Life Mask (29 page)

Eliza peeled open the paper, wishing the two of them were in the workshop at Grosvenor Square, instead of amid the humid flurry of Opening Day. The final layer of paper tore and a ring fell into Eliza's cupped hand; she almost dropped it. 'Oh, my dear,' she whispered. The ring was tiny and gold, in the shape of an aquiline eye; it seemed to wink at her. The eye was an insert of painted ivory, with a tiny black pupil. She turned it over and read, in minute italic engraving,
Preuve de mon amitié.

'Proof—'

'Of your friendship. Yes, I know enough French for that,' said Eliza, laughing to ease the moment.

'Friendship, or affection, or love; the two languages don't quite correspond,' said Anne, laughing too.

'Well, whatever it says, it's beautiful,' said Eliza. It fitted perfectly on the little finger of her left hand. 'However did you guess the size? Did you put me into one of Monsieur Mesmer's trances without my knowing and measure my finger with a thread?'

'No need,' said Anne. 'I have a trained eye.'

'So do I, now,' Eliza joked, holding up the ring.

'Do you know why I chose that device?'

'Could it mean ... that you're always watching?'

'Looking at you, yes. Watching over you. I knew you'd understand,' said Anne.

'Excuse me, Miss Farren.' It was Mrs Piozzi, tugging at Eliza's sleeve. 'Might I speak with you?'

Eliza gave her a puzzled glance. The older woman's manner was urgent; this was a strange way to force an introduction. 'Mrs Piozzi, how delightful. Mrs Damer,' she said, turning, 'I wonder, might I present—'

'So sorry to interrupt, but really I must presume on your kindness,' said Mrs Piozzi rapidly.

Had the Honourable Mrs Damer just been cut by a person from Streatham? Time to go. Eliza pressed Anne's hand. 'I'll leave you to your worshipful throng.'

'Write to me tonight?'

'I promise.'

I
N THE
sculpture room Derby's eye was pulled straight to the glowing marble face; he stood still and let the mass of people swirl around him. 'My very dear old friend,' he said, pressing through the crowd to clasp Anne Damer's hand, 'it's a triumph.'

'I'm so glad you think so. You've just missed the original, I'm afraid.'

He felt drunk with excitement. 'It's the lady to the life, yet the Muse of Comedy in all her Grecian purity too. You have this knack—no, that sounds too easy—you have this power to see into the hearts of women. You've never sculpted one of us poor menfolk, have you?' he asked, tearing his eyes away to focus on Mrs Damer.

'Not yet, no,' she said, 'only boys and the occasional god. I tried some clay sketches of my father once, but he complained he looked like a frog. No, it seems women alone stir my imagination. Women and animals.'

Derby's eyes had slid back to the
Thalia.
He licked his lip. 'I simply must have it. No, I mean it, truly, I absolutely insist. I'll pay any price.'

Mrs Damer lowered her voice. 'Derby, I don't think you understand. I don't
sell
my work.'

'I beg your pardon,' he said, chastened, 'I only meant—to recompense you for the costly materials—or perhaps you'd rather an exchange? I have some splendid Old Masters in my collection at Knowsley; you must come up for a visit one of these days and take your pick.'

'You've many fine things,' said Mrs Damer, a little tight-lipped, 'but I'm afraid the bust is not for sale or exchange.'

'Don't tell me you've promised it to Richmond already? Or Walpole? What engrossers of the market those fellows are!'

'No,' she said, 'I've intended from the beginning to present it to Miss Farren herself.'

Derby was taken aback. 'But ... our friend has herself to look at, in the mirror,' he said with a laugh.

'Oh, come, think how often she's been drawn and painted, yet she owns none of the results,' said Mrs Damer. 'Her image is pawed over in a dozen print shops and hung over fireplaces across the country, but she doesn't own a single representation of her own beauty. Is that just?'

Something occurred to him and he brightened. 'What about the terracotta version?'

There was a moment's pause. 'That will have to go to Walpole, I'm afraid.'

There was something curious about her phrasing. He'd almost have thought that Mrs Damer was lying—except that she'd no reason to lie. Walpole did have a particular fondness for terracottas, Derby knew that. So why did he have the impression that she'd only just decided to offer it to her godfather? 'Well, I resign myself, then, but not with good grace,' he said with a little bow, before he turned away.

