The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce (7 page)

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Authors: Hallie Rubenhold

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BOOK: The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce
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Neither Sir Richard nor his cousin, who had removed themselves to the sitting room, noticed Lady Worsley slip out the door. ‘Tell the cook that neither I nor Sir Richard shall sup at home,’ she instructed the butler. It was understood that the gentlemen would be joining her later, but as the hours pressed on, the baronet’s worsening cold pushed him back into the depths of his comfortable chair.
At about ten, his cousin suggested that they join the party at Leversuch’s, but Sir Richard ‘being rather indisposed’ waved Captain Worsley on, asking him to ‘send his excuses’ and explain that he had ‘gone to bed early … to endeavour to get rid of his cold’. He requested a draft of ‘sack whey’, an eighteenth-century cure-all and afterwards disappeared into his bedchamber.
By the time Captain Worsley appeared in the Leversuch’s drawing room, the surgeon and his wife had been entertaining a small gathering for a number of hours. Among the guests was Captain Bisset, who had placed himself attentively at Seymour’s side. In spite of gossip, Lady Worsley and her lover understood when to exercise restraint. Indeed nothing that night, their host was later to recall, ‘struck him as improper in their conduct’. They were ‘chatty and merry together’, but not in a manner which attracted curious glances. The couple had become practised at hiding their true thoughts. When Thomas Worsley entered the room offering Sir Richard’s apologies, both Seymour and her paramour must have caught their breath. This was the occasion for which they had been preparing. They sat for another hour by Leversuch’s fire, sipping tea and waiting.
When supper was called at eleven, the group rose from their seats and went downstairs to the dining room. Bisset moved swiftly to Seymour’s side and took her arm. He lingered behind while the chattering wives and finely groomed officers filed down the staircase. Alone, at the foot of the stairs, ‘he pressed her hands’ urgently and leaning close to her cheek ‘whispered for the space of a minute or so’. They would go tonight.
Although no one had seen the signal pass between the two, Lady Worsley’s demeanour quickly began to change. Mrs Leversuch’s seating arrangements, which placed Seymour between Bisset and Captain Worsley, had flustered her. A cold supper was laid before them, but Seymour’s thoughts and appetite were elsewhere. The minutes ticked away rapidly. In what must have seemed a disproportionate span of time, the empty
dishes were removed and Mrs Leversuch led her guests into the adjoining room, where Lady Worsley set her eyes on the clock.
As the hands of the timepiece ticked past midnight, Lady Worsley quite abruptly ‘got up and made a motion to go’. Leversuch also rose to his feet and, playing the genial host, asked ‘if the company was not agreeable to her Ladyship?’ ‘No,’ Seymour answered. What then might they make of ‘Her Ladyship leaving them so early?’ Those assembled fixed their gazes on her. Lady Worsley’s nerves were decidedly rattled. As one ‘always remarkable for keeping very late hours’, she was betraying herself. In the end it was her lover’s words that settled her. ‘Don’t go yet, my Lady,’ he pleaded, taking out his watch and commenting on the time. Slightly chagrined, Seymour ‘thereupon sat down again’.
The calm that came over her was fleeting. Hardly a half-hour had elapsed when, ‘in a hurry’, Seymour ‘rather unexpectedly to the company … got up again’. This time she was adamant that ‘she must go’. Captain Bisset also rose to his feet and simultaneously proposed ‘taking his leave … in order to see her Ladyship home’.
The distance between the Leversuchs’ door and the dimly lit windows of the Worsley’s house was no more than a matter of steps. Nevertheless, the surgeon insisted on lighting a candle and escorting his commander’s wife to safety. The impatient Bisset followed closely, eager to rid them of the meddling man. In the middle of the road and ‘within a few yards’ of her home, Seymour stopped her well-intentioned host, commenting ‘that he should not trouble himself to go any further’. Accordingly, the surgeon bid the couple goodnight and, at last, retreated with his guttering candle back over the road.
‘It was extraordinary,’ Leversuch remarked to his wife later that night, after the rest of the party had departed, ‘the circumstances of Lady Worsley’s breaking up and leaving the company at so early an hour. For at all other times, when the same company spent the evening together in the same kind of way, Lady Worsley … never quitted company till two or three in the morning.’ Below stairs, housemaids ferried dirty plates and china cups into the scullery. The cook put away the scraps and locked the tea caddy. The household prepared for bed, but no one was to get much sleep that night.
