“Well, you’ve picked a good one to advance it. Mary does whatever she sets her mind to.”
Mrs. Burgh took her arm. “I think of her, more than anyone, as a kind of daughter.”
“What kind?” Fanny asked.
“The very best,” said the widow, patting her arm. “Like me. But without the giving in.”
I had to stop on a bench to gather myself. What I would have given for my own mother to see me that way. My world felt complete.
She took me to church with her one Sunday, a Unitarian church “full of Dissenters,” and led me straight to the front pew. I had set foot in many churches, felt the exaltation of high ceilings, but this was new to me. Dr. Richard Price was short, thin, and dour-looking, with thick eyebrows angled like arrows, a stiff black coat, and full-bottomed white wig. I half expected a speech on damnation, hellfire, and brimstone, but when he opened his mouth, his voice was so soft and quiet, I had to lean forward to hear him. To my surprise, he spoke affectingly of individual conscience and reason, the habit of attention, patience of thought, the sagacity of mind that protects us against error. America had just secured a victory over us, and he pointed to it as progress. Freedom from tyranny—this was his subject!
The widow made a point of introducing us after the sermon, and I was gratified he knew who I was.
“Mrs. Burgh has spoken to me of your originality, and a passion for reform, that’s what she said, which naturally endears you to me. We need someone to school our future torchbearers. We won’t be around forever, you know.”
I hadn’t thought of it as a torch to be carried, but over the weeks, through his sermons, our deepening conversations, I came to understand where we two saw the world the same. For Dr. Price, as for me, education was the path to a more perfect future. The great American experiment was his ideal, the best example we had of the potential of an enlightened citizenry who might govern themselves. And if it failed, he said, what a tragedy that would be for humankind.
He knew Benjamin Franklin, the Adamses, both man and wife, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine. I asked him everything about all of them, each conversation they’d had, every letter written. But we had Locke in common, who had given me a new vocabulary to express what had always been my intuitive sense of injustice, my rage. Even before I’d read Locke, I’d felt the feelings, which had given me the strength to fight for myself and others, to challenge my father, save my brother, my sister, start a school. It was personal for me, and the stakes high—our very lives and futures—but Dr. Price gave me a politics that made it whole. My own life was the life of the world; my own struggle, the struggle of all people simply to be free.
Fanny, who took her Sundays to rest, rarely came with me, but she would insist that I sit on the edge of her bed and recite his sermons, our conversations, word for word.
“Your eyes shine when you speak of it. I do believe you’re happy, Mary.”
“Oh, that cannot possibly be,” I said with a wry smile.
“Why shouldn’t it be? You ought to have every expectation of happiness.”
“I wasn’t born like you, Fanny. Or had it drummed out of me. Happiness was not my family’s creed.”
“Well, that’s over now. You have your school.”
“We have our school.”
I smiled and lay on the bed beside her. Without a word, she put her arm out to let me rest my head in the nook of her shoulder.
“You see?” she said. “This, here. This is our creed.”
Eliza and Everina didn’t share our enthusiasm for any of it. They hated the long days and hard work of teaching and keeping up the school. Eliza regained her senses over time, seemed more like herself, if a fragile version, but she pined for her little girl. We took turns writing letters to Bishop, imploring him to let her see Bess, if not surrender custody altogether. He never wrote back, but word came to us, through Ned, that he would never forget what Eliza had done to him, never forgive her. The daughter was in the care of wet nurses and maids, which was hardly reassuring.
As her daughter’s first birthday neared, in August, Eliza became more agitated, more desperate. She couldn’t focus, often didn’t finish her sentences, would walk to the window to watch any mother and small child in the street, following their every move.
