“Water,” said Mary. “How lovely.”
“All the water you want,” said Mrs. B. “What else can I do to ease your way?”
“What can I do to thank you, for having eased it already?”
Mrs. B looked down at Mary, surprised to feel no pity in her heart but a caring beyond what she’d ever known, in all the births, the stillbirths, the miscarries and unwanteds, the children birthing children, the wee worn-out dead babes whose mothers refused to surrender their bodies even after the stiffness set in. And now this, a woman whose caring she felt in return.
“There is one thing,” she said, a tremolo in her voice. “It’s about my James.”
“Your husband, James. I remember. Of forty years—”
“Died twelve days ago. In our bed. Right next to me, while I slept.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Mary, reaching for her hand. “If only you’d told us, Mrs.… Will you tell me your name?”
“Parthenia,” said the midwife.
“Parthenia Blenkinsop,” said Mary, her voice thin and breath shallow. “What a wonderful name.” Her heavy lids flickered; she tried to fix her gaze as best she could. “It’s so hard talking up at you.” She patted the pillow beside her with a thin hand, the one with the pretty orange ring. “Lie on the bed with me?”
Mrs. B looked down at her old black mules. Without a word, she slipped them off and stretched herself long on the bed to face Mary, feeling all her own weight, and gravity. She put her tired head on the pillow.
“Now, about your James.”
“It’s just, there are things I wish I’d said. And I thought, maybe, if you see him…”
“Tell me.”
“Last night I tried to think of the words. I guess I thought maybe you could mix them with yours, and make mine prettier.”
“Tell me your words, then.”
“The thing is, it wasn’t any great passion that drew me to other women’s bedsides, but a sort of penance.”
“Penance for what?”
“When I was young, I believed it my duty to God, and the purpose of marriage, to make children, and I let my heart hope for it too, which I thought was sinful, wanting what I couldn’t have. I thought God meant to punish me, but that I could be redeemed in His eyes helping other women have their children. But my husband, my James, he never did blame me. I knew he wanted a child, or maybe just wanted me to have what I wanted. He was kind to me, always, even though I turned away all those nights, year after year. I made my heart cold to him, cold to myself. Sometimes he’d reach for my hand, and I’d pull mine away. And then we just stopped. But the day he died, it was the saddest day of my life. And there’s no reward at all, I see now, when I’ve lost the one man, right here on this earth, who ever loved me.”
Mary nodded, her flat gray eyes now gleaming with tears.
“And I am filled with regret that I didn’t tell him: I wish I’d loved you better.”
A single tear creeked down Mary’s cheek. Mrs. B dabbed it away with a corner of her apron.
“I hope I will see him, Parthenia. Because I’ll tell him for you, exactly that.”
“I know you don’t believe, like I do,” said Mrs. B. “And after these last days, well, there’ve been times I wasn’t sure if I could believe still. If I could forgive Him taking my James—and then you.”
Mary pinched her dry lips together. Mrs. B heaved herself from the bed, wrung out the cloth in cool water, and pressed it to Mary’s lips.
“But what I’ve seen and heard here, in these days with you,” said Mrs. B, “well, none could do all this but God with all his might.”
“Do all this what?” said Mary.
“All this—sad and glorious beautiful.”
Mary W
Before I left the wild North, I had a letter from Imlay, fresh proof of his indifference. He said our fortunes were inseparable, that he cherished tender feelings for me, and would do what was right, but it sounded like a burden. I was weary of traveling but sensed there was no home for me in him, no place to rest. I might as well have tried to lean on a spear.
My amiable innkeeper insisted that I couldn’t leave Norway until I saw the cascade outside of Fredrikstad, and said he’d take me himself. On horseback we took a road that wound along a gurgling river through woods of white-barked aspen and birch, deep oak. It had rained hard. Shimmering drops of water clung to the blazing leaves. A few of them fluttered down—they had lost their color and curled inward at the edges—a harbinger of autumn. We tied up the horses and set off down a narrow footpath through an ancient forest that nearly crowded out all light, full of aged pines with fine silvery cobwebs strung across their rusting needles, spiders making new life from old.
