Bishop paced in front of me, out of her earshot, asking what happened to his wife, where did his Eliza go, how could this happen?
“A little patience,” I said, “is required of us all.”
“But it’s as if her madness moves about, with no discernible pattern, and certainly no improvement. I cannot continue to live this way.”
“We must think of Eliza—”
“We must commit her, Mary.”
“No!” I stood abruptly, a book falling in a thud from my lap. “You must believe in her.”
“Do you believe in her?” he asked me.
I felt sorry for him, I did. He seemed sincere in his concern, grieving the loss of the wife he knew, unsure if she’d ever return, and if not, what would his life be then?
“Please,” I said. “We must give her more time.”
I had saved Henry from the asylums in Hoxton. I didn’t know whether I could save Eliza. I couldn’t leave her alone, except at night when Bishop took her to bed. I was glad for the respite, but alone in my own room, felt her madness creeping into me.
Then one day, when I was drying her after a bath, she grabbed her breasts and squeezed them hard in her fists, grimacing. “This-this-this,” she repeated.
“Stop, Eliza.” I reached my hands for hers, but she took my wrist like a vise, pulled me close to her face, and looked at me, lucid.
“It hurts, Mary, hurts.” She pulled a handful of her own hair as hard as she could, beat her fist on her pubic bone, thrust her hips back and forth, making noises like an animal in heat.
I stroked her wet hair. “What hurts, Eliza? Tell me what hurts.”
“He makes me. On my knees, on the rug. I have burns.” She rubbed her red knees with her knuckles. “Pulls his pants down. Pound-pound-pound. It hurts, Mary, it hurts.”
“Meredith?”
“Pulls my hair, pound-pound-pound. Every night. Till I’m dead.”
“You’re not dead, Eliza. You’re alive. You’re here with me.”
“Not safe, Mary. Not here.”
How reluctantly I walked her to her room that night. I put the babe to her breast to suckle, which was the only thing that seemed to calm her. She twirled a ribbon on the little one’s cap, and whispered, over and over, “Sweet girl, sweet girl.” Until Bishop came to join her. He stood beside her in the chair, stroked her hair, but it seemed like petting a cat. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back, but I couldn’t tell, was it relief, or surrender?
I retreated to my room and wrote Everina to say I couldn’t help pitying Bishop, but his misery was a small portion of our sister’s. I wrote to Fanny that Eliza seemed to think she was maltreated by him, but couldn’t bear to say the rest. What she was describing, whether true or false, was the same fornication my father had visited upon my mother for most of my remembered life. I had never seen it, but I’d heard it, lying on their threshold, imagining the worst things Eliza was now giving voice to. And while I thought my brothers and sisters didn’t know—that I was shielding them from it—they must have known, all the children, the walls, the windows, the doors. The whole house had borne witness. Was it possible that Eliza, in her madness, was conflating her married life with theirs?
When each day continued like that, whether I was dressing her or sitting just holding her hand, she’d begin again, describing awful scenes, some words I’d never heard, some I wish I hadn’t. These were things Eliza could never have seen with our parents, and could not have made up. Despite her agitation, the nail-biting, the nonsense talk, I began to believe her.
“Why would you suggest such a thing?” Bishop asked when I tried to broach the subject as delicately as I could.
“I only wonder if perhaps there’s a … roughness in your relations that makes her feel ill used.”
“What would you know about the sharing of a marriage bed? You’re a twenty-four-year-old spinster, Mary.”
“Quite by choice, I assure you.”
But Bishop was right, and maybe right to be offended. I know now what a chilly prude I was then, believing that carnal appetites, whether women’s or men’s, were deplorable inside marriage and out. And once children arrived, I was sure, the only passion between husband and wife should be whatever reproduction required. Indulging sensual gusts, I thought, was incompatible with the duties of parenthood.
Bishop moved close enough that I could see the sweat on his upper lip, and something between hurt and cruelty in his eyes. “Your sister is mad. And the sooner we come to terms with it, the better we’ll all be. The child most of all.”
