All the time Clinton wished that her face was not masked by a layer of white make-up in the eighteenth century manner, and further disguised by period dabs of colour on her cheeks and a prominent beauty spot. Her powdered wig made it still harder for him to judge what she would look like off the stage. At least her figure was not concealed by the tight fit of her low cut scarlet bodice which plumped up her breasts pleasingly.

  Clinton was not impressed by her until comparatively late in the play, and had till then been principally held by the theme of marriage, money and fidelity. But her reaction to the revelation that her country gentleman was married showed what she might be capable of if better cast: a subtle blend of anger, dignity and self-mockery, shot through with a sorrow that was neither maudlin nor pathetic.

  ‘You forget, sir, that I am an actress. A plaything for every profligate who can find the open sesame of the stage door. Fool to think that there was an honest man in the world and that he had shone on me. What have we to do with homes and hearths and firesides? Have we not the theatre, its triumphs and full-handed thunders of applause? Who looks for hearts beneath the masks we wear? These men applaud us, swear to us, cajole us, and yet forsooth we would have them respect us too. Stage masks may cover honest faces and hearts beat true beneath a tinselled robe.’

  The passion in her voice both pleased and puzzled Clinton, the sentiment of the speech being so much at variance with her prevaricating behaviour to Esmond. He frowned, and thought for a little; then he smiled to himself and summoned the box attendant and asked for pen and paper. It took him very little time to dash off a note and hand it to the waiting attendant for delivery.

  Dear Miss Simmonds,

  I beg a few words with you not as a devoted follower of Thespis, but as a sincere friend and colleague of Mr Danvers, to talk of what must concern you, namely his unhappy disregard for the high repute which he lately enjoyed. I shall present myself at the stage-door after the final curtain.

  Trusting to your kind consideration, I am honoured to be, dear madam, yours very truly,

  Frederick Higgs

  *

  It had rained during the performance and the gas globes over the stage door were reflected, elongated and iridescent, in the black mirror of the pavement. Clinton pushed his way through a group of waiting men, his eye caught by fur-collared coats, grey whiskers and glinting monocles. Across the road a street walker was hovering, and several urchins watched the men warily, doubtless waiting for the best opportunity to attempt to pick their pockets. Clinton announced his fictitious name to the doorman, and, to the fury of those who had been denied entrance, was immediately admitted.

  Backstage the air was stuffy and overheated, savouring of ammonia and the glue used in the scenery; up a flight of badly lit stairs, Clinton heard the noise of wash-basins and people laughing and calling to each other. Here in the dressing room corridors, the musky scent of make-up mingled with the pungency of hair warmed by curling tongs and the odour of damp powder.

  An old crone of a dresser with thin yellowy hair opened Theresa’s dressing room door and reluctantly let Clinton in. In front of a dressing-table covered by a grease-stained cloth and dotted with bottles and jars, the actress sat sponging her face, while the dresser unpinned her wig. Without moving, Theresa scrutinised Clinton in the mirror. She had made no preparations for the arrival of a strange man, and was wearing a dirty waist-length cotton chemise to protect the dress she had worn in the play.

  ‘Well, sit down, Mr Higgs,’ she said waving a bare arm impatiently in the direction of a sagging armchair next to a cracked cheval glass. As the dresser lifted off the wig, Theresa shook out her own rich copper coloured hair, which fell to her shoulders, at once softening and transforming her face. Without the stiff black mascara around her eyes and the white layer of make-up, Clinton was suddenly aware of the beauty of her eyes and skin. Disconcertingly she had not wiped the carmine from her lips.

  ‘Don’t you think it rather presumptuous, Mr Higgs, to involve yourself in a man’s affairs without his consent or knowledge?’

  ‘Concern for his well-being compelled me, madam.’

  ‘I’m a fiend, isn’t that so, Mary?’ she asked the dresser, who was now waiting to unhook the back of her dress. ‘Demanding this spot for my entrances, that one for my exits; bullying everyone in sight … ruining my lover.’

  The old woman shook with silent mirth and then broke into wheezy laughter.

