Lady of Passion

by Freda Lightfoot

  So he had found his rich heiress after all.

  The happy couple were married on the seventeenth of December, 1798. The love affair I had believed would last a lifetime, was finally over.

  One parting sigh, one tender tear bestow,

  And seem at least unwillingly to go!

  So shall that sigh repay me for my fate,

  That tear for all my sorrows compensate.

  Epilogue

  Feminist and Poet

  SWEET Nymph, enchanting Poetry!

  I dedicate my mind to Thee.

  Oh! from thy bright Parnassian bow’rs

  Descend, to bless my sombre hours;

  Mary Darby Robinson

  Ode to the Muse

  1799

  Maria and I were spending much of our time at Englefield Cottage where I became something of a recluse, although I did have many old friends who would come for dinner or to stay overnight as our guest, including Sheridan, William Godwin, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a new friend and fellow poet who invited me to stay with his family at Greta Hall in Keswick, Cumberland. My health did not allow me to face the hazardous journey or the inclement weather, but I wrote a poem to his new son, Derwent, on the child’s birth. Later, I published my own Lyrical Tales in honour of his.

  These last months since Ban’s marriage had been the very worst of my life. I thought for a time that the grief would overwhelm me. Losing Ban had felt as if I were dealing with his death, and then I would remember that he was still alive and as handsome as ever, but no longer a part of my life. He would never again come bounding up the steps into my home to sweep me into his arms and carry me off to bed. We would never attend the theatre together, or drive about Hyde Park in the morning sunshine. Nor would he be around to massage my aching limbs, or tease me out of a depression.

  He was gone from my life forever, had chosen another in my place, and for a time I was obsessed with a need for revenge.

  In my next novel, The False Friend, I created a character by the name of Treville, an evil priest who perishes on his way to Lisbon. It was published in February 1799, in good time to provide a thought-provoking read for the new Mrs Tarleton before embarking on her own journey. I wondered if Ban would read it, or if he ever thought of me. I wanted him to be filled with regrets, to remember the long happy years we had spent together, the adventures we’d enjoyed, the passion. I wanted him to hurt as I was hurting.

  In vain you fly me! on the madd’ning main,

  Sappho shall haunt thee ‘mid the whirlwind’s roar;

  I even considered taking out my bitterness on Susan Priscilla Bertie too, as she was exceedingly pretty and only twenty years old. I discovered she spoke several languages, was proficient at drawing, geometry, astronomy and music, and was the illegitimate daughter of Captain Robert Bertie, one of Ban’s reprehensible friends of his youth. Before his untimely death in July 1779, Bertie had bequeathed his name and his fortune to the child, and Lord Cholmondeley, the girl’s uncle by marriage, had brought her up together with Georgiana, the illegitimate daughter of my rival, Dally the Tall, and the Prince of Wales.

  What a small world it was, and how astonishing that Ban should marry his old friend’s daughter. But my research brought me to the conclusion that she was an innocent, more to be pitied than condemned for stealing my lover. The Natural Daughter, with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family, published later that year by Longman and Rees, whilst taking a swipe at the Tarleton family through the fictional Leadenheads, a vulgar family who had also made their fortune out of slavery, did not, as originally intended, malign her in any way.

  Revenge had proved to be poor compensation for my loss.

  But could I ever forget Ban? Not in a thousand lifetimes! Could I live without him? I must somehow learn to do so. I told myself that I had grown used to his absences over the years. And I still had my wonderful daughter, my faithful companion, who made her opinion of my lover’s actions very clear.

  ‘I have half-expected this moment for years, Mama. How can you compete with £20,000 a year? Let him go. Think of him no more. Be your own woman, as Mary Wollstonecraft would expect you to be.’

  It was true that my late friend’s philosophy on the status of women still resonated in my soul. I turned away from writing fiction and wrote Letter to Women of England. For this I used the pseudonym Ann-Francis Randal, in order to protect the work from my Perdita image.

  I would often look with pride at my beloved Maria, this fine young woman who had devoted every moment of her young life to me, the ink stains on her pretty fingers no small proof of her efforts on my behalf.

