Imlay looked confused coming out of his door at Saint-Germain to find me, sopping wet and in shock. But he pulled me inside, took me into his arms, hard.
“Paine’s been arrested,” he said. “Helen Maria’s gone into hiding.”
“Oh God, Imlay.”
“We have to get you away from here, Mary. Out of France if possible.”
“I don’t want to leave. My book isn’t done. And I don’t want to leave you.”
He rested his chin on the top of my head, his strong arms crossed on my back. I could sense him thinking it through, feel him nod, the way he did when concocting a plan. I could feel his lungs fill up against my chest.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ll register you at the American Embassy. As my wife.”
“As Mary Imlay?”
“It won’t be a real marriage. You won’t give up your legal rights, nor I mine. But at least you’ll be safe.”
How quick I was to give away my name, little bird, to save my neck. We would keep our dignity, not sacrifice our independence. I would live according to my philosophy, and he to his—that’s what I told myself. But I can’t deny the powerful temptation, then, to let Gilbert Imlay seal our bond, more sacred to me than any legal marriage could be, by putting pen to paper and making his name mine.
By the end of summer we were living together at Saint-Germain. Imlay founded a trading company with Joel Barlow to seize opportunities around the English embargo on French trade. America would be only too glad to supply soap, wheat, whatever was needed, and Imlay was uniquely positioned to make it happen. Though his days were filled with “minding the main chance,” we passed the evenings by candlelight in our cozy blue nest of rooms. We took supper, read aloud to each other, had long conversations about the future, ours so seemingly tied to that of France. A thousand pounds, he said, was what was needed to finance our American dream. It didn’t seem right to me that our simple farm should cost so much, but he felt energized and I, cherished. Our hearts, at least, were aimed in the same direction.
When he announced that he had to go to Le Havre for a while, more than a hundred miles away, I tried not to show my trepidation. His company would focus largely on Sweden and Norway, which were more than willing to take Bourbon silver off French hands in exchange for legal currency. We’d be very rich, he said when he hugged me good-bye outside his waiting carriage, and very soon. And then we would sail to America.
In September I suspected I was pregnant; by October I knew it. I relished the idea of becoming a mother, and Imlay seemed delighted by the news, vowing to return to Paris as soon as he could. He made me promise to watch over myself, and our child-to-be. I overflowed with tenderness toward him, and toward myself. Our child was the embodiment of true love and the revolutionary values we held most dear: trust, loyalty, equality. Except for Imlay’s absence, my life circled round and became whole, my happiness complete.
Paris, meanwhile, was in chaos—the Revolution falling to tragic pieces. I watched secret police kick in doors, searching for the remaining Brits, arresting them in public. Imprisoned Frenchmen and -women we knew, Girondists all of them, prepared to feed the guillotine with their necks. In mid-October the Jacobins executed Marie Antoinette. She’d been governed by “uterine furies,” they claimed, and deserved what she got. It was shocking to hear them argue that the new France must be more like ancient Rome: Men would make the laws, women should obey them, each sex in its rightful place. No divorce, no inheritance, no legal representation, no form of protest would be allowed for women. Even statues of Lady Liberty were felled for the more masculine Justice.
While I felt an unstoppable life force fluttering inside me, it seemed that France was dooming women, and daring its own demise.
Imlay didn’t come and didn’t come. His letters were sweet but impatient. Why did I press him? Why did I doubt his plan? Question his ambition? He never doubted mine. And then came word that Helen Maria had been arrested. I couldn’t imagine her being carted off to a jail cell, and went to visit her as soon as they allowed it. She put on a brave face, at first, as she would.
“Women make the best prisoners, just as they will the best citizens,” she said. “There’s a true spirit of fraternity here, or sorority—acts of care and compassion among us—why, we cheer up even the gloom of a prison!”
I put my hand on hers, as she’d done for me when we first met in her drawing room. Tears pooled in her eyes.
“But I’m terrified, Mary,” she said, cupping her other hand around her slender neck. “At night I feel the blade quivering over my head and can’t sleep a wink.”
I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles.
“I was cocky,” she said. “I thought by the sheer exuberance of our humanity, there’d be no stopping the world we could make together. But brute force has defeated sentiment, and the lust for power triumphed over reason.” She bowed her head and shook it. “I meant to be the spectatrice, not the spectacle itself. Now I lie awake wondering if I can be one of the bold ones who dance my way up the steps to the guillotine, sing a song, recite my principles, or just tell them to go to hell. Mostly I think I’ll simply weep for my life.”
“Imlay will think of some way to save you, Helen Maria, I know he will. He always has a scheme. And knows people on all sides.”
“That he does,” she said, slipping her hand from mine. “But I learned some time ago never to wait for Imlay.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “He’s on the same side we are. For the cause of good.”
“I think the one thing clear to most everyone but you is that Gilbert Imlay is for the cause of Gilbert Imlay.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Do not wait for him,” she repeated with greater force, and a sympathetic glance at my protruding belly, which I made no effort to hide. “I know you’re in love with him. But don’t make the mistake, as many have, of imagining your passion singular. I’ve been violently in love with him myself.”
