I could feel my shoulder blades pinch together, and remembered Judge Wulfsberg’s words. “I think Imlay only met Boone once,” I said. “He never told me otherwise.”

“Why would he? That he swindled an American legend out of thousands of acres of land in Kentucky, and had to flee the country to escape the debts, writs, suits, and claims against him? That’s why he went to France in the first place.”

I could barely speak. “I’m quite sure Imlay didn’t tell you that.”

“Wasn’t Imlay. I only found out after. I was bragging to my first mate, he’s an American too, about Imlay knowing Daniel Boone. It was him told me.”

“He had firsthand knowledge?”

Ellefsen shrugged. “Said that was the story going around.”

“People make up stories all the time.”

“When he said it, something inside me, I don’t know, it seemed true,” said Ellefsen. “Maybe I imagined Imlay as something he wasn’t. Something better than he is. Maybe I overlooked some things because of it. Me wanting him to be what I wanted him to be.”

Oh, little bird! Ellefsen’s words slapped my face like a bracing cold. Some veil was torn away and I saw that I was the same as he was, wanting Imlay to be what I wanted him to be. But I knew that my want preceded even Imlay, when revolution was in the air we breathed. We all wished to push it as far as we could, pledged not to miss its shimmering possibilities. Our utopian ideals were tested by the truth—blood in the streets, lost friends, exile, treachery, the sadness—but I didn’t dare give up on them now that I felt myself and the world conjoined. In the midst of all that, I met Imlay, wide open, free, and loving. He was a believer too. All my lost optimism I invested in him, in the dream of our “partnership of equals” in the pristine wilderness of a brave new country. New world, new life, new love, new me.

Imlay invested in other things.

Now I wonder how I could have thought he would change, when my own father had not. Even when I demanded that he stop violating my mother, laid my body across the threshold of their bedroom door, he had simply stepped over me. Why wasn’t that proof enough? The good men I’d known—John Arden, Richard Price, Joseph Johnson—couldn’t help but be who they were. I denied Imlay’s nature because I disliked it. But he was true to himself. It was I, little bird, who hadn’t been.

Love was a want of my heart, and what I deserved. What every human being deserves. Then, I asked myself, what was the defect in me that I could not accept that the Imlay I believed in was as slippery as the silver ship, and never to arrive?

Mrs. B

September 9, 1797