Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  Since the old stock scenes were now too small, Kemble had hired Mr Capon to paint exquisite flats and wings, many in the Gothic style which Walpole's toy house at Twickenham had helped to make so fashionable. 'This is the finest theatre in Europe,' Sheridan kept saying with a shark's smile that defied anyone to disagree with him. He claimed it would take in £700 at every performance; he referred to it as his Grand National Theatre, but everyone else simply called it New Drury.

  Since its official opening had the bad luck to fall during Lent, it was celebrated with a concert of Handel's sacred music rather than a play. The real opening was the first performance of Macbeth on Easter Monday, with fifteen new pieces of scenery that dropped down on rollers as if by magic. For the first time the weird sisters really would be seen flying through the fog and filthy air. As an innovation Banquo's ghost was going to be invisible; Kemble's horrified gaze alone would persuade the audience that there was something there, or so he claimed.

  Eliza wasn't in the play herself, but Sheridan—with a touch of malice—had written her a speech to introduce the new fire curtain. She shivered with cold as she applied her paint. 'I must say these new dressing rooms are no improvement on the old; narrower, if anything.'

  'Oh, they can't be, Miss Farren,' said Pop Kemble with mild reproach.

  'Half the size,' cried Dora Jordan. She had no role tonight, but much to Eliza's irritation had come to pay a call and was sitting in a corner suckling the latest boy she'd presented to the Duke of Clarence. 'Your memory deceives you, Mrs Kemble; it's been three years since poor Old Drury got knocked down.'

  Mrs Siddons, darkening her eyelids with kohl, spoke up gravely. 'Whatever about our backstage conditions, to my mind the theatre itself is entirely beautiful.'

  Despite Lady Macbeth's classical draperies she looked huge; could she be carrying twins this time, Eliza wondered? Mrs Siddons was known to need the money too much to withdraw from the role, but her I have given suck line would be sure to raise some titters tonight.

  'First call, Miss Farren,' said the boy, his head in the door.

  Eliza's mother hurried after her down the corridor. 'You've forgotten your hammer.'

  'Oh! Thanks.' Mrs Farren tugged at her daughter's ringlets to lengthen them. 'Don't fuss,' Eliza told her, 'I'll only be on a few minutes.'

  'Oh, but your speech will be the highlight of the night,' Mrs Farren assured her. 'People can't but take an interest in whatever'll stop them being burnt to cinders!'

  Jack Palmer had a curious philosophy about that, she remembered; he said all theatres were doomed to burn to the ground in the end, being as mortal as men. But Sheridan insisted that modern progress had finally solved this problem and that the new Drury Lane was spark-proof. Eliza remembered the terrible night in February when the King's arrival at the Haymarket had triggered a crush and a dozen members of the audience had been trampled to death. 'I wonder if Old Satan felt responsible at all when they told him what happened,' she said, not needing to explain her thought.

  'Oh, I doubt it,' said her mother, shaking out Eliza's skirt like a bridesmaid. 'Bringing such vast crowds under one roof will always have its hazards. Theatregoers are great excitable children, always ready for riot and tumult; they couldn't form an orderly line if their lives depended on it—which they did, that night, I suppose,' she added with a shiver.

  New Drury held 3600, almost double the capacity of its predecessor, but the moment Eliza stepped on stage—passing Kemble in Highland dress, with a huge bonnet trimmed with black ostrich feathers—she could tell the house was packed like a barrel of fish. She gave a sweeping curtsy to her friends in the boxes.

  The conceit of Sheridan's speech was that Eliza, in apron and mob cap, was a housekeeper giving the public a tour of the treasures of some tided collector. (She'd borrowed the mannerisms of Walpole's Margaret.) With her long feather duster she pointed grace-fiilly to the walls of the theatre, which she happened to know were only wood, behind a thin facing of stone, but never mind.

  Our pile is rock, more durable than brass,

  Our decorations gossamer and gas—

  She had the uneasy feeling that her words weren't reaching the fifth gallery, where the crowd seemed restless. Could they all see her from that height, even? She felt dwarfed, muted, overshadowed by the racks of stacked faces. She threw out her voice as she swirled round, her arms soaring.

  Blow wind—come wreck—mages yet unborn,

  Our castle's strength shall laugh a siege to scorn.

