The woman in the bed blinks. “The children?” He has a kind face, her husband. She has always thought so.
“The children,” he echoes. “Little Fanny, and the baby. Remember, they have been sent to stay with Mrs Reveley until…until you are well once more.”
She remembers, of course she remembers. Her daughter, Fanny, named in dearest memory of one by whose side she herself had kept helpless vigil so many years ago. Watching day and night while her sallow friend sickened and rallied and sickened once more. Watching, too, as the weak little creature her friend had birthed succumbed with barely a whimper, his gummy mouth limp against the wet nurse’s breast.
“The baby is dead,” the woman in the bed whispers.
“No, Mary,” William says. “Our daughter is strong and in good health. Do not weep for her sake, I beg you; she is in no danger.”
“The baby is dead,” she insists.
On the other side of the room, the Grey Lady speaks up. “It was Fanny’s baby who died, Mary, not yours.”
“And Fanny, too. Fanny is dead.”
“Yes, Fanny is dead,” the Grey Lady agrees. “But your daughters are both alive.”
Her husband pushes more words across the coverlet but the woman in the bed pays them no mind. “So many dead babies, and their poor mothers with them.” Tears scald her eyes. “Oh, for naught, for naught.”
On this matter, the Grey Lady remains silent.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
In Lisbon, the late November weather was more clement than what London might have offered, but Mary Wollstonecraft nevertheless harboured a deep chill in the marrow of her bones. She stood with her arms crossed, her back turned away from the bed where Fanny Blood—nay, Fanny Skeys, as her tombstone would newly have it—lay motionless and cold beneath the coverlet. If she had permitted herself a glance, Mary knew that she would see a yellow wasp perched on the dead woman’s brow, its forelegs bent as though in prayer. But she would not look. Around her finger, she curled and uncurled a lock of brown hair, recently snipped.
“If Skeys had but married her sooner,” Mary said bitterly. “If he had brought her across to Portugal a year or two ago rather than leave her behind to languish in London, her health might have been perfectly restored.”
Beside her, the Grey Lady tilted her chin. It was a gesture approaching acknowledgment more than agreement, and one Mary had come to find exceedingly irritating. “Fanny was consumptive for a long time,” the Grey Lady said. “An earlier marriage—an earlier pregnancy—might have equally exacerbated her condition.”
Mary exhaled sharply. “You cannot know this.”
“No, but I may decline to play such fateful games.”
Pressing her lips tightly together, Mary shook her head. Her heart felt empty, scoured out by this most recent blow. Surely, if she closed her eyes and allowed her imagination free rein, she might follow once more the footfalls of her sixteen-year-old self. Might step into that neat little house and meet afresh the slender and elegant girl who had instantly and irrevocably captured the entirety of her passion, of her desirous soul, with the turn of a gentle cheek and diffident flash of a smile.
And might Mary not then hold this girl in safer keeping than the world hence had done? Might they not set up a home together, alone, Fanny with her painting and clever seamstress fingers, and Mary able to find like employment perhaps, or perhaps even secure a teaching position? Might she not be permitted to then love Fanny as she truly wished, wholly and without censure or rejection, to feel that small, flushed hand clasped tight within her own, until their breaths jointly expired?
Instead of this. A fractured and disparate decade, so small a span, passed in such grievous haste.
“What will you do now?” the Grey Lady asked.
Mary wiped tears from her face. “Once matters here are settled, I expect I shall return to Newington Green—though I fear my sisters will have sorely neglected our little school in my absence. Everina does well enough if someone is nearby to drive her along, but Eliza…Eliza is a helpless thing.”
“Your own contribution to her state is not insignificant.”
Mary stiffened. “My contribution was to remove a near-deranged young mother from her oblivious husband lest she commit some dreadful harm to her own person. She did not wish to remain with him; you heard her speak it on several occasions.”
“She might not have wished to leave her infant daughter behind.”
“Do not scold me for that in which I was given no choice. If children were not deemed to be the property of husbands, how many more wives might seek to escape their arduous marriages?”
The Grey Lady tilted her chin. “I apologise. This is not the time to remonstrate on such subjects.”
“I could not know the baby would die. It was always my hope to reunite them once my sister was well.”
“That is true, but it provides no comfort to Eliza.”
Mary pulled the lock of Fanny’s hair even tighter around her finger until the tip darkened and swelled. To attend so frequently upon illness and death might be thought to numb a person utterly, but Mary had been left in a state of raw sensitivity. It was she who had nursed her abject, querulous mother throughout the months of her final lingering disease, changing dressings that did little more than hide the seeping necrotic flesh beneath, all the while managing her father’s ill-tempered impatience. It was upon her shoulders that care for poor, distraught Eliza had fallen—care and responsibility and blame for executing the only plan she thought viable, the sole desperate avenue of escape at their disposal.
And now Fanny, dearest Fanny, and her tiny newborn son.
Mary was exhausted, in her body and in her heart. “I cannot continue. Not without her.”
