For all Wortley’s jealous fears, she had not cuckolded him. With impeccable timing, she produced a son and heir nine months after the elopement, on May 16. He was christened Edward Wortley Montagu, Jr. Wortley stayed in town for the whole length of her lying-in, the six-weeks court that new mothers presided over from their beds, from which they were not allowed to rise. It was the longest period they had yet spent together. The very morning she was free, she found him in his study, packing.
“So much for conjugal bliss,” she said icily from the door.
“You would do well to control your sentiments,” he said tersely. “They are nothing but affectation.”
“Affectation!” she cried. “A pious prude in love with her stableman, Mr. Wortley, could not be more outraged by her own passion than you are.”
They quarreled, and Wortley departed abruptly, leaving Lady Mary to wander about London all afternoon like a soul adrift. You have not been gone three hours, she wrote that evening, and I have called at two people’s doors. Without knowing it myself, I find I am come home only to write to you. The late rain has drawn everybody to the Park. I shall pass the whole evening in my chamber, alone, without any business but thinking of you, in a manner you would call affectation, if I should repeat it to you.
Her eyes sore from hay fever, dim light, and crying, she left off at dusk and went early to bed. The next morning, she awoke early to find Frances pushing hollow-eyed into her bedchamber.
“What is it?” gasped Mary, her stomach dissolving into cold fear for Mr. Wortley.
“It is Will,” said Frances. “He has been taken with the smallpox.”
3
A DESTROYING ANGEL
MY brother has the small pox, Lady Mary scrawled numbly at the bottom of the letter she had written to Wortley the night before. I hope he will do well.
She would never have been allowed near the sickroom, since she had not had the disease herself. Still in her father’s disgrace, however, she was barred even the comfort of holding vigil with the family. Pacing through her tiny rooms alone with dread coiling tightly about her heart, she had to await the few terse messages Lady Frances could smuggle out and finagle whatever else she could from Dr. Garth.
When word came at last, she sifted between the lines for hope: My brother, she wrote Wortley, is as well as can be expected. But Dr. Garth says ’tis the worst sort, and he fears he will be too full, which I should think very foreboding if I did not know all doctors (and particularly Garth) love to have their patients thought in danger. She refused to admit that her brother, not yet twenty-one, had already been pronounced beyond remedy. Six days later, on July 1, he died.
The howl that rose through her mounted in waves until she thought she must burst. Fists to mouth, she strangled her grief into a silent scream that she poured into her journal: Will had been her best and only natural friend, standing by her even as she found herself banished from the rest of her family for the sake of a man whose desire had frozen to disdain. His death left her worse than alone.
She had never seen the smallpox at work, but she had heard plenty about it and saw its scarring tracks everywhere. Spotted and blown like a carcass left in the sun, Will began to haunt her dreams. In her waking hours, her fears veered in the direction of Wortley: Your absence increases my melancholy so much I fright myself with imaginary terrors, and shall always be fancying dangers for you while you are out of my sight. . . . I am afraid of everything. There wants but little of my being afraid of the smallpox for you, so unreasonable are my fears, which, however, proceed from an unlimited love. If I lose you—she broke off and fought for control—I cannot bear that If, which I bless God is without probability, but since the loss of my poor unhappy brother, I dread every evil.
Never again would she dismiss smallpox as a mere irritation. From then on, it surged dark and terrible in her imagination as her own private demon.
A week after her brother’s death, her husband had still finalized no plans to come south. Terrified for her new son and herself, Lady Mary fled north. While she stayed near York, searching for a suitable house, Wortley kept his distance, residing in bachelor’s quarters in the tiny borough where he was campaigning for a seat in Parliament. He insisted that she make all decisions about where and how they would live and grew irritated when she consulted him, even by letter. Then he questioned all her choices: of house, of coach and horses, of servants.
Wortley would have preferred the Sheffield area, but she chose the Italianate elegance of Middlethorpe Hall, just south of York. Shifting between Middlethorpe and London, Lady Mary whiled away a lonely year playing with her son and bickering long-distance with Wortley, who continued to flee every scene as soon as possible after her entrance.
