Life Mask (34 page)

'Should I lean on something?' She looked around for a plinth or some other bit of scenery to drape herself against, but saw nothing suitable. 'Where should I put my hands—either end of my fan, or crossed over at my waist?'

'No, no, just stand like that, sideways on to me,' he muttered. 'Don't pose.'

She gave him a sharp glance, but his eyes were on the paper. 'You're to paint me, sir, so it follows I must pose.'

He looked up and grinned. 'Granted, but I don't want it to look like a pose. Do what you did when you came in—your right hand bare, at your throat, opening your cloak, with a bit of fur showing inside the white satin. Your glove and muff in your left hand, dangling. But don't stiffen, I beg you; you must look as if you've only paused for an instant and you're about to rush away.'

That was exactly what Eliza felt like doing. Mrs Farren had found a stool in the corner and tucked herself away, her eyes, roaming across the studio in fascination.

'Do you know why Lord Derby sought me out, Miss Farren?' Lawrence asked suddenly.

'No, but I suppose he likes to encourage the young.' That should put him in his place. 'And you've been much talked of since you burst on the scene in the autumn when Queen Charlotte sat to you,' she added more kindly. 'Was Her Majesty an entertaining model?'

He gave her a glum look. 'I think you can imagine the answer. As soon as I'd sketched her face, she sent a lady-in-waiting with quite a different figure to pose as a replacement. Then the King refused to buy the picture, because I'd left off the cap the Queen always wears!'

'They're calling you a sort of infant prodigy, you know.'

Lawrence drew himself up. 'I am twenty years old, madam.'

'Exactly.'

'If I say so myself, I do have a knack for catching a likeness,' he murmured. 'Especially the eyes. Lord Derby said to me, "Sir, you paint eyes better than Titian."'

'I'm delighted to see you don't suffer from underconfidence.'

'Nor do you, Miss Farren, judging from your air as you strut on stage.'

Eliza choked. 'Strut, sir? I've never strutted in my life. You must be thinking of a fighting cock.'

'One of the famous Knowsley Black-Breasted Reds, perhaps?'

She turned her head and looked him straight between the eyes. What was she thinking of, sparring like this with a young man she'd only just met? 'I'm sitting for this portrait as a favour to His Lordship, but that won't induce me to put up with any impudence.'

'Oh, there'll be no
sitting
involved,' Lawrence muttered, sketching rapidly. 'I intend to keep you on your toes.'

Eliza thought of several possible replies to that. The minutes went by. The painter's girlish curls and rounded lips might suggest a certain
propensity,
as Mrs Piozzi would no doubt call it; Eliza didn't like to follow that train of thought. But then again, if she wasn't mistaken he'd been flirting with her just now.

In the corner, her mother yawned covertly. 'Are you quite comfortable, Mrs Farren?' murmured the painter.

'Oh, yes, sir.' She blinked. 'Don't mind me, it's an honour to be here.'

After a while he remarked to Eliza, 'You don't twitch. That's a help.'

'Well, I have been much painted,' she pointed out, playing the woman of the world.

'Oh, I know. Dreadfully.'

She stared at him.

'Eyebrows back in their places, please, while I'm sketching them,' he murmured. 'Yes, I thought Zoffany's recent effort was particularly poor.'

'That canvas was found universally pleasing.'

Lawrence nodded. 'A sure sign of mediocrity.'

'What—'

'That's why old Zoffany specialises in theatrical scenes,' he interrupted, 'because all he can do are costumes and props. Oh, he got your green satin dress and your black Spanish hat well enough—he's a sound drapery man—but where was the woman inside them?'

The cheek of this plump-faced Ganymede took her breath away.

'I always wanted to be an actor,' Lawrence remarked, 'but my father thwarted my ambitions.'

'Did he mean you to follow him in his own profession, then?'

Lawrence snorted. 'He has none. He failed as a lawyer and ended up as a publican.'

She felt a strange pang of sympathy for the boy. Her mother's father had been a Liverpool publican; she might have mentioned it, if Mrs Farren hadn't been sitting there. 'Well, the theatre has its
longueurs
too; rehearsals can be a bore.'

'I imagine they must be much like sessions with a sitter,' he said. 'Frequent and arduous, but necessary if the work's to be brought to perfection. Oh, and you'll have to leave your muff with me,' he mentioned without looking up, 'for closer study.'