Before we could see it, we could hear it, the ferocious roar shattering the woodland quiet. When we reached the waterfall, I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming power of it, a crashing torrent exploding out of the cliff above us. My gentle guide saw how I marveled at it, and, by the elbow, led me to a small plateau where, if I didn’t mind the spray on my face and clothes, I could reach my hand out and feel it. There was only room for one of us. He stepped back onto the path and let me alone. I reached for it slowly with a shaky hand. The icy cascade pounded my fingers, numbed them almost instantly. I closed my eyes and turned my face to the spray. My own feelings merged with the tumbling water itself, pouring out of me, unstoppable. I felt my own infinity, and insignificance. How easily it could—if only it would—toss me to the river below, and wash me full away.
Nature was my cathedral now, and this, a baptism by deluge, or as good as last rites. The sublime seemed to thrive at the knife’s edge between life and death, earth and Heaven, unchained by misery and grasping at immortality. But this hurtling tempest seemed like something getting free.
How I envied the water.
* * *
“You say my letters torture you; I won’t say what yours do to me.”
Imlay didn’t meet us in Hamburg. We sailed alone to Dover, but he wasn’t there either. He met our coach in London, had found a place for us, a maid, a cook. But not with him.
“You say my letters torture you,” I wrote to Imlay. “I am not, and never will be, a mere object of compassion. I can take care of my child. I want no protection without love.”
When I pressed the cook, poor woman, she admitted that Imlay had taken a lover, an actress with a strolling troupe, and that they shared a house, and had all the time I was away.
“I am agitated. My whole frame convulsed, my lips tremble as if shook by cold, though fire circulates in my veins.”
Why was I made this way, wandering to and fro in a vale of darkness as well as tears? The deep hole at the center of my being gaped open, a ravenous maw. I couldn’t go back there, not again. The old voice—where did it come from?—whispered in my ear to put an end to all these struggles.
“Forget that I exist. Be free, Imlay. Let us both be free.”
* * *
All emotion beaten out of me, and nearly too numb to cry, I kissed each of Fanny’s fingertips and held her close. She’d thrived for those weeks without me in the North, and I knew she loved Marguerite almost as much as she did me. I was grateful she was too young to understand, or to ask why tears come as close to pleasure as to pain.
I do not know how to describe the certainty that everyone you love, in the order that you love them, will be better off without you.
* * *
What happens next, little bird, is not the end of my story but the start of yours.
On a cusp-of-winter afternoon, I rowed alone to Putney Bridge, and paid the halfpenny toll for foot passengers, thinking, as I turned the coin in my hand, that another day I might have laughed at having to pay for the privilege of killing myself. There was scarce anyone about, which was best for my purposes. Can you see me, walking back and forth on the bridge long enough to soak my wool skirts with rain, to make myself heavy, as if my depression were not weight enough? I wanted to sink fast, drown my en
dless suffering, arrive at some eternal place of rest. No more thinking or feeling, no railing against the unjust world or the injustices done to my own heart.
Without a prayer or even a good-bye to the awful world, I climbed the low wall and plunged into the waters under the timbers of Putney Bridge, eyes closed, mouth open, intending to swallow the roiling river to help it swallow me. I have never told another soul what followed, not even the boatman who saw me jump, and dragged me, barely conscious, out of the murky tide.
I woke to him pressing on my belly and slapping my face and, though weak, tried to bat his hand away, despite my violent choking on river water. I was gasping for air, my ribs heaving. He sat me up on a slatted seat and made me hang my head to let the river run out of me, then clapped my back with both hands and didn’t stop until my lungs were clear. I scarcely knew who I was or where, but the old man, with a degree of tenderness I still recall, circled a heavy blanket about my shoulders and, after a few minutes, without a word, placed a cup of gin between my shaking hands.
His face, all that tethered me to this life, was a weathered map, with deep grooves going every which way, pointing in no direction at all. I couldn’t contain its goodness, or what I’d just done, which crept back into my awareness in small sips, and had to look away. The rain had stopped and the air was soft. I watched the water curling against the side of the boat, rocking us like a cradle. I don’t know how long we sat like that, we two, but he asked nothing of me.