The following summer, this dull run of affairs was punctured by two deaths and a wedding. At the end of May 1714, the dowager electress Sophia died in Hanover at the age of eighty-four, leaving her son George as Queen Anne’s heir. Two months later, on July 20, Lady Mary’s sister Lady Frances married John Erskine, earl of Mar, an unprincipled Scottish spendthrift fifteen years her senior. It was an inexplicable match—except as political insurance for Dorchester: Mar was a power among the Tory ministers of state. Lady Mary caught no whiff of the proceedings until too late to urge rebellion on her sister; she was not even in town when the ceremony took place. A week later, the queen fell ill. She had a rosy red rash, said the whispers; perhaps the scourge of smallpox had struck her family yet again. It had not, but that reprieve failed to improve her health. On August 1, 1714, Queen Anne died.
Up in York, Lady Mary saw George I proclaimed king amid fireworks, pealing bells, and rumbling fears of rebellion in favor of James Francis Edward Stuart, once the Whigs’ nemesis as the exiled Prince of Wales and now the chief challenger to George’s claim for the throne. The Pretender, the Whigs branded him. His followers they called Jacobites—after Jacobus, the Latin form of James.
With the kingdom on the edge of riots and his wife and child in direct path of Jacobite armies rumored to be massing in Scotland, Wortley remained in London, awaiting the new king. In the middle of September George arrived from Hanover to claim his new crown, and Wortley saw his star rise, along with the Whigs generally. He even began to gain ground in reconciling himself to Lady Mary’s father; by October 1, she could finish a letter to him saying, “My duty to Papa.” The Jacobite rebellion failed to materialize, but consumed by London politics, Wortley ignored his wife.
I cannot forbear any longer telling you I think you use me very unkindly, complained Lady Mary, still alone up in York in November. I parted with you in July, and ’tis now the middle of November. As if this was not hardship enough you do not tell me you are sorry for it. You write seldom and with so much indifference as shows you hardly think of me at all. You never enquire after your child.
At last, Wortley stirred himself to make arrangements for Lady Mary and their child to join him in London. I have taken a house in Duke Street, he wrote, near both the park and your father’s house.
She wrote back in a dither. The houses in that street were damp and falling down, she said. In particular, she hoped he had not taken the house of his cousin, Mr. George Montagu, nephew and heir to Lord Halifax, her long-ago partner in rhyme.
Wortley retreated once again to silence. Lady Mary grew frantic, as he knew she would: There was a particular terror about the house in question.
To Mr. Edward Wortley Montagu, to be left at Mr. Tonson’s, Bookseller, at the Shakespeare’s Head over against Catherine Street, in the Strand, London.
6 December 1714
Pray let me know what house you have taken, for I am very much afraid it should be the one where Mr. George Montagu lived and in which Mrs. Montagu and her child both died of the small pox, and nobody has lived in it since.
I know ’tis two or three years ago, but ’tis generally said that the infection may lodge in blankets, etc., longer than that. At least, I should be very much afraid of coming into a house from whenc
e anybody died of that distemper, especially if I bring up your son which I believe I must, though I am in a great deal of concern about him.
Before she could finish this letter, another arrived from her suddenly gregarious husband. Montagu had had two houses in Duke Street, Wortley suggested. He did not bother to say which one he had let.
I have received your second letter, Lady Mary added to the bottom of the one she had already begun, and hope by your mentioning another house of Mr. G. Montagu’s that you have not taken that which Mrs. Montagu died in. I know of but one he lived in, in that street.
This time, her fears about smallpox were neither random nor irrational. It had come to seem a time-honored tradition for pestilence to shadow the start of each new reign; previously, the epidemics of starkest memory had been the plague. With cruel irony, King George came accompanied by the scourge that had set him on the throne: the smallpox. The disease never entirely departed from London, but before the last epidemic in 1710, there had been a lull for a dozen years, long enough for Londoners to grow complacent, dismissing it as the mere inconvenience of a childhood disease. Now, only four years later, it was back at full putrid strength, sending Londoners young and old scattering before it. Perhaps, rumor muttered, the spans between epidemics would go on dwindling until London bubbled with infection year in and year out.
