“Mary,” she said, dripping the water onto the baby’s forehead, slow and careful, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Mary W
Hoxton meant to end me. No more of John Arden’s lectures, no school, no walks on Westwood Common. Living in a village of lunatics. At least I had saved my brother, but I had no way to save myself. My gloom was excessive, and grew worse by the day. My head ached all the time, I had unexplained fevers, bit my nails to the quick. I barely ate, or washed my hair. For what? I thought. Why bother? Even the young men of the Hoxton Academy, in their drab frock coats, buffeted me when I took my turn around the square each afternoon. They were thick with ideas and each other, and couldn’t see me. I didn’t blame them; I envied them. I had wanted to be in the world, as they were, but the world shut its door in my face.
Then, one afternoon, our neighbor invited me for tea. I knew little of Mrs. Clare except rumors that her husband had worn the same pair of shoes for twenty years, and didn’t go outside. Having never set eyes on him myself, I assumed he was one of those lunatics better kept at home. But their parlor was surprisingly cheery, with its woodland chorus wallpaper and rose-colored sofa, same color as Mrs. Clare’s cheeks. She was easy to talk to and asked good questions that brought me out. When the Reverend Clare walked in, by contrast, he looked severe in his minister’s clothing and wig, a dried-out reed of a man who hadn’t seen the sun in far too long. She must have seen my eyes go wide and fly to the shoes on his feet.
“It’s fourteen years, Miss Wollstonecraft, not twenty. And he’s really quite proud of it, aren’t you, dear?”
The reverend snorted an answer and sat down with his nose in a book. Nervous, I made a solicitous comment about the weather.
“Weather comes and goes,” he said, waving my words away. “I do not care for it. But if you want to tell me where you stand on John Locke, that’s another thing.”
“Now, Reverend,” said Mrs. Clare. “Leave the poor girl alone.”
He took off his glasses and studied my face, my hair tied back simply, no curls, my plain dress.
“I do not know John Locke,” I confessed. “I’m afraid my education has been somewhat suspended.”
“Suspended how?”
“I went to school in Beverley, where we learned frivolous things—”
“What frivolous things?”
“Well, I can manage a minuet, and ask for tea in French. Little else. I don’t go to school here. I’m not learning anything at all.” I looked down at his shoes again. “It’s left a sort of gaping hole.”
“Ah,” he said, “an horror vacui!”
I looked up to see his eyes flicker to life, an instantaneous glee.
“Yes, exactly!” I said. “Nature abhors a vacuum!” (Thank you, John Arden.)
“Because the denser surrounding material would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void.”
“I believe it would,” I said.
“And if a void is by definition nothing, nothing cannot rightly be said to exist.”
I could feel myself come alive. Losing John Arden had created a hole in me, with nothing in Hoxton to fill it. I was the void, the gap, a hollow container. I felt I was nothing, and if nothing cannot exist, I no longer existed. Until that moment when Reverend Clare saw my nothingness as something worth filling.
“No learning, you say? For a mind like yours?”
“No sir.”
“Well, we ought to fix that, don’t you think, Mrs. Clare?”
Mrs. Clare smiled into her cup of tea.
Little bird, my life began anew. But of all the gifts the Clares gave me, none was greater than introducing me to the woman I have loved more than all creatures on this earth, save your sister and you. She was two years older than I—eighteen—when we met. I remember just staring at her, in her family’s modest cottage in Newington Butts south of the Thames, where the Clares had brought me. While they visited with her mother in their narrow parlor, I sat in a corner of the kitchen and watched how she moved seamlessly from one task to another, giving her siblings food, cutting it into pieces where need be, kneeling down to meet their gaze when they spoke, and really listening, subtle corrections to their grammar, mimicking their facial expressions, and ending with a nod and a loving kiss on the tops of their heads. I felt I was looking at another self, a better self, a gentler soul, more complete. I cared for my siblings too, but frenetically so, sometimes sharp and impatient, sometimes resentful and then guilty for it. Fanny Blood moved in her world like a minuet.