No, he must be imagining things. His old friend had always been so encouraging of his quiet pursuit of Eliza Farren. He was simply unsettled because it was so rare—almost unprecedented"—to find something that the Derby fortune couldn't buy.

O
UTSIDE
Somerset House, on the noisy Strand, Eliza was sitting in Mrs Piozzi's slightly shabby carriage, staring at her. 'I have no idea what you're hinting at.'

Mrs Piozzi sighed theatrically. 'I don't mean to hint, dear girl, but it's impossible to be explicit on these dreadful matters.'

'What
dreadful matters?'

'The ones I've mentioned.'

'You've mentioned nothing,' snapped Eliza, 'you've only muttered darkly about
notorieties
and
criminalities.
Why was it exactly that you dragged me so rudely out of the Exhibition?'

The lady of letters, her lips pursed, put her hand on Eliza's knee for a moment. 'You may have heard the appalling rumours about the Queen of France and the Princesses of Lamballe and Polignac, in that sink of iniquity known as Versailles?'

'Which rumours?' asked Eliza. 'Marie Antoinette's enemies have accused her of every vice in the encyclopedia.'

Mrs Piozzi's eyes were beady. 'An example closer to home, then: you know the Devonshire House ménage?'

'I know Lady Bess is said to have had two children by the Duke—'

'Not just that!' Mrs Piozzi sighed like a bellows.

If she were an actress at Drury Lane,
Eliza found herself thinking,
she'd he told to pull herself together and stop hamming it up.

'Your innocence appals me, my dear,' said the older woman. 'Don't you know what sort of times we're living in? There's an unnatural, fantastical vice spreading across Europe, from Italy to France and now to our own shores. Haven't you ever heard of those monsters who haunt their own sex?'

'Ah,' said Eliza, on surer ground. 'You mean sodomites. Why are you telling me this?'

'Because you may be in danger,' hissed Mrs Piozzi.

'From a sodomite?'

Mrs Piozzi folded her arms. 'Are you being deliberately obtuse?'

'No, no, indeed.' Eliza suppressed a yelp of hysterical laughter.

Mrs Piozzi spoke in a rapid whisper. 'I'm speaking of man-hating
females.
Monsters in the guise
of
women. They go by a Greek name,
Sapphists,
after the criminal passions of Sappho, don't you know.'

Eliza's head was swimming. 'I thought she was a poet.'

'That and worse,' said Mrs Piozzi darkly. 'They're known as Tommies too.'

'Tommies?'

'Like beastly tom-cats.'

Eliza ignored that strange reference. 'I still don't understand—'

'Your so-called friend, Mrs Damer, was that a ring I saw her give you?' She took hold of Eliza's fingers and peered at them in the dark carriage.

Eliza snatched her hand away and covered it with the other. 'Mrs Piozzi, you forget yourself.'

'I beg your pardon, but—'

'You're babbling as if you have a fever. Or as if you're intoxicated. I don't know what you're talking about—'

'I have proof.'

'—and I don't wish to know.' Eliza was breathing heavily. She rapped on the side of the carriage for the coachman to come round and help her down.

'Oh, my dear,' said Mrs Piozzi, holding on to Eliza's lace apron, 'I'm only trying to warn you. Already there's a dreadful epigram going the rounds—'

Eliza stopped, her foot on the top step. She leaned back into the darkness. 'What epigram?'

'I was afraid you might have heard it already. I so wanted to be the first to prepare you against the shock. I thought of writing, but I couldn't wait, not when I saw her flaunt her sculpture of you in there and make a public show of your intimacy. How does it go? Yes, I have it.' Mrs Piozzi declaimed in a theatrical whisper:

'Her little stock of privatefame
Will fall a wreck to public clamour,
If Farren leagues with one whose name
Comes near—aye, very near—to DAMN HER.

Damn her, Damer, d'you see?'

Eliza stared at her, then stepped down into the street.

