So although Nan was itching to ask her who the father was and whether she had changed her opinion of marriage, she had to postpone her questions, for Mary wanted to know exactly how she’d managed to succeed. ‘You see how it is,’ she said triumphantly when Nan had answered all her questions. ‘A woman is as good as any man. All she needs is the chance to show her skills and not to be belittled and cast in an inferior mould. Men do us no service by pandering to our whims and assuming us to be witless.’
‘You do not change your opinion?’ Nan asked.
‘Of the rights of women?’ Mary said. ‘Why no indeed. ’Tis plain common sense to treat both sexes in the same way. Nothing will alter that, for in truth there is little to chose between us in matters of wit and intelligence. Nor in strength or fortitude either.’
‘Except that we breed.’
‘Aye,’ Mary said, laughing, ‘so we do!’
And then Mr Blake and his wife appeared at her side to claim her attention, and their first conversation was over. But it was so good to see her again. As she pushed her way back to Sophie through the crush, Nan was warm with the thought that she had rediscovered an old and valuable friend.
Sophie was bubbling with gossip.
‘She is pregnant, my dear. Due in September, so they do say.’
‘I know it Sophie, and I wish her well.’
‘Well, so do I my dear, of course,’ Sophie said seriously. But then her eyes gleamed with mischief again. ‘Do ’ee know who the father is?’
‘I could hazard a guess ’twould be Mr Godwin.’
‘Indeed it is. And they are married! Imagine that!’
That was news.
‘At St Pancras’ church, on March 29th, and uncommon quietly, so Mrs Wotherspoon says,’ Sophie went on. ‘I cannot imagine why she should want to marry such a man. He is feeble in the extreme, and a terrible scrounger, so Heinrich says.’
‘I en’t seen him,’ Nan said, wanting to more than ever. ‘Is he here?’
‘Over by the window, talking to Mr Cowper,’ Sophie said, turning her friend by the shoulder. ‘Look. Middling-size, middling-aged, that’s the man.’
A lifeless creature, Nan thought, gazing across the room at Mr Godwin’s pale face and languid air. He may not be much of an artist but he certainly goes out of his way to look the part, and she noticed the badly tied cravat he was stroking with his long, pale fingers, and how his little round spectacles glinted in the candlelight, and how long and ugly his nose appeared above such a narrow, down-turned, pouting mouth. ‘There en’t a deal of spark in him,’ she said, trenchantly. ‘No match for Mary, in all conscience.’
‘And that ain’t all, my dear,’ Sophie went on. ‘They say she has another child and illegitimate by all accounts. A little girl, fathered by that wretched man, Mr Imlay. I met him once in this very room and an uncommon spoilt brat he was. Far too selfish to stay true to wife and child. What taste she has in men!’
‘Did he desert them?’
‘Aye, indeed he did, and in dire straits if all I’ve heard is true.’
‘What became of the child?’
‘Why as to that, I couldn’t say,’ Sophie admitted.
‘I shall ask her,’ Nan said. Now that she’d met her again, there was a great deal she wanted to ask Mary Wollstonecraft.
The party roared on and became steadily more dishevelled. By ten o’clock most of the guests were looking decidedly the worse for wear. There were far too many skirts and trousers stained with spilt food and far too many faces flushed purple with wine. In fact, so much wine had been consumed that most of the gentlemen were unsteady on their feet and several had sunk onto the few chairs that had been left standing against the walls. ‘Time to go home, I think,’ Nan said to Sophie. ‘I shall make my adieus.’ And she pushed off through the crowd to find her host.
And on her way she found Mary Wollstonecraft again. She and her new husband were sharing a chair, sitting back-to-back extremely uncomfortably, but still talking to the group of guests around them.
‘You must come and visit us,’ Mary said, as Nan kissed her goodbye. ‘We live at number 29 at the Polygon in Somerstown. Say you will.’
‘As soon as ever I may,’ Nan promised.
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Bring your children,’ Mary called as Nan struggled off again towards Mr Johnson. ‘We will have a nursery tea-party.’
