read; it is all I can think about each evening. They went round and round on this.
She missed his hands. When she thought of Walwyn’s hands, Rachel covered her face with her own. She used to tell him that the Levelers liked to share all things in common, particularly womankind. He failed to see the humor in this observation. She would elbow him, saying, “Of course you have to admit it is funny.” He would grow angry, blustery, say she should not disparage herself. “I wasn’t,” she pointed out. Once she asked him why the Levelers advocated the abolition of distinctions between classes of men. “You would have us all stand together, all on the same rung of the ladder,” she marveled.
“That’s right,” he replied. “That’s the only way it is fair.”
“But there is not enough room,” she argued.
He listened to her. He not only listened; he absorbed. He changed his mind because of her, because of the things she said. To Rachel this was astonishing. She had never had this effect on another person, not even Robert. Sometimes, when Walwyn was working on something, he would read a sentence or two out loud, and she could hear where her thoughts streaked across the horizon of his words, like old stars that light up the night sky as they are falling. When John and Overton read the same passages later, over foaming ale, they bemoaned Walwyn’s latest pamphleteering efforts; Walwyn, they said, had stopped thinking clearly. “He is writing about love,” John complained.
She missed his hands; she also missed his face. She used to grab hold of it, pulling his cheeks. She would mash and squash him this way and that, creating animal faces. He let her do it. She poked and prodded. He endured countless humiliations in the name of love. He understood she was learning to trust. He was learning to trust too, but this was hard for him as a man to admit, so he concentrated on her first. He tolerated her tortures. She plucked rogue hairs from his eyebrows. She became an eyebrow zealot. He would slap his hand to his eye and tell her she was heartless, and she would laugh until th
e tears streamed. Then she would slide onto his stomach, slipping her hand between his spine and the mattress; she would wander up and down, counting his vertebrae. She counted the minutes also. This was not as good a habit. She tried not to count them, but once she started it became hard to stop. She would tick them off in her head, one by one, until one of the minutes turned inexplicably heavier than the others and she would pull back, leaving Walwyn saddled with her silence, forcing him to rise and pull on whatever clothing he could remember having come in wearing two hours earlier. I do not want to go, he would tell her. Yet still you leave me, she would say.
Rachel pulled her shawl high over her neck and ears. She had discovered another prisoner, an elderly man, slumbering under a pile of discarded cloaks in a corner of the hold. Covering his mouth and nose was the hem of a cloak that levitated each time he exhaled.
“What is this,” she remembered saying to Walwyn once. “What is this we are doing? Who are we? What have we become?”
“You are the one who saved me,” he said.
“I never saved anybody.”
“You saved me,” he said again. “You are wholly good.” But he stiffened when he bent down to say goodbye to her, and he moved with a sick heaviness, with a kind of sick heavy twist. She had not replied.
The guards outside the hold were quiet now. After a while she forgot where she was, and she descended into a hard and merciless sleep. The sleep was merciless because it was joyful. She waded from one green dream to another. She saw a verdant grove, a cottage sheltered under silver birches. She saw sea grass blanketing a child. Not until dawn began peeking through the narrow ventilation shaft high overhead did she open her eyes and realize how long she had been sleeping. She could hear the clatter of boots outside. The winter rain had stopped. Her stomach was growling.
Across the hold, the old white-haired man, the other prisoner, was awake and sitting on a bench of his own, the pile of cloaks strewn around him. He was barefoot, and his thin white shins poked out from the bottom of his robe. He bared his nearly toothless gums at her. “Best be waking, miss, for they take away the food if you do not set to it right away.”
“Who are you?” Rachel breathed.
“No one. Just an old thief they put in the wrong place and forgot.”
“They put you here by mistake?”
He nodded affably. “Don’t worry,” he said, reading her thoughts. “You are not the kind they forget.”
Two guards stepped into the hold and delivered bowls of gruel. The young one told Rachel to stop scratching herself. “You’ll take the skin right off,” he worried, studying the fleabites on her arms and neck. “The more you scratch the worse it gets. You’ll scratch to death.”
“God does not forgive self-murderers,” the other guard added as he tossed a bowl to the bench with a clatter. Reaching, the old man accidentally flipped the bowl over, splattering the floor with gruel. He used his long fingernails to scrape the spill back into his bowl. He put his fingers to his mouth and licked them. Then he returned his fingers to the grimed floors, feeling for more, his back bent over like the second half of a rainbow.
Rachel lifted her chin and looked straight at the guards. “The fleas are biting,” she said. “If that is self-murder, then there is a remedy.”
The young guard laughed, a hard grating gate that would not open. His teeth were black in the backs.
Seventeen
THE MORNING AFTER the trial, Walwyn rose from his bed, raced downstairs, and got as far as the sun-filled garden behind the apothecary before Anne called him back, summoning him to her kitchen. She was disemboweling a pheasant. Fourteen was not well, she announced, her hands spotted with feathers; he seemed to be running a fever. “You can conduct your business in the city later,” she said. “Right now your children need their father. You want to be a physician? Here is your chance.”
So he stayed. He checked Richard every hour as his youngest tugged on his father’s ears. He found no rising temperature.
