Accidents of Providence (12 page)

The funeral procession had its starting point near the vacant stalls at the western end of the Smithfield market. Behind the stalls Rachel could see the slaughterhouse and, beyond that, a shadowy woods with elm and beech trees still thin and white from winter. For a moment she considered escaping the morning’s events by hiding in the quiet of those elms. She did not want a processional. But Robert had not died privately, so he was not going to be buried privately either. She guessed he would have been proud. It had taken three years, but the Levelers had finally adopted him.

First ten, then twenty, then thirty figures gathered in the semidarkness around a horse-drawn cart that carried Robert’s body. Rachel saw Katherine Chidley, the haberdasher. She saw Gilbert Mabbott, the newsman, who arrived as the processional was starting. Mabbott waved when he saw her coming; he joined her for the first half mile. She was grateful to him. She asked if he had any news from the Levelers in the Tower. She was referring to Walwyn, though she did not say his name. She was wondering how she was going tell Walwyn she was with child. “They are all right,” Mabbott said, “but angry.” He was referring to Walwyn too. The newsman stayed by Rachel’s side until someone told them women were supposed to be at the rear of the processional, and Rachel dropped back, disappearing before Mabbott could explain that she was the dead man’s sister. The leaders of the march did not recognize her. Robert belonged to them now.

She saw William Kiffin, her former pastor, scraping dung off his boots at the side of the carriageway. She hid her face in her scarf and waited for him to pass.

Overnight the wind had swept away all clouds. When the sun broke over the tops of the vendors’ stalls it peeled the shadows off the mourners’ faces. The processional began coiling, a long leviathan, heading south to Newgate Street, then east toward Cheapside, gathering momentum and onlookers as six trumpeters sounded the call up front. Many in the crowd wore ribbons and scarves of the same sea green color as Rachel’s dress. To make the color, they dipped a piece of cloth in blue dye taken from the woad plant, and then they dipped the same cloth in a solution of alum and urine, because it cost nothing. The onlookers might not know Robert, but they knew the Leveler color; they knew what the color represented. They emptied out of their flats and boarding-house rooms and thatched-roof houses and joined the funeral walk. They saw the coffin draped in the hue of the ocean and they understood.

From Walwyn Rachel had learned that the sea green of the Levelers stood for all those places in Scripture where the poor, the meek, the hungry, and the desolate are said to be wider and vaster than all the waters in the ocean. He had explained this to her amid a crushing din of apprentices and agitators who had gathered, stamping and singing, around John’s table at the Whalebone, cups of wine and ale lifted high and spilling as John and Overton shouted out their latest victories, called for freemen to be given the vote, demanded just wages for soldiers, denounced passive obedience, and ridiculed the divine right of kings. This was back when the Levelers still thought they were winning. As the men sang and whooped, Walwyn leaned over to her table and murmured nonsensical things; her ears burned, and she studied his mouth as he delivered the words. Sometimes she could not even hear what he said, but she watched his lips in earnest. The others around them cheered and chattered. All the while Rachel waited for the wry grin that would creep up on him unnoticed, and the red curve of his lips, almost like a girl’s; she waited for the those lips to touch the rim of his cup; she wanted to watch him swallow. Her ears would sizzle; her ears would suggest she sat too close to the fire. Near the end of that evening she asked him if Scripture ever said that the poor being so vast in number was something to be corrected. She wanted to know if Scripture said the poor should be made rich. Walwyn looked at her and his brown eyes softened. He said he supposed the writers of Scripture didn’t always know what they meant. They wanted the poor to be raised high, to defend themselves; but they also thought only the meek would inherit the earth. So there is a problem, Rachel had said. Yes, Walwyn had replied, his smile broadening; yes, there is a problem. And though the other Levelers roared and drank and crashed all over them, she and Walwyn did not notice.

