Life Mask (11 page)

Derby found his fingers closed round the crumpled page. His throat was locked. How dare these money-grubbing journalists? He would have preferred to see himself linked in print with any female in Britain rather than his own wife. What if Eliza saw this item? Someone would be sure to show her. Please God she wouldn't believe it.

Contrition, my arse!
Self-pity, that was as much as Betty could manage and it had no hold on him any more. In the privacy of his own head Derby could admit that he wished above all things that he were free. He'd had his chance when Lady Derby had run away from Knowsley, but he'd gone no further than a private separation. An Act of Divorce in the Lords would have been slow, costly and a source of great satire in the press, but by now it would have been long over. Other members of the World survived such exposure, didn't they, and no one thought the worse of them for it nowadays? Why had Derby, at twenty-five, been so rigid in the ways of his ancestors, so convinced that the best thing to do with this marital humiliation was to bury it in silence? The years had rolled by and it was too late; if he suddenly sued the Duke of Dorset for
criminal conversation
with a consumptive invalid he'd be laughed out of court.

By now Derby could have been a single man again. Which meant that at any time in the last six years, say, he could have taken his freedom and thrown it at Eliza's slim feet. He could have knelt and said—

No, don't think of it.

He wouldn't care what mockery it earned him; he'd be more than willing to defy his forebears for her sake. This time, if only he were free, he wouldn't let discretion or reserve be his guide. If Eliza would be his on no other terms but marriage then, by God, he would get down on his knees—

Stop. You've no right to think of it.

Derby lay there in his chair, looking into the flames, his throat burning.

***

T
HE NINETEENTH
of April came at last and the World was arriving at Richmond House. Eliza stood in the wings and peered across the small dark stage, tried to think whether there was anything she'd forgotten. She could hear the band of musicians tuning up; Richmond had drafted them in from his own Sussex Militia, impressive but hot in their scarlet uniforms. (Apparently they weren't happy about their drink rations.) 'Such a delightful occasion,' a female voice in the audience carolled. 'All the fun of theatre without the squalor.'

Eliza listened hard.

'I couldn't agree more,' said a man. 'I rarely go to Drury Lane any more and Covent Garden is just as noisome. It takes an hour for one's carriage to get through the traffic and then one has to squeeze through the sweaty mob in the corridors. I lost my mother one night, not to mention my left shoe!'

A little rain of bright laughter.
They're in a good mood, they'll be indulgent,
Eliza thought.
They'll need to be.

'Who's there?' Mrs Damer stood at her shoulder in her Act One costume, embroidered gauze on white festooned silk, with wheat-sheaves of diamonds in her hair and a girdle of diamond stars. 'My mother's,' she said a little sheepishly, seeing Eliza's eyes on the jewellery. Eliza herself was wearing a simple Indian muslin tonight, to distinguish herself from the Players. Mrs Damer put her face to the crack in the curtains. 'I see the Cumberlands—'

'What, the playwright?' asked Eliza.

Mrs Damer laughed. 'No, I ought to have said the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland.'

No, I ought to have understood it,
thought Eliza.

'Here's Mrs Garrick, the Sheridans—I campaigned for the Foxites with Mrs Sheridan once, she's such a beauty, still—'

'Never mind her beauty,' said Eliza, 'it was her voice that was spectacular.'

Mrs Damer nodded. 'Such a shame that he made her retire from singing when they married. As if there were anything shamefill about a woman using her God-given genius! Oh, so many people,' she wailed. 'Good, Walpole's been given a seat at the front. Though I mustn't meet his eye; he'll put me off.'

'Are you a trifle nervous?'

The eyes turned towards her were huge and dark.

'Don't think of that last rehearsal; one can't judge a performance till it's on the boards.'

'I am frightened, horribly so,' admitted Mrs Damer. 'And the French lady's arrival only makes me worse.'

'I, didn't know you had a visitor.'

Mrs Damer let out a shriek of laughter. She covered her mouth. 'I keep getting things wrong and the performance hasn't even begun.' She leaned to whisper in Eliza's ear, 'We say
the French lady
for our monthlies.'

Eliza flushed in annoyance at herself.