So the next afternoon, when her work was over for the day, Nan drove to Somerstown, taking her three children with her, all dressed in their Sunday best and a little apprehensive at being asked to ‘visit’ because it was the first time they’d ever done such a thing.
‘Should we speak, Mama?’ Annie asked, as they climbed out of the pony cart and looked up at the sixteen-sided block of houses that was the Polygon. It was a daunting building, and far too grand for comfort.
‘If you are spoken to,’ Nan said, taking Johnnie firmly by the hand before he could run off and disgrace her. Then they climbed the steps to number 29 and were admitted by an amiable maid in a grey gown and an embroidered apron, who told them ‘Pray to follow me,’ and led them upstairs to the drawing-room on the first floor.
It was a large room but exceedingly dingy and dirty, and crowded with dilapidated furniture. There were a sagging sofa piled with cushions, two footstools heaped with books and papers, three side-tables, two with broken legs, and all of them covered with objects of every kind, crumpled cloths, dog-eared sketch books, jars full of clogged paint-brushes and broken pencils, side-by-side with smeared cups and chipped saucers and a variety of dishes containing the remains of a variety of meals. Mr Godwin was reclining in an easy-chair by the window. He was dressed in a red velvet banyan and a purple smoking-cap, and he had a glass of claret in one hand and a bitten sponge-cake in the other.
‘Upstairs, my dear,’ he said vaguely. ‘She expects you, I daresay. You see how it is with me. I must take my sustenance, my dear, or I shall be fit for nothing. Ain’t breakfasted yet today. What a weariness life is, to be sure. And yet we must take what pleasure in it we may, savouring what is beautiful. I do not flatter myself when I say I am a good judge of what is beautiful. A good judge. Nay, the best. Take this cake for an example. I could not bring myself to eat it, I tell ’ee, if ’twere not made of the very best butter and the freshest of eggs. She is upstairs.’
Annie’s eyes were as round as pennies, but true to her promise she didn’t say a word. The maid ducked a curtsey at her languid master and led them up another flight of stairs to the nursery, which, as Nan was happy to see, was a considerable improvement on the squalor of the drawing-room. It was furnished simply with a deal table and six plain chairs, a truckle-bed with a white linen counterpane and a linen press in one corner, but the furniture was of little importance, for this was a room devoted to toys and children. There was a rocking-horse before the fire, and a circle of dolls on the bed, there was a top and a hoop and a skipping-rope and a Noah’s Ark spilling wooden animals on the carpet; and a travelling trunk in one corner was simply bursting with soft toys of every kind. All three of Nan’s children sucked in their breath in wonder. If this was ‘visiting’ it was going to be fun. But they stood where they were like good children and waited to be introduced.
Mary Wollstonecraft was sitting in one of the chairs with a small, fair child on her lap. Now she set the child on her feet and stood up clumsily to walk forward and greet them.
‘This is Fanny,’ she said, holding the little girl’s hand and looking at Annie. ‘My daughter. She’s three years old, ain’t you, Fanny? And you must be Nan’s daughter. How old are you?’
Annie confessed to eight, but shyly, and Johnnie said he was five and ‘pleased to meet you’, but Billy was too busy staring at the table to say anything.
‘We will take tea now,’ Mary said, smiling at his rapt expression, ‘and then there will be plenty of time to play, will there not?’
The table was set with all manner of tempting dishes,
grapes and oranges, jellies and junkets, sponge cakes and comfits, and more iced cakes than they could count. But there wasn’t any bread and butter, so none of Nan’s children knew how to begin the meal. For you always started with bread and butter. That was the polite thing to do, even if you didn’t want to. Now they sat up at the table while Mary made the tea, and they dithered, looking from the heaped dishes to their empty plates.
‘Help yourself,’ Mary urged them. ‘Come now, don’t be shy. Try a little jelly.’
‘En’t we to eat bread-an’-butter first, ma’am?’ Billy ventured.
Mary laughed at him. ‘Why, bless us, no,’ she said. ‘Why should there be rules for feeding? Tell me that. ’Tis Freedom Hall here. In this house you eat whatever you like whenever you fancy it.’ And so they did. The boys were thrilled.
