The Disgraceful Duke

CHAPTER ONE 1803-2

“It must have been exciting!”

“It was!” her father agreed, “and when a man appeared in a boat and rowed about, the audience could scarcely contain itself!”

It was only when she grew older that Shimona realised that what Sheridan had called his ‘Grand National Theatre’ was unlucky from the very beginning, mostly owing to the disastrous condition of his finances.

From the highest to the lowest, payment of employees was spasmodic and there were constant strikes.

Good actors were sacked because they demanded their overdue wages and their places were filled by inferior players.

On Saturday mornings the actors would besiege Sheridan’s room.

“For God’s sake, Mr. Sheridan,” they would cry, “pay us our salaries. Let’s have something this week!”

If he was there, he would turn on his charm and faithfully promise that he would pay what he owed them and then vanish by another door.

Only Shimona and her mother knew how much Beau Bardsley gave away to the poorest actors and staff and how they had suffered in consequence.

They had to forgo the little luxuries and even the good food they should have been entitled to through the success that Beau Bardsley had achieved with the London audiences.

That he never worried was no answer to the problem and yet, like those who watched him play his parts, they adored him and his wife found it impossible even to grumble at the extravagant manner in which he helped others.

There was a sudden loud knock on the dressing room door.

“Five minutes, Mr. Bardsley!” the callboy shouted out.

Then Shimona could hear him hurrying down the stone passage, hammering on every dressing room door and repeating his parrot-cry.

Her father came from behind the curtain and she looked at him anxiously. But, as had so often happened, the atmosphere of the theatre was beginning to lift him out of himself.

Already he seemed to carry his shoulders straighter, his chin was higher and his eyes were alight with that irresistible magic that held the audience spellbound.

His costume became him and his thinness, which at times was pitiably obvious in his ordinary clothes, made him, behind the footlights, look like the young boy he was portraying.

He walked to the dressing table, applied a little more rouge to his face with the hare’s foot and touched up the corners of his eyes.

“You look very handsome, Papa!”

It was something Shimona had said to him ever since she was a small child and he smiled at her with great tenderness before he replied,

“You will stay here while I am on the stage and Joe is not to open the door to anybody.”

“I’ll see she’s all right, sir,” Joe Hewitt promised.

“Two minutes, Mr. Bardsley!”

The callboy’s shrill voice accompanied by his knock on the door seemed to lift the last remaining remnants of Beau Bardsley’s exhaustion from him. He gave a last glance at himself in the mirror and then turned towards the door.

“Good luck, Papa!”

He smiled at Shimona again, then he was gone and she heard him speaking in his deep voice to several people outside in the passage as they made their way towards the stage.

She wished she could be at the front of the house to see him performing one of his most memorable roles, which invariably had evoked paeans of praise from the critics.

One critic had written the previous week,

“I have run out of complimentary adjectives where Beau Bardsley is concerned!”

And The Morning Chronicle had said,

“The man ceases to be human as soon as he appears and he manages to transport himself and his audience to the foothills of Olympus!”

Shimona rose from the red plush sofa where she had been sitting and automatically began to tidy her father’s dressing table.

There was a miniature of her mother, which he carried with him always, painted by Richard Cosway. It was, Shimona thought, an almost perfect likeness.

She looked so beautiful, so young and happy, and it seemed impossible to think that she was dead and they would never see her again.

Cosway had made her large eyes shine with the adoring light that had always been in them when she gazed at her husband and her fair hair had strange shadows in it, which were faithfully portrayed against the soft blue background.

Holding the miniature in her hand, Shimona looked down at it with the pain in her heart that came whenever she thought of her mother.

How was it possible that she had died so suddenly and so quickly that they had not even realised she was ill until she was gone from them?

‘We were always thinking of Papa,’ Shimona told herself now, ‘and we did not realise that Mama needed attention until it was too late.’

She felt an inescapable sense of loss stab her like a physical wound.

As she returned the miniature once again to its hook in the velvet case, she glanced at her own reflection in the mirror and saw how closely she resembled her mother in looks.

She had the same pale shadowy fair hair, the same large eyes, the same oval forehead and the same softly curved lips.

There was also something of her father’s looks in Shimona’s face.

His Grecian profile seemed somehow to give him a spirituality that was seldom seen upon the stage and it also made his daughter seem different from other young women of her age.

She was lovely, there was no doubt about that!

There was also something unique about her, which was one of the reasons why Beau Bardsley kept her away from the people who frequented his dressing room at Drury Lane and who, although he called them his friends, he never invited to his home.

Beau had always kept his family life strictly private from the moment he had caused one of the greatest scandals that Bath had ever known.

