Anne asked what he was working on in the apothecary. “You were out there a long time.”
Walwyn invented an answer. He said he was developing a compound extraction of cloves and lemon intended to ease lung and respiratory ailments.
“Who for?”
“People who can’t breathe,” he said.
For reply Anne sliced her eel into five identical pieces.
When they had finished eating, she said to Alice, “Take the boy upstairs and put him to bed.”
“I thought I was to clean the kitchen,” the maidservant replied.
“We will clean it later. Mr. Walwyn and I must go over a household matter.”
As Alice led the boy up the stairs, he called down to his father. “Read me a story,” he demanded.
“Yes,” Walwyn promised. “Yes, I will read you a story later.”
Anne busied herself extinguishing the cooking fire. Since the first year of their marriage, she had opted to shoulder this chore by herself. Walwyn used to try to help, but she always refused. It was not a task for two people, she had said. This evening she was tamping the embers in a way that thickened the smoke into a dull blanket. Walwyn rose from the table and opened the front door, swinging it back and forth on its hinges.
“Stop that.” She glanced up at him. “The rain will get inside.”
“It’s not raining.”
“It will soon.” She continued tamping until the embers whistled and sighed. Walwyn closed the door and returned to his chair. Anne wiped her hands on a cloth and eased herself into the seat across from him. From the folds of her skirt she produced a piece of needlework. While she stitched, he waited. He rested his elbows on the table. He sensed something of what was coming.
She dragged her eyes up to his. Her hands did not stop stitching. “About this morning. About the scaffold.” She was stabbing at her needlework.
“Yes.”
“So this will be the end of it.” It was not a question.
“Yes,” he said. But it was not an answer.
Anne withdrew her eyes like a general pulling back a pair of victorious soldiers. She proceeded to reinforce the white border of her needlework with a new stitch, an elegant crosshatch. First she sewed twenty white half-stitches to the right, then twenty to the left, following a boundary she had begun earlier. As soon as she finished one row she started another. It was a lovely, severe pattern, using material he had not seen in years.
“What are you making?” he asked.
She raised the needlework from her lap so he could see. She had sewn a neat white border around one of the pretty green bonnets he had given her years ago, one of those dear and useless bonnets that had sat atop their wardrobe, waiting.
“Would you hand me that spool?” she said.
Walwyn reached over and retrieved a spool of white thread from the end of the table. In his fingers the smooth end felt like a pebble, like something he might have skipped across a creek when he was young. Before he could stop himself, his wrist snapped and the spool went flying. It skipped and bounced across the floor; Anne watched close-mouthed. It skittered against the table legs. It collided with the cooking pot near the hearth. It singed itself there a minute, giving off a little puff and hiss. Then it began a long, protesting roll back to its owner as the floor’s slant dictated; it advanced with glacial slowness until it came to rest at Anne’s feet. She reached down and scooped it from the floor. She returned to her needlework, creating one neat white X after another. She angled her chair so her husband could see her progress. Walwyn watched, his face stinging from the leftover smoke. She was sewing a fence.
Twenty-five
IT WAS CLOSE to sundown before Bartwain made it home. First he had to return to the courthouse, where his secretary did not appear to be speaking to him. He had piled into his satchel all the notes and papers he could manage; he was clearing out his desk, though he did not want to admit it. “I need to complete my final report,” he said defensively to White, who had not asked a question. Bartwain told the driver to give him and White a ride home, but the horse began limping so badly Bartwain wound up ordering the fellow to stop and let them out; he did not want the beast to go lame on his account. He made his secretary wheel him the rest of the way home. White obeyed in silence. Bartwain admonished him to mind the kennels; he did not want to be tipped into a sewage creek. Carefully his secretary picked his way through the alleys and carriageways of Westminster, though several times the chair wobbled and nearly toppled. When they turned toward the investigator’s house, the chair thudded into a muddy rut left by a carriage wheel, causing Bartwain’s head to whip backward. He had to pray White would not let go of the handles. He recalled the physician at the courthouse telling him it was a good thing he went through life swaddled in as much fat as he did; his girth cushioned his bones.
