III. No Such Prospect as Escape

The Fleet Street printer glared at the sheaf of paper Isobel Frothingham had handed him, and then at her. “What’s this?” he grunted.

She was here to arrange a private printing of her poems with Cyrus Hunt. Joseph Johnson had published her romance, Scarlette, but these were too personal to be sold to the public. Anyway, Hunt needed her patronage. He was a sour-faced little man, slightly hunchbacked, but with strong, nimble hands from rolling and unrolling galleys of type. He would have to do.

“Twenty-two poems, Mr Hunt. I want you to make a booklet of them. Perhaps forty copies. You needn’t read them yourself, I might add.” Though there was no need to warn him. He would set the type, she knew, the way a servant might straighten and rehang a valuable painting, seeing nothing in it beyond a jumble of colours and figures.

“You can pay my fee?” he asked. He meant, of course, that just because he was known to her, he would not do the work for nothing.

“You know I can pay. When can you have them ready?”

“Can’t say.” He frowned. “I got other work ahead of yours. I’ll get to ’em when I can.”

“Next week. I have friends waiting to read them.”

She wanted them soon—before she changed her mind. They were poems about her childhood; poems about her feelings, her loneliness, her fear of losing her looks. For this was her deepest fear: of growing old, losing her power. She didn’t think she could bear that. Her sympathetic female friends would understand.

As for Cyrus Hunt, she thought as she left the smelly print shop and the footman handed her into her carriage—he would not prate about her poetry in public. He was too literal a fellow, too proper. A bit backward, she thought privately—but he knew his trade. She had the coachman take her to a bakeshop for a sackful of chocolate biscuits, and then to the Foundling Hospital in Coram’s Fields. She came every three or four months. There was someone there she had to see.

Inside the ornate building she found several dozen girls in brown serge dresses with stiffened bodices—but no whalebone stays, thanks to a freethinking physician who had the good sense to declare that stays deformed women’s bones. A moment later a scrawny, carroty-haired girl in white cap and apron came running at her. “Missus Frothingham! What’d you bring me?”

The girl was a smallpox survivor: her face looked as if someone had taken a fork and made light dents in her cheeks and forehead.

“Chocolate biscuits. In anticipation of your, um, birthday (Isobel had just realized). Why, you’ll be thirteen years of age this Friday. Did you know that? And we’ll have a frosted cake, shall we?”

“’Course I know, I ain’t stupid,” the girl cried, sticking her hands on her non-hips.

Such dreadful grammar. Isobel felt more aggrieved at abandoning the child to bad grammar than at leaving her at the hospital. A dare from a friend, along with multiple glasses of claret, had led Isobel to seduce a prominent guest one careless night after one of her routs. It left her with child and in shock. In vain she visited the local “wise woman,” but the child was stubborn; it clung to the womb.

The last person she would have told, of course, was the child’s father.

An aide motioned Isobel to a small table outside the kitchen. The girl, named Ann after the wife of one of the hospital governors, plunked herself down in the straight-backed chair and began to stuff a biscuit into her mouth, and swallow it, half-chewed.

When the girl reached out for a second, Isobel said, “Not now. I don’t want you ill. You’ll enjoy it more on Friday. Or should we share these with a friend?” She glanced at a group of children who were sweeping and mopping.

“I got no friends here,” said Annie, as she preferred to call herself, pulling the sack closer.

Isobel thought of her own childhood: the absent, abstracted father; the rigid mother to whom appearance was everything, who allowed Isobel few friends for fear of smallpox or ague. She thought of her child’s birth: how she had brought her to the orphanage posing as “an aunt of the mother.” The governor had seen right through her, of course. She did not have to explain what a scandal it would be for a woman of her class to have a child out of wedlock. She pretended to go to Switzerland “on holiday.”

She had simply been required to affix on the child a distinguishing token so she “might be known hereafter if necessary.” So Isobel offered a locket containing a handwritten poem that began: I grieve to give away my lovely child but... The child wore it on a ribbon around her neck and told anyone who asked that her mother would one day come to claim her. She would go, she’d once declared, with no other.

Though no other wanted her, Isobel knew, not with that pocked face, or that arch I-can-do-it-myself-I-don’t-need-you attitude.

“Ah, child, I think you’ve grown since I saw you last. Stand up and let me see.”

The girl inched back in her chair. “Aye, I’ve done, and not because of the food here.” She glared accusingly into Isobel’s face. “They feed us coarse brown bread and butter with no jam (her voice slowly rising) and only a glass of sour milk for breakfast. Uck!”

“But pure milk, I know,” Isobel said defensively, “and the hospital makes its own fresh bread. And look at you. In the pink of health.” Seeing the girl frown, she drew in a breath and went on. “And how, pray, do you spend your days? Productively, I hope?”

