Love and Fury E-Book

Samantha Silva

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 438

Beschreibung

'Now, daughter, I'm to tell you a story to coax you into the world...'London, 1797. Mary Wollstonecraft awaits the arrival of the midwife who will help bring her child into the world, and support her through the testing eleven days that follow.After the birth, both mother and daughter fight for survival. Even as Mary's strength wanes, she urgently weaves the tale of her life to bind her frail Little Bird close.Wollstonecraft's journey to vindicate the rights of women spanned Europe and broke the conventions of the time. Amid the triumph and loss, she blazed a trail and passed that legacy on to her child, the future Mary Shelley.Love and Fury reclaims the all too brief moment when the stories of mother and daughter overlapped. It is a lyrical and moving tribute to an influential thinker and a remarkable woman.Praise for Love and Fury:'A luminous love-letter' Annabel Abbs, author of Frieda'Intensely moving . like watching newly-colorized archive film burst into life-I knew the story, but I never knew the story like this' Bee Rowlatt, author of In Search of Mary'Here is a novel set on the border between living and dying, with a heroine so powerful she conquers all territories, including this one-and she conquered me, too. Love and Fury thrums with beauty, pain, sorrow, wonder, tragedy, triumph, and life. What an extraordinary and transformative book this is' Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson'Love and Fury sparks with a thrilling jolt of electricity, reanimating the epic legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley . a spun-gold tale both sweeping and intimate' Afia Atakora, author of Conjure Women

Leseprobe

LOVE AND FURY

Samantha Silva

For all our daughters

You who were darkness warmed my flesh

where out of darkness rose the seed.

Then all a world I made in me;

all the world you hear and see

hung upon my dreaming blood.

‘Woman to Child’, Judith Wright

CONTENTS

Title PageDedicationEpigraphMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WMrs BMary WAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorBy Samantha Silva Copyright

MRS B

30th August 1797

Mrs Blenkinsop arrived at a neat circle of three-story houses at the edge of North London, surprised to find her charge at the open door, holding her ripe belly with both hands and ushering her inside with an easy smile and no apparent terror of the event to come. The home and its mistress, in a muslin gown and indigo shawl, smelt of apple dumplings. Though they hadn’t met, the woman took the midwife’s hand and led her past half-furnished rooms, introducing them as she went, waving away stacks of books on a Turkish carpet, anticipating shelves, and the occasional wood box and leather trunk, as ‘the old life still finding its place in the new.’ Mrs Blenkinsop had seen far more disarray in her time, and liked the simple touches, cut flowers in every room and a single oval portrait, just a face (that looked very much like the missus herself) gazing out from over a mantel. In the garden out back, which was enjoying its first late-summer bloom, the midwife caught sight of a little 10girl, three years old, she guessed, playing with a young woman who seemed to be telling her the names of plants.

It was a fine house, with fresh white walls and open windows, tall as Heaven, inviting a cordial breeze that followed them down a hall, up two steep staircases, and into the airy bedroom where the missus led her, answering each of Mrs Blenkinsop’s questions with an uncanny calm: her waters had started as a trickle but ended as a gush as she’d stood in the kitchen that morning. She’d felt a dull ache and scattered pains, with no sensible pattern, but she wasn’t unwell, and remembered eating, only two hours before, a small breakfast, which she hoped was enough nourishment to sustain her for the labour to come.

‘I don’t imagine there’ll be much for you to do, Mrs Blenkinsop, but sit by and wait for Nature to do what your art cannot.’

‘No objection by me.’ The midwife put her old bag and bottle of gin on the floor.

‘I can’t abide the lying-in. I was up next day with Fanny.’

‘Sweet girl in the garden just now?’

‘Yes, with our dear Marguerite. Both too sweet for the world, I’m afraid. But Fanny wasn’t shy coming into it.’

The midwife took off her brown cape and folded it over a chair. ‘Well, I’ve never seen two births the same. Not in all my time. But we’ll hope for the best.’

‘I told Mr Godwin I’d be down for dinner tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Let’s have a look, then,’ said the midwife, eager to attend to the business at hand. ‘D’you mind if I take off my cap?’

‘Of course, Mrs Blenkinsop. We don’t stand on ceremony here.’

‘“Mrs B’” ought to do fine,’ she said, taking some almond oil from her bag and rubbing her hands clean with it. ‘Shortens things up.’11

‘Mrs B, then.’

A servant appeared with a pressed apron for the midwife, which she wrapped around her own dumpling of a stomach and tied at the back. She removed the woman’s slippers, squeezing the arch of each foot before lifting her legs onto the bed, then laid her palms on the great taut womb, and closed her eyes as a way of gathering all her senses to feel the child inside. Satisfied that the baby had fallen down proper and headfirst, she sat on the edge of the bed to raise the missus’s knees to a slight bend, rolled her gown to the crest of them, pulled off her underthings, and lightly pressed her legs apart. They had the give of a woman who’d done this before.

As the midwife inquired into her case – dilated only one finger’s worth across – the pregnant woman exhaled a slow breath and talked to the ceiling.

‘I told Mr Godwin over breakfast I had no doubt of seeing the animal today, but that I must wait for you to guess the hour. I think he was somewhat alarmed at the prospect of it all, but relieved when I sent him away. Though I promised I’d send word throughout the day.’

