When the shaking finally subsided, and Mary slept, Poignand continued his examination. He felt the pelvis, the joints, for signs of swelling and heat. “I ought to have a look at her tongue,” he said.
“Let her rest,” said Fordyce in a Scottish brogue, with the grumbling slur of a man well into his cups. “None of that helps, anyway.”
“Fordyce is a lecturer,” Poignand said to Godwin, ignoring his rival. “In chemistry.”
“And the practice of medicine,” said Fordyce.
“Oh, do you see patients?” said Poignand tartly. “‘Put out your tongue—there. Let me feel your pulse—that will do.’”
“All that business tells us nothing of the sort of fever it is. Have to let it run its course, see what shape it takes, whether it resolves on its own.”
Mrs. B pressed the cool cloth to Mary’s forehead, attentive to the squabble. Fordyce was big-headed, puffy-faced, with heavy eyelids and protruding lips. He wore his white wig askew, and looked as if he wore the same clothes he’d slept in.
“I’m told no one knows fevers better than Fordyce,” said Godwin, in the man’s defense.
“What about bleeding her?” said Poignand, who stood and wiped his hands on a towel. “I think it’s called for, under the circumstances.”
“Of course, leeches! Why not call in the snails, toads, and staghorns while we’re at it, shall we?” said Fordyce, spitting each syllable.
“A lancet will do fine,” said Poignand, losing patience.
“Ah, the lancet! Fever, sore throat, stubbed toe—what isn’t it good for?”
“You’re drunk!” said Poignand.
“Not too drunk to think the lancet’s any improvement on the guillotine.”
Poignand looked to Godwin to officiate, but it was no use. The midwife could see the terror in Mr. Godwin’s eyes.
“I want both your opinions. Anything that will help my wife,” he said, looking between them. “But are you drunk, Fordyce?”
The doctor took another pinch from his snuff box. “Well, if it’s before noon, which I think it is, likely drunk from the night before. But after lunch, which I take precisely at four o’clock—my one meal of the day, at Dolly’s Chophouse on Paternoster Row, the usual ale, brandy, port wine—also drunk. So, in a word, yes.”
Mrs. B had always been thankful that her James never took to the bottle, but was surprised to find herself drawn to Fordyce. She liked his blunt instincts.
“Never mind. Tell me what you can about the extraction of the placenta,” he said to Poignand, changing his tone. There was no accusation in it, only inquiry.
“He’s not trained in midwifery, obstetrics!” Poignand said to Godwin. “I won’t be in the same room with him.”
“Please,” Godwin begged. “We’ve got to do something for her.”
The newborn started puling again. Mrs. B got up from Mary’s bedside and took her from Godwin’s arms. She had more experience settling a hungry child. An agitated Poignand punched his arms into his coatsleeves, preparing to go.
“No visitors,” he said. “And the child should be put out of the room. You ought to send it to a wet nurse straightaway.”
Poignand and Godwin turned to Fordyce, expecting him to weigh in.
“Mary won’t want a wet nurse,” said Mrs. B. All three men looked at her. “She’ll put up a terrible fuss.”
Poignand snapped his bag shut and marched to the door. Godwin grabbed him lightly by the elbow.
“I’m sorry, Poignand. I’m desperate.”
“Don’t risk the child’s health as well,” he said, and left in a huff.
Fordyce walked to Mary’s bedside, studied her sleeping face. Mrs. B watched him wring out the washcloth in the water bowl and press it lightly to her forehead.
“I agree with Poignand,” he said. “She can nurse if the fever breaks. But not until then.”
“But will it? Break?” said Godwin.
“Let’s give it another day,” said Fordyce with a sigh. He looked at the midwife. “And if she has the strength to put up a fuss, we’ll take that as a good sign, won’t we, Blenkinsop?”
“That’s right, sir. Mary Wollstonecraft is stronger than us all.”
