Accidents of Providence by Stacia M. Brown

Walwyn that sound was the war, which he hated, which he mourned before it began, while his friends maintained with remarkable certainty that armed conflict for the sake of the people was necessary once in a while; armed conflict, they said, was propitious. He nodded when they said these things but he did not write any of their words down; he began to spit on their words in his sleep. To him their arguments marked some elemental failure, some corrosion of nature and imagination against which only love could possibly prevail, against which only love could be thrown, like a sparrow flings itself up against the sooty sky on its first flight, panicked and weightless, yet beating. Walwyn no longer trusted the ends to which the word
necessary
was applied. This was another reason he had stopped writing pamphlets.
    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.