Life Mask (19 page)

'In fourth, behind Lord Grosvenor's Bustler; that thug of a jockey's trying to cross him. Now they'll curve left down to Tattenham Corner. Oh, he's edging up, good boy.' Derby's fingernails were embedded in his palms. 'It's a nasty turn into the last four furlongs, then it's straight uphill to the post...'

One jockey broke away from the knot. He was in black with a white cap. 'That's not Sir Peter, is it?'

'It is.' Derby seized her hand in his and in the excitement Eliza let him; she didn't care if her mother saw. She gasped as two horses slithered off their feet at the turn. Sir Peter was still in front. How could anything move so fast?
Sir Peter.
The winning post.
Sir Peter.

Derby leapt in the air like a boy. 'We've done it, by gad!' The crowd whooped and hats went up like bullets. Gentlemen turned to bow to Derby. 'Oh, it's a sweet day. Eliz—' He caught himself. 'Miss Farren, my dear ladies, you've brought me luck!'

She'd never seen him look so happy. She disengaged her hand, but gently. There was a stir in the stands, people backing out of the way. The Prince of Wales, a peacock in lilac and silver, thumped up the steps. 'Magnificent form, Derby. So you've won your own race at last.' Derby almost disappeared in the crushing royal embrace. Eliza could smell the sweet perfume from where she stood. Prinny cast an appreciative glance at Eliza over the Earl's shoulder. 'Miss Farren, always a pleasure,' he cooed.

She curtsied.
He likes us tall,
she thought apprehensively,
but surely I'm too thin for him?

'Two thousand guineas,' he boomed, releasing Derby to arm's length, 'and that's my final offer.'

For one terrible second Eliza thought the Prince was trying to buy her favours from their presumed owner. Then she realised:
the horse.

Derby was silent; confused, or considering the offer? But when he spoke, Eliza realised that he'd just been savouring the moment. 'I
am
sorry, Your Highness, but Sir Peter's not for sale.'

She thought then, with an inward sting:
He never gives up what he loves.

J
ULY
1787

Eliza had done it: with shaking hands she had signed a lease on the Bow Window House, Green Street, Mayfair. Now she could climb into a cab and sing out that address like a challenge to enemies, a whistle in the dark. Instead of a set of rooms, the Farrens had a whole small house to themselves, with a handsome fanlight, and an iron extinguisher for torches by the door; a wainscoted parlour and narrow dining room on the ground floor; a kitchen and scullery in the basement; two bedrooms upstairs; and garret space for the manservant and newly hired maid above.

To get to Derby House or Mrs Darner's Eliza only had to turn right down North Audley Street and go two blocks to Grosvenor Square. Walpole's town house in Berkeley Square was just a few minutes by carriage; so were Devonshire House and Melbourne House on Piccadilly. Fox, Sheridan, Pitt, everyone who mattered in England seemed to live just a few streets from her door, now painted a brilliant green. Nor had Eliza muscled in like some dreadful parvenue; she'd changed her lodgings on the express invitation of some of the most distinguished residents of Mayfair. Her connections were formed; her circle was enlarged but still select. She had moved west.

The only problem was that nobody else was there. It was perverse, Eliza always thought, how little the social seasons matched nature's. As soon as Parliament was prorogued in June London life—or rather, high life—shut down. Just as the roses were blooming in Grosvenor Square the World scattered to the countryside: their estates, spa towns, or the newly fashionable seaside. The Richmonds were down in Goodwood and Walpole wouldn't stir from Strawberry Hill; Mrs Darner was with her parents at Park Place near Henley and, of course, Derby was up in Lancashire, seeing to his estate and children.

Through the heat of July Eliza worked herself ragged. In the sticky evenings she sat in the parlour at Green Street beside her mother while insects veered around the lamp. Muttering under her breath, with her eyes on the ceiling (vines in plaster, a very genteel touch), she memorised the roles Tom King had sent her in a dog-eared bundle from Drury Lane. Twelve to play this autumn, four of them new, though they all sounded familiar somehow:
La, sir, you put me to the blush!

At the Haymarket Colman had given her Beatrice in
Much Ado,
a host of small parts and the lead in a new play called
The Follies of a Day
by a promising shoemaker-turned-playwright called Holcroft. Eliza turned twenty-five, but marked the day only by sharing a bottle of cold hock with her mother after the show. The little Haymarket theatre was so
cabined, cribbed, confined,
as Jack Palmer put it, that Eliza was forced to share a dressing-room not only with foul-breathed old Mrs Hopkins but with Mrs Jordan too. Mrs Farren had to fold herself up in a corner like a newspaper, to be out of everyone's way.