19th of November 1781
Standing beside the door to the Worsleys’ house, Seymour and Captain Bisset kept very still. On the other side of the wall sat the sleepy Francis Godfrey and Mary Sotheby listening intently for the sounds of their mistress’s return. In the stillness of the early hours the lovers watched for the surgeon’s shadow to disappear before daring to move. Only after his door had shut did they turn towards the Castle Green and creep away into the darkness. Near to the crest of the hill sat Tubb’s lodging house, folded in night. The house, sunk deep in sleep, issued only the faintest glow as the proprietor, Joseph Tubb, slumbered with a low fire in his bedroom grate. They tiptoed up the stairs and stealthily opened the door to the dining room adjoining Bisset’s lodgings. Once inside, a candle was lit. It was just after one o’clock in the morning.
Before their departure there were several things they had to do. Bisset took out two sheets of paper. On one, he began a letter to Sir Richard in which he formally resigned his commission as an officer. Before placing a seal on it he retrieved another, slightly larger piece of parchment awarding him his rank of Captain in the South Hampshire Militia. Later, Bisset would hand this to his trusted valet, Joseph Connolly, who would be given the unenviable task of delivering the message to the baronet. Lady Worsley then wrote her instructions to Mary Sotheby, whom she commanded to come to Lord Deerhurst’s house on Cleveland Row in London bringing the contents of her wardrobe. Retrieving her infant daughter would be more complicated and would most likely require negotiation with her husband following the elopement.
The letters were sealed and, not wishing to wake the house, the couple then extinguished the light and retired to Bisset’s bed. In the handful of hours that remained before their departure, sleep would have been inconceivable. Comfort in each other’s arms, however, was not.
At about 4 a.m. there was still no hint of sunrise. Bisset’s hearth was cold and the room remained in blackness. During the nervous moments after their arrival at Tubb’s lodging house someone had neglected to keep a flame lit. Now, when they most urgently required it, there was none to be had. Without even the slightest glimmer to guide them they would be unable to prepare themselves for their journey. Recalling the sight of Joseph Tubb’s illuminated threshold, Bisset jumped from the bed in his nightgown, crossed the corridor and anxiously beat on his landlord’s chamber door. Tubb was jerked from his sleep by his ‘much agitated’ lodger ‘requesting that he let him light his candle’. The oddness of the incident piqued him. Afterwards, Tubb crawled back into the warmth of his bed and listened.
From down the hallway he heard the floorboards creak. Someone, or several people were moving about. A loud whisper called out to Joseph Connolly. Fearing that his lodger was ill, Tubb cast off his bed covers and went quickly to Bisset’s rooms, where he banged at the door asking if ‘he might be of service’. The captain’s tense voice responded that he was indeed ‘exceedingly ill but that he had sent his man out for something’. The landlord was just about to return to his bed when he heard the murmurings of a conversation. Mr Bisset was not alone.
Tubb did not go back to his bedchamber. Instead he climbed the stairs to the garret and rattled the door of his housekeeper, the matronly Elizabeth Figg. Through the door, her master instructed her to rise and ready herself immediately, since her assistance might be required. The housekeeper lit her own candle and poked the coals in her grate, preparing rather prematurely for a long day’s duties. As she dressed in the cold of morning, pulling on her skirts and adjusting her stays, she heard a carriage clatter up to the front of the house. The sound of Connolly in his heavy boots clumping up and down the stairs was replaced after an uncertain pause by Captain Bisset’s steps and then by the unmistakable tread of feminine shoes.
Outside in the cobbled courtyard their carriage waited. Connolly, at 4.30 a.m. had been instructed to race across Lewes to the Starr Inn, where a post-chaise and a team of four horses could be hired at short notice. Bisset’s chargers and his groom were also staying at the Starr. Claiming that ‘his
master … had received an express from London and was about to set off for that place immediately’, Connolly woke Bisset’s groom as well as the groom at the Inn, Jerah Thompson, who grudgingly rose from their beds to hitch the horses to the chaise.
