Fordyce walked to Mary’s bedside, studied her sleeping face. Mrs. B watched him wring out the washcloth in the water bowl and press it lightly to her forehead.

“I agree with Poignand,” he said. “She can nurse if the fever breaks. But not until then.”

“But will it? Break?” said Godwin.

“Let’s give it another day,” said Fordyce with a sigh. He looked at the midwife. “And if she has the strength to put up a fuss, we’ll take that as a good sign, won’t we, Blenkinsop?”

“That’s right, sir. Mary Wollstonecraft is stronger than us all.”

Mary W

Fanny was pregnant within two months of the voyage to Lisbon and her long-anticipated marriage to Hugh Skeys, despite his being, in fact, “much fatter and at least ten years older” than the portrait he had left her long ago. She wrote often to me and my sisters, “her dear girls,” with brave humor, assuring us that her Skeys was a good sort of creature, with the good sense to let “his cat of a wife follow her own inclinations in almost everything.” She claimed he even relished when she was well enough to “coquet” with other men. Fanny, in turn, didn’t seem to mind learning that he’d been a dreadful flirt with the ladies of Lisbon, who were disappointed by his marriage. She had tamed him already into a plain man now inclined to pay more attention to his wife than any other woman. I thought she was pretending at contentment, and for myself, remained skeptical of his worthiness. How could he possibly appreciate her marvels, as I did?

Fanny promised to send “our assemblage of irresistible charms” at Newington Green at least two men from Lisbon who she assured us were tolerable flirts, and one in particular, her very own physician, whom she thought would be a good match for me, though she feared his shyness and sincerity would impede his getting forward in a world where arrogance and dishonesty seldom fail to succeed. I didn’t pine for a man, and Fanny knew it. But it was her way, I knew, to avoid the subject of her health, though she did admit that, on the good doctor’s advice, she’d quit the country for the dry, hot air of town, and had already found the spitting of blood arrested, and her cough, most days, trifling. Her letters went on like that, with seeming high spirits—regaling us with stories of playing the bon vivant, a crowd of visitors every night—but it seemed she was hiding the truth of things. She sometimes signed them “Frances (Heigh-ho!) Skeys,” which seemed overzealous, even for her.