“How do I do that? By spring I’ll have no school at all.”
“You must write, Mary. Write it down. Tell the world what you’ve learned.”
* * *
When we said good-bye to the last student in May and shuttered the school, I felt like the drowning French sailors, cast adrift with no ship on the horizon. Not knowing what else to do, I did put pen to paper, pouring out my anger and resentment, railing against the injustice of women like me, like Fanny and my sisters, unable to make our way in the world. Fanny might still be alive were it otherwise, and sitting next to me now, drawing a wildflower and all its intricate parts, joking with me, appealing to my better self, running her fingers through my hair. Whatever I was writing, I wanted to dedicate it to her. I told Mrs. Burgh I was calling it “The Unfortunate Situation of Females, Unfashionably Educated, and Left without a Fortune.”
“Why so glum?” she said with a mischievous smile. “Why not call it ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters’?”
Hewlett, when he read it, rushed it to his personal friend Joseph Johnson, one of the most famous publishers in London, a radical reformist. Hewlett thought my “original voice” might appeal to him. Johnson invited me to come to London at once. I washed my hair, considered what to wear, decided on exactly what I wore every day (what good would it be pretending to be someone else?), and took the next coach for the city, arriving at his offices near St. Paul’s.
“I like the way you think and write, Miss Wollstonecraft,” he said at our first meeting, sitting with my pages stacked on the desk in front of him.
Johnson was small and tightly made, with a sharp-cut jaw and slender nose. He wore his hair with two stiff curls above his ears, and a neatish mop on top. He had long fingers and fingernails, as I’d never seen on a man. Dressed in austere black, he welcomed me with the warmth of our mutual friend, Hewlett, but it was just the two of us now. I found it harrowing to have my future once again in someone else’s hands, even if I had less than nothing to lose.
“It’s direct and to the point,” he said. “No unnecessary flourishes.”
“I abhor flowery writing.”
“And flowery women, it would appear,” he said, looking me a little up and down.
“I mean to be hard on simpering society misses—”
“Who apparently raise spoiled, selfish children?”
“Well, who simply raise children in their own image. It is no fault of the children,” I said.
“Of course not,” said Johnson, breaking into a smile that seemed to put all his colors on display. “They prefer to make girls into creatures too delicate to think for themselves.”
“Yes, we must hammer their bold, creative spirit out of them as early as possible.”
“Never lead, but obey! For they are created for pleasure and delight alone!”
“As long as it isn’t their pleasure, their delight,” I said.
“What? Women having their own delight?”
I heard myself laugh out loud, and it startled me, for it was a sound I hadn’t heard in many months. To be deprived of one’s own laughter I knew in that moment to be a cursed thing. I felt delight as my right, my connection to the wonder that the world contained. I’d relied, for so long, on Fanny to provide it. But here instead was a near stranger, a man with tight-curled hair and plain dress—the opposite of Fanny in every way—making a twenty-seven-year-old spinster laugh. I realized I had tears in my eyes, and hadn’t spoken for some time.
“I’m sorry. Did I offend you, Miss Wollstonecraft?”
“No, Mr. Johnson,” I said. “You amused me. And I’m grateful for it.”
He looked down at my pages, his brow heavy. I prepared for the worst.
“Well, I would be grateful if you would take ten pounds for it, your manuscript.”
“Ten pounds?”
“With one condition.”
I held my breath.
“That you will send me anything you write in the future, give me first chance at it.”
I wanted to throw my arms around him and bless his good face. The whole way back to Newington Green, I felt the wind lift my sails. An important publisher, who had high regard in the world I wanted to be regarded by, would publish me. But Johnson’s ten pounds, though I was elated to have it, wasn’t enough to dig myself and my sisters out of the hole we were in, not to mention do something to help the Bloods, who had lost their primary source of income with Fanny’s passing. I’d promised her I would never abandon them, and promised myself. I would find something—anything—to right my ship.