  ‘You demand anything, Miss Simmonds … bully people …? Oh dear me … oh …’ Her laughter caught her breath and changed to a violent fit of coughing.

  Theresa turned and faced Clinton.

  ‘Being a humanitarian, I’m sure you won’t want to delay Mary getting home.’ She stood up and picked a towel from the floor, which she handed to the dresser. ‘Put that over Mr Higgs and we can get on.’

  Mary advanced on Clinton and looked at him sternly.

  ‘No peeping, mind,’ she croaked, dropping the towel over his head.

  While Clinton was shrouded, Theresa’s bodice was carefully unhooked and her skirt unlaced at the back. As Theresa stepped out of the dress, wearing only a petticoat, Mary, herself bent and withered, cast a solicitous eye over her mistress’s full upward tilting breasts. There was nothing the younger girls could improve on there. She hastily fetched Theresa’s long cambric dressing-gown, and, with a covert eye still on Clinton helped her into it.

  ‘You can go, Mary; and you may come out now, Mr Higgs, if you haven’t suffocated.’

  How in his own character he would have responded to having a damp towel placed over his head, Clinton did not know, but in the role of Mr Higgs, he thought it best to accept any indignities gracefully. The stilted awkwardness of his note had predetermined his behaviour, however ill it accorded with his appearance. When the dresser had gone, Theresa sat down on her dressing stool and smiled kindly at Clinton, as though trying to help a gauche embarrassed boy.

  ‘You look like someone well-accustomed to coming backstage, Mr Higgs. A man much in society, I’d imagine.’

  Clinton studied the peeling flower-patterned wallpaper with dignity.

  ‘Society and I, madam, only have a nodding acquaintance. Insignificance has that advantage.’ He leant forward and said as solemnly as he could: ‘Mr Danvers is not a happy man, Miss Simmonds. It’s not right, you know, to tantalise a man of his character.’

  ‘You sound like a physician, Mr Higgs.’

  ‘It needs no special knowledge to diagnose his disease and prescribe the cure.’

  ‘Which is?’ asked Theresa, her face completely composed but her eyes glinting.

  ‘Marriage, madam.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Marriage is the cure. Why do you live as his wife in fact, and yet refuse him the honourable satisfaction of making you that in law?’

  Theresa lowered her eyes.

  ‘The life of an actress makes me unfit for that honour.’

  ‘You mock me, Miss Simmonds.’

  ‘On the contrary; rank is not an illusion but a cruel hard fact.’

  Knowing very well that she was being insincere, Clinton had no idea how to make her honest without abandoning the restraints imposed upon him by being Mr Higgs.

  ‘Should an artificial social distinction,’ he asked, ‘part two people in other ways ideally suited?’

  Theresa bowed her head.

  ‘Mr Danvers is no ordinary broker. He is a nobleman’s son. His brother is a viscount.’

  ‘Actresses have married dukes.’

  ‘I cannot marry into his family, Mr Higgs.’ She clasped her hands as though violently agitated. ‘His brother would prevent it.’

  ‘His brother?’ echoed Clinton, bemused but also suspicious. Yet when he looked directly into her eyes, Theresa gazed back at him without the least trace of mockery; in fact tears were beginning to brim over.

  ‘If you knew a fraction of the things I know about that man, you wouldn’t doubt me.’

  ‘Tell me some,’ he sighed, wondering where his mistake had been.

  ‘He once bit an actress’s leg; he likes chasing young children.’ She rose and leant against the wall for a moment before coming close to Clinton; her manner was conspiratorial. ‘I hardly know how to say this, Mr Higgs.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘He’s about to contract a scandalous marriage to a woman old enough to be his grandmother.’ She looked into Clinton’s eyes, her own opened wide with horror. Clinton fought to stop himself smiling, but in the end could not help himself. She shrugged her shoulders and turned away. ‘You’re a poor actor, Lord Ardmore,’ she said quietly.

  ‘You knew all along?’ he asked, annoyed to have done so badly, but amused too by the absurdity of his situation.

  ‘From the moment you walked in. My poor daughter described you down to that little scar over your eye.’

  Clinton did his best to laugh.