‘Then it’ll just be the two of us, for now.’ The midwife wiped her hands on her apron. The custom of gathering a gaggle of female relatives and friends, as far as she was concerned, did nothing to serve the cause, or the patient. None of them, in her experience, could agree on a best course going forward or backward: was it oystershell powder for weak digestion, or crushed chamomile flowers? Cayenne pepper or laudanum for morning sickness? A ‘cooling’ or a ‘heating’ diet throughout? (Mrs B had seen too many women living like a horse on grassy food and water.) If a woman’s pains weren’t strong enough, her 12attendants promoted large quantities of strong liquors, and if very strong, even more. The only thing worse, in her mind, was the calling of a doctor, who was always quick with the forceps and short on patience with a woman in pain.

‘We ought to have a good long time together, looks as if,’ said Mrs B, rolling the woman’s gown back over her calves.

‘Are you sure?’

‘We must have a little patience.’

‘Those were my mother’s words to me as she was dying.’

‘’Tis true, comin’ or goin’.’ The midwife gave her a quick pat on the bodice of her dress. ‘Let’s get you out of this into something easier.’

The woman signalled toward a wardrobe, where Mrs B found a clean, pressed chemise, not a single heavy bedgown in sight, typical for lying-in but much too warm. She was of the view that nothing should be added to dress or bedclothes that the patient wasn’t accustomed to in perfect health. When she turned back, the woman was on her feet, arms surrendered to the ceiling, at ease in her body. Her hair was all soft chestnut curls, brown eyes to match, her figure like a bulging flower vase.

‘Not to worry,’ said the midwife, undoing the gown at the back and coiling it up over her belly, head, and arms. ‘Everything’s in a fair way. You’ll meet her soon enough.’

In seconds the new garment replaced the old. ‘Her?’

‘Mmm.’

‘But we were expecting “Master William.” We’ve been expecting him from the first.’

All the bending and up-and-down had Mrs B blotchy in the face. She stopped to blow a few strands of hair away, and saw the surprise on her patient’s face.13

‘Everyone does. Expect a boy. But you’re fleshy all over, not just out front. Feet nice and warm. Skin smooth as a plum.’ The midwife put her hands on her hips to squint at the woman’s eyes. ‘Pupils closed up and small.’ She put her nose in the air and took a satisfied sniff. ‘But it’s that smell of apple dumplings gives her away. You’ve a yen for sweets. That means a girl. Who’ll take her time with you, upon my word.’

Mrs B bent over for her bag. She set the gin and satchel on a near table, and began unpacking.

‘Another girl,’ said the woman almost under her breath, ‘in this world.’

Something in the cadence of her voice made Mrs B turn to take her in. The missus had stepped back into her slippers and redraped her shawl. She was very still, hands circling her swollen belly, staring down through the thin white linen with a wistful smile on her lips, as if saying hello and goodbye all at once. She’d looked so unafraid of everything until then: an older woman, late thirties maybe, experienced, with the way of the world about her. The midwife thought most women made far too much of the difficulties and inconveniences of childbearing, that it was a natural condition – not a disease at all – and ought to be treated as such. The woman in front of her now seemed not like them at all. No, she seemed the sort to look the task in the face, let Nature take charge, but help it along where she could, a short country walk, she guessed, gentle ride in a carriage, walk up and down the stairs, or busy herself in the early going with the distraction of dumplings, the spiced scent of a groaning cake. But standing there, some softness bled through the woman’s strength.

‘Shall I call you “Mrs G”, then?’ asked the midwife. ‘Just to 14shorten things up, same for both of us?’

‘Mrs G?’

‘Or Mrs Godwin, if you like.’

‘Mrs Godwin? Who the devil is that?’ the woman said with a bright laugh.

Mrs B looked at her, confused.

‘I’m sorry. It’s only that I don’t think of myself that way. “Mrs Godwin.” Though it’s been four months already.’

Mrs B made the count of months in her head. She was a Christian woman but didn’t judge. ‘Well, then, new married. Congratulations, I guess, are in order.’

‘Except that it goes against everything I believe.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Marrying at all.’

Mrs B was accustomed to women in her state saying things they might otherwise not, especially as the pains came closer together – sometimes things they would later regret, causing them to swear her to silence. She had heard secrets and gossip, pleas and gibberish, screaming, moaning, crying and curses, but never a declaration so clearheaded as this. Mrs Godwin seemed to be staring at her, almost daring her to disapprove. But Mrs B only smiled, in a way that didn’t show her teeth.

‘Well, we’ve a bit of a wait on our hands,’ she said, setting out the last of her tincture jars. ‘What shall we do with it?’

‘I asked Mr Godwin to send me a newspaper, a novel, any book. Some amusement to while the hours away.’

‘Maybe tell her your story, why don’t you?’ said the midwife, nodding toward the missus’s womb. ‘Just for her.’

‘Why do you think she’s taking her time?’

‘Ooh, the darkness can be a comfort, I s’pose,’ said Mrs B. 15‘It’s the darkness binds you to her, and her to you. S’where we all begin, don’t we?’

When the missus didn’t answer, Mrs B turned to see a shadow sweep across her face as she gazed outside, pulling her shawl close around. Mrs B took her as chilled, and stepped toward the open window.

‘Let me close that for you.’

‘No!’

Startled by the sharp edge in her voice, Mrs B let go of the tall panes, and felt her own fleshy shoulders drop. She was tired, there was no way around it, eleven days straight, the thrumming chaos of the Westminster Lying-In Hospital, and now this, before a day of rest. Rhythm, routine, as long as was possible, she thought. She could bear up one more time, she told herself, letting the soft breeze dry the water pooling heavy at the back of her eyes. She wouldn’t say a word, never would. It wasn’t her place. She was tired, that’s all.

