Too Great a Lady

by Amanda Elyot

  “I’m afraid I must disappoint you there, too. But I should like to learn. I should like to learn everything! ’Arry, teach me ’ow to ride! I’d love to go chasing over the Downs like the wind. I’ll win your derbys for you and you’ll be so proud of me—”

  “I’m sure you shall and I’m sure I will,” interrupted Sir Harry. “But you’ve only just arrived. And there’s so much more for you to see.”

  When he brought me to his own chambre à coucher, as he called it, it was not long before my gown was lying on the Turkey carpet, my petticoats and chemise in a heap beside them, and I was watching him as well as feeling him take me before the enormous looking glass.

  Uppark Harry was a man of large appetites in every way, possessed of a remarkable amount of energy for one who consumed food and drink with the same abandon he displayed during fornication. “Egad, but you’re delicious,” he said, helping me into my stays as his tongue followed the laces along the length of my spine. “I must congratulate myself. I don’t know which of us has got the better end of the bargain, eh?”

  It was a bargain indeed, for I did not love Sir Harry. But in my youth, men and women entered into every sort of arrangement where the benefits inured to all concerned and a legal love match was not in the hand that was dealt.

  “When my mother is in residence, you’ll take this route,” he explained, pressing on a length of wainscoting and escorting me through a cunningly disguised door that took us from his bedroom down a dark and narrow back staircase that led to a discreet rear entrance of the main house. “Don’t fret, pretty Emily, you’ll find that your own quarters are monstrous charming.” We took the dogcart down the slope toward the little village of South Harting, halting at a pretty cottage at the base of the hill. “Rosemary Cottage is your dominion, my girl. You’ll have a maidservant and the run of the place, and it shall be our little rustic hideaway.”

  The cottage’s low ceilings were stifling in comparison with the lofty ones found in the main house, and the view from the mullioned windows was not nearly as breathtaking as the vista from Uppark’s main house and gardens, but it was indeed delightful—and it was to be mine! Had an unschooled Chester lass ever been so fortunate? Sir Harry assured me that the mahogany wardrobe would be full to bursting with frocks as charming as those I had worn at Arlington Street. I would have a riding habit made up, and like a fine lady I could have the use of one of his carriages to journey to town for fans and gloves, perfumes and cosmetics, and whatever else might suit my fancy.

  I took to Uppark Harry’s horses like a pig to slops, in short order as adept in the sidesaddle as I was—having borrowed a pair of the master’s breeches—at riding astride, which titillated the derby spectators as much as it scandalized them. But the sport of kings was not even the most popular of pastimes (if you don’t count a good fuck) among Uppark Harry and his set of country gentlemen. Sir Harry bred fighting cocks, and the matches—which he held in his drawing room when the weather was unfavorable—were from rake to squire as well attended as any at the Cockpit Royal in London.

  And the wagering was fierce. Some men knew their Staffordshire jet-blacks from their Shropshire reds; others just threw their coin at any contender, for it was the betting itself that fired up their blood. Those were the gents who would bet on the speed of a rain-drop coursing down the windowpane of their London club. But among the cognoscenti, a prodigious amount of attention was paid to the trim of the wings (sloped), tails (shortened), hackle and rump feathers (reduced), combs (filed down to the merest ridge), and the type of spurs (metal or bone) that were strapped over the cock’s own talons to ensure a fight to the death.

  I wished my attendance was not required during the fights, but I was there to provide further amusement to Uppark Harry and his friends, decorating the room with my presence, breasts nearly spilling from my bodice, cheeks and lips fetchingly rouged, powdered hair tumbling askew—which it would have done at any rate from the sheer weight of my knee-length tresses under all the powder and pomade that was required to coat them.

  I’d lay the matting over the carpet; then the owners of each of the two cocks in the match would hold their birds on interlocking fingers close to the matting and swing them thrice forward before my command of “Go!” at which point, the cocks would be released to have at each other, feinting and falling back, strutting and tilting, the scratching of the spurs against the matting sending chills along the insides of my teeth. Meanwhile, the clink of coins against one another as bets were feverishly placed heightened the excitement. The wine flowed freely; if someone overshot his limit, he often went unnoticed as he slipped from his chair or slumped in a corner. A cheer sprang up at first blood. Shouts of encouragement drowned out the cries of derision. Had Harry’s mam ever witnessed this spectacle, she would have curled up her toes on the spot.

