“Well done!” I lifted her into my arms for a kiss. “Oh, my goodness, you’re such a big girl now; you’re getting too heavy for Mummy to lift.” She smelled of apricots, and I buried my face in her soft brown hair. “Well then, since it’s Perdita they all talk of, today I shall be Perdita for them.”
“What’s Perdita?” Maria twined one of my curls about her finger, then popped her finger in her mouth.
“Don’t suck your thumb like a stick of sugar candy, my poppet; you’ll end up with four fingers and a wrinkly raisin.” Maria gave me a disbelieving look and continued to enjoy her own digit. “Perdita is the name of one of the roles Mummy portrayed when she was at the playhouse. And though perhaps it wasn’t even Mummy’s best role, it’s the one for which she’ll be most remembered, as I daresay it’s become my sobriquet.”
“What’s a so-brickette?”
“A pet name, darling. And mine, Perdita, means the ‘lost girl.’”
Maria seemed to think this was the silliest thing she’d ever heard me utter. Dissolving into silvery giggles, she said, “But you’re not lost. You’re right here.”
With her sturdy little legs, she climbed into the wardrobe and hid herself amid my numerous gowns and costumes. “Now I’m Perdita, too,” came a muffled voice. “Come and find me!”
Alas, my estranged husband did not bring me the delight our daughter did. Perhaps he considered that the common knowledge of my infidelity—though my affections could not have been bestowed upon a loftier personage unless it had been the king himself—entitled him to public displays of his own adulterous affairs. I cannot recall when his behavior so scandalized me as the night of October 7, 1780, at Covent Garden, when with my quizzing glass I spied him in one of the upper boxes, in flagrante delicto—for all and sundry to witness—with one of the fancy pieces who trolled the corridors outside the gods.
This was too much for me to bear in silence. Nearly every man and woman of my acquaintance, whether wellborn or not, had a lover, a custom that society winked at as long as discretion was observed. Though our liaison was the talk of the town, even the prince and I did not indulge in our amorous conduct in the public eye. Now, before most of London—for those who were not at the theatre that night would surely read of the exploit in one of the several morning papers—Mr. Robinson was making a mockery of our marriage.
I stormed out of my own box and raced up three flights of stairs, lifting my skirts so that I could take the treads two at a time, and reach the uppermost gallery that much sooner. Throwing open the door to my husband’s box, I shouted, “You are welcome to shame yourself to your heart’s content, but I will not permit you to mortify me by your licentious conduct!”
As I thrust myself between Mr. Robinson and his latest conquest—and an ugly little thing she was, too—endeavoring to separate their bodies, he snarled at me for my hypocrisy.
Enraged, I began to beat him about the head and shoulders with my muff. The commotion caused quite a hubbub in the house below, and all heads turned away from the stage to observe the more interesting spectacle taking place in the balcony.
Subsequent to this contretemps, the derision heaped upon me by the press was sufficient to wrap several barrels of fish. But I was learning to play the game and was determined not to allow Mr. Robinson to win the day in our publicly staged morality wars, getting off more or less scot-free whilst I was vilified and eviscerated daily. I had coin enough to puff myself in the papers, and though had I been Catholic I would have been no candidate for canonization, I was not the debauched demimondaine, as my critics sought to paint me.
Because papers changed editors—and hence, their politics—as often as the well accoutered changed their hose, a broadsheet could be friend one day and foe the next. Printing costs were subsidized by the sale of column space to anyone who could afford it, with no editorial oversight, but even the publishers’ items made little distinction between fantasy and fact, opinion and truth. Their job was to sell papers, and the more scandals they printed, the faster they sold. People would have readily believed I drank dragon’s blood for breakfast, bathed in claret, and made love hanging by my toes, if the news bore the imprimatur of the Morning Post.
But if readers swallowed utter rot, they lapped up pap just as easily. As the curious dogged me wherever I went, it did not seem odd that an item about my charitable works appeared in the brand-new Morning Herald, published by an acquaintance of mine, the “fighting parson,” Reverend Henry Bate. He had trod the boards himself in his youth, and his wife was an actress whom I had known at Drury Lane.
I had also been very close at the time with another of the company’s actresses, Sophia Baddeley. Mrs. Baddeley had been one of Drury Lane’s great leading ladies, and an acknowledged beauty, but her trajectory had taken her from fame to—rumor had it—destitution and despair. She had been a highflyer and a mad spender, quitting the theatre for the arms of a titled protector who soon left her for another—a handsome, charming radical who, as irony would have it, had been an acquaintance of my own ne’erdo-well husband! I had heard that Mrs. Baddeley was no longer “going like herself,” as we used to say of her during her wild and flagrant days, and thought to pay her a call.
I alighted from my phaeton and instructed my liveried postboys to
