I could only come up with one answer: the Duchess of Devonshire. But why would she malign me?
The very next day I took my customary four o’clock drive in Hyde Park, dressed once again in my shepherdess’s attire, so all the ton should know that Perdita had triumphed. I waved to the throngs that greeted me as I dashed through the drive. And then I spied, coming up behind me, the prince’s blue coach. I slowed down to allow him to pull up beside me. As our horses were neck and neck on the turnpike, I turned to say hello to my love, favoring him with a dazzling smile that afforded the full measure of my adoration—but to my utter mortification, His Royal Highness turned his head to avoid seeing me, and even affected not to know me!
What had I done to deserve this cut direct? My chagrin was prodigious.
Baffled and angry, I requested an interview with the duchess, but she put off our meeting for the first time in our long acquaintance. A few days later, she deigned to see me, but her manner was chilly. “Have you deserted me, too?” I demanded, stifling my tears. What had prompted her turnabout? After all, it was she who had counseled me not to let my detractors witness my disgrace.
“It is ever a danger to aspire to heights beyond one’s station,” Her Grace replied, this nonanswer telling me all I needed to know. I had lost her, as well, somehow. It had been she, surely, who had spread the tale about my embellishing the prince’s miniature, falsely painting me as a self-aggrandizing, ambitious hussy. For some reason that image must have served her better than acknowledging that the prince royal and I had truly loved each other with a passion that transcended class distinctions. To accept the truth made rank and title worthless in a world where Cupid reigns supreme and even kings and princes were defenseless against the blinkered archer’s skill.
The only one who would listen with compassion was Mrs. Baddeley. After all, she had traveled the same rutted road as I, and had met with the same disdain from those whom naught but birthright placed above her.
“What will you do now?” she asked sympathetically.
I told her of my notion to return to the stage, but she confirmed what the duchess had already said: that the public would not tolerate it. Would my writing sustain me, she asked.
“Not without a patron,” I replied. “Besides, my creditors call daily; I am inundated with duns. I must have cash in hand to pay them off, and get my bearings back, to see my daughter fed and clothed and the landlord paid.”
And then I shared the plan that had begun so recently to unfold within my frantic brain. I still had the prince’s bond for twenty thousand pounds, though that would not mature until the prince did, when he turned twenty-one in 1783. But I did have something else in my possession that was perhaps just as valuable.
“I would never do it otherwise, Sophia, but my hand has been forced. I may not gain an immediate income from my writing, but I might do so through publishing.”
“Convey to His Highness that I intend to hire a printer to publish our love letters,” I instructed Lord Malden. The viscount had begun to call on me as often as my dunners, eager to offer his open protection now that the prince had spurned me entirely. But he had less money than I did; and besides, although his lordship was ever kind to me, my heart could not hope to recover so quickly. In my view, sex without love was the greatest crime, one practiced as much by the wellborn and the middle classes as by the lowly brothel worker. I have always held that the woman who bestows her person where she can withhold her heart is the most culpable of beings. The venal wanton is not more guilty.
Malden acted once more as a go-between in a series of meetings and negotiations that were canceled and postponed throughout the spring and summer of 1781. And my pecuniary situation was becoming increasingly desperate.
One July afternoon, I was stopped in Albemarle Street by a creditor. He demanded I alight from my carriage, which was immediately “touched”—seized for nonpayment of debts. Some days later it was restored to me, through the offices of a “noble friend,” I was informed. It could not possibly have been the prince! I suspected Lord Malden, but if he was as penniless as I, however did he manage it? Perhaps it had not been he after all. “Noble” could have meant the duchess. Had she begun to feel poorly for spreading such gossip about me? I knew her two greatest weaknesses were gossip and gambling. Perhaps she had looked within her heart and comprehended the damage it had done to one she had called her bosom friend.
Finally, on the last day of July, the dithering over my promise to publish the prince’s letters ceased. The cause was taken up in earnest when His Majesty himself became involved in the matter.
The king dispatched an aide-de-camp, his treasurer Colonel Hotham, to meet with me. Hotham visited me in Cork Street, and told me in no uncertain terms that his employer wanted the situation resolved with all due expediency.
“Very well then. It had never
