Accidents of Providence

by Stacia M. Brown

  “Now look,” he complained. John was an impatient creator.

  In the weeks since Mary had made her discovery behind the Smithfield slaughterhouse, none of the Levelers had asked one another if Rachel was guilty, although some had wondered about it privately. At a certain level, they already understood. The Levelers were failed revolutionaries. They knew what it was like to create and lose something for which one is then held responsible.

  Elizabeth was rubbing her puffed sleeve in a circle against the window. “Rachel has done well staying with us. But you have also benefited. I’ve never seen so many visitors in one month.” She peered out at the street below.

  “Yes,” John said, wistfully. He set the wooden fox on the desktop, where it toppled.

  The night before, after they finished supper and scattered sand across the floors to ward off pests, Elizabeth and John had left Rachel and Young Elizabeth resting on blankets in front of the hearth; John had taken his wife’s hand and guided her upstairs. He laid her on the mattress. He undressed her before a single quavering candle. He was insistent and therefore pitiable. He went after her like an alms beggar, with thrusts so urgent his yard softened. He hiccupped and coughed; he slipped out by accident. Elizabeth waited. His eyes were sagging into hers. His eyes held some thought she did not recognize. “John,” she said. He lowered himself again. He pressed his index finger inside her, wedging her open, then inserted himself behind. It was an old trick that generally left Elizabeth with bruises from his knuckles and not much else. Wax from the candle began dripping on the pamphlets. “John,” she said again.

  He shook his head, lips pursed. “Don’t.” His thighs were trembling as he reentered her.

  “John,” she declared a third time.

  It was too late. When he withdrew, unspent, neither of them could speak. He rolled onto his back. Together, husband and wife looked up at the rafters.

  “I have become a soap maker,” he whispered.

  “What harm is there in that,” Elizabeth whispered back, placing a cool hand on his stomach. “It is an honest living.”

  For reply, he had pinched the candle out.

  “John?” she was saying now, still at the window, still looking out. “Our lives are not the same as they used to be.”

  “I don’t so much mind if things change—” He stopped. A scuffle had broken out below, near the bishop’s old brothels. The worst of the stews were no longer in business; that was what Southwark officials said. But the officials did not venture near Clink Street in the evenings, where the Lilburnes lived; they did not hear the hard sound of poverty each night beneath the window, as the Lilburnes did.

  “Then what? What do you mind?” she said.

  He rose from the desk to stand beside her. Together they looked down at the city below the Thames, peering through the streaked panes, which had been poured into their settings unevenly. “I don’t know how to say it.” His head lingered close enough that his breath warmed her neck. His scent was sweet there, and unexpected.

  “Yes, you do,” she whispered. “You say things finer than anyone.”

  “I fear I have lost God’s favor.” John’s voice caught on something when he said it. No one else would have noticed it, but Elizabeth did. She could hear it. She could see it in his reflection. She could watch it blinking like a firefly, all the way out the window, out to the scavenger piles. The People were gone from his voice. From here on out they were not coming back. John would have to go back to the Tower and even there he would not find them. His days as Freeborn John, as the torchbearer, were over.

  Late that evening, well past midnight, Elizabeth dreamed of her two boys. She heard them yowling at her; she watched Tower and his infant brother banging on the table for beets. She awoke and sat up in the dark, gasping, a sad wind whistling up and down her pipes. She climbed out of the bed. She crept downstairs to Young Elizabeth, who was lying on a blanket before the hearth. She picked up the girl and carried her up two flights of stairs to her own bed. For the remainder of the night she slept curled around the little girl, arms fastened tight.

  Twenty-eight

  WHEN WALWYN RECEIVED word that Rachel was preparing to leave, he went to Anne and stood before her as she scraped watery gruel from a cooking pot. He said, offering neither introduction nor excuse, “I must go to Southwark.” He did not equivocate. He did not race out of the house this time. He simply said: I must. In his hand was the note he had received from Elizabeth. Anne glanced at it for several seconds before pushing it away, before pushing his hand away. She returned to scraping. She reached for a ladle and began slopping the gruel into bowls.