I doubted him, my sister, myself. I knew that because of my father I assumed all men to be despots until they proved otherwise. I saw no change in Bishop, no willingness to bend to her plight, to feel compassion for his wife. But was I being unfair?
I missed Fanny desperately, wrote to her every day, about the vicissitudes of Eliza’s madness, the precipice of my own. We were only in Bermondsey, but it felt a world away, and leaving Eliza, even for an afternoon, seemed dangerous. What she might do to herself, what Bishop might do to her.
One night I woke from a troubled sleep, twisted in my bedclothes. My nightmare compelled me to throw the covers off, put a robe on, tiptoe down the hallway and around the corner toward their room, without even a candle to light my way. When the floor creaked under my bare feet, I froze, until it felt safe to creep some more. When I neared their door, I heard it, what I’d heard so many nights of my youth. Him, grunting, groaning, clipped commands telling her what to do, how to lie. Her muffled shrieks, moans, sobs.
This, if not the first cause of my sister’s madness, was the fuel to its consuming fire.
“Eliza,” I said the next morning, sitting her down and kneeling at her feet. “I need you to listen, Eliza.” I took her face in my hands. “I believe you. Everything you told me.”
She put her hands over my hands, and leaned closer, sheer terror in her eyes. “I will die if you leave me here. I’m begging you, Mary.”
I tried to talk to Bishop, to suggest that he try gentleness with her, or put his own gratification to the side, at least until she regained herself.
“Of course you take her side. She’s your sister.”
“She’s a woman in pain, of course I feel for her. Why can’t you?”
“I house her, feed her, clothe her. Those are my husbandly duties! And what are hers to me?”
“She doesn’t feel safe here.” I knew, from my own father, the look of a man on the verge of hitting me. I saw it in his face but didn’t cower, didn’t move.
“I own her. Our house. Our things. Our life. Our daughter. All are my property. Never, for one minute, forget that.”
When he stormed out of the room, my mind was made up.
I concocted a plan for our escape. Eliza had no right to divorce, no right to any shared property, or to custody of her child, who was five months by now, and had worked her way into my heart as well. Bess cooed and smiled, nestled contentedly in our arms. I had to believe we could come back for her. I knew that at first Bishop would be furious, but I hoped he would soften with time and return the little girl to her mother’s bosom. I told Eliza just that. “Thank you, Mary, thank you,” she said, weeping into my shoulder.
“We who would save her must act and not talk,” I wrote to Everina, imploring her not to share our plan with Ned. I scraped together what little money I could, with Fanny’s help, and rented rooms in a modest lodging in Hackney as “the Miss Johnsons.” Everina took supplies there, a change of linens, a few morsels to eat. We waited for Bishop to leave the house, and when he finally did after lunch one day, I quickly packed a change of clothes for each of us, and bade Eliza say good-bye quickly to her daughter, then hailed a coach outside. I waited by its open door, holding my breath as each second ticked by. When she finally appeared, Eliza froze in the threshold.
“I can’t leave my baby. I can’t do it, Mary.”
But it was now or never. Bishop might be back any moment. Not knowi
ng what else to do, I grabbed her arm and nearly lifted her into the carriage—she weighed hardly a feather by then—and implored the driver to go as fast as he could. He couldn’t help that a snarl of other coaches kept stopping us at first, but each time I looked back expecting to see Bishop hot behind us. For caution’s sake we changed coaches twice to throw him off our trail. Sensing my agitation, Eliza rocked back and forth, gnawing at her thin wedding band until she nearly chewed straight through it, but with each mile closer to Hackney, a sort of calm came over my sister as I hadn’t seen in so long.
“Ah, the Miss Johnsons! We’ve been expecting you,” said the housemistress when we arrived, bedraggled but whole. She led us to our room, two small beds, simple curtains on the windows. I pulled them closed at once.
“Don’t like the light, that it?”