And when they were all stickily well-fed, they were allowed to play with all the toys, not one at a time, which would have been the rule at home, but all at once and any-old-how and not putting anything away when you’d finished with it. It was uncommon good sport.
Nan was surprised to see that her troublesome Johnnie was being most tender with Mary’s fragile three-year-old, lifting her down from the rocking-horse, and patiently setting the wooden animals in line for her. She’d expected good behaviour from Annie, and she’d known that Billy would be boisterous if he wasn’t corrected, but this new, gentle Johnnie was a revelation.
‘You’ve uncommon handsome children,’ Mary said, when her maid had cleared the table and the two of them were sitting watching the children play. ‘Your little boy is quite striking.’
‘Billy?’
‘Why no, though he’s handsome enough in all conscience. The younger, Johnnie. He favours you.’
It was really quite gratifying to hear such praise.
‘I shall be glad when this child is born,’ Mary said. ’Tis uncommon wearying to carry in the heat, and I’ve all June, July and August to get through.’
‘I will visit as often as I may,’ Nan promised. ‘’Twill help to pass the time.’
Which she did, and found that she was part of a large and lively company, for Mary had many friends and frequent visitors. And what talk there was during those long summer afternoons, of birth and death, of war and revolution, of lovers and husbands. And on all these matters Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her literary friends had fascinating things to say.
Annie and the boys were delighted with the arrangement too, for Freedom Hall was very much to their taste. It meant a whole afternoon away from Mrs Pennington and her schoolroom, and a chance to get out into the open countryside that stretched northwards beyond the Euston Road, where they walked and romped when the weather was fine and Mary Wollstonecraft felt fit enough for a promenade.
‘I can see precious little difference between a lover and a husband,’ she confessed to Nan one particularly warm afternoon, when the two of them were sitting with their backs against a haystack, watching their children at play. ‘Both have it in them to be kind or cruel and a ceremony has no power to alter character.’
‘And yet you married Mr Godwin.’
‘Since he is father of my child,’ Mary explained. ‘A good man, in all conscience. He took my Fanny into his household without demur.’
‘You did not marry Mr Imlay?’
‘No. More’s the pity. Which left him free to travel wherever he would without us, or take another mistress, or leave us when he thought fit. I cannot tell you the pain he caused me.’
‘I am sorry to hear it,’ Nan said with sympathy. And then she remembered Sophie’s advice. ‘Sophie Fuseli is of the opinion that the only way to handle a lover is to dismiss him first, and long before he tires of you.’
‘’Tis an excellent plan, in all conscience,’ Mary agreed, ‘but not one a woman in love could follow. There is too much warmth and urgency in love to allow for such cold-hearted treatment, sensible though it might be. We stay and we hope and we are grievously hurt, but there is no other way, for love binds us together for good or ill.’
‘But there is pleasure in love too, is there not?’
‘The highest,’ Mary said, smiling, ‘providing there is honesty too. That is the base of all good relationships, my dear. Without it there is no trust, no mutual help and comfort, and eventually, though it grieves me to say it, no love.’
‘So you see no harm in an honest lover?’
‘None,’ Mary laughed. ‘Have you one in mind?’
‘No,’ Nan admitted. ‘There are many handsome creatures in the City but none I fancy for more than a day or two, if the truth be told.’
‘And after a day or two you forget them, do you not?’
‘Aye.’
‘Then you do not love,’ Mary said. ‘If you did he would haunt your thoughts by night and day. Your boys are fighting, I fear.’
They would be, Nan thought, striding off to stop them, and just as the conversation was getting really interesting too.
‘We will meet again next Wednesday,’ she promised, when Thiss arrived with the pony cart at the end of that afternoon and her three sticky children were climbing happily aboard. ‘’Tis nearly the end of August, my dear. Your long wait will soon be done.’
‘I will see you Wednesday,’ Mary said, kissing her.
But although they didn’t know it, that afternoon had been the last time they would ever see one another again.