  “We could give them eggs, you know,” he suggested as he watched her. “The children might like eggs for breakfast. It would be a treat.”

  “Eggs for breakfast are not in the budget,” she said.

  “They are in the budget if we say they are in the budget,” he offered. “We could put eggs in the budget ahead of time, a year in advance if you wanted. We could have eggs every week, if you wanted.”

  She did not say anything to this. All she said was: “You will come back?” She would not look at him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I will come back.”

  He borrowed a neighbor’s horse, a two-year-old colt that was not pleased to find a bit in its mouth. He talked to the colt as he rode, to calm it. They passed through the city center, headed south; they passed the old fish wharf with its barnacled posts. When they crossed the London Bridge, with its shops and three-story buildings cramming the deck, neither he nor the colt could look at the water. The colt settled down by the time they reached the Southwark gatehouse. It trotted past Winchester House toward Elizabeth and John’s residence. Arriving, Walwyn tethered the colt to an iron railing the neighbors had erected in an effort to separate the paying renters from the brothels.

  Elizabeth opened the door, and Walwyn threw his arms around her, leaving her temporarily without words. He wore the twin scents of sleeplessness and tobacco. “I wonder if I might see her,” he said.

  It was January 30, the one-year anniversary of the execution of Charles I. Throughout the taverns and into the streets, people who had despised their king and wanted his divine rights stripped were now raising their cups to his memory, putting their arms around one another, singing ballads that called him martyr.

  “I hear you’re still trying your hand at physic,” Elizabeth said as she showed Walwyn to the third floor.

  “It passes the time,” he said. They reached the third-floor landing. Elizabeth fumbled in the dark for the latch as he asked how Rachel’s recovery was proceeding.

  “Better.” She pressed the latch; it stuck. “You know, no one could believe God would intervene like that on behalf of a murderer. But they also can’t believe a woman who gave birth out of wedlock could deserve a second chance. For, clearly, the child was hers.” She jiggled the latch. “So the pardon might have saved her from Tyburn, but it has not saved her from the rest.”

  “The rest of what?”

  “Why, the rest of her life.”

  “What does she say about all this?”

  “Ask her yourself.” She opened the door to Rachel.

  ***

  She was seated in a wooden rocker, clutching a book, her old three-legged dog curled around her feet. Whoever wrote the book must have had a great deal to say, for the volume was such a size that Rachel was forced to keep a tight grip on the edges so it would not slide off her lap. When she saw Walwyn she stood up. She did not let go of the book. “There you are,” she breathed. “I was waiting so long for you.”

  “You can read,” he marveled.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, and you were not even here to pester me.” Her dog, delivered by Thom the messenger on Mary’s orders, sacrificed its warm patch to rise and nose Walwyn’s fingers.

  “You helped obtain my pardon,” she added.

  He nodded. The effort to talk, to throw words around the last year, required more skill than he curren
tly possessed. All his concentration centered now on not touching her. He yearned to touch her, but something in her countenance prohibited it. When you have died before as many people as Rachel did, there is not much left you can call yours. You have reached the bottom, and everyone has seen you could not climb up. No woman wants to own such things, to concede she might bleed, or be impregnated, or love foolishly, or that her body might ache, roiled with uses, or that she might not even remember all it has gone through. He asked if she would forgive him. But the question would not come out as a question, only as a name. Rachel. His mouth folded around the word and refused to leave its side. The cloth in the window stirred, restless. “I cannot imagine a day without you,” he confessed.

