“It’s what I want for you, Mary,” he told me. “I have observed you, heard you, felt you, these months we’ve dined together, and I know that when you part your full, rosy lips, pearls of wisdom and hard-won things spring from your noble head. But the rest of you isn’t living at all.”

I stared at my reflection in the mirror. “I’ve never been touched by a man,” I said.

“Oh, I will touch you,” he said. “Here. And here. And here. Then stop, according to my agreement with my wife. But a painting takes time. And we shall take ours.”

We did take our time. Over days and weeks, rolling into months, Fuseli painted me with the same intensity and confidence he brought to everything. He wouldn’t let me see the portrait, but I was mesmerized by the sketches and watercolor studies pinned to his walls, sometimes overlaying one another, as if he couldn’t draw them fast enough—courtesans, lovers, eavesdroppers, voyeurs—women with high-dressed hair and stiff bows, or in various states of undress; women from behind, from the side, sitting, bending, touching, strolling, engrossed in a book, looking out a window, bare breasts like bright lights, at one with their bodies. He enjoyed saying that females were emotionally flagrant and feckless, but these were drawn in exquisite detail, with honesty and empathy. And now he turned his gaze to me.

We were fiercely alert to each other, and drew ever closer, meeting nearly every day, if not at his studio, he came to my new house in Store Street. We read each other’s work, argued over translations, shared what we knew of the dramatic events unfolding in France. Fuseli could be irritable and itchy, but I could tell he feasted, as I did, on our rich conversation. He never kissed me, never once removed his own clothes in the time we spent together, but when I posed for him, he studied the contours of my landscape by slow touch, sometimes with a trailing finger, a soft paintbrush, a feather quill. The back of his knuckles once grazed my breast as he shifted the draping shawl.

I remember people in Lisbon who spoke of the rolling earthquake some thirty years before as if they relived it every day. The undulating ground, a wave, a swell, a peak, and seawater crashing through walls. Sensations like that, more than words, are all I have to describe my awakening to my own trembling being. I had wanted women to choose reason, not romance; friendship, not sex; companionability, not carnal abandon. But here was I, bursting into brilliant bud and new leaf. I was not a delicate flower at all—I never had been—but a tall birch that bowed with the wind, whose leaves shimmered in any light, and shuddered at a breeze as small as a whisper.