Life Mask (23 page)

Fox mimed the tolling of a bell. 'Out with the old, in with the new!'

'It's hardly come to that yet,' protested Portland.

Sheridan ignored the Duke. 'Here's a plan of action,' he began, taking a page out of his pocketbook.

'I beg your pardon, Sherry?' said Fox pleasantly. 'At what meeting was this plan drawn up?'

'I saw Prinny earlier at Carlton House.'

Derby could see the tension flickering across faces. They all knew Sheridan had taken advantage of Fox's damaged friendship with the royal heir to strengthen his own position as intimate adviser to the Great Whale. Now he'd evidently begun private negotiations. 'Earlier than this?' Derby put in, trying to ease the atmosphere. 'Gad, I didn't know you were capable of such feats of early rising.'

Sheridan shook his head. 'I never went to bed.'

This raised a laugh. Sheridan grinned, scratching a red patch on his nose.

'Now, first of all,' said Fox, taking quiet control of the meeting, 'what do we know about His Majesty's illness?'

'Eh ... in brief, that's to say ... not enough,' said Portland.

'His symptoms, at least?'

The Duke consulted his notes, fingering the lines. 'The patient is sleepless, giddy, no thirst, no appetite. The veins in his face and feet are swollen, the whites of his eyes are yellow; cramps in his legs, a rash on his arms.'

'Some say it was brought on by overwork, or by sitting all day in wet stockings and eating too many pears,' Grey put in, flippant.

'Very unwise,' remarked Portland. 'I myself was reckless enough to consume a vast peach once—'

'But the key point, surely, is that His Majesty's mind is now said to be entirely alienated,' Loughborough interrupted in his deep Scottish voice. 'He slurs and muddles his words, babbles, rants about America.'

'I heard a rumour this morning at the coffee house,' said Grey, 'something the King said.' The young man quoted it with relish, like a line from a melodrama.
I fear I'm mad and I wish I might die quickly.'

They absorbed this in silence for a moment, then Georgiana made one of her rare, blunt contributions. 'A week?'

Grey turned, smoothing a curl out of his handsome eyes, and grinned at her.

'Your Ladyship,' stammered Portland, 'I find it a ... a rather inappropriate, or should I say, I don't believe speculation about the possible date of the unhappy event to be in the best of taste.'

Georgiana put her head on one side, wide-eyed. 'If I were in as melancholy a situation as His Majesty's, Your Grace, I assure you I'd pray to be released from it.'

'He's nearly fifty,' said Grey with the scorn of the young.

'A fortnight, perhaps, if he's not eating,' mused Georgiana. 'I'm sorry to offend anyone's sensibilities,' she added with a winning smile all round, 'but we must be ready for action, because our opponents certainly are.'

'Fox,' said Sheridan, 'you should drop Prinny a note—utmost sympathy, unqualified support, that kind of thing. I can draft it.'

'Thanks, but I'm sure I'll manage.'

There was a silence like an itch.

Suddenly the Prince was no mere buffoon but their imminent ruler. At Brooks's, recently, Derby had been among the members who'd blackballed two of the Prince's more disreputable candidates—from the new generation of cocky, underbred rakes who were clamouring to get into the Club—so Prinny and his brother the Duke of York had left in a huff and organised their own private gaming parties instead. How could the Foxites have been so careless of the heir apparent's favour?

'Portland—' began Fox without looking up.

'Yes,' said the Duke leadenly, 'I'm quite aware that the Prince's severe dislike of me, ah, ever since I protested against his robbing the public coffers of £300,000 to clear his debts, may constitute a problem.'

Derby could imagine the public uproar if the Great Whale demanded, not the safe candidate Portland as his Prime Minister but someone like Sheridan.

'I'll talk to him,' murmured Sheridan.

'Can we be quite sure of the Prince?' Derby asked, a little hoarse.

Six faces stared at him.

'If he wakes up King of England tomorrow, can we trust that he'll dismiss Pitt and call our Party to form a government?'

'We're his friends,' snapped Sheridan.

'We'll ride him to power like a thoroughbred,' Grey suggested, 'that needs the barest tug on the reins.'

Georgiana was smiling through her fingers, like a child. But Fox was silent. Was he thinking about thoroughbreds, Derby wondered, the most temperamental horses in the world?

