What are men to rocks and mountains? Or ornamental trees?
Subject: Robert Wanders Around St. James's Park Who: Robert Lovering Where: St. James's Park Warnings: Mentions of drug and alcohol abuse Open to: Anyone
The news of Daphne's engagement had come as such an welcome, thoroughly damaging surprise, Robert had spent over a month in such a drug-addled state he found it difficult to say how he had passed the time. He did not go to Parliment, which meant another one of William Wilberforce's abolition bills failed to pass the House of Commons (where it was narrowly defeated by eight votes) and also that he had run out of bribe money, he did not leave his room except to go get drunk at one of the clubs he belonged to or to buy more opium, and, at last, his landlady had stormed his flat.
In a fit of desperation (she had not cleaned for a month), she and her footman washed him, shaved him, dressed him, and shoved him out the door. Robert did not know what to do with himself. If he went to one of his clubs, he'd drink himself under the table again, and that had become extremely boring. When one had a reputation for drinking more than Pitt the Younger (three bottles of port a day), it was a problem. If he went anywhere else, his abolitionist friends would, in their saint-like way, try to lead him to the One True Faith, and away from drugs.
So Robert, hands stuffed in the shallow pockets of his cullottes, wandered aimlesly around St. James's park, feeling an aching hollowness that opium and alcohol hadn't filled, and excercise certainly wouldn't.