Eliza's head was swimming. 'I thought she was a poet.'
'That and worse,' said Mrs Piozzi darkly. 'They're known as Tommies too.'
'Tommies?'
'Like beastly tom-cats.'
Eliza ignored that strange reference. 'I still don't understand—'
'Your so-called friend, Mrs Damer, was that a ring I saw her give you?' She took hold of Eliza's fingers and peered at them in the dark carriage.
Eliza snatched her hand away and covered it with the other. 'Mrs Piozzi, you forget yourself.'
'I beg your pardon, but—'
'You're babbling as if you have a fever. Or as if you're intoxicated. I don't know what you're talking about—'
'I have proof.'
'—and I don't wish to know.' Eliza was breathing heavily. She rapped on the side of the carriage for the coachman to come round and help her down.
'Oh, my dear,' said Mrs Piozzi, holding on to Eliza's lace apron, 'I'm only trying to warn you. Already there's a dreadful epigram going the rounds—'
Eliza stopped, her foot on the top step. She leaned back into the darkness. 'What epigram?'
'I was afraid you might have heard it already. I so wanted to be the first to prepare you against the shock. I thought of writing, but I couldn't wait, not when I saw her flaunt her sculpture of you in there and make a public show of your intimacy. How does it go? Yes, I have it.' Mrs Piozzi declaimed in a theatrical whisper:
'Her little stock of privatefame
Will fall a wreck to public clamour,
If Farren leagues with one whose name
Comes near—aye, very near—to DAMN HER.
Damn her, Damer, d'you see?'
Eliza stared at her, then stepped down into the street.
JULY 1789
Derby had come to town for a few days, to escape the monotony of Knowsley, where his girls Charlotte and Elizabeth had developed a genius for reporting each other's petty misdeeds with the precision of law clerks. He dropped into the Farrens' with Fox and Grey one evening, to make up a rubber at whist. Mrs Farren was always relieved if there were three guests, so she didn't have to play. She had to ring for the tea kettle to be refilled twice and the gentlemen used up half a cone of sugar. Derby thought Eliza was looking rather pale; for years now he'd wished she could give up the arduous summer season at the Haymarket, but he knew better than to offer his opinion. She seemed preoccupied tonight and took little part in the conversation. Fox and Grey were having a heated debate about the importance of the Germanic, as compared with Latinate, contributions to the English language. Derby had never been much of a scholar; in Cambridge it hadn't been necessary to follow any particular course of studies or, heaven forbid, undergo any examinations. He edged the conversation towards politics, which somehow led to money, and whether it was possible to live in Mayfair on less than £3000 a year.
A low laugh from Eliza, eyes on her cards. 'I assure you, gentlemen, that my mother and I survive on less than half that, and put savings aside too.'
'What, you've got money in the bank?' asked Fox, aghast. 'What's it doing there?'
'On first coming to this metropolis Miss Farren adopted an extraordinary procedure,' Derby told them, 'she pays for things the day she buys, or she doesn't buy.'
'I never heard of such a prodigy of thrift,' said Fox.
'Doesn't your conscience prick you,' she asked him, smiling, 'if you ignore a tradesman's bill for years on end?'
'Not a bit of it,' cried Grey. 'It's all part of their business, that's why they reward themselves with such shocking rates of interest.'
'To quote our friend Sherry,' said Fox, 'paying creditors only encourages them! I should, of course, cough up for a debt of honour, mind you—'
'I've always thought that a rather hollow phrase for gambling losses,' Derby offered in the direction of Mrs Farren, who smiled over her knotting work.
'Tell your Lade story,' said Grey.
Fox beamed, reminiscent. 'At Newmarket once I was writing out a promissory note for Sir John Lade and I noticed he was doing some sums on the back of a playbill. Turned out he was calculating the interest he planned to charge me! "Are you, by gad?" says I. "I thought this a debt of honour, but as you seem to have turned Hebrew, Lade, I must tell you I make it a rule to pay tradesmen last!" And I ripped up the note on the spot.'
Grey clapped.
'Not that a promissory note from you would have meant much,' Derby pointed out.
'Oh, no, it was a promise that my good friend Lord Derby would pay him,' said Fox, deadpan, and Grey giggled into his tea.