Thompson rode with the groom to Tubb’s lodging house and waited for Captain Bisset. Within minutes he appeared, accompanied by a lady, whom he escorted into the carriage. In the gloom of early morning, Thompson watched her cross the courtyard in a scarlet and blue cape. She was dressed to travel, in her brown riding habit, the feathers atop her fashionably tilted hat bobbing with the movements of her head. A suspicious Bisset caught Thompson staring. Through the open window of the chaise, he beckoned him round. ‘Take care of my horses,’ he instructed the groom from the Starr. ‘I shall send word for them to be sent on.’ Then Bisset shouted to the postilion and the chaise, containing Sir Richard Worsley’s wife, jolted off to London.
At 5 a.m., while most of Lewes slept, a carriage shot up the High Street and on to the London Road. As they departed at breakneck speed for the capital, their chaise passed directly in front of Sir Richard’s darkened bedroom window, leaving a jangle of noise in its wake. The horses charged down the muddy, rutted roads with only the light from the carriage lanterns to guide them. Bisset and Seymour knew that every minute they put between themselves and the Sussex town they left behind was precious. Tubb would be dressed by now, Worsley would soon be stirring in his bed, servants would be waking and questions would be asked. In London, with its labyrinthine streets, its swarming crowds and countless hostelries, their hired yellow chaise would join a river of traffic and disappear into a stream of urban anonymity. However, while they rode they were vulnerable.
Bisset had ordered his groom (who, in the tradition of a post-chaise was driving the team from astride the front horse) to ride as hard as he could, pushing the beasts to exhaustion before changing them for fresh ones at each stage. For fear of discovery, neither Lady Worsley nor the captain dared move from the carriage. At about seven, their chaise pulled into the White Hart Inn at Godstone, a small coaching village roughly 30 miles from Lewes. As the spent horses were being unhitched from the carriage, Captain Bisset opened the door and stretched his legs. Confident that the most hazardous part of their journey had been accomplished, he paced around his vehicle. At that early hour there were enough enquiring eyes at the inn to notice
the presence of a well-attired gentleman and the slightly obscured profile of a lady, hidden behind the panes of the carriage windows.
In roughly two hours they had made considerable progress, but as they neared London, their pace would begin to drag. The roads soon grew dense with north-bound traffic: drovers behinds their herds, wagons of freight, passengers on foot, ungainly mailcoaches lumbering to the capital. They would pass through a series of towns and villages, inching towards the metropolis via the turnpike to Croydon, through the farmland and wooded glades of Mitcham, continuing through the increasingly populated parts of Streatham and Brixton with its collection of hamlets and greens. It was late morning when they crossed Westminster Bridge.
They proceeded through Westminster and the Haymarket to Pall Mall where the chaise stopped outside the Royal Hotel, one of many new, respectable establishments in this, the most fashionable district of town. The Royal Hotel had opened its doors only five years earlier and its proprietor, a Mr Weston, wanted to preserve its reputation among a patchwork of gaming clubs, taverns, tradesmen’s premises and Dr Graham’s spurious ‘Temple of Health and Hymen’ with its fertility-restoring ‘Celestial Bed’. To maintain appearances, a waiter or footman was always on hand to assist arriving guests. On the morning of the 19th of November, this was Thomas Fort’s duty. He came down the steps of the hotel, dressed in tidy livery.
As they sat in the post-chaise, Seymour and Bisset paused to catch their breath. Although their daring escape had been a success it would only be a matter of hours before Worsley, trailing their scent, would be searching every corner of the capital for their whereabouts. Soon word of their elopement would reach London and tongues would be wagging. They dare not venture out until they knew what Sir Richard was likely to do. In the meantime, everyone would crave a sighting of the pair, making it unwise even to pass by an uncovered window. They watched Thomas Fort approach the carriage. He would assist them as they stepped, in plain view, on to Pall Mall. Bisset turned and spoke to Lady Worsley, holding ‘the door for a minute or two in his hand as if hesitating and undetermined whether to get out of the Chaise or not’. Having braced themselves, the couple then briskly alighted, rushing through the hotel’s entry, ‘thro’ the passage and up stairs’ with the confused Thomas Fort pursuing them.
