He looked down at his hands, ground his palms, the way he did when he was thinking. Then looked at me squarely with soft brown eyes. “I believe in you, Mary,” he said. “I need you to believe in me.”

I sighed and looked out the window, trying to decide whether I could, after all, still believe.

“I won’t be separated from Fanny,” I said, as if negotiating terms.

“I’ve spoken to Marguerite. She’ll go with you both. She wants to go.”

I didn’t have the wherewithal to resent him presuming to speak to Marguerite without consulting me first, but marveled at her willingness to go.

“How can someone so afraid be so intrepid at the same time?” I said.

“Elias Backman expects you in Gothenburg. He’s our partner there. Knows all the details and has begun a lawsuit on our behalf.”

“To think that a month ago she’d never even left Paris.”

“He’ll make any necessary introductions.”

“And suffers such awful seasickness. But still she longs to go with me?”

Imlay sat back in the chair and studied me. “You make everyone’s world bigger, Mary. You can’t help yourself.”

Within a week we were in Hull, where Fanny, Marguerite, and I stayed in a house as cold as a tomb, with fewer comforts, waiting for a vessel to take us to Sweden. I wrote the first of my letters to Imlay an hour after we arrived: “Imlay, dear Imlay, am I always to be tossed about thus? Shall I never find a haven to rest contented in? How can you love to fly about—dropping down in a new world, cold and strange, every other day? Why do you not attach to those tender emotions round the idea of home, which even now dim my eyes?”

But I might as well have been talking about myself. Imlay was right about me—I’d been on the move since before memory began. Onward, outward. From Spitalfields to Barking, to Yorkshire, back to London, each time holding out a singular hope that I could reinvent myself, as my wayward father had, half believing that the next place would be different. But Bath, Lisbon, County Cork, Paris, Le Havre—they were all mine. No matter what setbacks, I did push forward, went somewhere else, tried again. Imlay was right, too, that I didn’t want to be in London, his being there aside. If not for our endless separations, I would never have returned to a place that had lost all charm for me, for which I now felt a repugnance that amounted almost to horror. I had no doubt most of London would turn against me if they knew I had a child out of wedlock. My own country no longer made sense to me. Moving did, as it always had. Locomotion was the only thing that had ever given me new life.