This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

Listener discretion advised.

The evening of April 7, 1779, was playing out just like any other typical night in Covent Garden.

The post-theater crowd was filled with London socialites, there to see and be seen, and maybe take in a little entertainment along the way. There had been a benefit that

evening at the Royal Opera House that included a performance of Love in a Village, a comic opera

about mistaken identities and the follies of young love. A lovely woman in her mid-30s was there, dressed in a fine silk gown and

adorned with jewels. In the bustling crowd, the woman and her friend chatted with acquaintances

while they searched for the woman's carriage to take them home. Suddenly, an agitated young man appeared. He approached the woman,

grabbing at her. Before anyone could understand what was happening, the young man raised a gun

to the woman's head and delivered a fatal shot. He raised a second gun to his head and tried to take his own life, but the gun missed. A would-be

murder suicide turned into regular old murder. The man was a lovesick soldier-turned-pressed,

and what about the woman whose night at the theater had just taken a deadly turn?

She was Martha Ray, a skilled performer in her own right, as well as a kept woman who had been through

plenty of romantic drama of her own.

I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

For Martha Ray, life began and ended in Covent Garden,

the vibrant London neighborhood where art and commerce intersected,

and where people from all classes rubbed elbows on a daily basis.

In between her humble beginnings and her untimely end, Martha scaled the social ladder,

gaining access to upper-class life and to creative outlets that

would not normally have been available to the daughter of working-class parents. She was

...