  The very ravages of fire we scout,

  For we have wherewithal to put it out!

  Here the curtain was drawn up—come on, Eliza thought, speed it up—and she ran to the edge of the stage. In response to her feathered wand, a great iron shutter was lowered. There was a storm of clapping.

  She drew the hammer out of her apron—thank goodness her mother had remembered it—and gave the iron curtain a bang. This produced the heartiest applause so far, especially in the top gallery; well, at least they heard that. What a silly spectacle this was—but Eliza couldn't help enjoying herself. She waited for a hush and held up one finger to let the audience know there was more to come. She waved her wand to raise the iron curtain, revealing a shallow artificial lake, which brought on much more applause.

  In ample reservoirs our firm reliance,

  Whose streams set conflagration at defiance.

  Panic alone avoid—let none begin it.

  She wagged her finger scoldingly at her friends in the boxes, one by one: Anne, Derby, Bunbury, Fox, Richmond...

  Should the flame spread, sit still—

  there's nothing in it—We'll undertake to drown you all in half a minute!

  This raised the first great laugh of the evening. It was followed by oos and ahs as a huge tank was revealed and tipped forward; water plunged into the lake. Eliza had to raise her voice to be heard.

  The hottest flame shan't singe a single feather,

  No! I assure their generous benefactors,

  'Twould only burn the scenery and actors!

  How the audience howled at that. A tiny boat floated on to the lake, with Bannister Senior and Junior in it back to back, trying to row different ways, and the band struck up 'The Jolly Waterman'.

  MAY 1794

  Derby left Newmarket after barely three days. His horses had come to nothing. Familiar faces were missing from the stands; bets were down. 'With the economy so uncertain,' Bunbury complained, 'no one's risking their money.' But it was more than that, Derby thought. There was an unease in the crowd; it reminded him of birds before a storm, hunkering down in the branches.

  Brooks's was a madhouse; everyone seemed to be eating bloody steaks. Sheridan collared Derby. 'Home Tooke's been arrested,' he said without preamble, 'and Hardy, and Holcroft, and a dozen others.'

  'Whatever for?' asked Derby, blinking. He knew that Hardy's London Corresponding Society had held some large public meetings recently—drawing up to 4000, on one occasion at Chalk Farm—but that wasn't against the law.

  'Sedition,' said Sheridan, 'that commodious portmanteau of a word which covers anything and everything Pitt dislikes! He's set up a Secret Committee—our former friends Portland and Loughborough are on it—which has seized the papers of the LCS for examination.' He knocked back his brandy like medicine. 'Holcroft, Jesus Christ, little Tom Holcroft! The tribe of playwrights have committed many crimes against the British public—implausibilities, tediosities, hideous rhymes—but nothing that deserves the gallows, a spell in Newgate, or Botany Bay.'

  'But what's Pitt after?' asked Derby.

  'A complete stranglehold on the nation,' growled Sheridan. 'He means to suspend habeas corpus for a year, to allow for arrests and detentions at will. His spies claim the Reform Societies are plotting to call a pan-British convention as a rival to Parliament, and simultaneously inviting the French to invade.'

  'Oh, what fantastical notions.' Derby could feel a headache starting up behind his eyebrows.

  'We'll
fight the Bill on the second reading but I don't know...' Sheridan scratched the flaming patch of skin on his nose. 'Did you hear about the judge who calls it an act of treason to speak the word republic?' He kicked the table leg like a child.

  'Now, now, none of that, sir,' said the manager of the Club, hurrying over.

  'And how many of us will be left to buy your mangy steaks and urinous wines,' roared Sheridan, 'when the King's Eunuch has arrested every man who dares to disagree with him?'

  Derby covered his jaw with his hand. He had a sudden vertiginous vision of being called into court in defence of Sheridan. Yes, Your Honour, I did hear him say those words in Brooks's Club, but only as it were in jest... He put an arm round Sheridan and bent to his ear. 'Mind what you say. Spies are everywhere.'

  Sheridan rolled his eyes. 'You think I'm blind, Derby? My letters arrive ripped open, or not at all.'

  'Then you must take more care.'

  'That same prominent judge has bet 120 guineas at White's that I'll be in the Tower in two months. It's too late to be careful, my friend. Lucky will have to do.'