Mary W
Fanny was pregnant within two months of the voyage to Lisbon and her long-anticipated marriage to Hugh Skeys, despite his being, in fact, “much fatter and at least ten years older” than the portrait he had left her long ago. She wrote often to me and my sisters, “her dear girls,” with brave humor, assuring us that her Skeys was a good sort of creature, with the good sense to let “his cat of a wife follow her own inclinations in almost everything.” She claimed he even relished when she was well enough to “coquet” with other men. Fanny, in turn, didn’t seem to mind learning that he’d been a dreadful flirt with the ladies of Lisbon, who were disappointed by his marriage. She had tamed him already into a plain man now inclined to pay more attention to his wife than any other woman. I thought she was pretending at contentment, and for myself, remained skeptical of his worthiness. How could he possibly appreciate her marvels, as I did?
Fanny promised to send “our assemblage of irresistible charms” at Newington Green at least two men from Lisbon who she assured us were tolerable flirts, and one in particular, her very own physician, whom she thought would be a good match for me, though she feared his shyness and sincerity would impede his getting forward in a world where arrogance and dishonesty seldom fail to succeed. I didn’t pine for a man, and Fanny knew it. But it was her way, I knew, to avoid the subject of her health, though she did admit that, on the good doctor’s advice, she’d quit the country for the dry, hot air of town, and had already found the spitting of blood arrested, and her cough, most days, trifling. Her letters went on like that, with seeming high spirits—regaling us with stories of playing the bon vivant, a crowd of visitors every night—but it seemed she was hiding the truth of things. She sometimes signed them “Frances (Heigh-ho!) Skeys,” which seemed overzealous, even for her.
I wanted to go to her, of course, nurse her through her confinement, knowing that she might not have the constitution to see a pregnancy through, and that it might kill her if she did. But without Fanny the school was on even more precarious footing, and Eliza and Everina showed no inclination to take on more responsibility. My only consolation was the students themselves, who awakened in me a deep well of patience I didn’t know I had. I treated them with respect and tenderness, not shame, not punishments, and they returned it all with keen attachment. Every day I reminded them to have the curiosity to learn, and the courage to say what they knew. No feigned raptures, haughty words, fake manners, and piddling accomplishments. I wanted them to write as much as read, trust their experience of the world, their truest feelings. They were like twenty Fannys in the making. I didn’t want them to be me; I wanted them to be her, at least until they could be themselves.
I tried to distract myself with the demands of the school, the students, counting our pennies in hopes of making ends meet one month to the next, even week by week. If we lost a single student, we’d have to close. Though I missed Fanny every day, I found stimulation in an ever-expanding world of ideas. I was often invited to Newington dinners, where men and women talked openly about child-rearing, schools, education, women, marriage—all subjects near to my heart, and quick on my tongue. It was June when the Green was abuzz with news that John and Abigail Adams were in London and had chosen Dr. Price and his church for their visit rather than one in the fancy West End. Londoners were aghast that these American heroes would choose an old Dissenter instead of a more fashionable minister, but Price had won the Adamses over by being one of the longest and loudest champions of the American cause. And now they were in our midst.
Price himself saved me a place near the front. When I thanked him for the privilege, he told me that I had a way of angling toward him when he sermonized, as if I were about to leap from my seat and throw in for the cause right then. He believed my enthusiasm contagious
to all. When John and Abigail Adams walked in and sat in the pew in front of me, I thought my heart would pound out of my chest. Mrs. Adams was known for her homemade bonnets, he for his awkward manners (the West Enders would have laughed at him), but I was drawn to their native simplicity, taking it as a sign that they preferred liberty to fashion, and ideas to trifles. Once, during a hymn—I could just see over the pew—the husband squeezed his wife’s hand, and she turned to him with smiling eyes. It was a small gesture, but I never forgot it.
I saw Abigail Adams in deep conversation after the service with Mrs. Burgh, who rarely came out these days, but of course she wouldn’t miss this. She leaned heavily on her favorite malacca cane with the painted porcelain female bust for a handle. Her tremor was worse, but her blue eyes gleamed like one of our girls at the school. I stopped a few steps short, not wanting to interrupt their conversation too brazenly. I was surprised to hear Mrs. Adams waxing poetic over the “simple charms” of Scotch songs. They always called up a memory, she was saying, of when her husband had been away in Paris, while she and her youngest sons were fending off a bone-cold winter in Braintree.