  ‘What can I say?’

  ‘What about what you intended to?’

  ‘That’s no longer possible. I’m afraid my brother might find it in rather doubtful taste.’

  ‘And how would you describe what you have done?’

  ‘Provided an intelligent woman with an excellent opportunity for making a fool of me.’ Her regal scorn was so superbly convincing that he laughed out loud. ‘You really should try that expression on the stage; poor old Sir Charles would take to his heels before his exit. How can I help what Esmond’s told you about me? That old story about biting an actress. The lady in question asked me to bring her a necklace in my mouth on my hands and knees.’

  ‘So you bit her like a dog. How witty, my lord.’

  ‘I thought so at the time.’

  Clinton got up. Her disdain no longer seemed so funny. He said mildly:

  ‘Aristocratic villains are more common in plays than in life.’

  ‘How fortunate,’ she murmured, removing the carmine from her lips.

  ‘One day someone will write a melodrama with a bestial heroine and a virtous aristocrat instead of the other way round.’

  ‘As a burlesque it might be successful.’

  Her ability to deal out sarcasm in a quiet almost gentle voice left him speechless. Looking at her silky hair and her milk white skin, lightly etched with the first faint traces of age at the corners of her eyes, he was filled with admiration for this woman, so unlike the pampered daughters of luxury. A widow of thirty-two or three could not be ruined by slander like a girl hoping for marriage; more experienced and therefore less prone to the emotional upheavals of younger women, she could afford to be herself serenely. With little time to waste, she would choose with greater caution; and, with less histrionics, feel more. He wanted to explain that he knew he had been mistaken in coming to see her in the way he had, but his mind felt dulled by the wine he had drunk during the play.

  In the brief silence which followed her last words, the doorman knocked and told her that her coachman was waiting. She held out a formal hand, which Clinton took with equal formality. She smiled wistfully.

  ‘Goodbye, Lord Ardmore.’ As he was going out, she called him back, and said with a hesitance that astonished him: ‘If you’d chosen any other subject, I wouldn’t have …’

  ‘Whipped me so hard?’

  ‘It was a good practical joke … your letter. I mean that.’

  ‘You’re kind to take that view.’

  ‘Perhaps I can hope to meet you properly at your brother’s house?’

  ‘So we can all laugh about it?’ Clinton smiled and shook his head. ‘I think not, Miss Simmonds.’

  The stage door had been locked, so he was shown out through the dimly lit auditorium. Trying to remember exactly what he had hoped to achieve, he found himself laughing aloud. Nothing could have made any difference to his predicament. Tomorrow Theresa would be equally passionate about the hearths and firesides, which probably meant nothing to her; tomorrow he would leave London to propose to Sophie, with about the same degree of sincerity. Dooming some to deceit, others to nobility—life going on.

  5

  A hot windless day in late July, and the country lying tranquil under a soft haze. The meadows after the cutting of the hay looked brown and scorched, and the leaves on trees and hedges were tarnished and dull. Clinton had been met at the station by one of the Lucas’s coachmen, and had asked the man to drive him to Ammering Court by the longer way, which took them through Dinsley woods and up onto Aylsham ridge. Already the hindquarters of the trace-horses were flecked with streaks of sweat, and their legs were hidden, except for the occasional flash of a metal shoe, in clouds of driving dust which billowed out from under the blurred wheels of the black and yellow phaeton.

  Up on the ridge, Clinton told the coachman to stop, and jumped down without waiting for the step to be lowered. He clambered over the nearest gate into a field where the air was heavy with the scent of hedgerow honeysuckle and freshly mown hay. From the nettles in the ditch behind him came the constant chirping of grasshoppers. Ahead lay a wide panorama of fields and woods: white chequering of barley stubble, golden squares of wheat, greeny brown patches of pasture, all sloping away to the darker tints of a thickly wooded valley. On the far side was a farmstead with ricks and barns, and to the right a rolling park skirting a small village. Near the grey spark of the church spire, stood a long line of elms: an avenue, and at its end a massive Elizabethan house in dark red brick. Clinton had not seen Markenfield for five years.