The next day he tried again. This time he made it as far as the crumbling stones of Moorgate before Anne came floating behind, calling for him. Fourteen’s fever was down but his cough was up, she declared. Again Walwyn returned home and sat with the boy, who was thrilled to have his father’s attention. Richard did not cough; he giggled.
Mabbott stopped by with a delivery from John. Walwyn glanced at the scrawled pages the younger Leveler had sent. John wanted him to review the draft of his latest treatise, Mabbott said. He was writing it in honor of Rachel and her pending execution. He intended the pamphlet to bolster support for the Levelers.
“Why does he want me to read it?”
“He wants you to advise him as to the ending. He doesn’t know if it’s right.”
“Tell John I am not in the business of good endings.” Walwyn handed the pages back.
“He’ll be disappointed.”
“A little disappointment will be good for him,” Walwyn said. “It will prepare him for when he is older.”
Not until the end of the week did Richard’s “fever” break. Anne had retired to her quarters. Walwyn sat on a pile of blankets in the next room, rereading Brooke’s Conservatory of Health until he was certain Richard was soundly sleeping in the small bed beside him. He set down the book, crept downstairs, and escaped, passing the flower garden and heading for the street that led to Moorgate. Anne stood at her second-floor window and watched him leaving—she was not actually sleeping.
Past Moorgate, Walwyn hailed a hackney coach and told the driver to take him to Newgate. The driver balked and said it was too dangerous this time of night. “I insist,” Walwyn said, and opened his purse.
By the time they arrived at the entrance, the driver was feeling responsible for him. “Don’t stand too close to the gates. They’ll rob you through the bars. I’ve seen them do it.” He was not referring to the prisoners.
Walwyn brushed off this advice, saying he would be fine. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew no one of sound mind visited Newgate after midnight, but he was not paying attention to those parts of his mind that were sound. Nor was he thinking of Anne, awake in her bedroom in Moorfields, listening to the sounds of a silent house. He reached the wrought-iron gates and pounded on them. Three guards were flipping cards in the courtyard. They waved him off; they said no one was allowed at this hour. Walwyn pounded again, bellowing Rachel’s name, demanding to see her, reaching his hands through the bars to grab the closest guard by the doublet. That did it. The guards pulled the gates open, not to let Walwyn in but to let themselves out. They proceeded to beat him, to teach the wretch a lesson. They pounded his face to a wet pulp. They punched his skin to a sticky mess like a woman punches her yeast dough, so that by the time Walwyn returned to Moorfields, past three o’clock and Anne at the second-floor window waiting, all she had to do was take one downward look at his bruised and bluish face to know what she already knew: he was not yet through with Rachel.
Eighteen
THERE ARE SEVERAL ways to make a martyr, and all of them require a printing press.
A few days before Christmas, John Lilburne shooed a blinking Elizabeth out of the bed at half past four; he needed the upstairs to himself. She stumbled down to the kitchen, too bleary to quarrel.
John crowned himself with his stocking cap and sat at his desk, which overlooked an alley. Cracking his knuckles prepared him to do his best work. He dipped his quill in the well, blotted the tip, and poised the instrument over a blank sheet of parchment, waiting for inspiration to drip.
Fifteen minutes passed. Beneath the window, a scavenger was scratching through a pile of onion peels and eggshells. The sound resembled a rat behind a wall. John reached under his desk and cracked his toes, one by one. He dipped the quill a second time and prepared to compose his concluding sentences.
John had resolved to set aside his personal opinions in the matter of Rachel Lockyer. What he thought of the woman was one thing. What he wrote about her was something else. He pl
anned to turn her death into something edifying, to transform her into a martyr of the people, as he had done for her brother, Robert. Doing so required a clever piece of writing, given the circumstances. No one wanted to be caught defending a murdering mother. So John had focused instead on how Rachel’s trial had fallen short of justice, neatly sidestepping any references to the child. Rachel Lockyer had been permitted no legal counsel, he argued. The bailiff had neglected to ask for her plea when the trial reopened. She had received no support for cross-examining witnesses or questioning the prosecution’s argument. She was uneducated; she could not read; she could hardly be expected to speak in her own defense. John did not believe his treatise would change the outcome or reverse the verdict. He had no intention of pulling the woman off the scaffold. He simply hoped to put her death to good use. He would persuade his readers to forget her crime and remember the injustice. He would turn her death into something useful—into a platform. He contemplated calling the piece The Martyred Mother, but to refer to her as mother might suggest she deserved that appellation. So he eliminated the word from his heading and went with The People’s Martyr instead.
Cracking his knuckles a second time, he returned to the final section. He scribbled along, completely engrossed, for three hours, until Elizabeth came upstairs to tell him their daughter had lost a tooth and could use comforting. From the kitchen came the singsong noises of Young Elizabeth talking to her doll, which John had whittled for her a year ago Christmas. He had put up evergreen branches and holly last year, too, in the front room. In principle, he had broken the law by doing so. Wary of the unrestrained behaviors and excesses of the Advent season, Parliament had declared Christmas a day for fasting and penance—though ordinary people still found ways to make merry. When he had given the doll to his daughter, Young Elizabeth had accepted his offering with a regal inclination of her head and said, “You forgot to give her a nose.” She was exactly like her mother. This year, the Lilburnes had not put up any evergreens or holly.
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