“She doesn’t feel safe here.” I knew, from my own father, the look of a man on the verge of hitting me. I saw it in his face but didn’t cower, didn’t move.

“I own her. Our house. Our things. Our life. Our daughter. All are my property. Never, for one minute, forget that.”

When he stormed out of the room, my mind was made up.

I concocted a plan for our escape. Eliza had no right to divorce, no right to any shared property, or to custody of her child, who was five months by now, and had worked her way into my heart as well. Bess cooed and smiled, nestled contentedly in our arms. I had to believe we could come back for her. I knew that at first Bishop would be furious, but I hoped he would soften with time and return the little girl to her mother’s bosom. I told Eliza just that. “Thank you, Mary, thank you,” she said, weeping into my shoulder.

“We who would save her must act and not talk,” I wrote to Everina, imploring her not to share our plan with Ned. I scraped together what little money I could, with Fanny’s help, and rented rooms in a modest lodging in Hackney as “the Miss Johnsons.” Everina took supplies there, a change of linens, a few morsels to eat. We waited for Bishop to leave the house, and when he finally did after lunch one day, I quickly packed a change of clothes for each of us, and bade Eliza say good-bye quickly to her daughter, then hailed a coach outside. I waited by its open door, holding my breath as each second ticked by. When she finally appeared, Eliza froze in the threshold.

“I can’t leave my baby. I can’t do it, Mary.”

But it was now or never. Bishop might be back any moment. Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed her arm and nearly lifted her into the carriage—she weighed hardly a feather by then—and implored the driver to go as fast as he could. He couldn’t help that a snarl of other coaches kept stopping us at first, but each time I looked back expecting to see Bishop hot behind us. For caution’s sake we changed coaches twice to throw him off our trail. Sensing my agitation, Eliza rocked back and forth, gnawing at her thin wedding band until she nearly chewed straight through it, but with each mile closer to Hackney, a sort of calm came over my sister as I hadn’t seen in so long.

“Ah, the Miss Johnsons! We’ve been expecting you,” said the housemistress when we arrived, bedraggled but whole. She led us to our room, two small beds, simple curtains on the windows. I pulled them closed at once.

“Don’t like the light, that it?”