Life Mask

by Emma Donoghue

  Anne narrowed her eyes. Miss Barren, an ageing spinster, formerly of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane? 'That's a touching little vision, but it doesn't ring true.'

  'Well, harass my mother with your questions, then! She's had it all mapped out since I was nineteen,' said Eliza sullenly. 'The Countess will kick the bucket, Derby will go down on his knees, I'll give him another half-dozen brats and we'll all live happily ever after at Knowsley.'

  Anne's chest felt tight when she considered the image.

  'But many an invalid dies of old age,' Eliza went on, 'and Lady Derby's not forty yet. Now that really would be tragic, if I fixed my heart on a future that never came to pass!'

  'So have you fixed your heart on it? We want what we want,' Anne persisted. 'Which of us ever managed to give up a strong desire merely because it mightn't be gratified?'

  'Well, perhaps it's not a strong desire,' said Eliza.

  'Don't you love Derby?' No answer. 'How can you bear to live so cheek-by-jowl if you don't?'

  Eliza shook her curls off her face. 'How can I tell if I love him? It's not like the ecstasies in the plays, I know that much.'

  'What you felt for Mr Palmer, when you were young—'

  'Oh, that was just childish infatuation. Derby seems more like a husband, from what I've heard of them, than a lover,' said Eliza, looking down the tunnel of leafy trees that marked out the Mall. 'Part of daily life. I've never had occasion to miss or long for him.'

  Anne nodded. 'Perhaps we only know we love when we lose.' Her eyes were burning; for some reason she found her mind going off at a tangent, to that awful day in the Royal Academy when she'd demanded an explanation from her former friend and turned to find herself in an empty room. If she asks me what I can possibly know of love, what shall I say?

  Anne hadn't told Eliza about William Fawkener's proposal; the scene in Hyde Park had been so ghastly that she'd spilled out every detail to Mary, then tried to forget it had ever happened. She'd never been what they called in love-, perhaps John Damer had snuffed out that possibility in her. But she did feel strongly about things. Her heart moved like a bird in its cage.

  JUNE 1794

  In the interval between the musical burletta and the main play, which was Mrs Centlivre's old favourite The Wonder, Eliza was in the dressing room running through her lines for Act Four.

  She who for years protracts her lovers pain,

  And makes him wish, and wait, and sigh in vain,

  To be his wife, when late she gives consent

  Finds half his passion was in courtship spent...

  She paused, struck by the lines, though she must have spoken them twenty times before. Was the observation true, she wondered, or merely cynical? Could Derby possibly be as zealous in marriage as in courtship?

  Mrs Siddons, huger than ever, came in to collect a fan she'd left in her paintbox. 'I do hope you're not reading that dangerous book, Miss Farren,' she murmured.

  Eliza glanced up and saw that The Adventures of Caleb Williams had slipped out of her bag. 'Dangerous?'

  Mrs Siddons blinked owlishly. 'Full of subversive doctrines, I mean.'

  'Have you read it?' asked Eliza with a fixed smile.

  'I wouldn't touch such stuff—'

  'Oh, do you get all your views second hand?'

  'My dear—'

  But there was a tap at the door. Her brother Kemble came in looking grave as ever. 'I must warn you, Miss Farren, Frederick's opening speech—the liberty one—I've had to change it, against my better judgement.'

  'Why don't you follow your judgement, then?'

  'Have a little appreciation for my position,' the manager pleaded. 'That line in Holcroft's comedy gave extreme offence to the crowd the other night. Do you care to see our fine new theatre ripped up in a riot?'

  Eliza shook her head, wrestling her temper into submission. She'd rather liked the Holcroft line: I was bred to the most useless, and often most worthless of all professions: that of a gentleman. Derby'd found it hilarious. Surely not every witticism counted as an attack on the established order? But then, poor Holcroft was still in gaol, awaiting trial, which rendered every word of his suspect.

  'I fear to provoke the crowd, it's so strangely excited,' Kemble added.

  'Brother,' said Mrs Siddons mildly, 'don't you know that the city's in fits of joy over that naval victory off Brittany? Mrs Jordan wants to play The Country Girl for a Ben for the widows and orphans of the men who perished.'

  'Ah, yes.'

