Accidents of Providence (27 page)

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.

W
ALWYN 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.

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.

I
T 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.