A third time the driver flicked the whip, leaving a trail of blood speckling the mule’s coat. Some blood spattered back on the driver’s face. He wiped at it, smearing red across his upper lip. He struck again. At last the old recusant surrendered. The mule leaned forward, wheezing, dragging the cart behind. The wheels rolled two feet, then two and a half, then three. For a short while Rachel still clutched the rails, still kept her feet planted. But not for long: the mule was finding the pace of faith. Now she was off the cart. She dangled in the air by her neck. She hung there, suspended; she was neither of the heavens nor of the earth. She swung between worlds. The mule turned its hoary head to see what its progress had wrought. Bartwain watched also. She was kicking, spinning, rotating in circles, her arms scrabbling at the noose, trying to get a breath. She bit through her tongue; blood sauced out.
Was she thinking? He doubted it. This was the body’s hour. Probably it hadn’t felt anything at all since that poor bastard died, and now everything was returning; all life’s sensations were being compressed into this one moment. Her body was rising up, he thought, rising up and reviving, demanding its place in the order of things.
Her hand fell open; the nosegay drifted to the earth. Bartwain lowered his head.
Mary was peering through the crowd at the scaffold. Fifteen minutes in, and her assistant was still kicking. Something was not right. The noose was not tied sufficiently tight. Mary did not blame such a mistake on God. She blamed it on the hangman, who had become the worst thing any hangman can be—ambivalent.
At the foot of the gallows, Kiffin strode back and forth, waiting for Rachel to stop breathing. Mary pushed toward the clearing. She could hear Kiffin muttering from the Beatitudes. He was not listening to the sounds above him. He was not hearing Rachel’s sliding guttural spasms. But Mary heard them. Mary closed her eyes.
Her late husband used to tell her that when one became a Christian, the way in which one inhabited the world changed. For Mary, becoming a believer had meant becoming an observer. She scanned her world as a sailor surveys the shoreline—from a distance. She looked for signs of trouble; she watched for leaks. Over time this discipline had had the ancillary effect of eradicating Mary’s joy altogether. The world receded each time she interrogated it.
Twenty minutes in, and Rachel stopped moving. Her head slumped to the side, arms slack, mouth open; she was no longer breathing. From the middle of the crowd, Elizabeth Lilburne began wailing, screaming Rachel’s name, her round face screwing up as she pitched toward the scaffold. The soldiers formed a barricade around Rachel. This did not stop Elizabeth. She hurled herself against them, pounding their chests with her fists; she bellowed the name of her friend. In the same moment John Lilburne began making his rounds, distributing copies of his pamphlet. He was handing out his martyrology to people who could not read, who could not write, to men and women who would not know what a martyr was if one rose up from the dead and mauled them. Mary folded her arms when he offered her one.
Just then a dry wind gusted up and began plucking the loose pages out of the spectators’ hands. The People’s Martyr had been bound in haste. Its binding was not well pasted. Its pages felt no obligation to remain in order. They began blowing around of their own accord, catching an upswing of air, raining mischievously down on the old mule’s head, so that it snatched a bite of parchment. The pages swirled around the scaffold. John raced in a spiraling circle, trying to collect his escaping words. The faster he ran, the more they scattered. The air was thick with sentences.
The hangman began sawing at the rope. The guards surrounded the scaffold to protect him as he worked. He pulled back as Rachel’s body slid into his arms. For a minute they were face-to-face. Mary stayed on her toes to watch. Her assistant’s neck was black where the rope had circled it. Her dress, soaked with sweat and urine and the blood of the shoat, gave off an acrid stench as the hangman laid her down.
Mary’s hand found its way up to her own neck. She felt the veins, tendons, vocal cords. For a moment she wondered what it would be like to love life so much one could not bear to leave it. The thought of such selfishness took her breath away. She removed her hand. She reminded herself it was not Christ who had loved the world. It was God who loved the world, and Christ who died for it. The two had split the task between them. Nowhere in the Scriptures was it ever said, Christ loved the world.
The hangman was covering Rachel’s body with a blanket. Mary made her way over to the anatomy doctors and asked what they would do with the body once they had finished dissecting it. The doctors said they would not be finished for some days, and she nodded stiffly and moved away. She straightened her shoulders as her pace increased. She felt around under her chin, making sure her bonnet was fast. She was going home to the glove shop on Warwick Lane. Behind her, she could hear the doctors starting. Clicking their pincers, they circled the corpse, revolving under a cloud of pamphlets. They were black beetles hauling a carcass back to their lair.
Twenty-three
AT MIDNIGHT ON November 1, 1649, between the last stroke of All Saints’ and the first stroke of All Souls’, Rachel Lockyer gave birth to a girl, the fifteenth child of William Walwyn, whom she loved too much. She delivered the child by herself. Mary paused outside the door on her way to bed and muttered something—Rachel could not hear exactly what, but it sounded like What is going on in there; what are you doing this time. And she remembered Mary telling her that a woman who gave birth to a bastard would find no safe harbor at Du Gard Gloves. So Rachel did not open the door. She kept it locked. She did not want the first face her daughter saw in this world to be someone who condemned her.
