One day I climbed to the vestiges of a fort battered by the Swedes long ago. The only human about, I reclined on the mossy down, lulled to sleep by the prattling sea. A balmy gale woke me; I turned my head to follow white sails as they turned the cliffs. Fishermen cast their nets, seagulls hovered over the deep. Everything harmonized into tranquility, even the bitterns called in cadence with the cows’ tinkling bells. It was the finest summer I’d ever known, with magic everywhere.
I began to write again, with a freedom I’d never felt. It was the book I’d told Johnson I wanted to write, though not the one I imagined. It seemed at first like a nosegay of unconnected remarks, observations, and musings—my own travelogue—lightly bound by letters to an unnamed lover. But as I abstracted Imlay, the outlines of my own self became sharper. How often had I written under a man’s name, or as high-minded philosopher who spoke of things that “one” believed. This was different on the page, surging up from uncharted depths. The “I” who wrote was not a passive woman in pain, but the thinking, feeling hero of each little tale.
While Nature was recalibrating my senses to the sublime, I found I was finely tuned to my emotions—the whole awful wonderful gamut of them—and that they in turn interacted with place, culture, history. The Norwegians seemed the most naturally free people I’d seen, no feudalism, no firstborn sons inheriting everything, instead, farmers tilling their own small plots of land, a free press, religious tolerance. Perhaps knowledge hadn’t yet enlarged the grand virtues—extended their humanity to the whole human race—but among the peasants I saw such simplicity, so much overflowing of heart and fellow feeling. I could see that all their exertions were for the good of their families. It was hard not to be touched by it, hard not to feel my embitterment diminishing, and my own battered ideals revived. If only power-seeking, money-grubbing men tended to the hearth at home, the world would be a gentler place for all.
I wanted to live again, write again. I recovered myself in the purity of the air, the trailing summer light, the ink on the page. I could feel the taut sinews of my thighs, my ribs braced, lungs like bellows. It was as if I’d faded away before the withering touch of disappointment, but in the mirabilia of this place become visible again, my mind and body reanimated. My desire for Imlay, for the peace we once shared, had made me forget the respect due my own emotions—sacred emotions that are harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy. Nothing could extinguish that heavenly spark.
I missed little Fanny, but I was happy alone for those three weeks. I could no longer even bear to think of being no more—it seemed impossible that I should cease to exist, this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow. In moments I thought of that ship hove down in Strömstad. Were her leaking holes resealed by now, sails mended, hull scrubbed clean and laid with copper? Surely she was ready to be righted, as I was, and take to the open sea.
What a long time it takes to know ourselves, little bird, and yet all of us know more than we’re willing to own, even to ourselves. But I rejoiced at having turned, in that strange solitude, a new page in the history of my own heart.
Don’t think that my entreaties to Imlay stopped. They didn’t. His letters to me, scant, were sometimes gloomy, other times buoyant. Some filled me with dread that his fickle attentions had already moved elsewhere—he hinted at it—which sickened my heart anew. Yet he spurred me in my quest, our shared purpose, and threw me a crumb now and then. Yes, he would meet us in Hamburg when it was all done, and we would go to Switzerland. He still believed in our future life. But another aspect took shape in my letters back to him, a feeling less of desperation than hope that as I was restored to myself, he would see what he was losing if he lost me. The sublime was on offer to him too.
* * *
“I don’t think the case will proceed,” Judge Wulfsberg told me when I met him in his office to hear his determination.
“But Ellefsen was arrested,” I said.
“And released on a bail of ten thousand riksdaler, thanks to his wealthy mother,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “I’m afraid there’s not enough evidence to convict him. And given the family’s position, not much likelihood of it.”
“But what about the silver he took, and his plan to sink the ship?”
“I believe that was the plan, but I’m not sure it was Ellefsen’s.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
The judge scratched under his wig and sighed. “The thing that continues to nag at me, Mrs. Imlay, is Ellefsen’s claim that it was you who gave him his final instructions.”
“I did.”
