But we soon lost him to the waterfront for long hours, negotiating with sailors and captains helping him skirt the English embargo and escape the notice of French authorities. I knew he and Barlow were desperate to capitalize on the steep rise in prices in France, and the brisk market for illegal goods. When Robespierre prohibited the French from owning luxury items, I came home one day to find a trove of Bourbon-crested silver platters, candelabras, and tea sets splayed and stacked across our dining table. They held no allure for me as objects, but it was impossible not to think of the real people they’d been taken from—not only aristocrats but émigrés, even victims of the guillotine. It could have been people we knew. Imlay bristled when I brought it up. Why did I see the wrong in things instead of what could be right?

He brought a young Norwegian captain from a prominent shipping family, Peder Ellefsen, to stay with us, while he and Barlow bought a French three-master for their scheme. Ellefsen was small built but strong. Despite his leathering face—too old for such a young man—he had a dimpled smile, a mop of yellow hair, and clear blue eyes. He loved to listen to Imlay’s tales of Kentucky, enthralled as he was with the American wilderness and the legendary Daniel Boone, whose autobiography he’d read. He told Imlay, in such a soft voice for a sea captain, “You remind me of Boone. I imagine him just like you.” Imlay said that he’d met him, just once, but that Boone was his hero too.

I knew that our future in America—maybe even bringing Eliza and Everina with us—depended on the ship setting sail with the silver on it, landing safely in Norway, and fetching a fair price. Still, I wanted no part in their plot. It was a dangerous business. I couldn’t condone it, except as a way to feed the starving people of France. But when an anxious Imlay was called away to Paris the day before the ship was to sail—some knavery by his underlings, he said—he asked me to see the ship off, and I agreed.

From our house we had often marveled at ships sailing in and out of harbor, but close up to the Maria and Margarethe, hearing the wind snap her great sails, and the groaning creak of that whalelike hull, was another species of experience. A ship was a leap of imagination, an expansion of human possibility. This one bore our shared hopes in her pregnant belly. I was to give Ellefsen his last orders, and I did.