When Nan arrived at the Polygon the following week, Mary was in labour. A very slow labour, according to her maid, but progressing satisfactorily, ‘so the midwife says’. But the next day, when she made another brief visit, the news was very bad. The child had been born, a girl and very pretty, ‘another Mary’, but Mary Wollstonecraft was very ill indeed. The afterbirth hadn’t come away, and although a surgeon had been sent for and had done his best to remove what he could of it, his patient was very weak and in a great deal of pain.
‘Pray give her my love,’ Nan said, ‘and these flowers and tell her I will call again tomorrow and hope for better news.’
She called every afternoon for the next eleven days, and after the third day, Sophie came with her to keep her company, but the news from the sickroom got steadily worse and worse. On Saturday Mary suffered a shivering fit so violent it shook the bed frame, on Monday the doctors applied puppies to her breast to suck off some of her milk in the vain hope of helping her, but by Wednesday she was so weak her life was despaired of and little Fanny was sent away to stay with a friend. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday passed most painfully, but she clung on, fighting for her life, while her husband sat beside her offering her sips of wine to deaden the pain and growing more and more distraught. And finally on Monday morning, when Nan and Sophie arrived in the pony cart for the thirteenth time, anxious for news, the maid came down to tell them that her mistress was dead.
‘At twenty to eight this morning,’ she said, weeping freely, ‘and how the master will make out, I do not know. The poor man is crazed with grief.’
‘She was a fine, good, kind, suffering woman,’ Nan said, pierced with sorrow. ‘We shall never see her like again.’
‘The good die young,’ Sophie said, trying to comfort.
But that provoked more anger. ‘Oh, Sophie! Why should they? ’Ten’t fair! I only just found her again and she was a good friend to me.’
‘We should like to attend the funeral,’ Sophie said to the maid, ignoring Nan’s passion for the moment, and speaking quickly because another carriage had arrived and she was sure it contained more friends of the Godwins anxious for news. ‘Pray tell your master. ’Tis the last thing we may do for her, poor Mary.’
So they went to her funeral and watched as two weeping willows were planted on either side of her grave, and commiserated with Mr Johnson who was wheezing most terribly, and agreed publicly that it was no wonder Mr Godwin was too grieved to attend, and afterwards said privately to one another that he ought to have been ashamed of himself for staying away.
But as Thiss drove her back
to the office in the September dusk, Nan’s sense of loss was almost too acute for misery. To have found a friend and then lost her all within four short summer months was too cruel.
She grieved for more than a fortnight and she was still dispirited three weeks later when she came home from supervising the distribution of the evening papers, to find Mrs Dibkins hovering in the hall with a letter in her hand.
‘That came the minute you left the house, Mrs William-dear,’ the old lady said. ‘Did we ought to have sent it round to the office? Ho lor! We been of two minds ever since it come.’ As Nan could see because the wrapper was smudged with thumbprints.
‘No, no, Mrs Dibkins,’ she said, breaking the seal. ‘Whatever it is, I dare say ’twill wait. Tell Mrs Jorris to serve whenever she is ready.’ And she took the letter into the dining-room to read it by the fire.
It was from Sir Osmond Easter of Ippark in the County of Sussex, no less, and Sir Osmond Easter was aristocratically annoyed.
‘It has been brought to our attention,’ he wrote (‘Our’ Nan thought, scoffing at the word. Royalty, is he?) ‘that you are engaged in common trade in the City of London and its purlieus, and moreover that to this end you have been making improper and illegal use of the family name. I have to inform you, madam, that the practice is to cease forthwith.’ (Oh, is it? We shall see about that!) ‘It is not the custom of this family to permit the use of our name in the pursuance of any trade whatsoever. You will oblige us. Given this day November 15th 1798 by the hand of Osmond Easter.’
She felt better at once, cheered by the most exhilarating fury. ‘What sauce!’ she said to the offending paper. ‘I got something to say to ’ee, Sir Osmond Easter, this very minute, so I have!’
And she stamped across to the writing-desk at once to pen a furious reply.
‘I have been trading under the name of Easter since your relation and mine, Mr William Henry Easter died and left me destitute with three young children to raise. Which your family showed precious little concern over, never having sent so much as a penny to us in all these years.
Tuppenny Times Page 26