“And yet you will,” the Grey Lady said. “As you always have.”
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
“Has it grown dark?” the woman in the bed asks. “I cannot see you.”
“I am here, Mary,” the Grey Lady says. Her tone is smooth as velvet curtains.
Deeper, more strained voices entreat from the wings, but the woman in the bed pushes them aside. She will no longer be corralled by the demands of men.
“I am here,” the Grey Lady repeats.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
When she’d set off for St Paul’s to see her publisher that evening, Mary Wollstonecraft’s mood had been one of anxious despondency. As much as the decision grieved her, she would need to abandon her rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s recent attack on the French Revolution, on the principles and passionate character of a people determined to dismantle a pernicious monarchy. Who was she to tackle so protracted and presumptuous a project, one so removed from her usual territory of pedagogy, fiction and the criticism, however barbed and insightful, that she regularly contributed to the Analytical Review?
Joseph Johnson had been encouraging of the proposed pamphlet, certainly, and she was painfully aware that he’d already had her first pages printed in anticipation of their completion, but her mind now floundered within its own argument. Clamorous ideas buzzed and batted within the confines of her skull, refusing to be pinned to the page: feckless parents, irresponsible aristocrats and spoiled eldest sons—her own brother, Ned, came readily to mind—who inherited familial wealth yet neglected to care for poverty-struck sisters; the inherent privilege entrenched in class and gender that bred selfishness and injustice within men, and forced desperate women into marriages little better than legal forms of prostitution; the dire need for social and economic reform, rather than dependence upon charity, which did merely gratify wealthy sensitives seeking to congratulate themselves on their benevolence while continuing to indulge in the vices of inequity.
So vast a problem, so much of which to speak, and—most insistent among her thoughts—who was Mary Wollstonecraft, former governess, sometime author and literary critic, to write A Vindication of the Rights of Men?
Now, as she mounted the steps to her Georg
e Street home, Mary did so with clenched teeth and renewed vigour. Her hands shook as she peeled away her gloves and hung her beaver-fur hat on its stand. She was not at all surprised to find a familiar figure waiting in her study.
“You are returned early,” the Grey Lady remarked as Mary seated herself at her desk. “I thought you might have stayed for dinner.”
“I find myself quite without appetite for food.”
“Did Mr Johnson take your decision well?”
“Mr Johnson said that I should not struggle against my feelings. That I should indeed lay aside the work if that would better my happiness. That he would destroy all that had already been written and printed, and do so cheerfully.” Mary snorted. “Cheerfully was the precise word he used. For such a mutilation.”
The Grey Lady smiled. “All is well then, and you may continue with your other work. A review of that play you attended with Henry Fuseli, perhaps?”
At the mention of the name, Mary felt her stomach flutter. She released a deep breath and steeled herself. No matter how great their genius, no matter how seductive their whispers, certain Swiss artists could be given no place in her heart this night, nor for many nights to come.
“I will put nothing aside,” Mary said. “Effusions of the moment these pages might be, but the moment is of no small import.” Unhappy with its banishment, Fuseli’s visage flitted across her mind. Undaunted, she flicked it away. “Tell me, why should genuine passion be so well regarded when it flows from the paintbrush of a man, but not from the pen of a woman?”
“It is the way of things,” the Grey Lady said. “As those with means and power govern those without, that which is male governs all that is female.”
“It need not be so,” Mary countered. “France shines hope upon us, no matter the worn and tired nostalgia that Burke and his ilk parade as vaunted tradition. We should yet see a progressive society built upon talent and ambition, rather than unearned privilege. Why should it be our continued duty to repair an ancient castle, built in barbarous ages, of Gothic materials?”
“Do you say, we should allow such edifices to crumble?”
“I say…” Mary paused. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “We should bring them to rubble ourselves.”
The Grey Lady clasped gloved hands together at her waist. “I would very much like to see such a world as you describe.”
Mary picked up her pen and found the place among her papers where her thoughts had stumbled and trailed off earlier in the day. Frowning, she crossed out a line or two. Then she cleared her throat, dipped nib into ink and began anew, words flying from her as furious wasps provoked from their nest.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
She was called a hyena in petticoats, a philisophising serpent. She was accused of lacking reason, of seeking to poison and inflame the minds of the lower classes, of being too shallow a thinker.
Those at the Gentleman’s Magazine confessed themselves astonished that a fair lady might seek to assert the rights of men, remarking that they were always taught to suppose that the rights of women were the proper theme of the female sex.
By rights, they did not refer to those of education or self-determination.
While Romans governed the world, they pointed out, the women governed the Romans. The age of chivalry having thankfully not yet passed, women should content themselves with ruling from the boudoir—though it remained questionable that such a viper as Mary Wollstonecraft might gain for herself so coveted a position.
The rights of women, indeed! Oh ho, what fertile ground for sarcasm and jest!
