“Why rare?”
“Because your strength is your weakness. The part you guard most closely, deny most fiercely, is the part of you that most wants to be free. If you would only surrender to it.”
“Surrender. Is that what you want from me?”
“It’s what I want for you, Mary,” he told me. “I have observed you, heard you, felt you, these months we’ve dined together, and I know that when you part your full, rosy lips, pearls of wisdom and hard-won things spring from your noble head. But the rest of you isn’t living at all.”
I stared at my reflection in the mirror. “I’ve never been touched by a man,” I said.
“Oh, I will touch you,” he said. “Here. And here. And here. Then stop, according to my agreement with my wife. But a painting takes time. And we shall take ours.”
We did take our time. Over days and weeks, rolling into months, Fuseli painted me with the same intensity and confidence he brought to everything. He wouldn’t let me see the portrait, but I was mesmerized by the sketches and watercolor studies pinned to his walls, sometimes overlaying one another, as if he couldn’t draw them fast enough—courtesans, lovers, eavesdroppers, voyeurs—women with high-dressed hair and stiff bows, or in various states of undress; women from behind, from the side, sitting, bending, touching, strolling, engrossed in a book, looking out a window, bare breasts like bright lights, at one with their bodies. He enjoyed saying that females were emotionally flagrant and feckless, but these were drawn in exquisite detail, with honesty and empathy. And now he turned his gaze to me.
We were fiercely alert to each other, and drew ever closer, meeting nearly every day, if not at his studio, he came to my new house in Store Street. We read each other’s work, argued over translations, shared what we knew of the dramatic events unfolding in France. Fuseli could be irritable and itchy, but I could tell he feasted, as I did, on our rich conversation. He never kissed me, never once removed his own clothes in the time we spent together, but when I posed for him, he studied the contours of my landscape by slow touch, sometimes with a trailing finger, a soft paintbrush, a feather quill. The back of his knuckles once grazed my breast as he shifted the draping shawl.
I remember people in Lisbon who spoke of the rolling earthquake some thirty years before as if they relived it every day. The undulating ground, a wave, a swell, a peak, and seawater crashing through walls. Sensations like that, more than words, are all I have to describe my awakening to my own trembling being. I had wanted women to choose reason, not romance; friendship, not sex; companionability, not carnal abandon. But here was I, bursting into brilliant bud and new leaf. I was not a delicate flower at all—I never had been—but a tall birch that bowed with the wind, whose leaves shimmered in any light, and shuddered at a breeze as small as a whisper.
* * *
“I have to go to Paris,” I said one day, when we met at a coffeehouse to read the latest news. “If ever there was a time, Fuseli, it’s now.”
“You dangerous radical, you.”
“Because I want to turn the world upside down? Shake the rich from their gilded cages, banish despots, and lift the poor?”
“You think the world a much better place than I, Wollstonecraft.” He couldn’t help a crooked smile. “But we shall go to Paris, and see for ourselves.”
Johnson signed on as soon as he heard, and Mrs. Fuseli wanted to come. How could I object? I would be with Sophia gladly to have her husband’s company every day. I was surprised when she arrived for the journey looking less like Marie Antoinette, and more like me.
“I took you as my inspiration,” she said. “As you say, ‘nearer to Nature.’”
“Then I’ll take it as flattery,” I said.
On that hopeful Tuesday in June, we set out in a carriage for Dover. If we stopped only for refreshment and fresh horses, we would be to port in a half day, waiting at most six hours for a fair breeze and a sailing tide to Calais. We could be in Paris in two days, three at the most. But at our last coaching inn, we found a crowd throbbing with news. The Tuileries Palace had been attacked, the royal family thrown into Temple prison, the Assembly dissolved, and Lafayette driven out of the country. Paris was thrown into confusion and chaos.
“It seems our traveling party is finished, then,” said Fuseli.
“All of us are unnerved, but this is our chance,” I said, trying to salvage it. “To see it up close. In all its vibrant colors.”
