Life Mask (30 page)

'Some of them had raided the Opéra for axes,' Georgiana added merrily, 'not realising the weapons used on stage were cardboard. So all they had were stones and pitchforks, hammers and spits, but they tore down the fortress and triumphed. Isn't it simply
ravish?'

'That'll give Louis a poke in the eye,' said Derby, grinning.

Fox put his hand over his mouth. 'Imagine if it happened here,' he stage-whispered. 'Say half London stormed the walls of Newgate roaring, "Crawl off the throne, mad Old George. It's time for Prinny's reign!'"

'Technically that's high treason,' remarked Grey.

'And you'd have got two dozen stripes for that back in Eton,' Derby told Fox. They were being very giddy, considering all they'd drunk was tea; the news was acting on them like champagne.

'Were there any deaths?' It was Eliza who asked.

'A few on each side, yes, including the governor of the Bastille,' said Georgiana, sobering. 'In fact, the rumours are rather disgusting—apparently the mob tore him apart with their hands.'

Derby was taken aback. 'I'd have believed that of a gang of hardened Cockneys more easily than of some cowed Frogs.'

'Such violence does rather tarnish the cause of Reform,' said Fox sadly.

'Oh, come now,' Derby told him, 'you haven't sat through enough cocking mains. No fight's glorious without some bloodshed.'

'This isn't sport, man,' Fox reproved him. 'The best thing for France is a thoughtful, peaceful progress towards liberty.'

'Were you frightened?' Grey was asking Georgiana, leaning in close.

'Oh, not for myself; a Parisian mob is nothing to the Westminster Election of '84!'

Fox grinned round at his old comrades.

'But Bess and I are rather
fret
for dear Marie Antoinette and Little Po and other friends at Versailles. Still,' Georgiana said, brightening, 'these are only the birthing pangs of Reform and I'm sure the worst is over.
Vive la France!'

'Vive
indeed,' said Derby, raising his cup of cold tea. He tried to catch Eliza's eye, to share the joyful toast, but her gaze was unfocused, as if her mind were miles away.

T
HROUGH THE
sweaty days of July Eliza played at the Haymarket, ate half of whatever her mother put in front of her, slept badly. She avoided Mrs Piozzi and answered about one in three of Anne's letters from Park Place, Goodwood and Strawberry Hill. When she looked on the post tray in the hall and saw the familiar wax seal marked with a little chisel, her stomach always went into a spasm.

My dearest A.D.,
she wrote,
Yes, yes, yes, to what you write so eloquently of Lafayette's Declaration of the Rights of Man. For the French to set down in
law for the first time that all are born free and equal—having the right to liberty, to property, to security & to resist oppression—it stirs my heart.

To be strolling through your father's lavender plantation, or chasing little Fidelle through the famous oaks of Goodwood—these are visions of bliss to one who must stay in London all summer & scarce can find a moment to pick up the pen, let alone think of a fortnight's holiday, so must regretfully decline your kind invitation. Howl wish ... but in vain.

Ever your servant and chère amie,
E.F.

It had a forced, gushing tone to it, she knew; did it sound like a tissue of lies?

Eliza's feelings for her friend weren't gone, they'd just been frozen up, iced over with panic, ever since that day at the Exhibition. In the long hours of the night she stared at the dark ceiling and Anne Darner's handsome, angular face seemed to float there. What Mrs Piozzi had said couldn't be true. It was impossible, absurd, obscene, laughable, terrible.

Had the sculptor's brown eyes ever revealed any emotion that was warmer than other women felt for their friends? Or no, not warmer;
darker,
rather? Was that smile suspect, that burning look on Anne's face as she'd given Eliza the ring? Was that what a
Sapphist
looked like, Eliza asked herself, squirming at the word? The band of gold was warm on her little finger; it felt like part of her body. Did Anne look at Eliza more lovingly—or no, less lovingly, but more peculiarly, more greedily, more carnally than other women did? Eliza didn't think so—but then, what experience of friendship had she for comparison?

It wasn't as if there were anything wrong with passionate bonds between women; they were praised to the heights in almost every novel Eliza picked up nowadays. Ladies in the World exchanged portrait miniatures and sat embracing on sofas; the more sensibility a woman had, the more overwhelmingly devoted she was to her female friends. How could something so respectable, so fashionable, be a mask for unnatural vice?