I would not fail my friend again.
* * *
Robert and Caroline King, Lord and Lady of Kingsborough, Mitchelstown, Ireland, were in need of a governess, and liked the sound of me. I was the right age, a spinster, and now an experienced schoolmistress. Lady Kingsborough had been impressed by my book, or at least that I’d written one. But more to the point, they would pay forty pounds for a year’s service, which, if I could suffer it that long, would give me twenty to pay off my debts and give something to the Bloods, while the rest I would save to help me and my sisters begin a new life. One year, and then I would be free.
The Kingsboroughs were the largest landowners in all of Ireland, English overlords who’d stolen Irish land for the Crown, and been rewarded for it. After a long, incommodious journey from London, I found myself in a carriage hugging the northern slopes of the Galtee Mountains. It was better than the Ireland of my imagination, a landscape of peaks and valleys, preternaturally green, drunk with water, birch and whitethorn trees. The road took us over a hill, opening onto a vast plain bounded to the south by the Knockmealdown Mountains, thick with evergreens, and in the middle of it, Mitchelstown Castle, surrounded by a twelve-foot wall.
It was a large Palladian thing with wings, but two towers carefully preserved from the old castle, I guessed, as a reminder that it was once a fortress. The house looked to be trying very hard to impress, with classical gardens, terraces with statues, a conservatory, and even vineyards, as if it had been plucked out of Renaissance Italy. But entering its gates felt like going into the Bastille. We passed the hovels of tenant farmers, where dirty-faced children in tattered clothes, even the littlest ones, worked outside in the cold.
We turned onto a long road leading to the grand entrance, and I felt the unhappiness even of the yews lining the way, trained and upright, not as a wild yew grows, with curling, reaching arms. This whole place was the opposite of Nature, and everything I hated.
“Where’s the village?” I asked the driver, when I disembarked.
“Oh, Lord Kingsborough didn’t like the view.”
“So, obscured by trees?”
“No, miss. Took the whole village down, board to nail, and moved it over there”—he pointed over a far hill—“where he don’t have to see it at all.”
A butler, one of eighty people (I soon learned) in their service, led me into the great foyer, more like the entrance to a museum than a house. I looked up at the cupolaed ceiling, painted with the Rape of Proserpine—the fleshy daughter of the earth goddess, breasts pressed against Pluto’s hairy chest, hanging her head in dread and disgust. We continued to the upstairs drawing room, where I was greeted first by a half dozen of Lady Kingsborough’s constant companions—not her children but her yapping dogs—followed by Lady K herself, examining me as if with a quizzing glass. I thought high society in Bath would have taught me what to expect, but was ill prepared for the ghastly chalk of her face and heavily rouged cheeks, the tower of frizzed hair atop her head (I wondered if mice might have taken up residence). She wore gondola-like protuberances beneath her taffeta skirts containing enough fabric to curtain an entire room. She could pass through doors only by turning sideways, though she didn’t walk so much as sashay.
Her lisp was extreme, her voice grating and high. She giggled when she told me she found me “quaint” in my simple dress, my hair gently swept back, no makeup, no embellishments at all, which seemed
to please as much as amuse her. I soon came to understand that the governess before me had been seduced by Lord Kingsborough, and unceremoniously dismissed. She took me, apparently, as no threat whatsoever.
The older sons were away at Eton; the three daughters were to be mine alone. She called them in and introduced them with no motherly pride, but more curiosity as to how these girls could have issued from so fine a womb as hers. There was Margaret, fourteen, tall, and built squarely. She had a pointy nose and brown hair that fanned around her face in fashionable disarray, which didn’t suit her at all. With arms crossed firmly across her flat chest, and a militant frown, she looked both miserable and fierce.
“Just look away from her spots if they bother you,” said Lady K, moving on to Caroline, twelve, and Mary, seven, with big blue eyes and abundant brown curls. Though stuffed into French dresses à la mode, they struck me like the wild yews outside, unhappy in the same way. Their manners were rough, nothing polite about them, and they seemed almost bored to meet me.