“I think the principal color is red, and it will spout from the necks of people like us,” he said. “A French revolution will not tolerate oglers, especially the English variety.”
“Paine is there. He’ll protect us.”
“Paine is hailed as a hero for now, but just wait for his fall.”
I looked at Sophia, expecting she would side with her husband. She had dared to come, without her usual dripping jewels and high hair. I found her, in her more natural state, even more beautiful than I remembered, but she looked less guarded without her costume, less sure. She rubbed her gloved hands together, looked between her husband and me. We locked eyes as she drew in a breath.
“If Mary thinks it safe to go—”
“I cannot guarantee our safety, Sophia,” I said. “But I can guarantee a moment that history will never forget. That we will never forget.”
She and I looked to Johnson for support, but he traded a defeated look with Fuseli, and shook his head.
“It’s not worth our lives, Mary. We should turn back.”
* * *
A few days after our return to London, agitated that I hadn’t seen Fuseli, I was surprised to find a great canvas wrapped in cloth and tied with twine delivered to my house, along with the folded indigo shawl, and a note: “Here you are, as you’ve appeared to me, in waking life and dreams, the goddess I have seen.” My mouth fell open when I pulled away its covering to see myself, as tall as I was in real life, standing with only the long shawl loosely about my shoulders, brocade silk velvet dripping with Venetian fringe, its deep indigo against my ivory skin, the natural rose of my cheeks, autumn hair, bare breasts, round belly, a fierce, loving gaze. Fanny’s carnelian ring ablaze on my hand. Close up I could see the peaks and troughs of his brushstrokes—feel the pressure of his fingers, the subtle turn of his wrist—these, his most intimate marks. What had seemed like recklessness on his palette and wildness in style had resolved to unity. Stepping back, I saw a woman on fire, pulsing with force and fury, waiting to make love to the world. She was everything we had argued over, that I had argued against. Desire inchoate, and not one ordinary thing about her. Fuseli had fixed me, incontrovertibly, as a caster of spells, the heroine of an epic tale I was writing myself.
In a fit of voracious gratitude, almost desperation, I sat down to write him, wrote again when I heard nothing back that evening, and after several more attempts through the rest of the week, felt a panic rise inside me. Even his place at Johnson’s table sat empty. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote Sophia, in whom I’d sensed an unlikely ally on our aborted journey to Paris. I told her I’d formulated an idea in my head, how we might enact our own revolution, in our own lives. She invited me for tea that afternoon, greeting me in high collar and close sleeves, hardly any makeup, her hair pinned up neatly. We sat opposite each other in their dark turquoise drawing room on a pair of green velvet sofas. Fuseli’s paintings governed every wall—creatures of myth and dreams, foreshortened, distorted, exaggerated—dramatic figures thrown into contortions that evoked both terror and the sublime.
“Tell me about your revolution,” she said, pouring champagne instead of tea, and getting right to the point.
“I have no right to your husband’s person, I know that. But to his mind alone, I stake some claim.” I took a sip of champagne, willing myself to go on. “I thought that we might live as the French do, right now. All strictures gone, all rules upended for the cause of liberty.”
“Liberty, you say?”
“Love’s very essence is liberty, isn’t it?”
�
�A ménage à trois, then? Is that your purpose?”
“He has abided by your agreement. I can attest. It isn’t sex with him that I’m after.”
“Love and sex are little acquainted in this house.”
“My proposal arises from the sincere feeling I have for your husband, for his genius. All I ask is the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily. I don’t think I can live without it.”
“You want to live here, with us?”
“Live lightly, not impede or impose. To give him, frankly, the one pleasure he cannot find with you.”
“Has he told you that?”
“He finds you endlessly alluring,” I said.
“But not his equal in mind? Or is it your judgment that I am not his equal.”
“I’m not here to judge you.”
“Yes, you are. You find me vain, frivolous, infantile, capricious. One begins to wonder whether you aim less to free women than abolish us altogether, while you play the impoverished writer, forsaking temptations of the world for what you think are higher claims.”
