Mrs. Baddeley embraced me as though I was a long-lost friend. “Why, Mrs. Robinson, what brings you here?”
“I heard you were not well,” I said quietly. In the room just past the entry, a baby bawled incessantly; the sound of the poor distressed mite was enough to shiver the floorboards. “I came to see if you need anything.”
Mrs. Baddeley chuckled darkly. “What do you think?” she replied, gesturing about her. “Many days I have to choose between milk and candles. Either we sit in the dark and make it through another week, or starve in the light.” She ushered me into the parlor, and motioned for me to sit, tossing a wooden doll, its painted face faded into little more than a smudge, from one of the chairs. “You’re looking very fine, Mary. Happy.”
“I am happy—and I am in love,” I sighed guiltily, remembering my friend’s former gaiety. No one had been more of a prominent fixture at parties and routs than Mrs. Baddeley. She’d made history when she was excluded from the then-new Pantheon, as the rules forbade “players” from attending any of the entertainments there. But a public outcry on her behalf from ladies as well as gentlemen who had seen her perform and thought the world of her talents gained her the entry she so desired. Mrs. Baddeley had paved the way for her fellow players in many ways, and I had always admired and esteemed her for it.
“Allow me to help you. Please,” I said, and took a purse filled with coins from the pocket beneath my robe.
“I don’t want your charity,” Mrs. Baddeley replied stiffly.
“Because the purse is mine, or because it’s charity? I was ever your friend, Sophia, and I mean to remain one. I even named my second child—though she was not long in this world—for you.”
Mrs. Baddeley gazed at me in utter astonishment. “Truly?” she asked, her voice scarcely above a whisper.
I nodded. “You were a champion to those of us in the profession who came up behind you.” I looked about me and shuddered at how she had come down in the world. An open bottle of claret rested on the table beside her chair, an analgesic, perhaps, for her sorrows. At least it wasn’t gin; she hadn’t fallen that far into despondency. I thought about Meribah Lorrington. I could not rescue my governess from her mental torments, but I might still be able to relieve some of Mrs. Baddeley’s anguish. “Theatre folk are family,” I reminded her, “regardless of whether an actor is still on the boards. You are, therefore, as a sister to me, and I would never turn away a sister in need.”
“I did not come to you in need, Mary,” said Sophia with the utmost dignity. “You sought me out.” Then, seeing how her pride had managed to wound my own, for she realized I had meant nothing but good by calling on her, she softened somewhat. “I am a cautionary tale come to life,” she said. “His Royal Highness is only eighteen years old; you are the elder, and, by virtue of having lived in the world and seen its degradations through the bars of a debtors’ prison, significantly the wiser. My advice to you is to trust no one’s honeyed words, choose your friends wisely, and have more than two talents. For once you have fallen from favor, and your looks eventually fade, your children will still need to be fed.”
As if on cue, her infant bawled from its cradle. One of her older children went to rock the little berth, but soon called, “Mama, I think you’d better come; she’s coughing something dreadful!”
“I—I am so sorry to have to cut short our interview,” Mrs. Baddeley said hastily, as I rose from my chair. A russet-colored puppy, looking as sad-eyed and hungry as her children, padded over to me and explored my hem with his wet little nose.
I left Mrs. Baddeley with the purse and a published copy of my poetry, for I knew she was fond of verse, and promised to call upon her soon again. As I mounted my phaeton, I ruminated gloomily on our too-brief encounter. I felt as though I had seen my own ghost: Sophia and I shared more than a passion for spaniels, literature, and lavender drapes—our taste for the high life was strikingly similar as well. Her sad fall from grace would become more than an object lesson to me, for not too many weeks later, in January of 1781, Mrs. Baddeley proved an inadvertent sibyl.
Twenty
Dashed from My Lofty Perch
1781…age twenty-three
Just when I thought I should be able to sustain my impatience for the next twenty months, until that splendid day in which I might behold my adored lover gracefully receiving the acclamations of his future subjects, when he might reach the age of twenty-one and be his own master—when I might enjoy the public protection of that noble being for whom I gave up all—I received a letter from His Highness, delivered not by the viscount but by a young, anonymous page.
We must meet no more!
Suddenly, I could not breathe. It was as though all the life had been sucked from my lungs by a force greater than anything known in nature. Silent tears ran in rivulets down my cheeks, for I was too shocked to sob. The note fell from my hand as I sank into
