Outside, Walwyn walked far enough to see the tail end of the processional winding past the cathedral. His hand traced a splintered groove in the outer wall of the Sessions House. Far ahead was Rachel. She was seated on top of a coffin. The coffin was in the middle of a cart. The cart was pulled by a mule. The mule was flanked by guards. The guards were riding horses. Rachel was watching those horses. She had fixed her eyes on them. She was wearing her sea green dress. The color assaulted him. They had allowed her to wash and change her clothing. Her dress shone in the bald winter sun as if someone had sewn a jeweled collar onto it, or stitched a line of stars. He fixed his attention on her face. He read her into his memory; he imprinted her onto his mind’s eye. He became gripped with the fear that he too would die. He was not afraid of death for its own sake. He was afraid because if he died he would no longer be able to see her; she would disappear down the corridors of his time. It was a selfish fear, but truth was salted through it.
During the trial, Walwyn had sat behind the spectators, wearing a low hat and a high collar, and he had listened as people whispered that the defendant was “already gone.” They were right, those who made that claim, but not in the way they thought. She was not trapped, or mad, or in search of Bedlam and its ship of fools. She was being released. From what, he did not ask. He did not have to ask. Though Walwyn recognized his role, he struggled to accept it.
The cart driver whipped the mule into motion. Walwyn ground his teeth and looked away, looked in another direction. He would not bless this day by bearing witness to it. He would not participate in the order of things, no, not this day. The monster of human bodies lurched forward. The bells of the old church were ringing. The bells were late. The priest was pulling the ropes hard and long to compensate. They rang like it was Epiphany; they rang like the Day of Annunciation. Walwyn sank to his knees, clapped his hands to his ears, and bowed his head against that slattern of a courthouse. He prayed.
Outside St. Sepulchre, the priest ordered the people to pray for the soul of the condemned. From where she stood in the crowd, Anne saw no evidence of their intercession. No one crossed himself, even furtively; no sermons issued from the lips of the homeless preachers. The next way station along the processional route was an alehouse, and the members of this mob looked far more eager to gather around the table at a tavern than to bow before a higher authority. Anne let herself be swept along.
It took ten minutes for the Newgate mule to trundle to a stop outside the Bird in Hand on Oxford Street. Bystanders crammed the walk. Some tried to follow the prisoner inside. Others kept their carousing on the streets, having brought their spirits with them. The gray mule was doing its best to ignore its surroundings. It nosed through its feedbag for stray oats as the guards pushed Rachel off her coffin, off the back of the cart. They were taking her under a low awning into the Bird in Hand. Once inside, the prisoner would share a ceremonial drink with her hangman. No one remembered how this tradition had come about or what it was supposed to accomplish. To Anne the plan sounded reasonable. If she were facing the gallows, she would want her executioner to come with a name and a face. She would want to meet him, to find out if he had an aunt or an uncle from Salisbury, a favorite Scripture passage, a preferred way of flavoring his mincemeat. Such knowledge could not prevent what was to happen, but it might soften the fear. And if a stop at an alehouse could not comfort the prisoner, it might offer something to the hangman instead—absolution. Anne stood high on her toes. The guards had barred the tavern entrance. Around her, the mob was swilling wine. A boy darted past the guards and entered the tavern unopposed. Seconds later he reappeared, waving his hat in circles. “They’re drinking,” he cried, “and more than one!” The crowd howled its pleasure. Everyone loved the camaraderie of an alehouse; everyone loved a good hanging day. The itinerant preachers prodded and jostled each other. Anne slipped on a pulpy rind and had to claw at the preachers to keep her balance, Fourteen clinging to her neck. The preachers moved in close, their rank thighs pressing, their breath stinking of gum rot. One of them gestured crudely. Anne shook her head, her hand still protecting Fourteen’s head. Her arms screamed with his weight. She felt his cheek; it was flushed. He stirred; he was all fists and yawns. He asked his mother to set him down; she said not yet. But her arms would not listen; her arms set him down regardless.