  'Earl Stanhope's windows got smashed the night before last, for not being lit up in celebration. Don't you ever read a newspaper, sir?' asked Eliza flippantly.

  'Never,' he assured her, half smiling. 'My reading hours are devoted, like the rest of my life, to the theatre.'

  Eliza, standing in the wings during Palmer's opening speech, realised that Kemble—that famous purist, that t-crossing quibbler—had simply changed liberty to loyalty all the way through it. She couldn't tell whether she was more irritated or amused. 'My Lord,' Jack Palmer roared out, very clear so the potential troublemakers in the upper gallery would be sure not to miss, or mishear, the lines, 'My Lord, the English are by nature what the ancient Romans were by discipline: courageous, bold, hardy and in love with LOYALTY.'

  A long ragged cheer went up from the crowd.

  Politics got in everywhere, like dust, Eliza realised. Even the stage, the last refuge for irreverent and daring speech, had come under Pitt's chill shadow. She watched Jack's cheerfid face. Did he remember doing this play with her in '89, did he remember shouting out in love with LIBERTY? Was she the only one who recalled the blissful grins that word produced? 'LOYALTY is the idol of the English, under whose banner all the nation lists,' Palmer went on now, 'give but the word for LOYALTY, and straight more armed legions would appear than France and Philip keep in common pay!

  Most of this crowd could have no idea who King Philip had been—the play was eighty years old, after all—but they howled their delight like wolves, so Palmer could barely be heard. 'Huzza!'

  'Hurrah for loyalty!'

  'King George and England!'

  Some fellows in the pit began singing the latest catch.' With soldiers and sailors and ships heart of oak! they chorused,

  we'll pay those French dogs for their barbarous work.

  With spirits like fire we'll make them to dance,

  and we'll baffle the pride and the glory of France...

  Eliza, watching at the edge of the curtain, despised them. Had they no guiding principle except fashion, whim and mob rule? If they'd only hold their tongues, she could run on stage now as Violante, the same way actresses had been playing Violante since the beginning of the century; she could charm them and amuse them and transport them to long-gone Lisbon. Instead, it seemed, they wanted to stay here with King George and England!

  Her cue: she stepped out, smiling like an angel.

  ANNE WAS in her room at Park Place, with curtains drawn against the blinding sunshine, scribbling furiously. Her parents had insisted on her coming down, as London was in such turmoil and the streets full of soldiers. 'And if those French dogs were to invade,' said her father, 'Park Place has a good hilltop position for defence.' She'd smiled at that, but hidden it.

  A radical journalist, a man called Charles Pigott, had just brought out a rash of pamphlets that insulted almost everyone Anne knew, Whig and Tory alike. Someone—she suspected William Fawkener—had sent her a batch of them, tied up with string, before she'd left London. Pigott, who boasted of writing this doggerel from his cell in Newgate, sneered at Miss Farren of Drury Lane and the Duchess of Richmond, among others, for their mannered affectations and at the Duchess of Devonshire for her spendthrift ways. The Misses Berry were named among the bluestocking prudes whose charms were beginning to wither on the vine; that was the bit that enraged Anne most, until she read the sneering reference to the girlish ways of Lady Horace Walpole. Pigott called all aristocrats brutes and offered as proof an old story about the Earl of Darlington,
who'd ridden his horse sixty miles in six hours, whereupon it dropped dead.

  Then came the bit about Anne's statue.

  Lord! what a lumpish senseless thing

  And yet 'tis very like the King!

  Why strive to animate the marble rock?

  His sacred Majesty's more like the block!

  Poor stuff, but not funny, not at all. It might be mild by comparison with what Anne had endured before, but it was a perfect example of the kind of thing she'd promised Mary to be on the watch for nowadays. In the past she'd been negligent, but this nasty little seed would have to be rooted up at once.

  If Pigott had been a man of any position in the world—a proprietor of a newspaper, say—Anne might have asked a gentleman friend to communicate her displeasure, but since the creature was in prison already she decided to take a direct approach. The rat, holed up in his stinking cell but still spewing out contagious bile! Pigott, her letter began (since she didn't want to call him sir),

  your scurrilous productions have been brought to my attention. I give you warning that I, for one, worit stand for such treatment. If you ever hope to be a free Englishman again, I advise you to cease your libellous & foul vituperations. It is godless, subversive men like you who have brought this country to its present pitch of crisis.

