I shook my head miserably.
‘Come on, Cat, cheer up! I’ll get my man to take Tweadle to court to get your manuscripts back. I haven’t yet decided if exposing his cheat would do you more harm than good, but if we decide to go public, we’ll seek damages too.’
Mr Sheridan’s display of writerly solidarity did hearten me a little but I still felt as if my life had been taken out of my hands. I let him conduct me through the noisy crowd of petitioners and pass me over to his wife’s maid. In half an hour, I was bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, ready for dinner.
Mrs Sheridan was dining out. It was well known in theatre circles that husband and wife were no longer on good terms with each other so I was not surprised to find myself alone with Frank and the master of the house in the dining room. Even in my despondency, it registered somewhere in my brain that this was the first time I had ever sat at a table with my patron. Perhaps if Frank had not been there I would have been invited to eat in the kitchen. Whatever the reason, I found myself being waited on by footmen and served a fine meal that I had not had to cook. I thought of all those involved in preparing this food, knowing all too well exactly how long it took to wash, peel and boil the vegetables on my plate. It was a pity I couldn’t summon the appetite to do justice to their hard work.
We ate in silence for some minutes before Mr Sheridan put down his knife and fork. I looked up; he hadn’t finished but he was gazing at me thoughtfully as he topped up his wine from the decanter in front of him.
‘I’m surprised at you, Cat.’
Was this the scolding I had long been expecting?
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Surprised that you haven’t shown any curiosity at all as to what favour I wanted to ask you.’
I remembered dimly that he had said something about this in the carriage.
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, sir.’
‘The old Cat would have pounced on this the instant I mentioned it.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘There’s no perhaps about it! You would have plagued me until I revealed all. What’s got into you?’
I shrugged, biting my lip to stop the embarrassing display of tears that were close to falling, and pushed the peas around on my plate.
‘I think, sir,’ said Frank boldly, ‘you are to blame for this new Cat. It was you, after all, who forced her out of Drury Lane so she fell prey to the likes of Tweadle. I – we thought the theatre was going to look after her.’ He had obviously been saving this speech up, resentful that I had been so casually abandoned.
Mr Sheridan splashed some wine into Frank’s glass.
‘Well said, young Avon. I’m glad Cat has such an able supporter. But if she would rouse herself to show the merest glimmer of interest, I’ll tell her how I wish to make amends.’
I looked up. ‘Sir?’
‘Over the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling at a bit of a loss.’
Not as much as me, he hadn’t.
‘Events are happening so fast in France – things that will decide the fate of Europe – and I only get to hear about them long after, when some newspaper gets round to printing an inaccurate story or two. Even then, they rarely cover the really important matters, such as how the French are reacting to the changes.’
He was right of course: I’d often thought that newspaper editors saw it as their national duty to send us to sleep with their accounts of debates and legislation. I rarely picked up a paper and then only to read the scandal column.
Mr Sheridan refilled his glass. ‘I was thinking that I need a correspondent in Paris, someone who can keep me up to date. A couriered letter would take only a few days to reach me – I could be among the best informed in parliament. This person could find out for me what the common people are thinking without alerting the governments of either France or Britain to my interest. This revolution is not going to be decided in the debating chambers or palaces of Europe, but on the streets. Only last week, I was asking myself who I know who understands both worlds – that of the poor as well as the rich – and could move between them without being noticed.’
Very interesting, but what was it to do with me?
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I ventured. ‘I don’t know anyone who could help – unless you count Johnny – Lord Jonathan Fitzroy. Perhaps if you –’
‘No, no, you halfwit. Not Johnny. In any case, he’s transferred his allegiance from us to his adopted country. I thought the answer was obvious. Don’t you, Lord Francis?’
Frank was now grinning at me. ‘As clear as daylight, sir.’
Surely he didn’t mean what I thought he meant?
‘I’m talking about you, Cat.’
‘Me? But I couldn’t even look after myself in London and you expect me to do so in Paris?’
Mr Sheridan waved this objection away with the decanter. ‘You mustn’t take one mistake as the last word on your abilities. Chalk it up to experience. Learn from it.’
‘I’ve learnt that I’m useless.’
‘Never say that – you are not to say that.’ Mr Sheridan exchanged a worried look with Frank. ‘It’s not like my Cat to let a scoundrel like that bookseller put her down – not the Cat who saved my diamond, the Cat who rescued Pedro, the Cat who wrote those stories.’
His words reignited a glimmer of pride in my achievements. He was right. I was wallowing in my own misery – not an attractive sight. It was time I struggled back into the mêlée as others had done before me. Syd never gave up if he was floored in a fight. He pulled himself up to the scratch and continued to slog it out. Mr Sheridan himself had not conceded defeat when his debut play, The Rivals, failed dismally on its first night: he revised it and continued on to a triumph.