  He thought of the dark panelled rooms and the bright thick panes of diamond shaped glass, the armorial windows in the hall staining the floor with reds and blues, and the grey leaded roof where he had loved to sit in summer. More vivid than any sights were remembered smells: beeswax on mellowed timber, linseed oil in the gun room, the mossy pithy smell of the logs in their baskets waiting to be burned. Closing his eyes he could see the pictorial story of John Gilpin on the nursery wallpaper and the holes in the skirting where he had placed traps for the mice whose dried skins had provided winter clothing for his lead soldiers. Again he was in the village church, tracing the grain of the wood in the family pew with his finger nail, confusing Biblical names with real people, watching his father’s bored face during the sermon. He tried to recall the pictures in the long gallery but there were tiresome gaps; what had been between Romney’s portrait of his grandfather and Marco Ricci’s painting of people walking in the Mall? With furniture and china too his memory was poor, and yet he could remember every door and corner under the pantiles in the yard behind the servants’ hall. The leather fire buckets filled with sand outside the butler’s pantry, the dangling bell rope in the kitchen passage used for summoning the outdoor servants, and the rows of polished jelly moulds and gleaming meat covers on the long shelves of the kitchen dressers—all these had remained far clearer in his mind than the wealth of detail in the famous Soho tapestries.

  Sophie had often come over to Markenfield from Ammering Court with her parents. On the first occasion Clinton could remember, he had been twelve and she seven, and she had said that unless he played trains with her along the narrow paved paths in the topiary gardens, she would scream and say he had punched her. From the age of fifteen she had regularly told him that one day they would marry. Until three years ago, Clinton had treated the idea with tolerant amusement.

  With his hands thrust deep into his pockets, he stood for several minutes with half-closed eyes before walking slowly back across the field to the carriage.

  *

  When the clock in the cupola over the stables struck three, Sophie was close to tears and her maid was little more composed. Sophie had tried on and rejected not only her Pannier dress with looped side flounces, but also her Redingote Princess dress, her Balmoral Bodice, and her favourite white silk walking dress with Greek key pattern frills on the skirt. In the end, still dissatisfied, she had selected a scarlet Garibaldi shirt and a Zouave jacket, which she had not worn for two years. While the maid was pinning up her chignon, she moved and the girl accidentally pricked her neck, making her scream with pain and anger. As soon as the chignon had been secured in a net of black chenille, she told the servant to leave, and sat down on the bed, her arms clasping her knees. Her forehead was burning and her head throbbed with going over and over the same thoughts. How, after her last letter to him, could Clinton be coming unless he intended to propose? Yet when she had seen him in London three months earlier, just before his departure for Ireland, she had been equally convinced that he would ask her.

  Her mother was enraged with her and her father could not bring himself to speak about Clinton. She was making a fool of herself, they said, refusing to go to town for the Season and behaving with impossible rudeness to every other eligible man her mother had asked to dine with them during the two brief weeks which she had grudgingly consented to spend in London that spring. Didn’t she realise that he was playing with her in an insulting and humiliating manner? According to Sophie’s mother, her daughter’s heroic fidelity to Lord Ardmore was due to diseased pride—a twisted determination to go on loving him whatever he said or did, thus proving herself in some inexplicable way victorious. Often her mother accused her of loving her pain and resentment more than the actual man.

  Sophie’s passion for Clinton had began in earnest shortly after his return from China three years earlier, when the change in his appearance had both shocked and thrilled her. A thinner, paler face with the eyes and cheekbones more prominent and distinct lines scored at the corners of his mouth. He had spoken and smiled far less, and had often worn a haunted remote expression that had puzzled and fascinated her. She had had no idea what he had been thinking about, and this, combined with the uneasy alertness common to men who had spent many months in danger, had made her love him more. When she had heard that he was having an affair with Lady Cawthrey, she had been ill with grief and anger, yet because she had admired the woman’s poise and inaccessible beauty, her rage towards Clinton had been tempered by an equally powerful feeling of jealous desire. Lady Cawthrey’s love for Clinton had increased his value still further in Sophie’s eyes.