DERBY AND Sheridan met Fox at Brooks's to brief him on the upcoming treason trials. (There had been no official rapprochement since the incident at Epsom three months ago, but somehow, in the glow of relief Derby felt at hearing from Eliza that she'd cut all ties with Mrs Damer, he'd let his grudge drop.)
'The Privy Council's now examined all the so-called traitors who were arrested last May,' he began.
Sheridan burst out, 'Gad, how do you have the stomach to take part in such a charade?'
'As a token Whig on the Council, Derby provides us with invaluable information,' Fox scolded.
Derby grinned at his leader, then sobered as he consulted his notes. 'The prosecution's somehow drummed up 208 witnesses against poor Tom Holcroft. Once he and Hardy are convicted, as test cases, 800 other warrants are to be served; they're written out already, ready to be signed.'
'What day is Home Tooke to be tried?' asked Fox.
'Tuesday,' Sheridan told him. 'The old firecracker's acting as his own counsel. He'll call your humble servant as a witness'—tapping his lapel.
'Mm,' said Fox uneasily. 'Remember what I said the other day, Sherry, about perhaps distancing yourself a little from the prisoners?'
'And remember what I told you, Foxy,' Sheridan retorted, 'that the thing's impossible? I don't much like some of these men, but I've worked shoulder to shoulder with them and my speeches have inspired them. I'll testify that Home Tooke's views are in many ways less extreme than my own.'
'Oh, why not go ahead and offer to swap places with him?' Derby suggested bitterly. 'I see you'll never rest till you reach the Tower.'
Sheridan smirked. 'Don't fret. Then comes the sudden twist,' he said as if describing a play. 'Tooke will pull this out.'
Derby automatically flinched at the sight of a pamphlet with curling edges. "What is it?'
'Ha ha! The constitution of the London Corresponding Society, which was formed to support the Duke of Richmond's Reform Bill of 1780. Then, Fox, we call your uncle Richmond to acknowledge that these so-called insurrectionists are only asking for exactly the same changes as he proposed fourteen years ago!'
'Brilliant,' murmured Derby.
'Awful cheek,' said Fox enjoyably.
'Then Tooke will subpoena one William Pitt,' Sheridan surged on, 'and force him to acknowledge and reminisce about several meetings he and Tooke attended together back in the early '80s.'
'Yes, of course, even the Eunuch began as a Reformer, didn't he? Everyone did, before all sense was scared out of them,' said Fox nostalgically.'Autres temps, autres moeurs...'
How the world had turned upside down in fourteen years; in the last four in particular. Derby caught himself thinking guiltily of Anne Damer. Things changed, that was simply how it was. All over the country friendships had melted away like wax.
'I'VE BEEN longing to see you,' said Anne in the parlour at North Audley Street, 'but not until you were ready. To find you cold to me would be worse than nothing.'
For answer Mary gripped Anne's hands in hers. Anne's dread fell away, her shoulders relaxed and it was as it had always been. The winter light coming through the window took on a softer glow; the air seemed more breathable. She could count each of Mary's warm fingertips on the back of her hands.
Then the door opened and Mary sprang back, her face frozen. It was only the maid, bringing the kettle. Anne thought, I won't cry. I'm a grown woman. What good would crying do?
They waited for the water to boil and spoke of other things for a little while. 'This trash of tea,' Anne quoted lightly, 'I don't know why I drink so much of it. Heigho!
Mary smiled, but as if she weren't sure of the reference. 'Are you working on a new sculpture?'
'No,' Anne said, 'I've not touched my tools since July.' The word hung between them. 'I was away from my workshop and since I've come back I don't know, I don't quite trust my fingers.' She stretched them out in front of her, considered the wrinkled knuckles.
'It's so good to see you in the flesh,' said Mary suddenly. 'Do my decrees of caution seem harsh?'
'No, no,' Anne lied. 'I'm content to let your kind judgement direct me.'
'It's only a matter of paying a sort of tax to the World—'
Anne flinched: that was Lady Melbourne's old phrase. 'Ah, I believe I've passed the age of delusion. None of society's blandishments can conceal its deformities from me now. What was that other line of mine, in The Way to Keep Him?' She called it up. 7 am tired of the World and the World may be tired of me, if it will.'
