She swept the rest of my pages off the bed onto the floor, and sat on the edge of her silk coverlet, watching me on my knees picking them up, one by one, both of us fuming. When I finished, I stood, clutching the mess of papers to my chest. She looked at me, deflated.
“I didn’t go in your rooms,” she said. “I went to Margaret, as you told me to do. She was standing on a chair, her corset tight around her bedclothes, powder on her face, disks of rouge on her cheeks, and hair pinned up in a great pouf, with ribbons and feathers, willy-nilly. Caroline and Mary sat on the edge of the bed, in stitches, while Margaret lisped her way through my words, acting out what you’ve written. My daughters … were laughing at me.”
* * *
By dusk I was leaving Mitchelstown in a carriage, my hastily packed bags on top. I hadn’t been allowed to say good-bye to the girls, or to Margaret. I could feel my heart beating through my homespun shift, my jacket. When I turned to take one last look down the avenue, there she was, lifting the skirts of her dress, hair flying, face streaked with tears, running after me, legs and arms pumping as hard as they could, bare feet on gravel, yelling over and over, “Please, Mary, don’t leave me! Don’t leave!”
I opened my hand and pressed it against the glass. She held hers in the air up to mine, fingers splayed, until the distance between us was too great a gap. She slowed and then stopped, straining for each breath, nostrils flaring like a racehorse, spent. I couldn’t bear to take my eyes away, even as she grew smaller. But even then, I could see her strong jaw set, like her hands on her hips.
Margaret King, I knew, would save herself.
Mrs. B
September 6, 1797
“Wet nurse engaged to give the Poor Babe suck. Puppies brought in for the missus.”
Milk fever, caused by stagnation, was to be avoided at all costs. Mrs. B had become dexterous over the years in drawing off an engorged breast, with the aim of more pleasure than pain. If the breasts grew knotty, she rubbed them softly with an oil-moistened hand. But the midwife, much as she tried, couldn’t keep up with Mary’s abundance. She used cabbage leaves to ease her discomfort, but it was Fordyce who finally ordered puppies brought in. He recommended that poor Mr. Godwin be spared the sight of it—in fact, spared the truth of most things.
Midday, Godwin led bright-eyed Fanny in by the hand to deliver her mother a nosegay from the garden. Mary, blessed with a respite from the fever and chills, hid her feelings, closed her eyes, and smelled it in, the small bouquet. Mrs. B could see that she fought through her fatigue to name the flowers with her little girl, always teaching. She drew each letter in the air with her finger: “P is for ‘poppy.’ L is for ‘lavender.’ Y is for ‘yarrow.’ And C is for—”
“Cosmos!” Fanny shouted.
It brought delighted tears to Mary’s eyes, quickly followed by sad ones. The absent baby left a hole that not even Fanny could fill. The whole house felt it. Strange, how quickly a baby’s gurgles and cries become part of the furniture, a habit of being, the way you walk around a chair, even if it’s been taken away. Or still feel a limb that’s been severed.
“When will baby Mary come home?” Fanny asked her mother. “I want to play with her.”
“Soon enough, Fannikin,” said Godwin. “Soon enough.”
“Will you play with me, Mama? We can take my hoop to the field, like we do.”
“I’ll do that with you,” said Godwin. “I have the whole afternoon to do anything you wish.”
Godwin didn’t look like a man who enjoyed playing games with children, but he wanted to be of some use, to show that he could, and would, do whatever was needed. Mary tilted her head and smiled at him. How little time they’d had these past few days to be alone.
Godwin turned to the midwife. “You ought to get some rest, Mrs. B, while you can. Marguerite’s doing the same.”
“I got a few winks in the night, sir. ’S all I need. But a little walk round the garden might be good for the soul, if you don’t mind.”
“I planted it myself, Mrs. B,” said Mary.
“Before bookcases, or pictures hung!” added Godwin, taking his wife’s hand in his. “She insisted on it.”
“It’s got hollyhocks and foxglove, and the most wonderful love-in-idleness, but you have to look for it.”
