Accidents of Providence (9 page)

When the sound of the dogs continued, he came to a halt at the side of the carriageway and bent over, hands covering his ears, as patchwork horses carrying out-of-work soldiers steered around him, the rank-and-files shouting at him, calling him an old man, telling him to move out of the way, as the hooves of their beasts clopped past. Walwyn ignored them. He kept his ears covered with his gloved hands, with those gloves that never left him. He leaned against those ancient Roman stones and waited for the sound to stop. What bothered him, he once tried to explain to Anne, whose gray eyes silently followed his gesturing hands, what bothered him was not just the sound of the dogs dying but the sound that came before it, of awareness.

In the few days since his release from the Tower, Walwyn had taken to reading his youngest, Richard—or Fourteen, as Anne called him—to sleep in the evenings. More than once Anne had awakened in the morning to find the two of them curled on a pile of blankets in the passageway, Walwyn’s hand cupping the four-year-old’s neck, the child’s hot face nestled in his father’s shoulder. Walwyn’s physician son-in-law, who had studied William Harvey’s
De Motu Cordis
, or
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Creatures
, had diagnosed the boy with poor circulation of the blood. He was born with a faulty heart—Fourteen, that is.

When he could not concentrate on his studies, Walwyn paced the length of the apothecary. He also cleaned. He sorted through instruments and vials. He sat on a stack of anatomy books and drank from a bottle of wine. Recently his son-in-law, Brooke, had compiled a manual of physic titled
A Conservatory of Health
and had left an early version in the work shed. Walwyn picked it up now and flipped through it. The book sought to explain how the world of science operated at the level of the individual human. It claimed to cover “the six particulars necessary to a man’s life.” These included (1) air, (2) meat and drink, (3) motion and rest, (4) sleep and wakefulness, (5) the excrements, and (6) the passions of the mind, in that order.

When Walwyn finished the book he studied the frontispiece before setting it back on the stack. Then he leaned his head against the wall and considered those particulars Brooke had not covered.

No one had seen them leaving the first time he and Rachel slipped out of the Whalebone. John and Elizabeth were finishing a plate of salted cod and arguing about a domestic matter. The others were drinking and squabbling about the limits of Parliament’s power during wartime. It was a good argument; it would keep them going for hours. First Rachel and then Walwyn had ducked out of the meeting room. No one noticed their departure.

The reason they had given each other, the reason that had pushed them, whispering like conspirators, outside in the cold in the first place, was Rachel’s offer to show him the glove shop on Warwick Lane. They had known each other only a few months. This was how she’d phrased it as they’d sat in front of the fire at the Whalebone: Would you like to see the glove shop? “Yes,” Walwyn had replied. “Why, yes, of course I would.” Until that moment he had never given glove making a second thought. “The sewing of gloves fascinates me,” he said. “For example, how long do the fingers need to be? Who supplies the hides?” He went on to ask about the layout of the store, about the organization of inventory. He posed innumerable pointless questions. It would be easier if she just showed him, she suggested, her words forming more slowly than usual, as if her lips were cold. Were her lips cold? Of course not. She was seated two feet from the fire. Ridiculous falsehoods had tumbled from her mouth, and he had returned them. Their lies were steppingstones; it was impossible to go where they wanted without them.

They took the shortest route to the glove shop, following a cottage-lined carriageway in the dark as fumes from nearby cooking fires stung their eyes and noses. When they reached Warwick Lane, Rachel stopped in the middle of the carriageway. “My head hurts,” she said, and tried to untie her bonnet, but during the brief journey her ties had tangled and she could not unknot them. She wound up shucking the bonnet from her head, embarrassed, yanking out several hairs in the process. She balled the bonnet up and pitched it in the kennel, the trough that collected rain and waste, on the edge of the street. “That’s better,” she said daringly, though in the morning she would repent of her recklessness and go back to retrieve it.

Not until they approached the darkened storefront did she reach for Walwyn’s hand. It occurred to her then that she trusted him. She was not sure why. He was not her husband. He did not belong to her, nor she to him. It was his hands, she later decided. She trusted his hands. She trusted how they appeared, callused and scrubbed, with ink staining his fingers. She trusted how they touched her.