T
HE PORTRAIT
sittings at Jermyn Street were frequent, but not particularly arduous, Eliza found. Tom Lawrence was a good listener and had a fund of gossip, especially about the art world. Poor Sir Joshua Reynolds was going blind, he told her as he pricked and squeezed a little bladder of paint, and Romney was a soft-hearted fool who never asked for cash up front.

She couldn't resist asking. 'Has Lord Derby paid you in advance, then?'

'Only half.'

How much was that? she wondered. Reynolds charged 200 guineas for a whole-length, but surely this newcomer couldn't ask a fraction of that—50 guineas perhaps?

'For a man of such infinite riches,' he murmured, 'the Earl's tight with his purse.'

She wondered whether to protest. 'No doubt that's how the riches stay infinite.'

'Did he give you that little ring, Miss Farren, the one with the ivory eye?'

Lawrence was unnervingly observant; she supposed it came with his trade. 'Sir, you overstep your mark.'

'Not again,' the boy cried. 'I seem to do that every time we meet.' He smirked a little, wet the tip of a brush in his stained mouth and dabbed at the canvas.

Eliza found herself gossiping shamelessly about her colleagues. 'I hear the Duke of Devonshire's managed to persuade his brother-in-law to call off his
crim con
action against Sheridan.'

'Isn't Mrs Sheridan seeking a separation, though?'

'Well, she's said to have forgiven his affair with the lovely Harriet—but last week at Crewe Hall he was caught in a bedchamber with the governess! Mrs Sheridan has all my pity,' said Eliza, shaking her head. 'I suppose she knows it's not in his nature to reform.'

'Nor in any man's,' joked Lawrence.

She gave him a severe look. 'Your sex boasts of its weakness, but I'd call it self-indulgence.' She was rather surprised at herself to be discussing such indecencies with a young man she hardly knew, but there was a strange intimacy about sitting for a portrait for hours on end at such proximity. She slid one eye towards her mother, to gauge her disapproval, but Margaret Farren was fast asleep on her stool in the corner.

Lawrence scrubbed some paint off the canvas with a rag and began to hum a tune under his breath.

'Please,' said Eliza, 'if you want this sitting to continue a moment longer don't hum that wretched song.'

He stopped, then laughed. 'Oh, yes, it's Little Pickle's, isn't it?'

'How Mrs Jordan has won such unconscionable fame by portraying a small boy who ties people's clothes together for a trick,' she said, 'I can't imagine.'

A little later, to her consternation, Eliza found herself dropping the name of Anne Damer into the conversation like a baited hook. She put it all in the past tense; she was talking about the Richmond theatricals.

Lawrence didn't look up from the gaudy palette round his thumb. 'She turns all you ladies to stone,' he remarked. 'That bust of you she showed last year? Rather beautiful in a cold kind of way, but it wasn't
you.
Some anonymous goddess who'd taken possession of your skin.'

So what am I like?
she wanted to ask him. She thought of the
Thalia,
which stood in the shadowy niche on her upper staircase at Green Street and reproached her silently whenever she went past.
Am I sillier than that? Plainer? Less like a goddess?
'I scarcely see her these days,' she put in, a little hoarse, and then she felt a stab of guilt.

'Gorgeous animals, though, so furry and alive,' he conceded. 'I've a spaniel at home, I'd like to see what Mrs Damer could make of him. Not that she ever takes commissions, of course; these genteel amateurs wouldn't soil their hands with cash,' he said satirically. 'Actually, you might know, Miss Farren, is it true she uses ghosts?'

Eliza blinked at him. 'You mean ... spectres?'

Lawrence let out a roar of laughter. 'No, I mean men to help her on the sly. At the Academy, some of my teachers called her a fraud—swore a woman couldn't carve marble all by herself.'

'I've watched her do it,' said Eliza frostily. 'If there are ghosts, they're invisible.'

'Oh ho,' he said, 'what an eloquent defender of your sex! A man must watch his tongue, in these days of
égalité,
or female tempers will run as high as French ones.'

Let it drop,
Eliza told herself,
let it drop.
It looked bad that she got so fired up in defence of a woman who wasn't a close friend of hers any more. The important thing was that Tom Lawrence hadn't said a word against Mrs Darner's personal reputation.

But then, would he, considering that Eliza herself was implicated by that dreadful epigram?

D
ERBY BROUGHT
the painter into the Club. He always found this helpful when negotiating with men of business; the severe architecture and atmosphere of exclusivity intimidated them. After the beefsteaks he faced his guest squarely. 'Now, what's all this about the price?'