  Derby suspected Sheridan of enjoying himself in some strange way.

  The next week had a nightmarish quality. Events followed each other without logic or pause. He couldn't wake up in the mornings; he'd have liked to stay asleep behind the tight shutters of Derby House. He didn't have time to visit the Farrens, or send more than a quick note. Soldiers marched along Oxford Street like some surreal procession, the gentle May sun glinting on their bayonets; they were part of a new army called the Volunteers.

  News was on every tongue, but one didn't know what to believe. Some organisation called the United Irishmen had been outlawed. Radicals were said to have gone into hiding, retreated to the provinces, or slipped abroad. The Secret Committee reported to the Commons that it had learned of orders for the manufacture of thousands of pikes, to be used in simultaneous uprisings in Dublin, Edinburgh and London; the Duke of Richmond spoke of a conspiracy to seize the Tower of London. Absurd details trickled out, or they seemed absurd to Derby. On the day the Revolution began, one spy claimed, farmers would be ordered to bring all their grain to market and all gentlemen would be confined to within three miles of their homes. At the Privy Council it was decided to call in several Foxite MPs for questioning about their meetings with enemy agents; one of the names was Richard Brinsley Sheridan's. Derby tried to protest, but his throat felt knotted tight.

  In the Commons Burke spoke in dark riddles; he said it was necessary to withhold British liberties for a while in order to preserve them for ever. Fox and his men forced fourteen separate divisions on the Habeas Corpus Bill and lost them all. Some of the Whigs tired and went home to their estates; in the final vote they mustered barely a dozen. By the time the Bill came to the Lords, Derby knew it was hopeless.

  He woke up that morning, sweaty and hot, and thought: I must speak. There were so few Foxites left in the Upper House that his diffidence was no longer a good enough excuse. Sitting in his study in his silk dressing gown, he wrote notes till noon, then sweated to memorise them. It doesn't matter how I speak, he told himself, only that I do. 'Make haste, man,' Derby snapped at his valet as he struggled into a narrow black silk frock coat to wear under his scarlet robes; he puffed out all his breath so the hooks and eyes would meet over his hammering heart.

  The Lords wasn't even half full. Derby's eyes scanned the ranks of red-robed peers, counted the bishops and the judges. The Pittites knew they'd win, so they hadn't bothered with a whipping-in. He felt insulted, but also slightly relieved that his first speech in many years wouldn't be to a vast crowd.

  The Lords, as always, behaved more calmly than the Commons; not having a Speaker to run the show, they'd learned centuries ago how to take turns. Bedford spoke against the Bill, then Lansdowne, Lauderdale, Stanhope (sounding rabid as ever) and Norfolk, each of them followed by one of Pitt's men, who spoke in the most loathing terms of the lower orders, of enemies to all those of us distinguished by worth and wealth, of conspiracies to deprive us of our God-given property, dignity, and even our lives.

  Derby was trying to remember when it had happened, this turning of lords against men. His father and grandfather had raised him to think of the tenants of Knowsley as his children, his pupils, his people. When did the rot set in, he wondered, when had peers begun to see laxity in every magistrate, treason in every tavern, evil in every labourer's muddy face?

  Finally it was Derby's turn, and he rose and wished he were taller. 'My Lords,' he said, too faintly, 'I am unaccustomed to address you, but on this occasion of grave importance I feel called to do so.'

  A loud yawn from the opposite side.

  He clasped his sweaty hands and pressed on. 'Are we a nation of terrified boys, so to deceive ourselves about the dangers we face? The government has reported on meetings and plans for a Reform Convention; well, conventions have met in this country before, without so much as a window being smashed as a consequence.'

  'Jacobin!'

  These insults had become so familiar that they were losing their power to hurt. In fact, this was the perfect prompt for Derby's next paragraph. 'No, rather,' he said, his voice too high and reedy, 'it is the government's Secret Committee that strongly resembles the sinister Jacobins. It is the spider's web of spies and informers that stretches across our islands—men who invent conspiracies to earn their pay—it is these spider's webs,' said Derby, losing control of his grammar, 'that adopt the abominable techniques of the French!'