“May I get you something, Miss Wollstonecraft?”
She woke me from my reverie. “No, no. You’ve work enough. You needn’t attend to me.”
She took off her apron. “This isn’t work, but a prelude.”
“A prelude?”
She took me by the hand (oh, the warmth of her touch, I feel it still!) and led me to a small room with windows on two sides and light crisscrossing everywhere. On a table, neatly laid out, were specimens of flowers, many I knew the names of, others I didn’t. And on the wall behind, a gallery of drawings pinned to the wall, each a flower in exact detail, its intricate parts punctuated with washes of paint, some in colors I’d never seen, not even in Nature.
“A flower sometimes looks small and simple at first, but then you look closely, and see a world unto itself.”
“These are beautiful,” I said, looking across them.
“I love the idea that one with only male or female parts is an ‘imperfect’ flower, but one with both, that can reproduce on its own, has achieved the status of a ‘perfect’ flower.”
She was standing beside me with her hands on her hips, surveying her own drawings. She blew away a lock of hair that had fallen across her forehead, and pointed to the topmost part at the center of one of her flowers.
“They call this female part the ‘stigma.’ It’s where bees and insects drop the pollen in. But why a ‘stigma,’ I often wonder? I think of a stigma as a stain or scar.”
“A blot, a disgrace,” I said.
She looked at me. “A taint, a mark, a blame.”
“Yes,” I said, turning back to the drawing. “Females take so much blame, don’t they, for everything, and deserve almost none of it.”
“I think I would call it the ‘vessel’ instead.”
“The blessed vessel.”
“The blessed vessel,” she repeated. “Yes.”
And like that, somehow, I knew that Fanny Blood would be the truest friend of my life.
She had better handwriting than I, better writing altogether, was calmer, neater, more precise in her thoughts and words, more disciplined and demanding in her thinking. Yet she possessed a sense of wonder; she laughed easily, at even the silliest things, and was capable of whimsy. Like me, she had a father who drank and gambled, but she didn’t resent him, and had found, through her drawings, a way to support herself and her family. She loved Nature as much as I did, taught me the names of more flowers than I knew—the perfect and imperfect alike. In public we observed a personal reserve, but in private we were better than sisters, brushing each other’s hair, talking through the night, arguing over petty nothings, just for the fun of it. Every step I took toward her was rewarded with a step closer to me.
We soon began dreaming aloud of a life together. We would read and study without interruption. She would teach me the German and Latin she knew, and we would teach ourselves French, some days converse in French alone. We would take turns making meals, or stand side by side and cook them together; we’d share books, clothes (our simple taste); she might teach me to draw, I might teach her to dance, and if we could only afford one bed, we would share that too. We would make, the two of us, a perfect household, where we would be the male and female parts together, whole unto ourselves, without a man.
Reverend Clare had imbued me thoroughly with a reverence for the ideas of John Locke, and Fanny was my ardent pupil. I read to her while she drew, and we talked
of it, even on the pillow. Creatures of the same species, we agreed, had a natural equality, and no husband should have more power over his wife’s life than she had over his. I told her of my pledge never to marry, but now, all my resentment about my father’s cruelty, the favoring of Ned, had a basis in thought. It was unjust. It was my right, my human right, to shape my own future, just as it was for her and everyone else. It was an obligation to overthrow tyranny wherever it was found. That was our pledge to each other. Together Fanny and I would be free from the despotism of men, whether at home or in the world.
There was only one man who stood between us. His name was Hugh Skeys. He was portly and self-satisfied, and had courted her patiently for a year, though she was lukewarm at best. On the eve of his departure to Lisbon, where he would solidify his business, he handed her his own portrait, with a vague promise to return in one year to marry her once he’d secured his financial future.
“It’s a terrible likeness of him,” I said. “And what sort of man has his own portrait painted who does not love himself mightily?”
Fanny only laughed at me.
“Clearly he’s left because he doesn’t love you,” I said. “Not like I love you.”