The prisoner emerged from the tavern steadier on her feet than when she had entered. She almost sauntered. If she was intoxicated, it suited. The guards boosted her into the cart. One of them grazed her hips as she stepped up and clutched the cart rail. He was a showman, this guard. He had thick spider fingers. The crowd applauded. He slapped her buttocks, twice, and the cart lurched into motion though the mule had not been struck. Slowly the processional snaked through the clotted thoroughfares toward the gallows at the edge of the city. At one point Anne came so close to the cart that when it graveled to a halt past the goldsmith’s, closing in on Tyburn Lane, she could see Rachel’s knuckles gnawing the coffin’s edge for balance. Anne glanced down at her son. Then everything stopped. The cart driver climbed from his seat and walked to the left rear wheel, going down on his hands and knees to inspect the underside. Six hundred eyes followed him. When he rose, he scanned the members of the crowd imperiously, as if they had come out solely for him, as if their one purpose in gathering was to hear a cart man make a pronouncement. “It’s the axle,” he announced. He could have been communicating news of a firestorm or the onset of hostilities between nations. “A stone’s been lodged in it. Can’t move till it’s out.”
A hackney man stepped forward and volunteered to help. The crowd applauded. The hackney man began his work. The crowd grew restless. It takes more time to repair a broken axle than to cause one, and the wine was running out. Someone threw a handful of gravel at the prisoner. Someone else, a tyrant, Anne thought, heaved a bleating, bleeding shoat into the bottom of the mule cart. The terrified creature scrabbled for balance, slipping in its own fluids, and ducked under Rachel’s skirts, where it proceeded to die all over her, its slit throat opening and closing with its pulse. Rachel knelt down, tried to tend to it; she was visibly agitated.
That was when Anne’s son declared his independence.
It took just one forceful tug for Fourteen to wriggle out of his mother’s grip. He pulled her arm so hard she thought she might be caught on something. “Let me go!” he demanded. His force of will threw her off balance and propelled the boy backward; he was stronger than she had imagined. His first experience of freedom was landing hard, and bottom-first, in the carriageway. This failed to discourage him. Righting himself, he bounded away before Anne could stop him. He pushed through the forest of legs and tottered to the edge of the street, where he bent his fat little body toward the ground, Anne watching in disbelief. All God’s children crossed this bridge if they were fortunate, but this little one with the weak heart had arrived early. Here he was, rebellious already, stomping his way into personhood. His black curls dusted the roadway; he was plucking something from the dirt. When he bounced up, his cheeks were blooming scarlet. His fat fingers clutched a drooping white nosegay. “Mama!” he cried, brimming with accomplishment. Without waiting for her reply, he tottered through the crowd, which parted for him. He approached the mule cart. Far ahead, in the distance, the gallows waited. He bobbled up to the cart, single-minded, bypassing the kneeling driver and the hackney man. He crawled up the back of the rail, the guards oblivious to his presence. He perched there, leaning against the outer edge of the cart, his shoes and socks catching the runoff from the shoat. His face was luminous; he really did have a fever. Rachel did not see her miniature intruder until he had leaned so far into the cart that his legs left the ground; he balanced on the cart railing with his round fulcrum of a belly and tugged at her dress with solemn insistence, confident in his own omnipotence. Richard Walwyn was one of those well-loved boys, one who takes for granted his youthful powers, who believes he will always hold this kind of sway over others.
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p; “For beautiful lady,” he burbled, and thrust the nosegay into Rachel’s hand. Then William and Anne’s youngest leaped off the cart and swam back to his mother, the people parting again to let him pass. Anne took his hand and she held it. She said not a word.
Someday, she thought, bold and enlightened women would laugh and cover their mouths when they read about matrons such as Anne Walwyn, when they studied the lives of the wives and mothers of the Commonwealth. These women would probably declare that their predecessors had lacked self-possession. To these accusations Anne would not have much to say, save to ask what it was love required. Love did not promise pleasures. One could hope for them, but there was no surety of attainment. She did not serve dumbly, or turn a blind eye. She served. That was enough. It had to be.
