Glancing at my writing desk one day, William solicitously asked, “Is this how you fight it?”
“Maria’s suggestion,” I murmured. “I am in the painful—yet liberating—process of editing Ban Tarleton’s name and all references to him from my verses and rearranging the revised poems for republication.”
That April, I announced the opening of a subscription list to finance the publication of my Poetical Works. My eyes flooded with tears when it was signed by many of the ladies of the ton, including my old friend the Duchess of Devonshire.
Yet my elation was short-lived. Maria, my gazetteer, had taken it upon herself to peruse the morning papers for puffs and squibs, or even something approaching a genuine news story, that featured one of my old friends.
“Well then, it seems Ban Tarleton is finally about to receive another commission!” she announced one September morning. “In Portugal! And there is another item about him…‘Colonel Banastre Tarleton betook himself to Houghton, the seat of the Earl of Chomondeley, in Norfolk, where a grand shooting party was on the bill of fare. He bagged a brace of pheasants, three hares, which were promptly jugged by the cook, and the young mistress of the house, Susan Priscilla Bertie, the natural daughter of the late Duke of Ancaster, with whom the colonel served in His Majesty’s Army during the war with the colonies in the 1770s. Now that our cavalry hero has broken free from his lengthy entanglements with a certain prominent lady scribbler and once-notorious actress and courtesan, he is at liberty to pay court to Miss Bertie—tho’ this fresh English rose is easily less than half the colonel’s age.’” Maria ducked. “Mummy, please don’t throw your inkwell! We cannot afford new wall coverings!”
On December 13, 1798, the Oracle announced that Ban’s nuptials to the dewy Miss Bertie were to take place four days hence. The young lady brought to her husband a sizeable dowry—an amount speculated to be anywhere from twelve to thirty thousand pounds. Maria embraced me, blotting my tears with her handkerchief. “I choose to think of it this way, my dearest Mum: now some other unfortunate woman will become responsible for his debts!”
Twenty-nine
Brandishing the Banner of Women’s Rights
1799…age forty-one
In 1799, as Colonel and Mrs. Tarleton prepared to sail for Portugal, I put pen to paper once again in an effort to assuage the myriad sensations of loss, regret, and betrayal that continued to plague my mind. The False Friend had been rushed into publication to coincide with the hubbub over Ban’s wedding; and the public eagerly snapped up the copies. By the end of May, the entire first edition had sold out and the second edition went on sale. At the same time, French and German translations—Le Faux Ami and Der Falsche Freund—were published in their respective countries.
In their review of The False Friend on February 18, 1799, the Morning Post took great delight in revealing an element of the plot, which they correctly construed as the author’s gleeful attempt at a swift and terrible revenge. If she could not wreak it upon the original, the avatar would be made to suffer. “Mrs. Robinson makes the hero of her new novel perish on his voyage to Lisbon.”
My friends cheered; Ban’s condemned me in their letters to the editors and in notes of admonishment delivered to my doorstep by the Royal Mail, but I never imagined they would do otherwise. And the Oracle’s critic tartly wrote, “Bravery in the Field is not always accompanied by Fidelity in the Closet.”
On March 5, 1799, when the Tarletons finally sailed aboard the Hyena (I was too morose to appreciate the mirthful irony of the vessel’s name), I penned another Sappho stanza, filled with despairing invective. Perhaps it was best to acknowledge that I could never entirely purge Ban from my soul. And wherever he sailed, and whoever traveled beside him, he would always carry a piece of my heart. Mayhap I was destined never to be whole again.
With Maria’s encouragement, I began a new novel. Still livid with Ban, I had intended, at first, to tarnish the rosy reputation of the former Miss Bertie, by reminding those who had not read her marriage announcements that she was the natural daughter of Bertie, the Duke of Ancaster, and Rebecca Krudener, his mistress whilst he was garrisoned in Philadelphia during the war with the colonies.
I was the one who came up short, however, when I could not uncover a single word of scandal or reproach regarding Susan Priscilla Bertie. Her birthright had not been of her own choosing, and she had been a stainless young lady. Suddenly, I felt sorry for her, and while my title remained unchanged, my plot evolved into something else entirely. The Natural Daughter metamorphosed into a slim, fictionalized autobiography. My avatar was Martha Morley, an actress and authoress, a much-maligned woman who at one point exclaims, “Of all the occupations which industry can pursue, those of literary toil are most fatiguing. That which seems to the vacant eye a mere playful amusement, is in reality an Herculean labor; and to compose a tolerable work is so difficult a task that the fastidiously severe should make the trial before they presume to condemn the humblest effort of imagination.” As Maria succinctly put it, I had returned to my literary leitmotif.
Of course, I created a
