Accidents of Providence Read Free

the night.”
    “What did you see?”
    “She was carrying something small and close to her chest. She walked fast all the way to the Smithfield market. She buried the bundle by moonlight near the trees, and then I suppose she ran away.”   
    “So you stayed behind to uncover what she had buried?”
    “No, sir. I went home. Rachel returned home too, later that night, very ill and in a fit, it seemed, so I helped her to bed. She would not speak a word. I returned to the market the next morning.”
    “Why did you wait until the next day to go back?”
    “Because those woods are not safe at night.”
    “Ah. You think those woods are haunted.”
    Mary reddened.
    “I wonder what your late husband would think of your superstitions.”
    “That isn’t fair,” she told him.
    “Nothing is fair.” Bartwain’s lungs were threatening to spasm. He coughed into his handkerchief, discreetly checked the contents.
    From research he had learned that Mary’s Huguenot parents had died by fire for their faith when their daughter was ten; a man named Johannes du Gard had taken Mary under his care in the days following. The same man married her three years later, for her protection, he said, and then went off to war against the Holy Roman Empire. He was gone off and on for twelve years, from what Bartwain could gather. When he returned, he found both his business and his place of worship destroyed, so he crossed the British Sea, wife in tow, to open a glove shop and die for Oliver Cromwell, who believed in the same God he did. Mary never had any children.
    White knocked on the door. “Your next witness is here.”
    “You may go,” Bartwain said to Mary. “But be prepared to testify if there is a trial. And I think there will be.” She excused herself and left, and he rose from his desk, wheezing, to find his pipe.
    The investigator appreciated, at least in theory, why a woman might not want to come forward if she’d given birth to a
living
bastard. But why would a woman stay silent if she’d given birth to a child that died? Where dead illegitimates were concerned, the law turned on concealment. Bartwain lit his pipe, pondering. The reasonable thing for a woman to do in such situations was to come forward and confess she had delivered an illegitimate, explain it had died while she was in labor or shortly thereafter, and present it to the authorities for inspection. But time and again he’d seen women who acted contrary to common sense, women who insisted on disposing of the infants in their own secret way and who then tried to deny any wrongdoing when they were discovered. They failed to grasp that the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children declined to distinguish between murder and concealment. The law did not care about such details any more than it cared about the identity of the father. It kept things simple. Any unmarried woman who concealed her child’s death could be declared guilty of its murder—why else would she need to hide it? If the death was hidden and the woman unmarried, she could be charged, tried, and executed. Accordingly, all Bartwain needed to indict Rachel Lockyer for the crime of infant murder was proof she’d tried to hide a bastard’s death and a reasonable assumption the child was hers. Whether or not she meant to harm it was not important; at least, not in the eyes of the law.
    He could hear someone banging around in the hallway. “White!” he called out. “Where’s my breakfast?”
    His secretary appeared with a platter of duck eggs. Bartwain reached for two and shook them to test for doneness; they were hard-boiled, which made him unhappy, as he preferred his yolks runny. But he was ravenous, so he ate them all anyway, not troubling to remove the shells, stuffing the eggs one after the other into his mouth. “Bring my next interview in,” he said between bites. “I will get to the bottom of this case today or I am not Thomas Bartwain.” White inclined