Accidents of Providence (24 page)

“Still it was lost to me!”

“Only by your own sinfulness.”

The young guard leaned in and interrupted to warn Rachel that the bellman would be calling for her soon.

When he withdrew, the two women went on with their discourse.

“Why William Walwyn?” Mary asked. “Why that man and not some other?”

“Because he loved me.”

“So you lived how you preferred.”

“I lived how I could,” Rachel corrected.

In a thin voice, uncertain of itself, Mary said, “You still do not know what the love of God requires.”

“Nor do you,” Rachel reminded her. “None of us does.”

“You never accepted my help. Why didn’t you ever accept my help when I offered it?”

“You never offered.”

“I did,” Mary cried. “I tried. I worried so.”

Rachel reddened. “Do you know what it is like to have people’s concern about you always come by way of their worry and their doubt? All my life, people who say they wish to help have surrounded me. But what good has it—”

“You find fault with everyone but yourself,” Mary interrupted, stepping closer and inadvertently rousing the prisoner in the corner. He sat up, blinked; he was nearly blind. He had eyes the color of spring sky over the moors. “I wish you had never met that man,” Mary went on, half sobbing, flinging her words forward. “I wish you had never fallen in with William Walwyn, or Elizabeth Lilburne, or any of that Leveling faction I have learned about. They are all the same. At least if you had stayed away from them, you would have been saved from too many hopes.”

“What, is it a danger for a person to have them,” Rachel flung back, “like hopes are pox, or bruises?”

“A woman does not generally find herself in a pickle such as yours without having had either too many hopes or too few.”

“Well, I’d rather too many!”

Mary’s response went unspoken because both women already knew it:
I’d rather too few.

In the stillness that followed Mary made her way over to the wooden bench and sat. She was younger than Rachel by almost six years. She had never had a child, never conceived a child, never once missed the monthly course of women. She cleared her throat and reached for Rachel. Grimly she gathered her assistant in her arms, though she did not look at her. There the two women sat, pity and duty passing back and forth, until Mary started as if she had forgotten something and declared she must be going. She rose and left the hold.

The word Mary had used was
abandon.
That was how she referred to Rachel’s action on the night of the Smithfield market. But who abandoned whom?

What Rachel knew, what she remembered, was that it was the night of All Souls’, and when she had unlocked her wainscot box it was still before midnight, still before the day turned. That much, at least, was clear. She had pried open the wainscot. She went in with her arms and came out with a child. She had worn no gloves. For once, the thought of gloves had not crossed her mind. She had wrapped her newborn in a shawl and carried it down the stairs, past Mary’s closed door.

There are some things a woman wants so much she will gibber and die to get them. This by no means indicates she will have what she desires.

Rachel left the house and stumbled onto Warwick Lane. She held the bundle so close she nearly crushed it. She began running. Screech owls flew overhead. They were chasing stars; the owls had mistaken stars for fireflies.

As she headed north to Smithfield market, Rachel told the little girl she would not miss her. One day, she explained, is not time enough to love something. Love takes years.

Besides, a woman in this situation could not miss a person, for a person requires a name, and Rachel had not named her. Yet as she pressed through the abandoned alley on the southern edge of the market, she could hear the owls hooting options. They were shrieking up and down the dung heap; they were calling the names of girls. She set down the bundle on an empty scavenger cart and shielded her ears until the names had passed. She picked it up and resumed walking.

When she reached Smithfield she threaded her way through the shuttered stalls of asparagus and orange vendors. She ducked under a low-hanging canopy, taking a shortcut toward the northern end of the market. She passed by cut flowers left overnight on a vendor’s table, mostly dandelions, out of season. They were frostbitten. Whoever had tried to sell these bunches must have given up; they were lying on a table in limp rows, unprotected, necks drooping. The market was quiet.

She made her way to the northern end of the stalls, where the earth changed over to spongy grasses and thick heather brush. She continued toward the slaughterhouse, where two bony steers were standing outside the clapboard shed, unmoving, their haunches withered, their necks tethered to posts. Rachel had no idea why the manager of the slaughterhouse had left them out overnight. Surely he could have finished them off, could have completed his task on time. No creature should be left out like that for twelve more hours, tethered under the moon, waiting. It seemed to her the height of cruelty; the gift of a day can be cruel.

Beyond the slaughterhouse she waded through wooded grasses so thick and dry they nearly pulled the burden from her arms. A faint rustling followed; she did not turn around. Had she looked, she would have seen Mary trailing her, but Rachel took no notice. All she saw was moonlight dancing on heather; the stalks were throwing their heads up to the bluish light. She pushed to the end of the grass, to the place where heather and wilderness met. London was overrun with such intersections. They would spring up where you least expected it. Here would be the city, all made up, trimmed and disciplined in the ways of reason, and then, just as you grew accustomed to it, just as you accepted your lot, out of nowhere appeared a tangle of old roots in the forest.

She entered the line of trees. The moon slipped closer through the branches. She found a plot of ground where the roots had not set in, and she dug. She crabbed her bare hands into the soil. Her hair leeched out of its bun; her skirts grew besotted with the earth. She clawed at the wilderness floor, made entreaties to it. She begged it to open, to receive her burden, to take back what God had given.

At last the earth acquiesced. It surrendered only enough to allow a shallow grave. Rachel laid the bundle into the hole and pushed the dirt back on top. She patted the earth; then she slapped the earth. She wiped her face, smearing her cheeks in the same places where Elizabeth wore her scars from the fever that had taken her boys. Unlike Elizabeth, however, Rachel was not allowed to mourn. One must not mourn a loss that comes about by one’s own hand. That was the rule. You could not mourn what was your fault. If the loss came by another hand, weep all you want. If it happened by your own, you could not.

