Mr. Bell glanced at a few of the poems. “These—these are quite excellent, madam,” he admitted, somewhat astonished.
His surprised reaction irked me. “Then your penance will not be a painful one,” I said, as a smile stole across my lips. “Now, if you’ll forgive me, I must curtail this interview. I have an unfinished sonnet that awaits my attention, and you must return to the business of running a newspaper.”
I rang for the maid, who escorted the editor to the door.
But Mr. Bell’s lies taught me a valuable lesson that perhaps I had been unwilling to con: that Mrs. Robinson’s character was weighed and found wanting, and that the name alone of a notorious lightskirt would be judged before something penned by her was given the slightest credence.
It would seem that nowadays I could only gain artistic success if I pretended to be someone other than myself. Not so awfully different from my days at Drury Lane, in some respects. But I fought the petty-mindedness and won out eventually.
Later that year, the very same Mr. Bell published the sixteen-page collection of my poems titled Ainsi Va le Monde, which ran through several editions and was then translated into French. The following February, the Monthly Review lauded the anthology, and my writing in general. I was in heaven.
And Ban, now on full pay and promoted to the rank of colonel, owing to his new prominence, took his seat in the House of Commons, immediately taking up the cudgels against the abolitionists. His most formidable opponent was the Tory from Yorkshire, William Wilberforce. Wilberforce resembled a misshapen troll, but his heart was in the right place, as far as I was concerned.
On December 10, the Yorkshireman introduced a bill that would abolish the slave trade and found himself going toe-to-toe with my lover, trading heated barbs across the aisle. Maria and I witnessed the fireworks from the gallery, as Ban had asked me to script his speech.
“How could you do it?” my daughter whispered, shielding her face with her fan that her words might not be overheard. Yet there was no disguising her disgust. “You—who dressed as a Quaker on your wedding day and have always despised the institution of slavery—how could you put words in Ban’s mouth that might very well postpone or prevent abolition?”
There were tears in my eyes as Ban thundered, “The common sense of the Empire will strangle this modern attempt at mistaken philanthropy!”
“Because I love him,” I murmured to Maria. And—what I could not confess to my young daughter—because every fiber of my being was in thrall to him. I was a sexual creature and no other man had ever brought me to such heights of ecstasy; Banastre Tarleton was the drug my body could never get its fill of. Too well I knew his capacity for cruelty, but I could not help myself. There are mortals from whom we can bear even severity, which from others would be wholly insupportable. And Ban was, for me, such a one. I might have been the speaker in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 57 who says, “So true a fool is love that in your will, though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.” Since when have Passion and Reason danced hand in hand along the strand?
That is why I agreed, despite morals to the contrary, and against all reason, to write Ban’s anti-abolitionist speeches. And, though I despised my own culpability in the sordid business, when one uses a quill to flagellate oneself, the sensation inflicted by a feather is, alas, but a tickle.
Ban rose to his feet again and leveled his arm at the center of the room, pointing with his three-fingered hand at Prime Minister Pitt. “As a member of the Opposition, as well as the voice of the people of the port city of Liverpool, whose economy and commerce are shackled to the slave trade and for whom abolition would prove disastrous, I cannot bring myself to think this is a convenient time, the country in an eligible situation, or the minister serious in his inclination to make an experiment which presents a certain prospect of no probability of advantage. An abolition would instantly annihilate a trade which annually employs upwards of fifty-five hundred sailors, upwards of one hundred sixty ships, and whose exports amount to eight hundred thousand pounds sterling.”
Curling his mangled hand into a fist, he shook it at Pitt, adding, “And the same experiment would undoubtedly bring the West India trade to decay, whose exports and imports amount to six million pounds sterling, and which gives employment of one hundred sixty thousand tons of additional shipping, and sailors in proportion; all objects of too great magnitude to be hazarded on an unnecessary speculation, which, in all probability, would prove ruinous to the commercial consequence, the national honor, and the political glory of Great Britain!”
I bit back my disagreement, and from the gallery added my voice to the chorus crying “Hear, hear!” in resounding approval of his oration. Maria made a point of sitting on her hands.
I confess I was proud of her.
Utterly devoted to each other, though officially domiciled a few doors apart, Ban and I lived elegantly and stylishly then, “making adultery respectable,” as even our detractors were compelled to admit.
Mr. Bell agreed to publish by subscription another volume of my poetry, which I had stitched together at the prompting of my dear friends, Sir Joshua Reynolds and the philosopher Edmund Burke. Reynolds even offered to paint my portrait for the frontispiece, a three-quarter view of my
