Yet I could never have anticipated that the least of the tribulations of incarceration would be the imprisonment itself! Whilst we were ensconced in the jail I received numerous messages and letters from those bon vivants of my pre-Fleet acquaintance: Lords Northington and Lyttelton, and Mr. Fitzgerald among them. Excepting the notes from Northington, the other missives were written in the language of unctuous gallantry, with honeyed words of love expressing a dismayed heartsickness at my predicament, adding if only—if only—I could see the reason in committing myself to their protection, I would soon see the last of my unpleasant and humiliating situation.
Though I burned their letters, giving no thought at all to violating my marriage vows, these gay blades could not begin to know just how unpleasant and humiliating my life had become! Mr. Robinson had fallen in with a bad lot, who condoned, even enabled, his participation in all of the licentious and lascivious behavior he had previously enjoyed outside the dank and rancid walls of debtors’ prison. And it became my lot to share the unhappy tales of his vile comportment with a most unlikely pair of ears.
Georgiana, the newly minted Duchess of Devonshire, now mistress of the spectacular Chatsworth, was the same age as I. On hearing of this vivacious young patroness’s penchant for literature, my sweet brother George, now apprenticed to a London merchant, demanded a copy of the volume of poems I had been preparing.
I clapped my hand to my bosom in amusement. “What makes you think she will admit you to Devonshire House?” I asked him.
“Because I’m charming!” He grinned. “Charming and clean. And I ask for nothing on my own behalf. All I wish to do is make a gift to her. And,” he added, with all the swaggering confidence of a youth of fourteen years, “I don’t think she’s half so inaccessible as people make her out to be, even if she is the most popular and fashionable girl in London.” George pressed his point. “Take a chance! What have you to lose?”
“Very little, indeed—though I’m no gambler,” I agreed. “Apart from my enduring a lifetime of mortification should she refuse you, or worse, detest the contents of this little parcel.” In an effort to mitigate what might have been an unkind reception—or, more likely, a blow to my own vanity as to the little volume’s artistic value—I penned a brief note to the duchess, apologizing for the verses’ defects and pleading my age (or the lack of it) as the only excuse for their inadequacy.
All that day, I was filled with agitation, wondering how such an illustrious personage would receive one such as I, let alone praise the humble efforts of my busy pen. I scrubbed the prison floors with an added vigor to relieve my mind from anxiety. I paced my tiny quarters until my slippers were scuffed, and gazed out our narrow window at the courtyard below, my only connection with the world outside, as if the duchess’s reaction to my poetry would be borne to me on a breeze.
At length the jailer rapped upon my door. “Your brother to see you, ma’am.” He held out a grubby fist for a guerdon. “And in ’igh spirits ’e is, too!”
“Good news! Oh, the most wonderful of news!” My young brother bounded into the room like a stag. “Her Grace wishes to see you! Tomorrow!” He wrinkled his nose at the sour odor that pervaded our room. “Someone needs her linen changed.”
I glanced at Maria’s basket. “No, the rooms always smell this way, I fear. But tell me”—I grabbed his hands—“what did she say? How did she look? Did she read my poems?”
George recounted their meeting in chapter and verse. Her Grace had been most amiable and gracious indeed; and, as my brother had accurately predicted, she had also been quite taken with his exuberance. She had paged through the slender volume, her eyes lighting on one or two of the poems, which she read to herself as her lips mouthed the words.
“As if to taste them,” George told me. “And then she inquired after the particulars of the situation of the young woman—nay, not more than a slip of a girl, she said—who had written the stanzas.” George lowered his eyes, his long light lashes nearly brushing his cheekbones. “I confessed all, I’m afraid.” Her Grace had been most especially impressed, as his errand showed the extent of a brother’s love for a sister in dire straits. “It was then she pressed my hands in hers and with the sweetest expression, told me, ‘She must come to call upon me tomorrow. I will not admit any refusal.’”
My brother’s eyes shone with admiration—yet whether they were for me or for the fair duchess, I could not say.
I ran to Maria’s basket and picked her up in my arms. “She’ll see me! She’ll see me!” I crowed, dancing about the room with her and planting kisses on every feature of her little face.
That evening as I strolled about the perimeter of the racquet court, eyes tilted skyward watching the clouds scud across the moon as if on some urgent errand to the other side of the atmosphere, I fretted about what I should wear on the morrow. The sartorially minded Mr. Robinson was of no use as a sounding board, for as usual he was nowhere about. During my seclusion from the world I had adapted my dress to my situation, a form of “costuming” I would continue throughout my life, both onstage and off. Neatness was at all times my pride, but now plainness was the conformity to necessity; simple habiliments illustrated my adversity. Thus, the brown satin gown I wore on my first visit to the Duchess of Devonshire was as strange to me at the time as a birthday court-suit would be to
