But I might as well have been talking about myself. Imlay was right about me—I’d been on the move since before memory began. Onward, outward. From Spitalfields to Barking, to Yorkshire, back to London, each time holding out a singular hope that I could reinvent myself, as my wayward father had, half believing that the next place would be different. But Bath, Lisbon, County Cork, Paris, Le Havre—they were all mine. No matter what setbacks, I did push forward, went somewhere else, tried again. Imlay was right, too, that I didn’t want to be in London, his being there aside. If not for our endless separations, I would never have returned to a place that had lost all charm for me, for which I now felt a repugnance that amounted almost to horror. I had no doubt most of London would turn against me if they knew I had a child out of wedlock. My own country no longer made sense to me. Moving did, as it always had. Locomotion was the only thing that had ever given me new life.
On a morning in mid-June the captain sent word that we were to be on board in a few hours. My spirits were agitated. All week in Hull I’d woken in fits of trembling. Now that departure was imminent, I knew I’d been wishing that Imlay would save me from it. But he never came. When we set out, on a vessel hardly designed for passengers, the winds changed again, leaving us afloat at anchor for another week in a misty fog that might as well have been purgatory. Marguerite was seasick from the first moment on board, and needed my constant care. A fidgety Fanny, gay as a lark, wanted to run about on her newfound legs, fall, get up again, and play. Imagine my guilt at stealing a glance out to the cold, gray sea, flashing on my secret wish that it might become our tomb.
You needn’t know all the details, little bird, of the lost treasure ship that was the aim of my journey; Imlay knew most of them already. I went because I needed to believe that if I succeeded in some way, at least secured restitution for our loss, Imlay would see that I was indispensable to him, that he couldn’t be parted from me. I could turn him around and back to us. But I see now that the mystery of the ship was not my true purpose, nor even whether Imlay and I would be together. Rather, I sought the answer to the deepest mystery of my own life in that moment—whether I should live or die.
* * *
The captain agreed to put us on shore at Gothenburg, where Elias Backman awaited me, but rough conditions forbade it. I caught sight of a lighthouse not far away and asked to go there. The captain, surprised by my determination, put out a signal for a boat to emancipate us (after eleven wearying days at sea), but for two hours no one came. Finally I used all my rhetoric to persuade the good-natured captain to let me have the ship’s boat, which argued against all his instincts and, he hastened to tell me, broke general rules. “But I see you like to break rules,” he said when he relented, and three sailors hoisted the boat in minutes, promising to row us to the lighthouse where we might recruit a pilot for Gothenburg.
“I don’t see a single soul,” said Marguerite as we neared the little island. Her fear always acted as a feeler before her adventuring spirit, but I didn’t listen until we landed, alarmed to find only two hermits who emerged out of their wretched hut. We made out that they had no boat, but some miles over there was a dwelling—they pointed past an outcropping of giant rocks—and we could try there. Our sailors didn’t want to risk their captain’s wrath, but for two guineas took the chance.
For two hours they rowed. I should have enjoyed the fine weather and good till, but fatigue showed on their young faces. We saw no dwelling of any sort, and they kept glancing at their own ship in the distance, making jokes with each other I couldn’t understand. Only one of them spoke any English.
“Why do you keep looking at your ship?” asked shy Marguerite.
“That good breeze?” said the sailor. “Maybe the captain sail without us.” The other sailors laughed, but only to cover their anxiety.
Marguerite looked concerned for them, for us, but she held Fanny tight and sang to her, which for a while calmed us all. Sunbeams played on the ocean, ruffled by the lightest breeze, but the wild, majestic coastline was littered with dark rocks jutting over the sea like the brute materials of Creation. I was more like the sailors, putting up a good front, but even I felt uneasy when the shore seemed to recede the harder they rowed, the tide pushing against us, wanting to carry us farther away. There seemed no end to it, no arrival possible. With dusk soon to be closing in.
