Life Mask (8 page)

Eliza pressed her fingers against her smiling mouth. What outrageous words to describe a dead husband.

'In Florence,' Mrs Damer groaned, 'we visited the Uffizi with one of John's brothers. I was enraptured by the statues, I felt as if I'd been lifted to Olympus to consort with the gods. But the East Gallery is so vastly long, John and his brother decided they were weary of art, and laid 50 guineas on the result of a hopping race. They nearly toppled a fourth-century Venus Pudica,' she said through her teeth. 'I couldn't tell what I saw after that—the art was hidden in a mist of shame for me—because all I could hear was the crash, crash, crash of two earl's sons pounding like gigantic one-legged hares down the gallery.'

Eliza released a giggle. 'Who won?'

'I didn't look.'

'The winner must have boasted. The loser must have cried foul.'

'Oh, I'm sure, but it's one of many details I've managed to forget. I was married for the best part of ten years, Miss Farren, but my memories probably amount to three months. It's rather terrible,' she added, 'to wish away one's prime years.'

'But they weren't.'

'Well, the twenties—aren't they meant to be one's best? But you're right,' she said with a smile. 'I think perhaps these are my prime years, now, past thirty-five!'

Just then a maid came in to say that Mrs Moll was ready to serve the tea. 'I should go,' said Eliza, glancing at the window, where a crust of snow had built up. She tried to collect her skirts without disturbing the dog, but Fidelle exploded off the chair and ran into a corner. 'You've been very kind.'

'Have you another engagement, or are you needed at Drury Lane?'

'Well, no, but—'

'Then you must stay for a dish of tea. Tell Mrs Moll we'll have it in the library,' said Mrs Damer to the maid. 'I'll join you, my dear, as soon as I've made myself respectable'—pulling off her makeshift turban as she spoke and releasing a shock of unpowdered brown curls—'and we can wait out this snowstorm together.'

'O
H, THIS
is so much better,' said Mrs Damer, moving round the circular ante-room in the Earl's opulent mansion on Grosvenor Square. 'Aren't we favoured, Derby, to have our own private rehearsal with Miss Farren? Is your dear mother not to join us today?' she asked, turning to the actress.

Eliza gave her a slightly wry smile, seeing through the pretence. 'I left her at Great Queen Street overseeing a thorough spring-cleaning. Let's begin with the scene of the Lovemores meeting by accident at Lady Constant's,' she suggested.

Derby leapt into action. When his wife asked him for the second time that day to come home for dinner, he turned his face away sharply and sneered,
'The question is entertaining, but as it was settled this morning, I think it has lost the graces of novelty.'

What pleasure he took in such refined spite, thought Eliza. She was seeing a face of the Earl's that she'd never glimpsed before. Did Derby have a secret envy of the rogues and rakes he knew from Brooks's Club, who never wasted an hour thinking of an unattainable beauty, but broke hearts every month and laughed into their brandy glasses?

She was enjoying this rehearsal
a trois
far more than the big ones at Richmond House. Next they tried the dinner scene, in which Mrs Lovemore talked so earnestly that her husband fell asleep in his chair. 'No, 110 injured looks, not yet,' Eliza instructed Mrs Damer, 'don't throw away the joke.'

'But wouldn't Mrs Lovemore feel hurt to have her husband snoozing over the soup?'

'In real life, yes,' said Eliza, 'but it's more painful and funnier if she doesn't notice yet. At the very end of the scene you turn to him—freeze at the sight—he lets out a gentle snore'—Eliza clicked her fingers and Derby snored—'and you pull yourself up and roar, "
Unfeeling man!"'

The other two burst out laughing.

'But mightn't Mrs Lovemore seem obtuse?' asked Mrs Damer.

'No, no, just wrapped up in her own woes,' Derby put in. 'That's the very meat of a marriage gone bad, I suppose: the two of them might as well be speaking different languages.'

Eliza blinked and looked away. Given his situation, she thought it tasteless of him to speechify about marital breakdown.

'Derby,' Mrs Damer asked when the ladies were putting on their cloaks at the end of the morning, 'I wonder will you be at the Commons on Tuesday for Sheridan's first sally against Hastings?'

'Mm, d'you need a ticket? I'd he delighted to escort you, if you can be up before seven,' he told her.

'How kind, that's exactly what I was hoping—and I never rise after six, I'll have you know! Miss Farren?'

Eliza looked up from buttoning her satin glove, startled. 'I wasn't planning to go; I get enough of Sheridan at Drury Lane.'