Derby grinned; the joke was on him. It was well known in the Party that Derby was a soft touch, though Sheridan was by far the worst for sponging off him.
'But really, it won't do, Miss Farren, this secret saving habit of yours,' said Fox, shaking his ursine head and holding out his cup to be refilled. 'What would the World come to if everyone behaved so timidly?'
'There'd be no debtors pining away in the King's Bench, for one thing,' Eliza suggested.
'No prosperity either, no growth!' He blew on his tea, sloshing some over the brim. 'Money's a liquid commodity, it mustn't be hoarded or it'll stagnate. It must be given, borrowed, lent, lost, without embarrassment—circulating like the very blood in our veins!'
A knock at the door downstairs and Mrs Farren put her knotting down. 'Whomsoever could it be, at this time?'
Derby saw a flicker of pain cross his beloved's face at her mother's bad grammar.
The manservant announced the Duchess of Devonshire and they all leapt to their feet. Mrs Farren wore a frozen grimace.
Georgiana swept into the little parlour and kissed Eliza on both cheeks. 'Pweez forgive my frightful rudeness in barging in on this cosy scene,' she said, 'but I'm just back from Paris—and such news!'
She had a gift for setting people at ease, Derby thought; they all sat down again at once, and Mrs Farren poured the Duchess a cup of tea without asking.
'It's about the Bastille—that grim symbol of tyranny, that dark dungeon from which none returns!' Georgiana held the pose of a Gothic heroine. 'Well, mes amis, they've gone and knocked it down.'
'Who have?' asked Derby.
'Le peuple.'
Mrs Farren was looking bewildered.
'Canis and Racky and I had already determined to go on to Brussels, as things were hotting up—riots and so forth—the theatres were closed, which seemed a bad sign,' said Georgiana, relishing her story. 'There were rumours going round that the King's brother was plotting to dissolve the Assembly and arrest the deputies. So a crowd went to seize weapons and powder from the Bastille and release the political prisoners. Picture it: on one side a trained army of 30,000 soldiers—on the other a few hundred desperate Parisians, shouting "Aux armes! Aux armes!".'
Grey was watching the Duchess like a star-struck schoolboy.
'Some of them had raided the Opéra for axes,' Georgiana added merrily, 'not realising the weapons used on stage were cardboard. So all they had were stones and pitchforks, hammers and spits, but they tore down the fortress and triumphed. Isn't it simply ravish?'
'That'll give Louis a poke in the eye,' said Derby, grinning.
Fox put his hand over his mouth. 'Imagine if it happened here,' he stage-whispered. 'Say half London stormed the walls of Newgate roaring, "Crawl off the throne, mad Old George. It's time for Prinny's reign!'"
'Technically that's high treason,' remarked Grey.
'And you'd have got two dozen stripes for that back in Eton,' Derby told Fox. They were being very giddy, considering all they'd drunk was tea; the news was acting on them like champagne.
'Were there any deaths?' It was Eliza who asked.
'A few on each side, yes, including the governor of the Bastille,' said Georgiana, sobering. 'In fact, the rumours are rather disgusting—apparently the mob tore him apart with their hands.'
Derby was taken aback. 'I'd have believed that of a gang of hardened Cockneys more easily than of some cowed Fro
gs.'
'Such violence does rather tarnish the cause of Reform,' said Fox sadly.
'Oh, come now,' Derby told him, 'you haven't sat through enough cocking mains. No fight's glorious without some bloodshed.'
'This isn't sport, man,' Fox reproved him. 'The best thing for France is a thoughtful, peaceful progress towards liberty.'
'Were you frightened?' Grey was asking Georgiana, leaning in close.
'Oh, not for myself; a Parisian mob is nothing to the Westminster Election of '84!'
Fox grinned round at his old comrades.
'But Bess and I are rather fret for dear Marie Antoinette and Little Po and other friends at Versailles. Still,' Georgiana said, brightening, 'these are only the birthing pangs of Reform and I'm sure the worst is over. Vive la France!'
'Vive indeed,' said Derby, raising his cup of cold tea. He tried to catch Eliza's eye, to share the joyful toast, but her gaze was unfocused, as if her mind were miles away.