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
Lips moving silently as she walked, Mary Wollstonecraft rehearsed the words she would soon say to Sophia Fuseli, sounding them for depth and clarity. Hers was an inarguably practical solution, a proposal that would surely suit all parties, and a rational one at that. Despite her many impassioned letters to the man, Mary suspected a recent cooling of Henry’s sensibilities and she required the situation between them to be resolved. Her mind would otherwise remain fragmented, her thoughts unmarshalled.
The printing of a second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had allowed Mary not only to correct some glaring errors of grammar and spelling, but to bolster arguments she feared too weak in the version Johnson had rushed to press this January—yet again! the Devil coming for the conclusion of a sheet before it was written!—but still she was unhappy. Although gratified by the book’s reception—more welcoming than her previous Rights of Man had enjoyed—a second volume remained to be written, her ideas expanded beyond the core theme of female education. If women were ever to be the equal of men, they would need to be treated thus, with responsibilities greater than coquetry, manners and marriage placed upon their dainty shoulders.
Why should they not aspire to autonomy? To their proper place within governance, commerce and the intellectual life of their society? A woman who had not power over her own self would remain forever a slave, and surely no true progressive argument could seek to deny universal rights to one half of the population…
Residual anger warming her cheeks, Mary paused to compose herself; she could not arrive in such a visible state of consternation.
Sophia Fuseli was already seated by the window when Mary was admitted into the modest but charmingly appointed parlour.
“Miss Wollstonecraft.” The younger woman scarcely smiled as she gestured towards a chair opposite. Her pretty face, those model features her husband so adored, remained stiff and unyielding. “May I offer you tea?”
Mary accepted both seat and beverage, though she perched nervously upon the edge of one and took little more than a sip of the other. Less than a quarter of an hour later, it was Sophia Fuseli whose complexion reddened and flushed. Her cup trembled on its saucer as she reached to place them on the table.
“You insult both my husband and his wife, Miss Wollstonecraft.” The woman’s tone was chilled, crisp as frosted glass. “And you make yourself a fool.”
“You misunderstand me,” Mary said. “I do not wish to share Henry with you in the manner of wife—”
“Kindly take your leave, Miss Wollstonecraft.”
But how could she, when Sophia was clearly confused as to her intentions—for why else would the woman take such prompt and livid offence? “Please, I do not mean to insult your marriage. My proposal arises solely from the sincere affection which I have for Henry, I can assure you. We have an intellectual affinity, he and I, and I plainly find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.”
“You shall have to find a means of living so.”
“But if we all inhabited the same household—”
“Will you not quiet your tongue?”
“Consider the practicalities, Mrs Fuseli, if nothing else. We are none of us people of great means; to combine resources and share expenses within one household—”
“Miss Wollstonecraft!” Sophia Fuseli rose up in one violent motion. She thrust a finger at Mary, who struggled to gain her feet as readily. “You shall leave my house this moment and never again stain its rooms—or my husband’s studio—with your presence. You are no woman of principle, to speak so boldly of your rights and yet seek to trample roughshod over mine. You are no woman at all, but a monster.”
Escorted to the street by the Fuselis’ housekeeper, Mary stumbled but a dozen steps before stopping to brace herself against a wall. Around her, London bustled through its afternoon. Pedestrians passed oblivious to her humiliation as the clatter of hooves on cobblestones, the wooden groan of coaches, assaulted her ears. Her heart was an empty, gnawing thing within her. She had lost Henry.
She had lost Henry.
Her scalp prickled with sudden regard. Blinking away tears, Mary looked about her. On the opposite side of the street, still and perfectly unjostled by the milling foot traffic, stood a tall woman wearing a hat dressed with ostrich feathers. The woman’s face was stern, reproving, and even at this
distance, Mary could glimpse the disappointment in those steely eyes.
Well? Though she but mouthed them, the Grey Lady’s words pealed loud as funeral bells in Mary’s mind. Did I not warn you, Mary Wollstonecraft? Did I not say?
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
If her heart was a cage, she was unduly careless of its latch.
Fleeing the whispers and sneers of London, she sought refuge in Paris scant weeks before the execution of the king, and so became witness not to her beloved revolution but to the bloody terror that would claim it. Helpless to do aught but write, she took up her pen with fervour, heedless of the danger in her very English observations. In her politics, in her words, Mary Wollstonecraft was fearless.
But her heart was a cage, and its door remained open long after Fuseli had slipped featherless from its hold. Open, inviting another who alighted upon the flimsy bars and sang of love and desire and the untasted delight of sweat-salted skin. Another who skipped inside to settle for a while, or at least to give appearance of settling, his brash American plumage so bright and strange that Mary found herself wholly captivated—in her mind and soul and finally, wondrously, in her body.
◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊∆◊
“She is exquisite, is she not?” Mary Imlay, as she now styled herself, held her newborn daughter against her breast. “Ten perfect fingers in miniature, and look! Eyes the very shade of my darling Gilbert’s. Surely now that our Fanny is here, he will stay in Le Havre with us. Whoever could resist such eyes as these?”
Cranky Ladies of History Page 5