'Oh, but if Hastings of the East India Company is impeached for his bribe taking and warmongering, by means of Foxite eloquence,' said Mrs Damer, 'it'll be a wonderful blow against corruption in high places.'

'I must confess I've little head for politics,' said Eliza.

'That's right,'joked Derby, 'when I rabbit on about by-elections and Third Readings and divisions, her eyes fog over.'

'Miss Farren,' said Mrs Damer as the ladies came down the steps of Derby House, 'this won't do.'

Eliza half laughed at the grave tone.

Mrs Damer put her hand on Eliza's elbow. 'You may think I've no right to say this, but ... no one with intelligence and a feeling heart can remain aloof from politics today. Least of all a woman, since our sex is too often confined to ignorance and triviality. Why, my dear, the stakes haven't been as high in a century! Is Britain to languish on under the corrupt and stagnant rule of Old George and his puppet Pitt, or will our Foxite friends seize their chance and drag the country—the Empire—into an era of liberal modernity?' Her eyes were shiny with enthusiasm.

Eliza, at a loss, found herself saying, 'Perhaps I will come with you to the Hastings impeachment, then, if I may.'

'Splendid. By the way, on a sillier matter,' said Mrs Damer, leafing through the papers in her leather pocketbook, 'my sister came across this in last week's
Chronicle.
Did you ever see such tosh?'

Eliza read the limp cutting.

Some say a certain hippophile Earl must be at least half in love with Mrs D—r, to play his part so well at the R-ch—d House Theatre. If she can bring cold Marble to life, perhaps she can win his heart from her Thespian Rival, Miss F—n.

'Oh, they'll never leave off their inventing, will they?' said Eliza, aiming for as light a tone as Mrs Damer's.

'Sometimes I suspect they throw all our names into a bowl—'

'—pluck out two or three, and compose a fiction accordingly!'

From the Derby carriage Eliza waved goodbye.
Mrs Damer wanted to be the one to show it to me,
she was thinking.
It was her way of saying I've nothing to fear from her.

I
N THEORY
, ladies were banned from St Stephen's Chapel, where the Commons sat, as too distracting a presence, but the doorkeepers of the End Gallery turned a blind eye as long as they got a few shillings from each visitor. Today the building was packed like a barrel of cod by eleven in the morning. The Members were squeezed on to their green benches and into the Side Galleries that were supported on slim white pillars, and the End Gallery was thick with visitors a good hour before Richard Brinsley Sheridan was scheduled to speak on the barbarous treatment of the Begums of Oudh (a phrase everyone in the World had by now learned to pronounce).

'I've never seen the House like this,' Mrs Damer marvelled to Eliza. 'Usually there's not a soul in here till two in the afternoon, and less than 200 out of the 558 Members show up at all.'

'I haven't been here in years. How carelessly they're dressed, considering they're running the country,' murmured Eliza. Most of the MPs were in the standard gentleman's uniform of dark coat and breeches with white shirt and stockings, but she saw riding coats, boots, the odd wide-crowned black hat or old-fashioned tricorne, and some of them had even brought in their young sons.

'Speaker Cornwall looks awake, for once,' remarked Derby, pointing out a man in an enormous wig, hat and cloak. 'He's a shocking dozer; he always has a pot of porter on the arm of the Chair.'

The Chair was more like a pulpit, Eliza thought. The many-branched chandeliers overhead blazed with wax candles; already it was uncomfortably hot and the air whirred with the sound of ladies fanning themselves. The building was ridiculously small, it couldn't be more than sixty feet long. 'I'd refuse to act in a theatre as cramped as this,' she remarked and Derby laughed.

'Excuse me, ladies,' said a Norfolk accent behind them, 'but might I beg favour of you to remove your hats? Only that I've ridden through the night to see this show, but the headgear this year is so ridiculous high—'

Derby bristled, but Eliza put her gloved hand on his arm. Mrs Damer had already lifted off her hat; it sat in her lap like a wedding cake. 'We beg your pardon, sir,' said Eliza.

'No, no, I beg yours'—and the stranger sank back on to his bench.

Even bareheaded, she and Mrs Damer towered above the Earl sitting between them. 'We couldn't have you defending our honour in such a scrum,' Eliza whispered in his ear.

Derby's lower lip twitched in amusement. 'Oh, here's the PM, as cool as ever.'

William Pitt sat down on the front government bench, his long ungainly legs crossed before him like kindling, his pointed chin as hairless as a boy's.

'Hard to believe he's been running the country for three years and he's still only twenty-seven,' murmured Mrs Damer resentfully. 'Has any nation ever been tyrannised over by one so young?'

