Mrs. B slept on the settee that night, fitful, wakeful. She felt herself overflowing more than usual, a roll of her fleshy belly, a swollen foot dangling off the edge. She was used to waking up in strange places, beds, chairs, now and then floors. She wasn’t home, that was always the first thought in her head, but now a second thought wedged itself in: She had no home, not anymore. Not like it was. At least she’d spent enough nights in the Godwin house to know its sounds and smells, its rhythms and rounds. Judging by most things, she’d slept till late morning. But she didn’t expect laughter.

Mrs. B rubbed her face and set aside the book, which she’d fallen asleep reading. The laughter was wafting in from the bedroom, she realized, right through the open door. It was Mary’s laugh, and a man’s laugh, one she didn’t recognize. She gathered up her loose corset and tiptoed toward the sound, near enough to see them—Mary and Godwin sitting against the pillows, side by side atop the covers, him with all his clothes on, save shoes, and her in her chemise and blue shawl, trading a near-empty wine bottle between them, another dead one on the bedside table, a corkscrew, and two unsullied glass goblets. It was Mr. Godwin’s laughter; she’d never heard it before.

“Pot-shotten, jug-bitten, drink-drowned, high-flown!” he was saying. “Wait, and drunk as a wheelbarrow. That’s a good one!”

“But why would a wheelbarrow be drunk?” said Mary.

“Why would a lion? Or a fox? Fox-drunk, lion-drunk? Never made any sense to me.”

In between they chortled, and took turns tipping the bottle back.

It was more exertion than she’d seen from Mary in the last day, and she had to give Fordyce credit for it. Many things might mark the nearness of the end—a wild countenance, delirium, sighs, low spirits, lassitude, weakness. The face might flush or pale; weak pulse, hard pulse. Usually, there’d be rattling lungs, that slow, awful death by drowning. The lucky ones were fey, she’d seen it before, with unnaturally high spirits, but this was another thing altogether.

Mary pointed to a hole in Godwin’s sock, his big toe sticking out. “You’ve got a hole in your sock!” She giggled.

“I’ve got no time to darn my socks,” he said, wiggling his toe. “I’m a very busy man.”

“I would darn your socks,” she said.

“Have you darn my socks, the Mary Wollstonecraft?”

“Not Godwin?” she said, her laughter subsiding.

He looked at her, and, though her eyes were sunken, cheeks hollowed, and all the light fading from her face, seemed to see only beauty. “‘Godwin’ is not good enough for you. Better that I should be William Wollstonecraft.”