“You must learn to be more sporting, Your Grace,” I teased. “Lures are used in fishing, not for hunting. As for the prince, fatigue would appear to be a stranger to him. I cannot keep him at bay much longer, for—oh, Georgiana, I think I have fallen in love with him!”
Her Grace rose and fetched a deck of cards from a narrow drawer within her escritoire. “Clubs, you withhold your affections; diamonds, you bestow them.” She shuffled the deck and fanned the cards in her hands, their pips obscured from my view. “Choose one.”
I selected a card and turned it over to look at it. “And what do I do with this suit?” It was the king of hearts.
Lord Malden continued to press the prince’s cause. A week later, he came to visit me bearing a most extravagant gift. Inside the velvet box—a sumptuous royal purple—lay the prince’s portrait in miniature. I required my magnifying glass to read the name of the artist: ’twas the most celebrated Jeremiah Meyer. The likeness shone like the sun, for not only did His Highness’s countenance smile upon the viewer, but the portrait was set all the way round with brilliants that caught the morning light, reflecting their effervescent sparkles on every wall of my salon.
“My heavens! This is too—” I had not words to express how overwhelmed I was with His Highness’s extravagant gift. “He takes my breath away.”
“I am given to understand that there is more,” said the viscount. “Lift up the mounting.”
I raised the little velvet plinth on which the miniature had lain to discover secreted beneath it a small heart cut out of paper. On one side was written Je ne change qu’en mourant, and on the opposite I read its approximate translation, Unalterable to my Perdita through life.
I clutched the portrait to my bosom, though fearful of staining it with my hot, happy tears. “Please convey to His Royal Highness that after so many months of doubt and delay, though I never wavered in my devotion to him, it would give me the most felicitous—the most unalloyed—pleasure to see him.”
Seventeen
Royal Flush
1780…age twenty-two
It was the prince’s design that I should contrive to be smuggled into his apartments in Buckingham House, disguised in male apparel—my cross-dressing costume from The Irish Widow, for example. Through Lord Malden I nixed the notion immediately, for the danger of detection was far too great. Not only that, the indelicacy of such a step made me shrink from the proposal.
My refusal threw His Highness into the most distressing agitation, as evidenced by the letter his customary courier—and courtier—delivered to me the following day.
I am bereft of all solace, lady, if you do not come to me. My heart aches with the most exquisite pain, which only your tenderest ministrations can relieve. Truly, I believe I may die if I cannot see you. For the sake of England’s future, for I may expire of love, I beg of you, do not postpone our meeting yet again.
“I own it wounds my heart to know that I am the cause of such misery,” I told the viscount. Yet, he looked quite miserable himself. “Pray, sir, what is it that ails you?” I asked, solicitous of his frail condition.
“I regret that I consented to this entire undertaking,” said Lord Malden, after several moments of hesitation.
“I am not sure I take your meaning, your lordship.”
“Do not shoot the messenger,” he exclaimed, then lapsed into another silence. Finally, he rallied his wits and his spirits sufficiently to explain that he, too, over the course of our acquaintance, had developed a violent passion for me.
I was utterly taken aback, for truth told I had not gleaned the slightest hint from him that he had conceived any attraction for me whatever, so assiduous and diligent had he been with his royal commission.
“Forgive me, Mrs. Robinson. I am the most miserable and unfortunate of mortals.” He bowed low and pressed his lips to my kidskin slipper. “I humiliate myself, but I can no longer keep my passion a secret. And yet I understand that a consummation is not to be. It is the acknowledgment that there can be nothing between us that gnaws away at my soul.”
What was I to do with such a confession? I both admired Lord Malden and pitied him. And of course he was quite correct that he could not woo me in the name of the prince royal and then attempt to claim the prize for himself. I held out my hand to him.
“Rise, sir. You do me a great honor by flattering me with your attentions, but we both know that nothing beyond the bounds of friendship can come of it. I will promise never to speak of this again…and permit you to tell His Highness that I will still agree to meet him—but not at Buckingham House. Perhaps Kew would be a better location for such an”—I dreaded to use the word—“assignation.”
The viscount stood, his face as rosy as I had ever seen it. Consulting a pocket watch produced from the fob attached to his yellow brocaded waistcoat, he declared that the time had raced away from him and that he must be going. I felt acutely aware that I was the cause of his consternation and embarrassment.
“I will come to you again, with another proposal…regarding the…er…arrangements,” he said, and beat a hasty retreat from my drawing room.
Yet I was still not entirely at peace with my decision. To stiffen my resolve, I thought to return to my chamber, where I kept the prince’s correspondence under lock and key, and reread his most tender sentiments and expressions of the sublimest passion. I was halfway down the corridor when I heard something of a ruckus coming from the room.
I tentatively