“No, it’s just—it’s been a long journey. I thought we might have a rest.”
“Where’ve you come from, then?”
I hated her questions. But our lives, our futures—whatever they were to be—needed this refuge now. I named a place, as far from Bermondsey as I could think of.
“Mmm,” she said, looking Eliza up and down. “Well, your poor sister looks like she could use a bit more than a rest. Is she all right?”
I feigned a relaxed smile. “She’ll be right as a line, you’ll see.”
The woman hesitated. “Well, never mind, then. There’ll be a nice tea waiting for you when you wake up. Just come down to the parlor when you’re ready.”
“Oh, no!” I blurted. “It’s just—my sister, she’s rather shy. I wonder if we might take tea in our room.”
She screwed up her mouth. “Suit yourself,” she said, then turned to go.
“Is there a lock on the door?” I had to know.
She jiggled the old knob, a half-broken latch. “Not sure what it can hold back, but it’s worth a try. Anyway, you’re safe here. Haven’t had any trouble at all for going on twenty years.”
When she’d gone I leaned a chair up against the knob, took off Eliza’s cape, and mine. We fell onto our beds with our clothes on and slept like bears in winter.
Bang, bang, bang on the door. I woke with a start, trying to get my bearings. Where were we? What time was it, what day? We were in Hackney. In the lodgings. But had Bishop found us out? I peeked out the window to see that it was late morning by the looks of it, which meant we’d slept nearly fourteen hours. Another bang on the door. I crept to it in my bare feet, trying not to make noise, and leaned my ear against it.
“Mary, it’s me,” the voice said in a whisper. I opened the latch, the door, and nearly fell into Fanny’s arms.
“Thank God you’ve come,” I said, and swept her into the room. “Have you heard from Bishop?” Eliza was still fast asleep.
“No. But I’ve had a letter from Ned, just this morning. He being Bishop’s willing emissary.”
“Do you think they had you followed?”
“I made sure I was not. But Bishop is serious, Mary. He will find a way to destroy you.”
“Destroy me?”
“He blames you. And Ned says the Wollstonecraft name is forever sullied, says you’ve ruined Everina’s chances of ever finding a suitor.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, sagging. “I suppose I give him that.”
Fanny sat beside me. I felt the warmth of her hip resting against mine.
“What have I done?” I asked her.
“Saved your sister, that’s what you’ve done.”
“I tried, for so long, to save my mother. I live with the weight of that. How could I leave Eliza to suffer the same fate?”
“You didn’t, Mary. You did save her. You have rewritten the fate of your family.”
“But what fate have we to write now? What can I will into the world with no money at all? And Eliza’s sweet, innocent babe. How could I have left her behind?”
“Because your sister begged you to save her life, and you had to choose. For the time being.”
I took her hands in mine and faced her. “How I’ve missed you, Fan. I do not want to, cannot, simply refuse to live without you. Ever again.”
“I refuse the same,” she said, touching my hair, my face, as if to make sure I was real. “What can be done? Because whatever it is, we must do it as one, and quickly.”
“Never be weak,” I said. “Never submit. Never cower. Not let small difficulties intimidate us. Struggle to the death with any obstacles rather than fall into a state of dependence.”
“Yes. But what will we do?”
Fanny was paler than usual, and thinner than I’d last seen her, but her eyes were vibrant and steady.
This is the next knot in the tree that is me, little bird—when I wipe my eyes and find in my sight a narrow gap between the curtains where a small slice of daylight shines in.
“Start a school,” I say, with a clear-eyed confidence I still remember. “That’s what we’ll do.”
