At Fanny’s insistence, I moved in with her family in Walham Green, a pleasant place near Putney Bridge. The Bloods were warm and easy with one another, and with me. Fanny’s mother was “our mother,” a modest, gentle woman who must have seen the wounds my own mother had inflicted on me, and healed some of them with simple kindness. When she and Fanny opened a small needlework shop, I helped where I could. I didn’t mind the punishing hours, the strain on the eyes sewing intricate stitches by candlelight. It was a way to piece together a life, scrap by scrap, stitch by stitch. I wanted to spend my life with them. This was poverty, yes, but there was bliss in it.

Fanny improved me in all ways—the quality of my writing, my thinking, my feeling, perception, manners, even my sense of humor. She taught me what it is to love, and be loved. Out of necessity we did share a bed, but it was as we’d always imagined, and even things we hadn’t. We lay awake nights, recounting the high and low points of our day, making fun where we could, whispering our worries. In winter we piled on the bedclothes and made our own warmth under the covers. In summer we lay atop them in our light linen sleeping gowns, tracing the outlines of our bodies, touching each other fondly, naming our flower parts: pistil, stamen, sepal, petal, leaf.

She dared me to be happy, without caveats, to claim it out loud. Not happiness in retrospect, she said, that was too easy. We must know it here and now. I promised her I’d try.

And then one day my dear Fanny coughed blood.

Her health was stable, her case mostly mild for now, but Fanny had bouts that frightened us all. They seemed worse when she had a letter from Skeys, anchored in Lisbon, putting her off yet again. He asked after the fluctuations in her lungs, as if a bellwether of his intentions. She’d come to feel disappointed by his hesitation, his courtship more off than on, and however relieved I was by it, I knew that her heart’s longings must also be mine.

Marriage had not been kind to Eliza, who wrote me a month after the wedding to say the honeymoon rapture was over. I took it as more proof of my position, but to Eliza I suggested patience and forbearance. She’d wanted money and status, and got it the only way she knew how. She had sealed her own fate. It was hers to bear.