‘I like the feel of it on my face,’ the missus said, by way of apology, Mrs B supposed. ‘I cannot abide still air. I can’t breathe.’

‘Open’s fine, till you tell me different.’ Mrs B set her shoulders and returned to the table. She poured a dram of gin from the bottle.

‘You think she can hear me?’ asked the woman.

‘Oh yes. Same as the whoosh-whoosh of your heart. Has done, all along. Why, you and her’ve known each other a good long while already.’ She held out the small glass, an offering. ‘And with God’s blessing, you’ll have a good long time to come.’

The pregnant woman took the glass, held it high, and swirled it, watching the gin catch the light.

‘And you think I can talk her into the world?’16

‘Well, there’s no talking her out of it.’

The woman’s eyes smiled. She tipped her head back to drink down the gin in one swallow, closing her eyes for the burn of it down the throat, which seemed to fortify her. She put the glass in Mrs B’s hand, cupping her own slender fingers around the midwife’s.

‘Call me Mary,’ she said, as if restored.

‘I am Mary Wollstonecraft.’

17

MARY W

Another girl. In this world. Like so many passages, it begins with water. Not the wide grey water of chopping seas, not pulling tides or rocky shores, not harbours. This water pools on the floorboards beneath me, clear liquid, splashing like an ephemeral fall from my own body, sputtering news of your imminent arrival. Mrs Blenkinsop trundles across the circle in my direction, it must be her: good round face and ruddy cheeks, summer cloak flapping behind, clutching a leather bag and glass bottle to her ample chest. Her white ruffle cap’s fallen down, showing her woolly hair (holding more to red than grey) swirling in a great bun, illuminated by the tender sun of the late summer morning. When she opens her mouth to speak, I see that her teeth are crooked and yellow, and that she resists smiling because of it. But her eyes are insensibly kind; a primordial mud-green, like a flashing creek after a storm, with twigs and leaves, sediment and rain all mixed together, flecks of light dancing on its rippling surface. Detritus, and all that is necessary for life. 18

Which is enough to set us on our long, strange journey together.

At the start she warns me that I won’t be relieved of my load anytime soon, though she assures me I’ll be safely delivered, head foremost, and all is as it ought to be. Some part of me believes in this seasoned midwife so thoroughly that when she announces your sex (with no fanfare at all) I am won to it like a trumpet call – réveillez-vous! ‘Awake!’ she says to me, to the daughter who stirs within. In an instant you spring from my imagination, entire. Never mind those who espouse the art of getting pretty girl babies, who would’ve had me gaze on cherry lips and lily-whites throughout my pregnancy, sitting quietly doing needlepoint, taking care not to think thoughts at all. Indeed, many in my state take up the cause of a nursery in the months before their confinement, if not the refurbishment of an entire house, always with an urgency that resides in our most primitive animal natures. Burrow deep, spin a steel-silk orb, feather the nest. For my part I cannot unpack a trunk without a thought bounding in, a rush to nearby fields and forests, a cold lake-bath, or the desk, the paper, the pen. There is no confinement that can hold me, no drawing of the curtains, but wide-open windows throwing fresh country light across the page, illuminating the blackest ink.

Now, daughter, I’m to tell you a story to coax you into the world. When Mrs B says it’s the darkness that binds us, I know she means nothing by it; they are words to ease my time. But the River Fleet, in the far distance out my window, demands that I look. More water, flowing across time, beyond pastoral fields and nursery gardens that remind me of the villages of my girlhood and the best part of my youth, out past the occasional brickworks that remind me of the worst. Here, at the edge of 19Somers Town, and the farthest reach of my vision, the river runs clear under an ancient elm with great gnarled arms. It bows its graceful canopy as if to mark the water’s progress to St. Pancras Church, where, this spring, that same old elm burst with frothy yellow buds that swayed with the wind, and bowed to us, your father and me. The day that I married, defying my own nature and betraying all I held dear.

My womb quickening with you.

It was the thirty-eighth anniversary of my birth, the day I chose, and Mr Godwin consented, to begin this life together, this new world we’ve made for you. I didn’t tell him, but am keenly aware that every year, without knowing it, we also mark the anniversary of our death. For however untroubled the Fleet is here, in this midlife paradise, I know that by the time it joins the Thames, it will be sullied by the bloody scraps of butchers’ stalls, the bloated corpses of cats and dogs, dead flowers, and human excrement.

My own story is no prettier, far from it. There are triumphs in it, a scattering of joys, but the beautiful sits side by side with the grotesque; I cannot separate them. All the brutality is there, the hurt I’ve suffered at the hands of others, but so, too, my own mistakes, missteps, and missed understandings. I have held it close, afraid to unleash it into the world. So how could I tell you, my almost-born daughter, the story of that vivid darkness as if it would persuade you of this place? Would you survive the deepest bone-secrets of our brief shared being? You inside me. Me inside you.

No, I think not.

But then true labour comes, quick and hard.

‘Perhaps it’s time to call for Mr Godwin, when he finishes 20his supper,’ I tell Mrs B.

She gives a note to the housemaid to deliver to him, and asks that some fresh butter be sent up. She helps me to the bed, where I’m to kneel, sit, crouch, lie down, as the pains permit. When the butter comes, she stretches my loins to ease the way for your head. I can hear Godwin’s footfalls up and down the hall outside, imagine him wringing his hands. He knocks on the door, but I can’t hear his exchange with Mrs B. I want to call his name, to reassure him, but can’t find my voice.

