I decide to write again to Marian, begging her to forgive us and to come save me from loneliness at Shibden when we return, for I cannot do this again. I cannot just sit and wait for Anne and then ride in a carriage for hours at a time and then sit and wait again like I am just some maid, growing ever more detached from the world, ever more detached from Anne. I must set her free.

France and Belgium do not quench her thirst and when I flippantly suggest she climbs another mountain, we are off into the Pyrenees where the cold air gives me aches and pains all over and I can never get warm. She leaves me in the care of strangers as she sets off to climb to a summit without me and I wonder if she will make it back to me alive, and how I would have to manage without her if she fell, escort her broken corpse back all those miles home to empty Shibden. If she should fall, she will take me with her – for how can I live on without her?

Miss Lister

It is over ten years since I made my last ascent to this height. This time I am the first person ever to do so. I convinced some local guides to take me where no one had been before. Reluctantly, and no doubt bemused by this English woman, who they no doubt thought would fail, they were swayed by the money I offered them.

Here I stand, triumphant. I am free. It is just me, in my body, away from the world, above everyone else living on it. I am at the summit of Vignemale. I make the first ever ascent on the seventh day in August 1838. I am the first to claim it, conquer it. I am forty-seven years old, and my body is more aware of my age than my mind is; it aches and my feet are raw. I’m too old for this climbing nonsense but would not give this up for the world. It has taken days to get here after bad weather delayed my guides and me on two attempts, but we persevered and slept under the stars and climbed in the dark to get here. Should I die here, right now, I would be content.

When on top of the world, the mind travels to the overriding vision of one’s own existence, one’s own life. I think of how much I have achieved and loved and lost. The rest of my life stretches out before me, but it is in tedium.