“You’ll be gone before Christmas, trust me,” Margaret whispered in my ear when she gave me her hand and curtsied, her gaze fearless.
“No need to curtsy for me, Miss Margaret,” I said. “I am not your master.”
“Yes, you are! And they must curtsy,” said Lady K. “I’m trying to teach them manners. And so must you. Anyway, make something of them, won’t you, Wollstonecraft? Not too much. Just enough.”
“She means, to get a husband,” said Margaret, rolling her eyes.
“As soon as possible, yes! I know it won’t be an easy task. But do your best. We’re counting on you.”
The girls, united in their cause, plotted and played tricks on me, presenting me one day with a bouquet of dead flowers, the next putting a live beetle in a hollowed-out apple, and the coup de grâce: a dead worm in my tea. When I seemed unimpressed, and told them about the Beverley girls and their tricks, I had their attention, at least for a moment. On our first day of lessons in a bleak, airless “schoolroom”—though I’d prepared over the summer, improving my French, music, and art—my own restlessness equaled theirs. They fidgeted. I shifted in my chair. We couldn’t find a rhythm.
“Put on your coats,” I said. “We’re going for a walk.”
“A walk?” Margaret groaned. “Outside?”
“For walking, I prefer outside to in,” I said.
“But we might catch cold,” said Caroline, “and then mother will scold us!”
“Mothers do not scold over niggling colds. And it is a lie that the outside will make you sick. It is the outside that keeps us well,” I said, trying to raise a window that was stuck.
“Mother makes them paint them shut,” said Margaret.
“Well, it’s this stuffy air that makes one ill. So, coats please.”
And so we started each of our long days together with a walk, no matter the weather. They resisted at first, walked single file behind me, griping at the ground, answering my questions with grunts. I’d stop to pick up stones, moss, fallen bark, and leaves, make them close their eyes and describe what I put in their hands. On one unseasonably warm day I made them take off their shoes and socks, to feel the grass between their toes. On another we walked all the way to where the tenant farmers lived. They didn’t seem to know who “those strange people” were, or how they were connected to their own estate, or how kept down by it. They only knew them as “stinking Irish,” and didn’t seem to care.
That I did care, and wanted them to, was the only evidence I had that there was a world outside this pretend one. And that I was still of it.
By mid-October they were climbing the yews, begging to go outside, asking questions one on top of another: Why are some stars brighter than others? Why do things die? Why do the French hate their king? In the handsome, well-endowed library that no one seemed to use, I cracked the spines of books and found all the knowledge I needed, each lesson designed around a question the girls asked. They were astonished that I detested needlework and eschewed French pleasantries, all of which, I told them, amounted to a heap of rubbish. If they wanted to learn French, it must be to speak of ideas. They soon began, as I did, to refuse eating sugar, which was linked to the slave trade, and to forgo the eating of meat whenever possible. They were surprised I coddled them when they were sad, and that I wanted to know why. Slowly they began to tell me, and I formed a picture of a house where love was banished.
When they fell sick six weeks after I arrived, one after the other, they were baffled that I tended to them closely, instead of quarantine, on which their mother insisted. I felt genuinely sorry for the girls, put warm rags on their chests, made them hot drinks of elderberry juice and gin, and told them stories, until at last they were better, and told stories to me.
Margaret, who held out the longest, came to me one day before Christmas with tears in her eyes. She had blood on her dress and stockings, and the look of a girl who was sure death was near. With calm reassurances, I helped her change her soiled clothes, explained what was happening, what to expect in the future. I could tell she was relieved, not just that she would live, but that someone would tell her the truth of things. She hugged me for the first time before she left my room. I felt her arms tight around my waist.
“You don’t wear a corset, ever?” she asked me when she pulled away.
“I don’t care for them,” I told her.