THROUGH THE sweaty days of July Eliza played at the Haymarket, ate half of whatever her mother put in front of her, slept badly. She avoided Mrs Piozzi and answered about one in three of Anne's letters from Park Place, Goodwood and Strawberry Hill. When she looked on the post tray in the hall and saw the familiar wax seal marked with a little chisel, her stomach always went into a spasm.
My dearest A.D., she wrote,
Yes, yes, yes, to what you write so eloquently of Lafayette's Declaration of the Rights of Man. For the French to set down in law for the first time that all are born free and equal—having the right to liberty, to property, to security & to resist oppression—it stirs my heart.
To be strolling through your father's lavender plantation, or chasing little Fidelle through the famous oaks of Goodwood—these are visions of bliss to one who must stay in London all summer & scarce can find a moment to pick up the pen, let alone think of a fortnight's holiday, so must regretfully decline your kind invitation. Howl wish ... but in vain.
Ever your servant and chère amie,
E.F.
It had a forced, gushing tone to it, she knew; did it sound like a tissue of lies?
Eliza's feelings for her friend weren't gone, they'd just been frozen up, iced over with panic, ever since that day at the Exhibition. In the long hours of the night she stared at the dark ceiling and Anne Darner's handsome, angular face seemed to float there. What Mrs Piozzi had said couldn't be true. It was impossible, absurd, obscene, laughable, terrible.
Had the sculptor's brown eyes ever revealed any emotion that was warmer than other women felt for their friends? Or no, not warmer; darker, rather? Was that smile suspect, that burning look on Anne's face as she'd given Eliza the ring? Was that what a Sapphist looked like, Eliza asked herself, squirming at the word? The band of gold was warm on her little finger; it felt like part of her body. Did Anne look at Eliza more lovingly—or no, less lovingly, but more peculiarly, more greedily, more carnally than other women did? Eliza didn't think so—but then, what experience of friendship had she for comparison?
It wasn't as if there were anything wrong with passionate bonds between women; they were praised to the heights in almost every novel Eliza picked up nowadays. Ladies in the World exchanged portrait miniatures and sat embracing on sofas; the more sensibility a woman had, the more overwhelmingly devoted she was to her female friends. How could something so respectable, so fashionable, be a mask for unnatural vice?
Of course, Eliza'd heard of such things; sodomy was a dirty whisper on everybody's lips these days and, now she came to think about it, she was sure she'd come across the word Sapphism before, though she couldn't remember where. In a book translated from the French, perhaps? But Eliza had never heard of any Englishwoman being accused of such exotic perversities.
Insomniac, she replayed fragments of conversation between herself and Anne over the last two and a half years; brief kisses, easy embraces. She felt her face heat up now, but not with guilt, only confusion. Did the sculptor's strong hands press Eliza's fingers any harder than those of other friends did? No harder than the small, slightly wrinkled hands of Mrs Piozzi, it occurred to her. Why, Anne had never given any evidence of besotted infatuation like Mrs Piozzi's Italian verses.
Could the authoress be mad? Jealous, perhaps, of Eliza's admission to a glittering circle which she herself, with no birth or wealth, a low-born foreigner for a husband and a Streatham address, could never hope to enter?
How could one look into the human heart and tell the sheep from the goats, the shining feelings from the stained ones? Amitié means friendship, affection, love, she remembered Anne saying as she gave her the ring; the languages don't correspond.
'My dear?' Her mother tapped at the door in the middle of the night.
Eliza jerked awake. No, there was yellow light coming through a gap in the curtains; it was another day. She cleared her throat.
'Will you take a bowl of chocolate?'
'No,' she called, heaving herself upright.
Mrs Farren's face came round the door. 'You worry me, daughter,' she remarked. 'You've been queer and unsettled all summer.'
'I'm perfectly well.' Eliza splashed her face with cold water.
