“I very much approve,” Abigail Adams said to me. “And always tell my husband, as the men busy themselves writing the new laws of the land, that they ought to remember the ladies, with a little less unlimited power for husbands.”

“All husbands would be tyrants if they could be,” I said.

She laughed heartily, completely at ease.

“You see what I mean,” Mrs. Burgh said to her with a wink.

“Well, there are a few good husbands, but I like to remind mine that if care and attention is not paid, the ladies will foment a rebellion not bound by any laws in which we have no voice.”

“Then America has won my heart!” I said. “Perhaps it’s my rightful home.”

“Oh no.” She hadn’t let go of my hand, but now had it between both of hers. “We need you right here, Miss Wollstonecraft, doing what you do, one precious girl at a time.”

Our encounter renewed my vigor and purpose, but a week later I received a letter from Fanny that altered my course. She tried to be buoyant. Hugh, she said, was working hard at being a good husband, though he was of little use or comfort. Still, she admired his effort. It was so like Fanny to find some cause for optimism, but there was misery between the lines. She included her now-finished botanical drawing of the Viola tricolor, the wild pansy, heartsease—her love-in-idleness—a “small token of her love,” and urged me to gaze often on its happy face. I sensed the underneath of it, that while accepting her fate, Fanny feared for her life and the life of her child, and thought she and I might never see each other again.

I could stand it no longer. I set a plan in motion to sail to Lisbon as soon as possible. Eliza and Everina accused me of abandoning them, of caring for Fanny more than I cared for them. A few of the parents had no faith that my sisters could continue to uphold the ideals of the school, much less the day-to-day of it, and threatened to withdraw their daughters if I should go. I tried to assuage their concerns, but mine had a greater hold on me.

I went to the widow Burgh, my only hope for passage.

“What about our school?” she asked. “I thought this was your purpose. I fear without you it will fail. And there’s Mrs. Cockburn down the way who has her eye on three of our very advantageous lodgers we might lose if you go.”

Here I was again, staring into a teacup hoping to make my case. “I once abandoned a little girl, not one year old. My sister’s daughter. I thought, at the time, that I must choose between them. That it was the only way to save my sister’s life.”

“Perhaps it was.”