Of course, Eliza'd heard of such things; sodomy was a dirty whisper on everybody's lips these days and, now she came to think about it, she was sure she'd come across the word Sapphism before, though she couldn't remember where. In a book translated from the French, perhaps? But Eliza had never heard of any Englishwoman being accused of such exotic perversities.

Insomniac, she replayed fragments of conversation between herself and Anne over the last two and a half years; brief kisses, easy embraces. She felt her face heat up now, but not with guilt, only confusion. Did the sculptor's strong hands press Eliza's fingers any harder than those of other friends did? No harder than the small, slightly wrinkled hands of Mrs Piozzi, it occurred to her. Why, Anne had never given any evidence of besotted infatuation like Mrs Piozzi's Italian verses.

Could the authoress be mad? Jealous, perhaps, of Eliza's admission to a glittering circle which she herself, with no birth or wealth, a low-born foreigner for a husband and a Streatham address, could never hope to enter?

How could one look into the human heart and tell the sheep from the goats, the shining feelings from the stained ones? Amitié
means friendship, affection, love,
she remembered Anne saying as she gave her the ring;
the languages don't correspond.

'My dear?' Her mother tapped at the door in the middle of the night.

Eliza jerked awake. No, there was yellow light coming through a gap in the curtains; it was another day. She cleared her throat.

'Will you take a bowl of chocolate?'

'No,' she called, heaving herself upright.

Mrs Farren's face came round the door. 'You worry me, daughter,' she remarked. 'You've been queer and unsettled all summer.'

'I'm perfectly well.' Eliza splashed her face with cold water.

Shopping for a light set of whalebone stays on Pall Mall, she found herself popping into Alderman Boydell's new Shakespeare Gallery, which was filled with illustrations of the Bard's plays by all the best artists of the day. One of Anne Darner's contributions was a bas relief of Cleopatra with a lady-in-waiting stretched out dead at her feet. Eliza went up very close and stared at the curved draperies of the blank-faced queen, how they blended into the body of the bare-armed attendant, who knelt behind her, her hand on the Queen's limp wrist, her mouth pressed to the Queen's shoulder in a kiss of grief. There was nothing that unusual, nothing obscene here—so why did it make Eliza's heart thump? And would others see what she saw? How many people had heard that epigram so far? What if the Queen of Comedy were observed here, on a Tuesday afternoon, staring at her friend's sculpture, biting her lips?

'That's a charming little ring,' remarked Derby over a game of piquet in his smaller drawing room, with her mother keeping score.

'Thank you,' said Eliza, shuffling the slim set of cards.

He took up her hand for a moment on the pretext of examining the gold and ivory eye on her little finger. Her heart began to thump. 'Wherever did it come from?'

'Gray's, on Sackville Street,' she said, deliberately misunderstanding.

His tone was light. 'A tribute to your genius from some gentleman whose heart you've conquered?'

'Oh, hardly,' she said with a little laugh.

In the carriage taking them round the corner to Green Street, Mrs Farren brought it up. 'Surely there was no need for obscurity when the thing only came from Mrs Damer?'

'Really, Mother, it's none of His Lordship's business where I get my jewels.'

'But now you've roused his suspicion—'

'He knows he has no rival,' said Eliza sharply, laying her head back against the cushion. 'I packed off the last cow-eyed suitor a good four years ago, didn't I?'

Her mother sat silent in the dark of the carriage, but only for the time it took them to reach their house. 'Still, a dash of jealousy never spoils a dish, only sharpens the appetite,' she concluded more happily.

Eliza resented being the
dish,
but held her tongue.

The next day she took a hackney to Streatham, to get it over with. Mrs Piozzi, surprised in a shabby yellow wrapping gown at her desk, begged her caller to excuse the disarray. 'I've had so many visitors recently, fleeing the heat and dust of London, and this morning I've been writing down everything I've garnered about the shocking violencies in Paris.'

Eliza couldn't spare any energy for arguing that the rapid pace of change in France struck her as utterly thrilling. 'May I ask, what did you mean when you said that you had proof?' She spoke very low, though she knew the door was shut tight.