“Mary granted me one little stone bench. Turns out it’s my favorite place to read in the whole house,” said Godwin, with a light squeeze of her hand. “But I didn’t know it until now.”
It was a penny’s worth of back-and-forth, but to Mrs. B, said so many things.
“I wonder if Fanny would like to show me the way?”
* * *
Mrs. Blenkinsop couldn’t remember the last time she’d held a child’s hand in hers. For a woman who’d helped birth as many babies as she had, she rarely got to watch them grow. She was struck how much affection lived in so small a grasp, and that it was offered without a thought, informal and natural, just like Mary’s garden out back. It was humble in size, but she’d made every inch of earth count. Herbs and flowers, enjoying their first full summer of life, spilled their colors, mingled and flopped over the walkway, the little gate. The midwife was glad to let Fanny lead her along the narrow, meandering path, to feel plants brush against her ankles. At the end of it sat Godwin’s bench, not much more than two rough plinths and an old sandstone slab that looked like it might’ve been pulled from a nearby field and pressed into service. It had an inviting carpet of mosses in greens and silvery grays, and a book resting open on its stomach.
Fanny wanted to sit and rest, so she could point to the flowers whose names she knew, the pansy being her favorite. Mrs. B lifted her onto the bench, her little legs dangling, picked up the book, and set it in her lap, just as it was, so as not to lose Mr. Godwin’s page. It had walnut-colored leather for a spine, and marbled boards for the back and front, in autumn hues. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, by Mary Wollstonecraft. It was the first she’d seen her charge’s name like that, not only on a book but embossed in gold.
Fanny insisted on taking off her shoes, and did it all by herself. “I’m allowed,” she said. “Mama likes me to feel the wind between my toes.”
Mrs. B thought that sounded just right.
“Will you read it to me?” said Fanny.
“I don’t think it’s a book for little girls.”
“Oh, I don’t like books for little girls. Well, I do, really, but I think all words are pretty. Especially big ones.”
Just then Marguerite appeared, rolling Fanny’s hoop at her side and calling her name. The little girl leaped off the bench into her arms, wrapping her legs tight around the young woman’s hips.
“How is she?” Marguerite asked.
“For the moment, comfortable,” said Mrs. B.
Marguerite nodded and brushed Fanny’s hair out of her eyes. “What do you say, Fanny?”
“Merci, Mrs. B-b-b…” Fanny couldn’t quite remember her name.
“B is for ‘Blenkinsop,’” said the midwife, with a hand on her heart. “But I’m the one should do the thanking.”
Fanny and Marguerite chattered away in French as they trotted off to the fields to play. Mrs. B closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun, the breeze. Filled her lungs and swore she could smell the first tinge of autumn, then other things: hyssop and wormwood, catmint, delphinium, phlox. All the smells of her husband’s flower garden; she could see it in her mind’s eye, where once a week in summer and into fall, he clipped blooms for her, and left them in a pewter jug on the table. He told her they were his consoling friends on her many days away, and a welcome smile for her return. James never let them die; dead flowers in a house brought bad luck, he liked to say. She couldn’t remember having thanked him for it. Maybe in the early days, when they still held each other’s hands, when she knew the knobby parts of each knuckle, the scarred bit of his left thumb where he’d lost a chunk chopping wood, the shocking softness of his palms. It was she who’d
stopped taking his hand and offering hers—she who’d turned away.
She felt a body sit beside her on the bench, heard the whoosh of a sigh. Was it James himself come to forgive her? She could almost see him sitting there, fresh-shaved the way he was on Sunday mornings, ruddy from a quick survey of his kingdom outside, drinking tea out of his good porcelain cup, reporting to her which flowers were waking this week, and which ones past their prime.
If only he would take her hand now, and tell her about the flowers, she would never let it go. But when she opened her eyes she found Godwin in a heap beside her, slouched with his fists in his pockets and staring at the ground.
“I would rather be fighting with her,” he said. “About almost anything.”
“Some women,” she said, “they come through it. We don’t know why.”
“I think she is stronger than all of us,” he said. “But only from being broken so many times. How much more can she take?”
“We mustn’t give up. As long as there’s still fight in her.”
