I closed my phone. Intriguing news, yes, but as I stared at James’s half-eaten plate and his dirty cloth napkin lying on the table, bigger issues tugged at my attention. The waitress offered a final glass of wine and I declined; two glasses with lunch were more than enough. I needed to sit and think for a few minutes with the steady din of conversation around me.

According to James, his infidelity came from a place of dissatisfaction with the safe, predictable nature of our lives. Was it possible we’d been equally discontent with the stagnant way of life back home and things had finally come to a shuddering halt? And if so, what did that mean for our desire to be parents in the immediate future? I wasn’t sure any child would want us for parents now.

A child would also need a stable home, a good school system and at least one income-earning parent. There was no doubt that our life epitomized this, but James and I had both just shared our dissatisfaction with the paths we’d chosen. Where on the list was our fulfillment, our joy? Was it selfish to put our own happiness before the needs of another human being, one who didn’t even yet exist?

Surrounded by London’s weathered brick buildings, mysterious artifacts and obsolete maps, I’d been reminded why, so long ago, I found myself enamored of British literature and history’s obscurities. The youthful, adventurous student in me had begun to resurface. Like the vial I’d dug out of the mud, I had begun to unbury something dormant inside of myself. And as much as I wanted to hold James accountable for keeping me in the States, at the farm, I couldn’t blame it entirely on him; after all, as he’d said, I was the one to rip up the application for Cambridge’s history graduate program. I was the one to accept the job offer with my parents.

If I was honest with myself, I wondered if looking forward to a baby had been a subconscious way of disguising the truth: that not everything in my life was how I imagined it would be, and that I hadn’t lived up to my own potential. And worst of all, I’d been too scared to even try.

As I’d yearned for motherhood, fixing my attention entirely on my someday, what other dreams had been buried and lost? And why had it taken a life crisis to finally ask myself the question?

17

Eliza

February 9, 1791

Just as Nella promised, the coaches began running again at daybreak. We took the first one back into London, empty except for us two ragged, dirty travelers and our filthy linen sacks full of beetles, many of which were still alive and nearing suffocation in their tightly tied bags.