“Why wouldn’t Mr. Imlay do it himself? Something so important.”
“Imlay trusted me to do it.”
“I can see that. But I wonder whether there was another plan, from the start, and Ellefsen was told to disregard yours.”
I felt my stomach churn.
“Think of it,” the judge said. “Most of the silver’s removed before Arendal, perhaps before it even sets sail, Ellefsen takes his agreed-upon share, but the plan to sink the ship goes awry, so now there’s a battered ship to contend with, cost of repair far exceeding what the ship is worth, and the silver unaccounted for. But if such a plan had gone right, one might recover the costs of the ship and the silver from insurance, and never have to produce either.”
My heart was pounding. “Imlay wouldn’t do that.”
“Perhaps not.” The good judge took off his spectacles, eyes full of sincere feeling. “But you might consider, if his only chance to recover anything from this debacle is an out-of-court settlement from the Ellefsens—the only characters in this drama with the means to pay—it is a stroke of genius to send Mary Wollstonecraft to lend her eloquence and reputation to the cause.”
Hearing him call me by my own name startled me. Not because it felt false, but because it felt true, and the central contradiction of the life I was living. Not wanting to be anyone’s legal wife or property, insisting on my independence, living by my principles, yet wanting the rights of a “Mrs. Imlay” to the point of desperation—the right to his strong hands, his first smile of the morning, last kiss. The right to need him, and be needed in return. But the thought that I had offered up my name, surrendered my own cause to nefarious dealings, rocked me.
“You’re wrong, Judge,” I said, my throat clutching. “It simply cannot be.”
“Certainly Imlay has more supporters than detractors. Quite an intriguing man, I take it. A sort of Daniel Boone type?”
“Did Ellefsen tell you that?”
“Perhaps you ought to go see Ellefsen for yourself.”
“I’d planned to. And I will.”
He took my hand warmly when I stood to go. “I hope I am wrong, Miss Wollstonecraft.”
* * *
Sailing through the islands that led to Risør, where Ellefsen lived, I saw two hundred houses packed together under a high rock just beyond a horseshoe bay, with only planks to walk between them. It looked like a place “bastilled” by nature, shut out from all that opens the understanding and expands the heart. I found there a hotbed of secrets and shady business among its inhabitants that almost frightened me, a sordid love of money. Men smoked pipes and made deals. Their breath, hair, clothes, and couches reeked of it. If this was the place that birthed Ellefsen and his family, I held out little hope for a resolution, and an answer to the mystery of the silver ship.
“I wish none of this had ever happened,” he said, when he sat across from me in the drawing room of the inn where I was staying. Peder Ellefsen wasn’t threatening at all, but diminutive and humble, the way I remembered him, same dimpled smile and soft voice. He looked uncomfortable dressed as a gentleman instead of a sea captain, with the same tossed mop of hair. His whole look begged my sympathy, but I didn’t intend to soften.
“We aren’t here about wishes, are we, Mr. Ellefsen?”
“I know what you think I did, Mrs. Imlay,” he said, almost rushing to get it out. “But you’ve got no proof.
”
“I know that now. We seek restitution, that’s all. If your mother was willing to bail you out for half what the silver was worth, why not settle with us?”
“My mother will refuse, as a matter of principle. She’s a very strong woman.”
“I’m a strong woman too. I believe in what’s right, and fair.”
He clapped his hand on his knee, surprising us both. “What’s right and fair about it?” he said. “The plan failed, but I’m the one left holding the bag.”
My jaw clenched. “Was there another plan?” I asked. “Different from the instructions I gave you?”
He looked out the window toward the bay, kneading his cap in his hand. I could feel his wanting the whole business done with.
“No one believes me anyway,” he said.
“Then why did you agree to meet with me?”
He locked his blue eyes on mine. “I thought you might … understand.”
“What is it you’d have me understand, Ellefsen?”
He ran his fingers through his hair. It seemed he was thinking how best to say it. Both of us steering around rocks lurking beneath the surface.