The closer the pains, the more I grow quiet and withdraw into myself. Mrs B mops my brow and whispers into my ear that a child cannot be far behind.

And then at last you slip from my body.

Mrs B tips you upside down and slaps your feet to wake you into the world. But the moment lasts longer than it should, and I begin to doubt. Then you gasp for air, at last, and live, not with a wail so much as a chirp and squeak I think only I can hear.

Oh little bird!

Your father bursts into the room at the sound of my giddy relief – was I laughing? He startles at the sight of you naked and trembling in Mrs B’s hands.

‘Is it—’

‘Breathing, sir, she is.’

‘Oh, darling,’ he says, coming to my side. ‘A little girl.’ He half sits on the bed and presses his forehead to mine. His joyful tears, my ragged hair matted against my forehead, as Mrs B cuts the umbilical cord and washes you with all the ceremony of scrubbing a turnip just plucked from the ground.

‘Made us wait for you a good long time, yes you did,’ she 21says, sponging your tiny face and chest.

But I know I have waited for you, for this, all my life.

‘Let’s give your limbs some liberty, shall we?’ Mrs B wraps you loosely in cotton cloth and delivers you into my arms. I free the blanket even more, to survey the whole of you, count your fingers, your toes. I can see in your father’s eyes that you aren’t what he expected, or what our gentle confederacy of perfections rarely admits: a child at birth is a shocking thing. Your skin is coated, as if with wax the colour of jaundice, so thin it bares the atlas of dark veins beneath. Instead of feathers you have fine white down, barely visible, all over your body; instead of wings, arms like spindles, held tight to your heaving rib cage, not much bigger than your father’s palm, which he holds against your quick-beating heart.

The love, instantaneous!

Mrs B tells me to hold you to my breast, but with your eyelids too swollen to open, your lips unaccustomed to the ways of sucking, your little beak searches but cannot find me. I see the worry in her eyes; she needn’t say so. You’re too small, your lungs work too hard, each breath a jagged try. But I would tell her I will not let you die, my own life force now inextricably tied to yours, a thousand times knotted together. And though we cannot choose which day we are born, into what time or place, a day chooses us. Never forget, little bird, that the day that chose you comes at the end of a month when a comet blazed across London’s skies, heralding your arrival.

Another girl, in this world!

And so I will tell you the story to fill you up and bind you to this wondrous vale, if you stay with us, little bird. Please stay. I will tell you the moments that begin and end me – because 22we are made of them all – strung like pearls in time, searching always for where the new circle begins its turn, the place of our next becoming. Where the line becomes an arc, and curves.

MRS B

31st August 1797

‘Mary W safe delivered at 11 hours 20 minutes last Evenin of a daughter after a long travail. Placenta not yet delivered,’ Mrs Blenkinsop wrote in her pocket diary when the patient finally slept for a few moments. Mr Godwin refused to set down the child, but sat in a chair pulled up close to the bed with their ‘little bird’ tight in his arms. Mrs B thought she ought to rethink him, after her first impression last night when he’d knocked on the door to inquire whether they ought not call a doctor, given the unexpected length of the labour. He’d been told by friends at dinner, and could confirm, having once read in a book, that it is the fashion to call a doctor or at least a male accoucheur to assist, to have the benefit of those with real medical training.

‘Not at all necessary, sir. I prefer to trust in Nature,’ said Mrs B. ‘Great and marvellous is the goodness of Providence.’

‘I am an atheist, Mrs Blenkinsop. That is of no use to me.’

Mrs B had never met an atheist, but she had encountered 24nervous men. In her experience, the bigger the brain, the greater the worry. She judged, by the way Mr Godwin wrung his hands as he spoke, that this was his first birth. He seemed an awkward man, like a stiff chair that hadn’t been sat on enough – the opposite of her own husband, whose life force had always pulsed in his large, rugged hands. Mr Blenkinsop, whom she’d tried to put out of her mind these last days.

Still, Mr Godwin was right that it was the custom nowadays, this sending for men, even when it might be no more than a common labour. It would be one thing if they were as old as she, with as much practical experience. Instead Mrs B saw mostly boyish pretenders who, having attended an anatomy course and seen one or two dissections of female bodies, believed themselves experts in the field, as if they’d invented it themselves. Nothing filled her with more dread than the sight of a chamois leather bag opened to reveal its forceps, perforators, blunt hook, and a pair of bone cutters. She had yet to meet a doctor who believed that doing nothing was the best approach.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Blenkinsop,’ said Mr Godwin, patting his glistening forehead with a cambric handkerchief. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

‘Nothing taken, sir. The waiting’s hard, I know, but there’s no cause for worry. None at all.’

She’d seen the way he burst into the room immediately after the birth and sat at the edge of his wife’s bed, right up against her hip, how they pressed their foreheads together, knit their fingers. While she’d attended to the just-born child, scrubbed away the scurf with warm water and wine and put a flannel cap on her head, she couldn’t help hearing Mr Godwin speak to his wife of a joy he’d never known; how sheltered he’d been 25before knowing her, and how wrong to let a Miss Pinkerton pursue him of late; how sorry he was for any pain he’d caused her because she must never doubt his love for her, and here was proof of their love, this little girl. As if a child had never been born on this good earth.

Mrs B was reluctant to ask him to leave his post by his wife’s bed, but Mary looked to be in the afterthroes, which she took to mean that the placenta was soon to follow.

‘It’s not finished, then? She’s not out of danger?’ Mr Godwin asked in a furtive whisper.