Derby came up then, in Mr Lovemore's nightgown. Eliza had never seen him without breeches before; she looked away at once. With his little calves, he was like a child, only hairier.

'Prinny's just swanned in,' Mrs Damer told him, 'with Mrs Fitzherbert, of course.'

'I'm surprised she came, given how shamefully she's been treated in the press this week. There's the Duke of York with him,' said Derby, his eye to the crack in the curtains. 'I'm glad he only brought one little brother; seven princes and six princesses is more than England will ever need, even if an epidemic of cholera were to run through St James's Palace.'

'Treasonous talk.' Eliza giggled.

'Gad,' murmured Derby, 'here comes Fox, arm in arm with the Prime Minister. Now that's a gracious gesture.'

'Wouldn't you do the same yourself, for the occasion?'

'Well, I might, but I'd be tempted to break Pitt's twig of an arm once I had it in my grasp.' Derby looked round with a grin, then seized each lady by a hand. Eliza let him, for once. His palm was hot. 'You know, we three...'

'Yes, Derby?' said Mrs Damer.

'I think we're alike, aren't we?' He looked from face to laughing face; he squeezed their fingers. 'We each know what it is to be pre-eminent in our field, whether it be sculpture, or acting, or sport—and we know the pressures that distinction brings too. Fame! As Milton dubs it,
the spur
that pricks us to labour in the cause of greatness, but also our weakness,
that last infirmity of noble mind.
We three understand each other.'

'Have you been drinking, My Lord?'

'Oh, not more than a couple of bottles over dinner,' Derby assured Eliza. 'Just enough to help my lines flow.'

Mrs Damer rolled her eyes.

The bell rang, to Eliza's relief. For a moment she found herself searching her mind for her first cue. How absurd: she'd forgotten she was the manager.

Mrs Hobart, in front of the curtain, began delivering Field Marshal Conway's prologue. 'Well, at least she's loud,' Eliza whispered in Mrs Darner's ear to make her laugh. They were on their own in the wings, Prompt Side, while on the Opposite Side, in the shadows, Sir Harry Englefield was giving them a manic wave. The band was playing a musical overture. Mrs Damer pressed her fingers to her mouth, then took them away; she looked at them to see if they were stained with rouge. 'Are you in pain?' Eliza whispered, remembering the
French lady.

'Not much. I was up very late last night, reading over my lines; I'm so afraid I'll forget them and let you down.'

'Oh, but you won't,' she assured her, touched that the woman seemed to care less about acting well than about Eliza's approval.

'Did you suffer from stage fright, when you began your career?'

Eliza tried to cast her mind back to those crude pantomimes in Liverpool. 'Really, I can hardly remember a time before I was on the boards, one way or another. And when I advanced to Drury Lane, well, it was only a bigger house. I find acting strangely relaxing; to play a part gives me the confidence of always knowing what to say. No, I sometimes suffer from life fright, if anything,' she added quietly.

'Life fright?' Mrs Damer stared at her.

'The difficulty of being Miss Farren,' she said, 'and knowing my lines. Deciding what to wear, what to do, whom to see, what to say.'

The sculptor was nodding.

'But yes, of course,' said Eliza more lightly, 'there've been a few occasions when my heart's been in my mouth before curtain-up. I trust my own powers, but I don't trust the crowd.'

'But don't we—don't your audiences always love you?'

Eliza made a face. 'What I hate is a spirit of controversy and titillation; it's so distracting. Sometimes the newspapers have been so full of nonsensical talk about me—my character, my connections'—she didn't want to say Derby's name—'that nobody in the crowd is following the play.'

'I know. I know exactly. I suffered that way after my husband's death. And Derby,' she said bluntly, 'how does he bear it? Does he always laugh off publicity, as he claims?'

'He and I never speak of it.'

The bell went again and they both jumped. The music had ended without Eliza noticing. The stagehand came to lower the chandeliers and light the scores of tapers. Mrs Lovemore's drawing room flickered to life.

The green curtain was winched open. Everything was slower than at Drury Lane, but this was an audience of friends, Eliza reminded herself. They immediately recognised the six ladies hung up in gold-edged frames and there was a thunderclap of applause. Eliza's own portrait was leaning against a chair, in what she realised now was quite the most prominent position on the stage.

