THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
lady must not guess that a pinch of tea was beyond her means. Twice on moonlight nights, with the lime trees in flower, she wandered in St. James’s Park and contemplated suicide in Rosamond’s Pond. Once, musing among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, the door was locked on her, and she had to spend the night in the pulpit wrapped in a carpet from the Communion Table to protect herself from the assaults of rats. “I long to listen to the young-ey’d cherubims!” she exclaimed. But a very different fate was in store for her. In spite of Mr. Colley Cibber, and Mr. Richardson, who supplied her first with gilt-edged notepaper and then with baby linen, those harpies, her landladies, after drinking her ale, devouring her lobsters, and failing often for years at a time to comb their hair, succeeded in driving Swift’s friend, and the Earl’s great-granddaughter, to be imprisoned with common debtors in the Marshalsea.
Bitterly she cursed her husband who had made her a lady of adventure instead of what nature intended, “a harmless household dove”. More and more wildly she ransacked her brains for anecdotes, memories, scandals, views about the bottomless nature of the sea, the inflammable character of the earth—anything that would fill a page and earn her a guinea. She remembered that she had eaten plovers’ eggs with Swift. “Here, Hussey,” said he, “is a Plover’s egg. King William used to give crowns apiece for them. . . .” Swift never laughed, she remembered. He used to suck in his cheeks instead of laughing. And what else could
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