Once, Lady Mary had tormented Wortley by withholding information in a time of smallpox; now he took revenge in selective silence. As to the child, he replied, if you do wrong about him, you will have no reason to blame me, for I desire it may be as you like best. You shall know by next post which of Mr. Montagu’s two houses we have taken, he promised. It is certainly not that which was thought in danger of falling.
The next post came and went, however, with no enlightenment, and Lady Mary began to despair. I hope you’ll take care to have the house all over very well aired, which I am sure is particularly damp in that situation. There should be fires made in all the rooms, and if it be the house Mrs. Montagu died in (which I hope it is not) that all the bedding (at least) be changed. Lady Mary Montagu got the smallpox last year by lying in blankets taken from a bed that had been laid in by one ill of that distemper some months before.
Finally, just before Christmas, Wortley told her what she wanted to hear: he was not, after all, consigning her to a stew of infection. I am very well satisfied about the house, she replied. Even so, she decided to leave their precious son behind in York, rather than expose him to the hazards of a cold journey or cankered city air. At the beginning of the new year, she set out alone for the brave new Hanoverian metropolis of London.
At twenty-five, Lady Mary was beautiful, witty, highborn, and wealthy. She had shackled herself to a husband so cold and remote that she nicknamed him Prince Sombre, but however stingy Wortley could be emotionally, he spared nothing where his reputation was concerned. They had a fine (if possibly infected) house in a fashionable part of town, and he supplied all the gowns and jewels proper to her station. So long as she did not disgrace him, he left her at liberty to do as she pleased. Even the smallpox seemed to bow in her presence and withdraw, waning to a faint glimmer of its former terror. In January 1715, the city spread itself invitingly before her, and she determined to enjoy it.
She acquired an invitation to hear a private reading by a poet her father favored—the rising poet of the age, some said. Having achieved quick fame for his Pastorals and a mock epic called The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope had taken up the greatest of literary dares: He had begun translating into English rhyme the sixteen thousand ancient Greek lines of the greatest of all classics, the Iliad.
Lady Mary admired his verse for its muscular symmetry, but the man who stood up to read in the leather-and-gilt hush of Lord Halifax’s library was as far from that description as possible. A slender four and a half feet tall, with a back twisted and humped, Pope was a victim of Pott’s disease, or tuberculosis of the bone. His detractors snarled that he was a venomous and impotent hunchbacked toad; he mocked himself as “that little Alexander that women laugh at.” He was edgy and his forehead was furrowed from chronic pain, but his large eyes snapped with glee.
Lady Mary knew why, for Mr. Congreve and Dr. Garth had let her in on a jest in progress. The previous fall, at Pope’s first reading-in-progress of the Iliad, Lord Halifax had interrupted the poet several times to proclaim, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please. Be so good as to mark the place and consider it a little at your leisure. I am sure you can give it a better turn.” Afterward, Dr. Garth had dared the fuming poet to read the same passages over a few months hence, only pretending to have changed them.
Now Mr. Pope bowed awkwardly to Lord Halifax. “I hope Your Lordship will find your objections to these passages removed,” he said, and proceeded to read them exactly as he had the first time.
There was a brief, expectant pause. “Nothing can be better!” Halifax exclaimed. “Now they are perfectly right!”
The smothered merriment that burst out later at the postreading celebration in the studio of Pope’s friend, the portrait painter Charles Jervas, whirled Lady Mary into the heart of London’s literary and artistic elite. Soon, at the challenge of Pope and “Johnny” Gay, she undertook to write a series of seven town eclogues, one for each day of the week, satirizing high society. Peccadilloes in the bedroom, vanity at the dressing table, and folly at the card table: she relished the absurdity of wealthy London’s minor sins.
