The Disgraceful Duke

CHAPTER ONE 1803-1

CHAPTER ONE 1803“How do you feel, Papa?”

“I will – be all – right,” Beau Bardsley gasped.

But, as he spoke, he sank down on his chair in the dressing room and stared at his face in the mirror with an expression almost of despair.

Shimona hovered behind him uncertain what she should do.

The fit of coughing that had racked her father in the passage after they had entered the stage door seemed to have sapped his strength to the point of exhaustion.

Without speaking, Joe Hewitt, Beau Bardsley’s dresser, brought his Master a glass of brandy mixed with water and set it down on the dressing table beside the greasepaint, the salves, the powder puffs and the hare’s foot.

To lift it to his lips Beau Bardsley had to employ both hands.

After a few sips the spirit seemed to revive him and in a very different voice he said to his daughter,

“You should not have come here with me.”

“I do not intend to leave you, Papa,” Shimona replied firmly. “You know as well as I do that you ought not to be performing today.”

Beau Bardsley did not reply and they both knew the answer without having to put it into words.

He had to work.

Not only did he require his salary to keep them alive but it was also only a question of a week or so before the management of The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane would consider that he was due for a benefit.

Beau Bardsley drew his watch from his waistcoat pocket with a shaking hand.

“You’ve plenty of time, Mr. Bardsley,” Joe Hewitt said in a soothing tone, as if he fancied his Master was worrying about it.

Beau Bardsley gave a deep sigh.

They all knew that in his present state it would require considerable physical effort on his part to actually get into the clothes he wore as Hamlet.

There was one blessing, however, Shimona thought to herself.

Her father had played the part so often that it was no effort for him to remember his lines and, once he faced the footlights, he would be inspired as he always was by the applause and adulation of his admirers.

At this moment The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was filling up with an audience who acclaimed Beau Bardsley as one of the finest actors that ‘Old Drury’ had ever known.

They came to see him even though at the moment the theatre itself had fallen on hard times.

Mrs. Sarah Siddons, who had reigned there as the undisputed Queen for twenty-one years, had left London to rest. When she returned, it was to the stage at Covent Garden.

There was an almost insurmountable difficulty in finding an actress capable of taking her place.

But as long as Beau Bardsley was billed, the audience flocked in. Unfortunately his health often prevented him from honouring his commitments.

He put out his hand now to pick up the grease-stick and, as he did so, he could see Shimona reflected in the mirror.

“You should not have come here,” he repeated. “You know I don’t allow you to be seen in the theatre.”

“Joe can keep your visitors away,” Shimona replied with a smile. “Besides, Papa, you must rest between acts and not make the effort to entertain anybody.”

“I always promised your mother that you would have nothing to do with the theatre,” Beau Bardsley said.

“And we will always do as Mama wished,” Shimona replied, “but I know she would not have wanted me to leave you when you are as ill as you are now.”

She looked at her father again and asked in a low voice,

“Would you not be wiser to cancel the performance before it begins?”

There was every reason for her apprehension, for Beau Bardsley’s handsome face was almost devoid of colour, his lips were bloodless and he seemed to have difficulty in lifting his eyelids.

“I have to go on,” he said almost savagely. “For God’s sake, Joe, give me some more brandy!”

The dresser snatched up the empty glass and hurried to the side of the room where there was a grog table loaded with bottles and a large number of glasses.

Shimona knew only too well how much of her father’s money was expended on entertaining the social personalities who fawned on him.

But he also played host to members of the cast whom he felt were in need of a stimulant and to whom he was always ready to extend an over-generous hand.

At least three quarters of Beau Bardsley’s salary every week, his daughter reckoned, was given away to those who spun him a hard-luck story or who were genuinely in need.

There were many in the profession who blessed him for saving them from the gutter, from starvation or from prison.

Because he had once played with them on the stage or because they had a common interest, Beau Bardsley would feed, clothe and pay the debts of any impoverished actor or actress who begged him for help.

Those who had suffered in consequence had, of course, been his own wife and daughter.

Despite all the years he had worked and commanded a high salary, he had no savings left. Every penny had been spent and the bulk of it on other actors.

Yet looking at him now Shimona knew that she would not have her father any different.

Even when he was ill, even when it was an effort for him even to speak, he still had a magic quality about him.

It was his glamour that kept the audiences spellbound and his deep resonant voice had a quality that seemed to draw the very hearts of those who listened to him.

The second glass of brandy brought a faint flush to Beau Bardsley’s cheeks and, as the dresser deftly removed his coat and waistcoat, he began with a hand that gradually became steadier to apply the greasepaint to his handsome countenance.

The son of a Curate at Bath Abbey, Beau Bardsley, who had been christened Beaugrave, ran away when he was sixteen to go on the stage.

He had been obsessed by the theatre, which in Bath had reached the heights of distinction when it was honoured by being the first theatre outside London to be granted the title ‘Royal’.

The actors and actresses who made their reputations there had no more eager and enthusiastic admirer than the Clergyman’s son.