  And when the owner of the loser congratulated his opposite number, and more bottles were opened and poured, it was a mournful Emily Hart who gently placed the corpse of the vanquished into a little box, swept up the errant feathers, and sent the matting to be scrubbed by the servants.

  We hosted many dinners at Uppark, and the atmosphere often turned hedonistic during the latter portion of the evening. Sometimes, a few of Mrs. Kelly’s “nuns” would be invited, to provide additional company for Sir Harry’s friends, and as the meal drew to a close and the gentlemen lit their clay pipes, we girls would favor the guests with a song or two, a dance, or a little skit of our own devising.

  My performances, above all, were greeted with the lion’s share of admiration. One evening, fired by one such prodigious reception, and perhaps a bottle or two of claret, I surrendered to Sir Harry’s drunken request to dance for him and his guests; and when he declared to all and sundry that he was the most fortunate man in the county, tying his tongue in knots in the attempt to spontaneously compose a panegyric to my beauty by rhyming “Sussex” with “lucky” and “fuck,” his friends began to clap and stamp their feet as though they were witnessing a prizefight.

  Aided by the host himself, I climbed atop the long table in Harry’s richly gilded saloon, and carefully placing my feet between the platter that held the remains of a particularly tasty suckling pig and a large dish of discarded prawn shells, I raised my skirts to display my ankles and calves, temptingly inching the petticoats higher and higher.

  “Sing for us, Emily!” commanded Uppark Harry, and thus encouraged by rhythmic shouts of “Sing! Sing! Sing!” I accompanied my dance with a flirtatious rendering of “When for Air I Take My Mare,” daintily picking my way amid what remained of the dinner’s delicacies. Kneeling before Uppark Harry at the head of the table, I struck up “Come Jug, My Honey, Let’s to Bed.”

  To the accompaniment of loud clapping and stamping, I led my lover out of the saloon, and before we got as far as his bedchamber, he was upon me in a trice.

  My little postprandial performance was such a sensation that I was requested by my protector to repeat it on subsequent evenings, and soon, some variation of the original repertoire became part of the customary bill of fare.

  Oh, there was guttling and tippling beyond description! One night, the dance went so far that, like Salome, I shed my clothes entirely. The payment I received in admiring glances and vociferous approval of my singing and dancing were to my fifteen-year-old soul the equivalent of a shower of molten gold.

  And there were evenings when were it not for the sumptuous surroundings, you might think you’d stumbled into one of the old Southwark stews instead. My sixteenth birthday, in 1781, remains forever woven into the fabric of my memory, for the impact it was to have on my life. As the meal drew to a close, and my health was toasted with many glasses and bumpers, Uppark Harry insisted upon a contest wherein each of his guests would bare his fair companion’s bosom, slather it with a liberal coating of syllabub, and thence, using only his tongue, remove every drop of the sweet, viscous beverage from her poitrine. Sir Harry’s friend the saturnine Charles Greville was at the table that even
ing and evinced no inclination to have a filly in the race, for which he was greeted with such jeers of derision that I could not reckon how he had the fortitude to remain so calmly in his chair.

  “Then you must be the judge, man!” exclaimed Uppark Harry. “For with this lot, there is bound to be some cheating.”

  I was of course to be Sir Harry’s partner, but scarce had a minute passed since Greville dropped his handkerchief, signifying the commencement of the contest, when I found myself rather abruptly pulled from Sir Harry’s lap, and onto the knees of Sir Roger Ainsley, who sat beside him. As a pawn, rather than a knight, in this scenario, I was unsure how to behave, for at Sir Harry’s behest I was there to please and entertain, the which I rather tipsily believed I was doing. Sir Roger’s gesture precipitated a number of similar exchanges and the contest continued to provoke much jollity among the participants, until Uppark Harry—suddenly realizing that he had lost control of the game—became violently enraged, as was his wont once a certain number of bottles had passed his lips. Rising from his chair, he tossed my old friend Sophia onto her arse. Grasping me first by my hair, and thence by closing his fingers about my arm, he pulled me to my feet, and, producing a glove from the pocket of his coat, tossed it down on the table before Ainsley and demanded satisfaction.

