“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “He’s on the same side we are. For the cause of good.”

“I think the one thing clear to most everyone but you is that Gilbert Imlay is for the cause of Gilbert Imlay.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Do not wait for him,” she repeated with greater force, and a sympathetic glance at my protruding belly, which I made no effort to hide. “I know you’re in love with him. But don’t make the mistake, as many have, of imagining your passion singular. I’ve been violently in love with him myself.”

When I walked out into the open air, I threw up into an overgrown bush. How could she not have told me, or he? I knew there’d been other women in his past, but I believed his past well behind him, and far away. Here it was in my face—an omission that felt like a lie, that began to feel like a trail of them.

My letters to him got longer, his terse and less frequent. I started mine trying to be light, and ended weeping on the page. I asked why he hadn’t told me about his affair with Helen Maria. He reassured me that it was long over, that he’d never lied about his past, and he loved me now, like a goddess. But my mind made monsters to taunt me. “My head aches, my heart is heavy; my happiness depends wholly on you,” I wrote to him. I thought we’d made a paradise together, but now our world seemed like that unweeded garden at Versailles, choked by everything.

My spirits rose again when Imlay invited me to Le Havre. I packed my things quickly before he could change his mind. Helen Maria, who’d just been freed from prison and was plotting her own escape from the city, begged me to burn my half-written book on the Revolution—sure that if discovered, the pages would land me in prison, pregnant or not. I couldn’t bring myself to do it; the work mattered too much. Not just to Johnson and me, but to all the curious world that was watching the contortions of the Revolution and holding its breath. I felt renewed by Imlay’s wanting me again, but I wouldn’t give up my work to be with him, or him for my work, and so, willing to risk my life for all of it, swept past the guards at the gates with my manuscript hidden under my skirts, pretending not to be terrified.