The axle repairs completed, the processional groaned back into motion, passing the stream of Mary-le-bone as the mule approached the scaffold. Anne followed a few paces behind. She kept her hand around her son’s wrist. In the back of her mind dwelled the thought that she should begin using her children’s Christian names.
At the scaffold they asked if Rachel had a final speech. She shook her head: no final speech. The crowd twined and hissed. William Kiffin, erstwhile officiate, arrived to join Rachel in the mule cart. He clambered up nimbly, his task being to remain beside her until the end in case she confessed or sought spiritual guidance.
Again they asked if she had any final words; she shook her head a second time: no final words. Kiffin asked if she would like him to pray. No, she said. No, I would not like you to pray. But what Rachel said no longer mattered. Kiffin would intercede for her. He would apologize to God on her behalf; he would apologize to God for a woman’s shortcomings. Thomas Bartwain, observing these rituals from his wheelbarrow chair, chewed his pipe and waited; Bartwain, who was not a praying man, prayed for it to be over.
The investigator sat detached from the crowd along the western edge of Tyburn, where the fields had grown thick with burrs and the path was almost impassable. He had not accompanied the processional through the streets. Instead he had made White find him a driver and carriage, arriving only for the final moments. He could not stomach more. He could not stomach this much. He blamed his lack of fortitude on his bowels, which clutched and roiled at the slightest provocation. His secretary had refused to accompany him. Bartwain squinted through the smoke from his pipe and took in Kiffin’s performance. The clergyman was perched on the mule cart. He wore a stiff doublet, a fraying jerkin, and misshapen breeches. He was bowing and blushing up there like a bridegroom. He began to call out a prayer for the forgiveness of sins. A good nonconformist, Kiffin invented his prayers on the spot; he did not believe the Holy Spirit could be found inside the Elizabethan Prayer Book.
Bartwain glanced at the sky. It was high noon. The shadows had vanished from the bottom of the gallows, that colossal triangle, that Triple Tree, as they called it, whose beams could hang more than twenty felons at once. In June, the Council of State had strung up twenty-four condemned felons simultaneously, causing the gallows to resemble a row of hanging root vegetables, each man swaying and sagging in his prescribed place like so many sacks of wintertime onions and carrots. Next to the gallows now stood the anatomy doctors. They were waiting for Rachel. They were standing in a thin line, holding their black bags. They were waiting to take the body for dissection; they were here to open a woman up for the advancement of science. Judge Blakemore had tacked this final, clinical punishment onto Rachel’s sentence after the jury’s verdict. If a woman could not be rendered useful in life, he had written, then let her be rendered useful in death. Give the body to science.
Kiffin was praying: “Our merciful God, who is also a God of judgment, angry and jealous, yet abundant in mercy, we thank You for calling us to seek Your face, and we ask You to turn Your kindness toward us this day, as we undertake this most difficult and necessary of punishments.”
Bartwain was watching the hangman. He was an oily, seal-like fellow. Probably he should not have shared a ceremonial drink with the condemned woman. An hour with Rachel Lockyer would leave any man in a diminished state. The hangman’s mouth formed an O, and his liquored whiskers bristled. He sneezed; his eyes were drizzling. It would take the smiting hand of duty to make this man carry out his task without faltering.
The guards put down the cart rail to slide out the wooden coffin. It landed upright, tall as they were. They lowered the box to the ground. They climbed back into the cart. They were not waiting for Kiffin to finish his prayer—they knew how long a Baptist preacher took. They wrapped the rope around Rachel’s neck, although they did not tighten it. That was the hangman’s job. They called to the hangman. It was his turn now. He was going to have to hitch the other end of that rope over one of the horizontal beams and lash the noose tight, so it would not come loose. The beams stood twelve feet from the ground. They were nearly as high as the Sessions House balcony from which Bartwain had fallen. The hangman began slinking toward his target. This was his moment. This was what he did. The plan was this. As soon as the noose was tight and the prayer finished, the driver would whip the mule, and the beast would lurch forward to escape the lash, causing the cart to pull away from the condemned woman, leaving her dangling. The only thing between Rachel Lockyer and God’s green earth at that point would be a braided noose and seven feet. Bartwain coughed; his lungs were worsening; he wished his secretary had accompanied him. The hangman started his work. He began to tighten the rope around her neck, but the close quarters of the cart did not make his task easy. To get the noose cinched, he had to angle himself around Rachel’s green dress, reaching over and securing the rope to one of the beams without losing the free end and without brushing up against her by accident. The cart groaned. The crowd began murmuring. Rachel twisted her head away from the hangman. Painstakingly, he fumbled through his ministrations. He belched. He bumbled. He fumbled some more. He apologized. Rachel kept her eyes on the horizon.