After the funeral marchers passed Newgate Street, they began the long climb north toward Moorfields. The processional would finish up in New Churchyard with a hastily dug grave, a reading of Scripture, and impassioned political speeches. By the end of the day, Freeborn John would be writing a martyrdom pamphlet in Robert’s honor from the Tower. As Rachel walked, she could see flung out before her a great expanse of humankind, two thousand now or more, a tide of green streaming through the carriageway, causing more doors and shutters to open. Onlookers pointed and waved from their second- and third-floor windows. These were candle makers and butchers and salt-and-pepper grinders and tanners and tailors and match vendors, men and women who toiled and labored for their living, all marching. Children thrust their heads out of boarding-house doors to marvel at the sea of people and to test their elders with questions.
Who is it? Who is the man that has died?
And the answer, thrown up from the swell of bodies, again and again, with a different voice each time,
A martyr of the people.
And though Rachel did not want her brother’s death used for political gain, her heart could not help but pound harder and faster as they neared the end of the march. When they passed the Roman wall and crossed into the rolling farms of Moorfields, the mourners had grown to three thousand strong, their scarves and ribbons flapping against the fields, flashing like iridescent scales on a sea snake as it passes through shallow water. In that moment she felt herself to be almost a new woman, and London almost a new city.

In the days that had followed, Rachel began talking to the child.

First silently, cautiously, in her head, while she was sewing a glove. She would loop a stitch and drop it, her hand falling slack. Then Mary would stare crossly at her until she returned to her task. She wondered how long it would take Mary to cast her out once she learned what her assistant was hiding.

Next she started speaking to the child out loud. She wanted to see how she sounded as a mother, even though at the time she was only a few months along. She experimented while sweeping the walk. She was trying not to worry about the future. Whenever the future invaded her thoughts, she despaired. Staying in the day was not too encouraging either, but at least it did not send her into the abyss; at least it did not pitch her into the pit like the future did. She asked the child its name; of course it didn’t answer. She asked again, pushing her broom harder. If she listened hard enough, she could pretend she heard it gabbling. She told the child who she was. “I am Rachel Lockyer, glovemaker,” she announced, then glanced around, expecting Mary to laugh at her. But Mary was not outside.

She told the child about the world. She talked about the turtles. She talked about owls. Recently Rachel had noticed a pair of screech owls nesting near the Smithfield market. They called one way when they were mating and another way when they were hunting moles. She mimicked their sounds for the child’s benefit. She explained the difference between calfskin and sheepskin in the design and manufacture of gloves. She told the child she was too old to be a mother. She did not give her exact age, but that was because she had lost count. She said she was born and reared in London and was sick to death of war and all it had wreaked on those she loved. She explained the war to the child. She said the reason no one understood the war was that it had two parts. The first part had been between the king and the army, and the army had won. The second part was between the army and the people, and the people were losing. Between parts one and two, the Levelers had changed sides. So while they’d been on the winning side in the war against the king, they were now on the losing side in the war against the army.

She talked about her brother.

She did not mention Walwyn, not at first. She had no idea what to say about him; she suspected the child would judge her. But when she whispered Walwyn’s name, she thought she could hear the child burbling with laughter. And as she swept she listened to the tinkling sounds of distant bells coming in her direction, sounds that coursed up and down her spine, and the laughter of the child joined with the laughter of the bells and left her weak-kneed with joy. It was the first time since Walwyn had gone to the Tower that Rachel did not feel alone. And even when the sound of the bells became transformed into the ringing of the scavengers’ carts as they lurched down the street in her direction, still she felt no fear. She glanced up at the rusted sign hanging over Du Gard Gloves, a large glove with a gold-trimmed cuff, and she smiled; the child comforted her.

When thoughts of the future returned, she fought them off as best she could. She took up arms against the future. Her weapons were thread and needle. She began sewing baby clothes. They were so small—woolly hats and boots no larger than three fingers. She asked the child what color it wanted and the child said,
Not green.
So she sewed in yellow. She made a dress in yellow brocade from a row of fabric at the bottom of Mary’s window covering. She hoped Mary would not notice the missing piece. Again she asked the child its name; again it did not answer. But at night it would squeal with giggles that she could feel cascading up and down her body. She shook with its sound. She longed to write it down, to describe it, to send the sound to Walwyn in a letter. She found some old news pamphlets, and several times she tried to trace the alphabet from them. I can do this, she said to herself. This is not beyond me. But then Mary would come in to remind Rachel a customer was waiting.