  ‘What of you, dearest, do you hope to find a good man and marry one day?’ I asked her one day.

  But she shook her head most firmly. ‘I have experienced enough of the trials of marriage and infidelities of men. I am content with living a life of independence and freedom, one in which I can control my own destiny.’

  I smiled in open admiration. ‘How wise you are, my child. There may come a time when women can choose their own partners and marry for love, when marriage is not ruled by money and family politics. Until that happy day, we still have our writing, do we not?’

  ‘We do indeed, Mama, and all of life’s experiences are grist to the writer’s mill,’ she added with a grin, which made us both laugh.

  I had loved three men in my life: a profligate husband, a rapacious prince whose miniature I still wore about my neck, and last but by no means least, a national hero. All of them had loved me too in their way. Sadly, none had been without flaws or remained faithful.

  But then I had flaws of my own. Despite my vanity and pride, my quick temper, my eccentricities and rapacious literary ambitions, I believe Banistre Tarleton had truly loved me, that I lost him only because of money and family duty. As for my feminist leanings, the remark he had once made that he’d never objected to my writing, nor ever attempted to confine me in any way, was perfectly true. He had been a fair man, kind and tolerant of my disabilities, and an exciting and wonderful lover. Ban Tarleton was the love of my life, the one who would ever live in my heart, and I had managed, at last, to shelve my bitterness against him.

  For now I had become what I had always longed to be, a woman of letters.

  Author’s Note

  I was inspired to write about Mary Robinson because I thought her a woman of talent and great courage. She married far too young, suffering from family pressure as was often the case at a time when love was not considered essential in a marriage. She was the first to own up to her own flaws of vanity and pride, not least her predilection for spending. She lived in an age of extremes, one almost as celebrity driven as our own today. This novel is entirely based on fact, much of it based on her own memoirs, backed up by less emotional biographies. There were sometimes differences of opinion between these, and when in doubt I went to the primary source. So far as her alleged affair with Charles James Fox is concerned, the evidence seemed mainly to come from a piece in the Morning Chronicle, so of doubtful origin, and a letter to Tarleton which is open to interpretation. Unlike many courtesans, Mary was intelligent and gifted, who later achieved the promised potential of her youth despite many disappointments in life and suffering from a crippling disease from a very young age. It is impossible to accurately diagnose the exact nature of the illness which struck her down on that fateful night. Very likely it was an acute form of rheumatic fever that possibly affected the nerves, perhaps caused by an infection during her miscarriage. Quite common at that time. She was an early feminist, a writer of Gothic romance as well as poetry, who has largely been forgotten, and despite the considerable pain she must have suffered, she continued writing to her death. She died practically penniless in 1800, of dropsy, a retention of fluid on the chest which causes heart failure, again often linked with rheumatic fever. She asked for a lock of hair to be sent to the prince, and one to Tarleton. She was buried in a corner of the churchyard at Old Windsor, apparently still wearing the prince’s miniature. He
r daughter, Maria Elizabeth, never married, but continued to live on at Englefield Cottage with Elizabeth Weale, who had nursed her mother to the end. She died in 1818, was buried in the same tomb, and is said to haunt the Old Windsor churchyard.

  Sources

  For those interested in reading further on the subject of Mary Robinson, the following were invaluable:

  Memoirs Of Mary Robinson, Perdita, from the edition edited by her daughter, with introduction and notes by J. Fitzgerald Molloy.

  Perdita by Paula Byrne, 2004

  The Prince’s Mistress: A Life of Mary Robinson by Hester Davenport, 2004

  Dr Johnson’s London by Liza Picard, 2000

  Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard, 1994

  Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman, 1998

  The Life and Times of George III by John Clarke, 1972

  The Romance of the English Theatre by Donald Brooks, 1945

  The Green Dragoon: The Lives of Banastre Tarleton and Mary Robinson, NY 1957

  A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actress etc. by Philip H. Highfill Jn et al. 1660-1800. US 1991.

  http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/robinson/1791/1791.html

  http://www.best-poems.net/mary_robinson/index.html

  http://www.lauzunslegion.com/

  http://home.golden.net/~marg/bansite/_entry.html