The Mistress

Pre-Victorian London, seventeen fifty-nine. It is an age of propriety and morels, of place and behavior. Where your station and the rectitude of your comportment are all that matters. In the public sphere, at least.

Sarah requires that her husband take a mistress. Not only to satisfy his virile lusts, (as she puts it "oh Richard, we made love only three days ago!") but also to protect their position of social prominence. She must convince him to take a kept woman before those quiet whispers rise into a clamor which might actually be heard above polite conversation over the cucumber sandwiches at the ladies croquette.
Those whispers, the ones which wonder if she herself might control her husband's purse strings.
Or that perhaps he is a poofter.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, he can not respond to her, down there.
Or worse, that he likes little boys.
Or perhaps, she is just such a bitch in the bedroom that he fears her wrath, if he follows in the footsteps of every man of wealth and taste who has gone before him.
But no, the truth of the matter is, Sarah's Richard loves her, as deeply as she loves him. And so he disdain's the unspoken morel code of his peers, and takes only her to his bed. Rather like a spoiled brat, Sarah complains.
This is something she can not permit to continue. Not if she wishes to hold her head up at the ladies card games ever again.
She begs him.
She cajoles him.
Finally, she tricks him.
With a little help from the maid.

Adapted from the author's stage play, enter a world of Victorian morels and cajolery. A delightfully humorous and deviously erotic romp as one humble wife forces her husband to grow up, and act as a man aught. To take a mistress, and to use her, as one should.

And look for the sister-piece, His Wife, in which Sarah, having got her way, faces her husband's punishment for her act of mephistophelian trickery.