“How much did you lose, Tom?”
“I don't know. Say ten thousand. Fox lost fifteen. It was a night, let me tell you.”
“That's more than Lord Madman usually carries in his purse,” William said to the girl. “You have nothing to fear.”
“I still shan't go,” the girl said. “Any man who wagers ten thousand pounds is truly a madman.”
William eventually persuaded the girl to risk a night with Lord Lyttleton. Back in Stonecutters Court, I expressed my distaste for this gentleman, who seemed the antithesis of the qualities my father had admired in the English aristocracy. William soothingly assured me that he found Lyttleton equally distasteful.
The next afternoon we went to St. James's Park, a lovely rectangle of green beside the palace of that name. Like Hyde Park, it was open on weekdays only to the gentry. Outside the iron railings, footmen sat on cream-and-gilt coaches while their mistresses promenaded in the mall. Here, too, the ladies wore masks and splendid dresses.
A fat, gorgeously dressed older woman, unmasked, approached us. She was escorted by Lieutenant Beckford. “Good day, Mr. Coleman, I'm delighted to see you,” she said. “Lieutenant Beckford tells us you've returned with promises of repentance.”
“Indeed I have, madam,” William said. “Flora, this is Mrs. Cornelys, an old friend.”
“Everyone is talking about her,” Mrs. Cornelys said. “You must come to my Society Night on Tuesday next. I'll send you tickets.”
“We'll be delighted to come,” William said.
In the hackney coach going home, William explained that Mrs. Cornelys was the owner of Carlisle House, in Soho Square, to which all the best people flocked for masquerade balls and musical entertainments. On the afternoon of Society Night, William insisted on my spending four hours at the hairdresser. He fussed over every detail of my gown, and his own clothes. Nothing but perfection would satisfy our hostess. We arrived in Soho Square to find it jammed with carriages. Carlisle House swarmed with brilliantly dressed ladies and gentlemen. All the ladies had dance cards, and I was startled by how swiftly mine was filled. A remarkable number of gentlemen, young and old, rushed to solicit my company. William was all smiles, bowing hello to Lady Grosvenor and Lord Stormont and Lady Archer and Lady Carpenter and Lord Lyttleton. We were all masked, but it was obvious that the disguises were nothing but an excuse to dispense with the usual formalities of society and permit everyone to speak and act as he pleased.
The orchestra struck up a country air, and the dances began. They were all violent gavottes and quadrilles, not at all what I expected aristocrats to prefer. But I was young enough to enjoy them. The activity and the crowd in the ballroom overheated me greatly and I asked William to get me some punch. I soon grew extremely giddy. The last thing I remembered
was someone asking me a peculiar question: “Has William learned any new parts?”
William, solicitude itself, carried me upstairs and left me in a bedroom with a woman servant. I lay there, between sleep and waking, while the festivities continued downstairs. I heard applause, much laughter. As if the ballroom had become a playhouse. Later, William carried me downstairs to a hackney coach.
The next day, I was miserable, thinking I had failed William. But he assured me that my debut in society had been a success. Nevertheless, he seemed overwhelmed by melancholy all day. He sat staring out the window, occasionally sighing to himself and scribbling furiously in a copy book. That night he made love to me with uncommon tenderness.
We kept to ourselves for the next two weeks, seldom going far from Stonecutters Court. Only when I noticed in the paper that the great David Garrick was playing Hamlet did William consent to go out. At the Drury Lane I was surprised by the number of young men of fashion who swarmed around us, smiling and joking with William. Lord Lyttleton was among them. “You must take care to drink less the next time we meet,” he scolded me. “Otherwise you shall never make your fortune.”
“I told youâI've changed my mind,” William said.
This struck everyone as amusing. Lord Lyttleton rattled some coins in his purse. “We have more confidence in that sound than we have in your mind, Billy.”
William led me away from his friends to our seats in the stalls. “I shall have nothing more to do with them,” he muttered. “We shall live quietlyâI swear it.”