“How else should I, when they make us scrub the pots and sweep the floors and turn the spits and churn butter and I don’t know what else—why, everything!” Annie stamped her foot. “We get hardly a minute’s rest. We’re slaves, that’s what.”

“But in that moment of rest, what do you do then?” Isobel would not be defeated. Besides, the child looked almost pretty with her flushed face. Were it not for the pox, she might have at least found an apprenticeship with an artisan. Now, in her unruly adolescence, she seemed destined to become a domestic servant.

The girl glared at her, her mouth set in a tight little bow, as though she knew it was Mrs Frothingham who had abandoned her. But Isobel was not going to feel guilty, no. In truth, she had all but come to believe that the child was not hers, but a poor foundling, dropped on a doorstep somewhere and brought here.

“I read,” Annie said. She folded her arms across her thin chest and looked at Isobel through the mother’s own sea-green eyes.

“Ah, I recall that you started to read more. And what are you reading now?” The school had a policy of teaching the teachable to read, to exercise, to keep set hours of play—a far cry from the wretched workhouses where children slaved a seven-day week with no play time. The girl should be thankful that Isobel had brought her here.

“Gulliver’s Travels,” declared Annie. “I like those horses—those Houyhnhnms. I’d like one of them for a parent.” She narrowed her eyes at her visitor. “And I just begun Clarissa. Miss Nasty over there—” she pointed at the aide “—takes it away from me, so I keep it under my pillow.”

“But that’s a naughty book!” was all Isobel could think to say—though she had read Samuel Richardson’s work herself, cover to cover.

The girl smiled. Not a mean smile, but a warm, triumphant, glowing kind of smile.

Isobel felt her heart breaking out of her chest and spilling over. The girl was so much like herself—she had begun to realize this during her last few visits; had tried to suppress the thought. She had even considered bringing the child to live with her. She could not admit to the world that it was her own daughter, no. She would keep the girl on as a—charity child, yes. Other fashionable women took on a foundling for a time as a Christian thing to do, and so might she. She would direct the girl’s reading: Rousseau, Shakespeare, Anna Barbauld...her own novel, of course.

For Isobel was lonely, in spite of her company, her routs, her assemblies, her series of tedious lovers. The life of an intellectual woman was not the carefree world it seemed—especially with some like the narcissistic Fuseli, who mocked her soirées.

She knelt to the child’s level—and then got up again when she saw that the girl was as tall as she, but for an inch or so. “Would you like to come home with me, Annie? Live with me and read my books? Go to the opera and attend my book discussions and walk with me in Vauxhall Gardens and visit the bishops in Westminster Abbey?”

The child’s green eyes penetrated Isobel’s. For a moment she resembled her father when he had struggled to resist Isobel’s lovemaking but finally gave in. Isobel looked back at her, and smiled.

The girl said nothing.

Then she gave a shriek and flung herself at Isobel. Isobel grabbed hold of a nearby chair—it slipped, and the pair went head-over-teakettle onto the floor. A servant came running to help them up. “But no dead bishops,” cried Annie, gasping for breath. “And I don’t know about any opera. But I’ll go pack. You wait here.”

“Oh no, no, child, not yet, we can’t just walk out today.” Isobel laughed at the notion—she felt a moment’s panic. “Tomorrow perhaps. Or Friday, on your birthday. Or the day after. There will be papers to sign, you see. I’ll have to speak to the hospital governor.”

“No more coarse bread,” Annie shouted at her peers. “No more sour milk and stinking drink-water. I’m leaving tomorrow, hurrah!”

“Not tomorrow, I said, no—it takes time,” Isobel called after the girl. “The authorities have to confer.” Already she was beginning to regret her quick promise. She would think it all through tonight. It might be wise to take the child on consignment, as it were, the way one pawned a watch or ring. To see how things worked out.

It might be time, too, she thought, to inform the child’s father of his paternity. It took money to bring up a child. And Isobel was having trouble paying her creditors lately.

She bypassed the director’s chamber for now, and left the hospital. She had to go home. Company was coming the next day. Important visitors: one had to keep up, save face. Her carriage was waiting; the coachman handed her in.

It was only after she was settled in the soft cushions that she thought of Mary Wollstonecraft who had passed her without a word outside the print shop. She had her chin up in the air, oblivious, as if she were counting clouds. But that embarrassing new book of hers! Isobel, too, was an independent woman, but there was no point shouting it out to the whole world. The authoress advocated schools for girls and boys alike, Isobel had heard, and oh, breast feeding? Thank God she had avoided all that.

Besides, Isobel had seen the way Miss Wollstonecraft looked at Henry Fuseli at her rout: like a puling adolescent. Independent, was she?

