Her colorful presence seemed to suck the air out of the room; I felt faintly queasy. “You know, Mrs. Robinson, I had intended that you should catch us out!” she said brazenly, referring to her interrupted liaison with my husband.
“And why might that be?” I asked her, utterly appalled.
“Because I have observed you. You do not know how to hold on to a man, child. And yet, you have too much to offer such a one as Mr. Robinson, but neither of you knows it. You deserve better than he, and I will teach you the way to obtain it.”
She drew my chair away from my desk and seated me in the center of the room. Slowly circling the chair, she said, “You must always scintillate. Fascinate. Use them. Your beauty is a tool, your figure a weapon. Look at you—dressing the penitent! Somebody must instruct you in the ways of the world or you will be squashed like a water bug,” she declared in her most melodious accent. “Now watch me,” she commanded. “Watch me walk. Watch me sit. Watch me look at someone in a way that will make them do anything it is I may require of them. How do you think I became the mistress of the Prince de Courland? I will do for you a far greater service than I provide for your husband. Your husband is nothing to me—a diversion only; you are welcome to him and your silly romantic domestic attachment. But I will instruct you on how to do far better. To use your beauty to advantage, rather than squander it on the undeserving. If you do as I have done, you, too, may command the attentions of the nobility.” She lowered her voice and told me, quite confidentially, “I have already spoken of you to the Earl of Pembroke. He has assured me that he would be happy to offer you his protection.”
“Believe me, signora, I am no stranger to the most licentious of lordlings offering me his protection, if that is what I desired!”
“Tut, tut, child, there is a world of difference between a man such as Lord Lyttelton and the Earl of Pembroke. The former is to the latter as dross is to gold.”
Thank heaven my view of womankind was not entirely sullied by this siren. For the Duchess of Devonshire, as kind as Signora Albanesi was calculating, extended the courtesy of inviting me to frequent her establishment as often as I could. Georgiana’s company brought my aching bosom tremendous solace, and as the weeks and months progressed we became confidantes, unburdening ourselves about our marriages and the husbands who could not be bothered to know our hearts.
I confessed to her that Mr. Robinson had been committing frequent and disgraceful infidelities, admitting the most abandoned of my sex, not only Signora Albanesi, but other women whose low, licentious lives were such as to render them the shame and outcasts of society.
“After I discovered him with Signora Albanesi, he did not even scruple to make a defense,” I told her. “I cannot say that he was brazen about their affair, but he most certainly did not appear the least bit contrite.”
“How can he not realize he has more loveliness, more animation, more grace under his own roof than he could ever hope to find elsewhere? What does this Signora Albanesi have that you do not?”
I lifted Her Grace’s spaniel pup into my lap. “You do not think me plain then?”
“Heavens, no!”
Almost absentmindedly, I stroked the spaniel’s silky coat. “Yet I realized that this serpent in the garden walked with dignity and grace. I did envy her confident mien as well as her fine clothes and her dark, exotic beauty. I resolved to listen to her, if only for a minute or two. I found myself appalled and disgusted at her vulgarity, and yet I could not help but admire her. As Angelina Albanesi promenaded about the room, using her face, her fan, and the movement of her skirts to allure and entice, how I wished to hurl something at her regal raven head! A tutor indeed, to teach me the art of seduction!
“At that moment, I admit to thinking of nothing but revenge on Mr. Robinson. But it was envy talking, the open, running sores of wounded vanity and pride. I did not fancy myself a siren whose aim was to seduce men and discard them for sport, in the mold of Signora Albanesi. Though I do not love my husband, I am devoted. And I view our wedding vows with all due solemnity.”
At length, after pouring herself a cup of tea and sipping it with great rumination, the duchess remarked, “At every turn the prison presents an evil influence. You made the brave choice to accompany Mr. Robinson in his captivity, Mary, but I am quite certain that his incarceration will not only fail to rehabilitate him—so he may be forever released from a debtor’s shackles of writs and decrees—but it will destroy you.”
“Though I have confessed much during our visits, were I to describe one-half of what I have suffered during these nearly fifteen months of imprisonment, the world would consider my confession as the exaggerated inventions of a novel!”
A sweet smile suffused the duchess’s lovely countenance. “If not a novel, why not poetry?” She surprised me by taking my little volume of verses from the depths of her embroidered skirts. “I carry this everywhere, you know. Whenever I find myself idle or discomfited, and in need of the balm that poesy brings, I choose one of your verses and read a few stanzas to myself—or to Charles,” she said, indicating the spaniel that had fallen asleep in my lap. “I believe you have
