In Search of Mary (11 page)

Wollstonecraft has hit a new low. The mission has collapsed scarcely halfway through the book. She’s left Risør and is heading back to collect her much-missed baby, to travel onwards with her and Marguerite. They still have Denmark and Germany to get through. There are repeated references to death and suicide, and I’m afraid for her. She has failed.

To find out how she failed I need to see Gunnar Molden again. Because there’s no one alive who knows more about this part of the journey. He has invited me to come and see his archives, in the town of Arendal. Arendal is further west than Wollstonecraft came, and was the family home of Captain Peder Ellefsen.

Gunnar’s office is inside Arendal’s original town hall. Despite all our high jinx and cinnamon buns on the ocean wave, Gunnar is still shy. He tenses up when I switch on my recording equipment. At first his answers are halting and short. I ask how long he’s been working on Wollstonecraft. “Only part-time,
in my spare time. I started twenty years ago. It all began with
Letters from Norway
, the Richard Holmes edition—”

“Me too,” I shout, the enthusiast overcoming the journalist in me. He pauses politely. I apologize and indicate silently for him to go on.

“The main story is of course what happened to the silver. We still haven’t found it. It’s very probable that Peder Ellefsen stole the silver, but he was not alone: he had some associates, and it’s possible that they forced him. When Wollstonecraft met him in Risør, she tried to get an out-of-court settlement. It is possible that he wanted to do it, but couldn’t because of their influence on him. Publicly he denied having ever received any silver. And Wollstonecraft couldn’t prove it. Ellefsen just completely denied it, which ended up being a successful defence.”

Some of the details of Wollstonecraft’s battle have only emerged in recent years. She went right to the top, roping in the Prime Minister of Denmark, then the ruling colonial power in Norway. And it was Gunnar, researching in his own time, living far away from national archives, who threw light on this. I ask Gunnar about his 2003 discovery of the Wollstonecraft letter, and he laughs nervously:

“It’s one of the finest experiences I’ve had. I was in Copenhagen and I’d spent nearly a week going through documents. I saw all kinds of other information about the case. I only had one week and I was running out of time. I found a file in a box marked
Madame Imlay’s Case
.” He pauses. “It was then that I understood I’d found one of the most important things.”

He avoids eye contact. I pry further: “Come on, what did it
feel
like?”

He lets out a giggle, “It felt… almost like proof that God exists!” He pauses again, an even longer pause, then heaves down several more boxes, rummages in them and passes me some large sheets of paper. I’m holding the photocopied pages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter. Here she is. I get a surge of affection seeing her determined, slightly loopy handwriting.

“It’s in perfect condition,” Gunnar says quietly. We look at the pages. I get a churchy kind of feeling and scarcely dare breathe on them.

“Her handwriting is not modern, but I’m used to reading Gothic script, and these are Latin letters, so it’s not hard to read. Of course I feel closer to her as a person, reading this. It’s important as found information – as a historian it’s important. But on a personal level it’s… it’s…”

I nod and smile, willing him on.

“…it’s… Well. I really enjoyed it.”

This is as effusive as he’s going to get. But instead of wishing I could get a better soundbite out of him, I’m struck with admiration. I’d mistaken his quietness for an absence, a lack of something: I was wrong. Gunnar spent his free time searching through years of false starts, misspellings and boxes of old paper, and he didn’t do it for glory. His thoughtfulness and precision make me feel cartoony and frivolous in comparison. Certain qualities are likely to advance humanity, such as curiosity and perseverance. And this man has them in spades.

The letter itself is a summary of the case against Ellefsen, and a plea for the Prime Minister to intervene on her behalf. The original is now in the Rigsarkivet, the National Archives of Denmark. Gunnar tells how she describes the meeting with
Ellefsen in Risør, how he is “humble” and regretful. She persuades him to bring compensation from his wealthy family. He returns later the same day, but in a very different mood. He’s spoken to his lawyers and is suddenly all a-swagger. Whatever advice he’s been given, it’s clear that she will now get neither compensation nor silver.

