Accidents of Providence Read Free Page B

have called me in here.” Elizabeth tapped her heel against the leg of the stool. He noticed her black boot, with its high arch and tarnished buckle.
    “You are friends with the woman under investigation?”
    “Yes.”
    “Tell me what you know, please.”
    “I have nothing to say.”
    He waited. He did not think she was the kind of woman who could stay quiet long.
    “This is an illegal investigation,” she flung at him, confirming Bartwain’s hypothesis, “and you are working for an illegal government. The Council of State is a government of the sword, not of the people. So I have no words for you today, Investigator.”
    “You will have to stop talking for me to believe that.”
    “You treat me like a fool.”
    “Be careful, or I will hold you in contempt.”
    “You already do.”
    They went back and forth, Bartwain making little headway. Elizabeth Lilburne was as belligerent as her husband. Finally he badgered her into admitting it was
possible
her friend Rachel Lockyer had been with child, and it was
possible
she had tried to hide this pregnancy from others, but he could not provoke her into saying anything definite. When he asked if Rachel could have laid a hand on her infant, Elizabeth’s face darkened. Only a savage monster could harm its own young, she said. When he asked if Rachel had confided in her, perhaps confessing to some kind of mishap in childbirth, she retorted, “Why would you care? The law still holds a woman responsible.” She went silent, holding the investigator’s gaze.
    If he could not wrangle information out of her directly, he would have to do so indirectly. “Would you say Rachel Lockyer went into a fit of grief after her brother’s execution this past spring?” he asked, trying not to sound suspicious.
    “You mean his murder.”
    “Call it what you will. Would you say she went into a fit of grief?”
    Elizabeth was not falling for the question. “I would not. For then you would use my words to paint her as a madwoman, capable of anything, even strangling her child.”
    “So you admit the child was hers.”
    “I was speaking hypothetically.”
    “That is some sleight of hand,” he observed. “You have spent too much time in your husband’s company. I hear he can make a cunning argument masquerade as a plain one.”
    “He speaks the truth,” she snapped. But her strained expression made Bartwain wonder if Elizabeth Lilburne defended her famous husband more vigorously to others than she did to herself.
    “I have read your Leveler pamphlets, with all their prattle about the rights and privileges and freedoms of the people. Did Rachel Lockyer believe those teachings?”
    She looked at him, puzzled.
    “I never knew any woman to harm her child without pleading some doctrine or justification to excuse herself,” he told her. “‘The child made me ill,’ she will say. ‘The child made me poor and wretched.’ It is the same principle you rebels and libertines rallied behind as you dragged this country into war. ‘The king makes us slaves,’ you said. ‘The king makes us pay taxes.’ Both of these—”
    “The Levelers did not kill the king.”
    Bartwain groaned. By nature he was not a political man. He did not think anyone could claim victory in the aftermath of civil war. How it was possible for a dead king to be the only one left standing at the end of a conflict, he didn’t know. But it had happened. He waved Elizabeth’s words away. “You’re missing my point. Both of these arguments are rooted in self-preservation. Both insist that what matters most is
my
life,
my
survival, even at the expense of others. Even at the expense of a child.” He should not have been discussing intellectual matters with a woman. When faced with a moral problem, with a case of conscience, as the casuists called it, women tried to solve their dilemmas by referring to examples and stories. They refused to think abstractly, to seek universal principles of reason.
    “You think a