Mary loved to hear about other people’s lives: it gave an opportunity to tell her own story. And indeed, her life had parallels to Lillian Guilfoy’s. The two women were seated together on the sofa Wednesday afternoon, after Lillian’s other guests had left.

They had both grown up as the genteel poor, with tyrannical fathers—Mary recalled sleeping on the landing near the door of her parents’ bedchamber to keep the drunken father away from her ailing mother after his night’s carousing. Lillian’s father brought his mistress to live with him in the house where her mother lay dying. “Look!” She lifted a lock of hair to reveal a shiny scar. “Boiling water—thrown because I refused something that woman wanted me to eat.”

Stunned at the coincidence, Mary told the story of her father’s taking a younger mistress while her mother was on her deathbed. “Yet even then my mother would scold if I uttered a word against him. Or especially against my brother Ned who could do no wrong in her eyes. He was always her pet.”

Mary felt better for all the talk. She was quite at home in Lillian’s little box of a house on George Street, not far from St Paul’s Churchyard where Joseph Johnson lived and worked. And why not, for this was today’s greatest coincidence: the house had been Mary’s residence when she had arrived, exhausted from a year of near slavery in Ireland.

“How can you afford this place?” Mary asked. “In my case,” she offered, to soften the question, “Mr Johnson rented it to me for a pittance.”

“For me as well. That is, he does it for Henry Fuseli, who helps with the rent, of course. It’s only right he should do so!” The muscles tightened in the young woman’s face. “Tommy is his child, you see, though he denies it in public.”

“Ah,” Mary murmured, pretending surprise—though she already knew.

“And I want nothing more to do with the man—after we free my Roger, that is.” Her face was flushed with the effort of admitting her dependence on Henry Fuseli.

Mary waited. It would all come out, though she burned with questions.

“Mr Fuseli was working in Paris with another artist, and I was spending two weeks with an aunt after my husband’s death. He was much older than I.” She lowered her voice, as if her late husband might hear. “A marriage of convenience, you know; I was eighteen, I didn’t know any better. It was a relief when—well, you can understand.”

Mary nodded, though in truth, she preferred the company of older men. They usually had more to say.

“So I went to see the other artist with the thought of taking lessons. The man liked my work. He liked—me. But I held him off, I did! And there I met Mr Fuseli.”

Mary gripped her hands together. She was not sure she wanted to hear this.

“I think you know what he’s like at first meeting. He makes you feel you’re the only woman on earth, that you’re beautiful. Somehow he becomes his paintings. He’s there with his winged horses; you want to mount behind him and ride off into the sun.”

“Yes.” Mary half closed her eyes. Though she was at war with the thought.

“Erotic.” The young woman offered the word that Mary was afraid to say. “The paintings are so erotic. And when I met him, I was, well, shocked at first. Then captivated. You can gather what those two weeks might have been.”

“I can,” Mary said, and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Tommy was conceived. Then Mr Fuseli went on to Rome and I stayed in Paris. When I discovered I was pregnant, I wrote to him. I hoped we might marry. But he insisted it was his colleague’s child. I was devastated!”

Mary held up a hand; she could hear no more. “Your fiancé—does Roger know that Mr Fuseli helps with the rent? Would that not bother him? Would it—” She took a breath. Would it make him angrier, she wanted to say, give more reason to steal a painting....

Her hostess crunched hard into a biscuit. “I’ve told Mr Peale I have reserves, a little inheritance from that aunt. Though not much to speak of, really.”

“Ah.” Mary sipped her tea. She was feeling a bit dizzy with all this talk about the passion Henry had offered other women.

“I understand you don’t believe in marriage,” Mrs Guilfoy said. “You wouldn’t know how I feel. When Mr Peale and I marry—that is—if...” Her voice broke.

Thwarted love. One day Mary would decry dependent relationships in a novel. She would get back at Fuseli for marrying that ninny, Sophia.

“I must tell you about Mr Peale’s past. I know you’re wondering.” When Mary shook her head, Lillian cried, “Of course you are, who wouldn’t be! It was years ago—five to be exact; he was eighteen and his apprenticeship was almost over—”

“Ah, I didn’t know he was—”

“Apprenticed, yes, to a frame maker. He was the fifth son of a middle-class family that had suffered losses—and so his father sent him to a friend who made frames. He was clever at it.”

“I’ve no doubt of that.”

“But he’d painted his mother’s portrait for her birthday, and at his work, made a beautiful gold frame; but the master said it was not for Roger to keep. So he—he—”

“Appropriated it,” Mary whispered.

“Yes,” Lillian whispered back. “And the master had him arrested. It was six months before the master, who knew the family, relented, and Roger was released. Now Fuseli’s solicitor has dug all this up, and misconstrued! And my darling is back in prison.”

