Life Mask (33 page)

They waited. 'Sherry,' Fox complained, 'you put me in a delicate position here.'

'Oh, go on, tell us,' Sheridan urged. 'Georgiana, Queen of our Party, connects to ... your Right Honourable Foxiness?'

'I'm not saying either way,' maintained Fox, rather red in the face.

'It's a bit late in the evening for such delicacy,' Derby put in. 'I propose that the meeting assumes it to be so, but unproven—and on to you, Bunbury.'

'Fox connects to ... damn it, sir, give me some ideas,' begged the Baronet.

'Mrs A. again?' suggested Sheridan.

'All right. Poor dear Mrs A., we're using her as the universal crossroads,' said Bunbury.

They were all staying carefully away from Sheridan's own history, Derby noticed, as the Harriet Duncannon matter was so fresh and painful.

Fitzpatrick spoke: 'Mrs A. connects to ... Lord Bolingbroke.'

'Good choice,' Derby approved. 'Who connects to ... his own sister.'

They shrieked with laughter. 'Bit of a dead end, there, though,' said Sheridan.

'Worth it. I'll stand the forfeit.' Derby drained the bottle into his throat. It took longer than he thought and by the end he was feeling rather shaky.

Sheridan proposed a toast to the spirit of fellowship, 'For when this Honourable Member's member'—here he clutched his groin—'makes his entrance into any particular House, he does so in the knowledge that it is a Commons where he's among friends and that he's making a contribution to the General Fund!'

Derby leaned over the side of the chair and threw up the entire contents of his stomach.

E
LIZA WAS
in the wings at Drury Lane, waiting to go on in Mrs Centime's old comedy
The Wonder,
her role was the lovely Lisbon aristocrat, Violante, who risked everything to protect her friend's secret. She adjusted the bow of her sash in the small of her back, where it was tied too loosely; the Drury Lane dressers never took as much care as her mother did. On stage, Frederick and Don Lopez were discussing the English. Eliza heard what sounded like shrieks of approval from the pit, and she straightened up and listened properly to Jack Palmer's speech.

...the English are by nature what the ancient Romans were by discipline: courageous, bold, hardy and in love with liberty. Liberty is the idol of the English, under whose banner all the nation lists.

Jack had a good strong voice, but it was almost drowned out by the hullabaloo in the theatre. Such howls, such cheers! 'Liberty!' Eliza heard them chant. 'Hurrah for Liberty!'

When the speech finished she listened for Charles Bannister's answer, but he was a true veteran; he waited till the cheers had died down and there was something approximating silence. Then he gave Don Lopez's reply: 7
like their principles. Who does not wish for freedom in all degrees of life?'

More clapping and chanting broke out. 'Huzza! Huzza! Freedom!'

Eliza grinned to herself. The spirit of French insurgency seemed to be contagious this year.
Freedom in all degrees of life,
the old line had a splendid ring to it.

After the performance, when she and her mother emerged from the side entrance of Drury Lane, the carriage with the crest was waiting as usual. Derby jumped down. The little man always looked at her as if she were the only woman in England; it was certainly comforting at the end of a long day. 'Take care, madam,' he told her mother, 'the stones are icy.' Mrs Farren heaved in beside Eliza and gave a sigh of satisfaction.

'Were you in the house?' Eliza asked Derby as soon as he'd rapped on the roof to tell the coachman to go.

'Marvellous, wasn't it?—that hullabaloo in honour of liberty! By the way, I'd a note from Mrs Damer inviting me to pop in for a bite of supper tonight after the play.'

'Yes,' said Eliza warily, 'I had one too.'

In the four months since the masquerade at Derby House she'd held to her resolution of curtailing the friendship, but it was harder than she could have imagined. She refused most of Anne's invitations on various pretexts; she dashed off notes in reply to long letters and the letters soon stopped coming. She'd thought Anne might send some wounded, angry accusation—but she hadn't. When they met in company Eliza couldn't bear to cut her, so she greeted her in a friendly way, apologising for being so busy, then edged away and spoke to someone else, her heart contracting with guilt.

Her mother had put the question bluntly as early as last November: 'Don't you care for Mrs Damer any more?'

