Accidents of Providence (20 page)

The judge rose. “Very well. I see you do not wish to speak further. Clerks, put her words in your books. The jury will adjourn.”

Bartwain squirmed in his movable chair, craning to get a better look. Say more, he silently urged. Explain what you mean. Don’t do this. Give us your side. Tell us something. Tell us anything. Give us a reason. There has to be a reason. Talk to us. Talk to me, at least. Tell me why it happened, so I may sleep again.

The judge sent the jury into the back chambers to dine on roast chicken and to deliberate.

Bartwain smoked his pipe and waited.

N
EAR THE END
of her trial, Rachel thought she saw her brother standing in the back of the courtroom. For a minute she forgot he had died; she looked for him among the spectators. When she remembered, she searched for Walwyn instead; she sought the one who was living. She concentrated so hard she became nauseated; she thought she might be sick on the stand. She beat back the urge. She found Walwyn in the last row. Fixing her attention on the horizon of his face, she distracted herself by trying to name all the sounds creatures make when they are in trouble. She ran the noises around in her head. She wished she too could roar and whistle and screech and bleat and rattle and all those other noises a woman could not make unless she wanted the world to declare her an animal, a creature of unreason, a dreamer of false dreams. She stood through two hours of testimony. She listened to friends and strangers tell the judge and jury who she was, what she had done, when and how far she had fallen. It took a while for her to grasp that she was the person under discussion. She could not find herself in their words. Not even in Elizabeth’s. Poor Elizabeth, who loved Rachel but was going about it the wrong way, who was trying to fix the problem by turning things upside down, whereas Rachel wanted to turn things right side up, to get off the ceiling, to pull her claws out from the rocks.

She continued to stand as someone in the audience threw a fig at her. Someone else suggested how long it would take her to suffocate once she was hanging. Through it all she kept her eyes on Walwyn. She went home to him in her thoughts. Even as the surgeon discussed the state of putrefaction, she did not pull away. No reservation lingered in Walwyn’s expression. And when Kiffin accused her of being an unnatural woman, her lover rolled his eyes with such an exaggerated motion she had to bite her lip to keep from smiling. He sustained her.

The judge sent her into Bartwain’s chambers to await the jury’s verdict. Two guards stationed themselves outside the door as she paced within, studying the books on the investigator’s shelves, trying to sound out the titles. Someone knocked, and she assumed it was Elizabeth coming to berate her. The latch opened. Standing in the door was Walwyn. The guards stayed outside.

He moved swiftly, crushing her in his arms. He had bribed someone to get inside the investigator’s chambers. He kissed her; his mouth was everywhere. Her hair, then her neck, first tentative, paternal, then harder. He pulled her to him; he would not leave her alone. His ferocity surprised both of them. This was not the time; he had not come here with that kind of thing in mind. He had come here to tell her he was sorry; instead he gave her his mouth. He was worn; he had not slept. He was whispering nonsense to her. He spun plans so idealistic and lofty only a Leveler could have concocted them. He promised to steal her away under cover of night. He would break her out of prison; he would find her a horse. They would ride together. Or they would board a ship. They would sail all the way to the colonies. Or they would travel to Clovelly along the far coast and build a cottage, just the two of them. He spoke with the frantic optimism of a man who has tasted the limits of what his life is going to allow.

She pushed him away. “Your plans are ridiculous,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice. “Your plans are not going to work.” They proceeded to argue.

He said, “What would you have me do?”

“I would have you be truthful about what your life is and what it is not.”

“I would have you be truthful too,” he said. “I have neglected everything for you. Don’t you see what is happening to my life? I have become a miscreant.”

“Don’t you see what is happening to mine?” Rachel said.

She won that part of the argument.

They were still angry. But then she pressed her hot cheek against his and whispered: “Do you love me regardless?” And he, immediately, wrapping her in his arms: “
Regardless
is not the word.”

He wanted to know why she had not said more on the stand. “My God, why didn’t you speak? You are giving the jury permission to think the worst.”

Rachel tried to explain. She told him that back at the trial’s opening, she had planned to say she was guilty. But that was before Elizabeth saw in Rachel’s eyes what she was planning to say and had leaped up from the witness box to argue her out of it, to tell Rachel not to give up. That was also before the scaffolding collapsed and they had taken her back to Newgate, where she stewed and brooded seven more days. When Walwyn asked her what she had contemplated, what she had thought about, Rachel went quiet.