Finally, I took a ragged gulp from the cup and felt the burn of gin down my throat, pure sensation, perhaps too numb to feel the pain of being alive. Too numb to locate any emotion at all. That’s when I remembered that watermen get paid to dredge for suicides.
“How much will you get for me?” I asked him, still reaching for every breath.
“A penny, if I’m lucky. But a pint on top if you’ve a tale to tell.”
“You’d trade my story?”
“If it’s a good one, I’ll have a four-pint sleep tonight.”
I pulled the blanket closer. “I meant to die,” I said. “That’s all.”
“They all says they meant to. But I’ve never seen a one off Putney twice.”
“There are other bridges.”
He drew his chin back and grunted as if he knew better. “’S not the way thinkin’ goes, when yer not straight-thinkin’.”
I let the blanket fall away from my shoulder, with not even the strength to keep it up. He leaned over and pulled it back into place. Such a small gesture, but it was everything.
“Let’s let the grim stream wait another day,” he said to me.
I drank the rest of the gin and handed him the empty cup with a small nod of thanks, surprised by a shiver of gladness that he’d saved me. He took up his oars, a slow pulling start for shore. I looked at my hands, coming back to feeling, the skin on my fingers puckered and white. That’s when I realized Fanny’s ring wasn’t there.
In that instant, I blinked and saw everything with shocking clarity, as if I were still in it: The frothing water closes above me. I sink in the slow darkness, my torso thrust upward, arms floating backward; my skirts and hair billow around me, pushed and pulled by the current; eyes open, gazing upward as if to catch some last shard of light, mouth sealed by instinct, and then, when I can hold it no longer, an involuntary spasm of breath that drags rancid water into my nose and mouth, filling my lungs. My eyes widen with panic, my limbs flail in slow motion, and I’m alone—the cold, hard nothing of being no thing—and then at last surrender, my body flaccid, all exertion ceased. I am free of all pain, all feeling, all past, present. All resistance gone. The only sound is my own heavy heartbeat inside me, sluggish and faint. I am overcome with the most perfect floating stillness and tranquility—my body itself becoming water.
Just then, some small thing brushes my cheek like a kiss. My eyes open but can barely make out what shines in the dark near my face, all alone in the watery world. As it rolls, end over end, away from me, I see it, the gleaming silver band of Fanny’s ring, its carnelian round flashing as it floats away, having slipped from my finger.
A hand that seems to be my own, disembodied, reaches for it, dragging the water’s weight, fingers outstretched, but I cannot grasp it. I can only watch its faint glint, receding in the darkness.
Stay with me, please.
I want to live.
Instead, blackness wraps around me like a cocoon. I have no sense that it’s an ending, because I have no sense—no thoughts—at all.
But then, little bird, but then!
Time circles back for me, bends, and breaks.
Something, somewhere, pulls me from the dark and explodes inside me, a rush of vivid scenes that fly at me like memories with wings, shimmering and breathing, moments from my life, most keenly felt, an infinite gallery of my own experiences coming at random, one on top of another, side by side, singular, then merging into one, a sweeping view of my entire existence, but every detail and color exact, all light and movement just as it had been. I relive every emotion precisely as it had felt, every wound and disappointment, but enchantment too; and not only my own feelings—I can go inside someone else and know what they’d seen and felt, know all the sadness and joy they carried from their own lives. Not only people, but animals and things—the whole universe alive to sensation and feeling—now alive to me! There is no progression, not even time at all, a second and a thousand years, both and neither. Everything at once and separate, present, and then gone, but indelible. Everything I have told you, little bird. All this reached for me and gathered me in its arms. Carried me across the gateway, and back to life.
I lifted my head to see the boatman looking at me, as I looked at him, a boundless sympathy between us. My mouth hung open, my jaw quivered, but no words came out. What words could there be? I wanted to grab his sleeves with both hands: Did you see what I’ve seen? That my heartbeat, like yours, is the heart of the world inside us? That everything touches every other thing, and love, even the darkest corners where no light lives? That we float, all of us, in the same water, on the threshold of eternity? And you and I, alive in it now. Right now.