  The most ungentlemanly ructions then ensued, as the guests, including the doxies, instantly chose sides.

  Naming me an embarrassing little slut and no better than a gutter whore, he berated me before the entire party, and I fear he would have slapped me had not Greville raised his arm to intervene.

  “It is one of the hallmarks of a gentleman to be able to finish what he began in the same spirit in which the enterprise was first undertaken,” scolded Greville. “Harry, this sport was of your own devising, and while Emily must own her share of the blame, you cannot excoriate her for her wantonness when the entire game suddenly turned round-robin. Your incomparable cellar is the envy of every man at this table, but given this evening’s excesses of food and drink, surely you cannot wonder at the disintegration of common courtesies, even within the limits of the lately interrupted pastime.”

  An uncomfortable pall descended upon what had begun as an evening of bonhomie and joviality.

  “Damme, but you’re a prig, Greville.”

  “If you do not lead by example, how is a girl with the background of Miss Hart’s to learn the finer points of gentry manners and be worthy of her responsibilities as your hostess and chatelaine?”

  “Enough!” Uppark Harry snarled. “When you are fortunate enough to induce a mistress to share your chilly bed, you may play the tutor and scold or coddle the chit as you wish, but I’ll thank you to keep your oar out of my affairs.” Then clasping me about the waist, he drew me to him with such force that my bubbies were nearly crushed against his chest, and planted a kiss upon my lips so ferocious that my breath was almost stop’d from the strength of his passion. Releasing me, he declared, as much for my ears as the others’, “I’m your protector, Emily; remember that. And I will remain so until I chuse to release you from our arrangement.”

  His words made me shiver; Sophia and I retired to a corner of the saloon to relace each other. “Is Sir Harry often this spiteful?” she whispered.

  I cast a glance at the disarray: upended bottles spilling the last of their contents in violet rivers upon the damask cloth; shards of crystal and items of plate that littered the Turkey carpet; bits of meat and fowl that clung to the chairbacks; and syllabub stains on the upholstery. “ ’E ’as a temper when ’e drinks too deeply,” I murmured. “ ’Is capacity is prodigious, but once the line is cross’d there is no vouching for ’is manners.”

  For many months I had been enjoying a life of untrammeled gaiety at Uppark, but Sir Harry’s behavior that night shone a bright light into the dark corners of my dreamworld. My knight was not always the hero of Dr. Graham’s murals. But Charles Greville . . . now, here was a revelation. I, too, had oft thought him a prig, but perhaps I had been too hasty to condemn a man who so consistently and assiduously behaved like a true gentleman amid a swarm of so many wild boys. Greville’s demeanor, his evident distaste for Sir Harry’s more raucous frivolities, and his ability to so deftly defuse the volatile encounter between Ainsley and Sir Harry had impressed my girlish heart, and from that evening on, I was greatly disposed to look upon him—with no small degree of interest—in a new, and decidedly more attractive, light.

  Eight

  The Wind Changes

  During the weeks that followed my birthday I began to notice a gradual cooling of Uppark Harry’s ardor. So keenly did I sense his increasing indifference and brusqueness that I felt no shame in meeting Greville during an excursion to London on the pretense of visiting Creed for a bottle or two of scent.

  He began our acquaintance by leading me on a tour of the enormous town house he was having built on Portman Square, and then, with furtive sighs and whispers, he expressed the desire to show me his “stones”—which I’d learnt at Mrs. Kelly’s was cant for a man’s balls. I can’t imagine what poor, proper Greville thought when I bosted out laughing at the sight of a bunch of old crystals, gemstones that looked like rock sugar candies, some of them still in what looked to me like half a coconut shell.

  “Why ’aven’t you scooped ’em out and made ’em into jewelry?” I asked. And then Greville explained—with such a grave expression on his face that I was near to bosting a stay—that the minerals, as he called them, were even more rare and precious in their natural state.

  “But what use are they if you’re not going to ’ave ’em made up?”