“We would be complete, the three of us. Body, mind, heart. Believe me, Sophia, if I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it or die in the attempt. Immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness.”
“How repressively didactic.” She stood, and walked to the window. I remember the swish of her taffeta skirts, a cool pride I’d never seen.
“It was my idea to send you the painting,” she said.
“Your idea?”
“Fuseli hates to let even one go. He wants to keep everything.” She turned and swept her arm across the extravagant exhibit of paintings. “As you can see.”
“But he could’ve kept it, if he’d wanted it. I don’t desire to look at myself.”
She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me. “When Henry and I made our ‘agreement,’ as you call it, he told me I could have an affair with anyone I cared to, with one caveat: that I didn’t fall in love. I was surprised, because he believes himself incapable of it. I know that he treasures me, in his way, but if he were to love me in the way I wanted, he would give up too much of his power, which is what he seeks most of all. And if I loved someone else, he would lose all of it. As him loving someone else would threaten mine.”
“You said yourself he’s incapable of love.”
“Believes he’s incapable. Resists with all his armaments: wit, reason, cruelty, sex—whatever will defeat it,” she said. “But only because it terrifies him.”
“You think I terrify him?”
“Being swallowed up by the other, lost, dominated, diminished, that’s what frightens him,” she said, fingering the ruffle at her wrist. “He thinks it the sign of a weak man.”
Sophia came to sit next to me on the sofa, our thighs touching through our dresses. I had seen her voluptuousness in his drawings, in person, but here I felt it, the heat of her.
“We’ve been together nearly every day. In the most intense, elevated conversation,” I said.
“That is his game, to keep you in his thrall.” She tipped her long neck back to drink the last of her champagne, then rolled the stem in her fingers. “Henry Fuseli is a conqueror, Miss Wollstonecraft. And he has conquered you.” She set the flute down and turned her face to mine. “The painting is done. He’ll move on now to the next shiny object of his desire.”
“Then why did you send me the painting?”
“Because when I saw it, finished, I knew you were no longer merely an object—someone to be conquered—you were the subject. He has uncovered a deep, dark well of desire in you, and glimpsed your raw power, which is the one thing he respects above all else. And because he is a weak man, I could not take the chance … that he might be capable of love. I had to remove it from our life. First, the painting. And now you.”
I could feel my chest heave, breath shortening. “Please, Sophia. I’m begging you.”
“You are banished from our home. From our life.”
I stood abruptly. “You can’t do this to me. Fuseli won’t let you.”
“You have the painting to remember him by. I think that was generous of me. But my husband has agreed. He will never see you again.”
* * *
Johnson found me in a heap on his doorstep. He sat beside me, offered his kerchief, and let me weep. He seemed to know all, before I said a word.
“You can’t possess a river,” he said. “It always flows away.”
I wiped my eyes. “You won’t believe what I’ve done,” I said. “In a fit of pique I ran all the way home, and cut the painting off at the neck, and threw away her body—my body. All I have left is my head!”
“Well, at least you’re left that!” he said, trying hard not to laugh at the absurdity. We both were.
I put my face in my hand, humiliated. “Your friend Godwin was right about him. I should have listened.”
“Godwin is right about a good many things, but he doesn’t know what’s right for you.”
“It’s some defect in me, Joseph, some compound of weakness and resolution—my wayward heart invents its own misery.” I pounded my curled fist on my knee. “Why am I made like this? I feel desperate to understand the whole of my existence, some greater purpose or meaning, but here I am wailing like a child who longs for a toy she cannot have.”
“You might grow tired of it as soon as you got it.”
“I think the toy grew tired of me.”
He took my fist gently and uncurled it, slid his slender fingers through mine, and pressed our palms together. “So you’re in a jumble now. You’ve lost your mind, along with your heart. It happens.”
“But never to you?”
