“With this ring,” she whispered, “I thee wed.”

Choked with tears, I couldn’t speak, but touched my forehead to hers, kissed her softly on the lips. She asked that I climb on the bed with her, and I did, offering my arm so that she could rest her head in the nook of my shoulder. There I stayed, holding her close, until she took her last rasping sips of breath.

In my grief, my spirits flown away, I didn’t have the strength to board a ship again so soon. And leaving her alone in the cold hard ground of the cemetery just beyond the city seemed a second abandonment too cruel to exact. Skeys was inconsolable, and wanted my company in his anguish. How could I leave when each day began with him crying over his toast, clutching Fanny’s shawl to his chest, and ended in a bottle of port and a recitation of his regrets at having taken so long to marry her? He’d lost everything, how would he ever go on without her, rebuild his life? I had to bite my tongue.

I haunted the streets of Lisbon by day, like a woman made of air. I would have been willing for even the lightest wind to lift me, all the way to Heaven if possible. I could think of nothing that would tether me again to this bitter earth. Maybe another great quake would come, reduce Lisbon’s new elegance to rubble, and swallow me with it. Despite what my eyes could see, the optimistic rebuilding of the city into great wide boulevards and grand buildings, parallel lanes named for their purposes—Gold Street, Silver Street, Leather Street, and so on—I had a sense at all times that the ground beneath my feet was not what it seemed. This alluvial soil so easily churned into unstable mud. For an earthquake is the collapse of the most basic trust in the world: that the very ground upon which we have built our lives can hold us.

The weather on my passage home to London, little bird, had teeth and a temper both. The ocean was like a monster with a thousand hands that slapped against our boat, heaved us up, and threw us down. We felt in imminent danger all the time. Even the captain’s hard face showed it. Day in, day out, and through each night, the gray brutal sweep of ocean waves pounded us, a storm furious and unrelenting. Our vessel rose and tilted on squalls, then descended into yawning gulfs. I wondered how we would ever hold together.