Will feels the need to put in an appearance at this stage. He rapidly builds up to a thrashing wail in his buggy, and to cheer him up we head out for a wander around Arendal. We stop in the Strand Kafé, Gunnar’s favourite, and I find a baby chair for Will. We order a
monke,
a small sweet dumpling, and some black coffee. Will drinks his milk thoughtfully, and I pass him little pieces of
monke
to chew.

Leaving the café, we climb up the hill and sit on a bench, overlooking some old cannons facing out to sea. At last I bring up the relationship between him and Wollstonecraft. The one that had seemed so unlikely when we first met. Why her, of all the women in all the books in all the world? Why does Wollstonecraft walk into Gunnar’s gin joint?

He breaks into a smile.

“I’ve always been interested in the connections between my local region and the world, and this is a perfect example. Personally, Wollstonecraft’s text makes it so easy to engage with her, she’s very subjective – and I like that.
Ja
. Why? Well. Maybe I’m a romantic person myself…”

But then we’re drawn back again, into the misery. It’s no longer just Ellefsen and the missing silver, there’s another massive body blow to come. All this time Wollstonecraft has been expecting a reunion with Imlay – their romantic holiday
together. But he’s gone cold. He is gradually withdrawing from his promise to join her. And so her letters become more bitter: she guilt-trips him about their baby, once more she’s struggling to keep going.

I tell Gunnar that I find some of the post-Risør letters difficult to read. There’s a growing sense of disgust, of pointlessness. A “black melancholy hovers round my footsteps”, she writes, describing “a sensibility wounded almost to madness”. It’s eating away at her. Yet on she goes, carrying onwards to Copenhagen and Hamburg and whatever secret unfinished business it is that Imlay’s putting her up to.

Here Gunnar has even more fuel for despair. He has his own theory about what that business might be:

“Imlay was a small player, but with important and influential contacts. I’m speculating here, but it’s possible that she has discovered that he’s dealing arms to France. Another possibility is gunpowder. Imlay’s plan was to use the silver to buy ‘provisions’ to bring back to France. The question is: were these provisions food or weapons? There’s a big difference. And the British said you weren’t even allowed to let food in – that was the blockade against France.”

Weapons-dealing! Such goings-on might explain the references to “vile trade” and “mushroom fortunes”. Also why she goes back from Scandinavia via Hamburg; the business centre for these important contacts of Imlay’s. Wollstonecraft’s penultimate letter seems to support Gunnar’s theory. “These men,” she writes, with energetic fury, “like the owners of negro ships, never smell on their money the blood by which it has
been gained.” In the middle of one of her diatribes against “sordid accumulators” she suddenly zooms in:

Is Wollstonecraft complicit? No one knows how much she knew. But you can bet she knew enough. Such business would be a betrayal, would compromise her completely. In Gunnar’s discovered letter, where Wollstonecraft pleads her case to the Prime Minister, she proudly invokes her character as “a moral writer”
.
Has she put her credibility at stake, and compromised her beliefs for Imlay? While he’s just gone and dumped her again? I chase away a small dog that’s come over and is sniffing Will’s leg. All three of us stare silently over the grey water for a while.

“What about France?” I ask. “She still wants to return and live there, but some of the violence has a profound effect on her. Do you think Wollstonecraft fell out of love with the Revolution after what she witnessed? Doesn’t she call Robespierre a monster?”

“Yes, she fell out of love with the bloody part of it. She basically kept the same opinion about all things, but was disappointed by what she saw, and when she came here to Norway she was shocked by people supporting Robespierre. She had the first-hand experience that they did not. The people who began the Revolution, they had no idea how it would go. It’s part of the human experience to watch how
it goes without knowing. Look what’s happening in Arab countries now.”

“Another reason we should learn from Wollstonecraft today.”

“Yes. That sense of uncertainty: we think it’s a good thing, but we’re not sure. This is the ideal moment to reflect on her times, as we’re in huge shifting times now ourselves. But Revolutions like this become very doubtful when they start using weapons.”