J
ULY
1789

Derby had come to town for a few days, to escape the monotony of Knowsley, where his girls Charlotte and Elizabeth had developed a genius for reporting each other's petty misdeeds with the precision of law clerks. He dropped into the Farrens' with Fox and Grey one evening, to make up a rubber at whist. Mrs Farren was always relieved if there were three guests, so she didn't have to play. She had to ring for the tea kettle to be refilled twice and the gentlemen used up half a cone of sugar. Derby thought Eliza was looking rather pale; for years now he'd wished she could give up the arduous summer season at the Haymarket, but he knew better than to offer his opinion. She seemed preoccupied tonight and took little part in the conversation. Fox and Grey were having a heated debate about the importance of the Germanic, as compared with Latinate, contributions to the English language. Derby had never been much of a scholar; in Cambridge it hadn't been necessary to follow any particular course of studies or, heaven forbid, undergo any examinations. He edged the conversation towards politics, which somehow led to money, and whether it was possible to live in Mayfair on less than £3000 a year.

A low laugh from Eliza, eyes on her cards. 'I assure you, gentlemen, that my mother and I survive on less than half that, and put savings aside too.'

'What, you've got money in the bank?' asked Fox, aghast. 'What's it doing there?'

'On first coming to this metropolis Miss Farren adopted an extraordinary procedure,' Derby told them, 'she pays for things the day she buys, or she doesn't buy.'

'I never heard of such a prodigy of thrift,' said Fox.

'Doesn't your conscience prick you,' she asked him, smiling, 'if you ignore a tradesman's bill for years on end?'

'Not a bit of it,' cried Grey. 'It's all part of their business, that's why they reward themselves with such shocking rates of interest.'

'To quote our friend Sherry,' said Fox,
'paying creditors only encourages them!
I should, of course, cough up for a debt of honour, mind you—'

'I've always thought that a rather hollow phrase for gambling losses,' Derby offered in the direction of Mrs Farren, who smiled over her knotting work.

'Tell your Lade story,' said Grey.

Fox beamed, reminiscent. 'At Newmarket once I was writing out a promissory note for Sir John Lade and I noticed he was doing some sums on the back of a playbill. Turned out he was calculating the interest he planned to charge me! "Are you, by gad?" says I. "I thought this a debt of honour, but as you seem to have turned Hebrew, Lade, I must tell you I make it a rule to pay tradesmen last!" And I ripped up the note on the spot.'

Grey clapped.

'Not that a promissory note from you would have meant much,' Derby pointed out.

'Oh, no, it was a promise that my good friend Lord Derby would pay him,' said Fox, deadpan, and Grey giggled into his tea.

Derby grinned; the joke was on him. It was well known in the Party that Derby was a soft touch, though Sheridan was by far the worst for sponging off him.

'But really, it won't do, Miss Farren, this secret saving habit of yours,' said Fox, shaking his ursine head and holding out his cup to be refilled. 'What would the World come to if everyone behaved so timidly?'

'There'd be no debtors pining away in the King's Bench, for one thing,' Eliza suggested.

'No prosperity either, no growth!' He blew on his tea, sloshing some over the brim. 'Money's a liquid commodity, it mustn't be hoarded or it'll stagnate. It must be given, borrowed, lent, lost, without embarrassment—circulating like the very blood in our veins!'

A knock at the door downstairs and Mrs Farren put her knotting down. 'Whomsoever could it be, at this time?'

Derby saw a flicker of pain cross his beloved's face at her mother's bad grammar.

The manservant announced the Duchess of Devonshire and they all leapt to their feet. Mrs Farren wore a frozen grimace.

Georgiana swept into the little parlour and kissed Eliza on both cheeks. '
Pweez
forgive my frightful rudeness in barging in on this cosy scene,' she said, 'but I'm just back from Paris—and such news!'

She had a gift for setting people at ease, Derby thought; they all sat down again at once, and Mrs Farren poured the Duchess a cup of tea without asking.

'It's about the Bastille—that grim symbol of tyranny, that dark dungeon from which none returns!' Georgiana held the pose of a Gothic heroine. 'Well,
mes amis,
they've gone and knocked it down.'

'Who have?' asked Derby.

'Le peuple.'

Mrs Farren was looking bewildered.

'Canis and Racky and I had already determined to go on to Brussels, as things were hotting up—riots and so forth—the theatres were closed, which seemed a bad sign,' said Georgiana, relishing her story. 'There were rumours going round that the King's brother was plotting to dissolve the Assembly and arrest the deputies. So a crowd went to seize weapons and powder from the Bastille and release the political prisoners. Picture it: on one side a trained army of 30,000 soldiers—on the other a few hundred desperate Parisians, shouting "
Aux armes! Aux armes!".'

Grey was watching the Duchess like a star-struck schoolboy.