She stepped away from me.

“Enough, Mary. This is the end of us.”

“No,” I pleaded. “You are my heart and soul.”

“You,” she said, “are nothing to me.”

She gathered her satin and turned to cross the lawn back to the glowing rooms. I thought of running after her, to press my case. But when she was close to the door, a man came lumbering out.

“Miss Wollstonecraft! Come at once!” Marmaduke Hewitt’s worried voice poured across the lawn, shattering the twilight. “It’s your father. Demanding to be let in!”

The rest, little bird, spins to nightmare. My father, so drunk he’d fallen into a bush, was slurring and cursing those trying to help him up. He even cursed Henry, saying the most awful things, and then turned his wrath on me. He wanted to fight the gentleman who’d refused to grant him entry, but only managed to punch the air. I don’t know what John Arden said to calm him down, nor how he got us into a carriage for the short ride home, refusing my frantic apologies, while a small crowd watched. I mostly remember Jane on the steps of Norwood, distraught but still dignified, and the last thing I saw.

My dearest Jane,

I don’t know how to ask your forgiveness. Your father gave me a book of essays that pictures the possibility of two people who would be guardian angels to each other and enjoy the benefit of a lifelong attachment that corrects our foibles and errors, refines the pleasures of sense, and improves the mind. You have now seen my “foibles and errors” in vivid presentation, but I will forever dream of a world away from the degradations of my home, from my own father’s violent temper and extravagant turn of mind, which I’ve been afraid to tell you are the principal cause of my unhappiness, with you my only respite.

But now I must bid you farewell, without the hoped-for forgiveness and forever friendship I so desire. We are to move to Hoxton within a fortnight, where it is my parents’ intention to commit my brother Henry to one of its insane asylums.…

“I thought I’d have a stroll on the Common,” said John Arden, when I ran into him on my last walk, the day before we left. “Are you going that way?”

We were soon passing a stand of trees that shimmered in the onset of evening. He seemed as taken by them as was I, though neither of us had said much to that point.

“Jane told me you know a good deal about trees.”

“Did she?” It seemed hopeful that she spoke to him of anything good in me. “I know some of their names, at least.”