“But you can’t just ask a dictator to step aside, can you?” I say.

“No, but you should wait as long as possible.”

“That’s all very polite, but if you were Syrian right now you might be arming to protect your kids. And don’t you think Syrians have waited? They’ve waited and waited and waited…”

“Ok, it’s inhuman to expect them to wait for ever,” Gunnar replies, “but I think the results are better without violence. I hope for change in Iraq, Afghanistan, but of course we have to be lucky.”

“Do you believe in luck?

“I don’t know.”

“How about God?”

“I don’t know. I hope there’s a God.” He laughs. “This goes on the list of things I need to prove.”

The wind blows a paper bag onto Will’s buggy wheels. A seagull swoops, then lands nearby and looks at us sideways. We look out to sea.

Chapter Seven

“To Achieve That Moral Improvement within Half a Century”

The correct antidote to dusty boxes full of despair is to go out on a boat. We meet up with some of Gunnar’s family and friends, and all head out for a picnic on the island of Merdø. Lucky I’m not French, I snigger. Gunnar’s daughter Jenny joins us; she’s ten and reminds me of my daughters. We sit together and I resist the urge to hug her in an act of surrogacy – I miss my girls so. The picnic includes fishcakes. Will and I set to, and I keep him on my lap as a pretext for eating a few more, while Jenny practises her English on me. Afterwards, as we step back into the boat to set off, Gunnar turns to me with a quiet smile.

“There’s one more place to show you.”

We moor up on a jetty belonging to an elegant house in Sandviga. A dashing man is standing there waiting, with tweeds and slicked-back hair like a matinée idol. He is called Terje Bodin Larsen, and he has a very large handshake. This is his house, and it’s the last known place that the silver was ever seen.

“They unloaded the silver from the ship
right here.
” Gunnar points out an iron hook sunk deep into the rock, to which they would have moored. “After that, nobody knows.”

Terje tells me that a survey was done along the coast in 1738 placing these mooring arrangements by issue of decree. The hook has been there ever since, he adds, “but I still haven’t seen any silver!”

After that, nobody knows.

Then the silver trail stops here. This is as far as we can go. A yellow sun streams all around us. It’s that mad hour of sunlight – it beams down into the water, shining clear right down to the bottom. There’s a diving board sticking off the jetty over the bright water. It’s salt water, but it looks as clear as the purest river. It’s the same buttery light that welcomed us when we first arrived in Norway, and it makes me feel drunk. It’s the same exhilaration I could barely contain on board Anjava. The same purity that dazzled me in Risør.

This place and moment are of such significance, they deserve some kind of ritual. A solemn dedication. I look around for an accomplice, and there’s one right here. Gunnar’s daughter is playing with my phone. “Jenny, do you want to jump in with me?” “Yes!” A girl of action, like my daughters. I pause for a second – Will is being adored by people while working his way through a bowl of gleaming strawberries – then strip to my T shirt and knickers. Laughing, Jenny and I hold hands and leap off the jetty diving board together.

Cold water closes over us as we plunge deep. Time freezes for a split second as I look up into the swirl of bubbles, trapped laughter, silver air, rising above my head. This is it! I say to myself, not knowing what it means, then we burst back up, panting. We immediately do it again to make sure it was real, limbs scrambling in the chilly water. One last breathless go – I
can’t resist. And then I creep into Terje’s house to dress, stuffing my soggy things into my jacket pockets. My breath, my skin, the hairs on my skin – everything’s heightened. I go commando, and feel invincible.

Terje hands out wine in heavy goblets, the sun streams through the liquid. The wine hits me right there. At the same euphoric instant, absurdly, a small orchestra warms up and begins to play, sitting outdoors just two jetties away. It’s altogether too much. Violins – you must be kidding. In a climactic finale, this sensory overload collides with my private mixed-up feelings of an ending; the trail’s ending. Like the rainbow trailing into the pot of gold. The music floats over to us like a spell, the golden sun is in my eyes, and the silver trail ends.