When I walked out into the open air, I threw up into an overgrown bush. How could she not have told me, or he? I knew there’d been other women in his past, but I believed his past well behind him, and far away. Here it was in my face—an omission that felt like a lie, that began to feel like a trail of them.
My letters to him got longer, his terse and less frequent. I started mine trying to be light, and ended weeping on the page. I asked why he hadn’t told me about his affair with Helen Maria. He reassured me that it was long over, that he’d never lied about his past, and he loved me now, like a goddess. But my mind made monsters to taunt me. “My head aches, my heart is heavy; my happiness depends wholly on you,” I wrote to him. I thought we’d made a paradise together, but now our world seemed like that unweeded garden at Versailles, choked by everything.
My spirits rose again when Imlay invited me to Le Havre. I packed my things quickly before he could change his mind. Helen Maria, who’d just been freed from prison and was plotting her own escape from the city, begged me to burn my half-written book on the Revolution—sure that if discovered, the pages would land me in prison, pregnant or not. I couldn’t bring myself to do it; the work mattered too much. Not just to Johnson and me, but to all the curious world that was watching the contortions of the Revolution and holding its breath. I felt renewed by Imlay’s wanting me again, but I wouldn’t give up my work to be with him, or him for my work, and so, willing to risk my life for all of it, swept past the guards at the gates with my manuscript hidden under my skirts, pretending not to be terrified.
I hated Le Havre, but was glad to be with Imlay again. It seemed everyone there had come to make their fortune, crooked or not, and he was no different with deals instead of ideals the currency of the town, densely packed against a high seawall. I felt confined and claustrophobic. I couldn’t get a Parisian newspaper, and had left most of my books behind, so determined to finish my own book before the baby came. Imlay had rented us a large house with a view of the sea. He li
ked to watch the ships go out, rising and falling on the waves. I envied the seagulls the smooth glide of their open wings. I decided to embrace his trading venture, do what I could to support him, and try not to ruffle his moods. Imlay seemed content to have me in his bed again, which I took as happiness enough.
I took a walk every day, and worked more intently than I had for a long time. Shopped for groceries, made meals, ordered fabric from Paris to make baby clothes, altered my own clothes to fit me. When Imlay was away, I might leave him a leg of lamb smoking on the board to lard his ribs when he returned home. I found linens for his shirts in Le Havre, and heard myself using “us” more than “I,” a matrimonial parlance that surprised me. I told myself that I’d succeeded in negotiating a domestic partnership without clogging my soul by promising obedience. The book began to take shape. Imlay read what I was writing over my shoulder and heartily approved.
In May I gave birth to your sister, an experience so exhilarating, I told Imlay I felt like I’d scaled the highest peak in the Swiss Alps, and breathless with the beauty of it, wanted to go again as soon as possible. I had only the help of a nurse who was convinced mother and baby would die without a doctor in attendance, and was mortified I wouldn’t stay in bed for more than a day after, insisting on going down for dinner the next night. But, trusting my own body, I found labor the most natural thing in the world—not smooth work but a triumph, without any terror in it. Imlay and I marveled at our newborn daughter, sometimes gazing at her for hours, only surrendering her to the other’s arms. Those first weeks he doted on me with constant and gentle attention. Baby Fanny, named for my dearest friend, went everywhere with us, out to dinner, down to watch the ships come in, to the market. She took only my milk, and Imlay loved to watch her nurse at my breast, “so manfully,” he said, “I reckon she’ll write the second Rights of Woman.”
But we soon lost him to the waterfront for long hours, negotiating with sailors and captains helping him skirt the English embargo and escape the notice of French authorities. I knew he and Barlow were desperate to capitalize on the steep rise in prices in France, and the brisk market for illegal goods. When Robespierre prohibited the French from owning luxury items, I came home one day to find a trove of Bourbon-crested silver platters, candelabras, and tea sets splayed and stacked across our dining table. They held no allure for me as objects, but it was impossible not to think of the real people they’d been taken from—not only aristocrats but émigrés, even victims of the guillotine. It could have been people we knew. Imlay bristled when I brought it up. Why did I see the wrong in things instead of what could be right?
He brought a young Norwegian captain from a prominent shipping family, Peder Ellefsen, to stay with us, while he and Barlow bought a French three-master for their scheme. Ellefsen was small built but strong. Despite his leathering face—too old for such a young man—he had a dimpled smile, a mop of yellow hair, and clear blue eyes. He loved to listen to Imlay’s tales of Kentucky, enthralled as he was with the American wilderness and the legendary Daniel Boone, whose autobiography he’d read. He told Imlay, in such a soft voice for a sea captain, “You remind me of Boone. I imagine him just like you.” Imlay said that he’d met him, just once, but that Boone was his hero too.