“Monstrous,” Mary said. It was the only word she could think to say. The pair sat in abject silence for a time and then Lillian jumped up to point to an oil painting. “It’s Mr Peale’s. Actually a copy of George Stubbs’s Haymaking. Copying, you see, is how a young artist learns. Look at that sweet old workhorse! Nothing like the cruel horse in The Nightmare. But over there above the breakfront—that’s his own. It’s a portrait of me, with cherries in my hair.”

Mary squinted. She was a bit short-sighted, but she would never wear those foolish round spectacles in public. The painting was a good likeness of Mrs Guilfoy. The young artist had talent. She noted the way he used tiny dots of colour to paint Lillian’s cheeks and hair. It was innovative, romantic. He was not, like Fuseli, diabolically inspired. Still, she might suggest to Lillian that he eat raw pork before he painted.

Two raps sounded at the street door and the nursemaid, a pasty-faced woman with a slight limp, shuffled into the room to answer, the boy at her heels. When the door opened wide and St Pierre strode in, rosy-faced from the cool wind, bowing deep over Lillian’s hands, his eyes bright with adoration, Mary was stirred. Like herself, St Pierre was obviously a victim of unrequited love. And here was his beloved: using him only to gain back his rival.

St Pierre had come, he said, to take Lillian to Newgate Prison where Peale was awaiting trial. He had arranged a visit, he told her: “For today—we’ll hope. Tomorrow at the latest. And that footman who was run down? He saw someone, I hear—with the painting. But he died before he could speak further.”

“You mean that someone would have actually carried out the painting in front of people?” The woman’s cheeks were on fire. “But it’s huge!”

“Non, non, ma chère, the painting would have been taken later that night.” (When the glove was found, Mary told herself, and then banished the thought.) “The thief just wanted to negotiate, no doubt, with a pawnbroker, perhaps, for a painting he hoped to sell. Monsieur Fuseli, I hear, has been visiting the pawnbrokers. He thinks the man was—”

“I know who he thinks. Let’s hurry then,” Lillian cried, running for her cloak. “I want to see my Roger! I pray they’ve treated him humanely.”

Was the Frenchman unhappy? He would like to have the young woman for himself, would he not? And yet he wanted Lillian’s favour—would perhaps risk his life to gain it. Mary considered herself a student of emotions and motivations. The reactions of others, she hoped, would help to understand her own conflicted ones.

“If all else fails, I have a plan,” Mary heard him tell Lillian as he helped her on with her cloak; and then heard the latter’s breathless “Oh! And what plan is that, pray?”

Excusing herself, she picked up her skirts and rustled out the door. Mary ran after her with her publisher’s guinea and the abstracted female pocketed it with barely a nod.

“You’ll have to pardon Madam,” the nursemaid said. “She would set her man free by any means. There is no stopping her.” She lowered her voice so the boy wouldn’t hear. “She’s obsessed with that young painter. She calls out to him in her sleep.”

“Obsessed, poor girl,” Mary murmured. “She’ll have to get over that, will she not?”

She turned away to hide the flush that was colouring her own face and neck.

Newgate was a massive stone building, rebuilt over the ancient prison after the place was randomly destroyed in the anti-Catholic riots of 1780. It was as cold on the inside, Lillian Guilfoy discovered Thursday morning—they had been denied entrance the day before—as it looked on the outside. It was a pit of lost souls who were allowed but a penny loaf a day, and that, as Jacques St Pierre reminded her, was merely a bit of bread boiled in water. “Poor Monsieur Peale,” he said, “gave all the money he had to tip the warder so his chest might be branded with a warm iron rather than a hot.”

The warder stopped them to examine the sack. He dropped the bread on the greasy floor—would have trampled it but Jacques’s quick hand rescued it. At the last the man gave back the bread and cheese but kept the ale. For the entrance fee, he said.

Inside, Lillian saw two- to three-score men and women in a room no more than thirty-by-twelve feet and low enough for only a middle-sized man’s head to brush the ceiling—too low for her Roger. The air was ripe with the sweat and stench of the prisoners. Above all, she could smell fear. Or was it her own fear? She held tightly to Jacques’s arm.

“Mr Peale!” she cried out, and was rewarded with a dozen hands thrusting through the grating, begging for money, food, and mercy—for a way out.

“In the next cell.” Jacques drew her to a second room, just as crowded, just as foul. There in a corner on the straw-covered dirt floor, head sunk in his hands, shirt torn and dirty—was Roger. He struggled up to see her; he thrust his fettered hands through the grating. She held his fingers tightly to keep herself afloat. Already a ragged old man was reaching out for the sack of bread and cheese she had brought.

The sack would not fit through the grating, so she tore off hunks and thrust them through, one by one. Roger stuffed them in his mouth and apologized for eating in front of her. “They fed us an elegant meal,” he said, “but I didn’t care for the Champagne.”

