Life Mask (70 page)

At times, strolling through the long gallery with her arm on the Earl's, Eliza couldn't help feeling that this was a rehearsal. Would she know what to say, how to act, when—if—they were married? It was not so much a matter of whether she would be happy, as whether she'd fit the role. Eliza liked luxury and fine things, but Mayfair was all she knew. How would she oversee such a vast, complex staff—or could she leave all that to the steward and butler?

Derby even confided in her about the children. Lord Edward's deafness bothered his father—it would debar him from politics—but rather less than his squeamishness about manly sports. In the summer, when Lady Elizabeth turned sixteen, Derby was planning to marry her to a Mr Cole of Twickenham.

'Is she ... willing?' asked Eliza, disconcerted by the ways of the aristocracy.

'Oh, willing enough, though girls are so coy it's hard to be sure. I'm only settling £2000 on her, because of her parentage,' he explained, 'whereas Lady Charlotte will get more like £30,000.'

The figures staggered Eliza. And his obstinate insistence that the girl was Dorset's. Should she say something—remark on how clearly she could see Derby's features echoed in Lady Elizabeth's, despite her colouring?
Stay out of it,
she reminded herself,
you're not his wife.

In the library on New Year's Day, Mrs Farren fussed over the fire screen, tilting it to keep the heat off Elizas complexion. It was a hideous copy of a Rubens painting, in thick worsted, and Eliza was suddenly convinced that it was one of Lady Ailesbury's; Park Place had been littered with them. The families were old friends, of course, but still it struck her as a malign coincidence.

Derby was asking her something. 'I do beg your pardon,' she said.

'I merely asked, how are things at New Drury Lane? Sherry
still
seems on the brink of bankruptcy, even though so many of us bought hundred-year subscriptions to get the new theatre open.'

Eliza sighed. 'One problem is that there are enough seats. You see, the old theatre was so overcrowded that people went early, or sent their footmen to hold their places. Nowadays they know there'll be room for everyone, so there's less enthusiasm; people come late, or don't come at all, for fear it'll be a quiet night and the place will have a half-empty, cheerless look.'

'But that's perverse! A rule of the market, I suppose,' Derby corrected himself, 'that people only want what's in short supply...'

'To fill over 3000 seats, and compete with acrobats and balloon flights at Vauxhall Gardens, Kemble and Sheridan have to keep thinking up more spectacular and expensive attractions,' Eliza complained. 'It's all melodrama and pantomime, with special effects. Take this lurid Polish thing,
Lodoiska\
last week Mrs Crouch was playing the damsel in the burning tower and her dress went on fire. She had to hurl herself down into Michael Kelly's arms—and the rescue was so popular with the house, Kemble told the two of them they have to repeat it every night!'

Derby laughed ruefully. 'Well, I'm glad
you're
not obliged to be set alight. I prefer the plain old comedies myself.'

'But I fear my acting's coarsened too,' confessed Eliza. 'We've all worked ourselves up several notches; one has to leer and grimace for one's expressions to be seen.'

Derby blinked at her, perplexed. 'You seem to me to act as perfectly as ever.'

'Which only proves, My Lord, that your critical faculties on the subject of acting have been suspended for the last dozen years.'

Mrs Farren gave her daughter a glare, but Derby laughed and said, 'How true.'

'Have you heard Colman's satire on the new gigantic theatres?' Eliza struck a pose for recitation.

When people appear
Quite unable to hear
'Tis undoubtedly needless to talk...
'Twere better they began
On the new intended plan
And with telegraphs transmitted us the plot!

'Oh, that's very neat,' said Derby, 'very up to date. I was just talking to a gentleman from Liverpool who wants me to invest in a telegraph.'

'Sheridan's now so entangled in mortgages and liabilities that he hasn't paid us in months,' said Eliza grimly. 'The new treasurer's office was built with a window on to the street, you see, so Peake can escape on Saturdays when we come looking for our wages.'

'I don't like the sound of that,' said Derby. 'If it's a matter of substantial arrears, I'd be happy to speak to Sherry on your behalf—'

'Oh, My Lord, how kind,' cried Margaret Farren.

