“All gone,” I repeated. “She says that when she plays peek-a-boo with Dorcas. If Maria wants a toy, or more milk or a biscuit or reaches for something it would be better not to eat or play with, Dorcas will hide it, like this.” I made a snatching movement with my hand and shoved the imaginary forbidden fruit behind my back. “All gone! And every time that night when a cloud would hide the moon, Maria would hold her hand up to the sky and say, ‘All gone.’ She’s but eighteen months old and already so…her mind is so quick.”
“Like her mama, I expect,” said the duchess, the volume of poetry nearly hidden in the silken folds of her skirts. “You must come back to see me again. And soon,” Her Grace insisted. “And next time you must bring Maria Elizabeth. I would so love to meet such a darling.”
Somehow from the depths of her magical pockets, the duchess produced a small purse. “I wish I could do more to soothe your troubles.”
I tried to refuse the gift, but she ever so delicately referred to my impecunious state and pressed the coins upon me more urgently.
“It will give you more time to write your glorious poetry. We must speak more of it—but I—” I noticed that the high color had begun to drain from her face. She caressed her rounded belly. “I fatigue easily these days.”
I returned to the Fleet filled with pride in the promise of a friendship with the vivacious duchess. What an honor I had been granted in her condescension of an interview! And to hear her praise my poetry—even the degradations of a debtor’s incarceration could not have dampened my spirits.
“Good news!” I exclaimed as I unlocked the door to our meager rooms.
I heard my husband’s voice coming from the direction of our bedchamber. “Blast!” he swore. “Are you back then, Mary?”
“Who else?” I asked gaily, breezing into the room. I halted, mid-step, at the sight before me. For there was my husband, naked as a plucked guinea fowl from the waist down, in the arms of a siren I knew too well.
I knew that Mr. Robinson had not been faithful to me, even whilst we languished in prison; but evidently his affairs were being conducted nearly under my nose. Now it was abundantly apparent that at every opportunity he availed himself of my absences, when I undertook my charwoman’s duties—and even during my visit to the Duchess of Devonshire.
“How dare you!” I said, keeping my voice low, “with our daughter slumbering in the very next room!”
My husband, and his inamorata, an Italian woman named Angelina Albanesi, whose husband was also imprisoned in the Fleet, regarded me with only the mildest interest. They did not even have the compunction to be affronted by my discovering them in flagrante.
I knew of Signora Albanesi’s reputation. She had not chosen, as had I, to reside in the Fleet with her husband, Angelo, an artist, but visited him with regularity. In the course of such conjugal excursions, she made so free to visit other men as well—and one of them was Mr. Robinson! I had been given to understand that Signor Albanesi, who I heard had been an artist of some renown, not only winked at his wife’s conduct, but—and I can think of no other term as appropriate—was her Pandarus. Purportedly he procured women for the other inmates as well.
Signora Albanesi disentangled her limbs from my husband’s body and straightened her violet silk petticoat.
“What monsters you are,” I said, my voice aquiver with rage. “To make a mockery of our marriage and a fool of me—I, who have willingly been the partner of Mr. Robinson’s captivity, the devoted slave to his necessities—while he engages in the lowest and most degrading intrigues imaginable.”
A bitter laugh strangled itself in my throat. “Why ever did you wish to marry me and consign me to hell when you never had any intention of honoring your vows? It is certainly not your first time, or even the fourth where another woman is concerned.” I lowered my eyes, ashamed to cry before the glamorous signora. “It seems I have always been the dupe of your affections.” I picked at the lace threads of my handkerchief so I would have somewhere to look that was not the lovers’ eyes. “Perhaps, Tom, if you loved another with constancy—if one woman had so captured your heart that you could never bear to see it released and therefore had none to give another, regardless of the state of wedlock—this, perhaps, I could understand.”
Signora Albanesi kissed my husband on each cheek, in the continental fashion. Then, crossing the room and clasping hold of my unwilling hands, she looked deeply into my eyes and said, “You are so young, my dear; you have much to understand about men—and women. It is the very least I can do to tutor you in the ways of the world.”
“I have no wish to con the lessons you might inculcate, madam,” I replied stiffly.
“Then you are a little fool,” she said, absent any trace of malice.
Despite my better judgment, some days later I found myself inviting Signora Albanesi to visit our rooms, whilst Mr. Robinson whiled away the afternoon in the prison’s coffeehouse.
I had to admit that La Albanesi did possess a certain magnetic exoticism. Though she was quite a bit my elder—between thirty and forty years old, I supposed—she was a handsome woman. Part of her allure was that she never powdered