Mary was nodding fervently. 'Yet we live in it; what escape is possible?'
'There must be one,' Anne told her. 'A castle on a Scottish mountaintop. Or no, a few rooms in a farmer's house in Spain, near the sea. A cabin under a few trees in Italy!'
'Would such a humble dwelling satisfy a child of Park Place?'
'Oh, yes,' Anne told her. 'Can't one take a stroll with as much pleasure over lands the law hasn't marked for one's own?'
'You and I won't ever be free to seek out those places. Our duties keep us here.'
'I suppose so. But the World and I will never be upon more than civil terms,' Anne warned her.
'Discretion and prudence is all I ask,' said Mary rather despairingly. 'But you mustn't coop yourself up in your house. To live so much alone is bad for you, and the more you see other people and convince them by your conduct that you're not what your enemies call you, the more I can see you too.'
'Well, if I must go out in company I will,' said Anne with a little shudder. 'While I've a dearer interest than mine to consider, I'll attend to the World's whims with scrupulous care.' And she took hold of Mary's hands again, lightly.
They tried to move on to general conversation. 'Can you believe that the treason trials have all. ended in acquittal?' asked Mary.
'Oh, I can't tell what to think! Fox maintains the government's been using the long suspension of habeas corpus to jail the innocent, much as the French kings used to. But on the other hand, what if the juries are contaminated with sedition,' Anne agonised, 'and they've set free a brace of revolutionaries who'll come for us with pikes in the night...'
DECEMBER 1794
The Derby carriage toiled up the Liverpool Road; snow clogged its wheels. It was proving one of the worst winters on record. This was their third day on the road. Eliza pulled back the velvet to look out through the frosted window, her eye trying to encompass the undulating Lancashire landscape: the white fields streaked with brown, the woods and pastures, and a faraway glimpse of the Irish Sea. She could hardly believe she was going to see Knowsley at last.
The Farrens had been packing and repacking Eliza's trunk all week. Some clothes looked too ostentatious for a country visit; others too sheer and revealing. But on the other hand, she didn't want to look plain or underbred. She left out her box of face creams, not wanting to seem painted—then thought of the wrinkles that said thirty-two and threw it back in.
She'd finally nerved herself to go back to Drury Lane for a revival of The Rivah, Sheridan had written her a charming prologue in which she'd appealed to the gallantry of the British public to protect her from further insult and calumny. It brought the house down. It had stuck in Eliza's craw to have to ingratiate herself with a mob for whom she was coming to feel nothing but revulsion. She was oddly reminded of Louis and Marie Antoinette in the early days of the Revolution, smiling unconvincingly in their tricolour cockades.
Derby was chatting away about his mines and spinning factories here in the North, 'which provide year-round employment even for children, it's marvellous'.
'Will this be ... a very festive Christmas?' Mrs Farren asked nervously.
'Oh, quiet enough. Apart from the Open Days for tenants, which I'm afraid are pretty much compulsory on a large estate.'
'And your three children will be here?'
'Yes; they're very eager to meet you both, as are my four Burgoyne wards, and my agents and neighbours.'
Her bright eyes slid to Eliza. Very eager to meet the n
ext Countess.
Eliza stared out of the window again, gripped by a ridiculous kind of stage fright. She knew her job: to convince all these people that she wasn't the painted Jezebel of their imaginings. She knew little about young Lady Charlotte and Lord Edward, and had no reason to believe that they'd greet her with anything other than scorn. She'd met Lady Elizabeth already, of course—though Derby didn't know that and she hoped the girl would never tell him. Eliza remembered that visit to Marylebone as a kind of feverish hallucination; that yellow Countess on what was meant to be her deathbed, saying such terrible things. Now that Eliza had thrown in her lot with Derby—had agreed to his ultimatum and made some peace with herself—why couldn't the raddled invalid die and be done with it?
Her stomach tightened as the carriage slowed, turning off the road on to a zigzag avenue. In the distance the huge walls rose up. Eliza thought of the 500 years of the Stanleys of Knowsley. They were mentioned in Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton; they were soldiers, statesmen, scholars, moulders of history...