Eliza darted a repressive look at her mother. 'Thank you, but no,' she told Derby in a tone that reminded him that he wasn't in charge of her affairs yet. Why had she been unwise enough to mention money?

When she and her mother were retiring for the night, Derby reached into the pocket of his jacket. 'I know you too well to offer you a Christmas present, Miss Farren,' he said awkwardly, 'but perhaps you'd accept this.'

She put up her hand, fearing it was a banknote.

'It's not what you think,' he insisted. 'Read it, I beg you.'

It was a small stiff page; she kept it folded in her hand all the way upstairs. 'Good night,' she told her mother with a firm kiss and shut the door in her face. At the mahogany toilette she pulled the candle close and read the note before she'd even taken off her Kashmir shawl.

I, Edward Smith-Stanley, twelfth Earl of Derby, do most solemnly swear that on the death of the present Countess I will propose marriage to Miss Elizabeth Farren, of Green Street, Mayfair, on whatever terms of settlement she may choose.

A
PRIL 1795

8 Grosvenor Square
Oh M., looking back over this arduous year (wh. I have survived only because of your aid), it seems more and more unjust that you and I should have to turn the other cheek to evil gossip, & be careful how often we meet & how we behave. Why, between oldfriends, need any excuses be made for fervency of affection? Does the warm partiality of two united hearts need to be justified to those who would interpret it with the basest cynicism?
Yours,
A.D.

26 North Audley Street
Dear A.,
I do believe we know each other better now—and trust each other more—than before those monsters attacked us. Our lives must be our honest answer. Surely when the World finds that our blameless connection continues with a steady, equal grace, year after year, it won't suppose it founded on the weakness of passionate engouement? So I conclude, after these many months, that I must put aside my trembling qualms & drop the mask of discretion, showing myself publicly to be what I will always be, your loving friend.

Your own,
M.B.

D
ERBY AND
Sheridan sat yawning in a pew in the Chapel Royal at St James's. The crowd had been in their places for two hours.

'So it doesn't bode well,' Sheridan continued in a husky murmur.

'Prinny really said that to the Earl of Malmesbury?
I'm not well, pray get me a glass of brandy?'

'He was overwhelmed, I tell you, with the stench that rose from his bride's armpits.'

Derby covered his mouth, trying not to laugh. 'But Malmesbury's escorted the Princess all the way from Brunswick. Surely he could have found a moment to have a word?'

Sheridan rolled his eyes. 'He swears he told her maids, he told her dressmakers, he told Caroline herself as bluntly as he dared: said the English and the Prince in particular were very strict on the niceties of feminine hygiene. She'd nod and say
ja,ja, oui, oui,
and call for more music.'

'Do you think Prinny will manage to consummate the marriage?' Derby whispered.

'He'd better. He must get a legitimate heir on her,' muttered Sheridan wrathfully, 'or what's the whole charade been for?'

'Now, about his latest round of debts, Sherry—all £630,000 of them—'

'A deal's a deal,' said Sheridan shortly. 'He marries and Parliament pays the lot.'

Derby was exasperated by his friend's desperate attempts to maintain his grip on the Prince's favour, while staying the darling of the radicals. Sherry and Fox both seemed to cling to the slim hope that the obese and increasingly conservative debauchee, somehow outliving his tough old father, would suddenly remember his fondness for the Foxites.

He gazed around the chapel. English fashions were more and more severe these days; the men were all in black or navy, the women almost inevitably in round-necked straight white dresses, only relieved by little jackets or shawls. He missed the bright silks and vast hats of the '80s. The one improvement, in his view, was that there were more bosoms on show—some of them pushed up as hard as apples. There were many cropped heads on daring young men and more dark heads all round, like his own, he noticed with interest; the tax Pitt had slapped on hair powder in the January budget was having its effects. It wasn't that these people couldn't afford a guinea apiece for a licence, God knew—more that it seemed somehow tasteless to parade one's wealth by wearing wheat powder when the poor were starving because, in the worst winter in living memory and with all trade stifled by the war, a quartern loaf had doubled in price to 12 pence.