During the same weeks, word reached London that the few Levelers still active in the Parliamentary army had managed to blunder another uprising. Cromwell had begun disbanding large sectors of his winning troops without troubling to pay their arrears, and a heavy-drinking corporal and Leveler sympathizer named Will Thompson grew enraged with this decision. Thompson organized several hundred soldiers to protest the policies of the general for whom they had fought. This sort of thing went on all the time now that England had no sovereign; this was what victory looked like. Thompson and his men marched forward, confident God was on the side of the poor; they were met, slaughtered, and left as carrion by another company in Cromwell’s army. Rachel heard the news from Elizabeth. Thompson and his ringleaders were executed in front of their men in a churchyard. The following night, Cromwell received an honorary degree from Oxford; two days later, he went bowling on the green at Magdalene College. Rachel wondered if Will Thompson had refused to wear a blindfold.

Several days after that, Mary mentioned in a brisk voice that she had seen Rachel making a dress out of a curtain. “Whose are those tiny clothes and why are you sewing them?” she demanded. Rachel said Mary should not be spying. Mary blushed but held her ground. Rachel listened, astonished, as a lie whistled out of her own mouth. She told Mary these were clothes for her expectant sister who lived in Essex. Rachel had no sister in Essex, but Mary did not know this. The two women did not divulge biographical details. They shared only the essentials. Rachel knew the precise dampness of air that caused Mary’s thumb joints to ache and what was required to ease them. Mary knew Rachel could not sleep when the moon was waxing. Rachel knew Mary attended the Church of the Refuge on Threadneedle Street, where the Huguenot pastor preached to his immigrant congregation that the higher powers of this world were being thrown down. Thrown where exactly, he never specified. He explained that Christ would be returning any day now, and the faithful must be careful lest they miss Him. And Rachel knew Mary was disappointed, for though she was very careful, Christ had not returned yet.

That night she began stuffing the corner of her shawl into the keyhole of her bedroom door so Mary could not peek through it. When she slept, she dreamed her brother called her a coward.

She tried to heed Elizabeth’s caution against contacting Walwyn. She understood it was not allowed; a woman in her position was not supposed to declare herself, to make public her situation. But she was growing angry. The future was continuing to intrude. It kept barging into her sleeping quarters at night, vexing her to no end; to make matters worse, dread had started sliding under the door with it. So, disregarding Elizabeth’s advice, she went ahead and tried to send Walwyn a message. Doing so required the help of Thom, the messenger boy who huddled in the alley behind Du Gard Gloves and who sometimes slept in the storeroom without Mary’s knowledge. Rachel did not disclose her condition to the boy; she suspected he would gossip. “Tell Mr. Walwyn I am in need of aid for myself and for Fifteen” was all she said. “And hurry.” She knew Walwyn’s wife referred to her children by numbers; she knew how many children the Walwyn household had. She prayed Walwyn would grasp what she meant; she prayed he would put fourteen and one together.

Thom made his way to the Tower, where Walwyn had remained with John, Overton, and Prince since the publication of John’s
Second Part of England’s New Chains Discovered
, which criticized the new government for being too much like the old government. Walwyn continued to deny any involvement in the pamphlet’s production. I am not the author, he said over and over to anyone who would listen; I am out of the Leveling business. At the same time, Walwyn
was
the author because he was John’s teacher; John’s wardrobe of ideas consisted almost entirely of hand-me-downs from Walwyn.

When a week passed with no word from Thom, a line appeared between Rachel’s eyebrows that did not soften when she slept. I will be whipped, she thought. Once I have this child, I will be whipped and cast into prison if I refuse to name the father. And if I do name the father, Walwyn’s wife and fourteen children will be publicly disgraced and humiliated. Their shame will be even worse than mine, because they are not expecting it.