One day I took delivery of a letter from Ned. In a final act of cruelty, Bishop could not even bring himself to deliver the news that little Bess had caught a fever and died. There were no details, not how long she’d suffered, whose arms she died in, if she’d called for her mother. Knew that her mother loved her. Eliza lay down on her bed and clutched a pillow to her chest. She stayed there for three days, wouldn’t eat, slept in fits. And then one morning she appeared at the breakfast table in a crisp dress, hair swept neatly back. She expressed no regret for her decision, but her eyes told me that she knew she had sacrificed her child to win her freedom. Her stoicism didn’t last. Everina was struggling with her responsibilities, and the two found common cause in their resistance to me.
“We must all live up to your standards, Mary. What is just in that?” Everina asked me.
“I seem to be the only one with standards. If you have something to contribute, Everina, by all means.”
“You’ve always had to have it your way, all our lives.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Because of you, and the scandal with Eliza, I will never find a husband.”
“Go then.”
“You know I have nowhere to go. I serve your will, your wishes. We all do. We must grind away to remake the world in your image. Not God’s, not our own, but yours!”
“I thought we were one on this, all of us.”
“Why must we all remake the world, Mary? What if I just want to live in it as it is?”
“I thought I was making a life for us, a life of independence—”
“Yes, we can be free so long as we are subservient to you. Even Fanny.”
“What about Fanny? She is here of her own will, we all are.”
“She is devoted to you beyond all reason.”
“We are the ruling passion of each other’s hearts and minds, no less.”
“And where does that leave us, your sisters? You treat us like children.”
“You behave like children! You want me to take care of you, while you do as little as possible on your own behalf, much less anyone else’s.”
“You go off to your lectures and discussion groups, your precious Dr. Price.”
“You want no part of that world. You’ve told me so yourself.”
“But did you know that Fanny stays behind to smooth our ruffled feathers? She is the sister we wish you were, Mary. And you seem not to see it at all. Not even to see her.”
“I see Fanny above all.”
“Then why haven’t you seen that she’s getting worse? Her coughing fits, her weakness? She cannot bear this damp, chilly England. It’s killing her. And yet you would work her to the bone. While she is the one keeping peace in this house. Behind your back.”
“Fanny is her own master.”
“Is she? Then ask her about Hugh Skeys.”
* * *
“You’ve had a letter from him, and didn’t tell me?”
It was her Sunday rest, of a sort. Fanny sat on top of the covers, propped against a pillow, shawl around her shoulders and thick wool socks on her feet. A piece of vellum on a makeshift easel rested against her bent knees; cloudy water and brushes in jars populated her bedside table, with pens and India ink, her paints, and a single flower, her subject. She still used her botanical drawings to earn money for her mother and siblings. This was her one day to do it.
Fanny’s ink-stained fingers slipped Skeys’s letter from under her pillow. “Two months ago.”
I sat on the edge of the bed with an offering of tea. She took it, set it on the table, along with the letter, but kept her eyes steady on her drawing.
“Words are not Hugh Skeys’s friend. Honestly, a cow could have written it b
etter.”
I knew this was her way of dismissing the subject, so I kicked off my slippers, spun around, and sat on the bed beside her.
“Looks like a common pansy,” I said, studying the fine ink drawing she was just starting to fill in with touches of purple, both subtle and bold.
“Love-in-idleness is the name I prefer, but lady-in-waiting, kiss-her-in-the-buttery, heartsease, if you must. Though there’s nothing common about the pansy.” Fanny commanded a room when she talked about her plants. “Even Shakespeare exploited its magical power to alter the course of true love.”
“What a terrible affliction,” I said.
“But it’s also its own cure, strangely enough. And my favorite of all the flowers.”
I leaned my head on her bony shoulder. “I like it for you. It’s who you are. Delicacy, with power. But magic most of all.”
She sighed lightly. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be one’s own cure?”
I thought she meant her illness, but we rarely spoke of it. She hated to.
“I think we’re so often the cause of our own suffering,” she said. “The things we let wound us, the indecencies that offend our beings, the injustices.”
“But those things are real, and outside of us.”