When at last we turned into the most picturesque little bay, we saw a small boat coming toward us, rowed by a lone man with a scruffy beard. Marguerite, who’d come to trust our rowers, looked alarmed when I said I’d soon release them back to their ship, but when the man introduced himself, with good English, as the lieutenant who commanded all the pilots on that coast, she climbed gladly on board. Soon a cottage came into view, overlooking the whole bay, and his plump wife appeared at the door, waving us a welcome.
The house was clean, with a sort of rural elegance, its simple muslin beds, curtains, table linens all dazzling white, the floor strewn with juniper sprigs. Fish, milk, butter, cheese, dense dark bread, and brandy were instantly spread on the board. The lieutenant and his wife doted on Fanny, who ate ravenously, tasting things she’d never had, and ending with rose-hip jelly smeared on both her cheeks.
I needn’t have worried about darkness closing in, as night never moved beyond a bluish-purple twilight that gave everything an ethereal glow. I was eager to see whether our honest tars had regained their ship, so the lieutenant gave me his telescope. I climbed some rocks and spotted the vessel underway with a fair gale on a calm sea, watching until it dwindled to a mere dot and disappeared from view. I was glad for them, followed by a sudden panic. They were the last link to our old life, now gone. We were entirely cut off, alone in a new world. There was no turning back now.
Feeling a fit of trembling coming on, I sat on the ground and pulled my knees to my chest, resting my cheek there, bone to bone, the way I had when I was young, and closed my eyes to still my breath. When I opened them, the most remarkable thing happened, little bird. I saw, in the azure eve, brilliant patches of earth popping all around me, the most exquisite verdure. And then a clutch of wild pansy caught my eye, peeking over a dark stone. I took one of its perfect blossoms in my fingers—love-in-idleness—sprays of sunny yellow radiating from its center and deep violet petals, velvet against my cheek.
I felt a sudden peacefulness wash over me. I knew it was Fanny Blood, not inside me but all around, in the glow, the never-night, holding out a lamp for me, a talisman against the darkness. I’d been without her for so long now—she’d soon be ten years dead—but here she was, Fanny, who had taught me to believe in the possibility of spontaneous pleasure and argued always that we were right to expect happiness. She was whispering a way forward, as she always did, one footfall at a time.
I didn’t want to go to bed, my senses awake and imagination busy. And nothing could equal the beauty of that northern summer night. All Nature seemed at rest, even the rocks, in deep repose. I kissed little Fanny’s cheek as she slept, my emotions vibrating on the brink between ecstasy and agony that gave a poignancy to all my sensations. I felt alive again.
Writing at midnight without a candle, I penned a letter to Johnson telling him I thought I would turn my travels into a book of some sort, and hoped that he would publish it. Then I tucked the violet blossom in a letter to Imlay, feeling strangely hopeful.
And so began our midsummer journey in the great wild North. By horseback, carriage rides, boat trips, ferry passages, long walks, ocean swims, and flights of fancy did I travel, and by travel I mean think, and by think I mean try to relocate myself in the world, and the world in me. Only a few weeks before, I’d wanted to die, aiming at tranquility, but instead almost destroyed the energy of my soul—almost pulled out by the roots what makes it mine. I had come here, I knew, to find it again.
I confess that I wrote often to Imlay, usually at night when I was most fragile, to report the progress of my journey, but instead poured out my fears. I pleaded with him not to taun
t me with promises he couldn’t keep, implored him to decide once and for all whether we would live as one or part forever.
But between those lines I lived another life.
In Gothenburg—a clean, airy, wealthy town with canals running through the streets and endless rows of trees—Elias Backman welcomed us into his lively home, with a French wife and four little sons. Marguerite was back to her convivial self, surrounded by familiar things. Each night before supper we’d repair to a side table to eat bread and butter, cheese, cured salmon or pickled herring, and a glass of brandy, always in the same order, same dishes, same Skål to our good health, as the Old Norse had done. I smiled and did my part, and at supper quizzed Backman about everything—the ship, the lawsuit, the Ellefsen family—but learned nothing new. He told me bluntly that I was a woman of observation because I asked men’s questions.