'The game here's not bad at all; of course it's all about management,' Derby was saying. 'During the shooting season I make it a rule that no gun may bag more than five brace of partridge in a morning, so there'll still be good sport for the ladies to watch in the afternoon.'
What a bore he can be, thought Eliza so suddenly that it frightened her.
'The Hall's a terrible mishmash,' said Derby fondly, gesturing across the lawns at the approaching walls. 'Those are my stables and kennels on the left. The King's Tower's the oldest piece of the puzzle: fifteenth century or so.' The carriage rolled under a frowning gateway with a turret. 'There's a rather jolly motto,' said Derby, pointing up at some chiselled lettering: 'Bring good news and knock boldly.'
When they stopped in front of the red brick main façade, Eliza counted: twenty windows across. The Earl jumped down and came round to hand her down himself. Would that look to onlookers like a mark of special respect, she wondered, or a shocking familiarity? She was dizzy with fright. She wished she were back in the narrow parlour on Green Street, sharing an eel pie with her mother.
Faces, lined up in the Great Hall. Eliza paused on the top marble step to gather her forces for her entrance. The heir, first; he mattered most. Lord Edward Smith-Stanley looked younger than nineteen, and nothing like his father; she gave him a slow, dazzling smile. She was expecting reserve, or sulkiness, but what she won from the boy was the most enormous blush. 'An honour,' he said, bending over her outstretched hand.
'Miss Farren,' said Lady Charlotte and gave a very small curtsy.
It all went much better than Eliza had expected. The food was rather overwhelming—turkey Perigueux and roast chine of pork with apple sauce on Christmas Day, wild boar's head in wine on New Year's Eve—but Lord Edward assured her that these particular dishes had always been served at Knowsley.
'The King eats no loaf but potato bread now,' Eliza told him, 'to set a good example while the wheat harvests are so poor.'
'Potato bread?' repeated Lady Charlotte, eyes wide.
'Yes,' Eliza told her, 'horrible stuff' and the girl smiled back faintly.
No one had cut her dead, so far, or roared out harlot or, God forbid, Tommy. Young Lord Edward was slightly deaf already, but very sweet, and the two girls were at least civil and apparently re-signed to her role in their father's life, though she couldn't imagine that he'd stooped to explaining it to them. If there was a certain wariness in the smiles of the local gentry—a confusion about the eyes of the rector—then that was only to be expected. Eliza's position as a visitor to Knowsley was an ambiguous one, to say the least.
When Derby wasn't meeting with his agents and factory managers he delighted in displaying all the charms of the estate to her and her mother: his collection of Stubbs and other sporting paintings, as well as some Van Dycks, Poussins and Veroneses, the chair in the library on which the seventh Earl had knelt to pray on the scaffold in 1651, the rolling parks (excellent cover for red and fallow deer, he assured her) and a frozen lake three miles wide. He took Eliza up a little hill, wrapped in all her furs, to drink hot port in a summer house lined with the estate's own oak, and they looked down on the Hall together; he was like Lucifer, tempting her with this expanse, she thought. Was she here to be impressed, then, as much as to impress? Was Derby saying, If I've asked much of you, I'm offering even more?
At times, strolling through the long gallery with her arm on the Earl's, Eliza couldn't help feeling that this was a rehearsal. Would she know what to say, how to act, when—if—they were married? It was not so much a matter of whether she would be happy, as whether she'd fit the role. Eliza liked luxury and fine things, but Mayfair was all she knew. How would she oversee such a vast, complex staff—or could she leave all that to the steward and butler?
Derby even confided in her about the children. Lord Edward's deafness bothered his father—it would debar him from politics—but rather less than his squeamishness about manly sports. In the summer, when Lady Elizabeth turned sixteen, Derby was planning to marry her to a Mr Cole of Twickenham.
'Is she ... willing?' asked Eliza, disconcerted by the ways of the aristocracy.
'Oh, willing enough, though girls are so coy it's hard to be sure. I'm only settling £2000 on her, because of her parentage,' he explained, 'whereas Lady Charlotte will get more like £30,000.'
