The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce (8 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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The Cuckold’s Reel
When Elizabeth Figg came down the dark staircase to Tubb’s basement kitchen she was surprised to find that someone had already lit the fire. Sitting beside it, dressed for a journey was Joseph Connolly. He looked up at her with a fearful expression. In his hands he held two letters ready for dispatch. Unnerved by his appearance, Elizabeth enquired if ‘he had known of the cause of the disturbance’. Connolly answered, quite shaken, ‘that his master, Captain Bisset was gone off with Lady Worsley and he … was to go to Lady Worsley’s maid to get her to go with him and to get Lady Worsley’s cloaths’. Then he gestured to the packet of papers in his hands: ‘the letter’, he stated with dread, ‘is from my master for Sir Richard Worsley, but I am too afraid to deliver it’. He had been stewing in the kitchen, attempting to fortify his nerve by the warmth of the fire.
As Connolly spoke, Tubb came down the stairs. ‘What was this noise I heard in the night?’ the proprietor asked. The valet then began to tell his incredible tale again: ‘Captain Bisset was set off for London and had taken Lady Worsley with him!’ He showed Tubb the letter in his hand and explained ‘his master had directed him to deliver it but … he feared Sir Richard Worsley should blow his head off’. As Tubb and his housekeeper stood dumbstruck in the kitchen, a shaken Connolly excused himself to pack Bisset’s belongings and face the trials that awaited him. For those at Tubb’s and for many others in Lewes, this was to be the start of an extraordinary day.
While Connolly and Elizabeth Figg were in the kitchen exchanging gossip,
down the hill from Castle Green, Sir Richard Worsley rose from his bed. He had not slept well. Throughout the evening the muted glow from Lady Worsley’s dressing room hearth reminded him that she had not yet returned. Mary Sotheby, who had kept a vigil with Francis Godfrey in the servants’ room had come above stairs several times to stoke the fire. Hearing the swish of skirts and the shifting of coal, Sir Richard had called out his wife’s name, but only Mary Sotheby answered. The clock had struck each of the passing hours and still there had been no sign of Seymour.
At shortly after 5 a.m. a post-chaise with a team in full flight had rattled the windows and jolted Worsley from his sleep. With his empirical, enlightened mind Sir Richard was not normally the sort of man to place much faith in his intuition. Strangely though, this noise, the race of horses’ hoofs and bounce of a sprung carriage unnerved him. He pushed aside his bed covers. From the door of his rooms, Worsley shouted to his staff below: ‘who is awake?’ he demanded. Mary Sotheby and Francis Godfrey replied. Sir Richard seemed perplexed. ‘Why has Lady Worsley not returned home?’ he called out through the unlit house, but neither the butler nor the lady’s maid could offer an explanation. When they climbed the stairs they found him in his nightgown looking ‘much surprised’ if not confused. ‘Certainly,’ he said to them, ‘she must have been taken ill or some accident must have happened.’ He glanced through the window to the house across the road and then turned to Godfrey: ‘go instantly over to Mr Leversuch’s and enquire for her,’ he directed. The butler made haste outside into the cold morning.
Worsley tucked himself into the shadows by his window and observed with stoic stillness. Mary stood beside him. They watched as Godfrey pounded on the door, knocking again and again, the sounds travelling down the High Street. The servant ‘had knocked some time’ but the Leversuchs’ household, fatigued from a night’s entertainment was slow to its feet. Growing more anxious Sir Richard turned to Mary and ‘ordered her to go over to the Butler and to keep knocking ’til they made somebody answer’. And so she too was dispatched over the road.
After much ‘violent rapping at the door’, Leversuch in his nightshirt threw open the sash window and stared quizzically at Worsley’s two servants. ‘Sir Richard Worsley desires that Lady Worsley would come home,’ Godfrey announced.
‘But Lady Worsley … was not there,’ the surgeon responded. She had, in
fact ‘left his house about one in the morning’. She had been in the company of Captain Bisset, who ‘had handed her Ladyship over the way and he, himself had lighted them within a very few yards of Sir Richard’s door’. This was not the reply that anyone had been expecting.
When Godfrey and Mary Sotheby returned to the Worsley house and repeated the conversation to Sir Richard the last of his solid composure soon melted into ‘extreme agitation’. The baronet ‘hurried on his cloaths’ and shouted for Godfrey ‘to light lanthorns’. He was determined to hear Leversuch’s story for himself.