She had a long labor. It is sometimes said bastards do not take as long to deliver and that the women in question do not have the regular pains signifying impending motherhood. Rachel had pains. The delivery did not go well. The child would not drop for two hours. Rachel was on the floor, her back against the side of the bed. When the infant finally did drop, it became caught partway; it stopped in the middle of the birth canal and would go no farther. Its head was free, but nothing else. This lasted for the longest time, until Rachel looked for something to guide the child out. She reached in the pocket of her dress for her measuring ribbon, which a glovemaker always keeps close. She bent down and tried to tie the ribbon around the child’s neck, which was barely showing; its head and neck were out of the birth canal now; its shoulders were not. Its shoulders were caught. Rachel bit down on her own arm to control the shaking, and she prayed to God to help her pull out the rest. Her legs and arms were spasming like a convulsive’s. She planted her right hand under her buttocks for leverage, but she slipped in her own fluids, so that her back struck the floor; in the same second her hand pulled the ribbon tight. She could not see what was happening. She did not let go of the ribbon. When she regained her balance, she tugged and pulled some more. She pulled hard on the ribbon for several seconds. Then the child did come out, all at once, with a kind of coughing sound, a kind of sick coughing twist. Rachel moved to her hands and knees and knelt before it. What she saw frightened her. Quickly she tried to unwrap the ribbon. But there was too much blood and the ribbon was too tight and the child’s face was going blue.
Then Rachel heard, or thought she heard, a voice.
She stopped. She went perfectly still. She listened. She could have sworn it was God talking. She heard the voice say, This is My daughter with whom I am well pleased. “Who is that?” she cried. When no one answered she grew furious. She tore at the measuring ribbon, picking at it with her nails, biting at it. It would not come off. She asked her brother, Robert, to help, but that was no use; he did not answer. Her sewing shears were in the wainscot box. She reached for them, straining. She took hold of the shears and returned to the child, her hand suspended over it. She observed its struggle, its minute and infinitesimal battle. She hated it; she hated how it floundered. Its weakness, its pathetic inability to live, horrified her. She also loved it; she loved it more than she had loved
or ever would love anything in this life, including Walwyn, including her brother whom she had raised almost as her own; she must get that ribbon off. She attacked the ribbon. She pulled hard, away from the skin, and she scissored it. It fell in two pieces from the infant’s neck. An angry purple ring puffed up, gasped up, where the ribbon had been, and in the same moment Rachel heard the voice again. This is My daughter; she is Mine. She heard it very clearly this time. It was not just her imagining things. She absolutely knew the difference. Again she stopped what she was doing. She took her hands off the child. She left the child on the floor before her, struggling silently. She did not know what to do about that voice. All Rachel’s life, her mother had said, “If God speaks to you, listen.” But what if God speaks and you do not understand what He is saying? So Rachel asked God to clarify Himself. And then God stopped speaking to her, which reluctantly He will do whenever any of His children insists over and over the course of years that she cannot hear Him, even as she must shout to be heard over God’s sound. The voice left her alone. But Rachel did not know the voice had left her alone, and she continued waiting. She counted backward. She counted from fifteen, which was how long William Walwyn once told her it took God to welcome by name any innocent who has suffered. Fifteen fourteen thirteen twelve eleven ten nine eight, and again she listened—something was wrong. Seven six five four three—she had made a mistake. Who was she to think God spoke to one such as her? She lifted the tiny creature and put her fingers into the mouth to clear the throat of mucus and fluids. Two one—this child was not breathing. She had waited too long. She had waited fifteen counts. She had thought God wanted the child back, for surely He knew what its life would be. She held the infant close, the birth cord still attached. She asked the child to wake up. When the child did not, she asked God to wake up. She shook the child. Nothing. She remembered God blew into Adam once. Or was it Eve? No, God blew into Adam; God gave Adam first chance at breath. She blew into the child’s mouth. She heard Elizabeth’s voice, berating her: How could you bring a child into this world? She heard another voice, Elizabeth’s as well: How could you not? She tried clearing the throat again. This child was no longer living. She pressed the tiny body to her breasts and closed its eyes; she covered its eyes with her fingers. Those sky blue irises were tearing into her. She said to herself: If I close her eyes then she will not exist in this world; she will exist only to me. And if she never sees me she will never suffer, for she will not know what kind of person she was born to.
She held her. She recited the verse in Matthew about the sparrows, about how if there are two in the field and one of them falls, surely our Father notices. She held her for an hour, until the child was cold. In the middle she delivered the afterbirth. When she took her hands away, her newborn daughter was curled up, one tiny hand on the measuring ribbon Rachel had used to drag her into the world, the other on her mother’s breast. She was dead.