I knew that our future in America—maybe even bringing Eliza and Everina with us—depended on the ship setting sail with the silver on it, landing safely in Norway, and fetching a fair price. Still, I wanted no part in their plot. It was a dangerous business. I couldn’t condone it, except as a way to feed the starving people of France. But when an anxious Imlay was called away to Paris the day before the ship was to sail—some knavery by his underlings, he said—he asked me to see the ship off, and I agreed.
From our house we had often marveled at ships sailing in and out of harbor, but close up to the Maria and Margarethe, hearing the wind snap her great sails, and the groaning creak of that whalelike hull, was another species of experience. A ship was a leap of imagination, an expansion of human possibility. This one bore our shared hopes in her pregnant belly. I was to give Ellefsen his last orders, and I did.
Soon after Imlay left, Robespierre fell victim to his own blade and timber, and at last the Terror was done. France breathed a heavy sigh of relief; we all did. I wanted to be in Paris with Imlay, not alone in a place I didn’t like, with the sole care of our child. Le Havre only made sense if he was with us. I felt abandoned one day, talked myself out of it the next, and was back to it that night, as soon as the sky pitched to dark. I wrote long, loving letters telling him that all I wanted was for the three of us to be together, and to be revived and cherished by his honest love, but they soon devolved to recriminations.
He responded with silence, all my insecurities reinvigorated. And then one day, without warning, he came home. He greeted us warmly, held his “Fannikin” close, apologized for being away, and made love to me as he always had. But by next morning he was tepid to both of us. He seemed agitated, and bridled when I asked him if he’d come to take us back to Paris with him.
“I have to go to London,” he said, setting his teacup on his saucer with a spilling clang.
“London? We’ll go there with you, then.”
“There’s been some bad business, Mary. The knavery I suspected. I’ve lost money.”
“I know it’s demanding, a new baby, but she’s the best baby, and will travel well—”
“I’ll take care of you and Fanny while I’m gone. Just tell me what you need.”
I sat across from him, stirred a splash of milk into my tea, something to occupy my own shaky hands. “It wounds me when you conceal yourself,” I said. “I ought to be the one person you can say anything to, without disguise.”
“I need to be in London when the English lift the embargo, make contacts with the right merchants. It’s an opportunity I cannot miss.”
“We don’t need all the money you think we do.”
“I can’t have a wife and child in tow.”
“I’m not your wife,” I said, but the words were bitter on my tongue.
“No,” he said, icy, draining his cup. “But I intend to honor my commitments.”
I reached for his hand across the table. He took mine, but his fingers were limp. “I don’t want you to be with us out of a sense of duty. If you don’t love me as passionately as I do you, you shouldn’t be with me at all.”
He loosed his hand from mine. “Don’t talk like that. You sound desperate.”
“Should I be?”
He looked out the window toward the churning sea. “I have serious business to conduct. Why do you take that as an insult to our love?”
“If you could let go of your obsession with making a fortune, we could be happy. I thought you were a man of ideas and imagination—”
“I’m a man of commerce as well, Mary. Why can’t you love me as I am?”
* * *
When Imlay sailed for London, I took Fanny back to Paris, hoping it would feel like home. The city was reopening, to itself and the world, but my own life grew small. Some friends were dead, others had escaped the country, Helen Maria in Switzerland, the Barlows in Hamburg, Paine still languishing in jail. Fanny was a wonder, and I adored motherhood, but I couldn’t take her everywhere. With no help, and hardly any means, I had to refuse invitations, stopped reading and writing, did everything myself. The apartment in Saint-Germain felt empty without Imlay, and since I’d refused his offer of money—out of pride and principle—I couldn’t stay there on my own, and didn’t want to.
I took new lodgings with a sweet German family. The father was always sunny, helped with the children, doted on his hardworking wife. They seemed to rest in each other’s company, laugh and tell stories, finish each other’s sentences, as if they spoke a language invented just for them. It was the life I wanted with Imlay. If he could only see them as I did—the perfect happiness they’d made without any fortune to speak of, except the love they had for each other—I knew he would return to us.
When I finally relented and accepted his offer of support, I found Marguerite first thing. She was young and willing, with black hair, a fair heart-shaped face, and dark, shining eyes. She became devoted to Fanny, and vice versa, and eager to help with anything. I could write again, study my French, take walks, shop alone, and go to soirées and salons, where I was greeted as “Mrs. Imlay,” which made me feel that it was true enough, in the way I needed it then. I didn’t want to be legally bound, but the solace of his company, the thrill of his physical being, I couldn’t live without. I would rather die than have him fall in love with someone else, as I often convinced myself he had, and I thought sometimes he hinted at. I made it a point to meet new people, and felt my old charms returning. Men were drawn to me, but I only taunted Imlay with them, and was faithful.
That winter was the coldest anyone could remember. Bread was dearer than ever, meat scarce, hardly a vegetable to be found. People burned their furniture for warmth. My spirits sank, and not even Fanny’s sweet temper could revive them. A virulent cold took hold of my lungs, and I worried I might die and leave her alone in the world without any parent at all. In one of my darkest nights, I wrote Imlay that if anything happened to me, he must promise that Fanny would stay in France, with the German family, because she would be freer there, and feel loved.
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