Mrs. B
September 3, 1797
The midwife woke with a start in the morning to find the child gone from her cradle. She hurried to lace her corset with clumsy fingers and fiddled to right her hair, remembering the whispers she’d heard yesterday that they were to build a coffin for the poor little dear. But as she reached for her spectacles, she heard Mary’s voice waft in through a crack in the open door. Mrs. B peered into the bedchamber, where the outline of the missus came clear. She was settled in the chair by the window, smiling and cooing to the baby latched onto her breast, who sucked as if she’d discovered the fount of all life, that miniature fist unfurled, pink fingers holding to her mother’s roundness as if she might never let go. The curtain at their back lifted and fell on the morning breeze, breathing for the whole house. The thinking part of Mrs. B thanked merciful God that her prayers, or someone’s, had been answered. But there was another nagging swell of tears behind her eyes, for soon it would be time to go.
Mrs. B didn’t know herself this morning. She was always quick to pack up after a birth, as soon as any danger passed and things were set to rights, eager to put the kettle on at her own house, simple as it was, take off her shoes and rub her tired feet, then begin a soup for her husband, a rough bread. She liked the feel of dough through her fingers, the push and pull of the knead, the shaping of the loaf. Her husband always kept the embers live in the great ash bed of the kitchen hearth, providing ready light for a candle, a quick boil of water, and warmth most of all, for her creaky bones. She relied on him for it.
Not wanting to disturb the serenity of mother and child, Mrs. B felt her skirts for the diary tucked in a pocket. She hadn’t managed to write in it for two days, and that part of her itched to record the time spent. She sat quietly at Mary’s writing desk, fashioned from walnut, the midwife knew (her husband was a cabinetmaker), with one simple drawer, nothing showy about it—a plain top, no leather, no marquetry, no veneer—but French, she judged by the fancy turn of the legs. A botanical drawing in a simple gold frame hung right above it, love-in-idleness, and a pinchbeck quizzing glass, cracked in two places, hung on a faded velvet ribbon over the frame’s edge. Mrs. B pushed a pile of loose letters toward the porcelain inkstand, and opened her little diary. She always started one fresh at the New Year, keeping records of births, deaths, remittances, expenses such that she might add them up at the end of each month to have an accounting of the year, and then ten years, and now forty, come and gone. She tried to say something of each birth to remember it by: the weather, inside or out, the health of the mother, the child, which tinctures and remedies were useful, what difficulties arose, which had been overcome, and which had done the overcoming. But what was it all for?
“Cloudy and cool. The missus is comfortable. Little Mary is cleverly, and, no doubt, as fine a babe as I’ve ever seen.” She hesitated. “I am not so well as I could wish,” she wrote, and then scribbled it out. Mrs. B set her pencil down and rubbed her face. When she took her hands away, her eyes darted to the pages she’d pushed away, stacked
willy-nilly, the deep black ink of the letters peeking out, written not in one hand, but two. Where her own writing was small and considerate of space, not calling attention in any way, these words wanted reading. She always prided herself on keeping the privacy of her patients, not listening to gossips, or at least not spreading their spew. But this had a pull of a different sort.
“I have felt considerable anxiety about you these past days.…”
Mr. Godwin’s hand was neat, even, and tight, with a few good round curls here and there, but always the same letters in the same way. His lines sat close together, and out near the margins, but you could feel the weight of his hand.
“We love as it were to multiply our consciousness even at the hazard of opening new avenues for pain and misery to attack us.…”
Mrs. B picked up a second letter, a third that stuck to it.
“I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you forever—and I will add what will gratify your benevolence, if not your heart, that on the whole I may be termed happy.”
Mary’s hand was taller and thinner than his, with jagged loops, slanted and in a hurry. But there was air between the words and lines, and clear space around them.
“How much tenderness for you may escape in a voluptuous sigh.…
“A pleasurable movement to the sensations that have been clustering around my heart …
“It is not rapture—it is sublime tranquility I have felt in your arms—hush!”
Mrs. B remembered, as a girl who read better than her peers, that she once happened on a conduct book that advised any woman, if she loved a man, never to reveal the full extent of that love, even if she were to marry him, which would show preference enough. A good man, the book told her, would ask for no stronger proof, and a young Blenkinsop had taken it to heart. No other possibility had ever occurred to her.
She picked another letter from the pile. It fluttered in her hand.
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