“I know. But what if our real power—the one we’re born with, which we rarely assume—lies in altering our sensibility to the things that aggrieve us?” She tucked her paintbrush behind her ear. “Imagine,” she said, “if we could heal ourselves.”
I knew she was talking about me. She had none of my animus, even if she marveled at it sometimes. Fanny accepted things I never could. She believed we could be content with the gifts we are given.
“What flower would you think for me?” I asked her.
She turned her head to study me, then leaned over and dug from a pile of discarded drawings on the floor. She handed one to me.
“The nigella?”
“Devil-in-the-bush, ragged lady, love-in-a-mist if you prefer. Can thrive in the most neglected patches of land.”
“Its leaves look like spiky thorns. Its petals have claws!”
“So do you, Mary. But in fact they’re soft and delicate. And though they favor a brilliant purple, they can be every variety of white and pink, lavender and blue. Like your many moods.”
I studied the flower, trying to see myself in it as she did. Our silences were snug and easy. We had no need to fill the empty space with unnecessary words. But Skeys’s letter still hung in the air between us.
“He says he’s ready for marriage,” she said at last. “That his business in Lisbon is secure enough to support a family. To support me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I feel humiliated by him. All these years, waiting, hoping. And then losing hope. And how many years has it been since I’ve set eyes on the man? I don’t even remember what he looks like. Probably old and fat by now.”
We laughed, but Fanny dissolved into a coughing fit. Her shawl fell away. There was blood on her kerchief. I’d pretended that Fanny was invincible—now that we had the life together we’d dreamed of—that she would naturally gain strength and health from it. I pulled her shawl back over her shoulder, waiting for her lungs to settle.
“And I would hardly call it an inspired proposal.” She reached for my hand, braided her fingers with mine. “But more than that, I don’t think I can leave you, Mary.”
I looked down at her hand, skin so thin it seemed barely to cover her bird bones underneath. I spun the silver band of her carnelian ring around easily with my thumb, and remembered her telling me that the Egyptians thought the stone protected the dead in the journey to the afterlife. I felt my stomach tighten, and wanted to cry.
“We have no choice, Fanny,” I said. “You must write to him, and accept.”
She retrieved the paintbrush from behind her ear.
“Portugal. A world away from you. I can no longer imagine what it could possibly hold for me.”
“Hugh Skeys,” I said. “Remember, you told me you might come to love him?”
“I don’t remember, Mary. I hardly remember the why of anything, but certainly not the why of Portugal.”
“Health,” I said. “Life.”
She squeezed her kerchief in her palm. It was always tucked into her sleeve, at the ready. Coughing was her constant companion, and messy.
“What is my life without you? Without my family, who need me?”
“I’ll look after them,” I said. “I give you my solemn word. But you’re of no use to any of us if you continue this way.”
“You mean dead. Just say it.”
“You need dry air, hot breezes, sunlight.”
“It was you who tried to persuade me against it! Against Hugh Skeys altogether.”
I was aware we’d changed places, each adopting the other’s view. But that’s how it had become between us. Merging easily one into the other, a united soul, if sometimes a divided heart. I didn’t want to lose her, but the choice was stark: accept Skeys’ proposal and sail for Portugal to be married, and recover her health, or refuse him, stay in London, and die.
For me the answer was simple. I would rather lose her to marriage than to death.
Mrs. B
September 4, 1797
A loud bang on the door, like a thunderclap. Mrs. B heaved herself from the sink of her own feather mattress, between a groan and a sigh, strung a shawl across her shoulders, reached blindly for her spectacles, and pushed them onto her face. It was still dark in the house; the fire in the hearth had expired, but she had a sense of dim first light when she opened the door to a driver in livery, who wasted no time.
“Blenkinsop, yup?”
She pulled her shawl closer and peered over his shoulder at the waiting carriage.
“You’re to come at once,” he said. “Get your things.”