It would have been comical, thought Eliza, if Pitt hadn't been such a very serious character. 'How old-fashioned he dresses,' she murmured, 'embroidered silks and lace ruffles!'

'Oh, but that's Court dress; he'll have been with His Majesty at St James's this morning.'

Was it impossible for Eliza to spend more than five minutes in Mrs Damer's company without exhibiting her ignorance?

Now the young widow was bowing to friends at the other end of the Gallery: Lady Melbourne (vastly pregnant), the Devonshire House set, the Richmonds. Eliza felt a prickle of embarrassment. It was a fact that she and Mrs Damer were becoming friends—somehow, despite the disparities between them—so why did Eliza feel such a fraud, sitting here by her side?

'Why is it that you almost never speak in the Lords, Derby?' Mrs Damer was asking. 'You're proving such a splendid Lovemore—'

'Oh, it's easy among friends, when the lines are in my hand,' he said ruefully. 'No, my job is to canvass for Foxite votes behind the scenes. Quiet influence, civil manners, a word in the right ear at the right moment, that's the thing.'

Eliza smiled, wondering if this was something Derby regretted slightly.

'I suppose, considering the eloquence of Fox and Sheridan and Burke, our Party hardly needs another orator,' said Mrs Damer. 'The vast majority of Members and peers are as mute as slugs,' she told Eliza. 'They come—if they bother to come at all—to vote as their leaders, or the King, or whim directs them.'

It sounded to Eliza as if the two Houses were much like the two patent theatres: a handful of stirring speakers and a sea of listeners.

'Do you ever wish you'd been a second son,' Mrs Damer asked Derby, 'so you could have sat in the Commons instead of the Lords?'

'Oh, this is a more exciting arena,' he admitted with a smile. 'In the Upper House we only tinker and polish. Fox lives in dread of his nephew dying young, which would foist a barony on him and bump him upstairs! But you know, we peers have an immense influence; the Commons is foil of our sons and brothers and chosen candidates,' he said, encompassing the benches with a wave of his finger. 'A good half of these seats are under patronage.'

'Owned, you mean,' said Mrs Damer sternly. 'I do hope Re-form will do away with many of the pocket boroughs.'

'Well, yes, of course, that's a laudable aim,' he said rather defensively. 'But till that time, I can assure you I put in two good men in Lancashire.'

Interesting,
thought Eliza,
she seems even more of a Whig in her principles than Derby is.

A stir in the House; Sheridan had risen to his feet. Derby craned to one side to see past the ranks of visitors. Elegant in a brown jacket, Sheridan looked strong in the shoulders; he pushed his notes aside and didn't give them another glance. Beside him sat Fox, and that brilliant boy Windham, and Burke, the thin, sad-mouthed sage of the Whig cause in his tiny spectacles. Funny, Eliza thought, how two Dublin nobodies like Burke and Sheridan had come to such prominence in a Party of English aristocrats. Personally, she'd always found it best to downplay her Hibernian connections, especially since her father had lived up to the joke by dying of drink.

The speech began, and Eliza soon had to admit that it was gripping. Sheridan surveyed the twenty-two high crimes and misdemeanours with which Warren Hastings was charged as former Governor-General of India, then he focused on the most serious. The Begums of Oudh were the venerable princesses of a noble family of Indian Muslims whose treasures had been seized by Hastings on the false pretext that the ladies had been fomenting rebellion. As Sheridan warmed to his theme, he shaped the mass of petty details into a grand drama. His eyes were brilliant; they transformed his face, so you barely noticed that patch of itchy red on his nose and cheeks that the government papers called his
mark of Cain
and attributed to brandy. He spoke fluently, Eliza observed, never rushing, never forgetting to face the Speaker; every figure and date came as if it had been burnt on to his memory. His voice was lulling and smooth—no trace of a brogue—but his words were fiery.

She had to grant him this: Sheridan might be an appalling proprietor of Drury Lane—the stack of new plays he left unread was known as the Funeral Pile and it was clear he was really only in it for the cash nowadays, to fund his elections—but he was a masterful politician. And something else, which she respected rather more: a self-made gentleman. He'd started out in life no higher than Eliza—his father an Irish actor like hers—and look at him now. Without benefit of tide, wealth, foreign travel or distinguished connections, he'd crafted himself into a man of the World. He moved, dressed, rode and spoke better than his tided colleagues (well, she supposed he had to); he'd even fought two duels over his beautiful wife. And recently he'd yoked his fortune to the highest star by joining Fox in playing mentor and bottle friend to the Prince of Wales—though Eliza sometimes wondered how they could bear the whims of such a petulant young lord.