“Why do I have to wear one, then?”
“Do you?”
“Mother says it’s a practice corset, and that I must. But it seems the only thing I’m practicing for is not being able to breathe.”
I smiled, seeing my young self in her. “Have you told her so?”
“She scares me. It would appall her if she knew my real thoughts.”
“I was afraid of my mother too. She was cold and distant—”
“And featherheaded?”
“I sometimes thought so. But I feel sorry for her now. I’m not sure it was her fault—her choice—to be that way.”
“But you tell us we must try to be true to our nature, fashion our own choices.”
“I wish that for all women, and yet feel compassion for those who don’t know themselves, and can’t find words for what they wish for, which seems to me a prerequisite for trying to get it.”
She licked her lips—for Margaret, a prelude to thought. “Well, I don’t like girl clothes at all. Mother dresses us like bonbons. I wish to wear boy clothes, in fact.”
“Hmm. I do see the difficulty of convincing your mother of that. But when you are grown, you should dress exactly as you wish, not as the rest of the world demands you do.”
“Then I will,” she said. “Dress as a man someday.”
“I have no doubt you will,” I said.
Margaret was devoted to me from that moment on, and I to her, to Caroline and Mary. The Kingsborough girls became my reason to live.
The rest of my world was a cruel desert, my room a prison, the loneliness crushing. In the first month I refused dinner every evening to rush to my room and cry in torrents. I thought it was Fanny I was lamenting, but it was also my grief for the fact of her fading, becoming less vivid, less near. I could no longer call up her voice, her laughter, no longer close my eyes and feel her finger trailing the length of my arm. And I was so far from everyone who loved her as I did. I wrote the Bloods, sent them money, but it wasn’t the same as having them near, to remember Fanny together.
I reviewed my whole life and found, apart from a few smatterings of joy, a catalog of calamities, disjointed as a dream and impossible to decipher. Despite being treated by everyone in the house as a gentlewoman, I had fallen so far, lost the only independence I’d ever known. I was an exile in a new land, trapped in a strange netherworld that held nothing for me. All the comforts of life weighed nothing against the liberty I longed for.
“Why are you sad today, Mary?” Margaret asked me one day when we were walking.
“Do I seem sad?” I didn’t want her to worry.
/> “I can see it in your eyes, the way you see it in mine sometimes. It’s a faraway look, but I don’t know where you are.”
She waited for my answer. I thought I ought to protect her from the darkness I felt, but if I urged them to speak from the heart, mustn’t I do the same for them? I took her hand tightly in mine. “Sometimes I am nowhere at all, sweet Margaret, but I feel frightened and alone.”
“Don’t be frightened, Mary. You have me. You have us.”
“And I count myself fortunate for that. But this is your place in the world, not mine.”
She thought for a moment and squeezed my hand back, her shoulder leaning into mine. “Sometimes I don’t know if it’s my place either.”
Lady Kingsborough, through all of it, vexed me entirely. The clearer the girls became to me, the more obfuscated she was. There was no humanity in her that I could see, not even love for her own children. She cradled her yipping dogs in her arms, talked to them like babies, laughed when they skittered across the marble floors, chewed up pillows, and said nothing when they pissed in the middle of the foyer, right under poor Proserpine. She seemed to hate her husband, of whom I saw very little, and was often confined to the company of women who gossiped and tittered, not real laughter or talk. When I tried to tell her about the girls’ progress in various subjects, she talked over me with news of last night’s party, who wore what, who flirted with whom, which men flocked around her, which friends were in, which out, whose love affairs were the most scandalous.
Out of desperate need for adult company, I accepted an invitation to one of those soirées, and soon found myself in animated conversation with a handsome man who caught my eye. His name was George Ogle. He was in his forties, married, successful, suave, but deeply unhappy in some way, and alert to another melancholy soul. He didn’t bother with small talk or gallantry. We found we were both reading Rousseau’s Émile.
Love and Fury Page 14