Accidents of Providence Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children (1624)

  Prologue

  November 1649

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  December 1649

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  January 1650

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Epilogue

  Afterword: Secret Births in Early Modern England

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2012 by Stacia M. Brown

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

  Brown, Stacia M. Accidents of providence / Stacia M. Brown.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-49080-9

  1. Unmarried mothers—Fiction. 2. Trials (Murder)—England—Fiction.

  3. Levellers—Fiction. 4. Great Britain—History—

  Civil War, 1642–1649—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.R722885A67 2012

  813'.6—dc22

  2011015933

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?

  And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

  —MATTHEW 10:29

  An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children (1624)

  WHEREAS many Lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoid their shame and to escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the Death of their Children, and after, if the Child be found dead, the said Women do allege that the said Child was born dead, whereas it falleth out some times (although hardly it is to be probed,) that the said Child or Children were Murdered by the said Women their lewd Mothers, or by their assent or procurement.

  For the preventing therefore of this great mischief, Be it Enacted by the Authority of this present Parliament, that if any Women after one month next ensuring the end of this next Session of Parliament, be delivered of any Issue of her body, Male or Female, which being born alive, should by the Laws of this Realm be a bastard, and that she endeavor privately either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by her self or the procuring of others, so to conceal the death thereof, as that it may not come to light, whether it were born alive or not, but be concealed, In every such case, the said Mother so off ending shall suff er Death, as in case of murder, except such Mother can make proof by one Witness at the least, that the Child (whose death by her so intended to be concealed) was born dead.

  — Corporation of London. Anno vicesimo primo Jacobi Regis, &c.

  (London: printed by Samuel Roycroft, Printer to this Honourable City, 1680) (21 Jac. I c. 27)

  Prologue

  MARY NEVER MEANT to be that kind of Huguenot. Since her husband’s death she had worked hard to make herself invisible. For five years she had labored in London as a glovemaker, slowly building the smooth façade of a widow’s anonymity. Over time, most customers had forgotten her French name, had forgotten she was a stranger. She kept her head low. She spoke flawless English. But on the night of November 2, Mary du Gard came out from the shadows.

  She did so grudgingly. In the first place, the moon was glaring and leering at her; she could not sleep. In the second place, her assistant was up to no good. So Mary pulled on her boots, pinned up her hair, changed her sleeping robe for a jersey skirt, and became what she’d never wanted to be: someone who got involved. She followed her assistant out the back door of the glove shop onto Warwick Lane. She crept behind at a safe remove, watching as Rachel Lockyer carried a tightly wrapped bundle half a mile north to the Smithfield market, past the old slaughterhouse, and to the edge of a thicketed woods beyond. Mary looked on but did not follow her in. Though a Protestant of the truest sort, she retained the common superstition that those woods were haunted at night.

  The next morning, at first light, Mary asked God what she should do about what she had witnessed. And God said: You are My servant; you know what to do. Mary bowed her head and wrestled with herself. Then she returned to the slaughterhouse. In the security of the morning sun she entered the woods and scrabbled up the bundle Rachel had buried. She brushed the dirt out of its crevices and wrapped her shawl around it, so she would not touch what was left. For a moment she was tempted to leave things as they were, to return it to the earth, to let God be the judge. But a pang of duty stabbed her. She pushed the shawl partly aside. What she saw was enough. Gently Mary lifted the bundle. She clutched it to her chest and carried it back to Warwick Lane. What she held was a talisman. What she held was a rupture. All manner of lies and deceptions would fall to their knees as she passed. And though Mary had never been a mother, she understood, better than most, that the lives of children are more complicated than the lives of men. So she made her way back to the glove shop with a heavy heart, and she hunted down her assistant, who was in the back room snipping satin and old velvet. She shoved the burden at her all in a rush, because she needed to be rid of it, because she wished she were someone else; and she said to Rachel Lockyer, quite clear and cold-like, colder than she felt, “Is this yours? Is this what you have gone and done?”

  That was when it started. It was 1649, the year everything happened, the year the wheels of providence rattled backward.

  November 1649

  One

  THOMAS BARTWAIN, CRIMINAL investigator commissioned by the Council of State, was standing outside the Sessions House in Old Bailey warming his bones under a weak London sun when he realized he was a quarter-hour late for his first deposition.

  He coughed and checked his notes.

  “Christ,” he muttered, and wobbled back into the courthouse as fast as his thick, bowed legs would let him. He handed his papers to his secretary, a tall and jaundiced man named White who in recent months had begun refusing to doff his hat to persons of authority. When Bartwain questioned this practice, given the volatile and warring times in which they lived, his secretary growled, ornery as a drunk without a drop, that his hat-doffing was no one’s business.

