St Pancras Old Church

And William and Mary Jane, fair play to them, do see this as a problem and do incarcerate Mary in the schoolroom.

Even so, with Claire's help, the pair exchange messages and find ways to meet at St. Pancras Churchyard, where Mary's mother is buried.

They take long walks together, and it is likely that at some point during this period, their relationship is consummated.

Appropriately for our Gothic heroine, some accounts suggest the act occurs on Mary Wollstonecraft's grave.

On the 21st of May, 1810, in that room in Holborn, at the age of eighty-one, the Chevalier d'Éon dies.

She is buried in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church, one of the oldest churches in London, under the plane trees, a few streets from where she lived.

Now we must acknowledge complexity.

After her death, doctors examined her body, and the answer they found was the one the gamblers of 1771 would have called male.

Rest in Milman Street in a warm room with Mrs. Cole bringing tea.

Dream of the white cross on the red ribbon worn over everything for fifty years.

Dream of the plane trees at St. Pancras and a churchyard that has held her safe for two hundred years.

Dream of a life that refused to be one thing and was honored anyway.