Mr. Robinson received his lordship’s felicitations on our nuptials, and then excused himself to fetch a glass of punch—whereupon Lord Northington made swift work of my unprotected state to make his two confederates known to me. They asked leave to pay their respects to the newlyweds, a boon I was only too pleased to grant, as I was eager to enter society as quickly as possible. The following day, both Captain Ayscough and his cousin Lord Lyttelton—the gent from the previous eve with the mis-buttoned waistcoat and unkempt appearance—paid a call at Hatton Garden, where I endeavored to entertain them, though my husband was not at home. From that day on, Lyttelton was a frequent visitor.
Had I known that night at the Pantheon what I was soon to discover about Lord L., I should not have been so quick to open my house to him. Too late I learnt that for a woman to be seen in his company was to compromise her reputation, for people suspected only one thing. How naïve I had been! At the pleasure gardens, words of warning were whispered in my ear by well-meaning acquaintances, but I had hastily dismissed these cautions, assuming they were born of envious motives. Yet even my maidservant seemed to be aware that he was known as the “wicked Lord Lyttelton,” a notorious libertine. He was twenty-nine years old to my sixteen, and only the previous year—1773—according to Caroline, my abigail, he had left his wife of but a few months and absconded to Paris with a barmaid. “It was in all the papers!” she said. “Not only that—he’d a mistress, too, at the time!” Caroline told me. “A Missus Dawson he was keeping over in St. James.”
The fabulously wealthy—and equally unappealing—Lord Lyttelton simultaneously courted the friendship of both myself and my husband, who insisted that I continue to admit him to our home, despite my abhorrence of the man. His lordship’s manners were overbearingly insolent, his language licentious, and his person untidy even to a degree that it was disgusting. Had he no valet? Though Mr. Robinson was deficient in his own ways, he was at least in every respect the reverse of his new companion: unassuming, neat, and delicate in his conversation. Yet my husband was too much pleased with the society of a man whose wit was only equaled by his profligacy, to shrink from such an ambitious association.
One might wonder, as did I at first, how a man whose appearance is slovenly and manners are impertinent has even the remotest chance of succeeding as a seducer, let alone become one of the masters of the art. Lord Lyttelton’s approach was singular, the Trojan Horse of Lotharios, for the very things that put one off about his person were those qualities that eventually gained him access to the boudoir.
Clever the man whose true prey is the young wife, for this sharper, while keeping company with Mr. Robinson night and day, took pains to ascertain my own pleasures. Upon learning that I dedicated my leisure hours to writing poetry, but a few days into our acquaintanceship he presented me with a rare volume, also penned by a woman.
Recalling too well that Mr. Robinson had used much the same stratagem in weakening my mother’s resolve to forfeit her daughter to him, plying her with copies of sermons and her beloved graveyard literature, I asked Lord Lyttelton if his design was not to seduce me, rather than befriend my husband?
“Heavens, no,” he drawled, feigning indifference. “What would I want with you? Your figure is tolerable to be sure, your face a picture of the buds in May…but no woman under thirty years is worth admiring. I’faith, even the antiquity of forty is preferable to the insipidity of sixteen.” I glanced at him darkly. “Tut, tut, I hope I have not made the pretty child angry.”
Had Lord Lyttelton himself not been a talented amateur in the field of poetry, I should not have been able to abide him at all.
I knew that he frequently led my easy-tempered husband from the paths of domestic confidence to the haunts of profligate debasement. Many were the nights that Mr. Robinson returned to Hatton Garden reeking of brandy, vomit, and those bodily effluents nocturnally exchanged twixt man and maid.
His intercourse with Lord Lyttelton produced a very considerable change in Mr. Robinson’s domestic deportment. Every hour he seemed to sink more deeply in the gulf of dissipation. At length, I confronted my wayward husband. “You are not the man I married,” I said sorrowfully, endeavoring to keep the scold out of my voice. “You are constantly together with his lordship, whilst I am left at home with nothing but quill and parchment to entertain me. Is the society of a clever, pretty wife so repugnant to you that you prefer to spend your evenings with gamblers and whores?”
I thought he might strike me. “I am doing this for us, Mary,” he insisted, dismissing out of hand the neglect with which I charged him. He had become not only careless of his wife and unborn tot, but of his pecuniary finances, whilst I—“the child,” as Lyttelton called me—was kept in total ignorance as to the resources that supported his increasing expenses.
The licentious activities of my languorous, and increasingly laconic, husband did not yield enough red meat for the gossipmongers who provided fodder for the morning papers, so the editors found fresh blood in traducing me for our new association! At least once a week did I read an anonymous on-dit that referenced myself and Lord Lyttelton. Speculation over whether a notorious rake had added to his list of conquests the latest pretty newcomer to the social scene was too delicious to ignore.
One rumor might have amused me, had I not given a fig for my character: The Morning Post reported that his lordship and I had made violent love numerous times during one rather jouncing carriage