He seemed to mean it. When another invitation arrived from Mrs. Cornelys, he tore it to shreds and took me to Vauxhall for a pleasant dinner. This time he did not sneer at the styles of the lower classes. We went to other gardens, Marylebone, Kensington, on other nights. But William was seldom
free of his melancholy mood. When I asked him why he was so gloomy, he said that his uncle was having trouble obtaining a new post for him. He had come home with the assurance that he would have an undersecretary's rank in the Colonial Office. But the noble lord who controlled the posts in that department had quarreled with William's uncle about Britain's policy toward America. Even thenâthis was 1771âAmerica was creating divisions in England.
One night Lord Lyttleton appeared, drunk and bawling William's name in the street. “I won ten thousand at Boodles last night,” he roared. “Tonight it shall be a hundred thousand. Half yours if you will reopen the Church.”
I had no idea what he was talking about but William found his offer irresistible. He dressed in his most expensive suit and left with Lyttleton. He returned at dawn, drunk and disheveled, and poured an astonishing pile of guineas on our bed. “Look at them,” he said. “Aren't they beautiful? Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?”
“Where did they come from?” I asked. There must have been a thousand of them.
“From Boodles,” he said. “Lyttleton lost twenty thousand but I made all this. I give you the credit. You've brought back my luck. Watch what I'll do with this. We're going to be rich, Flora.”
Eventually I looked back on that night as a fatal turning point in both our lives. William had tried to resist, for my sake, a world that had almost destroyed him once. But he could not do it. London itself, with its wealth gleaming in every shop window, was a vast seductress. His friends, rakes and dissolutes to a man, could not tolerate the thought of his defection from their desperate ways. Above all he could not resist the passion for gambling, which they all shared.
At first I really seemed to have brought William luck. He was amazingly successful. Each night I met him at a convenient tavern around 4 A.M. to count his winnings and celebrate past dawn. For a few months he seemed to be as rich as Lord
Lyttleton. He hired a coach and spent hundreds of pounds on clothes and jewelry for both of us. He convinced me that he was a genius at computing odds, that he had found a way to outwit fate. I believed him, in spite of stories I kept hearing of men who had lost their ancestral estates or their father's hard-earned fortunes at Boodles, Almack's, or one of the other gambling clubs. More than a few of these losers completed their ruin by committing suicide.
One night, in the fall of 1771, William appeared at our favorite tavern in Covent Garden without his usual smile of triumph. He took me to our coach immediately. As we jounced through the deserted streets he told me he had lost five thousand pounds at Boodles. “Lyttleton says he'll cover a thousand for me on one condition. That you spend the night with him.”
“You can't be serious,” I said.
“My dear, he's so drunk he'll do nothing but undress you,” William said. “Even when he's sober, there's little that he can do, for all his talk.” He seized my hands and swore he would love me forever if I agreed to do it. No matter what happened, he would love me no less. Wildly, he told me that his only wish had been to make a fortune so he could support me in the style that my beauty deserved. He had shared his good luck with me. Now I must share his bad. If I refused him, there was no hope. The bailiffs would be at our door to seize everything we owned and take him to debtor's prison. He had been there once before. He preferred death to another visit.
I agreed to the bargain. At Lord Lyttleton's mansion we were escorted to his lordship's bedroom. He seemed anything but drunk and he announced an adjunct to his bargain. William must stay and perform with me to arouse him. “I told you I wouldn't do that,” William said as I stared at him with dazed disbelief.
“I'll double the money,” Lyttleton said. He looked at me, his ugly mouth working. “He's famous for his performances, you know. He was high priest of the Church of the Cunt and
we were all his acolytes until someone ratted on him and we came near to ending in the pillory for blasphemy. I trust he'll repeat some of the flourishes he displayed at Mrs. Cornelys's masquerade ball. The one where you got so drunk. I for one have been offended by his refusal to share you since then. Would you like some laudanum before we begin?”
