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wearing a sheepishly flirtatious smile.
    Anne had finally noticed the mother, an odd, limp-jowled creature who sat behind her magnificent daughter like a shadow. She kept her head too low to catch anyone's eye and sipped her weak peach ratafia as if it were medicine.
    'I've often seen you at Drury Lane,' Miss Farren assured the Richmonds, 'and been grateful for your patronage.'
    'I've always wondered that very thing,' Anne jumped in, rather too loud, 'whether, caught up in the flow of the play, the players are oblivious?'
    'It would be hard not to notice an audience so visible and audible,' said Miss Farren, with a hint of laughter.
    'They press too near, to my way of thinking,' complained Derby.
    'It's true,' said the actress, 'the amateur critics in the pit frequently lean on the edge of the stage to get a closer view, so one has to take care not to tread on their fingers. As for the more distinguished inhabitants of the boxes, I do recognise faces, but I'm often far from sure whether they notice me, since they arrive so late and keep so busy with nods and bows and quizzing glasses that I wonder how they follow the plot at all.'
    She's satirising us, Anne thought, and we're lapping it up. Does she see this as an audition? Eliza Farren had all the sparkling enunciation of the ladies she played in comedies; she was the real thing. She sat with her closed fan balanced between her index fingers, with never an awkward glance at the Rubens hung behind her or the Titian to her left, as if she'd been brought up in great reception rooms just like this one, instead of ... well, squalid inns, Anne supposed with an inward shiver; barns, even.
    'Yes, Richmond and I eat so late and entertain such shocking numbers, ever since he's been Master-General of the Ordnance, we rarely get to Drury Lane before the third act,' said Lady Mary with a sigh.
    'But I dine at four, on a few plain dishes, to be in the box by five,' Anne admitted, 'since an unfashionable widow can consult her own pleasure.'
    The others laughed at her description of herself.
    'Luckily,' said Richmond, 'the stage is so clogged with old plays these days, we know the plots by heart. Is your proprietor ever going to write you a new part?'
    'Ah, Mr Sheridan's a busy man,' said Miss Farren. 'He was our best playwright since Shakespeare, but now—'
    'I admit, it's all the fault of us Foxites,' said Derby with a chuckle. 'The theatre engrossed Sherry's talents long enough and now they're required for a higher stage.'
    'The Party?' Anne asked.
    'The country, I should say.'
    A little snort from Richmond. Anne was suddenly reminded that by inviting a Foxite politician like Derby to take part in these theatricals her brother-in-law was making a rather gracious gesture across Party lines.
    'But I live in hope,' Miss Farren added, smoothly filling the gap in the conversation. 'Perhaps Sheridan will write me a new role by the time I'm forty.'
    At that they all broke out laughing again. Was it the delivery that gave the simple joke such a glittering spin? Anne thought, This girl will never be forty.
    It had been an uncomfortable moment between Richmond and Derby, though. Anne was only too aware that these men shared a painful history. Derby, Richmond and his nephew Fox, her father Conway, they'd all been idealistic Whigs in the glory days of the Party, protesting against the King's misbegotten war, wearing the 'buff and blue' of the brave Americans. Anne remembered feeling so proud of her eloquent friends and relations, united in the most noble of causes: Reform. To her, the word was a shining banner; it meant reform not just of Parliament—the broadening of the franchise (which currently let only one man in a hundred vote), the freeing of the Commons from bribery and bullying by the Crown—but also the end of all oppressions, such as censorship, poverty and slavery. Then, five years ago, the Whigs had got their moment in the sun, swept into government ... and after three months of