Malden was gobsmacked; my consternation and mortification were utter and complete. “Oh—you have both used me ill in your little game,” I declared, my Irish temper grabbing my passion’s reins. “I am no shuttlecock to be bandied about by either of you for your sport and general mirth.” Blinded by enraged tears I vowed to have nothing further to do with either of them, and fled the coffeehouse for the safety of my carriage and the solace of my lonely bed.
A few days later I felt enough myself again to take an airing in Hyde Park, and had no sooner gained the main road when a phaeton overtook me, careening straight into my little chariot and knocking me pell-mell to the pavement in a state of entire insensibility.
Imagine my gleaning through a few squibs in Reverend Bate’s Morning Herald the following afternoon that it was Tarleton who had rushed to my bedside as soon as he learned of my misfortune! He had kept a vigil all those hours whilst I had lain abed concussed.
“Then it’s true what they say in the papers,” I murmured to him. My hand felt small and warm inside his, a little sparrow nesting in his palm.
“Are you prepared to forgive me?” His whisper brushed my ear, tickling the tender skin into titillation.
“I may have to.” I smiled, despising my own vulnerability. “My need for you is beyond all rational control. You are as good for me—and yet I daresay as ruinous—as morphine.”
How to explain that we became inseparable and yet I could not hold him? I was entirely on quicksand with this man, the terrain ever shifting, and always unsure. No sooner had our ménage become public than he purposed to quit it.
“Good news!” Ban announced one chilly January afternoon in 1783.
“Does that mean you will accompany me in Hyde Park today?” I asked him. “If so, I will require the barouche, for I had planned to take my phaeton.”
He refolded a letter and placed it in his pocket. “Lord Shelburne has just appointed Cornwallis governor general of India. Cornwallis has asked me to command his cavalry there!”
I felt my stomach plummet. “When must you go? And where will that leave me—once you have departed for distant lands with your mentor?”
Ban kissed me fully on the mouth and my lips melted into his. I became as pliant as putty every time he touched me, and I knew it would be my downfall, even as I desired it. “In your pretty pink satin opera box, entertaining all the beaux and gallants. Come, come! My best girl must maintain all our smart connexions on the home front.”
I frowned. “Your best girl?”
“My only girl. How’s that, then?” Enfolded in his embrace I was powerless to put up a fight.
It was only luck that quelled my fears, for in mid-February, but a few weeks after Ban unfolded his proposition, Shelburne resigned as prime minister, leaving Lord Cornwallis without a sponsor. How relieved I was to know that Ban would remain in my arms!
We maintained an establishment in Mayfair. Maria was now nine years old, and I had undertaken to school her in the manner in which I had been educated. We corresponded regularly with my mother, still comfortably ensconced at Bristol, keeping her abreast of our activities.
Mr. Robinson was well outside our domestic picture, as ever the prodigious gambler and profligate rake. Yet as my legal husband, he was still legally entitled to come around for a handout when it suited him.
Our smart connexions, as my lover called them, included my former lovers—the prince, Fox, Malden—and almost nightly they could be found at Brooks, Boodles, White’s, or Weltje’s, their gambling insatiable and incurable. But the news, preliminary though it was, of Ban’s imminent departure for India—where his creditors could not touch him—had brought forth a torrent of duns.
In solitude I wept over Ban’s innumerable losses. What was it in my stars that fated me to forever be the consort of a gambler? I could not unburden my consternation to my dear friend the duchess, for Georgiana was just as voracious and thought nothing amiss of such a vice. She could not comprehend that wagering made my skin crawl with distaste. She found it as humorous as Ban did that the Prince of Wales had recently lost upwards of eight hundred thousand pounds at cards. Ban himself was then in the hole for thirty thousand, with no possible means of ever repaying his obligations. Debts of honor, he called them. I called them ludicrous.
“A military man on half-pay—how can you possibly behave like this?”
“My love, I gamble no more nor less than your former paramour the duc de Chartres,” Ban drawled.
“I was never Chartres’s mistress. You mistake him for Lauzun. Nevertheless, that odious Frenchman you refer to has an annual income of six hundred thousand pounds. Were it not for the generous credit extended to us because of our connexions, we could barely subsist. I despise leaving honest tradesmen in the lurch.” I reached for Ban’s hand and pulled him toward me. Could he not understand how palpable and genuine was my fear of returning to the Fleet? “What will happen when it comes time to pay the piper?”
Ban pointed to the poem I had been reworking for the past three days. “Your feverish little brain, my dear. Publish! Publish! Write faster!” He nuzzled the back of my neck and laughed, his warm breath exciting my delicate flesh.
“Oh—if only my publishing income was commensurate to your gambling debts! I should be the richest writer in England!”
By May, Dame Fortune’s folly had turned in his favor and Ban