He marched Godfrey with his swaying lamp back over the road and thumped once more at the surgeon’s door. There, in the drawing room where Lady Worsley had anxiously watched the clock only hours earlier, Leversuch ‘gave him the same … account he had sent by the butler’; that he ‘had lighted her over the way’ and had last seen her ‘in the care of Captain Bisset’.
Sir Richard stood in disquieted silence for several moments. The surgeon surveyed his expression, observing the incomprehension welling in his features. ‘Good God, Leversuch,’ he muttered at last, ‘what shall I do? I can not tell what to make of it, surely she must be playing me some trick.’ He then became ‘greatly alarmed’, pacing about, ‘quite undetermined what to do’ and ‘not knowing where to go to seek after her’. In fact, Sir Richard knew very well where he might have sought his wife. Leversuch had plainly told him with whom she had departed, but at that moment the betrayal it implied was too enormous for Worsley to accept. The possibility of his wife running away with George Bisset had always loomed, but given his liberal treatment of the affair and the dangerous secrets they shared as a trio, he may have convinced himself that the couple would never have resorted to such an irrational and impulsive act.
After nearly fifteen minutes of fraught deliberation the baronet convinced himself that she must have spent the night at Captain and Mrs Chapman’s house, as Seymour and Mrs Chapman ‘were very intimate’. He announced to Leversuch that ‘he would go and enquire after her’ there.
Godfrey strode briskly beside his master, lighting him down the road to the Chapmans’ rented house where Worsley believed he might find his wife. But after much anxious knocking and another quarter of an hour passed in Captain Chapman’s sitting room, he soon learned that they too ‘knew nothing of her’.
Outside on the street, the butler waited. Worsley emerged wearing a stricken face and visibly ‘in the utmost agony and distress’. Overcome by ‘a state of
uncertainty and suspense’, Sir Richard now realised that the matter was as grave as he had feared. Which aspect of the situation horrified him the most –the pair’s unexpected treachery or the knowledge that they now roamed at large armed with potentially lethal secrets–can only be imagined.
He took Godfrey back up the hill to the White Hart Inn in order to rouse Thomas Worsley from his bed. On learning of his cousin’s distress, he too slipped on his clothing and ‘after about ten minutes … appeared at the house of Sir Richard’. By the time Worsley and his servant had returned home, the dawn had begun to colour the sky. In the glare of daylight there would be further discoveries.
The commander and his cousin were sitting uncomfortably together, when at shortly after 7 a.m. a servant came to the door with a message. It was Joseph Connolly, relieved to deposit his small packet of bad tidings into the hands of Francis Godfrey, another unwitting messenger. Connolly did not linger for an answer. The butler examined the letters with some curiosity ‘and finding them to be directed to Sir Richard carried [them] to him’.
Immediately, Worsley recognised his wife’s curved, delicate script on the note addressed to Mary Sotheby, and his friend, Bisset’s writing on the parcel that bore his own name. He cracked the seal ‘and took out a small parchment appearing to be an officer’s commission’. Carefully, he unfolded the attached note. Both Godfrey and Thomas Worsley held their breath as their eyes studied Sir Richard’s movements. ‘Oh,’ he looked up and uttered, ‘my Lady is found.’
Mary Sotheby was summoned from below stairs. ‘Lady Worsley had been found’, she was told and Sir Richard required her ‘to attend him to the house of a Mr Tubb’. Sotheby had guessed that this trouble involved Captain Bisset. As she followed behind Worsley, moving briskly along the road, an increasing sense of dread began to overtake her, a fear that ‘Sir Richard and Captain Bisset might meet and that any mischief might then ensue’. Her trepidation was so great that when they approached the entry to the lodging house she could bring herself ‘to follow Sir Richard only as far as the stairs … and no further … being [too] frightened’.
The baronet mounted the stairway that had led his wife and her lover off on their adventure from Lewes. As he took the steps in his impatient stride, he called out to the floors above, ‘Lady Worsley!’ Lady Worsley did not answer. Instead Sir Richard was met by Elizabeth Figg, who told him ‘that she was not there’.
‘Upon your honour,’ he demanded, ‘can you say that Lady Worsley is not in this house?’
‘She is not in the house,’ Elizabeth affirmed. She found Sir Richard not only ‘agitated’ but threateningly aggressive. In an attempt to assuage his temper she added, ‘you are welcome to search the house if you think proper’. Worsley continued up the stairs, inspecting the surroundings with acute suspicion.