“I liked Imlay right off. His big view of things, grand schemes. No limits, not like here. Every man making his own way in the world. I believed in him.” A reluctant smile formed on his lips. “It impressed me that he knew Daniel Boone.”
I could feel my shoulder blades pinch together, and remembered Judge Wulfsberg’s words. “I think Imlay only met Boone once,” I said. “He never told me otherwise.”
“Why would he? That he swindled an American legend out of thousands of acres of land in Kentucky, and had to flee the country to escape the debts, writs, suits, and claims against him? That’s why he went to France in the first place.”
I could barely speak. “I’m quite sure Imlay didn’t tell you that.”
“Wasn’t Imlay. I only found out after. I was bragging to my first mate, he’s an American too, about Imlay knowing Daniel Boone. It was him told me.”
“He had firsthand knowledge?”
Ellefsen shrugged. “Said that was the story going around.”
“People make up stories all the time.”
“When he said it, something inside me, I don’t know, it seemed true,” said Ellefsen. “Maybe I imagined Imlay as something he wasn’t. Something better than he is. Maybe I overlooked some things because of it. Me wanting him to be what I wanted him to be.”
* * *
Oh, little bird! Ellefsen’s words slapped my face like a bracing cold. Some veil was torn away and I saw that I was the same as he was, wanting Imlay to be what I wanted him to be. But I knew that my want preceded even Imlay, when revolution was in the air we breathed. We all wished to push it as far as we could, pledged not to miss its shimmering possibilities. Our utopian ideals were tested by the truth—blood in the streets, lost friends, exile, treachery, the sadness—but I didn’t dare give up on them now that I felt myself and the world conjoined. In the midst of all that, I met Imlay, wide open, free, and loving. He was a believer too. All my lost optimism I invested in him, in the dream of our “partnership of equals” in the pristine wilderness of a brave new country. New world, new life, new love, new me.
Imlay invested in other things.
Now I wonder how I could have thought he would change, when my own father had not. Even when I demanded that he stop violating my mother, laid my body across the threshold of their bedroom door, he had simply stepped over me. Why wasn’t that proof enough? The good men I’d known—John Arden, Richard Price, Joseph Johnson—couldn’t help but be who they were. I denied Imlay’s nature because I disliked it. But he was true to himself. It was I, little bird, who hadn’t been.
Love was a want of my heart, and what I deserved. What every human being deserves. Then, I asked myself, what was the defect in me that I could not accept that the Imlay I believed in was as slippery as the silver ship, and never to arrive?
Mrs. B
September 9, 1797
Mrs. B slept on the settee that night, fitful, wakeful. She felt herself overflowing more than usual, a roll of her fleshy belly, a swollen foot dangling off the edge. She was used to waking up in strange places, beds, chairs, now and then floors. She wasn’t home, that was always the first thought in her head, but now a second thought wedged itself in: She had no home, not anymore. Not like it was. At least she’d spent enough nights in the Godwin house to know its sounds and smells, its rhythms and rounds. Judging by most things, she’d slept till late morning. But she didn’t expect laughter.
Mrs. B rubbed her face and set aside the book, which she’d fallen asleep reading. The laughter was wafting in from the bedroom, she realized, right through the open door. It was Mary’s laugh, and a man’s laugh, one she didn’t recognize. She gathered up her loose corset and tiptoed toward the sound, near enough to see them—Mary and Godwin sitting against the pillows, side by side atop the covers, him with all his clothes on, save shoes, and her in her chemise and blue shawl, trading a near-empty wine bottle between them, another dead one on the bedside table, a corkscrew, and two unsullied glass goblets. It was Mr. Godwin’s laughter; she’d never heard it before.
“Pot-shotten, jug-bitten, drink-drowned, high-flown!” he was saying. “Wait, and drunk as a wheelbarrow. That’s a good one!”
“But why would a wheelbarrow be drunk?” said Mary.
“Why would a lion? Or a fox? Fox-drunk, lion-drunk? Never made any sense to me.”
In between they chortled, and took turns tipping the bottle back.