“I guard myself too closely. I am a voyeur, Mary, sense desperate for sensibility, which I can only get from keen souls—the rare geniuses—who feel it, and live it, as you and Henry do.”
I had never heard him call Fuseli by his given name, nor utter any name with such tenderness. This, too, Godwin had understood. Johnson held our joined hands to his chest. “Love was never to be mine,” he said. “But I wish to be close to it, in all its strange and wondrous variegations, as often as I can.”
There was a soft silence between us.
“I know I can be petulant and stubborn, Joseph, but I don’t know where I’d be without you,” I said. “I never had a father or a brother. Not really. You are both to me. I love you, as my dearest friend alive.” I wiped my dripping nose. “But I really don’t know what I shall do now.”
“Mary, you’re the bravest person I know.” He clutched my hand even harder. “And yes, they run the guillotine now, day and night. No one knows who will be next. But Paris is waiting for you.”
I closed my eyes, trying to image forth my future. It was a blank to me, but not blackness, little bird, not despair.
I squeezed his hand back, and lifted my gaze to his. “Neck or nothing, Joseph. I will.”
Mrs. B
September 7, 1797
Every gleam of hope was seized upon by all. Mary began the day asking after her “little bird.” Marguerite had gladly consented to visit her each morning at the wet nurse’s home nearby. Mary told Fanny to be sure to talk to her, and wiggle her feet, the way she’d done with her own brother Charles, and that one day her little sister would surprise her with a belly laugh, and she would never forget it. Dr. Fordyce was often in attendance, watching for signs in the patient, and between bouts of fever or rigors that seemed to settle into a pattern, allowed Mary visitors—a steady stream of them that didn’t stop all day. A few friends sat with Mr. Godwin in the parlor, pulling in chairs from other rooms, and simply refused to leave until they saw her.
Mrs. B helped Mary into presentable bedclothes, brushed her hair and pinned it up loosely, sat her against some pillows, spruced up the posy of love-in-idleness she’d brought up from the garden, and opened the windows to bring more outside in. She stayed in the room, or the adjoining study, never far, to be attentive to when Mary needed rest. On this she claimed
more authority than Fordyce, who granted it to her. As for visitors, Mrs. B had more experience than anyone with scenes like these, but she’d never seen a mind so tranquil under an affliction so great. Mary was all kindness and attention, dwelling with anxious fondness on her friends, asking more questions than she answered, but with a wisdom about her condition.
The midwife understood that there’s a course to most illnesses, and as many variations as there are people. With childbed fever there might be nausea, vomiting, swelling, soreness in the belly, pains in the head, back, breasts, hips. The tongue, at first moist and white, might become covered in white fur. If it progressed, there would be other things, worse things, but Mrs. B didn’t fill her head with them—it was only inviting trouble. The patient listened steadily to her friends’ advice—orange rinds and Peruvian bark for the bleeding, and a strengthening diet overall: blancmange, flummery, calf’s-foot jellies, and hartshorn, as if there was no doubt of her getting well. Mrs. B plied her with sips of tea and broth, a few bites of gruel, but Mary had no appetite, much as she wished to have one. The midwife made sure to give her fresh linen cloths dipped in cold vinegar and applied to the bleeding three or four times a day, which seemed to help.
Mary seemed most glad of seeing her old friend Joseph Johnson, who pulled his chair close to her, set a thin book on her table, then put his elbows right on the edge of the bed and leaned in so far that Mrs. B thought he might lay his head on the pillow with her. She was accustomed to intimate moments, and didn’t mind. The house was used to her now, there was no attempt at privacy. People like her, the midwives and helpers, often grew invisible in the room when big things were afoot. There was no blame in it, just so much activity, it was natural to let lesser things blend in.
She could tell Johnson held a special place for Mary.
“Translations in four languages. I’ve brought you the German,” he said. “Your little book has caused quite a stir. Even Fuseli’s read it!”
“Fuseli,” she said. “I thought he wouldn’t even speak my name.”
Love and Fury Page 19
