When I was finally able to rouse myself, still amazed and afflicted beyond the power of utterance, I wrote immediately to His Royal Highness, requiring an explanation. He did not reply. Again I wrote—
Please, my dearest love, what means this extraordinary cessation of your affections toward me? How can you be so cold, so cruel, as to cut me from your life in such an unfeeling manner? ’Tis unlike you—your nature is such a one as to comprehend the gentlest of sensibilities. Write soonest, my beloved.
Yours ever—Mary.
And still the prince remained silent, sending me no elucidation of this most heartless mystery. I knew he was at Windsor. And if the mountain was not to come to Mary, she would have to ride out to it!
The most deject and wretched of mortals, my eyes swollen from weeping, their lids as red as if I had lined them with carmine, I set out from London in my small pony phaeton, accompanied only by a nine-year-old boy to serve as my postilion. It was dark by the time we quitted Hyde Park Corner.
At this hour we would not reach Windsor till nearly midnight, as we could not travel more than three miles an hour without endangering the team of ponies. In the dark it was nigh impossible to make out the ruts in the road from a carriage that lacked lanterns.
After a few hours, we stopped at Hounslow for nourishment, though my devastated heart and anxious mind counseled my better nature to avoid any additional delays.
At the posting inn, the innkeeper warned me that for the past ten consecutive nights, every coach that had passed the heath had been attacked and rifled.
“I fear no terror, sir,” I told him. “For I am so beyond caring that if I should die tonight, it would be a blessing and a balm to my confounded and most distraught soul.”
We thus pushed on, and had not journeyed terribly far upon the heath when a ruffian jumped out of the darkness and made a grab for my ponies’ reins. But my carriage was fortunately so light, and the postilion so agile, that the boy was able to spur it on, while the footpad huffed and puffed behind us in the road, endeavoring without success in overtaking us.
Nearly an hour later, we arrived at the next inn, the Magpie, with our hearts pounding in our chests. It had been a lucky escape indeed, for when I removed my cloak to dine, and touched my trembling throat with relief at our flight from danger, I realized that I was wearing in my black stock a brilliant stud of very considerable value, which could only have been possessed by the robber by strangling the wearer.
If my bosom palpitated with joy at my escape from assassination, it soon regretted I had not faced certain death after all; for upon regaining the road, we passed a carriage just outside of Windsor that bore Mr. Meynell, one of the prince’s confidants, and none other than Mrs. Armistead—my former dresser at Drury Lane, who had flown the limited cage of the dressing rooms for the loftier, and more gilded, perch of a fancy woman!
Now I surmised what had occurred. The prince had expressed to me on more than one occasion a desire to know that lady. Suddenly the reason for my curt dismissal was blazingly evident. It was Elizabeth Armistead who had come between us—and His Highness’s desire for her that was the instrument of my obliteration from his heart.
I could not bear it! Wracked with sobs, my face wet with salty tears, I urged my postilion to press on. I would see the prince and throw myself at his feet. There was barely a sliver of a moon by the time we gained Windsor. I alit from the phaeton and approached the castle gate on foot. The ground was hard beneath my feet, the lawns spangled with dew.
“I must see His Royal Highness,” I told the guards.
“No one is permitted entry to the palace, miss.”
“But I must see him!” I lowered my calash that the sentries might see my face, for I was well enough known from all the engravings made during my theatrical career—as well as from all the unfortunate caricatures that had been plastered across the pages of the newspapers. “I am Mary Robinson!”
“I don’t care if you’re Mary Queen of Scots, miss. We have orders to admit no one in to see His Highness.”
“But you have done so! He has been with Mrs. Armistead. I saw her with her—” with her pimp, I was about to say. His bosom friend Mr. Meynell, a man I’d oft entertained with the prince in Cork Street, must have been dispatched to act as the prince’s go-between with his latest conquest, as Lord Malden had done for me.
I could not cause a scene, for that would have availed me nothing but scorn. There was naught for me to do but flee any further mortification and drive back to London, filled with the despair and degradation of the mocked and defeated.
For half a year after that fateful command performance of Florizel and Perdita, I had withheld my favors, doubting the prince’s constancy and fearful that his infatuation with me was no more than a young man’s fancy. It felt miserable to have been