A
HARD
frost had set in and the stocks were still plummeting. The nation could talk of nothing else but the King's mysterious malady; wild stories flew from soirée to breakfast party, from snuff seller's to opera box. Old George was said to foam at the mouth, swear obscenely and howl like a dog; he'd thrown the Prince against a wall and hailed an oak tree as the Emperor of Prussia. For the convenience of his London physicians he was lodged at Kew, a summer palace with no carpets, where draughts whistled down the corridors. His doctors had blistered his scalp and his legs, leeched his face; they were using purges, emetics and ice to calm his frenzies, when he wasn't tied to his bed.

Eliza wished the poor man would die and be done with it.

Everyone was jumpy. Derby had the preoccupied, twitchy air of a conspirator and was always at Devonshire House or the Lords; Fox had fallen ill with a bloody flux. Her colleagues forgot the lines of parts they'd played all their lives. Dora Jordan
{the breeding sow of Drury Lane,
as Palmer called her) had a third child by her Mr Ford, but this one died and Eliza resented having to sympathise.

Sheridan—who, Eliza knew from Derby, was lurching headlong into an affair with Georgiana's lovely and unhappily married sister Harriet, Lady Duncannoii—rushed through the theatre one afternoon, handing out satirical couplets alluding to madness and government, to be inserted into epilogues wherever they could be made to fit. 'Isn't this a dangerous game?' Eliza asked quietly, stepping into his path.

He stared back with bloodshot eyes.

'Do you really mean to cast Drury Lane as a Foxite theatre and lose us half our audience?'

'Miss Farren,' said Sheridan, 'the only stage I give a fig for is the British Empire. Now get out of my way and learn those lines.'

Tom King, a pillar of promptitude for all these years as actor and manager, didn't turn up the next morning. In the Green Room Eliza found a knot of people gathered round
The Times.
John Bannister was reading in a rapid but clear voice: '...
having been called to account by authors for the non-performance of works I never before heard of—'

'What is it?' she asked.

Charles Bannister, at his son's shoulder, looked up sorrowfully. 'King's resignation.'

'No!'

'Who'd deny poor Tom his freedom?' asked Jack Palmer. 'Sheridan's been a lunatic.'

'There's a lot of it about,' quipped Mrs Jordan.

Eliza gave her a cold look.

'But to abandon us so publicly, in the middle of the season—' lamented Mrs Hopkins. 'Who on earth can replace him?'

'You could, Jack,' said Eliza after a moment.

He snorted.

'Miss Farren's right,' said Mrs Jordan suddenly. 'After all, you set up your own theatre, summer before last.'

'Don't remind me! That's exactly why our proprietor wouldn't trust me with the running of a nose—begging the ladies' pardon,' he added with a grin. 'I had to grovel long enough to be taken back into the company. Besides, it'd be the most thankless job in London, being manager under Sheridan.'

'Yes, look at this bit,' said Roaring Bob Bensley, reading over Bannister's shoulder, 'poor Tom complains he lacked authority to
command the purchase of a yard of ribbon, or the cleaning of a coat, which was often much needed!

'That's a good hit,' said Mrs Jordan. 'My dress for
Follies of a
Day
stinks to heaven and there's a rip all up the back from when I stood on the train.'

Eliza ignored this vulgarity. 'Kemble, then?'

John Bannister made a face at his father. Jack Palmer laughed. 'Kemble, with his finicky pretensions and his
Pray halt this rehearsal, let us consult Dr Johnsons Dictionary
?' His mimicry of the actor's hoarse solemnity was perfect.

'Between him and Siddons, it'd be a family takeover,' said Roaring Bob glumly. 'Since Gentleman Smith retired and poor Brereton died in the asylum, and with you in the doghouse, Jack, hasn't Kemble snuffed up every half-decent role?'

'Then the more fool he to turn to squabbles over lace and laundry,' Jack went on. 'Manager? He'd find it easier to fish corpses from the Thames with a banana skin!'

'Gentlemen. Ladies.' John Philip Kemble stood just inside the door, as grave as ever. Eliza's head snapped round. The fellow was tall and well-built, but his ability to slip in silently was unnerving. 'I came to acquaint you with my new position, but I gather you've surmised it.'

There was a painful pause, before Dora Jordan ran to his side. 'Oh, Mr Kemble, Johnny, dear.' He stiffened at the informality as she clutched his arm. 'You're not taking it on, truly? Such a fag it'll be!'

'I've never feared hard work in the service of Thespis, Mrs Jordan,' he assured her.