'It's gone up,' said the boy, sipping the excellent claret.

'Has it, indeed,' Derby scoffed. 'If my memory serves, I commissioned the picture at 60 guineas—a very good rate indeed for such an untried talent.'

'Well, I'd been thinking of painting Miss Farren before that, Your Lordship,' said Lawrence, 'so I don't know that I'd call it your
commission,
exactly.'

What strange times these were. Derby was all for Reform and a more equal society, but really, had it come to this, that a young commoner could defy an earl?

'Besides, as I said in my note,' said Lawrence, 'these two other gentlemen dropped into my studio, and offered me a hundred for the picture.'

'Which gentlemen?'

'Oh, I don't think I ought to mention their names without permission,' murmured the painter, bashful.

Derby's teeth were clamped.
He reads me like a book, this sinister, ringlettedpup. He sees my weakness. He hopes, by his talk of imaginary gentlemen, to make me pay a ludicrous sum for a picture of the woman I adore.
He relaxed his jaw and took a sip of claret. 'Well, in that case,' he said lightly, 'I won't stoop to squabbling.'

'You mean—' Lawrence's long lashes batted with excitement.

He thinks I'll pay a hundred or more. Time to call his bluff.
'Since you choose to break your word as a gentleman,' said Derby, 'far be it from me to prevent your turning a profit from these
other gentlemen.'

The painter sat back, registering the insult. But it was safe enough, Derby knew. If he'd said the same thing to a man of birth, or even a fiery fellow from the professional classes, a challenge to a duel might have followed (and Derby preferred to let his birds fight for him). But it would probably never occur to the son of a tavern keeper.

Sure enough, Lawrence took on a conciliatory tone. 'Come, My Lord, you misunderstand me.'

'I do?'

'I only meant to say that the interest of these ... other parties makes me hope that this will be rather an exceptional portrait. Miss Farren's ravishing beauty and expressive charms,' Lawrence murmured, 'have inspired me to new heights, if I say so myself. So I thought, if perhaps you came to see the picture—I've done the face and half the body—you might wish to reward me to the tune of, say, 85 guineas?'

Derby repressed a smile.
My card.
'I've seen it already. I called this morning and in your absence your housekeeper was good enough to show me the canvas.'

The boy's face contracted.

'I like the brushwork well enough and the originality of the composition,' Derby went on, 'but there's one thing that won't do: Miss Farren looks far too thin.'

'I paint her as she is,' said Lawrence, almost growling. 'She is of unusually tall and slender dimensions.'

'Oh, I know—there's not a woman in England like her,' said Derby, beginning to relax as the game turned his way. 'But the vagaries of fashion are currently against her special charms on this point, so you might plump her up a trifle.'

This gambit was received in silence. Derby wondered whether he'd pushed things too far; to refuse to raise the price, to criticise the painting and to imply the painter was no gentleman, all in one conversation ... If these
other gentlemen
were real they might secure, for a mere 100 guineas, what was looking to be one of the strangest, loveliest portraits ever painted. His stomach began to knot. 'But of course you must do as you think proper in these matters. Ah, Bunbury!' he hailed his passing friend to create an interruption.

The Baronet turned, startled.

'How was Newmarket?'

'Rained out, shocking muddy,' said Bunbury, coming over.

The painter remembered his manners and jumped up. 'I shouldn't keep you any longer, Your Lordship.'

'Have you met young Lawrence here?' Derby asked Bunbury, deliberately avuncular. 'Only twenty years old, and a rising talent.'

'Oh, yes? Talent at what?' asked Bunbury, oblivious, and Derby bit down on a smile; it was as if they'd rehearsed the insult.

'Phiz-mongering,' said the young man drily and took his leave.

Weakening at the last minute, Derby thought of agreeing to 85 guineas. But no, that would be capitulation.

O
N HER WAY
out of the theatre Eliza glanced at the new playbills pasted to the door. Then she stopped and looked more closely. She ripped one off the door and went back into the building. When she swept into the manager's office Kemble was alone, looking over the accounts. He'd recently surprised them all by marrying Pop Hopkins (widow of the poor lunatic actor Brereton), the most prim and undistinguished member of the company. 'Excuse me, Kemble—' Eliza laid the bill on the desk and tapped it at the relevant spot—'but I'm afraid there's been a printing error.'