As an amateur sibyl I proved accurate, for on our stopping at the Star and Garter at Greenwich, the person who came to hand me from the carriage was our opposite neighbor from the Southampton Buildings! I stifled my urge to gasp, for now that we stood so close, it was abundantly plain that he was nearly a head shorter than I was.
“May I present my young friend, Thomas Robinson?” Mr. Wayman made the introductions. I was confused, but my gentle mother was indignant. We had been set up like pins!
Our party dined, and early in the evening we returned to London without the company of Mr. Robinson, who remained on in Greenwich. As is so often the case in life, the fantasy was far more intriguing than the reality. Mr. Robinson was nowhere near the creature of my imagination, the mysterious stranger across the lane. I confess, the man made no grand impression on me that afternoon. His manners were tolerable, but his conversation was wanting, droning on ad nauseum about the Law—with which he was fluent—but tongue-tied when it came to discussions of the classics and suchlike. His wan appearance, which before our acquaintance had filled my girlish imagination with romantic notions of the invalid, now seemed merely pallid. His affability seemed his greatest talent.
I raised the subject of Mr. Robinson on the ride home. “Well, Mother, at least you were more impressed than I when he boasted of training with the firm of Vernon and Elderton.”
“It bespeaks a promising future,” Mr. Wayman interjected, as I pooh-poohed his prospects by fluttering my lips.
“Mary, that’s most unbecoming,” Mother scolded.
“My young friend would be quite the catch,” added the solicitor, pressing his advantage with the woman more likely to favor Mr. Robinson. “Mrs. Darby, Tom is the sole heir of his uncle, a Mr. Harris of Carmarthenshire, and stands to inherit thirty thousand pounds on the gentleman’s demise. Tom has a promising career ahead of him—Mr. Vernon sees great things for the youth—which is not to be sneezed at. And of course he’s immensely fond of your daughter.”
“Pandarus,” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say, Miss Darby?”
“Bless us!”
“Exactly! You could do worse than permit Mr. Robinson to pay his addresses.”
I confess that at the time I wondered at so effusive an endorsement. Why did Mr. Robinson not speak for himself that afternoon at dinner? But as I knew so little of him, I allowed that much of his languid demeanor might owe itself to shyness, and that he was more comfortable deputizing his wooing to an interlocutor.
But I was mistaken. Mr. Robinson could never be accused of lacking either temerity or tenacity. The route to his conquest lay in first seducing the gatekeeper, and here he excelled. Upon discovering that Mother had a fondness for what we liked to call graveyard literature, Mr. Robinson began making my mother gifts of it. The moat was bridged with the present of an elegantly bound copy of Hervey’s Meditations. After that, he laid siege to the citadel with daily deliveries of a volume on some moral or religious theme. These tokens were enough to convince Mother—who had closed the shutters upon his flirtations not too many weeks previous—that Mr. Robinson was the kindest and best of mortals.
Yet the hero’s greatest trials lay ahead of him.
The scourge that had overtaken so much of the Continent had crossed the Channel and one day darkened our own doorstep. My little brother George, only eleven years old, was suddenly sickened with the smallpox, becoming dangerously ill. For days he lay abed, fretting for water, delirious with fever, sores the size and color of cherry pits ravaging his small frame. There was scarce a patch of unaffected skin on his little legs or on his once-pretty face.
During those anxious and terrible days, Mr. Robinson was indefatigable in his attentions, conduct that offered tremendous consolation to my mother. The second comfort, if one can call it that, which she derived from our domestic catastrophe, was that George’s illness took precedence over all, necessitating the postponement of my Drury Lane debut.
I was heartsick, first for George of course, and then for myself. Like Sisyphus, I had been toiling toward the summit of the mountain, only to slide back down to its base.
“No one is sorrier than I at this change in plans,” wrote Mr. Garrick, “yet I heartily anticipate the day when your brother will in restored health rejoice at your maiden voyage upon the oaken planks of the Theatre Royal.”
And then, while the winter chill of 1773 hardened the ground and George himself was still wrestling with the angels, I succumbed to the disease. Within three days my figure was stippled with a rash, brow to toes, so that I appeared to have a thousand red navels. Yet I felt little terror at the approaches of a dangerous and deforming malady. Though my intended profession depended upon my looks as much as on my talent, personal beauty has never been to me an object of material solicitude.
Mr. Robinson now went full-bore to win my affections by showing his willingness to hazard catching the disfiguring and deadly pox himself, swearing oath upon oath to marry me even if my face and figure should be marred permanently by disease. Every day he attended my sickbed with the zeal of a brother, and ’tis true that zeal made an impression of gratitude upon my heart—an appreciation that became the source of all my succeeding sorrows.
I lay abed for nearly three months. During the worst of my illness, when my fever so overtook me that I was sure that angels and demons danced hand in hand before me, Mother and Mr. Robinson undertook a campaign designed to convince me to relent.
They assumed, at least in my presence, that I would survive as George had done. “But what condition will you be