Bartwain found himself fascinated by her neck. He could not keep his eyes off it. One rarely thinks to look at a neck for a neck’s sake. Rachel’s was narrow, and arched, with a hollow at the base where her dress fell open. Its curve was almost reptilian; it was primed for deflection or attack. Maybe that was how she finally did it, he considered abstractly, as was his wont; maybe that was how it happened. She had turned her head. Maybe it had been as simple and livid as that. One could survive any number of impossible things by looking away during the time of the undertaking.
Not long ago the investigator had seen a strange woman balding and begging along Bailey Road. He was making his way to the courthouse when he spotted her—a featherless old bird clutching her knees and rocking along the side of the carriageway. She sat on the stoop of a lodging house that charged so little only the very poor could not afford it. This woman was very poor. Bartwain, frowning, stopped to ask her why she was doing it, why she was rocking. It was a ridiculous question, and unseemly for a man of his standing to ask, but he could not turn away; Rachel’s case had rattled him. The old woman said nothing. Her eyes glinted up at him distrustfully. She was still sitting there three hours later when he checked from the window of the Sessions House. The next morning she was gone.
Kiffin was concluding his prayer: “Therefore we ask for Your mercy upon this woman, on her behalf; we ask for her repentance, even as she passes from us; we ask You, who know all things in Your infinite wisdom; You who knit her in her mother’s womb and knew her fully before she was born, and determined this as her course. May it redound to Your glory, now and forevermore. Amen.”
The hangman had removed the noose to adjust it for a better fit. Having encountered Rachel Lockyer’s neck, he now appeared to be faltering. She reached up and caught his wrist and said something in his ear, Bartwain could not hear what. Then she helped him put on the noose, lifting up her hair like a woman being given a necklace by a suitor. When it was cinched properly, when all was ready, she turned to the crowd, searching the faces; she did not
appear to find the one she was seeking. She sagged and sank against the side of the cart. Her legs betrayed her. The crowd grunted its satisfaction. If she was not going to give them a good sobbing repentance, then she would do well to grant them something else, like fainting, or madness, or a gibbering vomiting exodus. The hangman reached out to steady her. He was devoted to her now. He would not let her buckle a second time. He checked the noose; she nodded.
When Kiffin had finished his prayer and stepped down from the cart, the clergyman signaled to the hangman, who signaled to the driver, who cracked the whip, which signaled the mule. But the creature remained unpersuaded. It was not in on their little agreement. It was an old mule. It had traveled to Tyburn more times than it wished to remember. It had registered marked dissatisfaction with this morning’s oats. It disliked crowds; it disliked carts; it particularly disliked broken-axled carts. The mule dug in and farted. The crowd rocked and pealed. Rachel’s eyes were closed, her chest rising and falling so rapidly Bartwain wondered if she was having a seizure of the heart and might go that way, quickly. Let her go, he whispered, clenching the sides of his chair. Let God have her first. The driver cracked the whip again, cursing. The mule’s flanks welted pink. Still the animal would not move; still it balked; it was possessed. It swiveled its ornery eyes, shook its head, and gave a kick. The crowd applauded. It was a sign. Everyone became transfixed with the prospect. If they could not have a good hanging, then they would have a good miracle. They were Protestants, this crowd, but beneath their Calvinist words and judgments lay a hysterical substratum of Catholic symptoms. They longed for signs and wonders.
Accidents of Providence Page 20