“You do not like Hugh Skeys, that’s fine. But my feelings for him have no bearing on mine for you.”
“I think him beneath you.”
“I think him the only way my family will survive, Mary. It falls to me. I cannot keep them on what pittance I make from my drawings. Love does not enter into it. And I may come to care for him.”
“Love cannot be forced.”
“But it may be earned.”
“And haven’t we, you and I, earned it of each other?”
“Yes, my darling Mary. But love won’t feed us, or our families.” She pulled my hand to her lips and kissed my knuckles. The translucent slice of carnelian on Fanny’s ring—her singular ornament—burned fiery orange, as if from within. She often threatened to give it to me, as the ancient Egyptians believed it cured bad tempers, hatred, jealousy, and anger, all of which I felt in that moment.
To prove to Fanny that we didn’t need Hugh Skeys—didn’t need marriage at all—I took a job as a companion to a widow in Bath, who was old and wealthy, ill-tempered and arrogant. By then I was nineteen years old and keen to earn my own way, if not enough to support our future life together. I knew Fanny would have done the same but for her weak constitution, the responsibilities of running the Blood household, caring for her mother and siblings. The money she earned from her drawings had to suffice until Skeys returned to take her hand. Mama took my leaving for Bath personally, furious that I would abandon our household, which she relied on me to manage. Father had all but disappeared, dropping by to pay the occasional bill and visit his drunken threats on us all, which it fell to me to fend off. Eliza and Everina, too, felt abandoned by me. I realized they were resentful of my freedom and ill-equipped to take on my duties. I should have taught them, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t stomach preparing them for wifely duties when I wanted them to know about the workings of gravity and the birth of human rights. They called me selfish for going away, and perhaps I was.
One year—that’s how long I had to persuade Fanny against marriage.
Bath was my first introduction to high society, but I soon realized my widow and her friends, even the young women of the town, were everything I rejected. They were frivolous and frenetic. Wore striped taffeta, tight corsets, and on their hips stiff panniers too wide for most doorways. A curtsy was almost enough to tip one of them over. Their faces were coated in white powder, with rounds of rouge on their cheeks, their frizzed hair built up in steep towers finished with feathers and ribbons, stuffed birds, and fruit. All their world felt false to me, the opposite of my life with Fanny. Out of contempt, and on principle, I made myself a monk among them, dining on grapes and bread crusts while they stuffed their mouths with pastries and succulent roasts. I wore a few simple dresses in rotation, and no makeup at all, my loops of reddish-gold hair unpowdered. I read epic poems, took long walks, finding solace in the variegated light and shade, the gorgeous palette the sun’s rays gave to the hills around town. I could almost hear my dear Fanny gently lecturing me on the relative merits of ocher and umber.
One year turned to two. Hugh Skeys made more vague promises but had not returned to claim Fanny for a bride. I cut short my sojourn in Bath when Mama’s health declined and she demanded that I return home to nurse her, echoed by my helpless sisters. I was not surprised to find them chafing at the cruel smallness of their lives, and their dim prospects for finding husbands, with no dowry of any kind.
Hope stirred when Ned, now apprenticed to a firm in London, reached the age of majority and announced he would marry. Father had long ago squandered his part of grandfather’s estate, but now Ned would have his, a remarkable five thousand pounds. I hated the injustice of the eldest son receiving everything, but it was customary that on marrying, a brother might offer his sisters a dowry to increase their marriage prospects. It would have changed everything for Eliza and Everina, and for me, even a small nest egg would have made my life with Fanny possible. But Ned gave us nothing, not a guinea among us.
Right before Mama slipped into a coma, I sat at her bedside, desperate for some simple gesture of feeling. I had wiped her drool, held her bedpan, brushed her hair, but all she had to say to me was this: “A little patience and all will be over.”
And then it was.
Grief mixed with bitterness is a powder keg. I traveled to London alone to find my brother, and when I appeared on his doorstep to demand he take our sisters in, Ned was so taken aback that he agreed.