What I remember best is falling in love anew with my little girl. What an interesting creature she was, noticing everything, tirelessly curious. (How I envied her the magic of existence, seeing things for the first time.) Even when I fell into darkness, her smiles twined round my heart and stopped my self-pity. Seeing her frolic with the Backman children—how free she was, naturally kind, generous with hugs, happy to be tickled and tossed about, same as the boys—reinvigorated my belief that all children are the same if only they be treated so. But worry over her future slipped in, the oppressed state of her sex. Would she be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart? I was determined to cultivate her finer feelings, but in lending blushes to the rose would I sharpen the thorns that would wound her—by unfolding her mind make her unfit for the world she’d have to live in?
I wondered if that was what I’d done to myself. It all swirled inside me, the rosy tint of morning, the flush on Fanny’s cheeks as she played, the remembrance of color rushing to my lover’s skin, and mine. My eyes glossed with tears. Why must all roads lead to Imlay?
When I told Backman I wanted to go to Strömstad to see the damaged ship for myself, he offered to accompany me but said that I should then go on by myself to Tønsberg to meet the judge in our case, and it would be best to leave Fanny behind. I hadn’t been away from her since her birth. The thought of it nearly gutted me. But worse, how could I ever have thought of parting from her forever? When I’d wanted to die, the cleaving felt necessary to save her. An unhappy mother was a cruelty she didn’t deserve. Now that I began to want to live again, I couldn’t bear being torn away.
“Please don’t leave us,” said Marguerite, the night before we left.
“But you’re content here. You can speak French all you like. And Fanny, she has so much to distract her. I don’t think she’ll even miss me.”
Marguerite pinched the muslin elbows of her nightdress.
“I’m not worried about Fanny,” she said. “It’s you.”
“But I’ve often traveled alone.”
“That you’ll leave us here and never come back.”
“Of course I’ll come back.”
She hugged herself closer and pursed her quivering lips. Marguerite’s face always gave her away. I put my hand on her cheek and tilted her head to meet mine.
“I won’t hurt myself, Marguerite. I promise you. I’ll come back.”
She nodded, but the worry on her face remained.
“Ça va aller,” I said to her. “Tout ira bien.”
* * *
To see the careening of a three-masted sailing ship—a heaving down at high tide—as Backman and I did at Strömstad, is to watch mere men and their ropes topple a wounded giant against her will and nature. How strange it was to see the dignified Maria and Margarethe felled and lying on one side, sails torn, masts snapped in two, her hull exposed with its rotting craters and holes—barnacles, shipworms, and seaweed clinging to it, feeding away. I felt a keen sympathy for her plight. It was so like my own.
“Is she beyond repair?” I asked Backman.
“No, but she’ll be here a good two months, I guess. And cost a good deal.”
“Will Imlay have to pay?”
“I’m supposing that’s why you’re here.”
“But the silver’s disappeared. It seems unlikely we’ll recover it.”
“Then it’s on you to persuade someone to pay for what was lost, isn’t it?”
“Wouldn’t the judge do that, if he finds for us?”
“It’s a complicated business,” said Backman. “I’m supposing Imlay would rather rely on the pressure you might bring to bear, to settle with someone. No one wants the stain of a matter like this.”
“Well, why not Ellefsen?” I said. “His family’s got money enough.”
“If he’s the one who lost it,” he said with a shrug.
Seeing the ship hove down like that was as if I’d seen a vision of our future (or my own) having been dashed on the rocks and adrift at sea, now run aground. It made me redouble my commitment to her restoration, if not Imlay’s and mine. But when we settled at our inn, I was disappointed to find no letter from him. My being there was a chance, but a year before he would have taken it. Each time the post arrived and there was nothing from him was a fresh abandonment. Where was the man who’d been alive to our shared feelings, to imagination, our deepest principles—alive to touch, to kisses, beating hearts, and bodies in flight? If only he were here with me, this romantic country, these fine summer evenings, wouldn’t it turn his heart away from the coarseness that hardened it? I felt his absence as wrenching physical pain, and wondered what my existence was without him, without my daughter, without anyone.