  Yours,

  The Honourable Mrs Damer

  THERE WAS a paragraph in the Morning Post, Mrs Piozzi sent it to Eliza, with a circle of ink round it.

  The Countess of D—y, long an invalid, is said to be at Death's door. Should Fate so decree, we must wonder whether a happy event will follow swiftly upon a sad one and Hymen, who once fled wounded from Kn—y Hall, return there in wreaths of fresh blossom!

  The coy tone set Eliza's teeth on edge. She heard the same tone, too, in vague well-wishing notes from friends and acquaintances: hints that virtue was always rewarded in the end.

  She needed to stay calm and find out whether it was true. Was Lady Derby really going to die and when? There'd been false alarms before, though never this dramatic. Eliza couldn't concentrate on memorising her part for A Wife, or No Wife; she had to know whether the whirlwind was going to descend upon her. But Derby hadn't mentioned his wife's illness, of course, and to ask anyone for information would be intolerably vulgar.

  One morning someone left a print lying around in the dressing room—Eliza suspected Dora Jordan. She recognised her own silhouette instantly; tall, nip-waisted, with a cropped head of curls. It showed her visiting an old fortune teller in a workhouse and the bubble coming out of the fortune teller's mouth said Miss Tittup, I see a Coronet suspended over your head!

  Anne's carriage carried them up Bond Street towards Marylebone. 'I know it sounds outrageous,' Eliza told her friend, 'but I'm convinced I must make the attempt. By accident my life has been connected so tightly to this woman's—and I've never laid eyes on her.'

  'But my dear, even if Lady Derby's well enough to receive us and on some strange whim allows me to make the introduction,' said Anne, 'what can you hope for from such an encounter?'

  Eliza shrugged and fanned the sticky air in front of her face. 'To clarify my mind.'

  'You don't mean to triumph over the poor Countess as her possible successor?'

  'How could you think that?'

  'Very well. Because I must tell you I've always had a certain sympathy for Lady Derby. She and I were both married off without much consulting of our feelings,' Anne added, 'and both of us found ourselves unhappy in our mates.'

  'But you behaved quite differently,' Eliza reminded her. 'You were faithful to John Damer till his death released you.'

  Anne pursed her lips. 'It's true, but it doesn't make me a saint; it was more a matter of temperament than morality.'

  'I realise now that I've always wanted to meet her—and time is running out,' said Eliza.

  'I assume you didn't tell Derby what you were up to this afternoon?'

  Eliza shook her head. 'My mother will tell his man I'm indisposed.'

  'He'll be worried,' said Anne, amused. 'Hasn't he enough on his plate, with the Portland Whigs on the brink of a coalition with Pitt and Lady Derby on her deathbed?'

  'I won't have him take me for granted,' said Eliza. 'Not now, not ever.'

  Anne let out a dry chuckle. 'Every wife remembers that line. We've all said it on the way to the altar.'

  'But I'm not—'

  'You'll have to renounce such airs if you marry him.'

  The carriage turned off Oxford Street and rattled up Baker Street. Eliza had a strange thought. 'I don't believe you like the notion of us marrying, Derby and me.'

  'Nonsense.' Anne stared at her.

  Eliza grinned back. 'You're rather prickly on the subject, despite the fact that you're a close friend to both parties.'

  'Well, perhaps that's it,' said Anne after a minute examining her fingers. 'The idea of such a change ... unsettles me, I admit. I'd rather we all stayed the same.'

  'But nothing does, does it?' Eliza asked. 'I've a new wrinkle every month.'

  'Oh, my dear—'

  'No, I'm not looking for compliments. What I mean is—what's the tag?

  At my back I always hear

  Time's winged chariot hurrying near—'

  The carriage went into a pothole, throwing them against each other. 'These Marylebone streets! We could do with a winged chariot right now,' said Anne, straightening up.

  'No, but really,' Eliza persisted. 'I'm getting to that age when I can't expect my career to go on for ever—'

  'You're only thirty-one. Mrs Hopkins must be twice that,' Anne protested.

  Eliza gave her a cold look. 'I'm not going to hang about Drury Lane in my dotage, doing aged crones. The day Kemble asks me to be Juliet's nurse I'm off.'