  He took a breath and desperately tried to remember his next point. He scanned the rows of blank faces above the scarlet robes. Who were these men? He used to think he knew them; he used to feel one of their ancient, dignified company.

  'We've been told of the discovery of paltry caches of pikes and a few rusty muskets—but no weapons of mass destruction,' he spelled out, a word at a time. 'Ours is a populace that has neither guns nor the skill to use them—thanks to our ancestors, who framed the Game Laws that give us landowners the sole privilege of hunting on our own estates.' He threw that in as a sop to aristocratic pride. 'I don't deny that in a population generally loyal there may exist a handful of Britons with dangerous views—but I'm convinced that all they do is sing the "Marseillaise" and make fiery speeches. My Lords, if you pass this Habeas Corpus Bill in a spirit of panic, you'll be suspending that sacred liberty, won by our forefathers, that until this year has defined us as Englishmen.'

  He sat down rather abruptly, his face hot, to a few desultory hear hears. He shut his eyes. Well, at least that's over.

  AT NIGHT in her canopied bed on Grosvenor Square, Anne lay puzzling, as if over a page of mathematical problems. Some of the men arrested in the recent swoop might be innocent, but could they all be? What percentage of rumours could be discounted; did ten rumours amount to one fact? The poor rate had tripled this year; did this mean that three times as much was being done to help the poor, or that three times as many of them were starving, because of press-ganged husbands and other effects of the war? How many pikes added up to a conspiracy? How many French ships did an invasion require?

  After church she walked in the Mall with Eliza. 'Mrs Siddons?' the actress repeated.

  'Yes, she's agreed to sit for me; I thought I'd do her in marble as Melpomene, the Tragic Muse.' Anne was too queasy with fatigue to stay off the subject on everyone's mind. 'But Eliza, suspending habeas corpus must have been necessary to preserve national security,' she said, taking up their argument again, 'because almost the whole of the Commons and Lords voted for it.'

  'That only proves that Pitt has bought extensive flocks of sheep,' said Eliza.

  'Well, perhaps if you thought for yourself like a rational being,' said Anne, dropping her arm and turning on her, 'instead of following your man like an obedient spaniel—'

  The actress's gaze was ice. 'My man?'

  Anne knew she'd got in too deep. But for years now these words had been lodging like grit under her tongue. 'Your words, your argument
s, your very tone parrot Derby's.'

  'I happen to agree with His Lordship,' said Eliza, 'and with Fox and the fearless few who stand with them.'

  'How convenient! Because you can hardly afford to quarrel with the Earl, given the delicacy of your arrangement.'

  Eliza folded her arms. 'To what arrangement do you refer?'

  Anne was shaking now. 'I simply think it's revealing, the fact that you're still spouting the glories of liberty when the French fleet may be at the mouth of the Thames! You must have made up your mind to accept Derby when he's finally widowed. Your political views declare that you mean to be his.'

  'My views are my own. And I'm nobody's.' Eliza walked away, her parasol like a shield between them.

  Anne had to hurry to catch up with her. 'I don't blame you for your choice,' she said unconvincingly. After a moment she added, 'I spoke too harshly.'

  Eliza turned and looked her in the eye. 'You're in a very trying mood today, I must say.'

  She chewed her lip.

  'What can I tell you, Anne?' said Eliza with a shrug. 'Of course Derby's views have influenced mine—as yours did, years ago, when you taught me to think like a Whig,' she added pointedly. 'But I must tell you, as to the future, there's no more clarity between myself and Derby than when you first asked me this question.'

  'But that was what, seven years ago?' Anne remembered that shining afternoon at Park Place. How fresh they'd been back then, how unhardened. 'The quantity of time you've spent together since then, the whole tenor of your behaviour...'

  'Oh, I'm well aware that I seem like a Whig countess-in-waiting, grooming myself to be Georgiana's successor,' said Eliza sharply. 'None of which alters the fact that my own mind is not made up.'

  'But if you don't mean to marry him—'

  'What am I doing?' Eliza looked at Anne almost guiltily. 'I hardly know. I certainly don't mean to marry anyone else.'

  'Then—'

  'I've no fear of single life; it suits me perfectly well. If I build up my savings until I retire at, say, fifty, I should have a comfortable sufficiency to support myself and my mother.'