After some years of playing small parts in the London theatres, including Drury Lane, Beau Bardsley had returned to his native town.

His father had been appointed to a living in another part of the country and the theatre was filled with young and enthusiastic actors, who were to become some of the greatest in the land.

John Henderson, who after five years at Bath went to London as David Garrick’s natural successor, became one of England’s leading actors.

He in his turn had been much struck by a young actress whom he had seen performing in Birmingham and he recommended her to the Directors of The Bath Theatre, who engaged her.

As she had recently been dismissed by Garrick after a few unsuccessful months at Drury Lane, she was glad to have the chance to appear before a fashionable audience and this time she was no failure.

Sarah Siddons’ debut in Bath was a triumph!

She was a phenomenal success, particularly in tragic roles.

Being a woman and an extremely intelligent one, she looked around to find actors who would enhance her own performance and intensify the glamour she exuded whenever she appeared behind the footlights.

It was therefore not surprising that she looked very favourably on the compellingly handsome Beau Bardsley.

Sarah Siddons was to be the greatest tragic actress of the English stage.

She was beautiful and she had an excellent figure, but these attributes were unimportant beside the power she could exert over an audience.

Beau Bardsley had been with her when in 1782 she had returned to the scene of her failure – The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane,

He had often told Shimona what happened.

“When Mrs. Siddons went on the stage at rehearsal she was in a state of panic,” he related. “But gradually the play – Isabelle or The Fatal Marriage – took hold of her and, as it continued, many of the Company were in tears.”

“She was so convincing in her deathbed scene,” Beau Bardsley went on, “that her own eight-year-old son Henry, who was playing the part of her son in the play was actually deceived into believing that his mother had really died. He howled the place down until she finished the scene and comforted him.”

“Tell me about the first night, Papa,” Shimona would beg, even though she had heard the story over and over again.

Beau Bardsley would laugh.

“The audience were nearly drowned in tears,” he replied, “and long before the final scene there was frenzied applause.”

He smiled as he continued,

“I think we were all stunned by the ovation and Mrs. Siddons was too overcome to speak the epilogue. She could only bow to a storm of cheers.”

For the next twenty-one years Beau Bardsley had appeared in practically every important production in which Sarah Siddons played the lead.

But now she had gone and, although he could fill the theatre, which had been rebuilt nine years earlier, he was at nearly fifty years of age almost too ill to carry on.

Shimona watched her father anxiously as, his make-up finished, he rose to his feet and went behind the brown linen curtain at the back of the room to change into his clothes for the first act.

The new theatre had cost over two hundred thousand pounds and had been designed by Holland, the architect of Carlton House. The dressing rooms were certainly a great improvement on the discomfort, dirt and darkness of the old one.

Old Drury had been in a shocking state, having stood for 117 years since 1674.

But Shimona used to love hearing tales of what it had been like when her father first played there.

Then it had been easy to imagine Nell Gwynne selling oranges at sixpence a fruit to the Gallants, Samuel Pepys the diarist ogling the women and Charles II and his mistresses filling the Royal Box.

The audience would wander all over the stage and behind the scenes. There were ‘Fops’ who preened themselves and ‘Vizards’ who were ladies of the town disguised by black masks.

“Garrick drove the people from the stage,” Beau Bardsley told his daughter, “but it was shove and push outside the pit entrance for hours before the doors opened.”

“What happened then, Papa?” Shimona would ask.

“Men used their fists, the weakest were trampled underfoot and the pickpockets reaped a rich harvest!”

Beau Bardsley had performed in the last play at the old theatre, called The Country Girl and he was in Macbeth with Mrs. Siddons when the new playhouse was opened in April 1794.

The house was packed on that occasion, but it had not proved a lucky building and Richard Brinsley Sheridan was, everyone knew, deeply in debt.

Shimona later had much admired the new playhouse from a box where her mother had taken her to watch her father perform although they were forbidden to enter the stage door.

Certainly it was spacious and lofty.

There were four tiers and the boxes were on the lines of an opera house, but Holland had thought more of appearance than of the convenience of the audience.

It was found that the gallery was too high and so far away that its occupants had difficulty in hearing the actors and the eight boxes on the stage itself and the eight on either side of the pit were no use at all.

But the total capacity of the new Theatre Royal was three thousand, six hundred and in money over eight hundred pounds.

It certainly had many modern requirements. There was even a fire-resistant curtain made of iron.

This, Beau Bardsley told Shimona, had been “undoubtedly the star attraction of the opening nights and it aroused an already excited audience to a wild enthusiasm. Somebody struck it heavily with a large hammer,” he told her, “to demonstrate its strength and solidity.”

“What happened then, Papa?” Shimona would ask, although she knew the end of the story perfectly well.

“When it was raised,” her father replied, “the audience was thrilled by the sight of a cascade of water rushing down from tanks in the roof and roaring into a huge basin where it splashed and rumbled over artificial rocks.”