After a very long, tense ride and a night without rest, Lady Worsley and her lover wanted breakfast. Hotels, taverns and coffee houses had a variety
of upstairs rooms available for better-paying clients who preferred to separate themselves from the establishment’s less salubrious patrons when they dined. The management at the Royal Hotel therefore did not think it unusual when the pair requested a private dining room. It was about midday when Seymour and Bisset were shown into the Apollo, the hotel’s finest dining room on the first floor, ‘where breakfast was by their order immediately carried up to them’. As Fort laid the plates of buttered toast and breads on the table and poured the couple their tea he asked if they would be staying at the hotel. Lady Worsley answered yes and then requested ‘that a bed chamber be made up immediately for her and her husband’. Fort then rang for the housekeeper, Mrs Anna Watkinson.
When the capable Watkinson trundled up from below stairs Seymour explained that she and her spouse intended to hire out the Apollo dining room for their exclusive use and therefore required a bedchamber ‘as near as possible’ to it. Mrs Watkinson settled on the perfect room: number 14, separated only by a corridor. The bed, Anna Watkinson remarked, was then ‘made ready for their immediate reception’.
While Captain Bisset and Lady Worsley were taking their breakfast, two of the Royal Hotel’s housemaids had been inspecting the pair. At twenty-six and twenty-three, Sarah Richardson and Ann Ekelso had seen enough to know that not every married couple who slept in their hotel was a legitimate one. Ekelso’s suspicions were raised when she came above stairs in the middle of the afternoon to find that the two guests had retired to their bedchamber. She had been ordered to stoke the fire in room 14 but found the door locked ‘and the room shut up’. Furthermore, she noticed that the curtains had been drawn across their windows. ‘It was an odd time of day for people to go to bed,’ Richardson had commented knowingly to her fellow servant. From then on, for entertainment’s sake, the girls resolved to keep a close watch on the activities of the couple in number 14.
Lady Worsley and Captain Bisset provided them with ample amusement. At some time after seven o’clock in the evening, the bell rope was pulled and the two housemaids were summoned above stairs to ‘relight the fire and remake the bed’. The young women revelled in the bawdy scene that greeted them. With the relish of a tell-tale, Sarah Richardson recounted that the bed ‘was extremely tumbled with the pillows and bed cloaths thrown about and the sheets twisted together and everything in much great disorder …’ But more peculiar still, she and Ekelso were compelled to ‘put new sheets on the
bed’. This was an ‘extraordinary’ situation, Richardson added with a hint of coquettish mockery, as she had ‘believed the sheets they had first lain in to be quite clean when put on the bed’.
Shortly after midnight, the tinkle of a ringing bell called them to number 14 once more. While the pair were enjoying their supper in the Apollo Sarah and Ann were requested once again ‘to make up the bed’, a task they had performed not five hours earlier. Lady Worsley took them aside and specifically ordered the girls ‘to make it as hard as possible and put [further] clean sheets on … the bed’. Incredibly, when the housemaids opened the door to the chamber, the room had been returned to its former state of disarray, with the ‘bed cloaths being thrown in a heap and the sheets all in a twist’. These sheets were now soiled like those they had already removed. The bed with its fibrous feather filling had been completely displaced. As a feather mattress required shaping to make it solid, the maids climbed on to this site of debauchery ‘and trod it down’, though probably not without a lewd jest. With hindsight, and after the details of Lady Worsley and Captain Bisset’s story had exploded into the public domain, Sarah Richardson confessed with an edge of acerbity that she and Ekelso had always nurtured ‘a suspicion between themselves that they were not really married’. That which betrayed them was simple: ‘there appeared a greater fondness between them than is generally seen between husband and wife’.
Unfortunately, the situation that provided such fun for those on the opposite side of number 14’s locked door was becoming an increasingly distressing one for the couple behind it. By early evening, Joseph Connolly had arrived at the Royal Hotel. He had come without Mary Sotheby. He did, however, bring the news that Lady Worsley and Bisset were anticipating. Discovery of their disappearance had occurred shortly after dawn. Sir Richard and Captain Worsley, along with Leversuch, Joseph Tubb, the employees of the lodging house and the White Hart Inn, as well as various officers of the South Hampshire Militia, had become involved in a frantic inquest. He regretfully reported that Mary Sotheby and all of Seymour’s urgently needed clothing had been shut in the Worsleys’ house at Lewes. Connolly had come as soon as he had been able. Before his departure, he had caught sight of Sir Richard. He seemed a man ‘in great distress … confusion and panic’, and capable of anything. The last glimpse that Connolly had of him was when Worsley boarded a post-chaise and set off at full gallop for London.

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