‘There’s no danger, sir, just Nature, taking its time.’

He suggested, more gingerly than before, and with more respect, that they might call a doctor at any point she thought it necessary. She squinched her eyes in agreement, which seemed to satisfy him, but he only consented to leave the room when Mrs B allowed him to take the child with him. Just for a little while.

‘Watch over her, darling,’ Mary said with a weak turn of her head.

‘I promise,’ he said, and forced himself from the room, their eyes not leaving each other’s until the last possible moment.

Despite two hours of effort, the afterbirth refused to budge. Mrs B tried her old recipe of hyssop, wild mint, pennyroyal, and balm, good for easing gripes in the belly and cleansing impurities from the womb. Hyssop could even bring away a dead child, but mostly it helped beckon the soft, warm placenta, whole and unto itself, to slide into the midwife’s waiting hands. The less she intervened, the less blood would be lost, she knew, but there was a boundary of time, and they were near it.

When the herbs failed to move things along, Mrs B gave 26the cord a gentle tug, then rubbed and pressed on Mary’s belly.

The patient, at the start, was uncomplaining, even cheerful. Never mind her long and arduous labour, Mary now radiated elation at being delivered of her daughter. She was enthralled with her ‘little bird,’ and couldn’t wait for Fanny to meet her new sister. The matter of the placenta seemed an inconvenience she was anxious to have behind her, so she might hold her new babe in her arms, and urge her to suck. This, she’d told Mrs B, she believed in above all things – that the best sustenance for a newborn child was its mother’s own milk, and the love that flowered between them. But Mary began to tire, and the boundary of time drew closer.

‘Will it come on its own?’ she asked Mrs B. ‘Why isn’t it coming?’

‘I think your placenta’s a bit shy.’

‘That would be the only thing shy about me.’

‘It’s not just yours, it’s hers too. Belonged to both of you.’ Mrs B thought that talking was the best way to ease Mary’s mind. ‘It’s like a tree, I think,’ she said. ‘How the placenta makes the roots, and the cord is the trunk that grows from the roots, and your little girl is the fruits and flowers of all that.’

‘I’d like her to be a tree of her own,’ said Mary.

‘Why shouldn’t she be, then?’

‘You have a poetic soul, Mrs B.’ Mary squeezed out a smile and laid her head on the pillow with a sigh.

Mrs Blenkinsop told her to have a little rest, said they’d take it up again when she woke. She knew she must alert Mr Godwin to the risk of infection, however unlikely, given that he’d not stopped pacing the hall, and every twenty minutes asked for news through the door. She still believed, by faith and experience, that Nature would take its course, given time. 27

‘It’s hard to think clearly,’ Mr Godwin said, rubbing his temple.

‘We could wait till morning, sir.’ She was careful not to mention God again.

‘But waiting has its own dangers, yes?’

The swaddled child chirped low in her cradle. She seemed to grow weaker by the hour. Mrs B could tell that her little cries nearly broke Mr Godwin.

‘We’ve a French Dr Poignand, from the hospital. Maybe it’s for the best.’

Mr Godwin looked from the cradle to his sleeping wife, his tall forehead collapsing into folds. Mrs B had seen it before, a husband wrestling with his helplessness. Men believed in action above all.

‘What would the missus want? Maybe think of that.’

‘Yes,’ he said, pressing his kerchief three times across his brow. ‘What would Mary do?’ Mrs B could see him thinking it through, never taking his eyes off his wife. ‘To think that not much more than a year ago I believed in my solitariness with the greatest vehemence. There was not a woman in the world worth giving up the life I kept very much for myself, to do and think and write and dine and sleep exactly as I wanted. Marriage, I believed an intolerable oppression, a prison, a compromise I would never make. I was … delineated, and I liked it that way. And now? I can hardly find the line between us. Her thoughts are mine. Her feelings, mine. Our difficulties, ours. I am a different man because of her, Mrs Blenkinsop.’ He looked squarely at the midwife in a way men rarely did. ‘My love for Mary has freed me from the prison that was my life. And I cannot comprehend going on without her. What man I would then be.’ 28

Mrs B nodded. There were words he’d said that she didn’t know, but she had the sense of the thing, and was touched by him telling her. In the hundreds of births she’d attended, she could not remember a single man baring his whole soul. Pray, yes. Weep, yes. Punch a wall, she’d seen that too. But never this. She tried to imagine her own husband, what he might say, in far fewer words.

No, she told herself, don’t think of that. She must keep in the room.

Mr Godwin held the handkerchief to his lips and regarded his wife with a look of despair.

‘She would want to live, Mrs Blenkinsop. For her daughters. But I need her to live … for me.’

Mrs B kept both hands bearing down on the missus’s belly, at Dr Poignand’s instruction. Mary moaned and writhed, her hair stringy with sweat. In moments she fainted altogether, which the midwife counted as a blessing. When conscious, she tried to lift her head to look between her legs. Mrs B was determined that Mary not see the horror down below, the bloody mess, the doctor up to his elbow inside her, peeling the placenta, piece by piece, from her womb. The pain, she knew, was worse than childbirth itself.