Lillian could not manage a smile at his humour.

“There’s a tap room somewhere down the corridor,” Roger went on, “and you can buy a dram of ale or gin. I haven’t the money. I can pay you back.” He appealed to Jacques.

“Get it for him, for God’s sake,” she told Jacques, handing him half a crown. She was glad of the latter’s absence for a moment alone with Roger. She pressed her lips to the cold grating; her lover’s fingertips warmed after a moment’s pressure. She told him what Jacques had said about the footman seeing another suspect, and Roger laughed.

“It’s me Fuseli wants. It has nothing to do with a dropped glove. The man can’t bear a word against his art. Oh, he’s brilliant in his own way, I’ll give him that. He knows how to mix his colours—but he throws his tints onto the canvas with abandon. Is all that distortion and violence—art?”

“He claims to be inspired by the devil—he once told me that.”

“Ha! I wouldn’t doubt it. The fellow has the confidence of a Satan. You saw the way he critiqued my work, tore it to bits, and all because I’m doing something new. Why the fellow’s fifty-five if he’s a day! He’s out of the mainstream.”

“Fifty-one.” Lillian pushed back her hair where it had fallen across her eyes. “My friend Miss Wollstonecraft is in love with him, I think. She says she’ll try to help us, but she has conflicting interests—though she means well.”

“Over here, wench! Gimme a kiss, me pretty?” A bald fellow with an earring in his left ear, his right ear cut away altogether, waggled his eyebrows at Lillian, and she cried out.

Roger gave the man a shove. “You shouldn’t have come here. It’s no place for a lady.” Her fiancé’s cheekbones stuck out under the bruised skin; his eyes were dark holes in the starved face. It was more than unfair what Henry Fuseli had done to him—monstrous!

Still, Roger was beautiful, even with the ankle irons: shoulders lowered as though bearing the world, and bowed down by it. She held his gaze with hers. Though there were iron bars between their bodies, their eyes kept them connected.

Then Jacques returned, and Roger’s eyes focused on him and what he held in his hand. “You’ll have to find a turnkey to bring that in to me,” he said.

When Jacques bribed the burly gaoler to open the cell and thrust in the tankard of ale, a dozen hands groped for it. The turnkey knocked them roughly aside, spilling the drink on Roger’s shirt. Lillian wept to see her lover lick the ale from his lips and the back of his hand, then hurl himself at the grating. “The place is killing me, love. I can’t paint, I can’t think! A man died here last week, I heard—he’d been almost a year awaiting trial! Speak to Mr Johnson, will you? He has friends with influence. I must get out of here—discover who really did steal that painting.”

“Monsieur St Pierre has an offer of help, love. You must listen to him.”

“Not now.” Jacques laid a hand on her shoulder but she shrugged away from him. The turnkey was watching, reading lips perhaps. “Distract him,” Jacques whispered, and reluctantly Lillian approached the man. He was repellent. Yet here she was, diverting a gaoler so her lover could have a private word with his failed rival. It was madness!

She heard her hoarse voice; she cleared her throat. “I’ve a guinea in my purse, sir, and if you could kindly fetch my friend a dram that he can drink, and tonight bring him a decent supper, you can have it.” She held out the bookseller’s coin.

When the turnkey sauntered off with the guinea, Roger and Jacques pushed their heads as close together as the grating would permit. She saw the concentration on Roger’s face as they spoke; his expression changed from surprise to doubt and then to something like hope. When the turnkey returned, Jacques moved away, while Roger stared after him, open-mouthed, as though he still had something to say, or ask.

The turnkey opened the lock to hand in the dram, and Roger’s thirst overcame his pride; he gulped it down. The turnkey snatched away the mug and proclaimed the visit over. Lillian could only press her lips to the grating and murmur, “Je t’aime.” And offer a smile, for she must be brave.

“Lady, lady, come kiss me, lady,” cried the man with the earring. “Bed me, lady!” A roar and a thump from Roger brought a howl from the bald offender. She felt faint, and let Jacques lead her away.

An escape, the Frenchman whispered as they passed through the outer gate of the prison, was planned for some time in the following week. He would go back to Newgate to work out the details. “To bribe a turnkey. It’s easier now while your man is awaiting trial. Once convicted—they never get out of that bastille, I hear, until—” He closed his fingers around his throat, jerked upward, and she cried out.

“A thousand pardons, ma chère,” he said, “that was thoughtless of me to say. But we will find a way. Though I might need help with...” Flushing, he rubbed his fingers together.

Money? Where was she to find money? There was her small inheritance, of course. Though it was all she had for herself and the boy. “But monsieur, an escape? What if they capture him? Is there no other way?”