“Picture me, surrounded by a mountain of snow, sure that winter would begin and end me, my days as lonely as my nights were solitary. I missed my husband as if my own soul had flown away. A young friend found me in the worst melancholy, and sang me a song to cheer me up, about a wife greeting her seafaring husband after he’s been ‘awa.’ I still sing it to myself when I feel that hour upon me: ‘His very foot has music in’t/As he comes up the stairs—’”
“‘And shall I see his face again/And shall I hear him speak!’” I couldn’t help cutting in. It was Fanny’s song, the one she’d taught us.
They both turned to take me in. “Yes! You know it too,” Mrs. Adams said to me. “It has beauties in it an indifferent person wouldn’t feel!” She offered her hand to me. “And you are?”
“This is Mary Wollstonecraft,” said Mrs. Burgh, beaming. “Not an ‘indifferent person’ at all. She’s got a school for girls. Teaching them how to think for themselves. Reform the girl, reform the world! You would approve, Mrs. Adams.”
“I very much approve,” Abigail Adams said to me. “And always tell my husband, as the men busy themselves writing the new laws of the land, that they ought to remember the ladies, with a little less unlimited power for husbands.”
“All husbands would be tyrants if they could be,” I said.
She laughed heartily, completely at ease.
“You see what I mean,” Mrs. Burgh said to her with a wink.
“Well, there are a few good husbands, but I like to remind mine that if care and attention is not paid, the ladies will foment a rebellion not bound by any laws in which we have no voice.”
“Then America has won my heart!” I said. “Perhaps it’s my rightful home.”
“Oh no.” She hadn’t let go of my hand, but now had it between both of hers. “We need you right here, Miss Wollstonecraft, doing what you do, one precious girl at a time.”
Our encounter renewed my vigor and purpose, but a week later I received a letter from Fanny that altered my course. She tried to be buoyant. Hugh, she said, was working hard at being a good husband, though he was of little use or comfort. Still, she admired his effort. It was so like Fanny to find some cause for optimism, but there was misery between the lines. She included her now-finished botanical drawing of the Viola tricolor, the wild pansy, heartsease—her love-in-idleness—a “small token of her love,” and urged me to gaze often on its happy face. I sensed the underneath of it, that while accepting her fate, Fanny feared for her life and the life of her child, and thought she and I might never see each other again.
I could stand it no longer. I set a plan in motion to sail to Lisbon as soon as possible. Eliza and Everina accused me of abandoning them, of caring for Fanny more than I cared for them. A few of the parents had no faith that my sisters could continue to uphold the ideals of the school, much less the day-to-day of it, and threatened to withdraw their daughters if I should go. I tried to assuage their concerns, but mine had a greater hold on me.
I went to the widow Burgh, my only hope for passage.
“What about our school?” she asked. “I thought this was your purpose. I fear without you it will fail. And there’s Mrs. Cockburn down the way who has her eye on three of our very advantageous lodgers we might lose if you go.”
Here I was again, staring into a teacup hoping to make my case. “I once abandoned a little girl, not one year old. My sister’s daughter. I thought, at the time, that I must choose between them. That it was the only way to save my sister’s life.”
“Perhaps it was.”
“Our little Bess died one month shy of her first birthday. I left her to be neglected, without a mother, without motherly love at all. With no one to protect her. I still lie awake at night, sometimes, wondering what else I might have done to save her. I cannot live with myself if I do that again.”
“Yet our Fanny Blood, however dear to us, has her own fate. And is not a child at all.”
“We were, all of us, children once,” I said. “I think of who Bess might have grown to become, to full flowering, if I hadn’t left her there. So while Fanny lives and breathes on this earth, her fate is entwined with mine, the child she once was, the woman she is now, and may yet become. I cannot abandon her.”
Mrs. Burgh put her cane between her knees and leaned her chin on the tiny porcelain head, thinking. Her breathing was labored, her eyelids drooped low. Finally she looked up at me. “I will fight off Mrs. Cockburn as best I can,” she said. “Go to our Fanny. Leave the rest to me.”