To allow herself to recall that night was the first insuperable obstacle. If she could overcome that, she would remember studying the cracks along her bedroom ceiling. She would hear sounds issuing from her own body, sounds she did not recognize and could not control. She remembered smelling the stench as she lost control of her bowels and bladder. She remembered hearing someone breathing. It was her own breathing she had heard and not someone else’s, although the sound seemed to have come from outside. She remembered reaching for something in the wainscot. She remembered hearing a voice. When her mind crept toward the sound of that voice, Rachel could go no farther.

She looked at Walwyn. “I think the things they are saying about me might be true,” she whispered.

“Don’t you do that. Don’t you say even one more word of that kind.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “The prosecution is lying. The prosecution is creating a picture of you that is not true, that is sensational. If you will not trust yourself, at least believe me.”

“Believe you?”

“Yes!”

She laughed. She could not believe what she was hearing. She felt old, older than he was, old behind the eyes, old inside the bones. “What is there to believe about
you
? You are you. There is no believing or disbelieving that. You are William Walwyn, the fool who loved me. That is all. That is all I can think when I think about you. Now stop hounding me!”

“You lost something. That’s all. Don’t make it worse. Don’t turn against yourself.”

“Did I? Did I lose it? Or did I push it away?”

He hesitated.

“What if the Lord gave me a gift and I refused it? What if I turned my back?”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“But what if I did?” From next door, she could hear the clank of the jurors’ spoons scraping the bottoms of their soup bowls.

Walwyn was saying something, but his words meant nothing at this point; his words were just sounds. He was shaking her. “Never say such things,” he was crying. “Never say such things about yourself. You are wholly good.”

She pushed him back. “I abandoned her.”

“Why would you do that?”

She stayed quiet.

After a few seconds, he whispered, “I have ruined you then.”

“No, you did not. You freed me.”

“That is a lie and you know it. Any woman I know would beat me if I were to say that.”

“But it is true.”

By this Rachel meant: You loved me soul and eye and claw and wing, and everywhere I went, there you were. You saw and fed and watered me and now I no longer thirst. Now it does not hurt—now my life does not hurt, because I am known through and through. And you have not freed me on the outside but you did free me on the inside, and that is the side that matters; that is the one a person can do a bit about.

Walwyn asked if she remembered that night.

“Which one?”

“The night the child was conceived.”

She flinched. All those nights tended to run together in her mind.

“I do,” he told her. “I remember each of them separately.”

“I thought I had passed the childbearing years. I thought it was impossible.”

“Didn’t anyone ever read you the book of Sarah,” he whispered.

“You mean the book of Genesis.”

“They are the same,” he said, drawing her close, drawing her to him, with a smile that illumined his entire countenance.

Bartwain told White to be ready to wheel him out of the courtroom when the verdict came. He distrusted the crowd, which looked unruly.

It took thirty minutes for the jury members to finish their roast chicken and arrive at a decision. It would have taken fifteen but for juror-with-the-patch, whose opinion needed to be won over. The twelve sworn men of the neighborhood then filed back into the courtroom in a single line and announced they’d found Rachel Lockyer guilty of murder. They said she had committed a malicious assault and should die for her crime. The foreman went on to state that Elizabeth Lilburne’s testimony was not credible and qualified as perjury. As she was a grieving mother, however, with two sons recently lost, they would not assign her a punishment; they advised her husband to discipline her at home. The foreman read Rachel’s sentence: death by hanging. The execution would take place in a week. Then juror-with-the-patch spoke up and reminded the foreman it was Advent season. They had forgotten about that. They did not want to be responsible for hanging a woman on Christmas, or Christ-tide, as the Puritans preferred it called. The jurors huddled for another discussion. They returned to their places, their cheeks flushed from the effort of thinking on their feet. The foreman announced that the execution would take place in January, just after Twelfth Night, to avoid any conflict with the day three kings once carried gifts across a desert for a child. In the interim, Rachel would be returned to Newgate. This time she would not go to the women’s ward. She would be sent to the hold for condemned prisoners, a stand-alone shack where ringbolts lined the walls like settings on a bracelet.

