Free Life Mask by Emma Donoghue Page A

delighted to escort you, if you can be up before seven,' he told her.
    'How kind, that's exactly what I was hoping—and I never rise after six, I'll have you know! Miss Farren?'
    Eliza looked up from buttoning her satin glove, startled. 'I wasn't planning to go; I get enough of Sheridan at Drury Lane.'
    'Oh, but if Hastings of the East India Company is impeached for his bribe taking and warmongering, by means of Foxite eloquence,' said Mrs Damer, 'it'll be a wonderful blow against corruption in high places.'
    'I must confess I've little head for politics,' said Eliza.
    'That's right,'joked Derby, 'when I rabbit on about by-elections and Third Readings and divisions, her eyes fog over.'
    'Miss Farren,' said Mrs Damer as the ladies came down the steps of Derby House, 'this won't do.'
    Eliza half laughed at the grave tone.
    Mrs Damer put her hand on Eliza's elbow. 'You may think I've no right to say this, but ... no one with intelligence and a feeling heart can remain aloof from politics today. Least of all a woman, since our sex is too often confined to ignorance and triviality. Why, my dear, the stakes haven't been as high in a century! Is Britain to languish on under the corrupt and stagnant rule of Old George and his puppet Pitt, or will our Foxite friends seize their chance and drag the country—the Empire—into an era of liberal modernity?' Her eyes were shiny with enthusiasm.
    Eliza, at a loss, found herself saying, 'Perhaps I will come with you to the Hastings impeachment, then, if I may.'
    'Splendid. By the way, on a sillier matter,' said Mrs Damer, leafing through the papers in her leather pocketbook, 'my sister came across this in last week's Chronicle. Did you ever see such tosh?'
    Eliza read the limp cutting.
Some say a certain hippophile Earl must be at least half in love with Mrs D—r, to play his part so well at the R-ch—d House Theatre. If she can bring cold Marble to life, perhaps she can win his heart from her Thespian Rival, Miss F—n.
    'Oh, they'll never leave off their inventing, will they?' said Eliza, aiming for as light a tone as Mrs Damer's.
    'Sometimes I suspect they throw all our names into a bowl—'
    '—pluck out two or three, and compose a fiction accordingly!'
    From the Derby carriage Eliza waved goodbye. Mrs Damer wanted to be the one to show it to me, she was thinking. It was her way of saying I've nothing to fear from her.

    I N THEORY , ladies were banned from St Stephen's Chapel, where the Commons sat, as too distracting a presence, but the doorkeepers of the End Gallery turned a blind eye as long as they got a few shillings from each visitor. Today the building was packed like a barrel of cod by eleven in the morning. The Members were squeezed on to their green benches and into the Side Galleries that were supported on slim white pillars, and the End Gallery was thick with visitors a good hour before Richard Brinsley Sheridan was scheduled to speak on the barbarous treatment of the Begums of Oudh (a phrase everyone in the World had by now learned to pronounce).
    'I've never seen the House like this,' Mrs Damer marvelled to Eliza. 'Usually there's not a soul in here till two in the afternoon, and less than 200 out of the 558 Members show up at all.'
    'I haven't been here in years. How carelessly they're dressed, considering they're running the country,' murmured Eliza. Most of the MPs were in the standard gentleman's uniform of dark coat and breeches with white shirt and stockings, but she saw riding coats, boots, the odd wide-crowned black hat or old-fashioned tricorne, and some of them had even brought in their young sons.
    'Speaker Cornwall looks awake, for once,' remarked Derby, pointing out a man in an enormous wig, hat and cloak. 'He's a shocking dozer; he always has a pot of porter on the arm of the Chair.'
    The Chair was more like a pulpit, Eliza thought. The many-branched chandeliers overhead blazed with wax candles; already it was uncomfortably hot and the air whirred with