I wrote the last pages of my novel late that night. It had been a catharsis to conduct my heroine through a disappointing world, where none but the doomed or dying, like my Fanny, are fully worthy of love. Perhaps I couldn’t save Margaret from marriage, but I could save my Mary by killing her off to hasten her to a better world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage. I stacked the pages, tied them with a string, and put the whole of it in a drawer.

Two days later, on the eve of Margaret’s release, I was called from my rooms to attend to Lady K in her bedroom. I found her pacing the room in a dressing gown, hair down, the dogs reclining on their cushions, watching her, back and forth. Her face was crimson, eyes livid, holding pages of some sort in her quaking hand. As soon as I stepped into the room, she read from it aloud, without looking at me.

“‘She bestowed on her dogs, but never her children, the warmest caresses!… It proceeded from vanity!… Lisping out the prettiest French expressions of ecstatic fondness!’”

I took a step toward her, furious and mortified at once. I could see now that my entire manuscript was strewn across the bottom of her bed.

“‘In accents that had never been attuned by tenderness—’”

“You went through my things?”

“‘Her voice was but a shadow of a sound, and she had, to complete her delicacy, so relaxed her nerves that she became a mere nothing.…’” Lady K threw the pages at me. “How could you do this to me, write these horrid things? Make me so … ridiculous. A laughingstock!”

I knelt down and gathered the scattered pages. “How dare you go into my rooms! This is my private writing! Not for your eyes, not for anyone’s. It is my right!”

She swept the rest of my pages off the bed onto the floor, and sat on the edge of her silk coverlet, watching me on my knees picking them up, one by one, both of us fuming. When I finished, I stood, clutching the mess of papers to my chest. She looked at me, deflated.

“I didn’t go in your rooms,” she said. “I went to Margaret, as you told me to do. She was standing on a chair, her corset tight around her bedclothes, powder on her face, disks of rouge on her cheeks, and hair pinned up in a great pouf, with ribbons and feathers, willy-nilly. Caroline and Mary sat on the edge of the bed, in stitches, while Margaret lisped her way through my words, acting out what you’ve written. My daughters … were laughing at me.”