Mrs B knew a good deal about pain. She was childless herself, not for lack of trying, but that was long ago, so long she hardly remembered what trying was like, though she never forgot the wanting. In the early years, as apprentice to a country midwife, she found herself jealous of the pain that childbirth brought, though she never told a soul. How willing she would have been to suffer it, had she a child to show for it in the end, 29just one, that’s all she’d asked of Him. Instead, over time she convinced herself that God had spared her from her own travail that she might serve other women in theirs, and with that, her desire gave way to duty, her jealousy, to joy observed. But to pain, she became obedient mistress. To her way of thinking, it wasn’t enough to call a birth ‘lying-in,’ or ‘groaning,’ or ‘crying-out,’ as if a woman could be measured by the amount of noise she made. No, pain had a thousand likenesses, each as different as rough weather, every variation and never two days the same. She had seen women claw at their bedclothes, beat their own thighs, and try to climb the walls in hopes of escape.

But this was pain of another reach.

‘Look at me,’ said Mrs B, pointing to her chin. The midwife disapproved of Poignand’s method, of doctors who believed if there was room enough for a child in the womb, surely there was room for a hand. But she had sympathised with Mr Godwin wanting to do something, anything, that might turn the tide in his wife’s favour. She’d watched him from the window, frantic at being unable to find a carriage in the middle of the night, set off almost at a run for Parliament Street where the doctor lived. She wondered if she’d been too tired to press her point, but it was out of her hands now. Mr Godwin’d returned shortly before dawn with Poignand, who sprung to action, refusing even almond oil to cleanse his hands.

Mrs B found it hard to look herself. ‘Keep your eyes right here,’ she said to Mary, tapping the round button of her chin.

Mary, in a delirium, tried again to lift her head, to form her parched lips into words, but couldn’t. It was as if she’d lost her voice altogether, Mrs B thought, with everyone else talking for her. She squeezed some drops of water from a cloth into Mary’s mouth. 30

‘What is it, dear? Tell me.’

‘I want to die, truly,’ Mary whispered, ‘but I cannot leave her … I am determined.’

Mrs B pressed the cool cloth to Mary’s brow and clutched her hand. ‘Then don’t leave her,’ she said.

‘Both hands on the belly, Blenkinsop,’ said Poignand. ‘And can we not give the poor woman some laudanum?’ By now he was sweating too.

‘I promised her, Doctor. No laudanum.’

Mrs B thought she felt Mary squeeze her hand back. She leaned down to her ear. ‘It’ll soon be over, Mary, God willing. Think of your new little girl.’

But Mary had faded away again, and couldn’t hear. Mrs B had seen it before. The pain with no name, no sound, neither screams nor breath. A prayer no more use than the tip of a chin.

31

MARY W

Little bird. My true life begins not with my birth, but with a death, the shock of which will draw a line in my life that separates everything that’s gone before from all that lies ahead. I was thirteen years old, fiery but unformed, feared the wrath of my parents, hated my brother and my life, loved the countryside and my sweet spaniel, Betsy, who feared nothing, knew only joy.

We’d moved to the little village of Walkington, which, compared with the stink of Spitalfields, I was sure must be Paradise, or as close to it as I’d ever come. Best of all, I’d met a girl, in nearby Beverley, who I was quite sure had all one should ever want in life, and was all anyone should want to be. This day was Jane Arden’s birthday, and the hope that’d sustained me was that I’d be invited to her party. I’d had my one good dress, such as it was, washed and pressed for a week, hanging on a nail at the back of my door, with my pinchbeck quizzing glass, dangling from its velvet ribbon, looped around its collar, my single accoutrement. I’d waited every day for a letter to come, 32been on my best behaviour, not argued, and done my chores in hopes Mama would let me go should the longed-for invitation come. But it hadn’t.

Then my brother crossed me again, and I couldn’t help myself. He was the oldest, best-loved, do-no-wrong Ned, but I knew his secret. My fingers clenched the gathered corners of the kerchief I took from his room and now I stole past the village gates, Betsy cantering beside me. When the bare kiss of spring grazed my cheek, I set down the tied kerchief, pried off my boots, and peeled away my worsted stockings. I knotted them twice around my waist, wondering why all clothing was cumbersome to me, my chemise like a winding sheet, never mind my practice corset, my skirts. My spaniel crouched, then lunged at my feet, beckoning me to keep walking. Papa had tried for a year to make her his hunting dog, but she’d yelp at the blast of gunshots, bury her nose in the hedgerow, and run away when he raised his boot. Betsy was mine now, as loyal a friend as I had (perhaps my only friend, if Jane didn’t prove true), and freed from the necessity of recovering dead birds, she’d become an enthusiast in all things, even tromping on the year’s first columbine, worried about nothing at all.

I started off again, my rage at Ned propelling me, and counted my steps, which is how I measured whether my legs had grown, because there was talk in town of a desirable height for a woman, and I was sure I’d end up too short or too tall, but never just right. My body changed like a brewing storm, every day something new and unwelcome. Not so Jane Arden, whose skin had not a mark on it, where I was a map of imperfections: knobby knees, great white knuckles, freckles all over. She was the open, rolling countryside of those Yorkshire Wolds; I, the 33bulbous rocks and uneven ground beneath my feet. I imagined her parlour the best in all of Beverley. Even her French was impeccable, her grammar irreproachable, and I, a pretender, with dull pens my brother Ned refused to fix for me.

