My amiable innkeeper insisted that I couldn’t leave Norway until I saw the cascade outside of Fredrikstad, and said he’d take me himself. On horseback we took a road that wound along a gurgling river through woods of white-barked aspen and birch, deep oak. It had rained hard. Shimmering drops of water clung to the blazing leaves. A few of them fluttered down—they had lost their color and curled inward at the edges—a harbinger of autumn. We tied up the horses and set off down a narrow footpath through an ancient forest that nearly crowded out all light, full of aged pines with fine silvery cobwebs strung across their rusting needles, spiders making new life from old.

Before we could see it, we could hear it, the ferocious roar shattering the woodland quiet. When we reached the waterfall, I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming power of it, a crashing torrent exploding out of the cliff above us. My gentle guide saw how I marveled at it, and, by the elbow, led me to a small plateau where, if I didn’t mind the spray on my face and clothes, I could reach my hand out and feel it. There was only room for one of us. He stepped back onto the path and let me alone. I reached for it slowly with a shaky hand. The icy cascade pounded my fingers, numbed them almost instantly. I closed my eyes and turned my face to the spray. My own feelings merged with the tumbling water itself, pouring out of me, unstoppable. I felt my own infinity, and insignificance. How easily it could—if only it would—toss me to the river below, and wash me full away.

Nature was my cathedral now, and this, a baptism by deluge, or as good as last rites. The sublime seemed to thrive at the knife’s edge between life and death, earth and Heaven, unchained by misery and grasping at immortality. But this hurtling tempest seemed like something getting free.

How I envied the water.

“You say my letters torture you; I won’t say what yours do to me.”

Imlay didn’t meet us in Hamburg. We sailed alone to Dover, but he wasn’t there either. He met our coach in London, had found a place for us, a maid, a cook. But not with him.

“You say my letters torture you,” I wrote to Imlay. “I am not, and never will be, a mere object of compassion. I can take care of my child. I want no protection without love.”

When I pressed the cook, poor woman, she admitted that Imlay had taken a lover, an actress with a strolling troupe, and that they shared a house, and had all the time I was away.

“I am agitated. My whole frame convulsed, my lips tremble as if shook by cold, though fire circulates in my veins.”