The truth was too mortifying to explain. 'Oh, she and I were chalk and cheese, Mother. In upbringing, temperament, everything.'

Mrs Farren nodded. 'I always thought it a little odd that a widow of her age should cultivate a friendship with a girl of yours, though she was so kind. In my experience great beauties like you have no friends!'

Her mother meant it as a compliment, Eliza knew, but it made her shiver. She did need friends, she knew that now; she felt what she was missing. She didn't want to be cruel, but it was a matter of survival; she couldn't be seen to be attached to Anne Damer. The wretched subject was very much in the air this year for some reason; Marie Antoinette's Court was now said to have been riddled with Sapphists and some German tourist was claiming in his book on England that London had several secret societies for the obscene rites of
Anandrynes,
meaning
manless females.

A long pause had developed as the carriage rattled down Long Acre. 'I don't think you see as much of our mutual friend as you used,' Derby remarked.

Had Anne been complaining to him, Eliza wondered? It seemed unlikely she'd stoop to that. Probably he'd noticed it himself. 'It's been such a gruelling season,' Eliza murmured, 'I've neglected all my acquaintance.'

The Earl didn't answer immediately. When he did, the lightness of his tone showed that he'd decided not to probe further. 'Shall we show our faces at number 8, then?'

'I am rather tired tonight,' she said with a yawn.

He nodded.

She suddenly thought of herself and Anne and Derby, in the wings at the Richmond House Theatre, gripping each others hands. How keen and sweet that threefold friendship had been, before anything had come between them.

A
NNE WAS
sitting on a Roman-style leather stool in her cousin Walpole's tribune at Strawberry Hill. The room was a tiny treasury shaped like a flower, with stone-coloured walls ornamented with gilt and a barred door. He was doing the dusting himself, with a tuft of feathers, because once, twenty years ago, his housekeeper Margaret had cracked a Delft vase. His hand shook a little, but his grip was sure. Every niche held a little bronze or china statuette (a bull, a goddess, an angel; a hermaphrodite with two satyrs); every inch of wall was covered with miniatures in elaborate frames. Over their heads, the gold ribs of the fan vaulting met in a star. Walpole was so unselective in his enthusiasms, Anne thought; he had some real treasures here, like a small bronze of the mad Caligula with silver eyes, but he kept them alongside dubious oddities like Cardinal Wolsey's hat, or an ivory box containing two dates from Herculaneum.

Their conversation had somehow strayed on to the one subject that they fought about: France. 'I don't approve of
all
the changes,' Anne admitted, 'but I applaud the daring spirit of enlightened re-formers such as the Marquis de Lafayette and the Comte de Mirabeau. It's a real revolution, a renewal! This must be the first time in the history of our race that a nation has set out to forge itself anew, according to the highest principles of liberty, equality and fraternity.'

Walpole looked as if he'd bitten into something sour. 'Nothing is good except in moderation, says Horace—not even Reform, say I. Those frantic fools in the Assembly have acted like a man with frost-bitten fingers, who thinks to thaw them by setting his house on fire! In half a year they've pulled down their monarchy, church, nobility, law, army, commerce and manufactures,' he listed. 'What was it Burke called them the other day in the Commons?
The architects of ruin!'

It did worry Anne that Fox and his old mentor Burke had had such a public quarrel on the subject of France. 'Come now, he exaggerates and you do too. They're drafting a model constitution, aren't they?'

'While Paris transforms from a theatre of good-humoured gaiety into a scene of squalid bloodshed! Didn't a pack of fishwives slaughter the guards at Versailles? I assure you I love liberty as much as the next man,' Walpole fumed, 'but this is not the way to win it. Too much, too fast, too bloodily.'

'Teething troubles,' Anne soothed him, 'and there's been nothing half as bad as our own anti-popery riots of ten years ago.' She shuddered to remember the week of nightly fire attacks that had left more than eight hundred Londoners dead. 'For France, the worst is over and Madame de Staël in her last letter tells me that one can breathe more freely somehow.'

'Unless one happens to be sentenced to hang for selling a rosette in any other colours than white, blue and red,' Walpole pointed out. 'Cousin, I can't believe I'm speaking to a friend—or should I say a former friend—of Marie Antoinette.'