  “What use? Why, to look at! My child, you cannot begin to imagine the pleasure one derives, the exquisite enjoyment, from looking—looking at such treasures—in their natural simplicity. How much more attractive, how glorious, they are, the way Nature herself intended, rather than in a gaudy incarnation one might purchase at Asprey. For something in its natural state is far more beautiful than it is after the application of artifice.”

  Charles Greville fascinated me. I wondered why such a refined gentleman, a member of Parliament, would take the time and the pains to instill a sense of delicacy and education in someone like me. Never had a man cared for me in such a manner, and his generosity in this regard overwhelmed all my senses. We commenced a clandestine affair that continued throughout the summer months of 1781, and into the fall. Early on, while I was still ensconced at Uppark, I would come down to London on some pretext or other, which Sir Harry, increasingly losing interest in my company, would never question. Greville’s lovemaking—unlike that of Sir Harry, who rode me as if I were his prize mare—was slow, almost elegant. The time he took to explore my body as though it were a work of art was new and different to me, and I allowed myself to find delight in it. How I enjoyed giving myself to him! After I’d experienced the excesses of Uppark Harry, Greville’s restraint was intoxicating to me. He neither overate nor gambled nor drank to excess. And for the first time in my life, here was a man who was keen on broadening my interests, that we might have more to do with each other than romp between the bedsheets. To gain such a fine and amiable protector was akin to being taken to the bosom of God.

  Having secured a position with the Admiralty Board a year previous, Greville had the advantage of free accommodation in the King’s Mews. His Portman Square town house was being erected upon the speculation of grander things to come, and I own that I permitted my fancies to fly to an imagined existence within those high-ceilinged rooms with their white plaster moldings and their fine marble mantels.

  In August, I was struck with the realization that my courses had not arrived in well over a month. By early September I was sure that the best and the worst had occurred sometime in June or July and I was no doubt with child. I was certain the babe’s father was Sir Harry, for Greville always took the greatest pains to glove himself and then to withdraw at the moment of ecstasy, with a basin at the ready for me to thoroughly cleanse our parts. Uppark Ha
rry never took such precautions.

  A few weeks later, I was absolutely certain of my condition.

  At that time, we were all in town, Harry having quit Uppark for his Mayfair establishment; but as I was unable to join him there in all propriety, he lodged me in a small set of rooms in Whitechapel. It was horridly lonely, for I had no friends to call my own; those of Sir Harry’s acquaintance did not visit me in London. Sir Harry called on me only once. My body had not yet begun to betray my secret, but in my naive girlish fancy I believed that once Sir Harry learnt it, he would clasp me in his arms, smother my breasts and belly with burning kisses, and bring me to Rosemary Cottage with all due haste. Instead, we had such ructions that day that the landlady came up to see what it was all about. He berated me fiercely for several incidents of poor conduct and a string of infidelities. It was then I suspected that Sir Harry had discovered my meetings with Greville, though he did not name him. But there had been no others in my arms, and were it not for Sir Harry’s increasing neglect, I would not have thought to set my cap elsewhere, for well I knew the delicacy of my situation.

  In a frightful panic I turned to Greville, the only person I believed would be able to relieve my extreme distress. Coolly, he advised me to throw myself upon Sir Harry’s mercy and seek to patch things up between us.

  All through the fall I endeavored to contact my protector—praying that he would relent, for I truly believed Sir Harry to be the father of my babe—and each of seven letters went unanswered. I had deceived myself that I was standing on solid ground, when i’faith, I was on naught but a shoal; my happy world was like so many granules of sand being swept out from beneath my feet by the encroaching tide.

  Uppark Harry had left me no money, nor could I count on more than the occasional guinea from Greville. My landlady permitted me to remain as long as she received her blunt on time; but to keep the roof above my head, I was compelled to sink to the lowest and most sordid degradation, stooping to that which even the meanest, lowest woman in England should not have to abase herself to perform. I am ashamed even to confess it now. I own I was in real distress, accepting “guilty support” from anyone who could provide me with a few quid for food and lodging. Even as my belly swelled I frequented the pleasure gardens if the weather was mild enough, and haunted taverns on both sides of the Thames, each time hoping against all hope that I would catch no disease on the lice-ridden straw mattresses.