It was more exertion than she’d seen from Mary in the last day, and she had to give Fordyce credit for it. Many things might mark the nearness of the end—a wild countenance, delirium, sighs, low spirits, lassitude, weakness. The face might flush or pale; weak pulse, hard pulse. Usually, there’d be rattling lungs, that slow, awful death by drowning. The lucky ones were fey, she’d seen it before, with unnaturally high spirits, but this was another thing altogether.
Mary pointed to a hole in Godwin’s sock, his big toe sticking out. “You’ve got a hole in your sock!” She giggled.
“I’ve got no time to darn my socks,” he said, wiggling his toe. “I’m a very busy man.”
“I would darn your socks,” she said.
“Have you darn my socks, the Mary Wollstonecraft?”
“Not Godwin?” she said, her laughter subsiding.
He looked at her, and, though her eyes were sunken, cheeks hollowed, and all the light fading from her face, seemed to see only beauty. “‘Godwin’ is not good enough for you. Better that I should be William Wollstonecraft.”
Mary put her hand on his arm, concentrating all her energy on a smile. “We’re equals then, aren’t we? Just as we promised we’d be.”
“No, Mary.” He placed his hand on hers. “There does not exist your equal in the world.”
They sat like that, shoulder to shoulder, thinking their own thoughts. She rested her head against his, entwined their fingers.
Mr. Godwin sighed and turned his face to the ceiling. “If only I’d met you in Hoxton, and stolen you away somehow, we’d have twenty-two years together by now. I can hardly forgive myself for missing you.”
She put her chin lightly on his shoulder. “Oh, we wouldn’t have liked each other at all then,” she said playfully, but there was pain beneath it. “We have to believe that every step we’ve taken, even the ones when we were lost, led us to each other, right here, right now.”
Godwin traced the carnelian round of her ring. “And I guess you wouldn’t have met your Fanny Blood.”
Mary closed her eyes and nodded. “I could almost believe in Heaven if I thought Fanny’d be there to greet me.”
He squeezed her hand. “I know you loved her best.”
She looked into his eyes. “But love doesn’t always accord with happiness, much as we want it to,” she said, holding tightly to him. “I have both with you.”
Mrs. B had to look away. She le
ft the door as it was, so as not to disturb them, but sat on the settee in stockinged feet, let her corset go.
“I know, with all my being,” she heard Godwin say, “that we were formed—whoever or whatever formed us—to make each other happy.”
“You are the kindest, best man in the world,” she said. “You’ll be happy again. You will.”
“I have not the least expectation I will ever know happiness again.”
“Please, for the girls. For our little bird. They must believe in it.”
“What would you have them believe?”
There was a long pause. She thought of the way Mary looked up and to the right when she was thinking, the line of her jaw, the fullness of her cheeks. Mrs. B saw her in her mind’s eye, restored.
“In love, that melts into friendship,” she said, “and friendship that melts into love.”
After that, there fell a quiet that only a kiss can bring. Mrs. B rested her elbows on her knees, hung her head, and wept.
* * *
After Fordyce came in the early afternoon, mostly to declare the wine diet a success, Mary slept for a good few hours. There was nothing, anymore, to do. Visitors still sat in the parlor downstairs, wringing their hands, keeping Godwin company, hoping for one last word with Mary, but she’d said all the good-byes she had in her. How different it was, Mrs. B thought, waiting on death instead of birth. And still, perhaps the same. Both were a coming and going, a hello, a farewell. She hoped wherever it was Mary was going, it would be like another womb: no want, no thought, no pain, only sustenance, Heaven, and God’s love.
Reading, she fell asleep herself, hard and dreaming, and when her eyes opened, the first thing she saw in the shaft of gold light pouring in through the window was a spider finishing her web, knitting its gossamer filaments into a perfect whole. She heard Mary stir in the next room, a light moan, complaining of thirst.
“How strange to be as happy as I’ve ever been, and now to leave,” she said, after Mrs. B dripped water into her mouth from a soaked cloth, then dabbed her parched lips with it.
Love and Fury Page 25