Shopping for a light set of whalebone stays on Pall Mall, she found herself popping into Alderman Boydell's new Shakespeare Gallery, which was filled with illustrations of the Bard's plays by all the best artists of the day. One of Anne Darner's contributions was a bas relief of Cleopatra with a lady-in-waiting stretched out dead at her feet. Eliza went up very close and stared at the curved draperies of the blank-faced queen, how they blended into the body of the bare-armed attendant, who knelt behind her, her hand on the Queen's limp wrist, her mouth pressed to the Queen's shoulder in a kiss of grief. There was nothing that unusual, nothing obscene here—so why did it make Eliza's heart thump? And would others see what she saw? How many people had heard that epigram so far? What if the Queen of Comedy were observed here, on a Tuesday afternoon, staring at her friend's sculpture, biting her lips?
'That's a charming little ring,' remarked Derby over a game of piquet in his smaller drawing room, with her mother keeping score.
'Thank you,' said Eliza, shuffling the slim set of cards.
He took up her hand for a moment on the pretext of examining the gold and ivory eye on her little finger. Her heart began to thump. 'Wherever did it come from?'
'Gray's, on Sackville Street,' she said, deliberately misunderstanding.
His tone was light. 'A tribute to your genius from some gentleman whose heart you've conquered?'
'Oh, hardly,' she said with a little laugh.
In the carriage taking them round the corner to Green Street, Mrs Farren brought it up. 'Surely there was no need for obscurity when the thing only came from Mrs Damer?'
'Really, Mother, it's none of His Lordship's business where I get my jewels.'
'But now you've roused his suspicion—'
'He knows he has no rival,' said Eliza sharply, laying her head back against the cushion. 'I packed off the last cow-eyed suitor a good four years ago, didn't I?'
Her mother sat silent in the dark of the carriage, but only for the time it took them to reach their house. 'Still, a dash of jealousy never spoils a dish, only sharpens the appetite,' she concluded more happily.
Eliza resented being the dish, but held her tongue.
The next day she took a hackney to Streatham, to get it over with. Mrs Piozzi, surprised in a shabby yellow wrapping gown at her desk, begged her caller to excuse the disarray. 'I've had so many visitors recently, fleeing the heat and dust of London, and this morning I've been writing down everything I've garnered about the shocking violencies in Paris.'
Eliza couldn't spare any energy for arguing that the rapid pace of change in France struck her as utterly thrilling. 'May I ask, what did you mean when you said that you had proof?' She spoke very low, though she knew the door was shut tight.
Mrs Piozzi blinked at her.
She's going to make me repeat it, tho
ught Eliza. 'Of the lady in question being ... what you alleged.'
Mrs Piozzi settled herself comfortably in her chair. 'I knew you'd be ready to hear me, once you'd got over the shock,' she confided. 'I didn't take offence, when you slammed the door of my carriage without so much as a good day.'
'I'm sorry about that,' said Eliza haltingly.
'Quite understandable, my dear. Did you manage to get home that afternoon without coming over all faint? It's your long experience of the stage, I suppose; such stamina! Dear Sally Siddons tells me that when she's got through a tragedy, she feels wrung out like a rag. You recall she once passed out cold during the sleepwalking scene in the Scottish play?'
Eliza pressed her teeth together.
'I mention Mrs Siddons for a particular reason,' murmured Mrs Piozzi. 'I've discovered that it was none other than her husband who composed that nasty epigram.'
Eliza stared. She barely knew William Siddons; he was a failed actor, a man who lived in his wife's shadow and did little but spend her money. 'But what did he mean by it?' asked Eliza, anger like a bit of gristle in her throat. What motive could he possibly have? Did he resent Elizas fame for encroaching on his wife's, even though they never competed for the same parts? The man was a nobody, a nonentity. How dare he go around making up libels on ladies whose boots he wasn't fit to polish?
'Well, my dear,' said Mrs Piozzi, 'I went straight to our dear Sally Siddons, and asked her where William had got such a wicked idea.'
'I wish you hadn't spoken to her,' said Eliza, flinching.
'Oh, no, she was perfectly nice about it,' Mrs Piozzi assured her. 'All her husband could say in his defence, she reports, was that it's a well-known fact that John Damer killed himself because of his cold, unnatural wife!'
'To call a woman unnatural,' said Eliza, 'because her husband runs into debt and proves his cowardice by suicide—why, it's ridiculous! It would be like calling you a ... a pickpocket because your husband is Italian.'