He curled his lip, glimpsing 'Citizen' Stanhope, the Earl who'd recently found himself in a minority of one on some vote—having alienated his fellow Foxites—and announced that he was seceding from the Lords. Derby had no patience for principle when it was pushed to the edge of absurdity. If one wasn't doing anything concrete to help one's fellow beings, what was the point of being in politics?

'Did you hear,' Sheridan murmured in Derby's ear with a kind of manic zest, 'our former friend Portland has cashiered Fitzwilliam as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland after a mere two months, for supporting Catholic emancipation?'

'Fitzwilliam was too hasty,' said Derby, shaking his head. 'The King will never let a Catholic sit in Parliament.'

'Fine, so let's embitter every countryman of mine and push him into the hands of the French,' snapped Sheridan. 'Now Holland's fallen to the Patriots, Pitt's talking of an alliance with Russia and Austria, which will bring on war with Prussia, Sweden, Denmark and Turkey. What a truly diabolical character we're showing to the nations of the world—and how they must detest us. I suspect that if we left them alone they'd all be at peace by now.'

'Lower your voice, there's a good fellow.'

Sheridan made a face at him. 'Don't worry, they'd hardly arrest me in the middle of a wedding. Speaking of which,' he added in an odd tone, 'I'm getting married next Tuesday and I thought of honeymooning in a sloop off Southampton—if you could see your way to a loan.'

Derby stared at his friend.

'I know it's sudden, but Miss Ogle's a wild girl, she hates to waste time.'

'Why, congratulations!' Derby tried to remember what little he knew about Miss Hecca Ogle, daughter of the Dean of Winchester. She was radical in her sympathies, he thought he remembered, and not twenty years old, with strange clothes and a taste for headstrong horses. Really, Sherry was a force of nature; in a matter of years he'd broken his heart for one wife, then lost it to another. While Derby moved as slowly as some iceberg.

'I'll write you a draft on my bank,' he said with a noiseless sigh as he reached for his pocketbook. His investments were suffering this year, as everyone's were, but he'd never had to turn down a friend yet. At Brooks's last night he'd had to pay up the stakes he'd laid a year and a half ago, that Fox would have toppled Pitt and brought in Reform by now. It wasn't the 1500 guineas that stung so much as the humiliation; he'd never made such rash bets before, or caused such widespread amusement.

'You're the soul of decency, you really are,' said Sheridan. 'Especially after my piggish behaviour at Epsom—'

Derby cut off the apology: '—of which I don't care to be reminded.'

There was a bustle at the back of the Chapel. The great surge of organ music made Derby, on impulse, double the sum on the draft before he folded it and handed it to Sheridan. The Archbishop of Canterbury entered in full regalia and the crowd rose like a wave.

Princess Caroline was pleasant-looking enough, though rather too free with giddy smiles that showed her bad teeth. She wore silver tissue and lace, with a robe of velvet lined with ermine; Derby found himself memorising the details to tell Eliza afterwards. The Prince looked like some immense creamy-furred seal. Unsteady on his feet—ill, Derby wondered, or just drunk?—he was helped up the aisle by two dukes, like a man going to his execution.

M
AY
1795

This year Eliza let Derby escort her to the Royal Academy's exhibition at Somerset House. She walked on his right, because his left arm was in a sling; at Newmarket last week his carriage had been involved in a tangle with those of the Duke of Bedford, Lord Egremont and Old Q. (She suspected brandy was to blame.)

'There was a terrible kerfuffle at the Academy's annual dinner,' he remarked. 'Fox hadn't remembered to reply to the invitation, so when he turned up late there was no seat for him. He lost his temper and finally Farington wangled him a place at High Table. Now the papers are claiming it was a deliberate slight by Tory artists,
the hallowed Academy has succumbed to party spirit,
that sort of thing!'

'The paintings are a poor lot this year,' said Eliza under her breath. 'I see apocalypse and morbidity are all the rage'—gesturing towards Fuseli's
Odysseus Between Scylla and Charybdis
and his
Nightmare,
in which a demon squatted on the arched bosom of a sleeping woman.