I reached for the letter, which Maria neatly folded and brought to me. I could not tamp down my tears as I reread her words. Nicholas Darby had been my first hero—true, he had turned out to be a flawed idol, even a false one, but he was still my father. And I grieved for his demise and for the loss of the relationship he might have enjoyed with his grown daughter and growing grandchild.
“May I do anything for you?” Maria asked, tenderly placing her arms about my shoulders. I held her close and she stroked my hair, twining her fingers amid the curls until my scalp tickled and she forced a chuckle from my lips. “I wish I could cheer you, Mummy.”
My heart commanded my brain to engage my imagination and honor my father the way a writer best can—with ink and quill. Maria fetched my writing desk and set it upon my lap. Inside it lay everything I needed to complete an elegy.
Just as I had done upon the death of my mentor, dear David Garrick, my pen paid homage where my tongue could not. Line after line I scratched until my hands grew too cramped and I called upon Maria to transcribe the remainder of my tribute.
A chapter of my life had closed.
The first man to abandon me—yet alas, not the last—had gone to God.
His narrative completed, Ban departed soon after to return to England to have the memoir published. The India prospect was back on the table as well, it seemed. As he left me once again, I felt like a little skiff adrift on the bounding sea, rising and falling precipitously with every wave.
Banastre Tarleton could make my senses swell and sink like no other man I had ever known. There were times I despised myself for feeling so helpless in his thrall. Maria, too, though she put up with Ban for my sake, deplored his ability to be so solicitous in one moment and to treat me so cavalierly in the next.
“Perhaps it is no defense, but you have no idea,” I told her, “what a paragon Ban is compared to your ne’er-do-well of a father.”
I remained at Aix-la-Chapelle, taking the cures and scribbling away as the seasons waxed and waned. If my poems had not been published regularly in the London papers, one might have imagined that the world had all but forgotten Perdita. Perhaps some of them had….
“Mummy, it appears that you are dead!” exclaimed Maria one summer day in 1787.
“What the devil do you mean by that?”
With her nose in a newspaper, my daughter proceeded to read me my obituary. It seemed that I had died a few days earlier, in Paris, and that I was the natural daughter of Nicholas Darby, facts that most assuredly bore correction, along with much of the rest of the article—although the author did mention my liaisons with both Lord Malden and Ban Tarleton, and had fairly accurately described my theatrical career, with a nod to my charitable efforts, among them my connexion with the unfortunate Mrs. Baddeley.
“Should we not tell them you are very much alive?” Maria suggested.
“A capital idea, my darling.”
“Shall I write the letter?” She fetched quill and ink and seated herself at our dining table.
“Please.” I was not amused. Hobbling about the room as I dictated the angry note to the editor, I said, “Don’t forget to put the date and place—twentieth July, Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany—at the top.”
“I’m not a ninny, Mum. I’ve been writing your letters for over a year, you know.”
“I know, my pet. I’m not upset with you—just upset. It makes one rather ill to discover that one is dead.” Perhaps I should have found more humor in the situation, but there were grave consequences, so to speak, to consider. If I were really deceased, the prince’s annuity payments would be vastly reduced, leaving us to muddle through on the two hundred and fifty pounds annually payable to Maria upon my demise. That was no laughing matter. ’Twas vile enough that I was ridiculed in the press for soaking up the taxpayer’s hard-won and painfully relinquished money by my annuity, despite the fact that in the intervening years His Royal Highness had enjoyed the favors of several mistresses, each of whom had been similarly compensated with nary a second thought.
I cleared my throat. “‘Dear Sir’; no—just ‘Sir’ will be sufficient. Sir—With astonishment I read in the Morning Post of the fourteenth instant, a long account of my death, and a variety of circumstances, respecting my life, equally void of the smallest foundation.’ What have we got so far?” Maria read the sentence back to me. “Lovely. Let us continue. ‘I have the satisfaction of informing you, that so far from being dead, I am in the most perfect state of health; except for a trifling lameness, of which, by the use of the baths at this place, I have every reason to hope, I shall recover in a month or six weeks.’”
I had elected to shave the truth a bit, too vain to admit that my condition was a little more than “trifling,” though the therapeutic waters of Aix-la-Chapelle had improved it.
After clearing my throat, I dictated, “‘I propose passing my winter
