“Because the denser surrounding material would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void.”

“I believe it would,” I said.

“And if a void is by definition nothing, nothing cannot rightly be said to exist.”

I could feel myself come alive. Losing John Arden had created a hole in me, with nothing in Hoxton to fill it. I was the void, the gap, a hollow container. I felt I was nothing, and if nothing cannot exist, I no longer existed. Until that moment when Reverend Clare saw my nothingness as something worth filling.

“No learning, you say? For a mind like yours?”

“No sir.”

“Well, we ought to fix that, don’t you think, Mrs. Clare?”

Mrs. Clare smiled into her cup of tea.

Little bird, my life began anew. But of all the gifts the Clares gave me, none was greater than introducing me to the woman I have loved more than all creatures on this earth, save your sister and you. She was two years older than I—eighteen—when we met. I remember just staring at her, in her family’s modest cottage in Newington Butts south of the Thames, where the Clares had brought me. While they visited with her mother in their narrow parlor, I sat in a corner of the kitchen and watched how she moved seamlessly from one task to another, giving her siblings food, cutting it into pieces where need be, kneeling down to meet their gaze when they spoke, and really listening, subtle corrections to their grammar, mimicking their facial expressions, and ending with a nod and a loving kiss on the tops of their heads. I felt I was looking at another self, a better self, a gentler soul, more complete. I cared for my siblings too, but frenetically so, sometimes sharp and impatient, sometimes resentful and then guilty for it. Fanny Blood moved in her world like a minuet.

“May I get you something, Miss Wollstonecraft?”

She woke me from my reverie. “No, no. You’ve work enough. You needn’t attend to me.”

She took off her apron. “This isn’t work, but a prelude.”

“A prelude?”

She took me by the hand (oh, the warmth of her touch, I feel it still!) and led me to a small room with windows on two sides and light crisscrossing everywhere. On a table, neatly laid out, were specimens of flowers, many I knew the names of, others I didn’t. And on the wall behind, a gallery of drawings pinned to the wall, each a flower in exact detail, its intricate parts punctuated with washes of paint, some in colors I’d never seen, not even in Nature.

“A flower sometimes looks small and simple at first, but then you look closely, and see a world unto itself.”

“These are beautiful,” I said, looking across them.