When he made it to his house he sent White on his way before climbing gingerly out of his chair, hobbling for the stairs. He did not stop for a snack in the kitchen. He was too tired to eat. He could not even endure a biscuit. Upstairs, Mathilda was folding blankets.
“You made it,” she said. “How did you do?” She was wearing her scalloped nightcap.
Bartwain undressed, put on his nightclothes, and collapsed into bed. His lower back was tightening, his broken wrist throbbing. “I’m not getting paid enough,” he said to his pillow.
“I agree,” she replied.
He crashed into a dull and motionless sleep that lasted approximately three-quarters of an hour. Then Mathilda was patting him.
“Wake up,” she was saying, lively as ever.
“What is it?” He was furious. “What do you want? Can’t you see I’m spent? Can’t you see what this day has done to me?”
“Of course I can,” she assured him. “But that’s not my fault. Besides, it’s your secretary. He’s back. He’s at the door, asking for you.”
Bartwain fumbled for the ties on his robe and moved downstairs to the kitchen. Looming in the doorway was White, a specter of unrest, his eyes rheumy and yellow.
“What’s wrong?” Bartwain immediately said. “What happened?” A cold dread wrapped itself around his abdomen.
“It’s that woman.” The faintest hint of satisfaction flickered across White’s face. “That what’s-her-name, as you once called her.”
“Rachel Lockyer?”
“Yes.” White leaned in to say more, but when he saw Bartwain’s wife he drew back. Jerking his head at the wheeling chair, he motioned to the investigator. “You’d better come with me.”
Walwyn did not find out about it until hours after Bartwain did. Bartwain lived closer—he lived three streets away. When the doctors realized what was happening, they called for the investigator. They wanted his advice about the possible legal ramifications.
Bartwain and White reached the house where the doctors were working and found Elizabeth Lilburne waiting for them in the door; she pulled them inside with some impatience. The investigator dragged his failing body up from the chair, entered the front room, and turned to where Elizabeth was pointing. He saw Rachel’s unclothed body laid out on a long table, surrounded by trays of instruments, one basin on the left for organs, a second on the right for bloodletting. One of the anatomy doctors was poking and prodding her shoulder. Another was rubbing her feet, which had swelled with pooled blood; he was dictating notes to a clerk. A third doctor was circling the table, muttering.
Then Bartwain saw it. She was moving. More specifically, her chest was moving. Her lungs were taking air in and pushing air out. Her chest was rising and falling. There was no sign of life anywhere else, but those lungs were something. Bartwain staggered backward.
“This woman is not dead yet,” the circling doctor paused to tell him. “Either it is a miracle or the hangman failed to do his job.”
Elizabeth had heard the news an hour earlier. She’d learned about it from John, who had followed the doctors to the Westminster house—he wanted to see what they did with the body, in cas
e he could write about it later. John became the first witness. When he saw Rachel’s chest rising, he shouted at the doctors not to cut into her. The doctors were more surprised than John was. One of them jumped, stabbing Rachel in the shoulder with his surgical blade. As the doctors rushed to stanch the bleeding, John found an errand runner to fetch his wife, who he knew would not want to miss this. Elizabeth, hearing the message, left her daughter with the neighbor, begging his pardon for the inconvenience as she raced to the river. Crossing the crowded London Bridge by foot would have taken over an hour, so she hailed a waterman, who rowed her in half the time. When she arrived at the house in Westminster she shoved past the doctors, took one look at the body draped over the table, and said, in an offended voice, “But she is not wearing any clothing.” The chief doctor replied no, she was not, because until very recently they had not thought the woman would mind one way or the other. He then explained to Elizabeth that while Rachel was not quite dead, she was not quite living either. She is in the balance, he said. “Well, what are you doing to change that?” Elizabeth shouted. She began pushing the doctors into place, herding them, moving them through their paces. She threw her cape over Rachel’s exposed skin as a covering.