How this theory measures out with all the thousands of God’s children who have flung themselves, stupid and glorious, over and over, into the best and worst of things, loving whom they should not, seizing what they must not, running where they cannot, falling when there is no one to catch them—how this serves the betterment or edification of the species is not clear; people do it regardless. People have always done it.

After Rachel buried the infant she returned to Warwick Lane without seeing where she was going. She did not make it home. She collapsed on a stoop belonging to the butcher Dalton, three houses down. She did not know it was the butcher’s. She did not know it was a stoop. Dalton found her an hour later, and he and his wife stood in their doorway gaping at the fallen woman before them. Mrs. Dalton suggested fetching a doctor or a clergyman, but Butcher Dalton recognized Rachel and declared no pastor was needed. “This woman is a Leveler and a libertine,” he said. So they took her back to the glove shop, where they left her for the Huguenot to deal with. When Mary, who had returned home earlier, found her assistant on the walk—on the same front walk that Rachel daily swept—she half pushed, half pulled her up the stairs, opening the door to her quarters and leaving Rachel just inside the threshold. She then returned to her chambers, where she wrestled with God all night.

Rachel spent the remaining hours before dawn on her side on the floor in the corner, the same corner where she had given birth one night before. Her breasts leaked. The milk would not stop coming. It saturated her petticoat, her dress. It soaked the floor. Everywhere it was seeking for the loved object.

When Rachel slept, she dreamed. In the dream her mother and father were shoving a blanketed bundle in her face. Above her parents’ heads, the skies were raining clods of dirt, spits and spills of dried mud from the waste kennels and the scavengers. The city was raining filth. It was raining all that was lost in the war, all the soil and mud of a divided people, of a divided love, as London’s children coiled and drifted down the river, the river that stank, the river of flotsam and jetsam, sea of burdens unnamed.

T
HE BELLMAN OF
St. Sepulchre was calling for Rachel Lockyer.

In 1605 a benefactor had made a bequest to the cathedral of St. Sepulchre. The gift stipulated that at midnight on the day that a Newgate prisoner was to be executed, a bellman from the cathedral would ring a hand bell outside the condemned’s cell to inform him or her of the impending execution. From his priestly quarters in the basement, the bellman would creep through a secret underground tunnel, enter Newgate, and ring his chimes at midnight.

Rachel’s bellman was a tired fellow, dissatisfied with his lot. He did not like moving through the underground tunnels. The lambent light from the passages made him feel like a man on the run. An hour before midnight, he reluctantly made his way through the tunnel and up into the prison, then across the courtyard and into the condemned hold, where the guards let him in. A candle in his hand, he hovered by the prisoner’s sleeping head as he listened to his own heart racing. He was early. He was always early. He was not early because he was punctual. He was early because he dreaded his duty and wanted it behind him.

He waited for midnight.

When the stroke came, the bellman chimed his silver hand bell over the condemned woman’s head, twelve times over, using double strokes, a silvery
cling-cling, cling-cling, cling-cling.
Rumor had it that the sound could cause fits in bystanders who chanced to hear it.

The young guard, wearing his new gloves, heard the chimes from his card table in the courtyard and forgot the hand he was playing. “Ill luck to hear it,” he muttered. This guard would not last long at Newgate.

When he finished his chimes, the bellman pulled from his cloak a tattered scroll that held a poem for the edification and preparation of the prisoner:

You prisoners that are within, who for wickedness and sin,
After many mercies shown you,
Are now appointed to die . . .
I beseech you for Jesus Christ’s sake to keep this night
In watching and prayer for the salvation of your own souls,
While there is yet time for mercy, as knowing tomorrow
You must appear before the judgment seat of your Creator,
There to give an account of all things.

On the night the bells rang for Rachel Lockyer, no one but the bellman and the white-haired prisoner were with her. When the bellman finished the poem, she sat up and asked for a psalm. “I am not to say a psalm,” he said nervously. “I am to say the poem for the condemned, and chime the bell; that is the procedure.”

She asked again. He wavered. Something in her voice persuaded him. So, for the first time, the bellman broke with tradition. He reached for the easiest psalm he could remember, and he began to recite it. The old prisoner began saying the words too, in a whispery falsetto, across the hold.

I will lift mine eyes unto the mountains, from whence mine help shall come.
Mine help cometh from the Lord, which hath made the heaven and the earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to slip: for He that keepeth thee, will not slumber.
Behold, He that keepeth Israel, will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shadow at thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: He shall keep thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in from
henceforth and forever.

Rachel wrenched away from the blessing and she vomited. Clotted bile and brown liquid poured from her mouth and nose onto the floor. The bellman was quiet. His chin trembled. He had traveled beyond his usual level of involvement.

After a while she stopped, heaved, and wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Then Rachel let go one long cry that was also an acknowledgment. “I handed her over,” she cried. “I handed her back to God.” The old prisoner listened in silence.

The bellman gave Rachel an extra chorus of the bells for good measure as he was leaving. Her lungs fluttered in and out, keeping time with the chimes. When he finished the song he made the sign of the cross, which the old man promptly imitated. “God send you a good deliverance,” he said.

T
HE MORNING OF
Rachel’s hanging, Anne Walwyn could not find her bonnet.

She looked on top of the wardrobe, where her hats usually sat. They were all there except the one she wanted. She thought she might have placed it inside the wardrobe—it was not there either. She looked beneath, in case it had fallen. She was not sure why she wanted to wear it. It was not her everyday hat. It was green, and recently she had begun trussing it up with a white border. The white crosshatches against the pine-colored cloth reminded her of the boundary markers that had started going up in Moorfields, fences circling farms that used to be fields, the slow calcification of ownership. Secretly, Anne rejoiced to see wilderness wrestled into order. Some women had an eye for apparel or color; Anne Walwyn had an eye for enclosure.