  “And yet you have made it this far . . .” She was smiling, standing there, taking him in, telling herself to keep breathing, watching the hair falling into his eyes, studying his arms with those sleeves pushed up like they were the first time she met him, that night at the Whalebone, when he was this lone figure at the end of the table who glanced up from his writing, from his solitary thought, and saw her, who forgot his name when she entered his field of vision. He had responded with his whole body to her that night, and she with hers. She had not been afraid. She was not afraid now either. She should memorize how he looked, how he carried himself, so she would not forget. She studied him. And the closer she studied him the more she saw, and the more she saw the more she understood, until right then, right there on John Lilburne’s carpet of pamphlets, a tide of bright smacking hope rose up in her. It was a wave appearing out of nowhere. It did not belong to her. She knew that much. Hope did not belong to this day, not to this house, not to this year. She had not earned it, had not inherited it, had no money to purchase it. Hope was not her property. Yet here it was. Now she was moving toward him, putting her mouth on him. She was holding him as tight as a woman holds anything that was never truly hers. And she was asking, Do you love me; because for her this was the same thing as saying, I know I love you. And he was saying that he wanted her to tell him everything that happened, everything that had taken place during the months they were apart; start from the beginning, he murmured, do not leave anything out; do not leave me out. He kept talking, even as she kissed him quiet. His hand was on the small of her back. He was saying: What will we do now? What will happen to us now? And she was guiding him, comforting him; she was now the philosopher; every woman becomes the philosopher at some point; it is only a matter of time. And she said: We will not lose hope.

  Elizabeth, who had been standing guard on the other side of the partition, leaned her head around the cloth and interrupted. Her eyes bored through both of them as she proclaimed, “You’ve been given back your hope but now you have to live with it.”

  For Rachel that also meant: Now you have to live past it.

  She had to live with it. With what she did. With what she failed to do.

  She also had to live past it. Which meant: She had to live past Walwyn.

  This, then, was the battle of Rachel Lockyer. She battled two gods at once, her mother’s and her father’s. The two now spoke as one, having consolidated forces.

  She said to the gods: But I do not want to go. And the gods said: Yes, you do.

  She said to the gods: But I do not know how. And the gods said: You are learning.

  She said to the gods: But I have not the strength. And the gods said: Strength is breathing. You need only take one breath at a time. Anyone living is doing it.

  She said to the gods: But he was my whole heart. And the gods said: And you are his.

  Some hundred years later Elizabeth disappeared down the stairs, and Rachel flung her arms back around Walwyn. She ran her fingers along his jaw, along the lines circling his neck. She kissed his chin, his earlobes. She returned her arms to his waist, held him strong and hard and tight. In her eyes was the answer to the question he never asked.

  He asked it now. Did you give her a name? he said.

  Not one that can be considered as such, she told him. She pressed her fingers into her eyelids as she spoke. But she had thought of the sparrows in Matthew, the ones that fall to the ground, and how God picks them up.

  Walwyn put his head in his hands.

  She opened her eyes, kissed the top of his head. Stand up, she whispered, though he was on his feet. Stand up. Go now. Go now; hurry. Do it fast. Don’t delay. Don’t stay here any longer. Don’t drag this out. I cannot tolerate it when you are slow. You know that. I always told you that. I cannot bear it. It is your worst feature. Go now, leave now, or I will never be able to do this.

  Swallowing hard, he said he would look in on her from time to time. You are very fair, he whispered. In his mind’s eye, every time he laid eyes on her was the first.

  I am fair enough, she said, and smiled.

  You are the finest glovemaker the city has ever seen, he told her. You are a master.

  The next week, the glovemaker, the artist, inscriber of his soul, would pack her bag and leave Southwark. Then she would leave the city of London for good. She would not return to tell him in which direction her life was opening.

  Twenty-nine

  NOT UNTIL HER recovery was nearly complete did Rachel receive a visit from her mother. It was not a long visit. Martha Lockyer was not a woman who felt at home in other people’s lodgings, so she was in and out with some efficiency. Neither Elizabeth nor John had met her, so when the thin-lipped Mrs. Lockyer, reserved and wary but with the same lilting stride as her daughter, showed up on their doorstep on the first day of February, Elizabeth had no idea who she was and tried to send her away with a farthing—she took her for a beggar. Then the woman gave her name and Elizabeth stopped short.