She panicked at the thought of the risk, as if he were indeed guilty: men hunting him down like a beast. She pictured Roger hanging outside Newgate, like a youth she’d seen the year before: feet dangling, a purple bruise spreading over the neck; a crowd of voyeurs below. The victim was only a boy, not much older than her Tommy, the weeping mother yanking on his feet to hasten the death. He had stolen a lamb....

Oh, God. She did not want an escape. But was there an alternative?

Henry Fuseli, she thought. Once again she would have to lower her pride and plead with him.

The three golden balls of the pawnbroker J. Grippe hung out over the street from an iron rod with an arrowlike point. Henry would like to run the point straight through Roger Peale’s heart. From the outset he had been convinced of the young artist’s guilt and nothing had happened to change his mind—Bow Street had come up with no other solution. The footman had died before he could speak further of what he saw, but Henry remembered that nod when he mentioned Peale. It was a nod, yes, he was sure of it. It was Peale he saw in his mind with the painting.

Grippe himself was behind the counter, an obese, red-faced man who looked as if he might die of an apoplexy if you crossed him. There was something confident yet ingratiating in his voice as he handed over a guinea for a cookpot and eight silver spoons a woman with liver-spotted hands was handing him. “But they’re worth far more,” she cried, tears running down her withered cheeks. “Feel them, they’re genuine silver, my grandmother’s heavy silver. I wouldn’t sell them—but we’ve had reversals....”

“One guinea,” the pawnbroker grunted. “It’ll be less for you to pay when you come to retrieve them.”

Retrieve them, ha, Henry thought. It was common knowledge that one of every two pawned items was never redeemed, for want of money. The woman knew it, too, for she pocketed the coin, and hunching her shoulders, trudged out of the shop. That the spoons were her grandmother’s silver, Henry had no doubt, although this J. Grippe had a reputation for being a counterfeit broker, a receiver of stolen goods. It was for this reason Henry had come.

He whistled in a breath to think of that rogue Peale stealing his masterpiece. The blood rushed to his head, but he took another breath to calm himself. He was already fifty (or was it fifty-one?) but he was not ready for an apoplexy. He had work to do. Nothing was more important than his work. He had the acclamation of the whole art world, had he not?

Yet there had been others like Peale in his past who dared disclaim it—jealous, petty men, who might have stolen his work had they had the opportunity. Ach! The rogues, past and present, were trying to poison his reputation. He could not have that, nein.

He announced himself to the pawnbroker and requested the painting. For Peale was poor, he knew that. And in love, God help him, engaged to be married—he needed the money. Yesterday Henry had gone with a constable to look for the painting in the fourth-floor garret in Chelsea that he shared with another artist, and the paucity of furnishings was astonishing: a table, a chair, an easel, a dozen miserable paintings left to gather dust—three of them copies of George Stubbs. Copies!

Was that why he took the painting, to copy it? Sell it as an original? The arrogance of the man. The insolence! He would never get away with it.

Henry had not really expected to find his Nightmare in those dingy quarters. Grippe’s pawnshop was only a few blocks from the thief’s residence, and a thief—or a pawnbroker—would want to be rid of his purloined art as quickly as he could, would he not?

But one never knew. There was a long-ago time in Rome when Henry himself had taken a master’s painting. But only to study it, learn from it—nothing more! He had sat up with it all night, returned it the next morning. He would never keep it to copy, or to resell. The thought made him want to hurry back to his studio, to see if Peale had returned it.

But Peale was in prison. There was no returning it. Nein, he must have the man whipped. That would make him tell where the painting was!

Unless, out of sheer malice, Peale had destroyed it? Mein Gott! What a thought! A masterpiece, destroyed? Better he had killed someone....

But no, Peale needed the money. The pawnbroker would know. The theft was in all the newspapers, the man knew that. Pawnbrokers connived, one with the other. The painting would make its way from one broker to the next until it arrived in America. And who was to get it back from those outlaws?

He lifted his head and stared at the man. The scoundrel was smirking, he had no respect. He was too ignorant to know a master artist when he saw one—and the author of eight books, ja! Though his art was superior to the books, and he’d stopped writing them. “And you think the thief would have brought it here, do you?” Grippe said, leaning over the counter, his raisin eyes squinting into Henry’s. “And they would throw me in Newgate and I’d never again see the light of day? Am I that stupid I would accept a famous painting like that? As if I would take in the Mona Lisa and have the whole world wanting my head?”

Henry was somewhat appeased to have his painting compared to Mona Lisa, even though he privately felt that The Nightmare stood on equal legs. Surely his sleeping beauty was more sensuous, more erotic than that simper.

He would not be defeated by this arrogant pawnbroker.