“A good idea,” William said. He put one or two drops of the drug in a glass of wine and ordered me to drink it In a few minutes I seemed to drift out of my body. I watched them undress me and perform acts that I cannot describe to you. I found myself welcoming the most obscene commands. Lord Lyttleton's revelation about William made me want to become completely loathsome, beyond redemption. It was what I thought I deserved for defying God and my mother, for believing I had the power to escape my fate. I saw myself as both a sinner and a fool.
Back in our rooms, I discovered that I was neither damned nor completely loathsome, but simply miserable. I demanded the truth about his past from William. He confessed the real reason for his sojourn in Jamaica. He had won a reputation among the aristocracy as a performer in plays that were little more than sexual exhibitions. Such shows were among Mrs. Cornelys's many illegal sidelines at Carlisle House. When William lured away some of her noble clients to his blasphemous “church,” she had informed on him, forcing him to retire to Jamaica until the scandal subsided.
I accused William of bringing me to London to sell me to the highest bidder. He vehemently denied the charge. “What I told you in New Orleans was the truth,” he vowed. “You stirred the first genuine feeling I've ever known for a womanâfor anyone. But Mrs. Cornelys, Carlisle House, still haunted me. I wanted to go back there with you and defy them, mock Lyttleton and Lady Grosvenor and the rest of them to their faces. Unfortunately, when I got there, they insisted on my performing one more time. They offered me five
hundred pounds. I couldn't resist the money. But I put laudanum in your punch to keep you from seeing me.”
William begged me to regard the episode with Lyttleton as a nightmare, a thing to be forgotten as quickly as possible. He swore that I would never have to do such a thing again, although it had made him love me all the more. This declaration caused enormous confusion in my mind and spiritâto be told my debasement was treasured, revered, by my husband. I tried to believe him. But the events of the next few months made it impossible.
William's vow to change his life was as empty as his promise to me that I would never be sold again. He was still horrendously in debt, and he continued to gamble, hoping a run of luck would rescue him. But luck deserted him to an unparalleled degree. Not all his skill at computing odds could recapture it. Meanwhile, Lord Lyttleton was bragging to all his friends about the delights of Billy Coleman's quadroon.
More and more of Lyttleton's fellow aristocrats wanted to share his pleasure. Their pleas coalesced with William's ever-mounting debts. One more time, a second, a third, I was entreated into spending the night with some baronet or marquess and returned home to pour a shower of golden guineas onto our bed in Stonecutters Court. William took the money and lost it at Boodles or Almack's the next night, clinging to his gambler's faith that his luck had to turn.
To calm me, he began giving me laudanum regularly. I took even more of it after I became pregnant and William sent me to a midwife, who prescribed some herbs, which caused me to abort the child so violently that I lost a great deal of blood. A doctor who had to perform delicate surgery to save my life prescribed laudanum for the pain. The drug soon became so necessary to me I could not live without it.
My illness made William vow to stop selling me. I begged him to give up trying to live like an aristocrat, to move to another part of London. He had been given a place in the Colonial
Officeânot the undersecretary's post that he had wanted but respectable enough to enable us to live decently. William shook his head. Moving would not save him from his debts. It was too late for preachments. But he agreed to quit offering me to his friends. “There are other ways to raise money,” he said.
For another three months we continued to live in the same extravagant style. William continued to gamble. But there were no more assignations required of me. Then came the day I might have foreseen, had I know more of London life. A half-dozen bailiffs arrived at our door with William in manacles. They informed me that he had been arrested for forging Bank of England stock certificates with the help of “persons unknown” at the Treasury. I was taken into custody as his accomplice. My claimâthat I was William's wife and as innocent as any wife might be of a husband's crimeâwas overruled by the judge because no record of our marriage existed. Apparently the captain of the
Delilah
had never bothered to register it when he arrived in London.