Accidents of Providence (31 page)

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.

N
OT 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.

M
ARY 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. Beyond 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.

She rose from the stone seat and stepped toward the far edge of the hill, which gave way to an encroaching thicket of rosebushes before beginning the long downward slide into wilderness. Legally this was still part of the Church of the Refuge’s property, but the pastor had abandoned this patch, had given up maintaining it. This was the place. Mary had purchased the burial plot with her own earnings. She moved forward, lifting her skirts to avoid tripping over field maple roots gnarled like old knuckles in the grasses. The mist hung heavier here than at the crest of the hill, and the trees shut out the light. She pushed through the bushes. Briars clung to her stockings. Behind the roses waited a secluded grove, guarded from the elements. It was a quiet plot, a mound of earth no larger than a confessional.

Then Mary did what she came there to do. She did what any elder brother finally will do when he learns his curse is not to bear the consequences of breaking the law but to endure the long loneliness of upholding it. She pulled from her hip pocket a single white flower, tied around the stem with a sea green scarf. It was the same color scarf Leveler women had knotted in their hair as they streamed through the streets of London for the funeral of Rachel’s brother, for the army’s martyr. She left the colors beside the little girl, and then she stood there for a moment, and prayed safe passage.

The infant-murder trials of early modern England can be compared to the witch hunts of colonial North America, and some historians have identified common roots. Each reflected a shared Puritan concern with the damaging consequences of sin and the concealment of sin—the attempt to hide a trespass. Each also suggested a distrust of persons, especially women, who stood on the margins of the local community, and each attempted to control and regulate these women in ways that reduced whatever imagined threat they posed to the identity, cohesion, and moral order of the community.

Infant-murder trials in early modern England—
infanticide
was not a word commonly used during this period—typically targeted the poor and the unmarried, usually women and girls of humble descent. Determining if an infant had been stillborn, had died of natural causes during or shortly after birth, or had died from neglect or an act of violence was notoriously difficult. The draconian law of 1624 attempted to resolve the prosecutorial problem of insufficient evidence by capitalizing on the defendant’s reluctance to speak; the law turned the act of concealment into proof of guilt. Put differently, the law stripped these women of the one defense upon which they might have relied in other circumstances—their silence. By conflating the concealment of the death of an illegitimate child with murder, the 1624 statute left little room for mercy, for pleas of accidental death, or for a defense that took into account the reasons prompting the mother’s behavior, whatever that action (or inaction) might have been. Although Rachel’s story and the contents of her trial are fictional, the dialogue in her trial is modeled loosely on transcripts from the Sessions House in Old Bailey covering infanticide trials in the late seventeenth century. These trials rarely asked about motive and focused instead on the material evidence—what could be seen, touched, and quantified, such as the condition of the child’s body, the state of the bedclothes, and the verification of the pregnancy. Defendants did not often speak at these trials; those who did usually did not speak at length. Historian Allison May has noted that this behavior can be understood in light of larger social conditions. During a pregnancy and after a traumatic delivery, an unmarried woman’s survival depended in no small part on her ability to keep silent, to deny what was happening. It is not so strange that she might struggle to speak in front of a courtroom; she had spent much of the previous year doing exactly the opposite—trying to remain silent.

When a case such as Rachel’s was brought to trial, the judge and jurors and prosecutor could ask questions of the witness in whatever order they wanted—I suspect that chaos sometimes prevailed. I am not a legal scholar, and my depiction of Rachel’s trial relies far more on historical imagination than on any formal training in legal history. I was not able to verify whether or not witnesses during the specific time period of 1649 to 1650 were allowed to volunteer their testimony over a prosecutor’s objections, as I chose to imagine Elizabeth doing. But the transcripts of court cases from later decades and into the early eighteenth century suggested that friends and family members sometimes took it upon themselves to vouch for the character of the defendant without awaiting an invitation from judge or prosecutor.

In the eighteenth century, public opinion in England gradually began to sway toward leniency as more people began to sympathize with the plight of the unwed mother, and as the law’s assumption that concealing an infant’s death was tantamount to murder began to come under increasing question. With the rise of modern judicial practices and new theories of the self as a complicated and competing array of instincts, drives, longings, principles, and impulses, infanticide trials began to incorporate accounts of motive into defendants’ cases. The motive most often pleaded was temporary insanity—which, one might argue, is not so much a motive as an attempt to prove a motive’s absence. The insanity plea marked a different kind of appeal than the mid-seventeenth-century argument from ignorance—the claim made by some women that they did not learn they were pregnant until they went to the outhouse (or house of office) to relieve themselves and there suffered a sudden miscarriage or stillbirth. Over the span of two centuries, then, our thinking about women in these situations has traveled a curious course, from actions made out of ignorance to actions undertaken by reason of insanity. One could argue that this is not a significant improvement.

Some seventeenth-century Englishwomen attempted to resolve their plights by ending their pregnancies prematurely, either alone or with the help of a midwife. Their methods included bloodlettings from the foot and the ingesting of steel filings and herbal abortifacients. The women who undertook these actions did not see themselves as ending pregnancy so much as restoring or bringing back the menstrual cycle. To us this might sound like a mental sleight of hand. But in the seventeenth century, pregnancy was a more contested and negotiable state than it is considered today. In early modern England, it was indeed possible to be “a little bit pregnant.”

I am indebted to, among many other excellent resources, Laura Gowing’s “Secret Births and Infanticide in England,” in
Past and Present
156 (August 1997), pages 87–115, which explores the “collective trauma” of illegitimate childbirth during the early modern period, particularly the effect of these births on relations among women, on the telling and keeping of secrets, and on societal ideas about maternal shame, allegiance, and remorse. Any errors in historical research or misjudgments in creative interpretation are wholly mine, of course, and should not be attributed to my sources.

Accidents of Providence
is a work of fiction that borrows from history. The story takes place during the first year of the English interregnum, the tumultuous republican period that began with the 1649 execution of Charles I and the establishment of the English Commonwealth, continued with the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell and later Richard Cromwell (1653–1659), and ended with the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, when Charles II (son of Charles I) was returned to the English throne after an overseas exile.