One afternoon when Eliza was reading a satisfactorily apologetic letter from Cumberland, enclosing the rewritten part of Lady Rustic, Dora Jordan, baby on the breast, had the cheek to read the signature over her shoulder. 'Oh, Cumberland—when he's not in a brooding temper, he's always leering and nuzzling one's hand, don't you find?'

The playwright had never attempted to nuzzle any part of Eliza. 'No, I don't,' she said glacially.

'Methinks he protests too much! Bannister says the man's a finger twirler.'

'Surely not,' said Eliza, startled into a response.

Mrs Jordan pursed her lips and applied red greasepaint with her finger. 'His plays are always very luscious in describing the heroes.'

Mrs Hopkins, clambering into a skirt held open by the squatting dresser, gave a snort. 'Cumberland's no woman hater, just proud and fussy. Is that cloak pressed yet?'

'I'll do it presently, madam, I assure you,' said the harried dresser, muffled beneath the expanse of old brocade.

'Shall I?' asked Eliza's mother.

'Oh, Mrs Farren, you're a living saint,' said Mrs Hopkins, tossing her the cloak. 'Tighten my tapes,' she ordered the dresser, sucking in her bulk. 'No, poor Bickerstaffe, now, there was one with it written all over his face.'

'I've been in four of Bickerstaffe's comedies,' said Eliza, 'but I've never met him.' She stepped out of the way to let her mother hurry off to the costume room.

'No, you wouldn't have, none of you girls; he lives abroad and hasn't written a line since. Back in the early '70s, I believe'—the ageing actress frowned, retrieving the memory—'Bickerstaffe got word halfway through a rehearsal at Drury and had to scarper off to France.'

'Got word of what?' asked Mrs Jordan.

'Imminent arrest.'

Mrs Jordan was grinning through her fingers. 'For unmentionables?'

'With a soldier!'

Eliza suddenly registered the vulgarity of the conversation and took herself off to the Green Room to go over her lines for the after piece,
What's to Do?

The main piece was a melodrama,
Vordigus of Carthage
, and Eliza's part was only a minor one. 'Ghastly stinking summer, this one,' Palmer remarked when she met him in the wings.

'You say that every year, Jack. I like your hero's plumes, by the way.' He grinned and jerked his head like a charging bull. 'Your devotees will certainly be able to pick you out from the very back of the galleries.'

His face furled up again. 'I'm getting too old for these falderals.'

Eliza reached out to straighten up one of the purple ostrich feathers. 'Nonsense.'

'Forty-three, Eliza!' he said in a dreadful whisper.

'You don't look it, in paint. And the ladies wouldn't care anyway. You'll always be their Plausible Jack.'

He smiled again, stretched his muscular arms over his head, like an orangutan in a cage. 'I need a change. I'm not coming back to Drury.'

She looked at him sharply. 'Where are you going—the South Seas?'

'I'm in deadly earnest. I've had enough of working for that Machiavelli. Sheridan gives every plum role to Kemble, with his grandiloquent manner and leaden pauses—why, the orchestra could play a tune between one word and the next! The plays are old and the costumes are mouldy. Tom King's a sweet man but his hands are tied; Sheridan couldn't delegate if the theatre were burning down around him, as well it might, for all he lets King spend on water buckets!'

'Well, but what choice—' Her cue, she'd nearly missed it. She sped on stage.
'I hear him!
" she screamed.'
He means to murder me!'
She fainted neatly into Mrs Hopkins's meaty arms and let herself be supported back into the wings. 'What choice do you have, Jack?' she continued in an undertone. 'I doubt Harris would have you at Covent Garden, since Edwin does all the witty beaux and rogues there.'

Palmer spoke in her ear, his breath making her jump. 'I'm setting up my own theatre.'

'Don't talk silliness; you'll never get a patent for spoken drama,' she reminded him. Drury Lane and Covent Garden in the winter, the Haymarket in the summer, the King's Theatre for operas and ballets—those four had held the monopoly for fifty years. All the small premises Were permitted to put on were musical burlettas, pantomimes and such trash. 'You might as well try to set up a new Parliament or Bank of England.'

'Aha, but what if I mean to open outside the city?'

'Where, in the middle of some field?'