Standing before the court, his muscular legs planted wide, as if he were spanning the width of a rocking rowboat, Prosecutor Griffin urged Rachel Lockyer to thank the jurors for their mercifulness. They were doing her a favor, he said, letting her live through Christmas.

A cascading cry welled up and over the rafters. At first Bartwain could not place the sound. He guessed the cry belonged to Elizabeth or some other disconsolate woman. Then he realized it was coming from above. It was coming from the beams. It was the owl, the same barred owl that had sounded off on what was coming. As soon as one shriek ended, another took its place. The owl silenced the prosecutor.

Bartwain ordered White to wheel him outside. His secretary began to rock and pitch the old chair, then pushed it up the aisle, forcing a path through the pack of soldiers that now entered the courthouse, soldiers buzzing and swarming around the condemned woman like flies over a deer that has fallen.

“Get me out of here,” the investigator roared over the din. He was profoundly disappointed. “Get me out before the mob starts forming. I am through with bastard cases.”

T
HEN EVERYTHING STARTED
unraveling.

Spectators were fleeing the fetid air, stumbling and shoving as they exited the courthouse, some abandoning food baskets in their haste. At the same time, the soldiers were dragging Rachel toward the courthouse steps, and John Lilburne was herding some of his dwindling followers forward, calling whom he could, gathering stragglers. A group was congregating at the west corner of the courthouse. John was going to practice his ideas on them, survey their reactions. Having opposed any support for Rachel while her fate remained undecided, he was now changing sides. He had no interest in providing aid to a lewd woman, but he remained more than willing to capitalize on the upcoming death of a condemned woman. The Levelers needed a good martyrdom. Rachel’s trial had been a farce, a travesty of justice, he shouted. She had no legal defender. No one had allowed her to make a plea. Her conviction represented a violation of the rights of all Englishmen. As John put on his eyeglasses to take in his audience, his supporters stole sideways glances at one another in silence.

From the other side of the Sessions House, Mary du Gard looked on as John delivered his speech. She could not hear what he was saying, but she could read his countenance, which told her enough.

Mary did not consider herself a Leveler, and the members of that ragtag organization had never invited her to join their company. In her view, radicals were all alike, whether English or French, Puritan or Leveler or Huguenot. They all thought meetings and conventicles, illegal printing presses and secret societies, served a purpose. They all assumed that the busier they were, the more worthwhile their causes. And in their zeal, they invariably mistook fervency of conviction for effectiveness of tactics.

A ragged howl rose from the eastern end of the courthouse. Mary turned. The sound was coming from Walwyn. He was calling Rachel’s name, straining to reach her. His countenance was unbearable. He was spitting and lunging against six Parliamentary soldiers, rank-and-files who did not know that they were beating their hero, that they were striking a man who had advocated for their own fair wage. Walwyn fought them off—he was not so old as they thought—and shouted for John to come help, but John was otherwise occupied; John was constitutionally incapable of breaking off a speech once he had started it. The soldiers rode Walwyn into the floor until he was spitting splinters. They picked him up and threw him out the side door, shouting good riddance.

Mary’s eyes found her assistant near the entrance. Rachel’s hair, once smooth and shining, now hung snarled and limp. A grayish pallor clung to her skin. The deterioration was not simply physical. Mary could not have pointed to one part of Rachel’s anatomy and declared, “Here is the problem.” It was more of an intuition, a dull uneasiness. And whatever
it
was, this thing gone wrong, it seemed to have taken up residence. As the soldiers led Rachel toward the courthouse steps, the hem of her dress snagged on something and she tripped, pitching into her captors, who began groping at her. Mary rushed forward, her hand clapped on top of her steep hat. “That is my apprentice,” she cried out. “Do not lay a hand on her.” The soldiers ignored her. One of them shoved the tip of his pike into Rachel’s mouth until he threatened to puncture the windpipe. He withdrew as Rachel gagged. They did not stop harassing their charge until Thomas Bartwain burst back into the courtroom in a rattletrap conveyance that Mary took to be a wheelbarrow, his skeletal secretary flying behind him. Bartwain’s fat body, unbalanced by the sudden speed, swayed back and forth in his chair; furious, the investigator ordered the guards to stop.