‘Has she not been here?’ he asked her pointedly as he reached the top floor. They were standing outside her bedchamber. Elizabeth Figg was feeling intimidated. ‘It has been my understanding,’ she commented, ‘that Lady Worsley had been here and was gone off with Captain Bisset at about five in the morning, but … I did not see her.’ Then, in an action that ‘seem[ed] rather to discredit her’, the baronet pushed open the door of Elizabeth’s room to ensure that the housekeeper had not been paid to harbour the errant pair. Satisfied, he stepped back and then addressed her one final time: ‘Do you know what road they have taken?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I do not.’
To the housekeeper’s relief Sir Richard said nothing more and silently ‘turned on his heel … and then went away’.
Worsley now had time against him. He returned to his house ‘in a violent hurry’, bolting through the door and scattering servants in his wake. Urgent preparations were made for a journey to London. Gossip travelled faster than post-chaises. It was possible that the whispering had already gathered speed. He must do what he could to curtail it; to bring her back, to buy her silence, or to begin legal proceedings. Events had happened so suddenly that it is unlikely Sir Richard himself knew what course he would take, or even the situation he might find when his carriage arrived in the capital. He knew for certain that he would require moral support, and looked to his cousin, Captain Worsley, to accompany him.
Another post-chaise and four horses were hired. The baronet took his butler aside and gave him ‘strict orders … not to leave the house or to admit any one into it ’til he should see or hear from him again’. This message was then impressed upon Worsley’s small corps of domestic staff, who would effectively be locked into the house until further notice. This, they were instructed, ‘was for the sake of Miss Worsley, [their] daughter who was then there’. Gratefully, their son Robert who remained safely sequestered in the nursery at Appuldurcombe, would be spared the upheaval. Sir Richard had begun
to plot his strategy. He believed that if his wife were to return to Lewes on any pretext it would be with the intention of claiming her illegitimate baby. It would not be long, Sir Richard calculated, before the child’s true parents began to yearn for her. Should ‘Lady Worsley come to the house’, the staff were ordered ‘not to admit her or to suffer her to come in’. The baronet had publicly claimed Jane as his own and was determined for the sake of his dignity that she should remain so.
The only potential turncoat in his army of captive accomplices was Mary Sotheby. His wife’s letter, imploring her servant to come to London had never been delivered into Mary’s hands, but undoubtedly the maid was simmering with anxiety, anticipating a command from her mistress. Of all the servants under Worsley’s roof, no one would have been more distressed by the events of that morning than Mary Sotheby. Her concerns were not simply mercenary ones, that Seymour’s absence would inevitably signal the termination of her position, but genuine worry for the welfare of her lady. It was her responsibility to follow her mistress, to forecast her needs, to soothe her bodily discomforts, to dress her, to bath her and to coddle her emotionally should she require it. The complexities of women’s attire and the strictures of a genteel upbringing meant that a lady of privilege was virtually helpless without the assistance of her servant’s hands. Their relationship was a complicated one; an association of dependency based on mutual trust, subordination, friendship and sometimes unwavering fidelity and love. As it was Mary Sotheby’s occupation to observe her mistress’s person completely, she would have been privy to her most intimate secrets: the individuals with whom she corresponded, her private conversations, even the state of her naked body and undergarments. The bond that was forged between a maid and her mistress was often intense. Acts of disloyalty and disobedience could be taken as devastating betrayals.
Mary would have known that Lady Worsley urgently required her presence. With no clothing but the functional brown riding habit in which she had absconded, without so much as a change of linen or stockings, without her jewels, her pomades or powders and without Mary Sotheby’s fingers to assist her, Seymour would be as vulnerable as a motherless child. She would be forced to rely on the housemaids wherever she resided, with their catty tongues and thieves’ pockets. Without her baby, bereft of her clothing and parted from her lady’s maid, both Mary and Sir Richard knew, Lady Worsley would grow increasingly desperate. So it was to Mary that he turned before
his departure. He addressed her with sternness, impressing on her the importance of her duties to him, the master, rather than to her wayward mistress. It was the husband, not the wife, who paid her wages. Then, into her care he placed ‘Lady Worsley’s cloaths and jewels … with a strict charge not to let her ladyship have any of these in his absence’. He knew that Mary Sotheby’s heart would be burdened and her resolve slippery. Godfrey watched her closely.

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