I demurred. “I was a pupil of Hannah More, you know, though in my youth she was more the educator and dramatist than the popular evangelical she has become of late. Therefore, I’m afraid I must decline the title of novelist, my darling. The species of composition known by that denomination too often conveys a lesson I do not wish to inculcate.”
Maria looked at me, utterly appalled. “So you do believe just as the moralists do—that the content of popular novels corrupts the mind? Then inculcate your own lesson,” she insisted. “In any event, you’re obviously terribly good at it.”
I should have been floating on a silver cloud to see my maiden efforts at narrative fiction so well received by both proles and peers. But the praise was merely a temporary balm. It did not bring Ban back to my achingly lonely arms; he remained enamored of his gaudy new mistress.
On the fourteenth of February, I penned “To My Dear Valentine,” in which I prophesied that my devoted heart would haunt Ban from the grave, for so ill was I with rheumatic ailments that I verily believed an earthy entombment was on the horizon.
Meanwhile, I listened with admiration to every report of Ban’s performances in Parliament; he had been winning plaudits for his oratory, and though I was no longer penning his speeches, my bosom swelled with pride for his sake.
I could not live without him, and my course grew ever clearer. I would have to woo him back with the point of my pen.
Twenty-six
Courting Trouble
1792…age thirty-four
While Ban’s name led the rest in Brooks’s Betting Book, I wrote a poem titled “The Adieu to Fancy: Inscribed to the Same.” It captured the power of Ban’s magnetism, and how—aided by my imagination’s fancy and fantasies of the life we might share—he had bewitched me from the start, but my fondest hopes had proven mere delusions.
I sent Ban the poem, but received no reply. In sorrowful desperation, I left Clarges Street and let rooms at thirteen St. James’s Place, within shouting distance of Brooks’s, but it did not bring him closer.
On July 23, 1792, I wrote a confidential letter to my old friend Sheridan, complaining of poor health and a broken heart after the severing of an irreproachable ten-year connexion, averring that my only recourse seemed to be to quit London, where the imprints of Ban’s voice and image were everywhere etched. For all the stones the public hurled at me, aiming to shatter my reputation, it is worth mentioning that for the entire time I was Ban’s lover, I never once considered tasting the charms of another man. Though flawed, he was my sine qua non; if he were an illness, I was irrevocably afflicted.
The following day, my widowed mother, Maria, and I boarded a boat for Calais. Our ultimate destination was Leghorn, a port city on Italy’s Adriatic coast. I was eager to see my brother George, who had become a merchant there. Our elder brother John had died in 1789. I had not seen George in years; but the situation in France made overland travel exceedingly perilous. Times had changed since last I’d lived there. The Bastille had been stormed, the monarchy reduced to the merest cipher, and anyone with a pedigree was imperiled. Vicious demagogues were in control, not only of the Frenchmen’s new form of government but of their sanity as well. Whilst my philosophies had been sympathetic to the plight of the common man, what the common man did with the liberté he ripped from the jeweled hands of the ancien régime, turned my stomach with its vileness.
From a deck chair, to the rolling accompaniment of the swelling waves between Dover and Calais, I wrote a poem called “Bounding Billow,” which I dedicated to Ban. The sea spray misting my cheeks commingled with my tears.
I hoped to kindle some compassion in his breast with the stanzas:
I have lov’d thee,—dearly lov’d thee,
Through an age of worldly woe;
How ungrateful I have prov’d thee
Let my mournful exile show!
Ten long years of anxious sorrow,
Hour by hour I counted o’er;
Looking forward, till to-morrow,
Every day I lov’d thee more!
Fare thee well, ungrateful rover!
Welcome Gallia’s hostile shore:
Now the breezes waft me over;
Now we part—TO MEET NO MORE.
Calais was crowded with English expatriates living cheek by jowl, whiling away their days with insipid entertainments until it was safe to journey farther. We let a comfortable suite of rooms, installing ourselves until such time as travel to Italy might be safe. Our little distaff ménage brought me heart’s ease. My daughter had grown into a lovely young woman, tall and self-possessed; and I had missed my mother’s gentle spirit, particularly during the difficult times with Ban.
Yet somehow Mother seemed to bring the devil with her, as she had done so many years earlier. She gave me to wonder whether she had remained in contact with Mr. Robinson all this time, even when I had not—for soon after our arrival he appeared at Calais, calling on us with his elder brother William, now a commodore lately returned from the East Indies. My husband’s hair had grown thin, his complexion even paler than I had remembered it. Years of disporting himself in low pursuits had taken their toll upon his face and figure.
His brother bore little family resemblance; he was of stouter stuff, excepting that the upturn of his mouth, as if to indicate a state of perpetual affability, was a