“Of course you took it in. You gave Peale the money he asked. Then you passed it on.” He took hold of the man’s cravat and twisted it in his hands. “Where is it? Who did you sell it to? I must know. There is a reward out, you understand. You hear that? A reward! Yours. Speak up, man!”

The pawnbroker’s perspiring nose shone under the greasy whale oil lamp. His nostrils appeared to inflate as though he knew he had the upper hand. “Let me go and I’ll ask around,” he said. “I’ll try to find out for you. But I don’t have it, you understand. I do...not...have...it. Peale never brought it in. Not to me! You must try other pawnshops—try the publicans—The Blue Cat takes in stolen goods. It was not me.” Grippe peered closely into Henry’s eyes. His breath came hoarse and sour through the thick lips. “Peale did not bring it here,” he repeated. “Not to me. Never.”

Henry was sinking into his shoes; he could hardly stand. He released the fellow and held on to a stool to keep from falling. Tears blocked his vision. He was ready to break down. But he had his pride. His dignity. He was a master painter.

He gripped his hands together until the knuckles whitened. There was only one recourse. To go to Newgate. To see that Peale was made to talk. How, it didn’t matter. Peale would talk, ja. Talk or be hanged.

Needing solitude after the anguish of Newgate, Lillian parted company from Jacques and walked on, alone, down the windy streets, looking absently in shop windows. It was almost March but winter was still in her breast. She had gone only two blocks when she saw Henry Fuseli approaching. He looked like a lion, the way his whiskers grew around the sides of his face—like a lion approaching a kill. He was moving rapidly, his arms swinging with purpose, eyes wide and staring ahead as though if he blinked, he might swerve and miss his goal.

She saw her chance for a last appeal: “Mr Fuseli.” When he didn’t stop she shouted, “Henry Fuseli! We must talk.”

He halted, clicked his heels together, bowed, and smirked. “Madam, I am afraid I cannot stop. I am on business. Some other time we will talk. The boy is well, I presume?”

He was hurrying in the direction she had just come, and she turned to match her step to his. “It’s not about the boy—our boy. It’s about my fiancé, Roger Peale. Have you ever been in Newgate? Do you know the horrors inside—even for those awaiting trial? Men herded together like animals! I saw a young man with a rash covering his entire body, an old man who looked like a leper. Who knows what diseases run rampant with such proximity?”

He stopped for a moment and glared at her: “Madam, we can take care of that, the proximity you speak of. A cell to himself, ja. He deserves it, does he not?”

She stood a moment, uncertain of his meaning. He would have Roger moved to a better place? Henry Fuseli in a moment of humanity? The old Henry she had once loved? Though what was human about any kind of imprisonment? “Henry, wait,” she said hotly—for he was moving forward again: “He did not steal your painting. I would have known if he had! He is an honest man, learning his craft. He is—”

“An arrogant puppy. A parasite. Sucking up the master’s juices, consuming his mind. Do you think I have had a moment’s sleep since the theft of my master work? Do you, hey? Nein! Nein! Now go. Do not pester me about this. I do what I must do. I seek justice and only justice. It will be done.”

He strode on up the hill. A passing cart splashed her with mud and she raced at his heels: “I hate you, Henry Fuseli. You’re a barbarian, a monster! You’re making your son grow up a bastard. Your own son! How could you?”

He turned his head and grimaced. “Watch your language, woman. They will haul you off as a woman of pleasure.” He moved on and she stopped running. Spent, she held on to a hitching post in the road. She imagined Henry on his way to have Roger put into solitary confinement. In her inner ear she heard the cell door clang shut.

“Madam?” A hand stretched out to pull her up. She had fallen to her knees. It was a middle-aged man, nicely dressed, a boy at his side. “I’ll find a sedan chair for you.”

Dazed, she let him hand her into the chair. “Take this lady to her home and see that she gets in safely.” He gave one of the chairmen a gold coin.

“Forty-five, George Street,” she whispered, and sank back into the chair. “Thank you, sir,” she called out. But the man was already far up the street with his boy.

At least, she thought, there is some kindness left in the world. Then thinking of kindness, she changed her destination. “Wait!” she called out to one of the chairmen: “Take me to Store Street—near Bedford Square.”

Lillian Guilfoy’s unexpected visit was beginning to wear. She had planted herself beside Mary on the new second-hand sofa, and was raving on about Henry Fuseli’s cruelty. Mary sipped her tea and closed her mind to such thoughts—had Henry not given a gift of ten pounds last week for her brother Charles to study agriculture in view of his sojourn in America, and then sent over a vaseful of holly and ivy for her? Henry was not cruel. He was simply, well, wholly preoccupied with his art. Lillian must try to understand that. It was one reason, perhaps, that Henry had left her. Though Mary would never intimate that, heavens, no.