Sir Harry bounded on to the stage. He pronounced the opening line with such gulping clarity—
A plague ... go with iti
—that he provoked another round of clapping. Eliza felt oddly moved. They were really trying to please her, all her Players. She gave Mrs Damer's shoulders a gentle push and she was off, crossing the stage and settling herself at the tea table. She stared into her cup with what Eliza almost mistook for an air of contemplation. The fixed gaze gave her away. Eliza began to panic.
Go on. You don't need a prompt, not for your first line. 'This trash of tea'—

'This trash of tea!'
declaimed Mrs Damer with such vehemence that the pent-up audience broke into another wave of laughter. She glanced up at them, startled.
'I don't know why I drink so much of it,'
she admitted.
'Heigho!'

They roared, they shrieked, as if they were all tea addicts and had never heard a wittier sally. Eliza could see the colour warm Mrs Darner's cheeks, pinched by an invisible hand.

At the interval Richmond had ices served in bowls. Mrs Farren and Eliza stayed backstage to avoid the crowd. 'It's stifling hot,' observed her mother, fanning Eliza. 'Too much of a crowd for this tiny playhouse.'

'It's going well enough, isn't it, don't you think?'

'Splendidly,' said Mrs Farren.

In the second half Derby caused whoops of mirth when he fell asleep during dinner. The crowd even tittered on painful lines, such as when Mrs Lovemore cried out,
'I am lost beyond redemption
.' But they weren't mocking the actors—Eliza could always tell what kind of laugh she was hearing—they were just keyed up. Meeting her husband at Lady Constant's, Mrs Damer drew herself up to her full height.
'Do you come disguised under a mask of friendship?'

As for Derby, he was quite the libertine. Did everyone contain their opposite, Eliza wondered, and did it only take some play-acting to let the demon out?
'Hell and destruction!'
he roared, when all his plots were exposed in the last act.

The curtain swung shut and the applause rang out like brass. Strange, thought Eliza. For one night only a few ladies and gentlemen put on an old play and it was an event worth interrupting Parliament for.

Mrs Damer came in front of the curtain for the epilogue her father had written for her. The point of the piece seemed to be that theatre thrilled her even more than chiselling marble.

Oh, could my humble skill, which often strove
In mimic stone to copy forms I love,
By soft gradation reach a higher art,
And bring to view a sculpture of the heart!

She took her bows and walked off, straight into Elizas arms. 'Thank you,' she said, cheek to hot powdered cheek, 'thank you, thank you!'

The footmen were removing the chairs from the theatre, to let the crowd mill around, and bringing chilled champagne on trays. Eliza feared her face was scarlet from the heat; she tried to mingle unobtrusively, but people kept rushing up to congratulate her. John Philip Kemble, the gravely handsome rising star of Drury Lane, appeared at Eliza's side; he must have been invited by his sister Mrs Siddons. Somehow he always had the air of an ancient Roman wrapped in a cloak. 'A very creditable job, Miss Farren,' he murmured, 'considering what you had to work with.'

There was Horace Walpole, spindly as a spider, declaiming that his cousin Mrs Damer was the most wonderful actress ever to grace the boards. 'Well, who should act genteel comedy so perfectly but genteel people? The generality of actors and actresses—though I exclude the divine Miss Farren, of course'—catching sight of Eliza and making a stooped little bow—'have seen so little of high life that they can only guess at its tone and put on second-hand airs.'

Smiling, Eliza thought his theory nonsensical. As if one needed to have killed a man to act Macbeth!

'How the nobility of the last century would have thought themselves degraded, though, to see their descendants play at being players.' The remark came from a plainly dressed woman Eliza recognised as an authoress who'd recently given up playwriting, because of the sinfulness of the stage.

'What old-fashioned views you hold, Miss More,' said Walpole, regarding her quizzically. 'You make me feel so young.' He waited for the round of laughter. 'What I say is, let each of us express our particular genius however we can, whether with speeches or songs or—a chisel,' he added, as Mrs Damer joined them. '
Ars longa, vita brevis,
as Seneca puts it.'

'Well, yes, of course,' said Miss More awkwardly, 'true talent never degrades.'