Mrs Piozzi blinked at her.

She's going to make me repeat it,
thought Eliza. 'Of the lady in question being ... what you alleged.'

Mrs Piozzi settled herself comfortably in her chair. 'I knew you'd be ready to hear me, once you'd got over the shock,' she confided. 'I didn't take offence, when you slammed the door of my carriage without so much as a good day.'

'I'm sorry about that,' said Eliza haltingly.

'Quite understandable, my dear. Did you manage to get home that afternoon without coming over all faint? It's your long experience of the stage, I suppose; such stamina! Dear Sally Siddons tells me that when she's got through a tragedy, she feels wrung out like a rag. You recall she once passed out cold during the sleepwalking scene in the
Scottish play?'

Eliza pressed her teeth together.

'I mention Mrs Siddons for a particular reason,' murmured Mrs Piozzi. 'I've discovered that it was none other than her husband who composed that nasty epigram.'

Eliza stared. She barely knew William Siddons; he was a failed actor, a man who lived in his wife's shadow and did little but spend her money. 'But what did he mean by it?' asked Eliza, anger like a bit of gristle in her throat. What motive could he possibly have? Did he resent Elizas fame for encroaching on his wife's, even though they never competed for the same parts? The man was a nobody, a nonentity. How dare he go around making up libels on ladies whose boots he wasn't fit to polish?

'Well, my dear,' said Mrs Piozzi, 'I went straight to our dear Sally Siddons, and asked her where William had got such a wicked idea.'

'I wish you hadn't spoken to her,' said Eliza, flinching.

'Oh, no, she was perfectly nice about it,' Mrs Piozzi assured her. 'All her husband could say in his defence, she reports, was that it's a well-known fact that John Damer killed himself because of his cold, unnatural wife!'

'To call a woman unnatural,' said Eliza, 'because her husband runs into debt and proves his cowardice by suicide—why, it's ridiculous! It would be like calling you a ... a pickpocket because your husband is Italian.'

Mrs Piozzi squinted slightly. Eliza regretted the remark; her friend was very sensitive on the subject of her husband's nationality, for which she'd endured so much censure. 'I only mean the two traits are entirely unconnected,' she stumbled on.

A nod. 'Now, I have a very good bookseller I go to off the Strand who supplies me with anything I need, he's a gem,' said Mrs Piozzi, as if changing the subject. 'I was sure I remembered hearing about some old broadsides about Mrs Damer and it took him a week or two, but he found them.'

Them?

'They all came out after she was widowed in '77 or '78—that's just before you came to London, I believe? Vulgar, disgusting stuff, of course—I can let you study the publications at your leisure, I have them locked up in my drawer here.' Already Mrs Piozzi was fiddling with the key of her cherry
secrétaire.
Now she had the things in her hand; thin paper, yellowing with age.

Eliza found herself rising to her feet.
Old lies,
she thought,
stupid, cruel old lies.

'The worst of them's called "A Sapphick Epistle",' said Mrs Piozzi with relish, 'it's addressed to
Mrs D—dash
—
r,
well who else can that signify? It says she was delighted when her husband killed himself, because she was already a man-hating Tommy.'

Eliza was at the door. 'I'm afraid I have a rehearsal.'

'Won't you see for yourself?' asked the older woman. 'I warn you, there's one very obscene line about her relations with Italian girls—'

'No. That won't be necessary.'

'Well. You did say you wanted proof,' said Mrs Piozzi, her voice a little hurt. 'Not that such scurrilous stuff proves anything for a certainty, of course, and it was more than ten years ago, but one does have to wonder—no smoke without fire, as they say—'

'I've heard enough,' said Eliza. 'Thank you,' she added, delivering it like an insult.

'You know where they are, if you want them,' said Mrs Piozzi, locking the drawer again and patting the high polish of the desk. 'I had my suspicions about a friend of mine, a Miss Weston, until she overcame her reluctance to marry,' she confided, turning. 'The vice is on the rise, I do believe; Bath is said to be a cage of unclean birds.' Her voice had gone down to a hiss. 'Every week I hear some new evidence that we're living in the End Times...'