I confess I even wished her father were my father, for I couldn’t separate Jane from John Arden, with their noble noses and keen grey eyes. For weeks I’d secreted myself in the back row at his scientific lectures, pretending to be a Beverley girl. He spoke of things beyond all my knowing, of electricity and gravity, of ‘animalcules,’ invisible to the eye, that are borne by the air and reach all the way inside of us. I could see she was his daughter by the way she looked at him with pride from the front row, only occasionally staring out the window, when I could see her long neck and regal profile. Finally, with jangling nerves, I introduced myself to her, Jane of the fine manners. Wanting to impress, I pretended to know things I’d only just learnt. But she smiled as she took my cold hand in her gloved one. Here was a buzzing electrical current; here, gravitational pull. This, then, was the science of my heart. I had a sudden determination to overcome any obstacle to possess her friendship. I wrote her my first letter that night, and one every day after, with a third as many replies from her, polite enough. She didn’t know that it burned like a bonfire – a bone fire – inside me, the desperate wishing for her life to be mine, or for some sign of returned and equal affection, some inkling that she found me worthwhile.

When she asked me to sit beside her at a demonstration of her father’s portable scientific instruments, I couldn’t contain my joy. I thought Mama only assented because she, too, longed for us to be part of the Beverley crowd somehow. Jane sat in her chair, her hands folded as neat as a napkin in her lap. I 34tried to do the same, but kept inching toward the edge of my seat as John Arden revealed one instrument after another: an equinoctial sundial in a fish-skin case, a folding botanical microscope you could slip into your pocket, a compass with a steel needle ‘blued’ at North.

When Jane led me by the hand and introduced me to him after his lecture, I saw up close how sympathetic his eyes were, but sad too. I’d heard whispers that his wife had succumbed to tuberculosis when Jane was small, and that he’d raised her to young womanhood by himself. He looked at Jane with the same pride that she did him, didn’t talk down to her, but straight across, as if she were capable of any understanding. He cocked his head when he asked her a question, waiting to hear her opinion. Had he covered the material too quickly? Too much history? Enough explanation of each instrument’s capabilities? I felt, by the way he shook my hand firmly, that Jane’s endorsement of me was good enough for him. We lingered over his cabinet of curiosities, laid out on green velvet, which I was careful not to touch. When Jane excused herself to say goodbye to a group of girls near the door, I didn’t know whether to follow.

‘Here,’ said John Arden, offering a small magnifying glass from his collection, beautiful in its simplicity. ‘Look through this, and tell me what you see.’ He held out the walnut he’d used in his demonstration.

I pulled the glass close to my eye, but it made the world all wrong.

‘Move it near and far until things come into focus. It’s different for everyone, since our own eyes are a convex lens, infinite shapes, no pair alike.’

I soon found the walnut shell in full relief. 35

‘It’s said we have the Romans to thank, Emperor Nero, I think, who looked through a chip of some gemstone or other to better see actors on the stage. Don’t remember who figured out how to concentrate the sun’s rays to coax a flame. Useful, that. But our own Sir Francis Bacon was the first to turn it to a pure scientific use. Imagine, simply because the glass is thicker in the centre, it changes everything. Marvellous, really.’

‘It is,’ I said, studying the intricate grooves of the shell.

‘Also called a quizzer,’ he said. ‘I suppose you know that. Jane reminds me I need not always explain everything.’

‘Oh, not at all. I’ve heard of them. Just never held one in my hand.’

‘Not the finest example. But I like the pinchbeck. Not as good as gold or brass, but that’s the point, really; it won’t tarnish either. Look, you can give it a ribbon and wear it, so it’s always with you.’ He took it from my hand, pulled a velvet ribbon through, and tied it around my neck. I blushed at the feeling of his fingers near the collar of my dress, not for any impropriety; it simply felt what it must be like to have a father who cared for you, who might have once tied your laces, or patched a scraped knee. I raised the pinchbeck glass again to study the walnut, its grooves like dry riverbeds crusted with mud.

‘How much the small world resembles the large,’ I said.

‘Untold worlds, big and small, right in front of us, everywhere.’

I lowered the glass and looked at him. His high forehead was shiny and smooth as a peeled potato. He was dressed plainly, like a clergyman, but his sparse hair misbehaved, as if ideas sprouted from the top of his head. A thought flew into me that maybe he’d turned all his grief over his wife’s death to curiosity, looked 36away from the pain inside to the wonders without, whether for himself or his daughter, I couldn’t guess.

‘I can almost see the wheels turning,’ he said.

‘I can’t stop it, no matter how hard I try.’

‘Why would you?’ he asked, tilting his head as he did with Jane.

‘Because it hurts sometimes,’ I said, without thinking first.

He looked at me and smiled, the creases at the corners of his eyes deepening. ‘It’s a gift to be a thinker, to like ideas. But it’s a burden too. One can never turn away.’

‘I don’t know many ideas, not really.’

‘But you must be a great reader. All the girls at Jane’s school—’

I wanted to lie. I was embarrassed to tell him what counted as an education for me. I stammered instead. ‘I’m afraid I don’t go to school with—’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Apologies. I just assumed—’

‘Though I do love to read. But books are … hard to come by.’

‘Well, I’ve enough of my own for a small circulating library. When you come to Jane’s birthday, I’ll be glad to lend you whatever you like.’

My heart sank. I looked at the gaggle of girls by the door, all perfect curls, fine lace, and frippery. I would never be one of them, no matter how much I wanted it, or how hard I tried. Jane had not seen fit to invite me, or seen me fit to invite. ‘That’s kind of you,’ I sputtered, trying to hide my hurt. But he saw it.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sure Jane means to ask you. Still plenty of time. Hard to keep up with her social swirl.’

‘Of course,’ I said, embarrassed and grateful, a melange of feelings unknown to me. I started to untie the ribbon from my neck. ‘Thank you for allowing me—’ 37

‘No, please. Consider it yours. I’ve more quizzing glasses than any one man should, and I’m afraid Jane’s had her fill of them. I’ve got her every colour of ribbon known to man, and still she refuses to wear them. I cannot keep up with what’s au courant.’