Walwyn did not hear of these events until the following day. His friends forgot to tell him. Or maybe they did not want to tell him. Or maybe they were not his friends. Bartwain was the only one who thought of him. Bartwain, who never liked William Walwyn, remembered him in this moment.
The Leveler was home, chopping wood behind the house, silver hair falling into his face, not thinking anything, urgently thinking nothing at all, when up came old Bartwain, shuffling along the footpath, scowling.
Bartwain told Walwyn that though he did not half believe it himself, there was news, it seemed; there was news from the autopsy house. She appears not to have expired, he told him. Or, if she did expire, she appears to have returned. She is fighting for breath as we speak. The doctors have put aside their dissection and are tending to her. As the investigator spoke, he saw out of the corner of his eye a woman in the back window of Walwyn’s house, a woman concentrating as though pushing something, as though rolling a boulder up a slope, a woman with watery eyes and a bun pulled so tight it looked like punishment.
“It could well be that she does not survive the—” But Bartwain could not get any of his cautions and caveats out. Walwyn dropped the log he was not chopping. He dropped the ax. He dropped his unallowed thoughts. He dropped his duty, his principle, and his religion, such as it was. He walked down the path, in full view of his wife, who was watching. He neither saw nor heard a thing save a lone jaybird mocking him from the poplars. It was a gray and dreary January morning and the mist clung so thick that to walk outside was to be pricked by a thousand needles of rain. Over his shoulder he thanked Bartwain for his kindness. I am off to the city, he said. His voice held joy. He ran. He sprinted. He passed Moorgate, passed the dog skinner’s house in the distance, did not stop, did not listen, did not hear anything from that direction. Not today. Today was not for sorrow. Today was for Rachel.
He passed into the northern edge of the city. A crowd slowed him down outside the courthouse, as around the Sessions House milled a hundred shivering souls, huddled under heavy cloaks and wide-brimmed hats, gossiping, whispering. Already news was spreading. News from the next life, they were saying, marveling, asking each other if what they had heard was possible, if God still interceded in the lives of humans. For a few seconds Walwyn hung back, listening. He saw several faces he recognized but none he knew well, and when two apprentices from the Whalebone began pointing through the fog in his direction, calling his name, he left and began jogging south. He headed toward Westminster, toward the house where the anatomy doctors worked. His jog became a run. He encountered more delays, including one that held him more than thirty minutes—it was a carriage accident. An old man had stepped into a busy thoroughfare without looking. A passing coach had rattled too close and its driver swerved too late, landing half of his vehicle in the ditch and the other half on the old man, pinning him beneath. Now the driver was off the front seat, cursing, and the elderly fellow was under the carriage; they needed help pulling him out. Walwyn was not going to stop, but then he saw who it was. It was an old man, a very old man with hair so white as to be translucent, a man with two twigs for shins that poked out from his prison garb. He brightened with recognition as Walwyn bent down in the road to him; he looked up at Walwyn and said, spitting bits of tooth, that he had forgotten how fast the world moved; he had forgotten how fast horses and their riders traveled. The world goes by so fast, he said, marveling; the world goes by so fast. So Walwyn stayed. He slogged through the mud alongside three burly Scots to haul the carriage off the man, to heave the wheel high enough to slide the fellow out, one limb at a time and most of them broken, the freed prisoner beaming wildly the whole time, not minding the pain, not begrudging this final bodily insult. Through failing eyes he gazed up at the sky as it mixed with the smoke from the tallow chandler’s and with the steam coming off the horses as they stood to one side, pawing and whinnying and waiting and looking longingly at the vendors trundling by with their shiny apples on carts; and he declared old London beautiful. You are my angel, he said to Walwyn. All this took some time. When it was over and the carriage righted and the old man off to the side of the road with someone tending him, Walwyn resumed his race, his legs shaking from the effort to heave aside the coach, his boots sopping with mud and manure. He did not notice. He splashed past a Parliamentary carriage built so high whoever rode in it must have thought he belonged to God. As he ran, his mind lurched back and forth, skittering across the surface of his thoughts; his thoughts that morning were intolerable. He rounded the cathedral, the clapboard frames of the doctors’ house appearing through the mist, until an unexpected sight brought him up short. He clattered to a halt so fast he fell. He tripped over his own life.