Of course, with his kind gray eyes, he saw only a woman who’d jumped into the Thames off Putney Bridge, and escaped with her life.
When we reached the river stairs, he climbed from the boat and held out his hand to steady me. I offered him back his blanket, but he refused it.
“Almost forgot,” he said, pressing something into my palm. “When I pulled you up, you was holdin’ on to it for dear life.”
I looked down to see the carnelian ring, its perfect circle, returned.
When I opened my mouth to say something, he shook his head, no need. But I knew, looking in that good boatman’s face, that he was right. I would not jump off Putney Bridge again, or any bridge, not drink laudanum, not cut my wrists, but live to claim what joy was mine—the fierce, unruly, grim, defiant, soaring joy of being human.
And now, little bird, you too will do the same.
Sorrow, my sweet girl, will bring you to your knees, time and again, but so will beauty, so too love, enough to rise again, to try again, to live as all beings wish to live: free.
Acknowledgments
First thanks for this novel goes to Emma Parry, my wonderfully intuitive agent, who knew I was struggling to let go of Dickens, who’d captured my imagination for so long. It was the two hundredth anniversary of Frankenstein; Mary Shelley was everywhere. “What about Wollstonecraft?” she said. Who did, capture my imagination entirely, especially those eleven days between giving birth to her daughter and her own death from puerperal fever. How could one possibly say good-bye? What would she have her daughter know? But until Emma reminded me recently, I’d forgotten that when we had that first conversation, I’d just lost my own beloved mother, quite suddenly (though to a long illness), and that my seventeen-year old daughter, the youngest of my children, was getting ready to leave home. I see my mother in both my daughters (and my son), her
natural belief in equality that lived in every fiber of her being, as it did in Wollstonecraft’s. Of course it would be a mother-daughter story; I just didn’t know that when I started. But I think Emma did.
Still, taking on the iconic Mary Wollstonecraft—“the mother of feminism”—felt like an enormous responsibility. I wanted to shape her unruly life into a good story with just enough mess left in it. (We are nothing without our messiness.) Caroline Bleeke, my gifted editor, helped me do that with her gentle but exacting sense and sensibility, making the book better at every turn. I’m also grateful to Amelia Possanza and the whole Flatiron team for the great work they do for writers and their books, especially Sydney Jeon, Jordan Forney, Nancy Trypuc, Marlena Bittner, Keith Hayes, Kerry Nordling, Donna Noetzel, John Morrone, Emily Walters, Malati Chavali, Megan Lynch, and Bob Miller.
I also stand on the shoulders of giants, the great Wollstonecraft biographers: Janet Todd (Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life), Claire Tomalin (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft), Lyndall Gordon (Vindication), and Charlotte Gordon’s dual biography of mother and daughter, Romantic Outlaws. Each of them made Wollstonecraft come alive for me, in broad strokes and exquisite detail, leaving just enough cracks and clues in her story, and their unique versions of her, to find my own footing. But there’s no giant like Wollstonecraft herself to humble a writer. Her letters, novels, and other prose gave me an intimate glimpse of her intellect, but also her humanity—her human-ness—so full of contradiction and complexity, like all of us. To be sure, the best lines in the book are straight from her mouth and pen. I hope the ones that are mine do her justice.
Thanks to my once writing group, who read first chapters forever and seemed never to tire of it (at least they didn’t tell me so): Lynn Hofflund, Kim Philley, Erin McClure, but especially to Tish Thornton, my remarkable friend and editor-on-call, who’ll pick up the phone at the drop of a hat to debate the uses of the semicolon, or just as easily pivot to the meaning of everything. Tish was part of a reading group five of us started to stay grounded through the strangeness of the pandemic year. While I was finishing the novel, fretting, doing the usual weird writer stuff, we read War and Peace and then Middlemarch to each other over Zoom, every single word. Which certainly puts being a writer in perspective. And makes you reconsider the semicolon, not to mention dependent clauses and lots of other points of grammar, not to mention what shapes people, and history. The experience would not have been the same without the deep understanding and friendship of Elizabeth Tullis and Lori Benton.
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