For Walwyn, that first night was a humiliating experience, yet simultaneously a renewal, as if a layer had been peeled off his body, leaving him stripped, sheared, rebaptized. When they entered the glove shop they did not look over the inventories. She did not show him the ledgers. He did not ask to peruse the shelves. He did not ask to see anything. He saw no hides. He saw no account books. He received no glove-making tutorials. He did notice one sheepskin, recently cleaned, but that was only because he laid Rachel down on it. He slid it onto the floor in the back room, the workroom, next to the sewing desk. It was not a calculated action. It was just—there is a sheepskin, take it off the wall, it is better on the floor—here; and he was gently lowering her onto it, and then lying on his side, absorbing the sight of her, and she on her side as well, looking up. Around them hung freshly dyed gloves, suspended from ribbons Mary had strung across the frame of the door. They hung from the ceiling. “Where is your employer?” he whispered.

“Upstairs,” Rachel whispered back, pointing straight up at the gloves, which pointed back at her. He should have asked permission for what happened next, but they had bypassed permissions by this point; they were a mile down the road, past the first fork. He reached out and traced the line of her jaw with two fingers. A scarlet blush sprang up on her like a trail. He followed the slope of her neck, unfastened her bodice; the blush wandered south. Interesting, he thought. Where does this go? He was on a mission now. He was a merchant adventurer. The trail plunged to her navel. It followed the line of his thoughts. He leaned down and kissed it. He kissed each way station along it. He invented way stations where none previously existed. Every dip and curve startled him. As soon as his mouth touched her skin, he knew two things at once: he was going to love this woman, and he was going to be held responsible. For what? He did not ask. He did not know; he did not want to know; he was already old with it. When he reached her mouth, reason left his side, or more to the point, he left reason’s side. He abandoned reason at the front door of the glove shop. He left it out in the cold, under the swinging sign. He wanted to try one night in his life without it. Even as he left reason behind, however, he could hear it outside, at the door, calling for him.

For her part, Rachel pitied him. Odd to pity a man as he lowered you to the floor and prepared to climb and bob on top of you, yet there it was. He was like no man she had had before. He was hopelessly vulnerable. She reached out and tickled at his breeches until he lurched and let out a muffled sigh and collapsed onto her, like a tent whose stakes have been pulled up in the storm, leaving her pinned. She pushed him off and rolled back over on her side, though still on the sheepskin. There with him, face to face, eye to eye, hip to hip, hand to hand, she pushed everything aside but him and smiled into his eyes; she swept all questions and doubts out the door; she set her thoughts out for the scavengers.

His hand slid under her skirt. I am going too fast, he thought.

She pulled his hand higher. What took you so long, she thought back.

He entered her, at first gently, apologetically, a cowed dog. He had never done this before, not in this way; he had never been confronted with such a sensual woman. Rachel was not having the same thought. Her thought was: He is too slow! She had to speed things up. She bit down on his finger, hard, and held his gaze. It worked. She had not even taken a breath before he began hardening and stiffening. He turned her onto her back, arching her spine, making her laugh; she did not know why; she could not help it. She lifted her head higher to watch him, and as she took him into her sight her laugh dropped an octave, coming to rest near the base of her stomach. He was thrusting away, would have seemed angry were it not for the pink ears and earnest enthusiasm, which endeared him to her. He held her close; he kept one hand under the back of her neck, his gaze never faltering. She prayed to God that Mary du Gard would not hear them. She did not pray to Christ, for Christ too had been human and so He could not help them this time. Then she was rocking and he was expostulating, her mouth cracking wide, he delivering his point. His eyes squeezed shut; the upper and lower lashes joined. He ran over her as a carriage rattles over a hole in the middle of the street; he came to a rough and clattering halt. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Rachel whispered, beaming, and he, over and over, gasping, “Dear Christ.”