“Not forever,” he said. “A few months at most. Then you’re to come back for them.”
I wanted to spit in his face. “I don’t wish upon them a life with a man who’s never cared for anyone but himself. But it’s not them I pity.”
* * *
I was relieved when Eliza married soon after, and left for Bermondsey. Meredith Bishop was a suitable match, a respected bachelor, a shipwright—a path to security. Eliza flung herself into his arms, and he caught her, quite willingly. I still believed that marriage was a prison for a woman, and yet I knew it might also be her only means of escape. She’d grown into a vivacious, handsome young woman, who believed in marriage to excess, and begged me not to object. How could I blame her?
Father married the latest housekeeper, and retired to Wales. Some part of me was thankful to be rid of him, though he never missed the chance to ask me for money. Charles, now ten, went to stay with them. Everina was with Ned, still writing me desperate letters begging me to retrieve her. James, not yet fourteen, had gone to sea.
At Fanny’s insistence, I moved in with her family in Walham Green, a pleasant place near Putney Bridge. The Bloods were warm and easy with one another, and with me. Fanny’s mother was “our mother,” a modest, gentle woman who must have seen the wounds my own mother had inflicted on me, and healed some of them with simple kindness. When she and Fanny opened a small needlework shop, I helped where I could. I didn’t mind the punishing hours, the strain on the eyes sewing intricate stitches by candlelight. It was a way to piece together a life, scrap by scrap, stitch by stitch. I wanted to spend my life with them. This was poverty, yes, but there was bliss in it.
Fanny improved me in all ways—the quality of my writing, my thinking, my feeling, perception, manners, even my sense of humor. She taught me what it is to love, and be loved. Out of necessity we did share a bed, but it was as we’d always imagined, and even things we hadn’t. We lay awake nights, recounting the high and low points of our day, making fun where we could, whispering our worries. In winter we piled on the bedclothes and made our own warmth under the covers. In summer we lay atop them in our light linen sleeping gowns, tracing the outlines of our bodies, touching each other fondly, naming our flower parts: pistil, stamen, sepal, petal, leaf.
She dared me to be happy, without caveats, to claim it out loud. Not happi
ness in retrospect, she said, that was too easy. We must know it here and now. I promised her I’d try.
And then one day my dear Fanny coughed blood.
* * *
Her health was stable, her case mostly mild for now, but Fanny had bouts that frightened us all. They seemed worse when she had a letter from Skeys, anchored in Lisbon, putting her off yet again. He asked after the fluctuations in her lungs, as if a bellwether of his intentions. She’d come to feel disappointed by his hesitation, his courtship more off than on, and however relieved I was by it, I knew that her heart’s longings must also be mine.
Marriage had not been kind to Eliza, who wrote me a month after the wedding to say the honeymoon rapture was over. I took it as more proof of my position, but to Eliza I suggested patience and forbearance. She’d wanted money and status, and got it the only way she knew how. She had sealed her own fate. It was hers to bear.
In August she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Mary Frances Bishop, a nod to our mother, Fanny, and me. The birth had been hard, but what followed was worse. Eliza, it seemed, had fallen into a melancholia that erupted into fits of frenzy. Bishop, at his wit’s end, begged me come nurse my sister back to health, her right mind. What I found when I arrived shocked me. My sister seemed to be wasting away, never dressing for the day, not washing without help, rarely sleeping, never settling, sometimes waking with a scream. She spoke what can only be described as gibberish. Her eyes were vacant; she didn’t see the world quite right, or look anyone in the eye, except her little babe, Bess, whom she clutched to her breast like a doll.
I knew that women sometimes lost their senses after lying-in, but usually recovered with time. I thought Eliza just needed rest and relief. I held her in my arms, rocked her like a child. I washed and dressed her, took her for a drive in a coach. Sent the baby across the river to Everina, with instructions to send Bess home before dark, when Eliza would panic, going room to room if she couldn’t find her. The ravings seemed to lessen, but in their place was a wandering mind with disjointed ideas, like strange dreams in another language.
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