Godwin clutched the book to his chest, and bowed his head, his pain palpable. They sat in silence, letting themselves be filled by Mary’s garden, until Fanny’s voice tinkled on the air in the near faraway, breaking their reverie.

“Well, I’ve got some playing to do. I believe hoops will be involved.” He planted his palms on his knees, steeled himself, and stood, like an old man might, though he was far from old. He left the book on the bench beside her. “Why don’t you read it, Blenkinsop. I daresay it’ll make you a convert too.”

She held the book to her bosom. “Thank you, sir. But I was a convert from the first.”

Mary W

Imagine me, little bird, sixteen hours in a coach, then stepping off in hot, stinking London, buffeted by the crowd, the fashionables and downtroddens, pushed and pulled along streets I hardly recognized, stepping through other people’s sewage, and thinking I’d arrived in Paradise! My seclusion was ended, even if I was alone in the world. I wanted it that way. Never again would I let someone else dictate my terms, my station, my boundary as a human being.

I wanted to bathe, wash away the coach ride, Ireland, Lady K, and worst of all the memory of dear Margaret chasing after my carriage, both of us ripped away from each other. But I had nowhere to go, and no idea where I’d sleep that night. There was only one place I wished to go, where I would not be expected at all. So—in my homespun shift, thick-soled shoes, and flat beaver hat—I took up my suitcase, bursting with more books than clothes, and headed for St. Paul’s Churchyard through narrow dark lanes, as if they were birthing me, to the offices of the man who was my only hope in the world.

“Good Lord, it’s Mary Wollstonecraft!” Joseph Johnson said when he answered the door, and found me, ragged and drowning in rain. “You look like Miranda, tempest-tossed!”

“I always feel more like Hamlet,” I said.

He laughed and ushered me inside. Took the large bag from my hand and placed it neatly by the door, as if he’d been expecting me all along.

“Well, Hamlet is always welcome here,” he said. “‘To be or not to be.’ As she wishes.”

He poured me a welcome sherry, put a blanket around my wet shoulders, and invited me to sit across from him at his desk, a hundred times more chaotic than I remembered, like the room itself. Hill after hill of books closed in on us; they were crisscrossed and stacked almost to the ceiling, even covering the single window and snuffing out the light. But that musty darkness in midsummer was as good as a warm fire in winter. The drink gave me courage, but I’d come already fortified.