  White glanced down at Bartwain’s notes. “You want to see how many witnesses today?” His face wore a dour mien. “There is no way to interview all these people. You’re running late as it is.”

  “Their summonses have been delivered,” the investigator said. “They will be arriving throughout the day. Knock on my door just before each hour so I don’t fall behind. You understand the severity of the accusations against this woman, this Leveler, this what’s-her-name.”

  “Rachel Lockyer,” the secretary said.

  “Yes, that’s it. I need all the information I can find.”

  White nodded reluctantly. “Shall I bring in your first witness? She’s here.”

  “Yes. Send her into my chambers. And
bring me something to eat while you’re at it. I’m famished.” The investigator coughed again. He was sixty-one years old and his lungs were not good. Ever since the Council of State had assigned him to investigate the discovery of a dead infant behind the Smithfield slaughterhouse, his wheezing had been worse than usual. He stepped into his chambers, squeezed his fleshy stomach behind the desk, and adjusted his powdered wig. Then he picked up his quill, which he wielded like a scepter in between writing sentences.

  Rachel Lockyer’s case had made its way to Bartwain’s doorstep ten days before and so far he detested everything about it. After receiving the coroner’s report, he had interviewed a handful of witnesses, most of whom volunteered neighborhood gossip as testimony. From them Bartwain learned that Rachel was a spinster who lived independent of her mother (her father was dead), that she was poor (a glover’s assistant), and that she had spent time in the company of the Levelers (those political troublemakers), as had her younger brother, Robert, who’d recently been executed by firing squad for mutinying against his captain in the Parliamentary New Model Army. Only one witness, a gray-haired haberdasher named Katherine Chidley, had provided any information pertinent to the case at hand. Chidley recounted a series of examinations she had conducted of Rachel’s physical person and insisted Rachel had tried to hide a pregnancy from those who knew her. “She is the mother of that infant Widow du Gard found,” Chidley declared. “I have no doubt of it.” And while Chidley confessed she did not know the identity of the father, another witness—a homeless boy named Thom with a shock of orange hair whom White had had to drag in by summons and who remained reluctant to talk until Bartwain bribed him with candied flowers, which the child gulped down whole—reported being asked to deliver a message from Rachel to one of the Leveler leaders, initials W.W., who at the time was incarcerated in the London Tower. The investigator knew those initials. They’d appeared on the cheap pamphlets and polemical treatises produced by the Levelers over the past few years of civil war. The Levelers were always being incarcerated for one thing or another, usually for seditious writing. Bartwain asked the boy what the message was and how this W.W. had answered it, but the boy claimed to have forgotten the message and added that he’d never reached the intended recipient—something about a lion distracting him. The investigator doubted this account but went ahead and added William Walwyn to his interview list. Of course, the question of paternity was less significant now than it would have been if the infant had survived. When a bastard child lived, the magistrates could invoke the Poor Law and order the father to pay a stipend to the local church for its upkeep. A noncompliant father could be sentenced to corporal punishment, most likely public whipping alongside the mother. If the child died, only the mother was held responsible. Still, Bartwain thought the lead worth investigating.

  From the coroner he had learned that the newborn was female, dead less than three days at time of autopsy, and weighing six pounds and one-quarter ounce. Bartwain wondered about that one-quarter ounce. What part of an infant weighed this amount? A hand? A kneecap? He shuddered and spat into his empty water cup. He detested acts of violence against children. The coroner had said that the lungs were partly inflated, meaning the child had breathed outside the womb before it expired. The body was starting to decompose by the time of the autopsy. The earthworms had covered its little limbs, and moles had chewed through the cloth in which it was wrapped, while beetles had settled in the orifices. The coroner also reported a ring of bluish bruises around the infant’s neck, possibly made by string or twine. In his view, this suggested strangulation. But if someone was planning to lay a hand on a newborn, why clothe it first in a carefully sewn yellow dress?

  Bartwain tried to imagine what had happened, tried to theorize what had befallen the infant in the minutes or hours before it passed. He considered most women to be deceptive and unreliable by nature, so for him, the challenge in such cases was to leave room for some sliver of innocence, for some possibility that a criminal act had not taken place. Still, if the woman was innocent, why would she hide the body?

