Free Life Mask by Emma Donoghue

They nearly toppled a fourth-century Venus Pudica,' she said through her teeth. 'I couldn't tell what I saw after that—the art was hidden in a mist of shame for me—because all I could hear was the crash, crash, crash of two earl's sons pounding like gigantic one-legged hares down the gallery.'
    Eliza released a giggle. 'Who won?'
    'I didn't look.'
    'The winner must have boasted. The loser must have cried foul.'
    'Oh, I'm sure, but it's one of many details I've managed to forget. I was married for the best part of ten years, Miss Farren, but my memories probably amount to three months. It's rather terrible,' she added, 'to wish away one's prime years.'
    'But they weren't.'
    'Well, the twenties—aren't they meant to be one's best? But you're right,' she said with a smile. 'I think perhaps these are my prime years, now, past thirty-five!'
    Just then a maid came in to say that Mrs Moll was ready to serve the tea. 'I should go,' said Eliza, glancing at the window, where a crust of snow had built up. She tried to collect her skirts without disturbing the dog, but Fidelle exploded off the chair and ran into a corner. 'You've been very kind.'
    'Have you another engagement, or are you needed at Drury Lane?'
    'Well, no, but—'
    'Then you must stay for a dish of tea. Tell Mrs Moll we'll have it in the library,' said Mrs Damer to the maid. 'I'll join you, my dear, as soon as I've made myself respectable'—pulling off her makeshift turban as she spoke and releasing a shock of unpowdered brown curls—'and we can wait out this snowstorm together.'

    'O H, THIS is so much better,' said Mrs Damer, moving round the circular ante-room in the Earl's opulent mansion on Grosvenor Square. 'Aren't we favoured, Derby, to have our own private rehearsal with Miss Farren? Is your dear mother not to join us today?' she asked, turning to the actress.
    Eliza gave her a slightly wry smile, seeing through the pretence. 'I left her at Great Queen Street overseeing a thorough spring-cleaning. Let's begin with the scene of the Lovemores meeting by accident at Lady Constant's,' she suggested.
    Derby leapt into action. When his wife asked him for the second time that day to come home for dinner, he turned his face away sharply and sneered, 'The question is entertaining, but as it was settled this morning, I think it has lost the graces of novelty.'
    What pleasure he took in such refined spite, thought Eliza. She was seeing a face of the Earl's that she'd never glimpsed before. Did Derby have a secret envy of the rogues and rakes he knew from Brooks's Club, who never wasted an hour thinking of an unattainable beauty, but broke hearts every month and laughed into their brandy glasses?
    She was enjoying this rehearsal a trois far more than the big ones at Richmond House. Next they tried the dinner scene, in which Mrs Lovemore talked so earnestly that her husband fell asleep in his chair. 'No, 110 injured looks, not yet,' Eliza instructed Mrs Damer, 'don't throw away the joke.'
    'But wouldn't Mrs Lovemore feel hurt to have her husband snoozing over the soup?'
    'In real life, yes,' said Eliza, 'but it's more painful and funnier if she doesn't notice yet. At the very end of the scene you turn to him—freeze at the sight—he lets out a gentle snore'—Eliza clicked her fingers and Derby snored—'and you pull yourself up and roar, " Unfeeling man!"'
    The other two burst out laughing.
    'But mightn't Mrs Lovemore seem obtuse?' asked Mrs Damer.
    'No, no, just wrapped up in her own woes,' Derby put in. 'That's the very meat of a marriage gone bad, I suppose: the two of them might as well be speaking different languages.'
    Eliza blinked and looked away. Given his situation, she thought it tasteless of him to speechify about marital breakdown.
    'Derby,' Mrs Damer asked when the ladies were putting on their cloaks at the end of the morning, 'I wonder will you be at the Commons on Tuesday for Sheridan's first sally against Hastings?'
    'Mm, d'you need a ticket? I'd he