A few days after our return to London, agitated that I hadn’t seen Fuseli, I was surprised to find a great canvas wrapped in cloth and tied with twine delivered to my house, along with the folded indigo shawl, and a note: “Here you are, as you’ve appeared to me, in waking life and dreams, the goddess I have seen.” My mouth fell open when I pulled away its covering to see myself, as tall as I was in real life, standing with only the long shawl loosely about my shoulders, brocade silk velvet dripping with Venetian fringe, its deep indigo against my ivory skin, the natural rose of my cheeks, autumn hair, bare breasts, round belly, a fierce, loving gaze. Fanny’s carnelian ring ablaze on my hand. Close up I could see the peaks and troughs of his brushstrokes—feel the pressure of his fingers, the subtle turn of his wrist—these, his most intimate marks. What had seemed like recklessness on his palette and wildness in style had resolved to unity. Stepping back, I saw a woman on fire, pulsing with force and fury, waiting to make love to the world. She was everything we had argued over, that I had argued against. Desire inchoate, and not one ordinary thing about her. Fuseli had fixed me, incontrovertibly, as a caster of spells, the heroine of an epic tale I was writing myself.

In a fit of voracious gratitude, almost desperation, I sat down to write him, wrote again when I heard nothing back that evening, and after several more attempts through the rest of the week, felt a panic rise inside me. Even his place at Johnson’s table sat empty. Not knowing what else to do, I wrote Sophia, in whom I’d sensed an unlikely ally on our aborted journey to Paris. I told her I’d formulated an idea in my head, how we might enact our own revolution, in our own lives. She invited me for tea that afternoon, greeting me in high collar and close sleeves, hardly any makeup, her hair pinned up neatly. We sat opposite each other in their dark turquoise drawing room on a pair of green velvet sofas. Fuseli’s paintings governed every wall—creatures of myth and dreams, foreshortened, distorted, exaggerated—dramatic figures thrown into contortions that evoked both terror and the sublime.

“Tell me about your revolution,” she said, pouring champagne instead of tea, and getting right to the point.

“I have no right to your husband’s person, I know that. But to his mind alone, I stake some claim.” I took a sip of champagne, willing myself to go on. “I thought that we might live as the French do, right now. All strictures gone, all rules upended for the cause of liberty.”

“Liberty, you say?”

“Love’s very essence is liberty, isn’t it?”

“A ménage à trois, then? Is that your purpose?”