“Come where? The Lying-In? Who sent you?”
“The Godwin house. Been a terrible turn in the patient.”
“The child?”
“Don’t think so. He said, ‘Tell her it’s the missus,’ for he knew you’d come at once.”
Mrs. B heard a great sucking in of breath, and realized it was she who’d gasped. It was the same sound that’d startled her a fortnight ago, when she woke in her feather bed to find her husband cold beside her.
She dressed, squeezed her swollen feet into her brogans, and replenished her bag as quickly as she could. How could it be? she kept muttering to herself. She’d left Mary standing and smiling on the very threshold where they’d met, radiating good health. She’d dressed simply for an expected round of visitors, read a book to her sweet Fanny, planned a dinner menu, and nursed her new girl for the third time since they’d risen. Mrs. B would not have left had there been any doubt, reluctant as she was to go.
On the galloping ride to the Godwin house, in the back of the carriage, Mrs. B felt the rattling deep in her bones. She’d arrived to her cottage the previous evening, wet and toilworn, to a thin layer of dust on the sills, stone floor like a mausoleum, crisp browned wildflowers in a small pewter jug. Exhaustion did odd things to the mind, she knew, but she felt herself standing in a strange house, or she the stranger. She relived those first minutes as if dreaming them, an uncanny awareness of her every movement, doing each thing again: Set down her bag, lower the hood of her cape, wipe her fogged spectacles on her skirt. How she reached for the old elm tinderbox, lifted its lid, strangely soothed to find it intact and still neatly divided, steel and flint in the one part, tinder and damper in the other. Instead of charred rags her husband collected dried moss, leaves, and fungus, anything from “God’s great floor,” he’d say, “to bring a bit of Heaven inside.” She let the hook-shaped fire steel hang over her fingers, marveling at how it conformed to the human hand, and in the other, held the sharp-edged piece of chalcedony her husband had chosen just for this. With a few quick strikes on the steel, she coaxed a spark, caught it on a piece of dried moss, then a splint of wood, blow
ing on it to help the spark become a flame, then flame to candle, candle to hearth.
She had avoided going home as long as she could, said yes to all the births since he’d passed, slept at the Lying-In and then the Godwin house. What a blessing that this new deadness inside her had been kept at bay by life there.
“Please God,” she whispered, alone in the dark cab. “Watch over her.”
Which is when Dr. Poignand skirted across her memory, and his unclean hands in Mary’s womb.
* * *
Marguerite greeted the midwife at the door, her young face pinched with worry. Mrs. B stepped inside and looked up to the ceiling. She could feel it even there, the convulsing house, and heard the iron bedstead strike the wall. There was no mistaking a racking fever.
“Poignand is seeing her now. And there’s a Dr. Fordyce as well.”
“Fordyce?”
“I don’t know. Seems to be a friend. But Mr. Godwin said you should go straight up.”
Mrs. B climbed the stairs, already short of breath, a hand on the wall to brace her way.
Godwin, pale as fright, opened the bedchamber door, holding the mewling baby to his chest. “Thank God,” he said.
Poignand was at Mary’s bedside, trying to feel her pulse, while her whole body shivered and shook.
“Please make it stop, Mrs. Blenkinsop,” said Godwin.
Mrs. B glanced at the older gentleman leaning against the far wall. He seemed to be holding up that side of the room with his own corpulence. He balanced a gold snuff box on his palm and took a generous pinch, watching Poignand out of slitted eyes.
“Fordyce, Mrs. Blenkinsop.”
She nodded to him and brushed past, set her bag down, and tossed her cape onto a chair. She wrung out a cloth from a bowl of cool water, put her elbows on the bed, and mopped Mary’s damp brow—her eyes were fevered and high up in her head.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “We’ll get you through this.”
She wasn’t sure Mary could hear her until she gripped Mrs. B’s sleeve with her hot hand and clung to her hard.
Love and Fury Page 11