But he wasn’t there to meet us. The disappointment was crushing, but I didn’t show it. I was the one leading the charge for our small brigade, and couldn’t give up, not yet. We’d left everything behind; all our hopes resided in him. I dashed off a note and booked a coach to London the next day. The man who did greet us, though he looked like Imlay in every respect, seemed more like a polite stranger. There were no kisses, no long embrace. I wanted to grab his lapels and shake him but instead held my tongue.

We shared a house in Charlotte Street, but it was cold. Shared meals, but they were distant. Shared a bed, but Imlay slept on the far shore, and never pressed me to his heart the way I’d hoped, the way he had before Fanny was born.

I had no energy for anything. Not for a walk, for reading or writing, not even the simplest household chore. I felt the way I had when my mother turned away from me, when Father hanged darling Betsy from my favorite tree—some mix of anger, desperation, grief—even worse when Fanny took her carnelian ring from her own finger and closed it in my palm, then took her last breath and left me forever. The way I felt when Fuseli rejected me, refused to see or talk to me, despite how I’d opened myself to him. And now this.

I refused all company, even Johnson, who came nearly every day only to be turned away. He wrote me letters, but I didn’t answer. Marguerite tried to force me to eat, but it was a struggle to lift my head. She laid clothes out for me; some days I dressed in them, but sloppily. Mostly I wept, and wept some more. Sweet Fannikin, not yet one, had just learned to walk. She would come to me with her doll to coax me to play, but my limbs were heavy and my spirit weak. She put the doll in the crook of my arm, stood very close, and kissed my cheek. My sorrow had made a child of me, and it was my young daughter—your sister—who tried to comfort me. I was conscious of feeling nothing but the merest sense of being alive. If the house had been burning, I would have thought it too much effort to rise. I was not well enough to mother anyone, little bird, not strong enough to leave Imlay and start again. The world, and Fanny most of all, would be better off without me.

Mrs. B

September 8, 1797