  Anne was suddenly helpless with mirth.

  'What? What is it?'

  'I'm sorry. Only the idea—the very idea—of you as the Nurse. All those padded skirts—"What, lamb! What, ladybird!"' she quoted.

  On Gloucester Place, Anne sent her footman to the door with an inscribed card. He came back almost at once; that must mean a refusal, thought Eliza grimly. Or perhaps Lady Derby was too ill to be disturbed. Or already dead? Something leapt up in her throat at the thought and it didn't taste like hope.

  'Her Ladyship would be delighted to receive you,' said the footman.

  Anne turned to Eliza, her eyebrows up. 'Either she misheard our names,' she murmured, 'or she's in a very Christian mood.'

  But neither was the case, Eliza thought a quarter of an hour later as they sat sipping tea by the bedside of Derby's wife.

  The Countess was a most alarming yellowish-brownish colour about the eyes. Her features were good—wide and aristocratic, thought Eliza—but her face had fallen away from them. She looked more like sixty than forty; one could tell that she'd been ill for many years. But she still had a spark to her.

  'I've been besieged by visitors,' Lady Derby croaked. 'There's nothing like an advertisement for one's demise in the Morning Post to bring down the hordes. I don't think we've seen each other in twenty years, Mrs Damer. Are you, well? You look very well indeed, you must be quite recovered from your famous plummet from the scaffold. How widowhood suits some people!'

  'I'm very sorry to see you like this,' said Anne awkwardly.

  'Ah, yes, you'd probably like a full report, how remiss of me. I believe the precise phrase is ravaged by consumption—ravaged, as if by a hyena.' The Countess coughed wedy. 'In the same month as the fall of the Bastille I lost the use of my legs. Now, whether the consumption brought on the paralysis or the paralysis had some separate origin is a fascinating question on which I dwell in my many leisure hours. Then for a while last year I had a most irksome symptom: I began to speak so slowly that you could have recited the Lord's Prayer in the time I took to say Jack Robinson.' She began a ghastly parody. 'J-J-J- a-a-a-a-a-a-k R-o-o—'

  Eliza couldn't bear it; she had to interrupt her. 'I've wanted to make your acquaintance for a very long ti
me, Your Ladyship.'

  'Have you, Miss Farren?' Lady Derby put her head on one side. 'You're not much like the caricatures, I must say; they always draw you so hideously thin.'

  'Yes,' said Eliza.

  'And it's really not true that you're twice the height of my husband,' she added with a scientific eye. 'One and a half times at most.'

  Eliza felt her cheeks scald.

  'I'm being rather rude, aren't I? It's a deathbed privilege,' said Lady Derby, cackling.

  Eliza felt Anne take her hand; she clung to it.

  The invalid's eyes missed nothing. 'Mrs Darner,' she asked hoarsely, 'did Derby send you here by any chance?'

  'By no means!'

  'You're not a sort of spy, the kind they used to keep around the poor King when he was mad? No, I suppose not; you'd have come alone in that case. Then what's your role in this touching scene?' asked the Countess.

  Anne was looking guilty. 'I'm a friend.'

  'To which party?'

  'To ... all parties.'

  Lady Derby shook her head, tutting. 'Can't be done.'

  Eliza felt the conversation was circling away from her. She had a feeling there was some question she ought to ask—had come to ask—but she couldn't think of it.

  A girl came in with a medicine tray. 'Mrs Damer, Miss Farren, allow me to present my daughter, Lady Elizabeth,' drawled the invalid.

  Eliza recognised Derby's forehead in the young face. She almost jumped out of her chair; it rocked on its spindly legs. She'd never met any of Derby's children. What was Elizabeth now: fifteen, sixteen?

  'She doles out my drops herself, not trusting the maids,' explained Lady Derby. 'I used to have three offspring, you know, but by accident I mislaid two of them.'

  Only now did Eliza feel a stab of something she recognised as pity. How curious.

  An awful gasping laugh brought on a fit of coughing. When she'd recovered, Lady Derby whispered, 'My husband lets me have this girl with me because he's never been quite sure if she's his or the other party's. To an unbiased observer, Elizabeths the spit of him, isn't she? But of course the scales of jealousy have blinded his eyes. And I never like to point out the resemblance in case he snatches her away!'