“Fordyce tells me to keep faith. That from a man with more science than anyone I know.”
“He’s right. You must believe.”
“I know, Blenkinsop. Of course I do believe. But not like you. Or Mary.”
“No sir. You’re an atheist.”
He smiled, and looked to a distant stand of tall trees swaying in unison, clouds pillowing above them. “Yet sometimes when I walk with her in the wide-open fields, I think I experience it the way she does—that I see Him in the clouds and hear Him in the wind—in every object, a living soul, and in Nature all that is holy.”
Mrs. B was used to men wanting to talk in their weak moments, telling her their secret fears, regrets, their hopes. But she felt weak too. And no one talked like Mr. Godwin. She found herself hungry for it.
“You know, I didn’t like her at all when I first met her,” he said. “I found her overbearing and brash, and frankly, unfeminine. Then our friend Johnson gave me this new book of hers—new then anyway—and thought I ought to read it.”
Mrs. B handed it to him just as she’d found it. “I saved your place.”
“Oh, I’ve read it fifteen times by now,” he said. “Every page is as good as every other.” He ruffled the pages across his thumb. “If ever there was a book calculated to make a reader in love with its author, this is it.” He closed it and passed his hand across the cover, a bible of his own. “I love her imagination. Marvel at how her mind attaches so readily to the sublime and the good. Her sorrows fill me with melancholy, dissolve me into tenderness … but it is her genius that commands all my admiration. I am simply in awe of her.”
Godwin clutched the book to his chest, and bowed his head, his pain palpable. They sat in silence, letting themselves be filled by Mary’s garden, until Fanny’s voice tinkled on the air in the near faraway, breaking their reverie.
“Well, I’ve got some playing to do. I believe hoops will be involved.” He planted his palms on his knees, steeled himself, and stood, like an old man might, though he was far from old. He left the book on the bench beside her. “Why don’t you read it, Blenkinsop. I daresay it’ll make you a convert too.”
She held the book to her bosom. “Thank you, sir. But I was a convert from the first.”
Mary W
Imagine me, little bird, sixteen hours in a coach, then stepping off in hot, stinking London, buffeted by the crowd, the fashionables and downtroddens, pushed and pulled along streets I hardly recognized, stepping through other people’s sewage, and thinking I’d arrived in Paradise! My seclusion was ended, even if I was alone in the world. I wanted it that way. Never again would I let someone else dictate my terms, my station, my boundary as a human being.
I wanted to bathe, wash away the coach ride, Ireland, Lady K, and worst of all the memory of dear Margaret chasing after my carriage, both of us ripped away from each other. But I had nowhere to go, and no idea where I’d sleep that night. There was only one place I wished to go, where I would not be expected at all. So—in my homespun shift, thick-soled shoes, and flat beaver hat—I took up my suitcase, bursting with more books than clothes, and headed for St. Paul’s Churchyard through narrow dark lanes, as if they were birthing me, to the offices of the man who was my only hope in the world.
“Good Lord, it’s Mary Wollstonecraft!” Joseph Johnson said when he answered the door, and found me, ragged and drowning in rain. “You look like Miranda, tempest-tossed!”
“I always feel more like Hamlet,” I said.
He laughed and ushered me inside. Took the large bag from my hand and placed it neatly by the door, as if he’d been expecting me all along.
“Well, Hamlet is always welcome here,” he said. “‘To be or not to be.’ As she wishes.”
He poured me a welcome sherry, put a blanket around my wet shoulders, and invited me to sit across from him at his desk, a hundred times more chaotic than I remembered, like the room itself. Hill after hill of books closed in on us; they were crisscrossed and stacked almost to the ceiling, even covering the single window and snuffing out the light. But that musty darkness in midsummer was as good as a warm fire in winter. The drink gave me courage, but I’d come already fortified.
“I have a new plan, Mr. Johnson,” I said, perching on the edge of my seat. “To live entirely by my pen.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but I wasn’t done. The speech had taken shape in my mind all the way from Ireland, or maybe the whole last year of my life, if not all my years. And this, my one chance to say it.