* * *
I had never traveled by sea, a woman alone, with little experience of the wider world. I left on November 1, All Saints’ Day, knowing that thirty years ago that very day, Lisbon had been crushed by an all-consuming earthquake and tidal wave that swallowed the city, first by crumbling it, then drowning it, and then setting it all ablaze, due to the many candles lit to celebrate the day. I had an ocean to cross to get there, in three long weeks, during which time I prayed every day, on my knees, that Fanny would wait to give birth till I arrived, not even sure anymore if God was listening. I shared my cabin with a man and his wife—she seasick the whole time, and he a consumptive so oppressed by his complaints I never expected he would live to see Lisbon.
A November sea in that part of the world is an angry one, slapping and tossing our ship, daring it to stay afloat. For thirteen straight days the boisterous water came at us, into every cabin and crevice, and almost rolled the ship over. We had such hard gales the captain was afraid we’d be dismasted. The sea was so rough I couldn’t write, couldn’t read, sometimes reduced to staring at the chopping waves, trying to steady my jangled nerves on the straight line of the distant horizon. The last three days we were surrounded by a fog so thick and dark I thought we might disappear in the miasma.
And then one morning, as if by some miracle, the air cleared and magnificent Lisbon came into view, a sparkling new city built on a series of hills, with its grand boulevards and plazas, white buildings, tall windows, red roofs, a vast harbor full of every variety of vessel, masts billowing and full.
I was bedraggled but elated at the prospect of soon being with Fanny in this magical new world. I put myself together as best I could, said my good-byes to my traveling companions, and clambered into a cab. It took me up a long, winding street lined with young trees, then turned into a small courtyard off a narrow lane.
Skeys met me at the door.
“Thank God you’ve come, Miss Wollstonecraft,” he said, a mess in his unbuttoned waistcoat, hair fallen across his forehead, and a beading brow beneath. A servant took my things. “Her labor started in earnest some sixteen hours ago, but I fear she’s too weak to be delivered.”
He took me at once to Fanny, who looked as if she herself had been tossed by an angry sea: stringy hair, skin pale as whitecaps, liquid cough, blood on her pillow, her gown. Thin as
I’d ever seen her, cheekbones protruding, sunken eyes. And yet her face came alive when she saw me.
“I’m here, I’m here,” I repeated, springing to action, but calmer than I expected to be, obeying the commands of the midwife (who was no Mrs. B, I assure you). “Mop her brow! Rub her back! Squeeze her hand!” We stayed like that for four hours, while Fanny had not even the strength to scream, and suffered the worst of her labor in silence. I had never seen a child born, had no idea what to expect, but a woman so enfeebled, too weary to push her baby out—a woman I loved as I did her—was a terrible thing to watch. And then, without one peep from Fanny, not even a whimper, he slipped out of her, a little boy. Skeys was called into the room and held the swaddled babe in his arms, but he looked at Fanny, asleep on her pillow, as if she were a corpse already.
The child was puny but had good lungs for wailing and a strong desire to suck. Fanny was in every way his opposite, so reduced and worn out her recovery would be almost a resurrection. She held her child, said loving words, tried to suckle him, but every vain attempt ended in a coughing fit. It was no use at all. I wondered how there could possibly be milk in her breasts, but found myself praying there would be; even a few drops would be a sign that her body could sustain and provide—that she might regain her strength. Skeys wasn’t in his right mind. I tried to console him, but he was so sure of Fanny’s imminent demise, he wouldn’t listen when I suggested a wet nurse. It would be as if we were giving up on her, he said.
Wednesday night. Friday morning. Monday noon. Pounding rain and a dead stillness in the house. Time meant nothing anymore, the days all being one. Fanny continued exceedingly ill, without the strength even to lift a spoon. I tried to feed her myself, but she couldn’t hold her head up, could barely muster words to speak. I began to think it was almost wrong of me to hang on to her, but if I gave up it would be as good as signing her death warrant. When she finally had a comfortable night, her symptoms seemed a bit better in the morning. There was something almost sanguine in her mood.
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