are strong. Lately she comes before I even close my eyes, that hand lingering in the air and writing. Forty degrees below, sixty degrees below. Her white nightdress thin, yet she seems to feel no cold.
Her face not visible to me. I never see her face.
We were four children from four different fathers. Mine unknown. Charles’s unknown (though he and I had the same mother). Then Mary whose mother died when she was born, and whose father is Godwin. And Fanny, who was older, seven when we met, daughter of Gilbert Imlay—but I don’t think she ever really knew him. So that even though Fanny and Mary shared the same mother they have different last names. And they always seemed so different—Fanny quiet as if carrying a secret dulled and locked away behind her eyes, a drowned girl staring out. That girl slowly turning, adrift in brown water. William was born later, so in total we were five.
Maybe this is why I love ruins, feel almost peaceful when I visit them— however strange and adamant in their otherness they are, I’m returning to a place I somehow know. We were fractured from the start—waves hitting a brittle rocky shore, a bowl of patched fragments. So how could we just be kind to one another, alert to one another (each with our own jagged edges, our damage). (And staring out from Fanny’s eyes the drowned one lost in the muteness of water.)
Sometimes I secretly followed Mary to St. Pancras graveyard, watched her sitting by her mother’s grave. Her face turned from me. The back of her head a small night I saw but couldn’t enter—
Sometimes she leaves whole sentences and paragraphs, other times just scraps. Once she lit a corner of the page. I watched it curl and burn until only a few words remained:
find no
and
awaken strong against Fanny without.
(I think of your lost face, the way you left me. So much lostness in one single skull.)
I keep dreaming of snow, I don’t know why. Last night for instance, Hadrian was ordering snow-lions built all over Rome. But I’ve never even been to Rome. And how could snow-lions survive beneath the Roman sun? He said he wanted them because they were impossible, that if the people loved him they would find some way to make them.
When I woke I remembered we’re in France.
For weeks we walked and plotted in the Charterhouse Gardens—Shelley Mary and myself, making plans to leave England. Godwin suspected nothing. But there’s danger even in certainty (maybe, even, especially in certainty). As we crossed near Calais a storm rushed the boat. Everything reeling. A strange look on Mary’s face, like someone walking through a house they sense will soon burn down but no one believes them. At the time I had no words for what I saw. Her skin much too white, her hands shaking.
Today a Swiss gentleman asked Mary and Shelley if they ran away for love and they said yes. Then he asked me. “No,” I told him, “I came to speak French.”
Mary and Shelley sleep and I watch them, their limbs intertwined, his fingers moving in her hair. Our beds are dirty, we have little money. Mary carried a small locked box with her all the way from England. I don’t know what’s inside. We walk for hours each day and none of us has a watch.
Mary and I still wear our black silk dresses. We’re heading toward the Alps at the Swiss border. Nights we find cheap places to stay, eat milk and sour bread for supper. Why does she carry that locked box when it’s so hard to carry anything at all? Shelley says we’ll get a mule soon. Then we can take turns resting as we travel.
Skinner Street—it’s far away now, Snow Hill’s far away. But I dream of snow-lions, I dream of Hadrian impetuously giving orders, so how far have I come? I don’t know what freedom is I The Madame at the inn warns us of Napoleon’s disbanded soldiers, says they’re roaming and pillaging. Urges us to turn back. But there’s finally peace here and we want to see it.
Her hand stops, replaces the top on the ink bottle, puts down the pen, folds the paper, slips it in the drawer.
Her face hidden as before. Her name on my tongue an amulet or wish.
The whiteness of her sleeve before she leaves me.
“Magnetic needles always skew slightly east rather than purely due south,” Shen Kuo wrote in the eleventh century, in