Another silence. 'Well, good luck to you, that's all I can say,' said Jack, striding over to shake his hand. 'If any man can stand up to our esteemed proprietor...'

'The fact is, Mr Sheridan and I have come to terms and I am to have a free hand,' said Kemble, the corners of his chiselled mouth twitching with pleasure.

Eliza and Jack exchanged a dubious look. 'My congratulations,' she said, dipping into a curtsy. 'Are we to have some new plays? Comedies?'

'Perhaps, in the fullness of time,' Kemble said, which sounded like
no
to her. Dora Jordan crossed her arms. Little liking as Eliza had for the woman, they had a common cause.

'But above all,' he went on in the ringing tones of a prepared speech, 'we will dedicate ourselves to raising standards of acting, a new authenticity in costumes and scenery, a scholarly rigour in interpretation.'

Roaring Bob let out a faint groan.

D
ECEMBER
1788

The cold didn't break for a single day, Britain was in the unremitting grip of ice. There was a prophecy that showed up on walls and in letters to newspapers:
fourteen weeks frost, a bloody riot and a dead king.
If only it were that simple, Derby thought tiredly. After yet another meeting of the Privy Council to interrogate the doctors, he concluded that Old Satan hadn't shown any signs of dying in weeks. (Derby always felt like a fraud in that august advisory body, he knew he owed his place to his ancient tide, vast landholdings and influence in the North, rather than to any desire His Majesty had ever had to hear the views of a Foxite troublemaker.) He went straight on to Devonshire House to report every word spoken in the Council—he was a usefiil spy, at least—and stayed for a five-hour meeting to hammer out the arguments for Prinny to become sole regent.

He left the Lords late the next afternoon to wind his way through the corridors and cloisters to the Commons for the big debate on the Regency Bill. 'Fox looks ... well, not thin, but distinctly thinner,' he muttered in Sheridan's ear in the lobby. The bloody flux must have come back.

'He told me he thought he might be dying,' said Sheridan with an unreadable expression.

'Wouldn't that be hard luck,' said Grey with a nervous smirk, 'with the apple about to fall into his mouth?'

Derby stared at the young man, who he knew was devoted to Fox.

'Have you ever had an apple fall into your mouth, Grey?' barked Sheridan. 'You'd lose a few teeth, I can tell you.'

'It was only a figure of speech.'

They were all short-tempered with excitement. Derby found himself wondering whether Sheridan had ganged up with him against Grey, just now, in order to mask his own hostility to their sick leader.
Fronds nulla fides
, as Juvenal put it; never trust a face.

From the End Gallery, Derby looked down at his colleagues on the Opposition benches. He watched the pale Prime Minister rise to his feet and propose that the House appoint a committee to consider all possible candidates for a temporary regency.

Fox lurched to his feet, sallow and sweating, with swollen eyes. 'We need no committee, Mr Speaker, to tell us that there exists in this kingdom an ideal regent, an heir apparent of full age, discretion and capacity.'

'Capacity for quim and brandy!' roared some Tory wit, setting off a wave of laughter.

'It behoves us, therefore, to waste not a moment but proceed with all diligence to restore royal authority in the person of that heir. It is not for the people or Parliament to choose their sovereign ruler. For us to deliberate on the
merits
of that Prince,' Fox fumed, 'who has sole and unfettered prerogative to lead this nation by hereditary right, would be improper and a waste of time.'

'Order! Order!' bawled Pitt's men.

A beatific smile spread over the Prime Minister's face. Derby groaned inwardly; in his urgency, Fox had gone too far. For the celebrated Man of the People to tell Parliament that its deliberations were irrelevant—Sheridan was gazing upwards, as if waiting for a deus ex machina. Derby pressed his lips against the crystal top of his cane.

As the Whig leader flopped into his seat and mopped his forehead, Pitt rose like a wraith. 'Mr Speaker, sir, the Prince of Wales has no more
right
to take up the reins of power than has any other individual in this country.'

'Such as yourself?' shouted out someone on the Opposition bench. Derby craned to see; it was Burke.

'Order!'

'Yes, or my under-gardener,' said Pitt, two red lamps flaming in his white cheeks.

'So the Honourable Member would set up himself or his servant as rivals to his Royal Highness,' roared Burke.

'Order! Order!'

'Sit down!'

'For the Honourable Members across the floor from whom we have just heard to assert such an inherent hereditary right in the Prince, disregarding the views of the people as expressed in Parliament,' continued Pitt gently, 'verges on treason to the Constitution.'