Accidents of Providence by Stacia M. Brown Page A

“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