Anne flushed, but stared him down. 'I wish her no ill; I believe Louis will survive this storm and become a gender, fairer ruler of a better France. Why, he's proud to be seen in the tricolour cockade—'

'My dear, what a political
naïf
you are!' Walpole's fingers closed round the neck of a Meissen shephertless. 'The émigré nobles arriving at Twickenham tell of riots, murdered priests and burning châteaux all over the country, and the poor are still starving, because
natural rights
don't fill bellies. Louis and his family are hostages and he's wearing the mask of a tame bear for the moment. It wouldn't surprise me if they banish him and set up an American-style republic!'

'Oh, cousin, don't be silly; no one wants that.'

'Or else Louis will throw down the mask, shake off his chains, turn into the despot of their worst nightmares and it'll come to civil war.'

'You're such a Cassandra!'

He snatched up her fan to cool his cheeks. 'If you'd lived as long as I, my dear Anne, you'd have a nose for such things.'

A faraway gong. On their way down to the dining room he mentioned, 'I invited our dear Miss Farren to join us, as she's not to perform tonight, but apparently she has a touch of headache.'

Anne spoke before she could stop herself. 'Try asking her when I'm not of the party.'

Walpole stopped and turned on the dim staircase, so she almost ran into him. 'Is there some cause of alienation?'

'None that I'm aware of.' Her voice came out rather strangled. 'No quarrel, only a sort of withering away of the friendship on Eliza's side. It's rather mortifying.'

'I should say so!'

'I don't give my affection so easily that I can be blasé when it's thrown back in my face.'

Walpole took her hand in his warm paw. 'My dear! I always thought Miss Farren aware of the honour you did her by befriending her.'

'Oh'—Anne shrugged—'I never considered I was doing her a favour. I thought she liked me. I know she did; she can't have kept up a pretence for so long. And I'm not aware of anything I did to hurt or insult her, so what is it?' She wiped one eye hastily with the back of her hand. 'I know I can be candid to the point of bluntness—and I'm sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget the social niceties. Perhaps I was tactless or insensitive?'

'On the contrary, you're the soul of sensitivity,' said her godfather. 'Could it be that you're brooding unnecessarily, in fact? Perhaps Miss Farren really is snowed under with work. A woman who labours for her bread, if I may spell it out so tastelessly—'

'She had time for me before, no matter how busy she was,' Anne interrupted, her throat tight. 'She spent all those afternoons sitting for her portrait bust and now she can't find the time to pop round the corner for a dish of tea.' That prompted another painful thought: when Anne had last made the mistake of paying a spontaneous visit to the house on Green Street she hadn't seen the
Thalia
displayed in the parlour or the dining room and Eliza had muttered something about keeping it upstairs to prevent accidents. As if marble would shatter at a touch! All that beauty, hidden away from view.
I could have kept it for myself
she thought.

M
ARCH
1790

'Mr Lawrence,' said Eliza, rushing into the studio on Jermyn Street, a little breathless from the damp cold. '
Enchantée.'

The young painter kissed her hand; he had a soft, effeminate look, but his pink lips were very firm on the back of her gloved fingers. People said Tom Lawrence was a better portraitist than even Sir Joshua had been at his age.

'Will you be so very good as to excuse my lateness?' asked Eliza, as he bowed to her mother. 'Piccadilly's all slush and two coaches have smashed into each other at the corner.'

'There's nothing to excuse,' said the boy with a succulent grin. He had long curls at the sides of his face. The studio reeked of paint; Eliza rather liked it. She pulled off her muff to hand to her mother; she tugged off one glove and reached to unclasp her fur-lined pelisse. Lawrence raised one finger. 'Don't do that.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Stay as you are.' He was holding his hand up as a frame.

How commanding he was, the young pup. 'Mr Lawrence, if I might just take my heavy things off—I've worn the plain white muslin you asked for—'

'Lord Derby said he'd leave all the details of the picture up to me,' said the painter, snatching up a stick of charcoal and using his foot in its red-heeled shoe to pull his easel nearer. 'So it strikes me that I'll paint you just as I see you now, Miss Farren.'

Eliza smiled through her irritation. 'I haven't even tidied my hair.'

All the better,' he told her, engrossed in his sketching.

'Well, where should I sit?'

'Stay standing, if you please.'