I wrapped my hand around it, clutched it to my chest. ‘I shall treasure it.’

‘Don’t treasure it, Miss Wollstonecraft, just look through it every chance you get.’ He took the glass in his hand, and wiped it with his kerchief. ‘But best keep the fingers away from the glass itself.’

I was mortified that I didn’t have gloves on. But he skipped right past it, breathing his fog on the glass and wiping it clear. ‘You want clarity above all. You’ll be startled by what you see.’

I had never been so near a man who was not my father or brother, neither of whom had ever treated me with the regard I felt from John Arden in that moment. I realised I had never felt regard before at all. I mumbled a thank you, bade a clumsy goodbye, and started for the door.

‘Miss Wollstonecraft!’ he called from behind. I turned back.

‘Never worry. Ideas will find you, wherever you are.’

If only you could see me, little bird, clutching my brother’s kerchief so tight I almost forgot what was inside, my anger at Ned mingling with my envy of Jane, and my longing for her father’s regard. I wished I didn’t have feelings at all. But when I broke free of rough ground, the soft loam bulged between my toes and filled the arches of my feet. The sky threw a glimpse of morning the colour of seawater. Even if I couldn’t see it, had never seen the sea, I smelt and tasted it on my lips. It stirred 38everything in me. I was thirteen, yes, but I was a soul, could feel it rising inside me like high tide, feel the pull of it in my belly.

Nature was my only home on earth, a place to rest, unbound.

Betsy sprinted ahead of me. She knew the way, the only path to it, the one we’d made ourselves. I tucked the hem of my skirt into its waist to climb the final ‘stairs’: flat rock, grass, flat rock again, and at its peak, the large, buff limestone where I sat sometimes on its carpet of moss and lichen, master of my own world, that small circumference with a view, I pretended, all the way to Calais. I pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them, and laid my cheek there, bone to bone, breathing it all in. Betsy panted in the grass, head resting on her speckled paws, feeling the wind in her fur. No one but Betsy wanted it, or would walk that far, so we kept it our secret. But I would have let Jane Arden come. Because then she would know me, then see me. On my hillock that spoke everything of who I was.

That, little bird, the only true happiness I knew.

The barbed edge of my anger fell away. I knelt to the ground and set the kerchief on the level surface, untied the top, and peeled its corners away until one, two, three, and then thirty spiders at least, with what seemed like a thousand legs, skittered across the rock, under it, away, and into the wild. My realm had been theirs all along.

Could Jane Arden ever understand? She was refinement and elegance, knowledge and hope. How could I explain my letting loose a kerchief full of spiders on a nothing hillock that meant everything to me? How could I make her see that those spiders needed refuge, wanted to live as all beings want to live? Free. 39

I stood on the threshold of the cottage when Ned confronted me with his empty jar.

‘Where are they?’

Eliza and Everina turned to him because Ned’s mood of the moment, whatever it was, preoccupied all the household, except when Father was home. I brushed past him, defiant. I was second-born, a girl, but I never knew which was the greater crime. I paid for it every day, but that day I was tired of paying.

‘Take them off,’ my mother said, before she even turned to face me. She could point to my stockings with the back of her head, from that spot the size of a pin cushion where her hair was always uncombed and ratted. Though she wore a cap most of the time, there were eyes underneath, I swear it.

‘Don’t you want to hear my side?’

‘And not a single word.’

I pinched my lips to hold in not a single word but a thousand. I untied my brogans and rolled the stockings down, one by one, seams inside out, my toes poking through. I held them out to her, an offering: yes, I did it again, Mama, ruined everything. What shall we do now? She wanted me to fear her, but it wasn’t fear. It was boredom with our ritual, sadness that here it was again instead of anything else.

Ned stood between us, snorting like a bull. ‘Make her tell what she’s done with them, Mama!’

Eliza and Everina looked up sideways from their cross-stitches awaiting my next move, pretending not to. Their blank faces took no sides, as usual. Poor Henry, twelve years old, sat on the stone floor in the corner playing with dust balls and drooling into the rag tied around his neck. ‘I kn-kn-know where your spiders are, Ned.’ 40

‘Where, then?’

‘Outside, l-l-lots of them. I’ll get some for you.’

‘You imbecile,’ said Ned.

‘Don’t call him that!’ I said.

‘Not a single word, Mary, unless you’re prepared to tell Ned why his jar is empty,’ said Mama, shooing little James away from her skirts. Not yet three, he came to clutch at my skirts instead.

‘He stole my quizzer!’ I pulled the magnifying glass, freed of its ribbon, from my pocket and held it up as evidence of his crime. ‘It was hanging on the back of my door, but I found it in his room. And a pile of spider bodies, without legs!’

‘No one cares,’ he said. ‘They’re spiders!’

‘He pulls their legs off, Mama. And then burns them with the magnifying glass. In the most cruel way.’

‘It’s science,’ said Ned. ‘But you wouldn’t know that, would you? You go to a school for girls.’

‘I’m the one who told you!’ I shouted, but I couldn’t disagree. Of all my grievances against him, that Ned was seen worthy of a real education while I was not cut the deepest. ‘You’re not a scientist. You’re a torturer! Who pulls helpless spiders’ legs off to watch them suffer and squirm!’

‘Mary!’ Mama raised her voice to silence me.

But I was beyond her wrath, unafraid. ‘They’re not his