  The night before, the investigator’s wife had asked why this case vexed him so. She had seen him preparing his research notes and poring over the autopsy report. Start with the pregnancy and build the investigation from there, she had said. If only it were so simple, Bartwain had replied. In situations like these, identifying the mother could be a vexing challenge. Whether or not an unmarried woman had been pregnant remained difficult to prove after the fact. Some maids were sly and cunning and wore wide skirts to conceal their condition; Bartwain knew of a servant in Worcester who’d told her mistress her swelling belly was not pregnancy but colic. The mistress believed her tale until the servant showed up lean and weeping one Sunday with a dead babe in her arms, saying she’d found it in the alley. Other times women would plead they had not realized their condition until the pangs of labor started. Bartwain found this argument from ignorance persuasive only in exceptional instances, as in a case last year of a thirteen-year-old maid whose master had dallied with her as she moved past the point of her maturation; she had no way to recognize the signs that followed. The same plea would not suffice for a woman like Rachel Lockyer, a woman at the waning edge of the childbearing years.

  At half past nine the Huguenot glover Mary du Gard entered the investigator’s chambers. She looked a weary thirty. She wore a gray dress and a kerchief knotted around her shoulders. Her dark eyebrows almost touched.

  “Sit.” The investigator motioned from behind his desk. “Tell me your name for the record.”

  She perched on the witness stool, visibly uncomfortable. “Mary du Gard, sir. I am a widow. I would rather not be on the record.”

  “You would rather not be on the record? You were the one who brought this case to the coroner’s attention. Have you grown shy? Have you changed your opinion?”

  She blinked. Bartwain’s cheeks rounded into what on another face might have passed for a smile.

  “Now,” he said, leaning forward, leaning all the way across his desk, “if you are here to make my task harder, Widow du Gard, you may leave, and I shall send you back to whatever stinking village in France from which you came. But if you are here to obey the law, and to be a good Christian, then stay seated and tell me what you saw. I do not have all day.”

  So Mary began, reluctantly, to talk. She had managed Du Gard Gloves since her husband had died in battle; a few months after that, she’d hired Rachel to help in the shop. Together the two women paid a fee to the leather sellers’ company to become licensed vendors, though the business remained in the name of Mary’s husband. They specialized in military gloves, but because of the war they spent most of their time dyeing gloves black for funerals. Mary’s fingers, Bartwain noticed, were stained from dipping the gloves in dye.

  Throughout Mary’s deposition, which dragged on longer than most, the investigator kept growing distracted from the case; at one point he wandered off in the direction of theology. He found his witness’s manner dull and infuriating. She told him point by point about digging up a newborn in the woods behind the Smithfield slaughterhouse, but she took no initiative to explain what happened after. Bartwain wanted to know how Rachel had reacted when Mary returned to Warwick Lane and put the bundle into her arms. He wanted to know why Mary had banned Rachel from the glove shop that same day. Mary stared at him blankly and pretended not to understand. “My English is not good,” she said, in perfect English. So Bartwain, intuitively shifting tactics, devoted the next thirty minutes to engaging her in a discussion of ideas. He wanted to catch her off-guard so she would talk. Also, he harbored a hobbyist’s interest in the study of things religious. Although Mary was a Huguenot, or French Calvinist, her late husband had adopted the Particular Baptist faith when he moved to England, so Mary knew both factions. Bartwain asked her why the Particular Baptists believed Christ had died for some men only and not for the generality of them. She replied that Christ could not have died for all men because not all men w
ere going to heaven. It made no sense for Him to die for someone if that person was going to spurn Him. Therefore, Christ must have died only for those He foreknew would respond positively. At this point Mary fell silent and eyed the floor.

  “Can you confirm that what you unearthed was your assistant’s?” the investigator abruptly asked. “Are you quite certain the child belonged to her?” All he needed was one credible confirmation. The evidence required to indict a woman in such investigations was not stringent, not very stringent at all.

  “Oh,” she said slowly, “I could never be completely certain. But I lived with her, so I saw things.”

  “Things? What kind of things?”

  “To recount them would be too tedious.”

  “I’m a criminal investigator. I specialize in the tedious.”

  “Well,” she said, warming slightly, “I thought I heard Rachel the night before, in her room. She was in the throes of what sounded to me like a painful indigestion or labor. She would not let me in.”

  “Did you knock?”

  Mary hesitated. “I called her name.”

  “Did she hear you?”

  “I am sure she did. I asked what she was doing. She had stuffed a cloth in the keyhole so I could not peek inside. She did not answer the door, so I went back to my room.”

  “This was the night of November second?”

  “No, sir. It was the night before. I told you. It was late; it was around one o’clock. And I did not see anything for certain. I only heard the sounds.”

  “Did you see her the next morning?”

  “Yes, sir, she came down to breakfast, but she was later than usual.”

  “Did you see signs of a delivery?”

  “Not then. But I went into her room later, while she was outside sweeping.”

  “She swept the walk the morning after she gave birth?”

  “She swept it the morning after I heard those sounds, yes, sir.”