England's Mistress_ The Infamous Life of Emma Hamilton - Kate Williams [46]
After birth, well-off women relaxed in their rooms, cosseted by the servants, showing off the new arrival to visitors while languidly sipping gruel, tea, and a special hot spiced wine mixture called caudle. Emma, however, had to return to Greville. Her daughter was boarded with a wet nurse, probably near the lying-in house. Greville aimed to ensure she would have few opportunities to journey into town and visit her child. He sent little Emma off to her great-grandmother in Hawarden as soon as possible. Emma knew what was expected of her: she had to pretend that her pregnancy had never happened. Within a week or so she was traveling in a coach to a new home in Paddington, West London. There, she began to reinvent herself. Amy Lyon, the flamboyant would-be actress and extroverted girl about town, became Mrs. Emma Hart, just arrived from Chester, Charles Greville's quiet and terribly shy new mistress.
Celebrity Mistress
CHAPTER 14
Charles Greville's Penitent
Greville rented Emml, smill house on the rural outskirts of London. Surrounded by market gardens, the village of Paddington Green was a cluster of houses around an inn, a church, and a large hay barn. Londoners traveled over on summer evenings to enjoy the fresh air and watch the peasants at work. Emma's new home was truly "very retired."
When Emma arrived from the lying-in house, Greville would not have been there to meet her (when a man took a mistress, he left her to settle into her new home alone). Her mother, however, was already ensconced, eager to welcome her. Every kept mistress needed a chaperone, and Greville spared himself the expense of hiring one, as well as a housekeeper, by bringing in Mary. Emma's feelings as her coach drew up outside the house were mixed. After her rackety life with Fetherstonhaugh, she hoped to be able to settle into happy security as Greville's loving mistress. She was painfully aware, however, that she had not seen him for over six months, and she fretted that she was too changed by pregnancy to attract him. When he arrived later that evening, she flung herself at him, promising love, obedience, and anything else he wanted. Greville had to content himself with her caresses, for even by eighteenth-century standards (doctors seldom told new fathers to hold back), a few days after labor was too early for sex. Instead, he listened to her promises with pleasure. He intended to test her.
As Greville had instructed her, she had changed her name to Mrs. Emma Hart, perhaps a pun on heart, of which Greville tended to think Emma had too much. But from the outset he made ever more demanding rules that she struggled to obey. First of all, her daughter had to stay in the north. Greville wanted to head off any chance of Emma trying to show Sir Harry the child when he was in London, in the hope that he might be softened by the sight of his daughter. Although all genteel women boarded their babies out of the home with a wet nurse (apart from aristocrats, who hired a nurse in), most used a local woman, and few had to endure being on the other side of the country from their child. Had the baby been male, both Greville and Harry (when he found out about the child) might have been more amenable toward offering support or assuming the responsibility of a father. As a girl, she was unwanted.
Emma's mother also had a new name: Mary Lyon was now Mrs. Cado-gan. The name sounds a little like Kidd, or even a blend of Kidd and Lyon, but it was usual for a woman to take the name of the man with whom she cohabited (as Emma's old friend Jane Powell had done when she called herself Mrs. Farmer), and Mary had perhaps been friendly with a man of the same name, though the registers contain no record of Mary's marriage.1 However, it is serendipitous that Cadogan is a rare surname. AJohn Cadogan was