Gliding toward Walwyn, an apparition in the rain, was his wife of more than twenty years, and seven of his children walking in lockstep behind her. They were coming to retrieve their wandering mongrel. Anne had overheard Bartwain’s words while Walwyn was outside woodchopping. Fast as she could, she had borrowed the neighbor’s carriage. She had gathered all the offspring she could find to come with her, to head her husband off. If she did not head him off here, at the pass, at the very start of the pass, he would be gone. She knew it; he knew it. His eyes told her. Her eyes told him. His eyes said: Let me go; I must do this. Her eyes said: You will come home to Moorfields.
Walwyn tried to stand. The rain was in his face. He looked down and mud was everywhere; mud was spackling him. He rose to his feet and raised a hand to shield his eyes—the mist was coming in at an angle. Anne mistook his movement for a wave of greeting and she turned and said something to her children, who began fanning out and trotting toward their father all at once, the doctors’ house thirty yards behind them. He could see his children, and behind his children he could see the house. He could not look at one without taking in the other. Anne kept her gaze on him over the heads of her children, who cornered him, braying and barking; they plied Walwyn with tickles. Richard flung both arms around his father’s knees. “Come home!” he demanded. Anne stood back, appraising. Only when Walwyn was thoroughly treed did she approach, flanked by the twin sentries of caution and deliberation, which on another day he might have mistaken for patience.
“Papa!” declared Richard again. He rapped on Walwyn’s knees. Walwyn picked him up and the boy threw his arms around his father. Walwyn buried his face in his son’s neck.
“We came to bring you home,” Anne said. “I thought you had errands in the city, and since the rain is so heavy I wondered if you might want a ride.” The clouds over her head were starting to part.
“You are so dear” was all he could say. “How dear it is of you to come fetch your old Walwyn.” He could see and feel the doctors’ house, a living breathing thing, behind her. He could see silhouetted men
pacing back and forth in the window, doctors with their black bags, conferring, doctors with their instruments.
“Where were you heading in such a hurry? I hope we are not interrupting.” She glanced at his muddy boots. Richard pulled on his father’s ears.
“No, of course not,” Walwyn whispered. “I was just so eager to finish up these errands and get home.”
“Well, we will be there soon enough.”
“Let me down!” Richard wailed. Walwyn set him down, though the boy kept a tight grip on his father’s fingers.
“I’m sure there is something we’ve forgotten,” Anne went on over her shoulder. “Did you find potatoes for tomorrow’s roast?” She was halfway in the carriage before she turned around. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Yes,” he said. But his boots would not move. He checked to see if they were mired in mud; they were not. The black house was straight ahead, yawning, howling at him.
“Aren’t you at all glad to see us?” Anne asked, her voice wobbling for a brief second.
“Terribly,” he replied. And he was. How could he not be? He loved them. He loved them and it was necessary.
Wordlessly he lifted young Richard high, swinging him up against the slowly lightening sky, enthroning the boy on his shoulder. From this vantage point Richard could tug Walwyn’s beard, which had not seen a blade in days. “You need to groom,” the boy commanded. Together father and son followed Anne and the rest of her brood into a carriage drawn by two gray geldings. Walwyn was last to step inside.
Twenty-six
Report of the Investigation, Trial, Execution, and Miraculous Recovery of Rachel Lockyer, who being executed at Tyburn Tree, did after revive, and is now recovering.
Submitted to the Council of State in completion of the chief investigator’s requirements by Thomas Bartwain, Criminal Investigator.
Accidents of Providence Page 22