My letters were alternately plaintive, pleading, or proud. I was the abandoned woman, an exile pleading for return. I wanted to awaken his feeling, if not his guilt at having treated me unjustly. I berated him and enumerated his faults. But each time I posted a letter, I berated myself. How far had I fallen from the “Wollstonecraft” who’d argued against the victimization of women, the sort glorified in the novels I hated, capable of nothing but raw emotion—objects of male desire but never the subject of their own lives. All sensibility, no sense. Had I become the very woman I’d railed against?
Then something else began to stir inside me. On the morning I was to leave for Norway alone, a dish of coffee and crisp linen revived my spirits. Backman warned me that the roads were notoriously rocky and slow, so I determined to go by sea. The coast was known to be dangerous too, with rocks lurking just below the surface of the water, but it seemed the better means. The air was pure and balmy, producing the most voluptuous sensations. I wrapped my greatcoat around me and lay down on some sails at the bottom of the small boat I’d hired, its motion rocking me as we went. I crossed my arms under my head to watch the gray morning bloom with purple clouds, then gold, then pass to silvery white. How often had I felt myself a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind, all alone, and then something sublime and beautiful dilated my emotions to make me feel that I was still part of a mighty whole.
The clouds came into my vision, drifted across and away. But I didn’t want to keep them. Why would I?
I was the sky.
* * *
At Tønsberg, Norway’s oldest settlement, I met first thing with the thoughtful, good-natured Judge Wulfsberg, who had charge of our case. He said a fair inquiry would require him to interview everyone involved and that I should expect to stay three weeks at least, or I might as well not have come. When he saw the look on my face, I told him about Fanny, and lamented that I hadn’t brought my daughter with me. What I left out is that I no longer knew who I was without her. She had come to seem, even more than Imlay, my true anchor in the world.
The judge had found me a charming room in a quiet inn with a commanding view of the sea, ringed by an amphitheater of woods. It was almost evening, and I wanted to feel it on my skin. Standing under a towering grove of aspen and beeches, I turned my face to feel the whispering softness of those western gales. They almost died away that time of night, the leaves trembling into
stillness. A light shower had fallen; the juniper, the underwood of the forest, exhaled a lush perfume that enveloped me. Even the moon seemed to say hello.
No one at the inn could speak English or French, which was a good pretext to dine alone—and they let me at a late hour, which became my habit. Sitting by myself in the little dining room, with its tall white-trimmed windows, I was surprised to find that I relished my aloneness. Each singing scrape of knife and fork, delicate clink of glass was mine, every taste and thought my own.
With three weeks to fill and so much time by myself, I began to occupy the space it afforded, as it occupied me. I took long, blissful walks in pine and fir groves, struck with a mystic reverence, a sense that they were conscious of their own existence and the pleasure they gave. Fanny Blood walked beside me; I could hear her voice warbling over the heath. I found a swimming rivulet just out of town, but soon wanted to bathe in the sea. A young woman, with ice-blue eyes, proposed rowing me across the water among the rocks to a place she knew, but since she was pregnant, I took the oars and learned to row, soon becoming expert, even going by myself, my thoughts keeping time with the oars.
Nature was my first and, most days, my only companion. Its beauties seemed even more alluring than when I was young and sought refuge in it. Living for so long in cities, I’d come to think that mixing with the human race, in all its varieties, forced us to examine and lose our prejudices—that it was a culture of science, history, philosophy, and art that led to judgment and taste. But I remembered now that it was the countryside that gave birth to my imagination, to sentiments that were the true source of taste, and inquiries that expanded my soul. The horrors I’d witnessed in France had cast a gloom over everything, but they began to dissipate, and in their stead came the healing embrace of the natural world.
Love and Fury Page 24