In that moment Rachel understood herself to be the worst of all possible monsters. Sounds issued from her mouth, sounds she could neither control nor articulate. The sounds continued as she cleaned the child. She cleaned her and she dried her and she pulled her into the dress she had made out of the bottom of Mary’s yellow curtain. Then she wrapped her in one of the shawls she had sewn back when she still thought a person might escape one world and find another waiting. What finally happened, you see, was this. Rachel could not deliver the new world to the child, so she delivered the child to the new world. She gave her over. She gave the child her hope. Her hope became Elijah’s chariot, to carry her over, to bring the child safe passage from one world to the next. Walwyn could not do this. Only Rachel could. She did not do it for him. She did it for the child. She did it, as well, for the other children, for fourteen guileless and expectant souls who did not know that their father by being human had endangered them, who had no idea their happiness even needed protecting.
She started to leave the house with her that night but could not do it. She could not move, could not walk. So she hid the child in the wainscot box. She tried to mop the floor with the bed linens but she could not do that either. She crawled over to the bed. She could not climb in. She lay on her side on the floor. She dreamed that when the child got to the new world she told the guard at the entrance not to let her in because she had glimpsed the old world she had skipped over and wanted to go back. And the guard asked the child why. It is freer here, he said; there is no one to harm you. And the child said, My mother is there; I miss my mother. And the guard dropped his head and said, You do not have a mother; that is the price of her delivering you. And then in the dream the guard turned into John Lilburne, Robert Lockyer, William Walwyn, and all the men Rachel had known. And then it was only Walwyn. As he reached out she drew back, and he said, But there was love; and a vast emptiness opened below them, and they fell together.
When Rachel woke she did not go downstairs until late in the morning; she could hardly sweep for the pains. That night she carried the child out to the woods and buried it. The following morning Mary dug it up. The beetles and the earthworms had covered it. Only its eyes were untouched. Mary shoved the bundle at her and said, “Is this yours? Is this what you have gone and done?” and when Rachel looked all she could see was blue. Her daughter’s eyes were open. They had seen everything, in death and in life. She had known what it is to be a person. She had seen her mother.
Since that day Rachel had stopped trying to be Solomon; she had stopped trying to split the difference. A love that has happened and cannot go forward still holds a living purpose.
Twenty-four
WALWYN TOOK THE long way home to Moorfields.
He did not go to the gallows. He left the processional after the ringing of the bell at St. Sepulchre and headed north on his own. He walked. The coarse shouts of the mob remained in his ears after he had left the city. He crossed the Roman wall west of Moorgate and arrived home before Anne did. He did not know that his wife had gone to Tyburn. The remainder of the day he spent in the apothecary, that makeshift shed behind the house. For three hours he holed up, burning through his concentration. He pulled books from the shelves, blindly flipping through remedies and anatomy charts. He passed by recipes for poultices to dry up a woman’s milk after she has lost a child; he paged through the symptoms of melancholia and fainting sickness. His eyes lost their focus. For several minutes he studied the frontispiece of a handbook on midwifery, its author pseudonymous. The woodcut showed a woman draped in Grecian robes, devoid of expression, a child cradled in her arms. He set the handbook down. He retrieved his flask of wormwood, drank until his thoughts dissolved. Only then did he turn to his own work, unearthing a collection of pamphlets from the deepest drawer of the desk that examined the principles not of medicine but of liberty—these were his finest theories, his best ideas, carefully crafted treatises on the rule of law and the importance of religious toleration and the right to self-governance and the hope for a civil commonwealth. He flipped through the pages he had written and shook his head, bewildered. Who was this man who thought he could solve the world’s problems with words? The arrogance!
Not until Alice, the maidservant, came in to tell him Mrs. Walwyn was ready for supper did he end his solitary confinement, close the shed, and follow the serpentine curve of the footpath back to the house. The afternoon sky was settling to dusk. He stepped inside the kitchen.
“Finally,” said Anne, not to her husband but to her son.
Richard ran up and rapped on his father’s legs, testing them for soundness. When Walwyn scooped him up, the boy pinched his father’s nose. “You smell,” he said, waving his hand. Walwyn made a face for him.
“Set him down, please,” Anne said. He set the boy down.
“No,” Richard shouted. Walwyn picked the boy back up.
“He’s tired. He had quite the day.” She paused before adding, meaningfully, “We went on a long walk.”
“Where to?” When Walwyn’s eyes met hers, he saw where she had been; he saw
what she had seen. “My God,” he said. Abruptly she looked away. She was setting out the linens.
The Walwyns generally took their evening meals as a crowd. Some nights as many as sixteen or seventeen gathered around the table, if one counted grown children and neighbors and friends and spouses. Lately, however, the youngest had flocked to tutors, and the middle children had begun apprenticing for trades. Tonight it was just the four of them, including Alice, with supper a plain and subdued affair—eel and oysters, which could be purchased inexpensively, and cucumbers roasted with thyme. Walwyn used to try to persuade Anne to rub the oysters with garlic before cooking, but she never warmed to the suggestion. They ate peaceably enough, though Walwyn could not finish anything on his plate. Neither he nor Anne could bear to look at each other, so they looked at their son instead.
Accidents of Providence Page 21