The figures staggered Eliza. And his obstinate insistence that the girl was Dorset's. Should she say something—remark on how clearly she could see Derby's features echoed in Lady Elizabeth's, despite her colouring? Stay out of it, she reminded herself, you're not his wife.
In the library on New Year's Day, Mrs Farren fussed over the fire screen, tilting it to keep the heat off Elizas complexion. It was a hideous copy of a Rubens painting, in thick worsted, and Eliza was suddenly convinced that it was one of Lady Ailesbury's; Park Place had been littered with them. The families were old friends, of course, but still it struck her as a malign coincidence.
Derby was asking her something. 'I do beg your pardon,' she said.
'I merely asked, how are things at New Drury Lane? Sherry still seems on the brink of bankruptcy, even though so many of us bought hundred-year subscriptions to get the new theatre open.'
Eliza sighed. 'One problem is that there are enough seats. You see, the old theatre was so overcrowded that people went early, or sent their footmen to hold their places. Nowadays they know there'll be room for everyone, so there's less enthusiasm; people come late, or don't come at all, for fear it'll be a quiet night and the place will have a half-empty, cheerless look.'
'But that's perverse! A rule of the market, I suppose,' Derby corrected himself, 'that people only want what's in short supply...'
'To fill over 3000 seats, and compete with acrobats and balloon flights at Vauxhall Gardens, Kemble and Sheridan have to keep thinking up more spectacular and expensive attractions,' Eliza complained. 'It's all melodrama and pantomime, with special effects. Take this lurid Polish thing, Lodoiska last week Mrs Crouch was playing the damsel in the burning tower and her dress went on fire. She had to hurl herself down into Michael Kelly's arms—and the rescue was so popular with the house, Kemble told the two of them they have to repeat it every night!'
Derby laughed ruefully. 'Well, I'm glad you're not obliged to be set alight. I prefer the plain old comedies myself.'
'But I fear my acting's coarsened too,' confessed Eliza. 'We've all worked ourselves up several notches; one has to leer and grimace for one's expressions to be seen.'
Derby blinked at her, perplexed. 'You seem to me to act as perfectly as ever.'
'Which only proves, My Lord, that your critical faculties on the subject of acting have been suspended for the last dozen years.'
Mrs Farren gave her daughter a glare, but Derby laughed and said, 'How true.'
'Have you heard Colman's satire on the new gigantic theatres?' Eliza struck a pose for recitation.
When people appear
Quite unable t
o hear
'Tis undoubtedly needless to talk...
'Twere better they began
On the new intended plan
And with telegraphs transmitted us the plot!
'Oh, that's very neat,' said Derby, 'very up to date. I was just talking to a gentleman from Liverpool who wants me to invest in a telegraph.'
'Sheridan's now so entangled in mortgages and liabilities that he hasn't paid us in months,' said Eliza grimly. 'The new treasurer's office was built with a window on to the street, you see, so Peake can escape on Saturdays when we come looking for our wages.'
'I don't like the sound of that,' said Derby. 'If it's a matter of substantial arrears, I'd be happy to speak to Sherry on your behalf—'
'Oh, My Lord, how kind,' cried Margaret Farren.
Eliza darted a repressive look at her mother. 'Thank you, but no,' she told Derby in a tone that reminded him that he wasn't in charge of her affairs yet. Why had she been unwise enough to mention money?
When she and her mother were retiring for the night, Derby reached into the pocket of his jacket. 'I know you too well to offer you a Christmas present, Miss Farren,' he said awkwardly, 'but perhaps you'd accept this.'
She put up her hand, fearing it was a banknote.
'It's not what you think,' he insisted. 'Read it, I beg you.'
It was a small stiff page; she kept it folded in her hand all the way upstairs. 'Good night,' she told her mother with a firm kiss and shut the door in her face. At the mahogany toilette she pulled the candle close and read the note before she'd even taken off her Kashmir shawl.
I, Edward Smith-Stanley, twelfth Earl of Derby, do most solemnly swear that on the death of the present Countess I will propose marriage to Miss Elizabeth Farren, of Green Street, Mayfair, on whatever terms of settlement she may choose.
APRIL 1795
8 Grosvenor Square