I wanted to live again, write again. I recovered myself in the purity of the air, the trailing summer light, the ink on the page. I could feel the taut sinews of my thighs, my ribs braced, lungs like bellows. It was as if I’d faded away before the withering touch of disappointment, but in the mirabilia of this place become visible again, my mind and body reanimated. My desire for Imlay, for the peace we once shared, had made me forget the respect due my own emotions—sacred emotions that are harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy. Nothing could extinguish that heavenly spark.

I missed little Fanny, but I was happy alone for those three weeks. I could no longer even bear to think of being no more—it seemed impossible that I should cease to exist, this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow. In moments I thought of that ship hove down in Strömstad. Were her leaking holes resealed by now, sails mended, hull scrubbed clean and laid with copper? Surely she was ready to be righted, as I was, and take to the open sea.

What a long time it takes to know ourselves, little bird, and yet all of us know more than we’re willing to own, even to ourselves. But I rejoiced at having turned, in that strange solitude, a new page in the history of my own heart.

Don’t think that my entreaties to Imlay stopped. They didn’t. His letters to me, scant, were sometimes gloomy, other times buoyant. Some filled me with dread that his fickle attentions had already moved elsewhere—he hinted at it—which sickened my heart anew. Yet he spurred me in my quest, our shared purpose, and threw me a crumb now and then. Yes, he would meet us in Hamburg when it was all done, and we would go to Switzerland. He still believed in our future life. But another aspect took shape in my letters back to him, a feeling less of desperation than hope that as I was restored to myself, he would see what he was losing if he lost me. The sublime was on offer to him too.

“I don’t think the case will proceed,” Judge Wulfsberg told me when I met him in his office to hear his determination.

“But Ellefsen was arrested,” I said.

“And released on a bail of ten thousand riksdaler, thanks to his wealthy mother,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “I’m afraid there’s not enough evidence to convict him. And given the family’s position, not much likelihood of it.”

“But what about the silver he took, and his plan to sink the ship?”

“I believe that was the plan, but I’m not sure it was Ellefsen’s.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.