“I must be independent. It is the project of my life. I wasn’t born to tread the beaten track—it’s the peculiar bent of my nature. And I know your sex generally laugh at female determination, but I never resolved to do anything of consequence that I didn’t adhere to resolutely, improbable as it might have seemed.”
He sat back and considered me, folding his slender hands into a perfect steeple.
“First, I am known for not being the most accurate representative of ‘my sex.’ I am asthmatic and short, with a weakness for chintz. But I will say that nothing about you seems improbable, Miss Wollstonecraft. Still, how will you do it?”
I opened the haversack on my lap and pulled out my hastily tied manuscript, unrolled it, tried to straighten the pages, and set it on the desk between us, though there was scarcely space for it.
“I’ve written a novel. About a woman. Named Mary.”
“What a surprise,” he said, taking it in his hands. “Not a wedding bells plot, I presume?”
“I’d say not. She is … a sort of genius.”
“Ah, so more Reason than Sensibility.”
“No! An exquisite sensibility, which is the fruit of her genius, or the seed of it. Not the derivative, prescriptive, imitative, affected, but the freshly seen—originality, independence, spontaneity, the natural, innovative, imaginative, and real, true feeling felt firsthand!”
“All that, in this?” he said, riffling the pages. “Does she marry at all?”
“Yes. But unhappily.”
“Of course. Live or die?”
“I do not strive for happy endings,” I said.
“So dies then.”
“But free. To love whom she chooses, in Heaven. For all eternity.”
He cleared his throat. “Heaven is fine, but I am more for what happens here on earth.”
“But will you at least read it?”
“I will, but I don’t need to. I’ll give you ten pounds for it.” He paused while I collected my jaw from the floor. “But keep in mind that a woman writing for her living must think what will make money … on a continuing basis.”
I felt my shoulders sag and a corner of the blanket fall away. “I don’t know what will make money. I suppose that is the flaw in my plan.”
“Already with the gloom?”
“I do have a tendency to despair and vexations.”
“Well, banish them. Will you write reviews? Translations?”
“I thin
k I can.”
“What are your languages?”
“Well, a bit of English,” I said, in hopes of making him laugh, which he did. “A smattering of French, pinch of Portuguese. But I’ll teach myself. Any language you require.”
“What about conduct books, making ready for the marriage market, for the lady readers. Is that something you might do?” His eyebrows punctuated the question.
I hesitated, knowing he held my fate in his hands. “Honestly, I should as soon throw myself off Blackfriars Bridge.”
He laughed again. “Exactly what I hoped you’d say. Now, tell me where you’re staying.”
How the heart soars and dips, little bird. He must’ve seen my panic because he stood abruptly and put his hand on a pile of books, as if taking a pledge.
“Here. That’s where you’re staying. Until we can find you something better. Unless, that is, you would be scandalized by a single man and a single woman sleeping under the same roof without supervision.”
“I have no worries how I’ll be judged, as I’ve never considered myself on the marriage market, or intend to be. Surely I’m a spinster by now.”
“Then we’ll be spinsters together,” he said.
He showed me the two floors above his print- and bookshop, where he lived. They were not elegant at all—tilting floors, low ceilings, rough walls at odd angles, with only books to anchor them, as if words and leather spines held the whole enterprise upright. Even the dining room had volunteered as a makeshift library, though the table and chairs looked well sat-in, and on one wall loomed a large painting I couldn’t make out in the half-dark. I saw the occasional chintz, yes, but this was a home fashioned most of all for thinking.
He showed me a bedchamber and introduced me to a servant, an old woman, not unlike our Mrs. B, who would help me with a bath, if I so desired. Oh, glorious bath! She poured warm water over my hair, my back and shoulders, cleansing me of Mitchelstown. It felt like a baptism. I missed my Margaret, but she would never be mine. I was twenty-eight years old. Unmarried by choice, without children. I had debts to repay, sisters who begged to be cared for, Fanny’s family always in need, and guilt about all of them. But when that old woman scrubbed my body dry with a coarse towel, it felt like a new skin. For the first time in my life, and no one to care, I climbed between the summer bedsheets with nothing on—not a stitch—and slept like a sailor home from sea.
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