Because of it he had been determined not to expose his wife to the familiarity and the free and easy morals of the theatre world.

It was when he was playing some of his last parts at Bath with Mrs. Siddons before they both went to London, that Beau Bardsley had noticed a girl in a stage box.

It was not surprising that he became aware of her, for she was there day after day. She was usually accompanied in the afternoon by a maid or footman and in the evening by an elderly couple whom he learnt later were her father and mother.

There were plenty of people in Bath to tell him about Annabel Winslow.

Her beauty had taken the fashionable Society that congregated in the Assembly Rooms by storm.

She was feted and sought after by the dandies and bucks of eligible age and she was adulated by the elderly Noblemen, who found her manners as charming as her appearance.

All Bath appeared to be delighted when Annabel’s engagement was announced to Lord Powell, a gentleman whose wealth and distinction had already impressed itself upon the pleasure-seeking visitors to the famous Spa.

He had come to Bath because he was suffering with rheumatism in his legs, but after one look at Annabel his rheumatism was forgotten and he lost his heart!

Lord Powell’s was undoubtedly the most prestigious offer of marriage Annabel had received and her father, Sir Harvey Winslow, lost no time in accepting on her behalf.

But no one realised that, if Lord Powell had lost his heart, Annabel had also lost hers.

Her parents had not concerned themselves with her passion for the theatre. After all, it was good for her education to listen to Shakespeare’s plays, and Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Desdemona was the talk of The Pump Room.

Sir Harvey and Lady Winslow also thought her excellent in Garrick’s version of Hamlet and they did not notice particularly the actor who played the name part.

They were therefore stupefied with astonishment, as indeed was the rest of Bath, when Annabel ran away with Beau Bardsley.

When Mrs. Siddons left for London and Drury Lane, Annabel and Beau followed her.

Sir Harvey cut his daughter off with the proverbial shilling and returned to his estates in Dorset, saying that he never wished to hear of her again.

Annabel was, however, supremely and utterly happy with the man she had chosen for her husband and, when Shimona was born in 1785, she thought that it would be difficult for any woman to be more blessed than she had been.

From the time they married there was never another breath of scandal where Beau Bardsley was concerned.

It was to be expected that he would be pursued by women of every sort and kind, but while he was always courteous and pleasant, they found him elusive and impossible to meet outside the theatre.

As soon as a performance was over he went back to the little house in Chelsea where he lived with Annabel and Shimona and craved no other company but theirs.

Perhaps it was the puritanical streak in him that he had inherited from his clergyman father, or maybe a sense of guilt at his own shortcomings towards his parents that made him ultra-strict with Shimona.

She had no idea that her life was different from that of other children or that she and her mother might have been living on a desert island for all the contact they had with other people.

From the moment Beau Bardsley left his home to the moment he returned there was always a feverish activity to get everything ready for him and to make his homecoming a perfect one.

From the time she was a tiny child Shimona was told, “you must not bother your father, you must not upset him, you must not worry him”, and her whole object in life therefore was to make him happy.

The only amusement that was permitted outside the ordinary round of her life at home was when she and her mother went to the theatre to see her father in each new role.

It was then he seemed to her to be a very different person from the man who held her on his knee to kiss and fondle her.

On the stage her father became a Knight like those she read about in storybooks.

There was something inspiring and spiritual about him too, which made him seem almost like the angels she had believed in ever since her mother had taught her to say her prayers.

If the audiences worshipped Beau Bardsley for his looks and the magical hours of pleasure he gave them, his daughter worshipped him because to her he was everything that was fine and noble personified in one man.

Beau Bardsley had, despite his father’s poverty, been well educated.

He had been accepted in private schools at reduced rates because his father was a Clergyman and the parts he played also gave him a command of the English language and a knowledge of history which he imparted to his daughter.

Although she never went to school and never competed with other children, Shimona was far better educated than was considered necessary for the average girl at that time.

In fact through her father’s tuition she received to all intents and purposes a boy’s education, while her mother imparted the accomplishments that were considered obligatory for a well-bred young woman.

When her mother died, Shimona experienced a loneliness that she had never encountered before.

Now there were long days at home when there was nothing to do but talk to her old nurse and await her father’s return.

Because she was lonely and because time often hung heavy on her hands, she started to read the newspapers and enjoy all the anecdotes and gossip that her father brought home in the evenings.

Whereas before her death, Beau Bardsley had talked with his wife about the problems and quarrels of the theatre and about those who visited his dressing room with their scandal and gossip, he now talked to Shimona.

She had always been excluded in the past from anything that appertained to the outside world, but now, because his wife was no longer beside him, Beau allowed Shimona to take her place.