  Martha Lockyer was nondescript in character as well as appearance. She was not old, but she was not young either. She did not frown, but smiling failed to brighten her. She asked if this was the house that held the woman who had been raised from the dead. Elizabeth, speechless, showed her to the third floor. Mrs. Lockyer flew to her daughter, who was packing her belongings. She went down on her creaking knees, where she began praying her way around the Roman calendar of saints, teeth chattering with pride. Elizabeth had to hurry away two other visitors in case a pair of Protestant ears should overhear the sounds issuing from the bedroom.

  After Martha Lockyer took her leave, Rachel made her way downstairs to the kitchen. She sat at the table, picked up a cloth, and helped Elizabeth wipe plates. While she worked, she told her friend what had happened.

  She said her mother had prayed for a quarter of an hour, thanking the Virgin for Her mercies. Rachel tried to speak, to say something, but her mother shushed her with the martyr’s prayer of St. Ignatius: I will praise Thy Name continually, and I will sing praise with thanksgiving. My prayer was heard, for Thou didst rescue me from an evil plight. It was the same prayer Martha Lockyer had recited more than twenty years before, on the day her husband passed. Rachel reached out, extending both arms. She said, “But Mother, I am here. I am here. Look at me. I am your child, your flesh.”

  “You are not my child.” Her mother shook her head. “You are a miracle.”

  Then Elizabeth realized Rachel’s mother had made a pilgrimage of twenty years and twenty miles not to see her daughter but to touch a living relic. She had come to Southwark not to ask how Rachel was recovering, not to extend concern or dispense advice or even to pronounce judgment. She had come to see if God still intervened in the world of temporals. And once Martha Lockyer had confirmed that He did, she asked if she could take a lock of her daughter’s hair with her when she left. Rachel let her. It was what she had.

  Epilogue

  MARY WAS a member of the Huguenot Church of the Refuge on Threadneedle Street, a clapboard sanctuary that leaked when it rained and groaned when it was dry. Each week for five years she had attended Sabbath services, and each week for five years she had listened as the clergyman repeated the same sermon: God loves strangers in a foreign land, he said; God loves the persecuted. Be
yond the church, at the end of Threadneedle Street, lay a wooded hill where members of the Huguenot congregation could bury their families and neighbors. Not long ago, Mary had purchased a plot.

  She made her way to the church on a Friday in early February. She had not gone to visit Rachel, though she had heard the accounts coming out of Southwark. She had sent the dog instead—she suspected Rachel preferred its company. Besides, she had too many customers to take time away. She swept the floors herself now.

  Mary knocked on the front door of the sanctuary. The exterior façade had been blackened by countless small fires that had burned during the war, although the top floor had survived unscathed, two round windows intact. When no one answered, she made her way around the back. She would find the place on her own.

  As she walked, Mary pressed through the veil of what was said, what was not said, what was written, and what was not written, in the weeks since she had found the infant; and she realized she was no longer certain what it meant to say, as Christ did, that something was finished. For Christ came back. She wondered if any of His disciples, on hearing that news, had felt a slow despair rising. The Scripture told only of their surprise and disbelief. It did not say if any of them was ruined by it. What if there had been one disciple, just one, who needed the Lord to let him be, who had started to make his way in the world, who had just begun to learn there was more to being a pilgrim than following? And then there Christ was, resurrected, back in the thick of things.

  Halfway up the hill, she passed through a patch of thistle and honeysuckle. The path steepened. She gritted her teeth. Under her breath she cursed all those prodigal sons and daughters who wandered, joyful and licentious, through the best years of their lives, only to turn penitent and prizewinning after the journey flogged itself out. When would it be the eldest son’s turn to be blessed, and kissed, and welcomed back into the squall of faith? Cresting the hill, she came upon a patchwork of stone ruins. She chose the smoothest of the stones and rested for a moment. She could not breathe, it seemed. Her comings and goings were not as they used to be. From here she could see far ahead, as far as Moorfields. A pillar of smoke curled up from the dog skinner’s fire. The dog skinner, too, was probably an elder son.