Poets and artists did not occupy all her time: she was also in demand in the highest circles at court. At fifty-five, the king was a handsome man with china-blue eyes, long, fine fingers, and a long nose. As a monarch, he was conscientious and demanding, though not brilliant. As a man, he was a quiet, domestic sort who liked to spend time with family and close friends; he was also a deft storyteller who liked a good, earthy joke. He did not, however, speak more than about ten words of English, and never attempted to learn. For him, German and French were enough.
In part because she could join in the French raillery, Lady Mary soon became one of very few English ladies regularly invited to the intimate supper parties hosted by the two ladies known as “the king’s women”: his tall, angular, and slightly gawky forty-eight-year-old mistress, Melusine von der Schulenberg, and his portly half-sister, Sophie Charlotte von Kielmansegg. The Maypole and the Elephant, as they were known to the more irreverent wits frisking about the palace.
Though Lady Mary was duly grateful for the weight of the king’s eyes upon her, the parties that seemed so relaxed and homely to him seemed to her excruciatingly brittle and dull. One evening, as the Maypole made the king chuckle by snipping caricatures of his courtiers out of paper and the Elephant sparred over some obscure phrase in Mr. Locke’s philosophy, Lady Mary had to clench her jaw to keep from screaming with boredom. Her only partner in small high-jinks was thirty-year-old James Craggs, fast rising in the ranks of power due to formidable talent in the council room and an equally formidable talent, it was rumored, in the bedroom. Tonight, he was late; as a result, Lady Mary had been marooned at a card table with three Germans so staid they might as well have been stuffed. Half an hour later, she gave up on Mr. Craggs and dared to contrive an escape.
“C’est injuste,” complained the king in his heavily German-accented French as La Schulenberg delivered Lady Mary’s request to withdraw early, along with an indulgent recommendation to grant the young lady mercy. “Absolument perfide,” he added, gazing down at Lady Mary’s black hair and creamy décolletage as she sank into a curtsy. “It is unfair, absolutely perfidious, my lady, that you should cheat me of so charming a presence in such a disloyal manner.” It amused him to tease her, engaging her in inventing ever more rococo apologies. Not until he saw that she was no longer certain whether he was teasing—perhaps she had really irritated him—did he allow her to depart. Or desert, as he maintained.
Released, she flew with quick pattering steps down the grand marble st
aircase of Kensington Palace, her gown billowing behind like wings, brushing against the dark curlicues and leaves of the wrought-iron balustrade. She was glancing over her shoulder, as if pages even now might be chasing after her to call her back, when she ran hard into someone at the foot of the stairs.
“What’s the matter?” cried a deep voice as two hands seized her. “Is the company put off?”
“Oh, Mr. Craggs,” she gasped. “No. It is just that I have had prodigious trouble in coaxing the king to let me go.” Up this close, he was even more handsome than generally allowed, though some affected to scorn his broad-chested exuberance as more proper to a porter than to the whipcord beauty of the ideal courtier.
“The king particularly wished you to stay?” he asked; in reply, she gave him a sly little smile.
Suddenly Mr. Craggs tossed her over his shoulder and leapt upward two and three stairs at a time. No amount of pounding on his back slowed him even a jot; in any case, she was giggling too much to do any real damage. At the arched entryway to the king’s apartment, he set her down, ostentatiously kissed both hands, and disappeared without a word. Before she could so much as shake out her crumpled skirts and smooth her hair, the bewildered royal pages flung open the doors and reannounced her.
“Ah!” cried the king with obvious pleasure. “La revoilà!” She has returned!
There was nothing for it but to curtsy and rejoin the party. “Lord, sir!” she exclaimed as the king raised her up. “I have been so frightened!” Laughing breathlessly, she regaled the company with a lively rendition of Mr. Craggs’s prank. Amusement played around La Schulenberg’s lips, but the king’s older friends gravely shook their heads; the young British were not merely undignified, they were altogether hooligans.