After, they lay silent. They stayed on their backs, looking up at the ribbons that crossed the workroom, the ribbons that held the gloves. He supposed the two of them might have lain there longer save that Rachel’s powers of hearing worked exceptionally well, and she sprang up from the floor a minute later, swearing she could hear Mary trundling about upstairs. She pushed his clothing into his arms and told him to hop to. As Walwyn tried to remember how to pull on his breeches, tried to remember what purpose breeches served, she drove him toward the door, whispering goodbye for now, watching him struggle for his footing. “My legs haven’t returned to me,” he confessed. He started to say something else, leaning toward her, very silly grin, really, but she rushed him off; she didn’t have time; she wanted him to hurry. Mary would have her head, she told him. Walwyn could not have hurried if he’d tried. He could not have hurried if two hundred soldiers were firing cannonballs at his buttocks. His thighs had mutinied on him, his thighs and also his calves. “I am undone,” he rejoiced. Yes, yes, she nodded, as am I; now go. Briskly she pushed him out the door, where he shuffled like an arthritic beggar into a lane that had no light except two candles winking from the windows of a travelers’ inn one block over. He kept turning around, even after she closed the door.

In the days that had followed, they tried to be careful. They would time things according to her monthly cycle; they would take all the usual precautions.

But then weeks turned into months, and months into a year, until finally three years had grown vines around their love, with hidden cords keeping them safe, and suffocating. They became both comfortable and reckless. If it is possible to be so at one, so intertwined with another person’s life, that you hurl yourself onto the rocks daily, then that is what they did.

She had decided to keep him. In her own mind, at least, she was completely in the clear. She was not sure what obligations she had to him. In the absence of a definite list, she would bring him oranges from the market and then eat half of them. She did not bring him by the glove shop. She did not tell Mary about him. Once in a while she would visit the church where Walwyn brought his family. She would sit across the aisle, two rows back. It was a good view, not of the preacher but of Walwyn, who was hard and lean and silver and weather-beaten and everything else that caused strife in a woman. During the sermon she would count the heads of all his children. Afterward, she would despise herself; she would despise him; she would resolve to throw him out. But then he would come to her; he would invent preposterous problems that required him to skip his Leveler meetings and go see her, even as his friends started wondering about him. “You are not writing like you should,” John scolded. Walwyn didn’t care. The real problem, for him, the problem that vexed him, plagued him daily as he washed his teeth and studied his watery reflection in the basin, was this: How shall I make love to her next? He spent a good deal of time considering the question. He nearly wrote an essay on it. When he saw Rachel he would forget everything he had planned and pull her to his chest, planting his chin on top of her head while they embraced—he was that tall. She didn’t mind his being tall, she would say. “What do you mind then?” he asked once. She said she minded going without a window. When she spoke her head moved and his chin moved with it. “All right,” he replied. “A window it is.” That much, at least, he could promise. She could hear his heart scudding beneath the cage of his chest. The sound made her almost forgive him. They would stay for a few hours at the travelers’ inn; the plan was to make love but more often Walwyn wound up listening and Rachel wound up talking. He would lie at her feet in the rented room as she told him about her life. She did not know she had so much to tell until Walwyn started listening. She had more stories than he had time. She astounded herself. She had never been a talker, and look now.

He asked about other men, about former loves or lovers; he wanted to know why she had no husband. She replied that many women had no husbands during a civil war. It was the fault of the times, she said. She adopted her haughtiest expression, lifting her chin high as she informed him of this, though really she was evading the question. Of course there had been other men, here and there in her past, but none of them had wanted to keep her. She saw no reason to speak of them, to bless them with words. And she had not conceived a child in the past, she thought, she reasoned with herself; why should she now? So, as the months went by, she began to take precautions only when she thought of it, when the weather was chilled or the hearth not lit, when the river’s edge was caulked with fog.

She told no one about him except Elizabeth, who, on hearing the news, groaned and struck her forehead.

Their second winter together, Rachel and Walwyn had traveled to see Robert, whose company of New Model Army foot soldiers was waiting out the winter in Hounslow.