“And now there is to be an escape,” Lillian said, turning to look at Mary. “I was not to speak of it, but I had to tell someone. I knew you would keep it to yourself.”

“What?” Mary was incredulous. “An escape? From Newgate?”

“Newgate, yes.” The tea trembled in the young woman’s hand.

“Impossible,” Mary said. She thought of the French royals’ escape from the Tuileries where the revolutionaries had imprisoned them. How they had reached Varennes near the Austrian border in a coach overloaded with family and memorabilia; how they were caught and returned to Paris. The sans-culottes kept their hats on when the coach passed through the streets; they shouted and cursed and hissed their disapproval.

She thought of Thomas Paine, his life in danger after the publication of his inflammatory Rights of Man. The Dissenters were urging him to escape. But where to?

There is no such thing as escape, Mary thought, recalling the flight with her sister, who had abandoned her abusive husband, lost her child, and now could never remarry. It took an act of Parliament to divorce: proof of incest, sodomy, bigamy—none applicable to poor Eliza who had simply begun to go mad from living with the man. The baby, abandoned, now dead, never ceased to wail in Mary’s nightmares.

“Impossible,” she said again, “the whole situation is impossible.”

Lillian agreed. She would speak to Jacques, she said, and urge them not to try to escape the prison.

A moment later she disagreed. “But Mr Peale cannot stay in that black hole! You can’t lock up an artist. He must be free to work. And free, he says, he can hunt down the real thief.”

“Perhaps,” Mary said. “But even free of the prison, he would be in hiding. How could he hunt a thief?”

She thought of her year in Ireland with the autocratic Kingsboroughs. To the latter she was just a servant. She wore no shackles, but she was never free. What was “free” anyway? Who was ever free in a society where everyone knew everyone else’s business? Oh, dear God, she couldn’t think straight. Her temples were pounding. Being in love was not freedom either. It was thralldom. She knew Henry’s faults, but could not help herself. “Then you must help to find the thief,” the young woman cried. She flung herself at Mary and tea spilled in both their laps.

“Poor dear,” Mary said, “don’t worry,” and mopped up after them both. People alter with misfortune, she thought. Most people, that is. Herself, she had learned to endure. When Lady Kingsborough had poked her rouged face towards Mary’s and said, “You will pack your things and go,” she’d had a moment of panic. But then went straight to London to see her publisher, to thrust her novel Mary, a Fiction at him—and there it was now, on her bookshelf.

“You are not the only one with troubles,” she said, thinking of that autobiographical novel. “Yet good things can come from adversity. You will come to see that, yes.”

Her young friend did not see at all; she was holding a handkerchief to her face. What more could Mary do to comfort her? She had been up half the night working on the Vindication sequel (Joseph Johnson had advanced her ten pounds—already spent on her brother James); then, in despair, for she’d written little of worth, she’d torn up the pages.

“You will help find the thief,” Lillian implored once more, standing to take her leave; she leaned over Mary and squeezed her hands so tightly they felt like empty gloves. “You’re a celebrity now, you can do that.”

“I’m a celebrity?” Mary said.

“Your Vindication has been translated into French—Mr Johnson didn’t tell you? A Parisian publisher. And they have it in America as well, Miss Hays told me that. It’s in the Boston bookshops.”

“Boston? And translated into French?”

“Yes! And do you want to know something?” She leaned closer as if to divulge a secret. “Fuseli is jealous of you.”

“Of me?” Mary was incredulous. How could that be?

“Yes! Miss Hays says so. Because your fame from the new book is greater than his, and he’s a man who can’t stand to be surpassed by a woman. No woman, I’ve heard him say, can create a lasting work.”

“Oh, the scoundrel!” Mary cried. But jealous? She almost laughed. But Lillian was still talking.

“That’s why I’m asking, Miss Wollstonecraft—nay, begging you to help free Mr Peale. You know the right people. Get them to help before someone—dies.”

“Dies?” But someone already has, Mary thought, remembering the hapless footman.

She rose from the sofa as if the thought alone had lifted her up to take action. “I’ll try then, I shall.” (Though first she needed a nap. She could neither pursue a thief nor write without rest. She must spend more time on her protest against the biased laws of inheritance, her greedy brother Ned an example.) “Tomorrow,” she said, “I am to go to St Paul’s Churchyard to discuss the new work with Mr Johnson, and I’ve naught to show but bits of ripped paper.”

“It’s Fuseli, is it not?” said Lillian, narrowing her hyacinth eyes at Mary. “The man is wronging us both. You must look closely, my dear, and see who he really is inside. You must understand he cares only for himself—and that miserable painting. Can you see that? Can you?”

Mary sighed and clutched her empty cup. Her reason could see. But oh, her heart could not. She was not free at all. One could not escape oneself.