'Tower Hill,' he whispered triumphantly, his eyes on the action on stage. 'Turns out it's got ancient liberties. I've drawn up a prospectus for investors.'

'But—'

He strode on stage, struck a few attitudes, drew his sword, threatened suicide.

'Jack, this scheme is pure fancy,' Eliza snapped on his next exit.

'Oh, you're a female attorney now, are you?' he mocked. 'So you won't be wanting to join us when we open in August? Even if you can have your choice of roles—Olivia, or Miss Tittup, or Lady Townley—whatever you fancy...'

Eliza thought of her shocking rent at Green Street. 'I have a position at Drury Lane—'

'An oppressed position.'

'—still, one I don't mean to lose.'

He shrugged magnificently. 'I'll ask you again at Christmas, since we're old friends.'

'You're an old fool, Jack.'

A
UGUST
1787

Eliza lay in a wet winding-sheet. Her ears were buzzing, as if a fly had got trapped in her head. The air was too heavy to breathe; she tried to move her legs but they were tangled, knotted fast.
Bam, bam.
There it came again, that terrible noise. Had she heard it before, or only imagined it?

Voices on the stairs, one low, one sharp. 'If your young mistress is all alone, I insist—' The door squeaked open and the room was suddenly full. 'My dear Miss Farren.' A huge white hat; brown curls; a narrow, vital face. Eliza struggled to sit up. 'Don't move,' said Mrs Damer, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking Eliza's hand between her own cool, slightly rough palms. 'You must forgive me for bursting in like this. Won't you forgive me?'

Eliza cleared her throat to speak, but it was quite dry. Mrs Damer poured the last half-glass of wine from the bottle beside the bed and held it to Eliza's lips. She sipped and sank back.

'Here, you can't rest lying down, it's not healthy.' Mrs Damer helped Eliza to sit up against the pillows. 'I never thought you'd be here today; I only meant to have my driver enquire of the staff whether by any chance you were the new tenant of this house. You can imagine my shock when your maid revealed you were up here on your own, lying in a dreadful fever!'

'My mother—' said Eliza, hoarse. She knew Mrs Farren was haggling over chops at a market, but she couldn't bear to say so.

'Yes, the girl said her mistress is out and that's all very well, but what are we to do with you? Has your doctor called?'

'He says I'm mending.'

'You don't look it,' said Mrs Damer.

Suddenly Eliza's vision swam and a tear ran into the corner of her mouth. 'I do beg your pardon—and she sobbed.

'Oh, my dear girl!' Mrs Damer whipped out a handkerchief and wiped Eliza's cheek. Dizzy, she closed her eyes. Mrs Damer laid her cool knuckles against Eliza's forehead. 'A bad summer fever.'

'Take care.'

'Oh, I never catch a fever; no, my weakness is for coughs and catarrhs and such wintry English nastiness. Whereas you—' She was looking down with stern fondness. 'This won't do!'

She came back to Green Street that afternoon with a hamper of ice and a peppermint throat syrup from Gunter's. The day after next, when Eliza was beginning to feel rather better, she brought some of the famous plums of Goodwood, 'with my sister's compliments. You must have your cook mash them up for our dear invalid,' she told Mrs Farren.

Eliza felt a surge of mortification, but luckily her mother only nodded. Mrs Farren was cook, housekeeper and general factotum; Eliza might have the right address nowadays, but she still couldn't afford to live at the level of her neighbours. Her mother seemed a little ruffled by the visitor at first, but Mrs Damer paid her some very soothing compliments on the care she was taking of her daughter. Soon Eliza knew all was well, because Mrs Farren had fetched Mrs Damer the best chair from the parlour and put it beside the bed, before excusing herself and going downstairs to hound the maid.

'Have you heard from Knowsley?' asked Mrs Damer.

'A kind note, yes.'

'I really should be at Goodwood myself,' said Mrs Damer, 'or back in Park Place with my parents, or paying an overdue visit to Strawberry Hill. But instead I'm living up here, quite incog. My mother wailed, "What will your neighbours think if they hear you were in town in July, like some pariah with nowhere else to go?'"

Eliza managed a faint chuckle.

'I promised her I'd be most discreet—keep all the shutters closed on the Grosvenor Square side—toil in my workshop, have dinner on a tray in the library, with only Seneca and Epictetus for company.'

Authors, Eliza guessed, and nodded as if she knew them well.

'If I take Fidelle for a stroll or ride in Hyde Park I go darkly veiled,' Mrs Damer added in Gothic tones.